Refusing to Harness a River

Abstract This article considers conflict between mid-twentieth-century dryland farmers in Saskatchewan, Canada, and a provincial government intent on irrigation. As part of a high modernist multipurpose water development project undertaken with the Canadian federal government, Saskatchewan committed to irrigate fifty thousand acres, but many farmers in the targeted area of Outlook-Broderick were opposed. Drylander resistance included efforts to draw on nationally and internationally significant ideas about democracy, freedom, and rights. Particularly in its later years, resistance was sustained by women's involvement. Despite the apparent success of resistance efforts and the equivocal results achieved by those farmers who did irrigate, the Outlook-Broderick area was nevertheless profoundly changed by irrigation. Drawing on a wide range of historical sources, the article considers what this historical episode reveals about publicly funded irrigation, the power of rural communities, and the limits to resistance on the mid-twentieth-century Canadian prairies.