"A tone-perfect elegiac meditation on the impossibility of engaging with painful history and the necessity of doing so." – Margaret Atwood, Thomas Morton Memorial Prize for Poetry

In the stunning poems of Settler Education, Laurie D. Graham vividly explores the Plains Cree uprising at Frog Lake -- the death of nine settlers, the hanging of six Cree warriors, the imprisonment of Big Bear, and the opening of the Prairies to unfettered settlement. In ways possible only with such an honest act of imagination, and with language at once terse and capacious, Settler Education reckons with how these pasts repeat and reconstitute themselves in the present.

• "Graham grabs you by the hand tugging you into a running pace across prairie time and space in a frenzied barrage of culture, history, memory and detritus." --Telegraph-Journal

• "In a manner reminiscent of Jan Zwicky and Robert Kroetsch . . . [Graham’s poetry] combines meditation with compact sensory impressions. . . . [Innovative], lyrical, wise, and moving, [her work] considers and details the surface changes of a region in Western Canada, evoking a strong sense of place." --Gerald Lampert Award jury citation