Homer on the Range
Alberta has always had a taste for epic stories about itself: the frontier, the oil patch, the independent Westerner standing against a distant and meddlesome East. But lately, those old myths have begun to sound less like history than political scripture.
In “Homer on the Range: From Sophocles to Danielle Smith,” I look at Alberta’s growing separatist movement through a rather older lens: Greek tragedy. The province’s grievances are real, but so are the stories it tells itself about those grievances — stories of betrayal, exceptionalism, wounded pride and heroic resistance. And, as the Greeks understood rather well, the most dangerous myths are often the ones in which we cast ourselves as the hero.
The essay moves between ancient tragedy, Alberta history, the mythology of the West, and the politics of Danielle Smith’s Alberta to ask what happens when grievance hardens into identity — and when a political movement becomes so enamoured of its own story that it can no longer see where that story might be taking it.
Published in the Literary Review of Canada:
