A memoir that reckons with the high costs of European settlement and Indigenous dispossession on the Great Plains.

A surprise rodeo leaves a buffalo bull dead and a cowboy gored to death. Seeing the death of the one man who was kind to him, Dawn Morgan’s father shoulders the blame and ends up dead. His sudden death, and the blundering way Morgan learns of it, forces her to reflect not only on the events in the bloodied corral, but also on the buffalo herds decimated and Indigenous Peoples displaced to make way for settlement in ranching and farming country in the prairies.

Unsettled is a deeply moving work of literary non-fiction, a probing memoir examining family tragedy in relation to stories—both fact and fiction—of settlers and Indigenous Peoples on the Great Plains. Morgan shares the internal struggle between resistance and allegiance to the settler-descendent stories she grew up with while paying respects to her father and documenting the censorship she faces from her mother, loyal still to the pioneer myth of the early twentieth century. It is only when both parents are gone that Morgan is liberated to write a story of reckoning on the northern Great Plains.

Dawn Morgan's profile page

Born and raised in Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, Dawn Morgan is currently Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

"Compelling...written in beautiful and Keroucian prose." —Winnipeg Free Press

"A powerful read, filled with tragedy and love." —CBC Saskatchewan

“Morgan’s tale is shocking, sad, literary, and episodic, trading a settler’s unease for solidarity.” —Dennis Gruending, author and former Saskatchewan MP

"Unsettled is a pioneer history like no other. It starts with a buffalo, a gunshot, and a dead father, then moves through time and prairie spaces—as if Marcel Proust gallops past Cormac McCarthy—before returning to a mother’s Saskatchewan deathbed. A tremendous book, of the kind that arrives once in a generation." —Erín Moure, author of The Elements

“Morgan’s Unsettled is a wide-ranging, often erudite blending of the intensely personal, through alternate versions of history, western folktales and myth, the themes, ideas and anecdotes seamlessly woven to make a rich and striking whole that in a new way, illuminates the nature of the West and its people.” —Sharon Butala, author of Where I Live Now