Community Thread One: ‘The Prairies’

This month, we want to talk about ‘The Prairies’ what we mean when we say it, what it evokes, and how those outside of this place might misrepresent or misunderstand it. What do you think of when you think of this place? What makes it unique? What do you think people miss when they think of this place? What are the stereotypes and which (if any) might we benefit from all leaning into? If you moved here from somewhere else, what stuck out to you? If you were born here, what did you notice when you went elsewhere? If you don’t live here, or have never been here, what’s your sense of this place? What do you wonder about it?

We’ve gathered three images we think might help represent ‘The Prairies.’ The first two are familiar sights here on the ground. One: the all too familiar pickup truck with way too many offensive bumper stickers. Long before COI had a name or a form, we were talking about the importance of representing this region in all its complexity, and one of the things we kept coming back to were those ‘Fuck Trudeau’ stickers. Seriously, they came up a lot! We questioned whether they were a form of art, what they said about identity, what they said about culture here—even what it meant that we had come to accept “the f word” as something we would encounter in public. Two: that sky and those clouds, all too familiar—and what we love about this place—but also an image that is tethered to the western as a genre that is colonial at its core. Three: So much of the image of ‘The Prairies’ that circulates across the country is determined by others—sourced from a couple of the especially negative headlines that continually define us (we’re also super Alberta biased here) so we thought we’d ask AI to generate a third image for us—to see what represents us in the collective slop intelligence of the masses.

Images L-R: Anonymous, 2025; Zachary Ayotte, 2025; AI-generated from prompt: Can you generate an image of the Canadian Prairies that blends the landscape with the cultural and political realities of the place, 2025.

Community Threads has changed! Community Threads was an experiment, we wanted it to be a space for us all to engage in discussion, get to know one another better, and share thoughts and ideas. We thought of Community Threads as a sort of group chat; our idea was that, each month, we would share a prompt to start the conversation. We have come to realize that Community Threads wasn’t quite right – maybe our timing was off and it will make sense to revisit it in future seasons of COI, maybe it will forever sit as a failed experiment! For now, at least, Community Threads is no more.