Jessica Jack PhD Student
My research examines how settlement converted Indigenous land into private property on the Canadian prairies. Between 1880 and 1930, Saskatchewan developed an intricate settler network of homesteads, large-scale farms, and more than 900 hamlets, villages, towns, and cities. Combining close archival reading with historical GIS and text mining, my dissertation asks how this network functioned, who accumulated land beyond the homestead scale, and how its growth related to the pace and pattern of Indigenous dispossession. My preliminary work shows that settler density, not reserve population, was the strongest predictor of reserve land surrender. By showing that dispossession on the prairies was driven by the accumulated, everyday pressure of settler economic life as well as by policy, I hope this work helps settler Canadians see how ordinary acts of settlement made dispossession real on the ground.
Research Area(s)
- Prairie History
- Settler Colonialism
- History of Capitalism
- Historical GIS
- Digital History
Selected publications and presentations
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Jack, Jessica, with Chloë Farr and Jacob Polay. 2026. "Not Just Farming: How an LLM Helped Me Study Saskatchewan's Smallest Settlements." Active History, October 14, 2026.
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Jack, Jessica, and Jim Clifford. 2026. "Unmaking the Prairies: Rethinking Saskatchewan's Networked Settler Colonialism." Panel presentation, Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting, Charlottetown, PEI, June 1, 2026.
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Jack, Jessica. 2026. "What Became Possible: Iterative Visualization with an LLM as a Research Method in Computational History." Working Papers in Critical Search, Paper 002.
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Clifford, Jim, Jacob Polay, Jessica Jack, Mark Humphries, and Lianne C. Leddy. 2026. "Reading the Archive by Machine: An OCR Benchmark for Historians, 1612-1921." Working Papers in Critical Search, Paper 003.