8

Many Voices—One People

CANADA’S CONSTITUTION ACT, although it now considers the Metis as Indigenous (Aboriginal) people, has yet to determine who can, from the government’s perspective, rightfully identify as Metis. Indeed, this is not a definition that can be determined by the Canadian government. Yet nor have the Metis people and their organizations agreed on this point, or even reached agreement about the proper spelling of “Metis” (Métis; metis). It is likely that the historical community has contributed to, and perhaps even created, some of the ambivalence surrounding the term “Metis.” Beginning in the 1970s, when more scholars turned their attention to the Metis, there was a focus on demonstrating the divisions in the geographic area of Red River. Since the 1970s, whether examining religion, class, company structures, or geographic territories, historians have argued either for or against the reasons behind those divisions.

These debates certainly drew attention to the history of the Metis, which had largely been ignored until the 1970s. However, there is also the possibility that the focus on conflict and disunity among the Metis has actually presented challenges for them as they struggle for rights that would equal those of other Indigenous people.1 Certainly, the tendency to focus on differences in the Metis community might lead some to argue that it is not logical to compare Isabella and Marie Rose, given the divergent paths their lives followed for most of their adult lives. As scholar Brenda Macdougall notes, because Metis ancestry is drawn from both Indigenous and European heritages, “their stories are not told in one voice or by one group. Rather the stories are layered.”2 Although the stories are clearly not told in one voice and are layered, this book has demonstrated that there were many parallels in Marie Rose’s and Isabella’s lives and as many similarities, both in how they adapted to their changing worlds and in how they managed their identities as the fur trade drew to a close. Thus, much can be learned by conducting close case and comparative studies about the survival strategies of other Metis people as the fur trade transitioned.

Indeed, in an interesting discussion about the challenges for scholars of defining one Metis culture and identity, Nicole St-Onge and Carolyn Podruchny note that, despite difficulties, it is important that scholars continue their work. In part, this importance rests on the fact that Canada’s Constitution Act of 1982 recognized Metis people and confirmed their “aboriginal” rights. These scholars argue the claims processes that have forced the Metis to define territories risk dominating the definition of a Metis Nation and do not reflect the reality of the Metis people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the time when Marie Rose and Isabella, and their families before them, were internalizing their own identities. They argue that focusing on territorial claims distorts the reality that, for many “Metis,” their identity and culture were more rooted in “extended kin lineages, reciprocal ties, and access and use of common resources” than in “abstract identities with central authority and clear territorial boundaries.”3

Some also argue that kinship has not received the attention it needs when studying the history of the Indigenous people of North America. Indeed, kin connections were a very important component of Metis life and identity, where traders were “born into a fluid and mobile fur trade world” in which small hunting camps and trading posts were connected to vast geographic and global systems of trade.4 At a time when Metis people were often defined by their link to the fur trade, it was this link and the kinship connections on both the maternal and paternal sides of the two Metis women, Isabella and Marie Rose, that established them and their Euro-North American husbands as community members of important social standing in southern Alberta after the fur trade transitioned. Even more importantly, Marie Rose and Isabella devoted a good deal of effort to extending their fur trade kinship connections by developing fictive kin networks that would serve to solidify their own status in this transitional period.

This book confirms that both Isabella and Marie Rose were publicly silent about their Metis identities. Yet some of Marie Rose’s and Isabella’s descendants have openly acknowledged their Metis ancestry. This fact certainly suggests that a pride in that history and culture may have persisted privately for both women and their web of kinship networks. That Isabella and Marie Rose did not publicly embrace their ethnicity, as there was certainly no clear evidence of Metis sashes, fiddle music, a Metis flag, or the Michif language, does not mean they privately denied that Metis ethnicity. Indeed, this study of their lives suggests that any ambivalence was not born of a lack of a sense of self as Metis women but rather of a need to accommodate the increasing racism in their society.

Because they were apparently publicly silent about their Metis identity—we might ask of both Marie Rose and Isabella—what made them Metis? In its most basic sense, both women had mothers, fathers, and grandparents who were ethnically Metis. However, categorizing Isabella and Marie Rose as Metis simply because they had ancestors who were Indigenous and ancestors who were Euro-North American would be to priviliege racial categorization above cultural categorization and, ultimately, to continue the historical fallacy of understanding the Metis as a people “in between.” As Brenda Macdougall argues, implying that “mixed blood, mixed ancestry…is all that is required to be Metis” negates the authenticity of the Aboriginality of the Metis, potentially reducing them to an “in-between, incomplete, ‘not-quite-people.’”5

Indeed, the Metis identity, history, and culture of Isabella and Marie Rose moved beyond the fact that they were ethnically Metis. Both had a history and a connection to the fur trade. As young girls, both lived the collective experiences of their fur trade families,6 Marie Rose in Red River and on the western plains, and Isabella at the northern fur trade posts and in the care of her Metis paternal grandparents. The close presence of their Metis mothers was an important component of the identity formation for both Marie Rose and Isabella. Marie Rose recalled the many times she spent at the side of her Metis mother, listening to the oral history of her people and learning the culture. While Isabella said little that was documented about the importance of her Metis mother, it was her mother who knew the customs of the northern Metis and who was the primary caregiver during Isabella’s formative years when Isabella’s father tended to his duties as chief factor of the vast Mackenzie district.

As adult women, both Isabella and Marie Rose achieved a good measure of success in the Euro-North American world in large part by continuing to rely, as Metis women married to Euro-North Americans, on their fur trade families. At a time when locale was not as important as kin to the Metis identity, both Marie Rose and Isabella established their marital homes near their fur trade kin group in southern Alberta. At various times, Marie Rose’s parents and many of her siblings lived in the Pincher Creek area near Marie Rose’s Jughandle Ranch, and they no doubt contributed to her ability to operate a ranch, raise seventeen children, maintain a small cottage industry, and publish some articles, all while her husband maintained a semi-nomadic lifestyle. As a girl of marrying age, Isabella was sent to live with her fur trade chief factor uncle in the sparsely settled hamlet of Calgary, at a time when her uncle was an HBC man who nonetheless still recognized that his right as a Metis man entitled him to receive government-issued Metis scrip. Isabella always relied on the Hardisty kin group to expand her own network, and to ensure the success of her husband. Due to her Metis family’s contributions, Isabella was able to establish herself as an important member of her new community, manage a stately home, and raise five children, all while her husband was often away.

The fur trade Metis were always closely tied to mercantile capitalism, which remained the case for both Marie Rose and Isabella. As a chief factor for the Hudson’s Bay Company, Isabella’s father, and then her uncle, with whom she lived in Calgary, were both adept at realizing profits for the company and for themselves. When the fur trade transitioned, the Hardisty family incorporated the outsider, James Lougheed, whose skills as a lawyer were useful in the new economy that became reliant on paper transactions. In Marie Rose’s case, her father was a fur trader of some worth with an extensive trade network, as was the Delorme family that continued to support Marie Rose’s mother after the death of her husband. There is some indication her mother continued as an independent trader, no doubt within the context of the Delorme family trading network, until she married another Metis man. When the marriage trade was effected that saw Marie Rose marry the robe and whiskey trader Charlie Smith, her Metis kin continued to traverse the plains with the couple, trading and following the treaties, eventually settling in southern Alberta along with them. It is clear the fur trade Delormes had incorporated the outsider Charlie Smith into their kinship web, as had the fur trade Hardistys incorporated the outsider James Lougheed into theirs.

There are documented cases, such as that of Johnny Grant, in which the Metis settled in areas in which they had never lived because they knew they would find a web of kinship. These connections or “webs as mental spaces and physical realities could be resilient and robust.”7 No doubt these connections were crucial for both Marie Rose and Isabella, who successfully transitioned because those webs of kinship, both real and fictive, supported them in their new homes in southern Alberta. Not unlike the fur trade business that needed the Metis for their skills as entrepreneurs, labourers, and middlemen, James Lougheed and Charlie Smith needed the skills and connections of their Metis wives and their kin connections to thrive in the transitional period after the fur trade. At the same time, the Metis families of Isabella and Marie Rose needed the newcomers, who had skills—James as a lawyer and Charlie as a rancher and horse breeder—that were necessary in the new economy. Also, not unlike the Metis at the height of the fur trade, identity based on expansive kinship networks allowed Marie Rose and Isabella to adapt and prosper in situations that were at times hostile, to recover from financial and personal setbacks, and to demonstrate a resilience that reflected that of their Metis fur trade families.

Both Charlie Smith and James Lougheed clearly recognized the value of being incorporated into the family networks of their Metis wives. Charlie’s granddaughter acknowledged that Charlie had determined upon his first encounter with the Delorme winter camp that he should work out an arrangement to forge a partnership through marriage. In his own words, James Lougheed acknowledged that, in marrying Isabella, he had himself become a “company man.” In the end, this book has confirmed, as have others, that being Metis, “whether one formally labelled oneself as such or not—was an intrinsically adaptive social construct” that “ebbed and flowed given specific conditions in specific moments and places.”8

This book has also shown that, as Isabella and Marie Rose negotiated a changing society, the adaptive social construct common to the Metis also changed. Their higher status during the fur trade had enabled them to enjoy Euro-North American educations. Marie Rose’s grandfather, known as le chef des prairies, had been a captain of a Metis hunting brigade, while Isabella’s grandfather and father were chief factors in the HBC, assuring both a higher status. It is true that, between 1885 and 1925, a number of Alberta’s bourgeoisie very likely had ties to the fur trade, and more specifically to the HBC. Thus, the class system that was becoming more apparent during the latter part of the fur trade, in which those affiliated with the HBC achieved more influential positions and thus more wealth, would persist.

However, despite the higher status that both had enjoyed during the fur trade, and which was more likely to continue for Isabella due to her HBC connection, both Isabella’s and Marie Rose’s social status was threatened as adult women. Most basically, both were Metis at a time when many Metis were relegated to lower-status lifestyles. More specifically, for Marie Rose, there was a time when the men in her Delorme family network aligned themselves with Louis Riel, and thus they needed to be silenced in her manuscripts when Riel’s armies were defeated. For Isabella, beyond her Metis ethnicity, which some argue affected her husband’s political aspirations, her social standing was threatened when the vast estate she and James had been able to amass, based on business partnerships with the Hardisty family, was devastated and Isabella was left virtually penniless. Yet the semblance of higher status remained for both Isabella and Marie Rose all of their lives, due in large part to the social capital both continued to contribute to their respective communities, as well as their ability to create new personae.

While early historians of Metis identity argued class distinctions played a role in that process, some suggest that, in studying Indigenous history, it is more appropriate to understand identity formation from the perspective of kinship and gender than it is to focus on class and race.9 While this book has only briefly examined the histories of the male members of Isabella’s and Marie Rose’s fur trade families, it is clear Isabella and Marie Rose were able to rely on their Metis kin, identity, culture, and gender in order to transition more successfully than their male siblings.

In terms of using gender to discuss Metis identity, Brenda Macdougall argues that Metis people defined their relationship to each other based on their maternal and paternal ancestors, and that the act of applying for scrip demonstrated an assertion of rights that “flowed from their maternal ancestry to land.”10 Although not all Metis in North America were eligible for scrip, and, therefore, the application for scrip is certainly not the only signifier of Metis identity, those Metis who did make application (as did both Isabella’s and Marie Rose’s families) were asserting a belief in their rights as “a people” apart from First Nations and Euro-North Americans.

While this book has examined identity primarily through culture, gender, and kinship, there are some who argue that, for an individual or a community to rightfully identify as Metis, they must not only self-identify as Metis but must have a “connection to the historical core in the Red River region.” The argument continues that to discuss Metis identity in terms other than “nationhood” reduces the discussion to one of race.11 This perspective discounts the possibility that a community or individual could be culturally and historically Metis, even if they had no connection to the Red River region. This perspective then naturally raises the question of the Metis families and communities that developed in and around the HBC trading posts that had little or no known connection to the Red River region, and, thus, to the “nation” of Metis that was claimed by Louis Riel and his supporters. To suggest the Indigenous people connected to northern fur trade posts were not culturally and historically Metis (because they may not have experienced a “gravitational pull” to the Red River region for “Métis collective self-identification”)12 would be to view them as “mixed-bloods.” This perspective reduces the discussion about the history of these particular Indigenous people to one of race, and thus forces us to demonstrate ambivalence about them as Metis people.13

Further, to suggest the Metis began to perceive themselves as an Indigenous people primarily as a result of specific events in Red River, such as the conflicts in 1816 and 1869–70, is to discount that the Metis (bois brulé, gens libre, freemen, country-born, mixed-blood, or half-breed) understood themselves to be distinct Indigenous people, even if they were not referring to themselves as “Metis.” This perspective risks perpetuating colonial discourses that proposed Indigenous people had no agency, and that their very identities must be categorized and inspired by outsiders. At the very least, this perspective denies that one can identify as a Metis person without formulating a “national consciousness.”

Both the Hardisty and Delorme families asserted their Metis rights (and identity) through cultural practices and, indeed, scrip applications. However, the argument is not that all members, or Marie Rose and Isabella, ascribed to a Metis nationalism in the same way the Metis of Red River did after the conflicts of 1816, 1869–1870, and 1885. Indeed, it should be noted that Metis nationalism largely went underground after the defeat of 1885. Simply because both Isabella and Marie Rose did not appear to publicly identify as Metis, and there was certainly no indication of Metis nationalism, does not negate the reality that they capitalized on their Metis identity and the Metis culture of their youth as necessary in order to successfully transition. This very ability is at the root of Metis identity as it is understood by many scholars and in this book. That Isabella and Marie Rose understood the challenges of publicly embracing a Metis identity in a society that was increasingly focused on racial categorizations and boundaries does not mean they stopped relying on their Metis culture and kin—it simply means they adapted and they compromised. Rather than focus on race or nationalism as a method of understanding the history of the Metis, a greater understanding is found in examining the role of women, the reciprocal relationships that were integral to Metis communities, their participation in the fur trade and in transitioning economies, their ability to adapt, and the compromise the Metis always sought between “European and Indian ways.”14

As they adjusted to the new realities of their southern Alberta homes, Marie Rose and Isabella compromised and adapted. At the Euro-North American boarding schools, Marie Rose and Isabella learned the ideology of “gracious womanhood.” These schools provided skills that assisted in Marie Rose’s and Isabella’s transition when the fur trade gave way to more sedentary lifestyles. Yet, in some ways, these schools also confirmed both girls were “different” from Euro-North Americans. As this book has suggested, it was not only their Euro-North American educations that enabled their transition. In reality, neither Marie Rose nor Isabella “married out.” As part of transition planning, there was family involvement in the choice of their marriage partners, but those partners were really without influential connections themselves. It was actually Marie Rose and Isabella, relying on their Metis culture, identity, and families, who carried the class distinctions into their marriages and who provided the social capital to enable a successful transition, both for themselves and for their Euro-North American husbands.

In Marie Rose’s case, her marriage arrangement to a Euro-North American man was more apparent, largely because we are privy to her innermost thoughts about her lack of agency. While the man chosen as Marie Rose’s husband may have appeared wealthy enough by the standards of the day, he was still a nomadic robe and whiskey trader with no family connections in the North West. It was a fortuitous trade on Charlie’s part because not only was Marie Rose a member of the hunter and trader class of Red River Metis society but she proved adept at using her Metis culture to adapt to a sedentary economy. Charlie made few adjustments when he and Marie Rose chose a homestead in southern Alberta. For a large part of the year, he continued to traverse the plains, either as a wolfer, trader, or guide to newcomers. Indicative of his social standing was the fact that Charlie could not deal in scrip but was relegated to “obtaining money from the Indians” at treaty time. It was Marie Rose who assumed the more sedentary lifestyle, managed the ranch, and gave birth to seventeen children, while trading with First Nation people for supplies and earning pocket money for herself and her children. More importantly, it was Marie Rose who seems to have assumed the primary duty of social networking with new arrivals to southern Alberta, and who was able to establish herself as a respected homesteading pioneer.

Although she proved adept at networking, Marie Rose faced several challenges. In addition to the challenges of living with a nomadic and hard-drinking husband, Marie Rose had to contend with the fact that her Delorme family had made the choice to fight alongside Louis Riel. Thus, whereas her Metis culture had served her well, the Metis family that had held influence during the height of the fur trade era, even though some settled near her, became somewhat of a public liability. It turned out that there were no male family members with whom Charlie could publicly forge economically advantageous business connections. Further, Marie Rose was of French ancestry in a society that was becoming increasingly Anglocentric. Marie Rose continued to rely on the culture of her youth, and even privately on her fur trade family. She would have had to in order to survive the rudimentary conditions of the West as Charlie’s wife. However, Marie Rose perceived the wisdom of subsuming her Metis ethnicity, and even her French ethnicity, as the demographics of the West changed. She increasingly preferred to present herself as a homesteading pioneer, an old-timer, rather than as a French-Metis woman. At this time, with the conflicts arising from the Manitoba schools question in 1896 which became a national crisis, there were problems presenting as a Metis and as a French person. At the same time, Marie Rose expanded her network, her Metis web, by incorporating outsiders through practices such as godparenting, and through marriages for her children to English-speaking, Euro-North Americans, thus maintaining a class position that began for her during the fur trade era.

In Isabella’s case, her mother continued to rely on her Metis fur trade family network when she dispatched Isabella and her brothers to live with their uncle in Calgary. By this time, Richard Hardisty was well on his way to becoming one of the wealthiest men in the North West. The HBC remained a viable entity in the new economy, enabling officers and their families to transition more successfully than the French Metis. Richard was the area’s first senator while he was still an HBC man, demonstrating the advantage company men continued to enjoy. After Richard Hardisty’s death, the man who had become the patriarch of the Hardisty fur trading family, Donald A. Smith (Lord Strathcona), would also preside over the long transitional economy in the West. Smith would emerge as one of the wealthiest men in that new economy, as he diverted his investments, and those of many of the Hardisty family, to rail and land.15 Due to the positions of her family members, both in the company and in the new economy, when Isabella’s mother sent her to live with her uncle in the tiny hamlet on the open prairie, it was a natural assumption that Isabella would maintain her social standing. Indeed, the connection to the Hardisty family accomplished what was intended for Isabella, who was able to maintain her social standing, while her own mother lost both her connection to the Hardisty family and her social status. Like Marie Rose, through various practices such as godparenting and marriages for her children with Euro-North Americans, Isabella maintained the class distinctions she had enjoyed as the daughter of a chief factor in the fur trade.

When Isabella married James Lougheed, his legal training was complementary to the changing economy, in which it was no longer trading chiefs that served as useful connections but lawyers able to negotiate land deals and commercial ventures. James provided skills the Hardisty family needed, thus ensuring he and Isabella maintained higher social standing. Unlike Charlie, James rose to a high enough class that he did not need to rely on trading for treaty money; rather, James was able to trade in land scrip. James’s economic success enabled Isabella to be well positioned to emulate her father’s role as a chief factor, adept at hosting dignitaries and boosting her own social network, thus contributing social capital to the partnership. It soon fell upon Isabella to manage the couple’s networking in Calgary when James stepped into Richard Hardisty’s position in Ottawa, a situation that also raised Isabella’s own status in the community.

However, as ethnic boundaries increasingly solidified in the West, Isabella, like Marie Rose, chose to recreate her public persona by subsuming her Metis ethnicity. Isabella, too, determined to portray herself as a homesteading pioneer, an old-timer. Marie Rose’s and Isabella’s ethnicity appeared very much to be an instrumental one that could be highlighted or downplayed as need be, or adapted, as had always been the case for the Metis. Their public personae, depicted in the photographs that were used by newspapers, were those of English-speaking, Euro-North American women. These public personae, developed for the sake of successful transition, in no way suggest Marie Rose’s and Isabella’s private personae were indicative of a “mixed people in between” but rather confirm their identity was very much diverse, fluid, and resiliently “Metis.” Both were able to adapt and expand their network to incorporate outsiders as a way to ensure their social status was not threatened.

In the public realm, it appears both Isabella and Marie Rose had their homesteading pioneer (rather than Metis) identities confirmed by their contemporaries. In a 1922 article about Canadian women that appeared in Saturday Night, Isabella’s life was described as having “all the background of romance, adventure and hardship of the pioneer life of the frozen north—on down to the comforts and civilization of the ‘Boom Days.’”16 Marie Rose’s obituary in the Pincher Creek Echo, on 7 April 1960, described her as one of the area’s “most colorful figures,” while noting she was one of southern Alberta’s “earliest and oldest pioneers.”17

While Marie Rose and Isabella were recognized as pioneers of some note, their degree of financial success for a large part of their lives as married women was vastly different. Isabella lived in a palatial home, where servants often helped raise the children, the first home on the prairies to enjoy the luxury of electric power. James was a gentleman, adept at networking with princes and prime ministers. On the other hand, Marie Rose raised her seventeen children in a log home, where she continued to rely on wood stoves and cupboards made of boxes. At times, Charlie was a wolfer, the class of men who subsisted after the disappearance of the great buffalo herds by poisoning carcasses and harvesting the spoils. Try as she might, and despite permeable boundaries during the boom and bust days of early settlement, Marie Rose could never really be considered a “rightful” member of the upper class. Yet both Isabella and Marie Rose relied on a classification system for the Metis, viewing themselves as of a higher status and some Metis as lower class “half-breeds.” Both were proponents of the image of a new “civilized” Prairie West, in which they were respected pioneers of higher social status, unlike other Indigenous people.

In maintaining social status, based simply upon their life occupations, the financial capital offered by Charlie and James is more apparent than that of their partners. The labour Marie Rose and Isabella expended had social value but unidentifiable monetary value. There are no documents to tell us how much material worth their labour contributed.18 Yet, just as reasoned speculation confirms that female partners in the fur trade were valuable contributors to both the company’s and the hunters’ and traders’ activities, their lives speak to the fact that Isabella and Marie Rose were equally important to the financial and social success of their respective partnerships, not only by way of their physical labour but by the social capital they contributed. They were managing the households and creating their personae while their husbands were away for extended periods of time. Isabella and Marie Rose were forging relationships with important members of their respective societies by entertaining visitors and new settlers in their respective homes. While the guests Isabella was entertaining were actors on the political stage, who virtually guaranteed her social status, to Marie Rose, her guests were equally important to the social fabric of her community and, indeed, contributed to her social status.

Because the economy had changed, rather than trade in furs, cooking utensils, and beads, Marie Rose and Isabella now traded primarily in hostess skills, community-building skills, mothering skills, boosterism skills, and really anything that could contribute to the success of their respective social and familial kinship networks, while also contributing to the image of a new Prairie West. In reality, Isabella and Marie Rose provided many of the technical skills necessary for survival in the new economy, as had their own mothers during the fur trade era. Given the realities of their new homes, it is even more likely that both Marie Rose and Isabella continued to rely on the social and economic relations, obligations, and exchange traditions that are traceable to the process of “being and becoming” Metis.

Although their family fortunes were vastly different for the majority of their lives, Marie Rose and Isabella lived their last days in houses they no longer owned. Yet the webs of kinship they had developed came to their aid at the hour of their greatest need and speak to the success and status that both Isabella and Marie Rose were able to maintain their entire lives. Indeed, it was their community of connections that assured both Isabella and Marie Rose a semblance of respectability in their final years, and a semblance of retaining the land that had become important to them. For Isabella, the municipality heeded the call for assistance and responded by allowing her to remain as hostess of her grand home. Also, a former prime minister very likely ensured the funds were available so she could manage that grand home. For Marie Rose, support followed when at least one of her aristocratic friends stayed in her boarding house and thus enabled land ownership. Also, the old-timers came to her aid, making countless appeals to the government so she was finally able to sell her land, and even providing funds so Charlie could have a respectable burial.

Despite somewhat similar conditions near the end of their lives, for the greater part of their adult lives, Marie Rose must have been more concerned about the social capital of her new connections. Her family presented more challenges for a successful transition, due partly to their political activity as the fur trade drew to a close, and partly to their ethnicity as French Metis, and partly to the fact they were not part of the HBC culture. Yet, as both women negotiated a new society founded in paper transactions, they had to be cognizant of the image they projected. For Marie Rose, that awareness meant writing herself into history as a homesteading pioneer and creating a paper kinship network. For Isabella, as it had for Marie Rose, that awareness meant distancing herself from some members of her fur trade family, such as her siblings, and even her mother, who had not successfully transitioned. For Isabella, it also meant managing her image through various media outlets and establishing herself as a pioneer community builder through leadership roles in various social organizations.

In 1983, Jennifer Brown identified a need for further study of the detailed family histories of Metis women to understand how the economic roles some of them assumed afforded them the opportunity to maintain a sense of continuity with their past.19 While reflecting on her life after being diagnosed with cancer, renowned Prairie author Margaret Laurence (whose main characters were often Metis people living on the prairies after the end of the fur trade) observed that the kind of history that

has the most powerful hold over us in unsuspected ways, the names or tunes or trees that can recall a thousand images…this almost-family history can be related only to one’s first home.20

Laurence continued of her first home in Neepawa,

This was my territory in the time of my youth, and in a sense my life since then has been an attempt to look at it, to come to terms with it.21

Due to a paucity of sources, the challenge presented by Brown, and the quest to understand the ways in which Metis women came to terms with their first home (as identified by Laurence), have been difficult to accomplish in the case of Metis women. While many scholars likely believed the Metis continued, in the transitional period, to rely on the culture and extended networks, or the “webs of real and imagined kin,”22 established during the fur trade, it has often been difficult to reach definitive conclusions. However, this close study of Marie Rose and Isabella confirms that their transitional lives relied on a certain continuity with their fur trade lives, their “first homes.” This conclusion, upon further study, might be extended to many Metis who negotiated their survival as the fur trade was waning, and whose lives have yet to be studied.

Marie Rose and Isabella may have chosen to come to terms with their perceived need to obscure some of the culture of their first homes through the organization that held their interest for so long, the Women’s Pioneer Association of Southern Alberta.23 This organization proudly displayed its connection to former times in many ways, not the least of which included singing the Metis folksong “Red River Halfbreed” at all of its public gatherings until at least the 1930s.24 This association also had a mandate to record the “local history” of the pioneers, that group of people defined by the fact that they were living in the North West prior to 1884.25 It is clear the pioneer association was not referring to the homesteading pioneer but rather the fur trade pioneer. We know that Marie Rose had an interest in history and, if the conclusion reached by the first researchers at the restored Beaulieu House is correct with regard to Isabella’s passion for history, then it would be an interest she had in common with Marie Rose.

In 1927, when Isabella was again elected president of the Women’s Pioneer Association of Southern Alberta, the member for Pincher Creek was Mrs. C. Lynch-Staunton, while the member representing Macleod was Mrs. G.C. Ives.26 Marie Rose knew both women quite well and spoke of them in her manuscripts. It is altogether possible that membership in the pioneer association brought Isabella and Marie Rose together on some occasion. Even when the group stopped meeting at Beaulieu in favour of the Palliser Hotel, Isabella continued to

greatly enjoy these meetings…where old friends and acquaintances join with her in recalling the days of the prairie schooner, the buffalo herds, the wide ranges and also many departed pioneers of the seventies, eighties and nineties in Southern Alberta.27

Given their backgrounds, if Isabella and Marie Rose met through the pioneer association, they would have had a great deal to reminisce about. Because the pioneer association was formed and grew in popularity in the 1920s, during the economic slump in Alberta the resiliency and importance of the Metis “pioneer,”28 in particular, may have been accentuated. Indeed, Isabella’s and Marie Rose’s communities recognized them as Metis pioneers, and so did their family members.

When Isabella’s daughter related the automobile trip into the mountains, she noted that Isabella had demonstrated her “pioneer spirit” by walking the seven miles to the train station. Her family member knew Isabella was not a homesteading pioneer, but rather that she was a pioneer of the northern fur trade posts, when she spent her formative years primarily in the company of the Metis mother who had also spent her own formative years in fur trade country. In Marie Rose’s case, her unpublished manuscript, “Eighty Years on the Plains,” confirmed that she, too, was not simply the homesteading pioneer that her brief published manuscripts described, but rather that she was a Metis pioneer.

Perhaps Isabella’s and Marie Rose’s conversation, if they met in person, may have even strayed to fur trade families. Had their conversation been frank and private, Isabella and Marie Rose might have commented that they both continued to rely on those family networks when they first settled in southern Alberta. They may have commented on their work to maintain the social positions they had enjoyed during the fur trade, but that faced challenges due, in part, to emerging racial boundaries. Had their conversations carried on to siblings, they might have found more similarities.

This book touched only briefly on Marie Rose’s and Isabella’s brothers, in part because that information is not as easily accessible, and in part because comparative studies of the adaptive strategies of men from the French-Metis tradition and the English-speaking tradition have not yet been undertaken. However, the intital information suggests their male siblings were not nearly as successful as Marie Rose and Isabella in negotiating the changing economy of the Prairie West. While both Marie Rose and Isabella achieved some considerable attention from their contemporaries and the local media, their brothers did not. There is some evidence Isabella’s brothers did not continue to enjoy material wealth, even though they were from the HBC tradition. Despite the Hardisty family’s extensive connections during the fur trade and into the early transitional period, Isabella’s brothers all appear to have faded into obscurity, some in very dire financial conditions and certainly without the social status that they enjoyed because they were sons of an HBC chief factor. This book did not delve into this reality for Isabella’s brothers, and further study could shed light on the value of Metis culture and identity for men in comparison to women during the transitional period. The same could be said of Marie Rose’s brothers as is said of Isabella’s, which might be more the expected outcome because of the French-Metis ancestry of one and the Sioux ancestry of the other. It appears that both of them lived briefly in the Pincher Creek area but had little hope of carving social positions for themselves as respected homesteading pioneers in the way Marie Rose did. This book did not delve into these circumstances, which invites further study as well.

In a close case study of one Metis man, Gerhard Ens argued that, when the dualistic economy disappeared from the plains,

Metis identity was no longer instrumentally advantageous. It was during this period that many Metis began drifting back to their native roots (entering treaty or reserves), or assimilating to a Euro-Canadian identity…Being Metis during these decades was no longer economically nor socially advantageous.29

It may have been the case that it was no longer advantageous to be Metis for men, and more comparative studies may confirm that and explore the reasons for it. However, “being Metis”—that is, relying on the social and practical skills Metis women learned during the fur trade era—was of considerable advantage to Marie Rose and Isabella, as it may well have been for other Metis women at the time. What was not advantageous for Marie Rose and Isabella was to openly embrace the fact they were Metis.

We can clearly see through her own words the manipulation of Marie Rose’s persona. She was successful at writing herself into homesteading pioneer history, even though little of that history was published during her lifetime. The gaps in Marie Rose’s history served to distance her from the Metis conflicts of 1869–1870 and 1885. It was only in Marie Rose’s brief fictional accounts that she flirted with publicly embracing a Metis identity and summoned the courage to chastise the governing forces for their inattention to Metis territorial land rights.

Isabella’s manipulation of her persona must be deduced from the many contemporary publications that paid her attention because of her position as the wife of the area’s senator. A great deal of space was devoted to elaborate descriptions, often by male journalists, of Isabella’s clothing and her hostess skills. Pictures and descriptions of Isabella as a gracious Euro-North American lady, while most were aware of her Indigenous ancestry, suggest she may have been viewed as a commodity of boosterism and successful assimilation. However, Isabellas participation in the media also suggests that she not only allowed herself to be such a commodity but manipulated the management of her own image. During the few public interviews she granted, while dressed as a gracious woman, Isabella ensured that readers were aware she had endured many “privations” at a northern fur trade post but had successfully transitioned.

In addition to their ability to manage their own personae, Marie Rose and Isabella also shared some external cultural factors, such as traditional Metis clothing, socials, music, jigging, and country food. More importantly, there were social factors evident in the manifestations of their early identities: a common history of duality and distinctness emanating from the fur trade, family collectivity shaped by common employment and reciprocal responsibility, as well as religious beliefs, historical knowledge, adaptability, and the incorporation of outsiders as real and fictive, or imagined, kin that allowed them to “survive and refine themselves,”30 as the Metis had done throughout the fur trade era.

Yet self-identity is not found only in itemized lists of cultural attributes or in census documents. In addition to sharing the cultural identifiers of the Metis, both Isabella and Marie Rose were physically identifiable as being of Indigenous ancestry. Contemporaries knew Isabella was Metis. Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance confirmed it in an article for the Mentor, writing that Lady Lougheed, wife of Minister of the Interior Sir James Lougheed, was a “half-breed.”31 In her interviews with pioneers conducted in 1935, Edna Kells described Marie Rose: “Of Indian blood. Yellow complexioned, brown eyes that seem to penetrate, dark hair, sharply modelled features, lined face. Erratic—kindly.”32 According to a recent study, Metis ethnicity and identity were often a function of the beliefs of “historical actors who [were] both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders,’” so that whether one saw oneself as Metis could at times be dependent upon how others viewed that person or group.33

We cannot ignore both biological and historical realities, and how those impacted self-identity for many Indigenous people. For some, increasing racism and the categorizations imposed by governments and “outsiders” were major catalysts in embracing a Metis identity,34 and this may have been the case for the men in Marie Rose’s and Isabella’s fur trade kinship network. Further research may confirm their own Metis identity contributed to the lack of financial success for both Isabella’s and Marie Rose’s siblings. However, Marie Rose and Isabella were negotiating a changing society and they were women who married Euro-North American men. At the beginning of their married lives, there was nothing very unusual about interracial unions. Both Isabella and Marie Rose might even have initially assumed their Metis ethnicity was advantageous and neither a matter to be denied or asserted. However, as more settlers arrived, both women astutely recognized the need to establish new economic pathways, to embrace the new era of the paper transaction, and to recreate their public personae as gracious “pioneer” women, something their marriage to Euro-North American men facilitated. Their physical appearance may have provided even further incentive to forge new connections with Euro-North American people. Indeed, their new communities of connections clearly recognized the social capital Marie Rose and Isabella contributed, not only to their marriage partnerships but to their communities as well. Yet, while all knew Marie Rose and Isabella were Metis, most public accounts supported Isabella’s and Marie Rose’s homesteading pioneer personae while downplaying any Indigenous ethnicity.

If we were to base our conclusions of successful transition on economics, then we would have to conclude that Marie Rose, a woman of French-Metis ethnicity, did not transition as successfully as Isabella, a woman from the country-born tradition. However, if we are to judge by their own perceptions of their distinctness and the pride in their own abilities to transition and to position themselves as “pioneers,” there can be no doubt that both Marie Rose and Isabella successfully negotiated the changing economy. In fact, they were validated as important pioneers by their societies. For Marie Rose, her influential connections were forged in the pioneer ranching and agricultural community, while Isabella forged her connections in the emerging commercial real estate and political community. These important new connections assisted Marie Rose and Isabella in retaining positions of importance in their respective communities.

In the end, though, there are no real and permanent fixed boundaries when considering culture, identities, and kinship networks. This fluidity was particularly so for the Metis, whose history demonstrates an ability to both incorporate outsiders and to adapt. The lives of Isabella and Marie Rose are a testament to the importance of appreciating the reality of fluid boundaries of identity, which are nonetheless diverse but in no way “in between” or “mixed.” In Isabella’s case, she appeared equally at ease hosting in her stately home the aristocracy of Europe, while they enjoyed the strains of classical piano, as she did in hosting the pioneers of southern Alberta, with whom she enjoyed the tunes of the Red River Jig and reputedly gladly shared the smoking of a pipe.35 Yet, while on the one hand explaining the privations that she, as a daughter of the fur trade, endured at northern posts, Isabella could just as quickly express disdain that the only hired help available to her as she managed her stately mansion were “halfbreeds,” who were none too reliable.

In the same way, Marie Rose felt equally comfortable continuing to trade with First Nation people for hides and ministering to their ailments as she did in forging links with the emerging aristocracy of early prairie ranching society. She could publicly refer to “Indian halfbreeds” with a disdain that suggested they were dirty and unreliable, while privately referring to Indigenous people as nature’s children, capable of caring for their sick with the wisdom of ages. Marie Rose could publicly refer to the foolhardy half-breeds who followed Riel, while privately and “fictionally” pointing out the irony of the Metis being held to account for purloining stockings while the government was not accountable for encroaching on the small plots of land that had, for generations, rightfully belonged to the Metis.

If we are to believe the words Marie Rose wrote, and the words her contemporaries wrote about Isabella, for the majority of their adult lives both women lived like Euro-North Americans. Yet both women served as living examples of the bridge that allowed for the transition of the North West from nomadic fur trade economy to sedentary agriculture and the beginnings of industrial capitalism, in effect serving as major contributors to the building of the new Prairie West. By providing the technical and social skills necessary for their families’ survival in the new economy, Marie Rose and Isabella not only increased their own power, status, and influence, but they remained distinct, in the same way Metis women did during the fur trade era when their identities were situational, inclusive, fluid, and complex. Yet that distinctness for Marie Rose and Isabella must, for the most part, be viewed publicly in the vein of “gracious womanhood,” of homesteading pioneer, of old-timer, rather than of Metis matriarch. Indeed, their respective societies confirmed that they were, in the end, respected “pioneers” of the new Prairie West. Their status suggests that further study will confirm that many other Metis “pioneers” relied on the same cultural, adaptive, and situational survival strategies that these two intelligent, resourceful, and strong Metis women did as the fur trade transitioned and the Prairie West was built.