This essay has an express purpose of exuding orality, with the objective of raising awareness about Metis love of land, or of landedness. As such, I am approaching the discussion more from a literary and creative approach. I am of course aware that any mention of the Metis can bring up any number of issues from pretty much any number of disciplines. I will not try to address these multi-faceted issues which can involve historical, constitutional, social and ethnographic questions. My discussion here is obviously quite exploratory, and I have taken some poetic liberties with style and organization.
While the displacement and dispossession of the Red River Metis is more or less a well-known historical fact within academia (and to a lesser extent, in the wider community), ironically rarely is the theme of place associated with the Metis. By place I mean more than geographical location or mapping, though all that is included; by “place” I mean more like attachment, rootedness, groundedness, materiality. Familial-ity. Home. Homelands. A particular and unique land area in this country where we carry out body and home-stitching everydayness. A place where we live. And go to work from. Or in. A place where we come to know the ways and voices of family and neighbours. A place where we become familiar with pots and pans, woodpiles and water pails. Or computers and iPods. A garden we tend. Blueberry meadows we work or rest in, meadows surrounded in sunlight streaming through poplars and birch. A place where we dream. Yes there was the Red River and that was and is a place. To be sure a very significant place. But Red River has been so over-politicized that we can barely recognize it as a real place where real people practised their everyday ways of life and livelihoods. What did Riel eat?
Let me put this matter of place in another way. People in western Canada, and especially Manitoba, know about the Red River Metis. Or should. Everyone knows that Riel defended Metis interests and died for the Metis cause. And everyone knows the prairie Metis (or a handful of them) took a sort of last stand at Batoche, put up a good fight but lost.1
And everyone knows the other Canadian story—the sanitized school story—the pioneer version of how the coureurs de bois, or the voyageurs in early fur-trade times, sang and joshed their way up and down the St. Lawrence, portaging their way into the interior. Strapping, jovial “halfbreed” men who seemed to be forever paddling.
Another theme of halfbreed wanderings is to be found in Norma Bailey’s Daughters of the Country series produced by the National Film Board. In the third film, titled Places Not Our Own, there is a scene where a Metis family is travelling by horse and wagon. It is sometime in the Depression. It is somewhere in the Prairies. Here the Metis are the prairie gypsies—apparently homeless and with no specific place to go.2 And where did Morag’s Metis lover in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners live? Where does he come from? Where does he go? Like an apparition, he fades in and out of Morag’s life.3 Whether the Metis are presented as portaging minstrels, prairie gypsies or inconstant lovers, popular culture has romanticized and perpetuated the myth of Metis as roaming transients with little or no sense of rootedness to homes and lands, to homelands.4
Yet everyone knows the Metis fiddler. Or the Metis fighter. And the Metis martyr. But who knows the people? Who knows where they played their fiddles? Who really knows why they fought, or why they sacrificed their lives? Who knows who the Metis are and what they love and hold dear? Who knows where they have lived—or where they live now? Who knows how they felt or how they feel now about being displaced, then replaced? And today—where are their places? How do they live in those places? What do they feel about these places? Or that one place?
Of course, I am not going to answer these questions or issues. I raise them poetically rather than ethnographically. Here I only have time to offer vignettes of thoughts from several Metis writers and to highlight those facets and issues which often get neglected in film, literature, and other popular productions, but even in critical discussions. Generally, critical attention to Metis writers focus on socio-economic and identity issues.5 Here I take three well-known Metis—Maria Campbell, Marilyn Dumont, and Greg Scofield—who clearly express their profound attachments to home and landedness. I turn first to Maria Campbell, who in Halfbreed (1973) offers considerable cultural information tracing Metis life from the Metis Resistance era of the late 1800s to her own era of the 1950s–70s from which she wrote the memoir. Maria Campbell is of Cree/Scottish Metis Nation ancestry from Saskatchewan. Her parents raised her and her siblings with Metis material culture as well as Metis values. It is not incidental that Maria begins her facts of biography with this: “I should tell you about our home now before I go any further.”6 She then proceeds to describe their “two-roomed large hewed log house,” detailing their homemade tables and chairs, beds and hay-filled canvas mattresses, the hammock that babies swung from, the huge black wood stove in the kitchen, the medicines and herbs that hung on the walls, the wide planks of floors scoured evenly white with lye soap, and so forth. I am sure it was with tears of love that she reminisced: “The kitchen and living room were combined into one of the most beautiful rooms I have ever known.”7 Clearly, these tangible everyday objects remain a cultural palate of warm memory and strong attachment from which Maria Campbell has written and lived.
In a very short non-fiction piece called “The Gift,”8 Alberta Metis writer Marilyn Dumont writes about watching her father revisit and linger over a beloved spot of land he had long ago lost. This land, located in northeastern Alberta, had been given to him as a wedding gift by his father—but he and his wife (Marilyn’s parents) were unable to keep it due to the Depression in the 1930s. Many years later Marilyn and her aging father climb up a hill to see—and to say a final goodbye—to this place. Before leaving this ancestral high ground, Marilyn watches with pain as her father “tucked some blades of grass and twigs into his wallet.” She describes her own reaction: “My thoughts raced. I wanted to take something too. Something to say I’d been here. My eyes searched in the grass. A light flickered. I picked up a brown piece of glass. The heavy broken bottom of a jug. I didn’t know what I’d do with it. It didn’t matter; I gripped it against me.”9 This fact-based story is another very moving testament to Metis attachment to place, in this case a parcel of land. Not just any land. But a very site-specific, family-significant, and much-loved place. It is excruciatingly difficult to lose places we love. As Marilyn Dumont puts it: “Who knows what it’s like to leave, to give up a piece of land? If you do, it might haunt you forever, follow you til you come back.”10
Many Metis—not all, but altogether too many—have been forced in some way or other to leave their special places. In this sense, there is some truth to the image of the Metis as prairie gypsies, but this should be seen as a consequence of displacement—not as a cultural or individual trait to be romanticized. The sad fact is that many Metis cannot come back to their places of origin due to urban and industrial encroachments, or outright dispossession by either federal or provincial laws and actions. But even this reality does not erase the Metis love of home, kin, or community. Some have had to adopt symbolic places that hold great significance. One such place is Batoche. In his autobiography Thunder Through My Veins (1999), Metis poet Gregory Scofield titles one chapter “Pekewe, Pekewe” (“Come Home, Come Home” in Cree). He had come home to Saskatchewan, to the prairies, to what he calls his roots. After a very long and troubled and confused youth, Gregory had finally discovered Batoche—on one hand a historic place of sacrifice, loss, and pain, but for him, a new place of peace and belonging. A place, a people, a culture that he could identify as his very own.11 These prairie writers, each work reflecting a different period of time, nonetheless experienced some form of uprootedness in their personal and community lives—yet each is deeply rooted to particular histories, places, geographies, and families. To be sure, there are many differences between these writers (age, gender, experience, and genre among them), yet one constant stands out—a strong identification with placeness. Landedness for the Metis remains an unbroken bond.
My father used to say we are nothing without land. Rarely did my gentle father make such categorical pronouncements. He was born at the turn of the twentieth century in northeastern Alberta, his roots coming directly through the Red River Metis of the 1870s–90s. Bapa was a hard-working man forced by colonial history to raise his family in a road allowance section of land he never got to own. “We are nothing without land.” It took me some time to realize the full profundity of his statement. He was not just talking about legal ownership of property—although land and resource rights, of course, remain an unfinished business for the Metis, certainly for the Red River Metis. My father (and mother), who never had the means to own property, had a philosophy and praxis about land that was far greater than capitalist notions of land as real estate commodity. Metis writers reflect and express what Metis peoples know and feel—that they are deeply, ancestrally, Indigenously, and fundamentally rooted to their lands and families. To my Metis parents land represented identity, culture, self-sufficiency, and independence. Landedness also meant family, home life, kin, and community. Landedness is purposeful; it gives meaning to language and life.
For all our efforts to explain our identity and our epistemic world views in relation to land and place, stereotypes and ignorance about the Metis persist. I come back to the beginning. I have just spoken to the well-known and perhaps worn-out old stereotypes. Earlier in my research I had been struck by the portrayals of Metis as alienated loners who insert into Native or white lives without context or belonging. Like Billy Jack in the movie Billy Jack. Sometimes they were romanticized. Like Morag’s lover in The Diviners. Often they were demonized. Historians and novelists alike presented metis as volatile males splintered between the chasms of civilization and savagery.12 These should be old stereotypes, yet have these rather classic images changed? I am not so sure. I have noticed that some Native American writers and academics make no distinction between individuals who are half-white/half-Indian, and those Metis Nation peoples of western Canada who formed a distinct ethnic culture and community.13 The more recent post-colonial emphasis on hybridity or border-crossing, useful concepts in some contexts, can serve to further obscure Metis national identity and culture and, in turn, Metis land and resource entitlements.14 But even in Canada we still have films, poems, stories and books, titles and academic treatments that tend to focus on Metis homelessness, identity crises, marginalization, or an in-betweenness. Of course, there is some sad truth to these images. The Red River Metis did lose their beloved lands in the Red River, and about 83 percent of this population were forced to relocate and many could not find a new place or new homelands.15 If they did, they would face other dragons such as the “scrip” that the federal government gave as poor compensation for Metis claims, the Gatling gun at Batoche, provincial confiscations of traplines through Natural Resource laws, or the oil sands in northeastern Alberta. To name but a few. And notwithstanding the somewhat recent Powley Supreme Court Decision (2003) that recognized specific Metis harvesting rights,16 neither the provincial nor federal governments are anywhere near fulfilling the Canadian constitution—that is, of actualizing Metis land and resource rights as Aboriginal peoples. But despite all these historic pressures, Metis managed to stay together and even to develop strong communities in central and northern parts of the prairie provinces, many along road allowances. The Metis Nation story is a remarkable feat of survival and cultural tenacity. For despite all the succession of losses and obstacles, there are thousands of Metis Nation families and individuals across western Canada who live lives quite similar to those of “ordinary Canadians.” That is, they have homes—maybe even “homelands”—and culturally cohesive and functioning family lives with meaningful occupations. Without in any way seeking to minimize those Metis who have suffered much personal and cultural dislocation, some of us Metis have had to say “hey—not all of us were stolen or fostered, not all of us suffered identity crises (even despite huge obstacles) and not all of us had to look for homes and places.” Historians and literary critics now need to refocus and enlarge their portrayals and treatment of Metis peoples, issues, and themes. I say this to draw attention to our rootedness, to our integrated identity as Metis Nation peoples. To our love of our lands.
Love of land does not depend on property ownership (though that certainly should be a right that Metis have). My family still owns no lands. But long before the province of Alberta was established, long before Confederation was arranged, my paternal and maternal Plains and Woodlands Cree/Metis ancestors filled these lands by use and love of the land. Like other Red River Metis Nation peoples of their generation, my parents knew every nook and cranny of lands stretching hundreds of miles within their areas. My brothers—along with others of our generation and their children—still know, occupy and use these lands. Metis scholars, and writers and poets such as Maria Campbell, Marilyn Dumont and Greg Scofield carry the nooks and crannies in their hearts. As do I. I end with Marilyn Dumont’s poem “not just a platform for my dance”:
This land is not
just a place to set my house my car my fence
This land is not
just a plot to bury my dead my seed
This land is
my tongue my eyes my mouth
This headstrong grass and relenting willow
these flat-footed fields and applauding leaves
these frank winds and electric sky
are my prayer
they are my medicine
and they become my song
this land is not just a platform for my dance17
1 I am referring to the Northwest Metis Resistance at the Battle of Batoche in 1885 where some 250 Metis men fought some 900 Canadian Militia troops. The Metis took a last stand to protect their lands against imperial forces. See Walter Hildebrandt, “The Battle of Batoche” in The Western Métis: Profile of a People, ed. Patrick C. Douad (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 2007). See also 1885 and After: Native Society in Transition, eds. F. Laurie Barron and James B. Waldram (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1986).
2 Places Not Our Own, directed by Derek Mazur (National Film Board, 1986), available online at http://www.nfb.ca/film/places_not_our_own, accessed 6 October 2011.
3 Margaret Laurence, The Diviners (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974).
4 I am not suggesting that we confine any Indigenous group, including the Red River Metis, to the sort of rootedness that freezes them to the past which would keep them “in their place” so that colonizers can gaze or segregate them. For an interesting discussion on the uses and abuses of notions of “roots” see Renate Eigenbrod, Travelling Knowledges: Positioning the Im/Migrant Reader of Aboriginal Literatures in Canada (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2005), especially the chapter on “The Rhetoric of Mobility.”
5 For example, see Kateri Damm, “Dispelling and Telling: Speaking Native Realities in Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed and Beatrice Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree” in Looking at the Words of Our People, ed. Jeannette Armstrong (Penticton: Theytus Books, 1993): 93–114. For a more post-colonial reading see Helen Hoy, How Should I Read These? Native Women Writers in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).
6 Maria Campbell, Halfbreed (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973), 16.
7 Ibid., 17.
8 Marilyn Dumont, “The Gift” in Writing The Circle: Native Women of Western Canada–An Anthology, eds. Jeanne Perreault and Sylvia Vance (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1990), 44–46.
9 Ibid., 46.
10 Ibid., 44.
11 Gregory Scofield, Thunder Through my Veins: Memories of a Metis Childhood (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1999).
12 Emma LaRocque, “The Metis in English Canadian Literature,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 3, 1 (1983): 85–94.
13 Native American writer and academic Elizabeth Cook-Lynn in Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996) takes a very troubling view of “Métis” as halfbreed individuals who threaten Native “tribal” identity. There is no mention or appreciation of the Red River Metis as Indigenous with Indigenous identity. See also Julia D. Harrison’s treatment of the Metis as people in between in her book Métis: People Between Two Worlds (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1985).
14 For further explorations of these issues, see Emma LaRocque, “Native Identity and the Métis: Otehpayimsuak Peoples” in A Passion for Identity: Canadian Studies for the 21st Century, eds. David Taras and B. Rasporich (Toronto: Nelson Thomson, 2001), 381–400; Emma LaRocque, “Reflections on Cultural Continuity Through Aboriginal Women’s Writings” in Restoring The Balance: First Nations Women, Community and Culture, eds. Gail Gutherie Valaskakis, Madeleine Dion Stout and Eric Guimond (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2009), 149–174; Emma LaRocque, When the Other is Me: Native Resistance Discourse (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010).
15 See Joe Sawchuk, Patricia Sawchuk, Terry Ferguson and Metis Association of Alberta, Metis Land Rights in Alberta: A Political History (Edmonton: Metis Association of Alberta, 1981). See also Canada, Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996), Volume 4, Chapter 5 on “Metis Perspectives,” 198–386, found at http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/webarchives/20071115053257/http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ch/rcap/sg/sgmm_e.html, accessed 10 April 2012. See also D.N. Sprague, Canada and the Métis, 1869-1885 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1988), Chapter 3.
16 R. v. Powley, [2003] 2 S.C.R. 207, 2003 SCC 43, found at http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2003/2003scc43/2003scc43.html, accessed 5 October 2011. Also see the recent Manitoba Metis Federation vs. Canada decision at http://scc.lexum.org/decisia-scc-csc/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/12888/index.do,” accessed 25 March 2012.
17 Marilyn Dumont, A Really Good Brown Girl (London, ON: Brick Books, 1996), 46.