2010
University of British Columbia Press
“to comprehend fully how wahkootowin functioned in the northwest, we have to go back to its genealogical reconstruction to piece together the region’s social patterns and dissect the clues that they provide. By doing so, we can chart and evaluate the kinds of structures that brought coherence and unity to this Metis community over time and in a specific place.” (55) Readers of
Indigenous Peoples Issues and Resources will find the new author Dr Brenda Macdougall an engaging and compelling Metis historian. This book, her first published work and by all signs the start of a promising career, was written in part as her doctoral thesis, completed while she was teaching and acting Chair of
Native Studies, University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada).
One of the Family: Metis Culture in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Saskatchewan makes a great contribution to Native Studies, and to the emerging canon on Métis studies. The best part is that it is a fascinating read. Macdougall offers an instructive and comprehensive overview of methodological considerations for Indigenous historical research. Macdougall’s purpose (12) “is not to quantify the demographic characteristics of this community, to reveal or analyze such things as birth rates, martial ages, or mortality. Instead, the methodology used here draws from the qualitative methodologies… what can the genealogical reconstruction of family structures tell us about larger historical issues of Metis identity across western Canada and the northern plains, and what can it tell us about the intellectual process that went into the establishment of a new society?” This work represents a deep understanding of Metis social relations and speaks to both economics and geography, environmental relationships that shape culture for a specific region over time.
Before I go on, I use both spellings for Métis throughout this review. The accent is used by the people where I am writing from and it denotes respect and celebration of both Indigenous and French origins of Métis families (in Ontario, Canada). When I was growing up in St. Boniface, Manitoba (Canada), the accent was sometimes dropped. It could be argued that as one travels further west in Canada the distance from the French community becomes larger and the connections more tenuous. While not only a result of geography, historically the accent was not used because of certain considerations for the social and political forces at play. When I was growing up in Red River (present day Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada), the
Quiet Revolution, the
FLQ and
October Crisis, had far different impacts then it did in Montreal or Quebec City (Quebec, Canada). One must always pause to consider that the 1869 establishment of the Provisional Government in Red River and the resistance at
Batoche (Saskatchewan) in 1885 had a very different effect in Kingston (Ontario, Canada) and Quebec City. While there are complex personal reasons why people who are Métis choose one spelling over the other, in Northwestern Saskatchewan most choose to write it without the accent. In this review I use both to write respectfully about Métis in Ontario and Metis in Northwestern Saskatchewan, both of whom are part of the larger Métis nation.
Readers of this review should keep in mind that while talking about Métis/Metis, they are like other Indigenous peoples in other parts of the world, they share much in common and have cultural differences; one nation but with a lot of diversity. As Macdougall notes (30) “how a people name themselves and insert their narrative into a landscape reveals a great deal about their self-conceptions.”
With the publication of this book, Dr. Macdougall has moved to the University of Ottawa where she has taken up the first Research Chair in Métis Studies. The Research Chair is unlike any other in Canada, funded to a sustainable level by the Government of Ontario and the University of Ottawa. It is a significant policy and political shift from the dark days when the government issued a bounty on the head of Louis Riel. The idea of the Chair was first discussed between the Métis Nation of Ontario and then leader of the opposition, Dalton McGinty. The significance of these relationships is that they help explain the context in which
One of the Family emerges in 2010.
Relationships between people and place are core features of Métis protogenesis, genealogy and resiliency over time. Macdougall notes, “Over time, the region was transformed into a Metis homeland not only by virtue of the children’s occupations of the territory, but also through their relationships with the Cree and Dene women and the fur trader men from whom they were descended. The Metis, like their Indian and fur trader relations, lived in a social world based on reciprocal sharing, respectful behaviour between family members, and an understanding of the differences between themselves and outsiders.”
Like other Indigenous people, Métis were often treated as marginal to the written history describing the development of Canada. The main reason they were marginal was that they did not write this history. Métis began to surface in scholarship, in particular fur trade history, social history and women’s history in the late 1970s, but it is only within the last decade that governments in Canada have redressed the racists policies of assimilation and acculturation of the past hundred and fifty years. Most of the past scholarship on the Métis focuses on the fur trade, Red River (present day Winnipeg, Manitoba), the establishment of a government in Manitoba in 1869-1870, and the resistance in Batoche in 1885; however, there is relatively little scholarly attention paid to contemporary Métis.
One of the Family is a much richer exploration and reconstruction for a specific region and period and thus serves as an opportunity to bring forward the documentary archives of a number of different sources within an Aboriginal intellectual framework.
Macdougall uses the Cree concept of
wahkootowin to present the extensive genealogical research of the Metis from the English River district, Île à la Crosse, a land the people call
Sakitawak. Macdougall (7) did not take the concept from the historical record, “While outsiders knew Aboriginal languages, they learned those languages only to advance their own agendas –expansion of the fur trade or conversion to Christianity. These outsiders were not necessarily interested in the cultural dynamics of the community itself or in understanding the philosophical or religious meaning behind a people’s action or behaviours.” The beauty and uniqueness of the region is obvious, it is boreal forest and the rich cultural history since the late 1700s is situated along the rivers and lakes west of the Nelson River and south of Lake Athabasca. It is the height of land between two major basins: the Hudson Bay and Athabasca, which linked the fur brigades before the 1900s that shipped European goods inland by canoe and moved the furs out to the coast bound for Europe. It is the interzone between the northern Cree and Dene, where the Metis took on characteristics of both mixed with their rich traditions of Scottish, French, and English forefathers.
As a reader I am both informed by the book and left with many questions, and I think that is the greatest contribution of this research. As readers we might wonder what became of the many men and women, families, who left the English River District. How much were the people influenced by larger global forces such as changing fur prices, economics, and world wars? I often wonder, because I lived in the Northwest Territories for a while, what sorts of connections the Dene and Métis there had with the people living around Sakitawak. What do we know about the relationships of people from other parts of western Canada, Ontario and Quebec, the men and women, and how much mobility was there to and from the Northwest Territories, northern Alberta and British Columbia? We can only speculate about the changing demographics and how this influenced Métis culture. Reading about the influences of the Oblates and later the Grey Nuns is fascinating and makes one wonder what administrative and government changes, such as game laws, did to the social landscape of the region over time.
It was encouraging to read this historical account of Metis culture in Sakitawak. How it fits with the larger nation across Canada and the United States has yet to be written. If history teaches us where we come from it must have something to tell us about where we are going. As such
One of the Family contributes to future renewal, one that has important lessons about relations among people and the place where they live. Readers of
Indigenous Peoples Issues and Resources will find much to use in this book that transcend specific Indigenous peoples and hopefully the book will stimulate discussion, debate, and new research on Métis issues, historical research, acculturation/resiliency, and mixed race studies.
Reviewed by Chris Paci, The Metis Nation of Ontario
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