‘We will start from there’
Métis Matriarchs: Agents of Transition
by Cheryl Troupe and Doris Jeanne MacKinnon (eds.)
Regina: University of Regina Press, 2024
$34.95 / 9781779400116
Reviewed by Linda Rogers
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It is no secret in Indigenous community that survival of eclipse is determined by the sun and moon holding the sky in balance. That’s how the curtain of darkness is pushed aside and the light gets in. This timely book, is written in the words of Métis matriarchs and descendants who listen with respect to the voices of past and present, clarifying the role of women, past and future, in the maintenance and preservation, the actual survival of their ancient cultures.
Just as allies have been stitching quilts to comfort the survivors of the atrocities of church and state that stole children and placed them in residential schools to “destroy the Indian in them” and white families complicit in scooping “little savages” in an attempt to civilize and assimilate children who did not belong to them, so does this pair of scholars thread the elephant in the room through a needle that stitches fact and feeling to tell stories of resilience that are the narratives of the outstanding women who guarded the Prairie Nations from cultural genocide.
Women were the first targets of assimilation. As knowledge keepers within their tribal groups and teachers of children, they were in the front line when the Canadian government and churches declared war with the Indian Act. Denigration of those who carried the information about family history and social practice began, as totalitarianism always does, with slander. Native women were described as drunks and whores in the popular culture and the next step was simple, take their children, save them from belonging to a tainted people.
It started with Eve’s responsibility for the fall of man, the Christian view. We have seen this happen over and over in capitalist political systems. It just did (again!) and who, we don’t need to ask, is the current scapegoat, one of them devastated in the election of a demagogue?
But, aha, long live the light. You simply can’t kill a good idea, and the idea of goodness persists, even as the light under a proverbial bushel. So long as women gave birth to women and the memory of language and custom was never completely extinguished, they were bound in the words of a great American poet, to rise!
The editors write: “Despite their marginalisation and the racism they experienced at the hands of settlers and the state, Métis women as matriarchs, including and similar to those explored in this collection, continued to pass on knowledge and cultural teaching and fulfill their roles as women, mothers, aunties and grandmothers to ensure their kinship networks and community structures remained strong.”
Their book, a collection of case studies, reveals the parallel experience of Indigenous women living on the Canadian prairie in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the “nuance and diversity in their everyday lives, in how they responded to, resisted, and refused settler colonial intrusion, and in the ways they persisted in the face of the many transitions that infringed on their traditional ways of life. There is also a commonality in how these women assumed authority in providing family and community leadership and made decisions in the best interest of their extended families by drawing on their cultural understanding and experiences.”
Let’s call a spade a spade. The writers are polite, mindful of the leadership call to reconciliation. “Intrusion ” and “transition” mean “assault” and “genocide.”
We will start from there.
The first introduction is Doris MacKinnon‘s record of the long life of Marie Rose Delorme Smith aka “Buckskin Mary-Queen of the Jughandle,” the daughter of buffalo hunters aligned with Louis Riel, who was literally sold by her mother to a much older whiskey trader at the age of sixteen.
It began as a transactional marriage that benefited both sides, much like European royalty who acquired land and power through conjugal attachments. Despite her initial reluctance, Marie had seventeen children and the benefit of his absence while she built her own empire and freedoms, and, as they grew closer, a good partnership. This is a common theme, strong women finding a path through adversity, whether it be the institution of marriage or the public institutions that oppressed. These women found their voices because it was bred in them to struggle and survive.
Trilingual: Métis, English, and Cree. Marie was a successful business woman, author, medicine woman, midwife, and leather and bead artisan. All these traditional skills eased her family’s transition from a hunting to a homesteading economy in Southern Alberta, a change many Métis people did not accomplish in the face of interfering government and settler aggression upon the lands and rights of First Peoples.
When she died at ninety-nine, having translated the skills she learned from her elders to the new reality of settlement, she was remembered as a leader and chronicler of powerful Métis women informed by the necessity of maintaining family life and language in the frequent absence of men, traditional traders, and buffalo hunters. Her documents, including a book on natural healing, and unpublished short fiction, are critical to understanding the resilience that is the matrix of survival, not only of her own people but of Indigenous culture in general. Knowledge keeping and skill sharing is fundamental to enduring the calamity of settlement, disease, and miscarriage of justice.
It is significant that the stories of these women have similarities which at least partially explain their influence. Early on, Delorme Smith and her sisters Victoria Belcourt et al were called upon to adapt as their families, descendants of Indigenous nomads and French coureurs de bois, followed the seasonal hunts. Their maps were large as they traversed the traditional lands of the buffalo and when settlement intruded, they changed course and rebelled. That required strong spirits and may have given an advantage over, for example, coastal peoples attached to specific places and resources more easily colonised as they stayed in place.
The detail in which matriarch Victoria Belcourt records her heritage of rebellion explains her position in the social order. “A closer look at her life, ” writes her biographer Madalyn Mandziuk, “also increases our historical understanding of the essential roles and experiences of Métis women socially, economically and culturally during a time of sustained cultural and settler oppression of Indigenous people.”
Similarly, Vanessa Winn‘s account of the life of Josette Work is summed up in the phrase “Strong and elastic as steel.” She had to be. They all were, and their stories are various around common themes.
Born of French and Indigenous roots, like many of the matriarchs of this gathering, in the Red River Settlement, Caroline McNabb, as described by her great-great granddaughter, literary scholar Jade McDougall, circumvents “the long-standing practice of omitting women from the official documentary record or only seeing their presence “coloured by the colonial male perspective.” This deficit is failure to understand “female presence and authority,” especially in Indigenous community. And it is still happening, making this document as necessary part of the conversation.
The emphasis in all these personal narratives is on insistence redressing omission, with only half the story told by traditional historians, their failure to comprehend the necessity for male and female balance in successful society.
Kinship, the understanding of relationship to all living things, is the basis of matriarchy, and balance dependant on “the intertwined lives and stories of many Métis families belonging to a complex and expansive kin group” and their relationship to a larger landscape.
Several of the contributors acknowledge the Scot-Métis consanguinity in addition to the French connection, their shared history as Indigenous people and experience of British colonialism. Their genetic memory is shared loss of the land that birthed them.
Another value is acknowledgement of the Aunty system where mothering is shared in the extended family and larger community. It does take a village. A skill is not to be hoarded but passed on to the next generation. That is how culture survives, through an unbroken legacy of generosity and community parenting.
Scholar Gabrielle Legault describes her great-grandmother Julia Lamotte from a kinship perspective, elaborating the blood narrative that flows from her hand. “Though it is easy to think of historical research as a strictly intellectual pursuit, my research has been an extension of my spiritual practice of connecting with my ancestors.
Spiritual practice aside, it is through the phenomenal evidence that we are brought to feel the lasting presence of these women: their healing medicine, their recipes, and heirlooms like Julia’s birchbark basket, her pheasant feather hats, her tanned cattle hides and fiddle.
“I have felt my grandmother’s hands on my shoulders, supporting me.”
In her chapter on generations of matriarchal rebellion, Janice Cindy Gaudet makes it clear that mother love in Métis culture is more than sentiment, beyond mere influence, the transposition of manners, but the highest purpose of shaping and strengthening character, especially in the face of adversity. Indigenous women across Turtle Island were the first line of assault in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when denigrating women promised subjugation of the entire culture.
The women described in this book, like fine swords, were tempered by a holy fire, the wisdom of many generations. They knew their worth, the importance of resistance, and their legacy endures in outstanding contemporary community leaders like the final subject, Nora Cummings, born on a road allowance and rising to leadership in the greater community, who exemplifies the values passed down by her mother and grandmothers. Cheryl Troupe writes, “Nora learned those lessons first by watching the older women in her family and then modelling their behaviour.”
Understanding their significance, we should be grieving for the generation of children being minded by electronic devices. The contrast is devastating.
The life histories recorded in this book are unique unto themselves and at the same time homogeneous in their teaching. These strong women are the root system of exemplary cultures where all life is valued and carries responsibility for the well-being of the whole, giving family its finest context and matriarchs their due respect.
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Reviewer Linda Rogers, blessed by the teachings of (her forty years older best friend) Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw elder Maggie Blaney Jack, the subject of her first book Queens of the Next Hot Star, observes the failure, even now, of traditional scholars and fools to appreciate the gender balance in Indigenous society and recognize the contributions of matriarchs to tribal survival. While writing her biography of Chief Tony Hunt, she encountered this bias from some individuals who fail to understand the meaning of matriarchy, which is not domination but balance, women’s knowledge and skill essential to the health of community. [Editor’s note: Linda has reviewed books by Adrienne Gruber, Peyman Vahabzadeh, Michael Elcock, Marion McKinnon Crook, Tim Schouls, and Michelle Good for The British Columbia Review.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster