For the first fifty years, though, most interpretations offered a more balanced narrative based upon the Coltman Commission’s report, representing Grant’s Métis not as bloodthirsty savages but as participants in a larger struggle between the Métis and the North West Company on one side and the Hudson’s Bay Company and settlers on the other. Coltman’s balanced report, based upon sixteen depositions from settlers and seventeen from Métis people, concluded that the only mutilation and desecration of the settlers’ bodies was at the hands of a French Canadian man, François Dechamps, and his three sons. None of the Métis in Grant’s brigade participated.
From 1870 onward, however, the “massacre-by-Métis” narrative, amplified and repeated by Anglo-Canadian historians, began to dominate. Selecting partisan accounts from settler witnesses, Manitoba historians such as George Bryce, president of the Royal Society of Canada, constructed romantic plots and morality tales pitting a warlike Métis against defenceless settlers, savagery against civility. “Having tasted blood in the death of Governor Semple, they were turbulent ever after,” Bryce said in a paper he delivered to an audience of the society a mere ten days after Riel’s execution in November 1885. “A too generous Government overlooked the serious nature of those events. It was reserved for what we may trust may be the last manifestation of this unruly spirit existent for three quarters of a century to show itself on the banks of the Saskatchewan in 1885.”12
Although recent academic interpretations such as Dick’s textual analysis have uncovered a more nuanced and complex understanding of the events and their social-political context, a century of Anglo-Canadian history telling has distorted mainstream perceptions of Métis people from Seven Oaks onward, covering up any anterior responsibility settler culture might have for their landlessness and poverty.
A new “master narrative of progress,” Dick wrote, required the Métis to assume “broader allegorical roles . . . . The Métis needed to be seen as violent, volatile, easily led astray, and lacking in judgement—in short, as the antithesis of qualities considered essential to the development of a stable free market economy in the West.”13
Seven Oaks was one of several battles the Métis would win over the next seventy-five years, but the war was one of attrition in which no Indigenous nation could prevail. In the years to come, Grant would learn there was no way to hold back the flood of Anglo- Canadian agricultural settlement loosed upon the plains by the Selkirk Colony.
Before the deluge, however, Grant’s Nor’Westers chased away the settlers a second time that summer of 1816. Without harming anyone, they put the Scottish farmers into boats and sent them downriver to Canada. Grant returned to his home in the Qu’Appelle Valley, leaving a few of his men in charge of Fort Douglas. But their grip on the Forks was to last only seven months. On January 10, 1817, Miles Macdonell returned with a small battalion of trained Swiss mercenaries, veterans of the War of 1812 hired by Lord Selkirk, to retake the colony. In the cold light of a winter dawn, they hoisted four ladders against the stockades and went over the top, recapturing Fort Douglas and placing the NWC men under arrest.
Hearing the news, Grant mustered a troop of men and headed east once more, setting up camp at a safe distance. From there he and Macdonell exchanged threatening letters. In one of them, Grant closed with “your threats you make use of, we laugh at them and you may come with your forces at any time you please. We shall always be ready to meet you with a good heart.”14
Grant, perhaps seeing that this was a battle that he and his men would almost certainly lose, eventually agreed to go peaceably to Montreal to face several charges, including murder. Arriving in October 1817, he waited in a jail cell for his hearing. Some time the next year, while released on his own cognizance, Grant found a light canoe and fled to the northwest. Woodcock speculates that the law in Montreal, home of the NWC, had little love for the English and the HBC and no enthusiasm for pursuing such a fugitive through the wilds to the west.15
When the English courts of Upper Canada examined the events at Seven Oaks, the NWC denied any responsibility and blamed Grant. Tried by proxy, he was nevertheless cleared of the indictment.
In 1821, the two fur-trading companies—weary of the fight and losing profits—decided to merge under the HBC name. In a matter of months, they closed one of the two formerly competing forts at all trading centres across the northwest. The HBC, now led by the infamous George Simpson, moved great numbers of suddenly unemployed nwc and HBC men, women, and children to the colony at Red River. These Michif and French-speaking people became the Red River Métis of the great buffalo-hunting brigades. For the next five decades, they grew crops and raised livestock along the two rivers at the Forks and headed out in the spring and fall in their long cart trains to hunt buffalo on the western plains. Some historians would call it the Golden Age of the Métis, but it was launched by unemployment from a corporate merger.
Governor Simpson was the type-specimen for today’s sociopathic CEO: shrewd, deceitful, amoral, and utterly dedicated to the monomania of profit making first and last. Within a year of taking his post at the head of the newly merged HBC, he had acquired a chilling grasp of how to use commerce to manipulate and subjugate the Indigenous people in his territory. His journal includes passages that locate the foundations of Canada’s abuse of First Peoples decades before treaties and residential schools, in the heart of the fur-trade era, which too often has been romanticized in Anglo-Canadians’ telling of history:
I have made it my study to examine the nature and character of the Indians and however repugnant it may be to our feelings, I am convinced that they must be ruled with a rod of iron, to bring, and to keep them in a proper state of subordination, and the most certain way to effect this is by letting them feel their dependence upon us. In the Woods and Northern barren grounds this measure ought to be pursued rigidly next year if they do not improve, and no credit, not so much as a load of ammunition given them until they exhibit an inclination to renew their habits of industry. In the plains however this system will not do, as they can live independent of us, and by withholding ammunition, tobacco and spirits, the staple articles of trade, for one year they will recover the use of their Bows and spears and lose sight of their smoking and Drinking habits.16
It did not take Simpson long to recognize the utility of a man like Cuthbert Grant. Having been flushed out of the northwest’s remote forts and brought to the Red River after the amalgamation, the Métis, Simpson realized, outnumbered the English settlers and could become a source of instability. If he could gain the cooperation of Grant and convince him to become a settler-farmer, then other Métis men would follow. In 1824, Simpson gave Grant a large piece of land at White Horse Plain along the Assiniboine River, inviting him to establish his own settlement, Grantown (at today’s St. François Xavier). Simpson noted in a report to shareholders that:
he has got a grant of land at White Horse Plain . . . where he is joined by McGillis, Potts, Bolinot, Inkster . . . . These people will turn their attention to agriculture . . . . I shall rejoice if the plan takes as it will rid us of the greatest evil . . . . Grant has turned very serious and by management will become a useful man to the colony and company, but he requires good management, being an Indian in nature.17
One hundred families followed Grant to Grantown in the first year. That spring he plowed his first thirty-four acres of prairie. Later he dammed a creek and placed a water wheel flour mill on the pond, but it never worked. In 1828, Simpson completed the process of securing Grant’s support by employing a tactic that has often served Canadian governments and corporations well in their dealings with Indigenous people. He invented a title for Grant, appointing him Warden of the Plains, and paid him a handsome stipend of two hundred pounds per annum. Describing Grant in his Book of Servants’ Characters, a private HR dossier in which Simpson evaluated the utility of more than 170 company employees, he referred to the appointment as “a sinecure afforded him entirely fr
om political motives . . . [to prevent] him from interfering with the trade which he would otherwise do in all probability.”18
Grant lived out his days at Grantown, each spring and fall leading large buffalo-hunting expeditions farther west as the great herds retreated and thinned out year after year. The pemmican they took continued to fuel the transportation of furs and trade goods into and out of the northern reaches of the HBC charter, but the trade shifted over time away from the beaver pelt to the buffalo robe. All fur-bearing animals were in decline from centuries of commercial trapping, but the market was changing too. Silk hats were catching on in Europe, and beaver hats were falling out of fashion, while buffalo hides and robes began to find new markets.
By 1860, the plains had lost both its warden and Simpson, its de facto emperor. Grant, content and no longer a militant, had nothing to do with the resistance that would eventually form among the Red River people. In 1854, he fell from his horse and soon died of complications from the injuries. Simpson, having invested his substantial earnings and dividends in steamship and rail companies, died a very wealthy man on his estate in Lower Canada.
A new era was on its way. Within the decade, the HBC would sell its land charter to the freshly constituted Dominion of Canada for £300,000, without so much as a thought for the rights of the First Nations and Métis peoples. That backroom deal would set off a cascade of policy and exploitation that would exterminate the buffalo and force the Plains Cree, Blackfoot, Saulteaux, and Assiniboine into signing treaties, eventually starving them into submission and onto small reserves. Advancing west from the foothold of colonization at the Red River, the railway would soon release a flood of immigrant, land-hungry farmers with John Deere plows ready to turn the ancient prairie into wheat fields homestead by homestead.
Norman stops at a headstone with the family name Boucher. Could it be a descendant of François-Firmin Boucher, the one who parleyed with Semple at Seven Oaks? Before I have a chance to ask Norman, we are on to another name.
“Alec Venne. He used to talk about the day they left Ste. Madeleine. He said they stopped to look back one more time and saw smoke rising from buildings.
“You see, many of the people were away when it happened, working on farms around Langenburg, or on farms at other places, doing different types of jobs during the summer. They were away from home working, and they came back to find their houses burned to the ground and the town gone.”
It was the late 1930s. Millions of square miles of grass had been plowed up, and farmers all over the northern Great Plains had already used up much of the ancient prairie soil’s organic matter. Failed crops and too much tillage had left the land exposed to the blowtorch winds of drought. Topsoil built up over thousands of years by the trinity of grass, bison, and fire was suddenly travelling aloft in apocalyptic dust storms. When homesteaders began abandoning their farms, the federal government formed a new agency called the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration. It would work with rural municipalities and governments in the prairie provinces to stabilize the soil in the worst-hit areas by removing any remaining farmers and then establishing large community pastures that would hold on to the soil and offer affordable grazing to local livestock producers.
In 1937, two representatives of the Rural Municipality of St. Lazare, John Selby and Ben Fouillard, came to Ste. Madeleine and began telling people that they would all have to leave. The land—more than three thousand acres where Métis families lived—was being reclaimed by the federal government to make a community pasture. Those with title and paid-up taxes would receive equivalent parcels nearby. People who did not have title, or those who had title but unpaid taxes, would be resettled with no compensation in one of two new settlements to be established in the municipality. Anyone who tried to stay on the land would be removed by force. And so, most families slowly moved away over the next year, leaving their homes behind. At some point, the municipality men moved in and lit the houses and other buildings on fire. Witnesses say they shot several dogs at the settlement.
Harry Pelletier was away from home working with the Métis Federation in Saskatchewan at the time, learning about the Métis’ historical right to land. In Ste. Madeleine, Community without a Town, he talks about his return to the town in 1938: “I just came for a visit. See how the people were making out . . . . There was nobody there. A few people still, but that’s all . . . . [t]hey’d moved their houses, their furniture . . . . They were going to make a pasture and put cattle in there.”19 When he went looking for his relatives and friends, he found them in the nearby town of Binscarth and at the two resettlement sites along road allowances, named—by the residents and not without some irony—after the municipal men who had ordered the clearance: Selby Town and Fouillard Corner. A few were squatting elsewhere. Many others were missing.
I found my brother, Louis, living on a farmer’s land. I stayed there till winter came. Then the war broke out. I went back to Russell [Manitoba] and joined the army. I stayed in the army till 1946. Yes, everything was lost ’cause my place where I was raised was gone. And I couldn’t find the people. They were scattered all over the country . . . . I get kind of lonesome, wishing to be back again, in that place. Because that’s where I was raised. We made our living in there. We had gardens. We had everything we needed there . . . . They pushed us out of our homes and they burned our houses and shot our dogs.20
At the end of his interview, Harry tells Riel stories he received from his grandfather, wounded at Batoche in 1885. They are part of the oral tradition Métis people keep alive to honour their kinship with their Red River and Batoche descendants. His last story explains how a disguised Riel eventually surrendered to the “red coats.” At its conclusion, he mentions that his grandfather told him that Riel’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Bellehumeur, visited Ste. Madeleine. Then he refers to “old Pat Bellehumeur,” Riel’s brother-in-law, Patrice, as though he was a resident at some point. Finally, he tells the interviewer that he used to know a song about Riel. “I don’t know if I can sing it,” he says. “My voice is pretty near gone.”21
We have arrived at the southwest corner of the cemetery. Past a couple of willows, everything looks different. No plastic flowers, no statues, and no modern headstones. Rows of weathered crosses rise from the grass without any inscriptions—no dates and no names. One area has narrow concrete headstones with pointed ends, also unmarked and leaning in various directions. They appear to be the oldest graves in the cemetery.
“These are the people from the Gambler Reserve,” Norman says as we walk. “They have a little reserve just a couple of miles away, but originally they had all this land around here as part of Treaty Four. Most of it was expropriated to be given to farmers. I hear they got a bit of compensation not too long ago.”
I ask Norman about the people of Ste. Madeleine. Shouldn’t they be seeking compensation?
He pauses, grimacing in a way that lets me know he is choosing his words carefully. “Yes, sure they should, but you see some people were compensated. A couple of families got better land—there’s no denying that. Ask the Boucher family. They will tell you. They had paid their taxes, so they were fairly compensated, and they’ve done pretty well ever since.
“Some other families never did recover, though. It was devastating for them. Sure, the same thing happened to some white homesteaders in the ’30s, but the difference at Ste. Madeleine is that it wasn’t just individual farmers losing their connection to a piece of land. It was 250 people losing that connection, but also losing their community, their connections to one another. If your stories are in the land and in your community, and that all gets uprooted and scattered, how do you continue telling your stories? What happens to that, and what happens to your language?
“But the Michif are survivors. It takes a strong back and a strong mind to be a voyageur or a buffalo hunter. There were hardships, but we survived. And we survived the loss of the buffalo economy, the loss of the trade,
and we survived every advance of colonization and settlement on the prairie. We survived Seven Oaks, Red River, Batoche . . . .”
Norman doesn’t say the words, but they ring in the air above the gravestones: and we survived Ste. Madeleine. The graves lovingly decorated by recent visitors, the pump with water in a jug for priming, and the picnic supplies stored for the summer celebrations to come all testify to the unbroken chain of proprietary interest in this place that the Michif people of Ste. Madeleine have sustained for more than seventy-five years since they were removed from the land. Neither Selby Town nor Fouillard Corner has a cemetery. When the descendants of Ste. Madeleine die, most of them are buried here.
Among prairie peoples, the tenacity and adaptability of the Métis are hard to match. A Métis cultural historian once told me that a Red River cart freighter could walk into an aspen bluff in the morning with no more than a sharp axe and some shaganappi rawhide and emerge at sunset with a new cart that, given a stout pony, could carry half a ton of supplies across the prairie.
Something of that bioregional tenacity made it into the twenty-first century even as Canadian governments dispossessed the Métis people and moved them from self-reliance to dependency. The Ste. Madeleines of the prairie world are here at this end of things, where we speak proudly of survival, but at the other end, when the Métis’ indigenous hold on the land began to slip, the narrative is about loss. The denouement of the crisis played out at Seven Oaks and other battles across the Great Plains would be the continent’s greatest ecological tragedy—the extirpation of the buffalo. Endorsed by corporate and political interests, that loss would ultimately deprive the prairie, and its hunting cultures, of this region’s primary bond between its people and the gifts of the grass.
Towards a Prairie Atonement Page 5
