Towards a Prairie Atonement

by Trevor Herriot

  In the 1830s and ’40s, with men like Cuthbert Grant leading the spring and fall buffalo hunts west from the Red River country, the Métis pemmican industry shifted into high gear and continued to fuel the HBC fur trade. As the market moved from beaver to buffalo hides and robes, the pressure to take more buffalo intensified. By 1844, the HBC was processing 75,000 buffalo hides a year at posts on the prairie.

  In Alexander Ross’s eyewitness account of the spring hunt of 1840, the train of 1,210 Red River carts was six miles long. It included 620 hunters, 650 women, 360 children, more than 400 buffalo-hunting ponies, 600 cart horses, and 500 oxen.22 A three-year-old Gabriel Dumont was among the 1,600 souls heading west that spring from Pembina (along the Red River south of the Forks in North Dakota). After 250 miles, the cavalcade came across its first large herd of buffalo. Within two hours the hunt was over, and 1,375 buffalo were dead. At the end of the two-month journey, the Métis returned with more than a million pounds of pemmican and meat. Ross estimated that they had left an equal amount on the prairie.

  By 1850, there were no buffalo anywhere near the Red River. By 1860, they were gone from Turtle Mountain, just east of today’s Manitoba-Saskatchewan border. Over the next decade, the buffalo frontier retreated to the Cypress Hills, where Saskatchewan’s western border is today.23

  Although the pemmican trade had all but vanished, by the early 1870s the Métis could see that they were becoming victims of their own success. But there was much more behind the slaughter than fast ponies, breech-loading rifles, and rising demand for hides. The U.S. government was losing its war with the plains peoples but had come up with a new plan: get rid of the buffalo, and the Indians would soon surrender. For Canada, military justification for extermination was not necessary. The politics of expansion, railway building, and clearing the plains for settlement was enough to urge those in power to look the other way as the buffalo faded from history. In 1877, when it was already much too late, Parliament passed the Buffalo Ordinance, a law aimed at slowing down the slaughter, but one year later it was repealed.

  By then, Louis Riel had brought more than one hundred Red River families to Montana, looking for buffalo and a life free from the persecution they had suffered at the hands of white settlers after the failure of their provisional government. The last Métis buffalo hunts are thought to have occurred in the Judith Basin area south of the Missouri River, where a remnant of buffalo had survived.24

  The eight-thousand-year reign of the plains bison was over. You can parcel out blame any way you like, but if there had been no market for pemmican and robes, no eastern industry using tanned hides to turn its wheels, no corporate greed driving the trade from 1780 onward, and no collusion among the governments in London, Ottawa, and Washington, many things might have turned out differently. If they had wanted to, the powers behind the railways, westward expansion, and trade could have put a halt to the slaughter by disabling the export-based buffalo economy driven by colonial-industrial interests. The hunt would have taken its place again at the centre of a subsistence-based economy for plains peoples, who in turn might have had the self-reliance to hold off on signing treaties until they could be sure they would not be losing the prairie and its resources. No reserves, no Indian agents, no pass laws, and no residential schools. That we did not take that fork in the road and instead dispossessed the ancient prairie of its native peoples, buffalo, and grass stands as one of the great tragedies of the modern era.

  It is the end of the day, and the sun is low and filtering through aspen leaves as we sit and talk beneath a Métis flag riffling in the breeze. I am afraid I have exhausted Norman with my questions, but I ask him to take us back one more time to the clearance of Ste. Madeleine.

  “Prior to 1938, people may have been poor, but they were happy. They still had their independence, their own ways of doing things. After 1938, people were less independent. There was a loss of self-respect and self-determination. When you’re kicked out like that, you lose everything.”

  Not wanting to misrepresent the complexity of the story, Norman again mentions that a few Ste. Madeleine survivors would tell it differently. “You should talk to them. They take a different angle on what happened.”

  These days some of the most prosperous Métis families near Ste. Madeleine are running Charolais or Angus beef cattle instead of buffalo. Working with what the prairie provides, a family ranching native grass—regardless of bloodlines—is as much a cultural substitution in the grassland world as their cattle are an ecological substitution. Not the same thing by a long stretch, but replacing some of what has been lost.

  If Canada had found a way to respect and retain Métis title to portions of the prairie, then there would be more Indigenous families tending our native rangelands in their own ways, operating alongside white settlers. Together, applying a diverse set of land practices and models of tenure, might they have found a way to hold back the tide of cultivation, development, and resource extraction that continues to lap at the edges of the remaining archipelagos of grassland on the northern Great Plains?

  Idle imagining now, perhaps, but anyone who has faced the cultural and ecological tragedies of this place is vulnerable to the allure of “what if?” You find yourself sifting through the stories from before the prairie was given over to plowmen. You look for points in our past where you can detect the weight of history lurching towards the colonial dispensation that still degrades prairie life: the first rifle in the hands of a buffalo hunter; the land assessment expeditions sent forth to find a prairie Eden ordained by God to grow wheat; the handshakes of men signing treaties; the memo recommending “industrial schools” for the people living on reserves; the passing of the Homestead Act; and the advance of the railway, penetrating farther west each summer with its cargo of land-starved peasants and scheming speculators.

  If I had to choose a single moment in prairie history when things could still have gone either way, it would be this one. Métis storytelling tradition has it that in 1869, when a twenty-five-year-old Louis Riel was one among many Métis farmers struggling to survive along the Red River, a Canadian survey crew arrived at the Forks. They were there to take the measure of the prairie for the patchwork coat of settlement and cultivation it would soon wear. It was October 11. Riel’s cousin André Nault came across the surveyors running their chains across a piece of the community’s “hay privilege” used by Edouard Marion.

  Six months before, the people of the Red River had heard that Canada had somehow purchased all of Rupert’s Land, all 1.5 million square miles of it, from the HBC. As outlandish as that sounded, now there were Englishmen driving survey stakes into land that the community grazed and cut for hay.

  Nault went to tell others, and soon there were sixteen men on horseback riding towards Marion’s pasture. Unarmed, they dismounted and addressed the crew. Riel was one of the younger men, but he knew English. “Stop,” he said, “you will go no farther. This land belongs to Monsieur Marion. We will not let you continue.”25

  When the surveyors did not budge, one of the Red River men quietly placed a moccasined foot on the survey chain. Riel and the other men did likewise. Marion’s hay privilege was not surveyed that day, but before sixteen years had passed Riel would hang from a gallows in Regina for his part in a series of escalating conflicts that began that day with sixteen Métis men standing on a surveyor’s chain.

  When I go to the rim of a river valley—the Qu’Appelle, the Assiniboine, the Saskatchewan—and look at the narrow band of native grass left on the slopes between cultivated bottomland and the sea of monoculture above; when I hear white ranchers argue against reintroducing the buffalo to prairie landscapes; and when I think of Ste. Madeleine and the Sand Plains taken from its people, all of my retrospective “what ifs?” turn from looking back on history to face the work of atonement that stands before all prairie people today.

  Branimir takes a last photo of Norman walking through the gravestones,
and then we offer our thanks and say goodbye. With Norman’s permission, we have decided to camp overnight in the school bus at the picnic site and then get up for the sunrise over Ste. Madeleine.

  Before he goes, Norman tells us there are bears here. “You see them sometimes at dusk,” he says, stepping into his truck, and leaving us with the image of bears in the dark, rambling through the cemetery like fugitives.

  The wind down, evening comes on calm and pellucid from horizon to horizon. The poplars surround us—white guardians of the prairie. Notes of Tennessee warblers, an ovenbird, and a Swainson’s thrush ring out from the trees and across the headstones. Barn swallows have settled onto the arms of the white cross encircled by the Red River cart wheel. All the ingredients of peace are here—stillness descending from the sky with nightfall, quiet headstones casting long shadows, the day’s last notes of birdsong—but an uneasiness invades my thoughts. There is no peace here because there is no justice.

  A lark sparrow lands on a headstone, opens its mouth, and fills the air with its jumble of clear, high notes and a glissando of buzzy trills on a lower register. It is the song of one who has travelled from the grasslands of central Mexico to look for a savannah just like this, with sandy soil and sparse grass next to trees.

  It sings to claim a place on the prairie, but its title, and that of many other grassland creatures, has been placed at risk by the same failure to reconcile and bring justice to the land.

  As the lark sparrow falls silent, the sun slips down to the western edge of the pasture. Time drifts on air currents between the rows of carved stone and concrete. Then all around me, small dollops of gold, blue, red, and green begin to flicker and glow. Most prairie cemeteries have a few recent graves that are well tended, but at Ste. Madeleine the majority are festooned with solar lights and memorabilia to comfort the spirits of those whose bones rest under the grass: flowers of unnatural hue, stuffed toys, small statues of angels or the Virgin Mary, a red Métis sash, a baseball cap. Some of the lights are crucifixes.

  Branimir, out on the open pasture photographing the sunset, returns at dark. We walk to the bus, open its rear door, and climb in. Tidy, with rugs covering the floor, it will make a fine bivouac for the night. There are two cots folded up with quilts and a woodstove vented out the side. On shelves and the floor are large margarine pails with “cups” written on the lids in felt pen and boxes marked “assorted plastic cutlery.” A stainless steel dogfood bowl waits under one of the half dozen chairs stored against the walls.

  After unrolling my sleeping bag across the floor, I look out the windows at the cemetery. All dark now, but through the screen of aspen trees I can see the coloured lights at the graves. As I stare out at the points of green, red, yellow, and blue, something, or a shadow of something, passes across them from east to west. It moves as an animal would, and when it is gone the lights pulse softly again, like lanterns from the windows of a village gone to sleep.

  At daybreak, 4 a.m., with thrushes and ovenbirds leading the day’s chorus, I awake to find Branimir already gone.

  Pumping water from the well to wash and drink, I head back to the graves of Ste. Madeleine to walk through them one last time. The grass is wet with dew, and the low tufts of speargrass look as spiky as sea urchins, with a droplet of water at the tip of every blade. Ants have made mini-doughnuts of sand wherever the soil is exposed. On the slope falling away from the central cross, the purple-red blossoms of three-flowered avens dangle above a matrix of plants, lichens, and club mosses that have held the prairie together for thousands of years. How much longer they can hold out against the pressure to grow crops to feed the growing hordes of humanity no one can tell.

  A flash of white catches my attention amid the plain wooden crosses in the Indian section of the cemetery. It’s the lark sparrow again. He is showing off his white-bordered tail, fanning it and drooping his wings as he struts back and forth over a platter-sized patch of bare ground. The chestnut feathers on his crown raised and shining in the sun, the charcoal medallion proudly displayed against his white breastplate, he moves like a tiny guard at the gates of a lost kingdom. Pausing in his ceremonies, he lets out a few soft notes of his courtship song and then flies to a willow. As he disappears in the bush, a second lark sparrow flutters up to the top of the adjacent cross. The male then re-emerges with a tiny twig in his bill and flies over to his mate. There, above the anonymous grave, he passes her the twig, and she holds it while he alights on her back, flicking his tail down and to one side. There is a brief flutter of wings, and then he releases her, flying towards the refuge of the poplars.

  The lark sparrow does not need a lot to ensure its kind will still be here next year—a bit of open country with sparse grasses, some bare ground and bush nearby, some weed seeds and grasshoppers to eat. Even a messy farmyard will do for the summer. Beyond Ste. Madeleine, the Spy Hill–Ellice community pasture, with its thousands of acres of speargrass and grama grass, is welcoming chestnut-collared longspurs and Sprague’s pipits just back from the winter in northern Mexico, and upland sandpipers and Swainson’s hawks back from the pampas of Argentina. These birds, and many other grassland creatures, are fussier than the lark sparrow. They need native grassland, large expanses of it, and for that need they have been suffering.

  The cascade of ecological destruction that began with the removal of the buffalo and the buffalo-hunting economy, and continued with the tearing up of the prairie and the suppression of fire, has left the remaining islands of native grass vulnerable to a chain of cause and effect that has altered everything from the microcosm of soil biota to the macrocosm of weather patterns under climate change.

  Ste. Madeleine’s story, nested within one of those islands, is easily filed away as another narrative of colonial violence against the Indigenous peoples of this place, but it is more than that. Yes, something died here, and it would be wrong to forget that. A worse sin, though, would be to miss what made it through the death and loss and not receive the spirit and life of what is still here and worth fostering, nurturing. That other side of the narrative persists in the courtship of the lark sparrow, in the picnic supplies stored in an old bus, and in the Michif to Go smartphone app that Norman developed and released last year.

  There will and should be more talk about who must be compensated for past wrongs, who should be granted land, but those conversations too often resolve down to a discussion of worthiness—the kind of worthiness that comes from a quotient of victimhood bound to this or that quantum of blood. If there is a contest for innocence in our centuries-long drama, then the prairie earth will win every time. Compensating the prairie, by restoring our grasslands, wetlands, and rivers to health, is the good work that would reconcile and bind all of us together, but we have scarcely begun to talk about it.

  The land, for its part, does not ask for blood quantum or innocence as a measure of worthiness; it asks only for our forbearance, gratitude, and good labour. To meet those expectations would require a community with the responsibility and respect to restore the land’s well-being. Instead, we have invented a private morality and a public legality that protect and mythologize the privileges—secured for us by the colonial enterprise—that parcel out the possibility of wealth family by family. To comfort ourselves with these privileges, we need merely look for our names on titles and contracts; but to find and be disturbed by our responsibilities, our portion of care, and earn our place on the prairie, we need to look elsewhere: between the gravestones, in the unjust narratives of our collective history, and upon the sunlit plains themselves.

  Some biographies suggest that Grant had attended boarding school in Scotland.

  Peter Fidler, HBCA B/22/A119, quoted in Margaret Arnett MacLeod and W. L. Morton, Cuthbert Grant of Grantown (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1963), 43.

  Ken Zeilig and Victoria Zeilig, comps., Ste. Madeleine, Community without a Town: Metis Elders in Interv
iew (Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications, 1987).

  Ken Zeilig and Victoria Zeilig, comps., Ste. Madeleine, Community without a Town: Metis Elders in Interview (Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications, 1987), 147.

  Norbert Welsh speaks at length about La Prairie Ronde, the Trottiers, and some of the last buffalo-hunting expeditions in that area in Mary Weekes (as told to her by Welsh), The Last Buffalo Hunter (Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers, 1994), 37–77.

  Grant MacEwan, Métis Makers of History (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1981), 18.

  The general area at the time was known to the Métis as Frog Plain. Today it has the Scottish name West Kildonan.

  Peter C. Newman, Caesars of the Wilderness: Company of Adventurers, Volume 2 (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1988), 175.

  Lyle Dick, “The Seven Oaks Incident and the Construction of a Historical Tradition, 1816 to 1970,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 2, 1 (1991): 91–113.

  George Bryce, “The Old Settlers of Red River: A Paper Read before the Society on the Evening of 26th November 1885,” Transactions [Manitoba Historical and Scientific Society] 19 (1885): 6.

  Lyle Dick, “Historical Writing on ‘Seven Oaks’: The Assertion of Anglo-Canadian Cultural Dominance in the West,” in The Forks and the Battle of Seven Oaks in Manitoba History, ed. Robert Coutts and Richard Stuart (Winnipeg: Manitoba Historical Society, 1994), n. pag. http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/forkssevenoaks/historicalwriting.shtml.

  Cuthbert Grant, letter to Miles Macdonell, Assiniboine River, March 2, 1817, Library and Archives Canada, Selkirk Papers, MG 19, E4.

  George Woodcock, “Grant, Cuthbert (d. 1854),” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 8 (Toronto: University of Toronto; Laval: Université Laval, 2003–16), http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/grant_cuthbert_1854_8E.html.