Towards a Prairie Atonement

by Trevor Herriot

  Frederick Merk, ed., Fur Trade and Empire: George Simpson’s Journal 1824–25 (1931; rev. ed., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 179.

  George Simpson, letter to Andrew Colvile, May 31, 1824, Library and Archives Canada, Selkirk Papers 26–27, 8221.

  George Simpson, Book of Servants’ Characters, quoted in MacEwan, Métis Makers of History, 24.

  Zeilig and Zeilig, Ste. Madeleine, 143.

  Zeilig and Zeilig, Ste. Madeleine, 143–46, 191.

  Zeilig and Zeilig, Ste. Madeleine, 149.

  Alexander Ross, The Red River Settlement: Its Rise, Progress, and Present State (London: Smith, Elder, and Company, 1856).

  Travis R. Annette, “Where the Buffalo Roam: Migration of the French Red River Métis to Lewistown, Montana,” http://www.montana.edu.

  Travis R. Annette, “Where the Buffalo Roam: Migration of the French Red River Métis to Lewistown, Montana,” http://www.montana.edu., 46.

  As recounted in the oral tradition.

  — Part 3 —

  A Pasture to Share

  On the drive back to Regina, my attention drifts into its default mode of watching for birds and assessing the landscape that brings them back in declining numbers each spring. The miles click by bird by bird, field by field, as the Qu’Appelle Valley gives way to the cultivated land south of it leading to the Trans-Canada Highway: blue-winged teal in a channel dug by a farmer to drain a swale that would have supported nesting teal but instead will produce flax or canola this summer; tree swallows trying to make sense of a small mountain of broken trees and willows bulldozed during the winter; a meadowlark singing by a pasture where the cattle have not left enough grass for a nest; and miles of land running off to every horizon where, instead of seventy species of perennial grass and wildflower to support the birds, there are two or three annual crop species and a few European weeds.

  I am good at making this kind of complaint. A lot of white people have the skill. Rural or urban, we like to mutter about what other people are doing to the countryside: the man who puts the string of ugly billboards on the road into town next to the auto graveyard; the lakeshore a lurid green with algal bloom from urban sewage; the wild lilies gone where a new landowner has plowed the road allowance; the pesticides hurting everything from honeybees to barn swallows. Each insult that makes the prairie unattractive and ecologically dysfunctional is at the same time an irritant causing tension and disharmony between neighbours and between farmers and consumers.

  Whether it is your field of weeds the municipality decides to spray or the neighbour’s dog coming onto your property to harass your llama, all of these issues are about the conflict between private and public interest. In place of a useful set of customs and practices, or a system of local governance that might prevent or resolve such disputes by intervening with a sensitive and intelligently administered community interest, we have a legal system with ham-handed laws devised in distant legislatures and rendered inept by underfunded government agencies and monitoring systems. On rare occasions when they actually discover an infraction—someone illegally altering a creekbed, ditching water off his or her land, or cultivating native grass on leased Crown land—the authorities seem to look the other way, apparently reluctant to intervene and enforce regulations that limit land use rights.

  The Blackfoot, Assiniboine, Saulteaux, and Cree people of the region have always held their title communally. Historically, there was a fluidity to their system of tenure, in which large expanses of the great prairie commons were held in traditions of occupancy negotiated in relationships and battles among the tribes. That system worked not only because they lacked bulldozers, smartbombs, and a petroleum industry but also because an individual’s freedom to take from the commons was always tempered by cultural and spiritual practices stipulating care and restraint on behalf of the community, human and natural, to which everyone belongs.

  Retaining only the barest shreds of any such culturally endorsed forbearance, and wielding the wealth-concentrating tools of individualism and industrialization, the colonizing English could not abide a commons. Communal title would not serve their political and agricultural interests. To fill up the west, thwart American expansionist ideas of crossing the forty-ninth parallel, and grow grain to fuel the urban masses in the east and abroad would require nothing short of the complete alienation of the prairie into the hands of the Crown so that it could then be subdivided and parcelled out into small, exclusive holdings.

  From the moment when men like John Palliser, Henry Youle Hind, and John Macoun first gazed upon the prairie with an eye to agriculture, the non-Indigenous perspective on land has amounted to little more than an assessment of its human utility. Settler culture and land governance to this day value the prairie according to its “highest use” and whether it has been “improved.” To “improve” land you must first break it, strip it of its natural cover. Once that is accomplished, higher use becomes possible. The spectrum of use begins on the low end with “unimproved”—that is, natural prairie that has no fences or dugouts for cattle grazing—and climaxes on the high end with a shopping mall, urban subdivision, freeway, or golf course. In between, the range of increasingly higher uses runs from cattle ranching, to gravel production, to the plowing of land to grow tame hay and pasture, to the annual cropping of cereal, oil, and pulse crops, to oil and gas well development, mining, and damming.

  This gradient of value by type of use appears on the balance sheets of landowners, rural municipalities, and provincial governments, which peg property tax rates, real estate prices, lease fees, and rebate programs to the highest actual and potential use of property. Every time land changes hands, every time a landowner or farmer reviews his or her finances, every time a municipal councillor looks for ways to cover the costs of road maintenance, land-use decisions drive the accounting. Before long the logic of highest-use economics, coupled with landowners’ rights to do what they like with their properties (neighbours and future generations be damned), drives more and more “improvement.” Meanwhile, at the lower levels of use, the prairie waiting to be “improved” is left with little economic value to offer those who decide how it will be treated.

  That might sound like an indictment of private property, and it is, but each system also has its virtues. Government title recognizes the long-term public interest in the well-being of the land that extends beyond the life span and concerns of any one person or family. Yet there is no denying the independence and democratizing effects that have come from placing small parcels of the prairie into the hands of thousands of single families—though almost all of those hands were male and white. Private ownership, at least at the small freeholder end of the scale, empowers individuals or families to use the land to feed themselves and foster well-being and economic activity for themselves, which will also spill over into the greater economy.

  These are two powerful but opposing ideas—the idea of the public good and the idea of private property—but for centuries now they have been at loggerheads for want of a third element to resolve them: the idea of the commonwealth. The Métis of Canada’s northwest, with their distinct makeup of Indigenous and introduced ways, understood and instituted the nuances of that third element out of a cultural and spiritual obligation to the creation that provided everything.

  Where did that sense of responsibility to the shared well-being of the earth go? It is still alive in the wisdom of knowledge keepers and in their stories, but in extinguishing Indigenous title to the land our colonizing ancestors at the same time disabled all of the systems and traditions applied by First Nations and Métis people to regulate how the gifts of the prairie are to be used and shared among those who dwell there.

  Reparation, reconciliation, repatriation—the work that comes with seeing that “our tipis are held down by the same peg” ce
ntres on land and includes restoration of title, but we must also restore Indigenous models of honouring the community interest.

  To argue for reparations, the Métis of Ste. Madeleine, Batoche, Red River, and twenty other places across the prairie have no choice but to use their history as a dispossessed people. They might win more land one day and gain title through the same legal process that ran surveyors’ chains across the hay privilege in 1869. That would be right and just, and could help to heal the wounds borne in stories of bigotry and persecution26 in the aftermath of the 1869 resistance, but there is a healing that land repatriation cannot achieve on its own. It will not by itself bring health to the prairie, for it will not in any way compensate the prairie world and its human cultures for another loss seldom spoken of and yet indivisible from the first.

  In an economy founded upon private land ownership, we understand the deprivation that comes with expulsion. When we revisit the twentieth-century narratives of loss and dispossession in which the Métis were driven from the scraps of land left over after settlement, we can recognize the injustice. Those removals, though, were merely the aftershocks of earlier detonations that did untold harm to a nascent prairie culture with an emerging civil regard for the land as a commonwealth and for how it is to be used by the community and individuals. At Red River and Batoche, there were casualties for which our histories have done little accounting. One nation or community losing its hold on the prairie is tragedy enough, but in dismissing the Métis way of sharing its gifts we all lost forms of land-use governance that might well have helped us to protect more of the ecological integrity of our rivers, valleys, and plains into the twenty-first century.

  For fifty years, from 1820 to 1870, the Métis settlers at Red River communities practised and regulated a system of land use and commonwealth that placed their agricultural and economic lives within a gradient from riverside farm and garden to shared pasturage to open prairie beyond.27 Behind the river lots at Red River, and surrounding the village and farmsteads at Ste. Madeleine, there was always the grass shared in a system that held public and private interests in a healthy tension. At Red River it was the privilège de couper le foin—“the right to cut the hay”—the hay privilege. It was a unique form of land-use rights applied to the first two miles of unfenced prairie running back from a farmer’s river lot. The hay privilege was not exactly a commons. It was a zone of grassland in which the community shared a broad, long-term interest but in which the adjacent farmer held a more particular and immediate interest as the one who, if he followed the community’s rules and regulations, possessed first rights to cut hay or graze his livestock there.

  The outer boundary of the hay privilege formed a line parallel to the riverfront and four miles back. It afforded some rights to the community but most usage rights to the adjacent farmer. Beyond that four-mile line was the great prairie commons, which the people also used for grazing, haying, and hunting on a first-come, first-served basis. Claiming only their two-mile river lots and the adjacent hay privilege, the people of Red River recognized that the rest of the prairie remained under Indian title.

  By 1835, when there were somewhere between two and three thousand cattle at Red River communities, the Métis had their own regulations governing the exact date when haying could begin on the hay privilege and the prairie just beyond. The date varied according to conditions each summer, but anyone who cut hay before the agreed-upon day would be penalized by losing that year’s right to cut hay on his portion of the hay privilege.

  As the date neared for the first haying on the prairie outside the hay privilege—usually set for late July or early August—the Red River families would travel out to set up camp on the land a day ahead of time. With children, tents, food, and haying gear aboard their carts, they went out looking for the best grass for the winter to come. At midnight each family would claim its piece of prairie according to a set of common practices and rules of fairness. The community would live in a tent village out on the prairie for most of a month, cutting the prairie grass with sickles and scythes. Each Saturday night everyone rode back to the settlement to attend church and do chores on their farms the next day.

  Once the winter’s hay supply was stored up at home, the community would begin to prepare for the fall hunt and its much farther journey out onto the prairie.

  Riel’s provisional government was established in part to protect the Métis’ distinctive form of land tenure, recognizing three kinds of title: the private farmstead owned by a family, the open prairie owned communally by First Nations but used by all who lived on the land, and the hay privilege, with its mix of private rights for some kinds of use, communal privileges for other forms of use, and regulations governing the commonwealth of both. When the attempt to assert Métis governance failed and the Province of Manitoba was formed in 1870, the Canadian government promised to preserve Métis title and the hay privilege system. By 1873, however, new settlers had placed claims on the hay privileges of Métis farmers, already being described in legal documents as “former occupants.” The lieutenant governor at the time, Alexander Morris, threatened to prosecute them for trespass if they cut any hay on their hay privilege lands.28

  From that point onward, the new homesteading laws imposed by Canada required that the claimant receiving a 160-acre parcel for a ten-dollar fee must plow at least forty acres and erect a building within the first three years. Only men could make a claim, and if they failed to fulfill those two requirements the land became free for another man to claim. The plan worked with breathtaking speed. Within thirty years the prairie was drawn, quartered, and privatized into little squares in which the homesteader held exclusive rights to use the land as long as he plowed up the minimum number of acres. The concept of long-term community interest helping to sustain a balance of the private and the public had been completely extinguished at Red River and in the signing of the numbered treaties. The new prairie dispensation would prove to leave little room for the commonwealth.

  For the Michif people who gathered at the turn of the century around Father DeCorby’s mission, Ste. Madeleine offered another chance to reconstitute something of the community land-use ethic their ancestors had established at Red River, Batoche, and other places. There was land where they could grow gardens and crops, enough open prairie for them to hunt and gather, trees to cut, and grass for a hay privilege behind the farmsteads. Their descendants might simply describe that arrangement as tradition or “the old ways,” but it was more than that. It was a remnant of an evolving system of community-informed land tenure that had been cut down at the Red River just as it was beginning to adapt to the diminishing buffalo hunt and the demands of modern economies and agriculture.

  Sixty years after passage of the Homestead Act, the Canadian government began to see the damage it had unleashed upon the plains. Homesteaders on the lightest soils were abandoning their claims, leaving behind crops eaten by grasshoppers and scorched beneath merciless skies. In Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the federal government worked with municipalities to create a new network of community pastures, including the one at the border between the provinces where 250 Métis people were living at Ste. Madeleine in the traditional way.

  The federal and local governments at the time chose not to include the people of Ste. Madeleine in discussions on how to conserve the land around their community in a grazing commons. They chose not to include them in discussions of what was to become of their community. None of that is surprising. This was 1937. White settlers would not have been burdened by any consideration that people with generations of prairie living behind them might know something about grazing land and how to share it or that they might have any historical rights worth considering.

  If that was a missed opportunity in 1937—to respect and protect a Métis community and its understanding of land tenure—it has come around again today. Seventy-eight years later prairie people and governments are trying to decide how to conserve the vulner
able grasslands in the decommissioned community pastures, including the one surrounding Ste. Madeleine.

  As I write this in the summer of 2016, we are marking exactly two centuries since Cuthbert Grant rode out of the Qu’Appelle Valley with sixty horsemen and a shipment of pemmican. Armed with a modern perspective on the injustices contained in those centuries, the current governments of Saskatchewan and Manitoba have another opportunity to restore a remnant of the Métis commonwealth at the Spy Hill–Ellice community pasture straddling their common border.

  The prairie life, a life of great potential, which Grant, Riel, and every Métis leader since them tried to defend, deserves much more than a remnant, much more than a small attempt to recognize and reinstate the legitimacy of the Métis’ distinctive way of dwelling here and sharing the gifts of the earth. Although it would only be a start, all of us who live on these contested plains owe at least that much to history, to the scattered people of Ste. Madeleine, and to the land itself.

  On islands of grass all across the northern Great Plains—like the sandy pasture surrounding Ste. Madeleine but each with its own distinct history and ecology—the prairie world carries on besieged by the rising tides of cultivation. If these islands make it through another century of our beleaguered tenure, and if some swift foxes, pronghorn, sage grouse, and longspurs make it too, no one will credit the policy that converted the long horizons of grass to small squares of cropland. They have made it this far on the agricultural limitations of the poorest soils and the care of a few who know how to keep the grass healthy.

  A woman contacted me recently asking if I would like to see a piece of native prairie that she had come to own. I have had this kind of invitation before, but there was something in her offer that seemed particular, as though she were following a call or principle. She called herself its “bewildered steward” and said “I don’t like to think of myself as owning it so much as sharing it.”