Towards a Prairie Atonement

by Trevor Herriot

  She went on, speaking from her delight in the beauty of the place, the way the poplars on the river bottom fade into grassy slopes and meadows above, the time she walked to the top and found herself caught in the gaze of a white wolf. As we spoke, though, it became clear that there was something else about the land that she wanted to discuss.

  “You see, it’s one of the old Métis river lots on the South Saskatchewan. I looked into it and found the name of the family that lived there in the nineteenth century. Later it was homesteaded by white settlers, ranchers, and they looked after it well, but now I have it, and I am exploring what that means.”

  Reading Diane Payment’s The Free People/Les gens libres,29 she came across a passage describing a celebration on the property hosted by the family some time in the nineteenth century between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Driven by what she had learned and a desire to do right by the land, she seemed to be searching for a wider embrace, for a way that leads on towards reconciliation with those who had to leave the riverside they loved, fleeing the economic hardship of dispossession and the violence of Canadian law.

  She talked about a small cabin the rancher had built long ago, which she was repairing on weekends with the help of friends. The more time she spent there and walking the prairie and riverbank alone, the more she felt that the place was opening her heart, teaching her about the land and how the Métis had lived along the river. She said she has begun to see the elegance, the beauty, of what she calls their “place-­based land-use” system.

  “I knew a bit of history about the river lot system in Quebec and here with the Métis, but I know a little bit more now. You walk the land, and you can feel how it was a way of governing land use that was communal and completely in relationship to the ecology and geography of the place. The way we have divided up the prairie into squares just seems so wrong. It isolated us from one another and from the land. The Métis system is about place and community. It makes so much sense to be in walking distance from the neighbour’s so you can visit and dance and sing and decide things together.

  “One day, watching our wide river run to the north, listening to the poplars and feeling the wind, I realized suddenly why they fought and died for their land—not just to defend a place they loved but to defend a way of living on the land that they knew was right. What happened to the Métis at Batoche was an atrocity. People who spoke for their rights of settlement, livelihood, and governance were driven from their homes, raped, exiled, imprisoned. Many died of illness and starvation. I cannot close my eyes to these truths.”

  So what do you do when you know the name of the family who lived on the river lot whose title now bears your name? When you feel that your privilege to own land has come at the cost of other privileges your race destroyed, privileges more gracefully regulated by a community made of wild and human relationships? You could give it back of course. Doing so might discharge some liberal guilt for a spell, give you a piece of moral high ground on which to stand. I asked her if that was her plan.

  “I will work that out, but all I know for now is this: the work of reconciliation we have been called to do is not just for governments and institutions. I can be, I am, part of it, and getting to know this river lot is helping me find others who want to be part of it too. I may just be a placeholder for it, a steward for a time. Private landowners need to be thinking about that, to let go of the sense that land is only about money and wealth. Part of reconciling as people under treaty—and including the Métis who were left out of the treaty but who also had land rights—is to make decisions that are not about money, that will get us thinking about wealth from a broader, community perspective.

  “I’ve asked a Métis woman to be my Elder as I explore these questions about the land. She agreed, and in that first conversation she told me that ‘reconciliation means sharing what we have with one another and not taking from one another.’ That made sense to me.”

  In the end, care for the land and a willingness to share its gifts might be the best measure of entitlement. When I stood in the school bus at Ste. Madeleine and watched that shadow pass between the gravestones, I thought about the old Wiihtigo spirit in the traditions of Algonquian peoples and the Métis. The Wiihtigo is a demonic force often personified as a gluttonous monster whose hunger can never be satisfied. Watching traders gather and ship thousands of tons of meat and hides out of the prairie, the old and wise might well have warned that Wiihtigo was taking charge. Today the prairie suffers more than ever under a Wiihtigo economy,30 making it harder for people to hold together the kind of community that supports the private stewardship of our grasslands.

  It will not be easy to defeat such a spirit afoot in the land. It takes courageous fools to walk into a dark place, to say, yes, we can find our way through this. Any chance to create an economy that nurtures the prairie instead of devouring it, to break down the garrison holding the wealth of the land and keeping its First Peoples out, will require us to embrace the best of Indigenous and settler values.

  Faint lights glimmer just ahead. A recent Supreme Court decision declared, after a fifteen-year battle, that responsibility for negotiating with Métis and non-status Indians rests with the federal government. No one knows exactly what the decision will mean, but at the very least it has set the table for serious discussions of outstanding Métis land claims.

  Meanwhile, the federal community pastures have not all been transferred yet and to date none of the transferred ones have been sold to private interests. They remain Crown land in both Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The new Liberal government in Ottawa has agreed to review the decision and see what can be done to recover something of the conservation element abandoned when the program was cut. Until then hundreds of thousands of acres of old-growth prairie wait for a reversal of policy or a new way to protect them from the forces that degrade and plow grassland.31

  The foolish and the brave are among us now, prairie dwellers who get up every morning to see what steps they can take in such dim light. Some of them work with radio telemetry and vegetation surveys; some with education campaigns and mailing lists; others with roadside rallies, round dances, and sweat lodges; still others with stories, dances, ideas, and images. Too often they sort themselves out along lines dividing rural from urban, producer from consumer, public from private, Indigenous from non-Indigenous, but somewhere ahead, where the land rises to meet the pipit song that falls from summer skies, there might yet be a place, a sandy plain, where we, sharing one tent peg, can meet and see how the prairie might bring us together.

  The law that had removed Riel’s provisional government so effectively and yoked the northwest to the will of Upper Canada was somehow powerless to prosecute any of the perpetrators—the white settlers who nearly killed André Nault or the mob of Orangemen who forced Elzéar Goulet into the river and stoned him to death. See D. Bruce Sealey and Antoine S. Lussier, The Metis: Canada’s Forgotten People (Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications, 1975), 93.

  Norma J. Hall, A Casualty of Colonialism: Red River Métis Farming, 1810–1870 (Winnipeg: Wordpress, 2015).

  Norma J. Hall, A Casualty of Colonialism: Red River Métis Farming, 1810–1870 (Winnipeg: Wordpress, 2015).

  Diane Payment, The Free People/Les gens libres (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2009).

  Robin Wall Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Potawatomi Nation, coined this phrase, “Windigo economy,” in her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013).

  Governments are capable of surprising reversals. In this summer of 2016, a remnant of native grassland that would have been destroyed by a wind energy development north of Chaplin Lake was spared after hundreds of people let the provincial government in Saskatchewan know their concerns.

  A Small Good Thing

  — An Afterword —r />
  At the start of this book, Trevor Herriot said that he hoped some small good thing might come of his efforts in travelling to Ste. Madeleine. I hope and I think it has in this small book. But he was worried when he started out. He was worried that in trying to do something good he might trip a few times. I was worried too.

  To be honest, there were times when I was uneasy by his questions and by what Trevor wanted from me as we walked around, talking that day at Ste. Madeleine and driving to the community pasture. I became frustrated and upset at times because people have taken so much from us and have said so many things about us that are destructive and untrue.

  But I stayed with Trevor that day and talked with him because I did think that his intentions were good and that he was trying to do a good thing, trying to help protect these grasslands and the creatures on the prairie.

  Another reason I worried is because there are many ways to tell the story about this time and place and the people, and there are some who might be able to tell it better than I can or tell it differently. Others will also come to write of this history and speak to what happened. But Trevor phoned me that day and asked me to take him there and tell him what I knew. I agreed because, as I said, I believed he wanted to do something good.

  I told Trevor about how some of the Michif people fared better than others. Some people did well—they received some land and compensation. But most lost everything. They came home to find everything had been burned down. Local officials had lit their houses on fire and even shot their dogs—some right in front of the children. It was a scare tactic. And so those Michif families had to walk away from that land with nothing. It was hard to recover from that. How do you ever recover from that?

  Still, the Michif people keep coming back to the land there. They return to Ste. Madeleine every year. It’s an important and sacred place, and they continue to be closely connected to it and care for it.

  Yes, Trevor said he hoped some small good thing might come of his efforts in travelling to Ste. Madeleine and speaking to me that day and writing about the place, the community, hoping it would connect to his understanding of how the native grasses have come to be in such danger of being lost forever. And now I do believe some good has come of his efforts and his speaking to me about our history and what the Michif people face today and what they faced in the past.

  Let us not forget that there are also many good stories that we—Michif and settlers—share, stories from our past that tell of how the Michif and newcomers worked together. It was sometimes only by helping each other that we got through terrible and difficult times in those days. Michif families and settler families often supported each other. We sometimes forget that. Not every relationship was a bad one between Michif and white families. Many good relationships existed between us.

  With the final word in this book, what I most want is for my children and grandchildren to hear about us and of Ste. Madeleine, and as we move forward into the future, I want them to know this: we lost a lot. We were treated unjustly, and understanding this history is crucial.

  But it is also important for them to know—to show them—that the Michif people are survivors. We lived well and independently on the land, and we kept good care of it and the creatures on it. Everything was clean because of how we managed and lived, connected to the land and to the winged ones and the four-leggeds. The way we lived meant that the water was clean and pure, and so were the animals. They were clean and pure and healthy. We were good caretakers of the land. We were the stewards. We still are.

  And we continue to be survivors and we are successful in so many ways now. We are businesspeople and professors and carpenters and ranchers and lawyers and doctors and politicians and teachers and farmers. We are educated in all ways. As I look ahead, I see a bright future for all of our children and grandchildren. We will continue to live and teach the Michif ways, and learn and speak the Michif language, and we will continue to return to and care for Ste. Madeleine and be tightly connected there as a people.

  Indeed, just last month, on June 19, 2016, hundreds of our people gathered at the site of the Seven Oaks victory. We came together to mark the 200th anniversary of that fateful day when we emerged as the Métis Nation. We are the best of both worlds—Indigenous and European—unified into a people. Now we all need to strive to create peace, to bridge these two worlds on this land, and it cannot happen without working with Indigenous peoples.

  In the Spirit of Michif,

  Norman Fleury

  July 19, 2016

  References

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

  Berry, Thomas. Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988.

  Bryce, George. “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): n. pag.

  Chambers, Cynthia, and Narcisse Blood. “Love Thy Neighbour: Repatriating Precarious Blackfoot Sites.” http://www.learnalberta.ca/content/ssmc/html/lovethyneighbor.pdf.

  Dick, Lyle. “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, edited by Robert Coutts and Richard Stuart (Winnipeg: Manitoba Historical Society, 1994), n. pag. http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/forkssevenoaks/historicalwriting.shtml.

  ———. “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.

  Gauthier, D. A., and E. B. Wiken. “Monitoring the Conservation of Grassland Habitats, Prairie Ecozone, Canada.” Environ Monitoring Assessment 88, 1–3 (2003): 343–64.

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

  Hall, Norma J. A Casualty of Colonialism: Red River Métis Farming, 1810–1870. Winnipeg: Wordpress, 2015.

  Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

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

  MacLeod, Margaret Arnett, and W. L. Morton. Cuthbert Grant of Grantown. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1963.

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

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

  Payment, Diane. The Free People/Les gens libres. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2009.

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

  Sealey, D. Bruce, and Antoine S. Lussier. The Metis: Canada’s Forgotten People. Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications, 1975.

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

  Weekes, Mary, comp. The Last Buffalo Hunter. Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers, 1994.

  Woodcock, George. “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.

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

  The Regina Collection

  Named as a tribute to Saskatchewan’s capital city with its rich history of boundary-defying innovation, The Regina Collection builds upon University of Regina Press’s motto of “a voice for many peoples.” Intimate in size and beautifully packaged
, these books aim to tell the stories of those who have been caught up in social and political circumstances beyond their control.

  Other books in The Regina Collection:

  Time Will Say Nothing:

  A Philosopher Survives an Iranian Prison

  by Ramin Jahanbegloo (2014)

  The Education of Augie Merasty:

  A Residential School Memoir

  by Joseph Auguste Merasty,

  with David Carpenter (2015)

  Inside the Mental:

  Silence, Stigma, Psychiatry, and LSD

  by Kay Parley (2016)

  Otto & Daria:

  A Wartime Journey through No Man’s Land

  by Eric Koch (2016)

  About Trevor Herriot

  TREVOR HERRIOT is a prairie naturalist and author of several award-winning books, including Grass, Sky, Song and the national bestseller River in a Dry Land. He is a grassland activist and a skilled birder. He posts regularly on Grass Notes (trevorherriot.blogspot.ca), his web page on grassland culture and environmental issues, and is featured regularly on CBC Radio for the call-in show Blue Sky. He and his wife, Karen, live in Regina, and spend much of their time on a piece of Aspen Parkland prairie east of the city.

  About Norman Fleury

  Originally from St. Lazare, Manitoba, NORMAN FLEURY is a gifted storyteller and teacher. Dedicated to the conservation and promotion of the Michif language, he has contributed to dozens of language resources. He currently teaches Michif in the College of Education at the University of Saskatchewan.