Halfbreed

by Maria Campbell

  Copyright © 1973 by Maria Campbell; Afterword © 2019 by Maria Campbell

  “The Grandmother Place” © 2019 by Kim Anderson

  First hardcover edition published in 1973 by McClelland & Stewart

  This paperback edition published in 2019

  McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request

  ISBN: 9780771024092

  Ebook ISBN: 9780771024108

  Front cover photograph: Dan Gordon

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v5.3.2

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Grandmother Place

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Afterword

  About the Author

  This book is dedicated to my Cheechum’s children. Thank you Stan Daniels for making me angry enough to write it; Peggy Robbins, for your understanding and encouragement but especially for believing I could do it; my family, for your patience; Elaine, Kay, Sheila, Sarah and Jean, for understanding, listening, typing and babysitting; and a special thank you to my friend Dianne Woodman.

  The Grandmother Place

  AN INTRODUCTION BY KIM ANDERSON, PH.D.

  It’s midsummer, 2017 and a group of women are sitting around the open kitchen/living area at “the Crossing,” Maria Campbell’s home on the South Saskatchewan River. For many of us this is Metis homeland, a space Maria created on the land where Gabriel Dumont and his wife, Madeleine, once operated Gabriel’s Crossing. In Dumont’s time, a ferry transported Red River carts across the South Saskatchewan as they made their way to Batoche and other nearby Metis communities. Maria’s great-grandmother Cheechum spent time here when she was a child, and later, when Maria was a girl, it was a stopping place where her family would camp, visit with the owners overnight, or spend a few days by the river while Maria’s dad and uncles threw fishing nets. Maria purchased the property in 1975—a few years after Halfbreed was published—and since that time it has been a place where Indigenous leaders, storytellers, musicians, artists, activists, and scholars have crisscrossed, coming and going to replenish and engage as they make their marks on the world.

  You can still see the tracks of the Red River carts on the hills as they snake down toward the river, familiar signs for those of us who have spent days sitting on the bank of the other side. This is where Maria sends people out to fast, and today we feel the power of those timeless tracks as we have just completed our week-long fasting camp. We are exhilarated and exhausted from all the labour involved in holding ceremony and are ready to settle into the storytelling that follows. Maria is finally sitting down at the kitchen table next to the big brown teapot that never goes empty. Mugs are scattered about but the rest of the dishes are drying in a basin on top of the wood stove, pots have been hung back up in their proper places on the walls, and the fasters and helpers sit at the table or sprawl out on the couches under the fine art in the adjoining living room. Most of us are middle-aged Metis and First Nations women, and in our lives outside the Crossing we work in community organizing, academia, law, medicine, midwifery, land-based learning, and the arts. We are part of Maria’s extensive lodge family, the ones who work, train, and do ceremony with her. She has mentored every one of us, and as she nears her eightieth year, she is telling us she wishes to transfer some of the responsibilities she has been carrying. We look around and realize that even though there are eight of us present and as many or more across the country, we will be challenged to take it on because of the current range and depth of her work.

  This is the grandmother place Maria occupies as she launches the revised version of Halfbreed, more than forty-five years after it was first published. If the reader wonders what happened to the passionate young woman who wrote Halfbreed, it should come as no surprise that Maria continues to be a person of hard, steady work fuelled by a love for her people and a commitment to justice. She is a leader who works with an expansive range of people, always in the spirit of wahkotowin, an interconnected web of relations in which everyone has responsibilities—for as she has often said, “you never get anywhere unless you take your people with you.” These community responsibilities are intricately woven with Maria’s work as a powerful translator of art and spirit, and the foundation for all of this can be found in the narrative she shares about her young life in Halfbreed. The book contains so many teachings it is possible to gain something new with each reading, but when I read it this time my first thoughts were about the connections between the Maria in the book and the one many of us know today.

  First, Halfbreed is full of stories of a grounded childhood community, stories that translate to the teachings about kinship, land, and storytelling Maria now shares as an esteemed Elder and Metis knowledge carrier. Halfbreed shows us a young woman with a deep commitment to family as she works against formidable challenges to be a caregiver/protector to her siblings and her own infant children. The fruits of this can be seen today, as Maria is now a great-grandmother supporting a large kinship network that includes her own five children, their children and grandchildren, the siblings, the nieces and nephews, and then the many others who have come into Maria’s lodge family. The Maria we meet in Halfbreed is also inquisitive, a critical thinker who questions the power of the local priest and the patriarchy of her own political leaders. Toward the end of the book, Maria takes a critical approach to research, and all of this signals how Maria will go on to a long career in research, mentoring, and teaching in academic and community settings. Halfbreed is a book about historic injustices toward Metis people, and the ongoing nature of these injustices make it necessary for Maria to keep working for Indigenous peoples and lands. Finally, the power and craft of the storytelling in Halfbreed foreshadow what will become a trail-blazing career in the arts.

  Maria, then, is a remarkable person, and Halfbreed is a remarkable book that went on to live its own full life as one of the most influential works of Indigenous literature. We now live in an era of “truth and reconciliation,” but before Halfbreed, there were very few resources that revealed the truth of racism and oppression against Indigenous peoples in Canada. Maria’s skill in telling the story from her lived experience changed the lives of many Indigenous peoples across Nor
th America, as they had rarely seen an accurate portrayal of their lives in print. Halfbreed continues to influence lives; this I know from seeing people approach Maria in public settings to tell her so. As one of the earliest works of Indigenous literature, it has also inspired multiple generations of Indigenous writers; poet and playwright Daniel David Moses once remarked, “She is the mother of us all.” Halfbreed is widely read and taught worldwide, having been translated into a number of languages, and, as a seminal work that has timeless significance, it has been the subject of an abundance of scholarly work.

  Although she has been asked many times over the years, Maria has never been interested in writing a “sequel” monograph about her life, nor has she wished to revise the text of Halfbreed. She has reiterated in the afterword of this edition what she stated in an interview with Hartmut Lutz in 1989: “I wouldn’t want to touch what’s there, because that was the way I was writing then, and I think that it’s important it stays that way, because that’s where I was at.”*1 In that same interview, however, Maria indicated there was one story among the hundreds of pages that were edited out that she would have put back. That story appears for the first time in this edition, having been recovered from the McClelland and Stewart fonds at the McMaster University archives by literary scholars Alix Shield and Deanna Reder.

  Shield and Reder have written about the sequence of events leading to this recovery, starting with when they met Maria for the first time at a conference in Dublin in 2017. Finding themselves sharing a table at the banquet where Maria was storytelling, they asked for permission to look up the original Halfbreed manuscript in the McMaster archives. Six months later, Shield was in the library basement at McMaster, about a hundred pages into the manuscript when she came across “a page-and-a-half that had been struck out with a giant red X.”*2 It was the story Maria had told Hartmut Lutz she wanted in. As the reader will see in this edition, it is a deeply distressing story and one that takes courage to share, for it reveals that Maria was raped by the RCMP in her childhood home at the age of fourteen.

  Like Shield and Reder, readers familiar with previous editions may find that this horrific part of the Halfbreed narrative provides some of the missing context around the trauma experienced by Maria and her family, possibly identifying another turning point for the unravelling that takes place. What makes this story even more significant for me, however, is that the pages that Shield found were cut from the original publication out of a fear that the RCMP would get an injunction to stop the book’s publication.*3 As Shield and Reder reveal, those pages were removed in spite of Maria’s insistence that they stay in, and Maria discovered the story was missing only when she received her author’s copy of Halfbreed in the mail. This revised publication thus represents a response to a silencing that is still too common for survivors of assault. By Maria agreeing to republish Halfbreed with this section in it, her courage gives us strength once again.

  Maria has spent her life protecting women, children, and families, and we see the origins of this in Halfbreed too. In Chapter 23, Maria expresses how frustrated she is that there are no halfway houses or resources to support women who are on the street or otherwise at risk. Not long after Halfbreed was published, Maria worked with a coalition of six Indigenous women to co-found the first halfway house for Indigenous women in the country, located in Edmonton where she was living, which was followed by the first women and children’s emergency crisis centre. Now, almost half a century later, Maria has worked with me and Metis artist Christi Belcourt to co-publish her most recent book, a collection of essays entitled Keetsahnak: Our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Sisters (2018). This book accompanies Belcourt’s Walking with Our Sisters ceremonial and commemorative art installation—a collaboration involving thousands of Indigenous women across Turtle Island (North America), including Maria, who has served as the national Elder/advisor. As I write this introduction, Maria is collaborating with historian Cheryl Troupe, legal scholar Marilyn Poitras, and playwright and director Yvette Nolan to produce a play in response to the national Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Women and Girls. These examples represent only the latest footprints in her long trail of collaborative activism to end violence against Indigenous women, and they show how innovative Maria has been at weaving social justice, activism, and art to make a better life for our families.

  Connected to her interest in families and children, Maria has had a long-standing interest in politics, governance, and law. In Halfbreed, we see her working with the emerging Métis Nation of Alberta and, later, Maria ran for president of the Métis Nation of Saskatchewan. At one point she successfully wrote her LSATS and planned to go to law school. Ultimately, however, she found a more fitting place through a combination of grassroots, artistic, and scholarly work. Environmental justice has been part of this work; for example, Maria spent three years in the 1990s working with Canoe Lake Elders to stop logging in their territory, and she has worked with the Lubicon Cree over the years in their struggle to protect their lands and peoples from the extraction industry. Maria’s work in social justice has included volunteering in prisons; in Halfbreed we see her beginning to work with inmates in a men’s prison, and later she went to work with women, conducting weekly writing workshops at the Pine Grove Correctional Centre in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Maria’s commitment to justice led her to become a founding member of the Grandmothers for Justice in Saskatchewan, and during the Oka crisis she walked with this group across the country in support of the Kanesatake people. This Grandmothers group was pivotal in bringing about inquiries into “freezing deaths” of Indigenous men in Saskatoon, resulting in The Commission on First Nations and Métis Peoples and Justice Reform, which Maria later served on as their Elder. Maria has also served for many years as the Elder for Classic, an organization that provides legal services to low-income residents in Saskatoon. Today, drawing from her years of experience, Maria is employed as a cultural advisor and sessional lecturer at the Native Law Centre, University of Saskatchewan, where she is producing scholarship on Indigenous law through innovative research and teaching. This work involves the integration of oral history, storytelling, performance, and theatre in developing theoretical cases and mock courts. Her work at the Law Centre has also involved teaching about traditional legal processes in Cree stories, which is the subject of a book she is working on with Marilyn Poitras.

  Maria’s impressive record of social and environmental justice work (which I can only touch on here) goes some way to explaining the somewhat astonishing remark she has often made: “I never really thought of myself as a writer.” This is perhaps because her writing is so tied up with her work to create change, but it should not overshadow the innovation and impact of her career as an artist. In turn, because of the widespread popularity of Halfbreed, people sometimes associate Maria primarily as the author of that book, but she has had a trail-blazing career in storytelling, writing, theatre, film, and television and radio. I became aware of the extent of her career only when I did some research to nominate her for a 2004 Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize. This might seem odd as I had been working with Maria for a number of years already, but she is never one to talk about her accomplishments. As I discovered through my efforts to summarize her career, Maria has been involved in a number of “firsts.” I will go through some of these to give a sense of how influential she has been as an artist.

  After Halfbreed, Maria published four children’s books; this was significant as it provided Indigenous children’s literature at a time when there was very little in this genre. This work is still influential: in recent years, Maria worked with Sum Theatre in Saskatoon to bring her book Little Badger and the Fire Spirit to life as one of its Theatre in the Park productions. Another genre in which Maria has shown leadership has to do with oral history and Indigenous storytelling. As a scholar in these areas, I appreciate that Maria’s work to bring oral history to the page was ahead of its time in implementing what we now call “Indig
enous research methodologies.” The earliest example of this can be seen in writing that came soon after Halfbreed, when Maria worked with Big Bear’s daughter-in-law Seeaskumkapo to document stories about the struggles of the Cree during the 1885 resistance.*4 Maria has told me that she had to spend years searching for the meaning of Seeaskumkapo’s name prior to beginning this research, as this was one of the old lady’s conditions for being interviewed. Later, Maria published Stories of the Road Allowance People (1995), providing one of the earliest examples of protocols for working with oral history and storytelling. Maria spent more than a decade working with the Elders and storytellers, and in the introduction to the revised edition, she notes, “I have paid for the stories by relearning and rethinking my language, and by being a servant and helper to the teachers. I have also paid for the stories with gifts of blankets, tobacco, and even a prize Arab stallion.”*5 In 2010, Stories of the Road Allowance People was re-released with a new story and accompanying audio tracks, offering a great example of Maria’s skill to work collaboratively with other artists, such as painters and musicians, to enhance the storytelling.

  As her childhood stories indicate, Maria has a lifelong love for theatre, and her first professionally produced stage play (Flight, 1979) became the first all-Indigenous theatre production in Canada. Maria wrote and directed this play, which brought modern dance, storytelling, and drama together with traditional Indigenous art practices that are based in ceremony, teaching, and healing. Her subsequent play, Jessica (1982), based on her life story and done collaboratively with Linda Griffiths and Paul Thompson, played in Canada and Europe and resulted in The Book of Jessica: A Theatrical Transformation (1989). Maria later worked for many years as both an artist and Elder with the Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company. In 2002 she collaborated with urban youth in Saskatoon to write and produce The Alley (2002), which was a story of the strength of Indigenous tradition and culture in a modern world. In the summers of 2007 and 2008, Maria collaborated with the Compagni V’ni Dansi to employ youth as dancers and actors at Batoche National Historic Site. This experience was transformational for the actor/dancers as well as the audience, and their production, known as The Crossing, won the 2009 Spirit of Saskatchewan Award. While building this substantial career in theatre, Maria also worked in film and television. She ran Gabriel Productions with Wil Campbell and Roxanne Fischer for twelve years, and during that time they co-produced the first television series by Indigenous people, My Partners, My People (CTV Network, 1986–1989).