The <meta>Ball - Winter 2009

Lately, it is slightly more appalling than usual how poorly people seem to understand Canada's parliamentary system. The recently proposed coalition and its attempt at a non-confidence motion is being painted as illegal (it's not), even as a coup (that's just silly). It's a tightly controlled media generating public opinion, here, and the misinformation is having serious consequences; a Prime Minister who can shut down parliament and cut funding to political parties - then successfully sell the notion that he acts in the name of democracy is a master of the spin.

We shall see how history remembers all this, and him. As I have said elsewhere, it is really my Prime Minister's red rimmed and black-holey eyes that bother me most, and not even he can control television news to improve those. But their creepiness wouldn't show up on a statue, or on a nice granite bust...

Consider Sir John A. Macdonald. What winds up still resonating lifetimes later is the image of Nation Builder, bequeathed to each new generation through ten dollar bills and solemn-looking statues. His murderous and systemic campaign against the Métis people of Manitoba is not something he's famous for, though.

The Métis are descendants of unions of Cree, Ojibwa, Algonquin, Saulteaux, and Menominee Aboriginals with white people (mainly French, English and Scottish), and are one of three recognized Aboriginal peoples in Canada, along with the First Nations and Inuit. The term Métis originally referred to mostly fur-trading (think voyageur!) descendents of the French-Catholic Métis of the Red River settlement (present day Winnipeg). Descendents of Protestant English or Scottish and Aboriginals were historically called 'half-breeds' or 'country born' and were more oriented toward farming.

The term, however, eventually evolved to refer to all 'half-breeds' whether linked to the historic Red River Métis or not. In the last several years, there has been a sort of Renaissance of all things Métis; as people begin to talk about the Métis, one of the contested issues is how particular of an identity is named by capitalising the M. The lower case métis now often refers simply to all who are of mixed European and Aboriginal blood. In any event, the political and spiritual consciousness of a nation finds itself rooted deeply in the Red River settlement, the home of Louis Riel - a Red River boy educated in St. Boniface and Montreal who returned to lead his people during the dramatic events of the 1860s & 70s.

The Dominion of Canada and the Hudson's Bay Company made arrangements for the transfer of 'Rupertsland', a territory that had, to that time, been considered by the Imperial authorities as the effective property of the Hudson's Bay Company. The people residing in and around the Red River settlement (largely Métis) were concerned that they were not consulted about the transfer, nor the impacts it would have on their lands and livelihood. Their concerns were exacerbated with the arrival of Canadian Surveyors at Red River and the appointment of an English speaking outsider as Lieutenant Governor (William MacDougall) for the territory in advance of the transfer. In February of 1870, the Métis and other residents of Red River formed a Provisional Government with Louis Riel as their leader, and were recognized as the de facto authority of the area. After months of tension between the Canadian and Provisional Governments, three delegates from Red River were sent to Ottawa to negotiate with Canada and resolve the situation. The result of the negotiations was the Manitoba Act, 1870, a statute that established Manitoba as a Province in the Dominion of Canada and protected specific rights of Red River residents.
(Métis National Council - Historical Online database)

It was messier than that, though: the only elected MP never to take his seat in the House of Commons (dissuaded from going to Ottawa because of the price on his head), Riel was betrayed throughout his life but especially by the Manitoba Act (which has never fulfilled its promises). Branded (and institutionalized) as mentally ill, hunted and hounded into exile in the United States, and finally hanged for high treason by Macdonald's government in Regina in 1885, Riel led Red River in the uprising of 1869; it was the first crisis to face the new government following confederation in 1867. The Métis prevented Lieutenant Governor MacDougall from entering the land, arrested (and executed) Orangemen, and formed the provisional government described above. Ottawa was most unimpressed:

"These impulsive half-breeds have got spoiled by this uprising and must be kept down by a strong hand until they are swamped by the influx of settlers," said Prime Minister Macdonald in 1870 (actually, in the French in which it was uttered, it's more like being crushed with an iron fist). Measures introduced to accomplish this crushing were many.

Scrip entitlements (like a census/agreement) were offered wherein a Métis adult (named on these documents "a half breed head" - head? like cattle, I guess) could choose a small allotment of land or a small amount of money. The individual signed their name if they could write, and just put an X if they could not, swearing that they accept their compensation and will never make any more noise about it. Of course, most people chose the money, and left - rather than face the systemic rape, arson and vandalism to their property, economic discrimination and generalized violence that characterized Red River at that time.

The continued evolution of these scattered people - these impulsive half breeds - interests me. It was after all a distinct culture, with a distinct language (Michif - a language resulting from the combining of French nouns and Cree verbs), was marked also by the bannock bread, the fiddle music, the beadwork, and of course the sash (the colourful, fingerwoven Ceinture Flechee), one of the only bits of iconography that has a chance of being recognized specifically as Métis.

It is my impression that much of this culture is very much alive, in some cases watered down, as if seen through thick glass. A teaspoon of baking soda is added to the recipe, and bannock is now called 'tea biscuits'. We know that most of those people fled to Saskatchewan, and some straight north, to the lakes of Central Manitoba, where the skies took their breath away by day and by night.

Cold comfort, perhaps. Métis people 'enjoyed' no recognition as one of the First Nations, which would have involved access to the reservation and modified taxation systems, the protection of Chiefs and the governance of councils - not that all that has been going so well! Yet in the absence of any robust relationships to white settler society, this disenfranchisement had profound economic and spiritual consequences.

Métis people were known as the 'road allowance people' in the ensuing decades; that's the land between the crown and the private land, which any Manitoban can tell you is code for 'big ditch'. Racism and classism being what they are, connections to non-Métis institutions (farms and towns) would be tenuous. I imagine one would trade with whomever was willing to trade with one.

One's children would go to whatever rural school was available, where Michif would not be on the curriculum (any more than Soto or Cree). If the teacher at said school, for example, called your child (pejorative) Indian and took away the prized baseball glove his sister had sent him from Winnipeg, I don't imagine there was all that much you could do. You have eight of them and the project of ensuring their survival would be preoccupation enough.

Rural and urban poverty differ; rural and urban shame might be similar. If, for example, one had an awareness of the stereotype of the Drunk Indian, and if one's husband who looks full-blood Indian drank too much, then an efficient and loving response might be not to make too much of that, to erect a (protective) barrier of silence around it, maybe even in the event of a disastrous miscalculation of funds-for-booze versus funds-for-stuff-to-get-through-the-winter...

In short, if you could - if you were light skinned and so were half of your eight children - you might indulge in what sociologists call 'passing', a phenomenon whereby racial discrimination led many Métis to hide their heritage and assimilate into Canadian society. If you were surrounded by the burgeoning stark image of the Indian as drunk and unable to take care of things... well, you might identify more with the European side of your Métis mix, just as others choose to emphasize the Aboriginal side - there is no 'racial' difference. Indeed, one of the only three legal criteria for membership in the Métis Federation is 'self-identification'. But why subject yourself to persecution when you could choose to sign up under the other burgeoning myth called 'Canada'?

You would raise children who say, with slight defensiveness, "Canadian!" when asked what they are. Children who have tantrums on hairdressers who accuse them of wanting an out-of-fashion perm only to hide how Indian they look. Actually, there is a disproportionate amount of permanent waving going on among the modern Métis, I believe, but I'm no sociologist.

I believe. Having only swatches of cloth to weave together a quilt to get me through this winter, this winter of Harper's flagrant attempt to pervert the course of my country. Is it mine, though, that nation? I look up from my position among the bulrushes, on the road allowance, my son Riel by my side. Any place that is still called Canada must want to see us and count us among its own; we make the best tea biscuits you have ever had.

That recipe I carry, as I carry a memory of a tapping foot as I am surrounded by fiddle music; those ones are easy, concrete. Most of what I carry, though, is ambiguous and harder to define. There is certainly a spirit of indomitable rebellion in me, along with the double-edged and haunting awareness of otherness. Both sustain me and serve me well. I have also had a bit of help:

A star academic involved in the current Métis Renaissance, my cousin Jeremy has shown me my great grandparents' scrip records, some with signatures and others with the X. He had prepared, through the University of Manitoba, the genealogy document that enables my sister and me to get cards from the Métis Federation. We have yet to take this on, though every year we get closer.

Maybe what else I carry is a radical anti-racist conviction that nothing of value can strictly be said about blood. I am, after all, my mother's daughter. Among the pieces of utter science fiction she asked me to believe as a child was that my uncles were brown from 'suntans' because they were 'out on the tractor every day'... (And, I guess, they looked Asian because they were squinting. From the sun, like.)

Of course I reject the denial - the 'passing' - inherent in her words, but I do not condemn her in the least. I do not blame her for not taking up this Renaissance - I'm the one with urban sensibilities and a master's degree, who lives in an environment where Aboriginal heritage is 'cool' rather than vilified.

Nor am I culturally confused. I grew up in a mid-sized city eating Kraft Dinner and Flintstone vitamins, watching TV and going to swimming lessons - very much a white person (what's more, my father is an English man the colour of paper). And Marx taught me all about the materiality of privilege and how my blue eyes can hail a cab at 3am and get served nice at the restaurant and called on first in class.

Yet... I was nourished by a stranger's comments a few years ago, only at that moment realizing I had been hungering for... something. On a Greyhound bus going up Highway 2, hours into the journey from Winnipeg, I was listening to these two sweet but hectic (rough, drug addled) teenagers arguing. He was ribbing her about having a white boyfriend, and she counters that, "he is not!!! He is Métis!!!" And the guy goes, "well he has blue freaking eyes, yeah?" And she goes, "like they all do you retard!!!" I got such a kick out of being validated by these kids, who got off at my stop with me; it just made me feel great.

That bus was taking me to where my mum is from: a farm snuggled right up against a reservation in the middle of nowhere. It is another world. It is another culture (how my Granny laughed when my cousin and I finally managed to explain to her that in the city people buy and sell 'organic' food - that's right, they don't do anything extra to it and then sell it for more. A real knee-slapper.) My grandfather spoke a language other than English or French. The baseball glove, given by my mum, was stolen from my uncle, who grew always to insist on a funny afro perm. Rest in peace.

Not being named out loud for two generations has not killed my family, has not killed any Métis people.

We live and breathe just a little outside the dominant culture, and certain memories reverberate such that our sense of entitlement is just a bit scrambled. But we were not crushed by anyone's iron fist; rather, we are coming up just now, surfacing over coffee at Chicken Delight, under the prettiest skies you've ever seen, coming out and declaring our blue-eyed difference.

Métis people live. I am one. I will continue to rebel against the likes of Sir John A. Harper. He has nothing to do with my Canada. He will not last here. And he will never ever see my X on any of his dirty documents.