Towards a Prairie Atonement Read online

  The pasture is the core of what local farmers still call the Sand Plains—leftover land whose poor soil attracted few, if any, white homesteaders. Sand Plains history is a narrative of men and women as hardy as poplar trees, surviving, even thriving, on a prairie that agronomists dismiss as unproductive. A century and a half before the Canadian government drew lines around the Spy Hill–Ellice community pasture, before the four strands of federal barbed wire enclosed it, a new and resilient prairie people were living here and at places like it throughout the watersheds of the lower Qu’Appelle and Assiniboine rivers. Neither the original race nor the colonizers, yet bearing some of each in their flesh and customs, these early modern dwellers on the plains, refugees displaced from Batoche, the Red River, and elsewhere, spoke the language, sang the songs, and told the stories that their fur-trading ancestors first voiced in the prairie world.

  This morning, when we met for a late breakfast at a restaurant in the town of Binscarth, Norman introduced us to an old friend, a Mr. Genaille, who works as a grain buyer these days. His father was a great speaker of Michif, the Métis language rooted in a mix of Cree and French, still spoken in pockets of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and North Dakota. As they visited and laughed at memories, bits of Michif spilling into their English, Norman began to talk about the origins of the language. His explanation, one he learned from his grandmother as a child, would fit well in one of the books he has written in Michif or in the undergrad language classes he teaches at the University of Saskatchewan.

  “I asked my koohkoom, I said, ‘Where did the language come from?’ And she said, ‘Why are you asking me that?’

  “Nobody asks where their language comes from because you are born with the language. But she said, ‘You come tomorrow morning, and I will tell you.’ I used to go there every morning for breakfast—we shared the same little farm. ‘You come and eat tomorrow morning. I will think about it.’ She didn’t want to just give me any old answer—it had to be the right one.

  “The next day she said, ‘You know, grandson, when God created the world’—you see the old people always gave everything that spiritual context—‘overseas there are white people there, different nationalities, the Germans speak German, the French speak French, and the English speak English. Here,’ she said, ‘there are the Pramyayr Naasyoon,’ the Indians, ‘there are the Blackfoot, they speak their language, lii Syoo,’ the Sioux, ‘they speak their language, Dakota, the Cree, they speak their niihiyow language. Then it was our turn, we are the ones who finish that circle in creation. God gave us this language, so we could all understand one another, and called it Michif like our nation.’

  “If I asked my grandparents what language they spoke, they always said, ‘li Krii biikishkwaan, maaka namooya li vray Krii,’ meaning ‘I speak Cree, but it’s not the real Cree because I use French in my language.’ And that’s how they’d explain it.”

  It took less than a century for the new language to take root after first contact between French and Cree, and that rapid formation, said Norman, has brought linguistic experts from Europe to study the language.

  “There were these new people who were not this and not that. What are we going to call them? In Lower Canada it was Mitif—French for ‘mixed blood.’ But because of the way the new people spoke, their distinctive accent, they couldn’t pronounce the ‘t,’ so they said Michif.

  “We inherited our European heritage and our First Nations heritage but became a distinct people. We ‘michified’ it—the language, the stories, the mythology—all those things became Michif. The Cree word for us, Otipaymishoowuk, means ‘owners of their own destinies.’ The free people.

  “When we talk among ourselves, there are no questions of who we are—we know who we are. But it gets lost in translation. Trying to tell your story in another language is not easy.”

  The prairie we are driving across needs translating, too, though there are words here that belong. The southern edge of the pasture is wrinkled with ravines or coulees on the rim of the Qu’Appelle Valley. Coulee is a Michif word that has made its way into modern English in the west.

  Down through those coulees and across the river, half a day’s walk through speargrass, aspen bush, and slopes of bur oak and bluestem grass, three small monuments mark the national historic site where traders from Montreal built Fort Espérance in 1787. In defiance of the 1670 HBC royal charter granting the corporation exclusive domain over Rupert’s Land—all land draining into Hudson Bay—the Montreal traders had followed fur trader Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de la Vérendrye, and his sons deep into the interior of the northwest to trade with the Saulteaux (Anishinaabe), Cree, and Dene where they lived. HBC officers soon realized that these “pedlars”—at Fort Espérance and other inland forts—were changing the game. It would no longer work to sit at York Factory on the coast of Hudson Bay and wait for Cree trappers to travel with their furs to the post.

  Calling themselves the North West Company (established in 1779), these Montreal traders were among the first people with European blood to walk and paddle the Qu’Appelle Valley. In the early years, they were Michif and French men who resented British control of the territory, but they were soon joined by Scottish men who had their own reasons to hate the English.

  When the HBC began to build its own inland trade forts, the competition was on. Employing the toughest men they could find—Métis, Orkneymen, and displaced highlanders—the two companies leapfrogged upstream past one another, striking deeper into the watersheds of the Athabasca, Saskatchewan, and Qu’Appelle rivers in search of furs. In the North West Company (NWC), clans that had feuded for centuries on the far side of the Atlantic—the McKenzies, Camerons, Campbells, and McTavishes—now stood together to face the HBC, their new common enemy that was a proxy for the English king. This new world held the promise of a return to the high and free life of their ancestors, and there would be many a bloody dawn before they let the English take it all for themselves.

  By 1804, outposts on the lower Qu’Appelle were exploding and smouldering at regular intervals. The two companies burned out one another’s forts with some regularity, seizing trade goods and pemmican and jailing the factors and their men.

  The feud climaxed in 1816, when a young Nor’Wester, Cuthbert Grant, left Fort Espérance to guard a pemmican shipment with a brigade of sixty mounted men. Some, like Grant, had Scottish blood mixed with Cree or Saulteaux heritage, and others were descendants of French traders and Cree or Saulteaux mothers. Most would have spoken Michif and one or two other languages.

  The men who died that day were the first casualties in a two-hundred-year struggle over how we want the prairie to be used and shared among Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. All the elements that plague our decisions about these lands today were present then: powerful corporate interests, misguided public policy, and groups of disenfranchised people, with long tenure on the land, who are recognized and valued only when it suits the interests of those whose names are on the titles.

  The surnames of the men who rode with Grant that morning in 1816 are still here on the Sand Plains and at many other places scattered across the west: Boucher, Hourie, Tanner, Fleury, Lepine, Malaterre, Belhumeur, Pritchard, Falcon, and others. They are etched into gravestones from the Red River to the North Saskatchewan. A few are written on deeds in land title offices. It is doubtful that many are on papers granting rights to the oil and gas under the soil, but people with such surnames work far afield in those industries today.

  The extractive industry that fuelled the passage of NWC and HBC boats into and out of beaver, marten, and mink country relied almost entirely on the hunting skills of Métis, mostly Michif-speaking, men on the prairie. Paddlers on the Athabasca, Churchill, and Saskatchewan rivers were powered by pemmican, the northwest’s high-energy staple made of dried and pulverized buffalo meat, mixed with melted fat and berries, and stored in bags made from buffalo hide. Each man working in a York boat or
canoe would eat two pounds a day. The easiest way to procure and process the required meat was to open “victualling posts” at the edges of the plains along rivers within a few days’ paddling distance of the fur country to the north.

  Fort Espérance was one of these depots for extracting and processing transportation fuel. Métis men near the posts were useful as buffalo hunters, and their wives were useful as pemmican processors. They saw none of the profits accrued in London or Montreal by the white owners of the two companies, but they understood that products made from each buffalo could be traded for guns, blankets, pots, sugar, flour, and rum. By 1812, though, the NWC discovered another use for Métis plainsmen—as allies who could be persuaded to fight the corporation’s battles.

  How little things have changed here in two hundred years. The wild buffalo herds disappeared into the belly of the trade, but the prairie is still a place of depots and posts where cheap food and fuel are gathered to be shipped elsewhere at the bidding of men in distant boardrooms. And the people who live on the land and do the dirty work of producing and shipping the food and fuel are still drawn into fights ignited and ultimately extinguished in those distant rooms.

  On the morning of May 8, 1816, when young Cuthbert Grant led his brigade of sixty buffalo hunters east from Fort Espérance, he could not have guessed that the events to come would lead future generations of Métis to place him at the origins of their nation and its fight for an indigenous hold on the prairie or that the violence about to erupt might one day be considered a form of resistance early in the lineage that led to defining Métis’ acts of nationhood at both the Red River and the North Saskatchewan.

  Grant did know that the new Selkirk colonists at the forks of the Assiniboine and Red rivers were threatening his livelihood and freedom. The colony’s appointed governor had posted a law, the “Pemmican Proclamation,” placing an embargo on the export of pemmican from the region. That injunction, abetted by a further prohibition against the “running of the buffalo” (the Métis’ preferred method of hunting on horseback), made the Métis and their employers in the NWC into allies against a common enemy. A colony pronouncing rules on how pemmican was to be acquired and exported was as much a threat to the nascent Métis plains culture as it was to the business of the NWC.

  The company’s officers had appointed several of their Métis clerks to be captains but chose Grant to be their “captain general of all the half-breeds.” Historian George Woodcock has argued that Grant knew he was being used but took on the role in the hope that it would advance his career in the company. The feud with the HBC had been under way for twelve years or more without any law to dampen the sport. One more skirmish wouldn’t hurt.

  The Selkirk Colony was a philanthropical side project allowed by the British government at the bidding of the Earl of Selkirk, Thomas Douglas, a man with big dreams who had a seat on the board of the HBC. The Scottish peasant colonists Douglas wanted to bring to the northwest were themselves refugees from another enclosure of the commons across the Atlantic. Allowing them to settle in the chartered lands would be a significant departure from company policy, so Selkirk had to make his case to both the HBC and England’s Secretary of War and the Colonies, Lord Bathurst. There were three strategic reasons for allowing a colony of Scottish settlers in Rupert’s Land: the colonists could grow food for the company, settlement would improve the value of HBC lands, and settlers would bring civilization to the Indians.

  Cheap food to fuel economic growth, a chance to improve value for investors, and managing Indigenous peoples—to this day these are the pillars of federal public policy in Canada’s hinterlands.

  Norman lets the truck roll to a slower pace as we pass through the gate into the Spy Hill–Ellice community pasture. “I worked on those corrals forty years ago.”

  Norman grew up among men who made the original fences a couple of decades before he was born. Stalwart trunk and limbs, a full head of curly black hair, and an unguarded smile, he is in his sixties now. As he talks, squinting through the windshield against the sun’s glare, I am distracted by the thought that he inherited his stature from buffalo runners whose grandchildren became fence builders.

  “It happened in the late 1930s. The Depression. A lot of our people needed work, so when the government decided to make a community pasture here they got some income putting up fences.”

  When the light improves, we will come back. Branimir has a soft spot for corrals backlit with pink skies, and we are driving through a plain of native grass lit with the fuchsia of three-flowered avens in full bloom. As we reach the far side, the other aspect of the savannah landscape—aspen bush—takes over. A copse of poplar leans out towards the expanse of grass, and our trail draws us into the wall of green it forms. As we approach, an opening in the aspen emerges. Spanned by a gate made of wood and wire painted white, it is unlike any I have seen in a community pasture. This is our destination for the day. Like living ramparts, the poplars encircle a space that, for Norman and the Michif of this region, is filled with all of the story and meaning a place can hold.

  “Ste. Madeleine.” I look up at the words fourteen feet above the grass in white capital letters formed from steel rods bent and welded to a black frame arching over the gate. In the distance I can see rows of headstones and a large white wooden cross with a Red River cart wheel at its crux, but the sign does not use the word cemetery—only Ste. Madeleine.

  Out of the truck, Norman opens the gate, and it swings lightly on sprung hinges. There are two outhouses on the left and two more on the right. As we walk forward into the ten acres of grass surrounded by aspen trees, something about the place stirs a pang of nostalgia for an old prairie fairground I knew as a kid.

  I ask Norman how Ste. Madeleine came to be.

  “It was Father DeCorby. He used to travel out with the people on the buffalo hunt. With the Red River people, the ones who were scattered after the first Riel resistance in 1869. The settlers were hostile, so many of our people decided to leave. ‘We can go farther west,’ they said, ‘we know those places from the buffalo hunts. We’ll go see uncle, we’ll go visit cousin farther west.’ Some of them found places to live near Fort Ellice, just south of here.

  “He was a good horseman, DeCorby. He came and served the Fort Ellice people when it closed down in the late 1800s. At St. Lazare, just a few miles from here, they built a church together; then a couple of years after that he helped the people living here build one—a mission they called it. That was the beginning of Ste. Madeleine. That’s how we got here.”

  Cuthbert Grant was but twenty-three years old when he led the sixty horsemen east, but he had already seen the colonizers’ civilization first-hand at the boarding school he had attended in Montreal.3It would spread over the prairie and change everything, the way it had in the St. Lawrence Valley. The pemmican trade fed and clothed every family in the Qu’Appelle and Assiniboine country. If they let that collection of oatmeal eaters at the Red River start dictating the laws of the land, soon there would be farmsteads all over the plains—and, even worse, he’d be stuck on one of them.

  Not that his boss, the NWC’s Alexander Macdonell, could be trusted either. He was a bastard, just like his cousin Miles Macdonell, the governor of the Selkirk Colony who had the gall to write the Pemmican Proclamation. But Alexander Macdonell was the devil Grant knew.

  His official instructions were to escort a shipment of pemmican safely past the colony and into the hands of Nor’Westers on Lake Winnipeg nearing starvation. That much Alexander Macdonell would admit when the gun smoke cleared and he had his chance to testify. Grant, he would say, was told not to threaten or attack the settlers.

  No one knows what Grant was actually told before he left. The NWC had been using the Métis to fight its battles with the HBC for twenty years by then. Only three years earlier the Macdonell cousins had begun to argue over who owned the rights to the territory and its resources. Alexander and the Nor�
�Westers started a campaign of intimidation fuelled by dreams of nationhood that they encouraged among their Métis employees.

  It was relatively easy for the Nor’Westers to ship Miles Macdonell and the first batch of Scottish settlers back east, but another group arrived the next year under a governor more foolhardy than the first. Robert Semple, a man more accustomed to the drawing room than the canoe, penned thoughtful essays for the Edinburgh Review. Regardless of the vanity or credulity that brought such a dandy to the gunpowdered northwest at this dangerous juncture, Semple set the tone for his brief governorship shortly after arriving in the territory in the late fall of 1815.

  On a tour of the District of Assiniboia—as the lands included in the Selkirk concession were now called—Semple arrived at the gates of Grant’s fort in the eastern Qu’Appelle. After some presumed niceties, he announced that the NWC must surrender the fort and its supply of pemmican forthwith. Grant, no doubt puzzled by the man’s apparent delusion, showed remarkable restraint in not tying Semple to the nearest oak and smearing him with lard. Instead, the record shows that he merely said no and bid him a good day.

  The following March Semple managed to seize the NWC’s Fort Gibraltar at the Forks, cutting off its trade route north along the Red River. Then he had his men dismantle the fort and float its logs downriver to reinforce the colony’s Fort Douglas. This was the sequence of escalating hostility on the minds of Grant and his men when they left the valley in May.

  Their first act was to ambush an HBC canoe brigade carrying pemmican down the Qu’Appelle River. It was heading for the Red River to feed the colonists, short on food after several years of failed crops, but now it would be escorted along the Assiniboine River and then past Fort Douglas and the Selkirk Colony to reach the hungry brigades of Nor’Westers waiting on Lake Winnipeg.