Towards a Prairie Atonement Read online

  Partway along the Assiniboine River, Grant and his men stopped in at Brandon House, the HBC fort just above the point where the Assiniboine receives the Souris River, near today’s Brandon. The great Peter Fidler, explorer and cartographer of the northwest, was the HBC factor for Brandon House at the time. Here is his account of the moment when Grant and his troops rode in under their new flag of Métis nationhood, given to them by Alexander Macdonell, a blue horizontal X-shaped cross formed into a sideways figure eight, a variation of the ancient white saltire of Scotland:

  At half past noon about 48 halfbreeds, Canadians, Freemen and Indians came all riding on Horseback, with their flag flying blue about 4 feet square and a figure of 8 horizontally in the middle, one beating an Indian drum, and many of them singing Indian songs, they all rode directly to the usual crossing place over the river where they all stopped about two minutes, and instead of going down the bank and riding across the river they all turned suddenly and rode full speed into our yard—some of them tied their horses, others loose and fixed their flag at our door, which they soon afterwards hoisted over our East Gate next the Canadian house—Cuthbert Grant then came up to me in the yard and demanded of me to deliver to him all the keys of our stores warehouses and I of course would not deliver them up—they then rushed into the house and broke open the warehouse door first, plundered the warehouse of every article it contained, tore up part of the cellar floor and cut out the parchment windows without saying what this was done for or by whose authority—Alex. McDonell, Serephim, Bostonais, and Allan McDonell were at their house looking on the whole time.4

  Neither Fidler nor his men were harmed, but the message was received: colonizing plans drafted in London by English investors are not welcome in this new world of buffalo, muskets, and grass. Against this and any other incursion stands a new nation, by their mothers native to the prairie, who will defend their claim to the land.

  Norman leads us towards what looks like a well-tended campsite. Picnic tables next to a firepit, chairs upturned and stored carefully to one side on a countertop, two large grills made from oil drums cut in half and welded together, and, tucked into the bush, a small school bus up on blocks and converted into a camper.

  In front of all this stands a cast iron pump with a wooden handle. Next to the housing is a plastic milk jug half-filled with water. Norman pours some into the top of the pump, and I lever the handle up and down. In ten strokes the priming takes hold, and I can feel the water rise in the pipe from somewhere beneath the yarrow and sage growing at our feet. A couple of hollow glugs, and then water sloshes out in curling ropes of crystal lit by the sun. It smells of earth, tastes of iron, but a cupful in the hand runs cold and satisfying down the throat.

  Norman explains the campsite. “The families still come here. Ste. Madeleine means something to us. Some of this was brought here recently I think—it looks new—but there’s a celebration here every summer. Ste. Madeleine Days—lots of people, food, music, and dancing. It’s like Back to Batoche Days.

  “We don’t know for sure, but in 1937 they say there were about 250 people living all around here. The plaque in the cemetery says the population peaked at 400 in the ’20s. Father DeCorby was long gone, but the church was just over there, and there was a school too.

  “It was the 1930s, so times were pretty hard. For the people of Ste. Madeleine, the buffalo hunt, our commercial life, had been gone for a while. Our homeland on the Red River had been taken away. The people who settled here to try farming had moved west after the events there with Riel. There are unmarked graves out here from that first dispersal generation.

  “Some of them were already subsistence farmers. They might have had two or three cows, they might have had a team of horses. So they’d look at this place and say, ‘Well, let’s go there,’ because it was all prairie like this. There were a lot of berries here, a lot of herbs, there was water, and there were trees. Everything that they needed. With the poplar they could build their houses, furnish them, and keep warm.

  “They came here for deliverance, for freedom, to hold on to a way of life that they were accustomed to. The spring and fall buffalo hunts had to be replaced with something else, so they decided to become farmers. They were the first farmers in the area.

  “The light sandy soil had not attracted many white homesteaders, but some of the Métis took homesteads here—most of them did. It was extended families. The farms were scattered here and there on the plains surrounding the settlement. Some of the families did better than others because of their circumstances. If you had a quarter-section of land, you could have five or six families live on it. Just living the old way. But then this whole new way of doing things is imposed. Taxes and land surveys and establishing municipalities with sections and townships and ranges. We’d been here for more than a hundred years, and then this new system just takes over.

  “But when we talk about those days, sometimes it sounds like there was always bad relations between the white farmers and our people. But that isn’t right. There are lots of stories about them helping one another. When the first white farmers came, they sometimes needed help, and the Métis knew how to survive and showed them things. And then they would help each other, like neighbours do. Sure, there were problems, but it wasn’t all bad.”

  As Norman spoke, I remembered reading that many of the other families would leave the community for months at a time to get work on settler farms in the area. In 1987, Ken and Victoria Zeilig put together a book of interviews with people who had lived in Ste. Madeleine.5

  One of the longest testimonies came from Harry Pelletier, whose grandfather, Edouard Pelletier, was wounded at Batoche. In his interview, Harry described Ste. Madeleine’s farmland and townsite as taking up five square miles “from the boundary of Saskatchewan down to the [Assiniboine] River.”6 In spring, he said, his father would take him and the other children out of school. The family would travel and live in a big tent. The children would cut brush and cordwood while their father worked as a farmhand. They received a dollar and a half for a cord of wood.

  Several others interviewed for the book mentioned “scrubbing,” or cutting brush and gathering Seneca root, a native plant used in making pharmaceuticals for tuberculosis. Some families would pay a fee for the right to cut hay on Crown land. When winter came, the families would return to Ste. Madeleine, and the children would return to school.

  Norman remembers his grandparents disagreeing on the value of a school education. His grandfather saw people being swindled and losing their land because they could not read or understand the legal system. He wanted his children to go to school.

  “My grandmother was more traditional, and she said, ‘Why?’ You see, she didn’t go to school. She always said, ‘The kids can work like you, they can cut cordwood, they can work for farmers, they can dig Seneca root, they can cut fenceposts, they can haul to the convent and to the stores, and they can make a living like you.’

  But my grandfather started to see things differently—he thought we could become educated and be doctors or lawyers.”

  If a lack of formal education placed Ste. Madeleine and other Métis communities at a disadvantage when white settlers arrived and began offering money for land, the colonial imposition of the Dominion Land Survey and Dominion Lands Act, still fresh in the minds of Elders, set the stage for the landlessness that would characterize the Métis in the twentieth century. The fraudulent land scrip system, to all appearances devised to ensure that very few Métis would actually make their way through its convoluted procedures and retain title to prairie lands, allowed the Canadian government to strip away traditional Métis title and clear the plains for settlement while avoiding the need to negotiate treaties and almost appearing benevolent in the bargain.

  The Métis retreated to places like Ste. Madeleine not merely to survive but to hold on to the remnants of their traditional concepts of land tenure, which had been developed locally
on the prairie and worked for generations before the northwest was dealt from the HBC to Canada. In his interview, Harry Pelletier said that his parents had each received 240 acres of land through the scrip system established to compensate the Métis after the events at Red River, but his father had sold his land for fifty dollars one day.

  Norman begins to walk toward the cemetery, and I follow. Although the community might have once spread over the thousands of acres all around us, Ste. Madeleine as a historic site and cemetery is a handful of acres fenced off from the rest of the community pasture. There are five strands of barbed wire strung high and tight between solid fenceposts. No Hereford is getting through. It would take a buffalo.

  A recent grave waiting for its headstone is marked with a small plastic stake noting “Braendle-Bruce Funeral Service.” The burial happened last summer, but the sand atop the grave is already being reclaimed by tufts of native grass, small mandalas of antennaria in bloom, as well as chickweed, fairy candelabra, and thread-leaved sedge. None of it would reach the top of my shoes. Asked about management of the cemetery, Norman says that there are so many unmarked graves from the first generation of Michif escaping the aftermath of Red River and Batoche that the funeral service companies sometimes come across bones when they dig new ones.

  The headstones bear the same names from those early conflicts. Norman reads them as he passes slowly down a row, stopping now and then to tell a short story of this woman’s connection to Louis Riel or that man’s ability to speak several Indigenous languages. The names vibrate with cultural pride harkening back to a golden age: David Isadore Genaille, Mary Victoria Demontigny, Ambrose Morrisette, Alfred Laurent, Riel Fleury.

  Stopping before the grave of Louis Pelletier, Norman lowers his chin. “I remember old Louis saying, ‘It was a good place to live. We lived like we used to live.’ That was the way those people talked about Ste. Madeleine. And without saying what that was but meaning we were self-sufficient and still living the old ways even though the buffalo was gone. They define it through the stories they tell you. Hunting and survival techniques, the relationship to the land, the animals, and the birds—the things that were given to them by the creator. My grandparents would always put it that way and speak about what God had given us.

  “The people here were resourceful and independent. They knew how to survive. We had good relationships with the winged beings and the four-leggeds. They knew the times for things—when to pick the berries and when not to. You could not find better conservationists. I remember the older people always talking about how everything used to be pure and clean. That is the word they used—clean. The water was clean, the fish, the animals. Everything they ate was clean, and they had good, respectful relationships to the land and the other beings, and they knew how to take care of the land and those relationships.”

  In the middle of the next row, Norman begins to speak of his great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Jean-Baptiste Lepine. At the Red River in 1869, he was part of Riel’s provisional government asserting the Métis claim on the newly established District of Assiniboia. He sat on the tribunal that tried and convicted Thomas Scott of treason but was one of the two who voted against the death penalty. But Norman wants to talk about Jean-Baptiste’s work with Father DeCorby.

  “When Father DeCorby went west to establish missions, Jean-Baptiste went with him as a guide because he could speak Cree and Saulteaux. One time they went to La Prairie Ronde (forty miles south of Saskatoon today and contained in Dundurn PFRA pasture) to visit relatives there, the Trottier family. This was quite late, and the buffalo were already disappearing.7 Anyway, the Trottiers went out on their last buffalo hunt, and my great-grandfather went with them. He told that story to my mother.”

  Trottier. When I was a kid growing up in Saskatoon in the late 1960s, that was the most feared name on either side of the river. La Prairie Ronde’s Trottiers were living in urban poverty by then and had acquired some habits that made them well known and well respected in schoolyards. Behind their backs, we called them Indians. No one told us that they were the great-grandchildren of the last great Métis buffalo hunters or that they were who they were in 1969 because in 1869 our ancestors sold the land out from under their feet.

  The first Selkirk Colony farmers used hoes and shovels to tear up the ancient bluestem and cordgrass prairie along the Red River so they could plant their crops. For two or three summers, the seeds they had brought from Scotland failed to produce crops. Rust and other plant diseases, grasshoppers, and harsh weather kept the northern Great Plains’ first non-Indigenous settlers hungry and dependent on pemmican and other country food. But there was another threat that made it hard for the hoe-wielding colonists to sleep on spring nights: the possibility that a band of NWC Métis might again chase them away before they could see their crops ripen.

  Shortly after Captain General Cuthbert Grant and his party turned inland on the morning of June 19, 1816, to cross the prairie and circumvent the HBC garrison at Fort Douglas, they spotted two Selkirk farmers working the soil. It is not clear from the record, but some reports suggest that Grant’s men threatened or intimidated the farmers.

  Separating fact from fancy in the reports of an encounter between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is tricky when it happened yesterday. At the distance of two centuries, that job is mired in a slurry of ideological history-making crafted by interpreters choosing from among various accounts to suit their own larger narratives of how this land became the happy home of white farmers, potash miners, and oil workers.

  Grant MacEwan—not the most scholarly of prairie historians but one who knew a good tale and how to supplement it with a flourish of imagination here and there—begins his account with a description of a young settler boy in a watchtower at the Forks. Seeing the mounted brigade approach along the river road, the boy, wrote MacEwan, “gave warning. Governor Robert Semple, showing neither excitement nor emotion, placed the spyglass to his eye and agreed that these were probably the Métis about whom he had been warned.”8

  Gathering a group of twenty-four farmers with guns, Semple marched out to meet the brigade at a place the settlers called Seven Oaks. Mid-twentieth-century historians of Anglo-Canadian descent presented Grant as the aggressor, but more recent interpretations have argued that the Métis did not want trouble and merely planned to escort their cargo safely around Fort Douglas to deliver it to their counterparts to the north on Lake Winnipeg. All accounts agree that Grant initially sent one of his lieutenants, François-Firmin Boucher, to parley with Semple and his band of settlers, all of whom were on foot.

  There is no account of what words passed between Boucher and Semple, but it is fair to assume that the governor, enamoured of his commission as the king’s representative in this land of heathens, did his best to assert his authority and demanded that the brigade surrender its cargo and retreat. Boucher, as a Métis plainsman with no loyalty to proclamations and principalities concocted by Englishmen on this side of the Atlantic or the other, may well have responded with the nineteenth-century equivalent of “Blow it out your arse, you pompous jackass. You are surrounded by sixty mounted sharpshooters who can kill a buffalo at a hundred paces as they gallop over gopher holes. Put down your guns and step aside.”

  Regardless of the words exchanged, the next move belonged to Semple. All accounts report that, as the discussion deteriorated into yelling, the governor reached out and grabbed the bridle of Boucher’s horse (some say it was his gun that Semple grabbed). At that point someone fired a shot. A pause and then a second shot that set off a barrage of gunfire by both sides. A commission appointed a year later by the British government and led by Lieutenant Colonel William Coltman would conclude that the first shot came from Semple’s men, but some witnesses said that two shots came from that side before the Métis moved to defend themselves.

  Most reports agree that in the melee Grant shot Semple in the thigh. MacEwan and some other historians descri
be a moment when the wounded Selkirk governor cried out to Grant for mercy, asking to be dragged to safety. Grant, according to this narrative, turned away to find help just as one of his men rode by and shot Semple in the head. Fifteen minutes later, with the smoke of musket fire drifting over the Red River, twenty-one settlers lay dead among the willows and grass of Seven Oaks.9 The Nor’Westers had lost but one.

  How the battle ended in such a one-sided body count can be explained in part by lack of military experience among the settlers. Métis accounts say that, after firing their first volley, Grant’s men fell to the ground to reload their muzzleloaders, as was their custom in battle. The settlers, believing they had hit their targets, threw up their arms and cheered, only to find the dead on their feet and charging at them, muskets blazing. That was when most of the twenty-one died.

  Reports divide along ideological lines when historians try to account for what happened next. Someone among Grant’s men stripped the bodies of several settlers and mutilated them. Peter C. Newman, that cheerleader for Canadian business from the HBC forward, enthusiastically described it as “an orgy of mutilation.”10 Others, similarly undaunted by the passage of centuries, have taken the accounts of settlers at face value and not investigated them any further.

  In 1991, Lyle Dick, a historian working for Parks Canada, conducted an exhaustive survey and analysis of writing by both academic and popular historians who have, since the 1820s, given many interpretations of the events at Seven Oaks. Publishing his paper in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Dick identified a shift in perspective over the two centuries.11The popular interpretation of Seven Oaks as a “massacre,” as it is still referred to in most history books, did not show up until the post-1870 period, just in time for Canada to justify its dispossession of the Métis and First Nations of the northwest.