Halfbreed Read online

  The Indigenous arts community is thriving today, with Aboriginal theatre companies, radio and television networks, galleries, publishing houses, training venues, and granting programs. Maria supported the initiation and evolution of much of this activity, acting as a role model and working to support arts organizations as well as emerging artists. Among her many volunteer responsibilities, Maria was a founding member of the Aboriginal Arts Alliance, which successfully advocated for and launched Indigenous programming with the Canada Council and several provincial arts councils as well as Aboriginal Arts programming at the Banff Centre. Maria then worked as a steering committee member to assist Jeannette Armstrong in creating the renowned En’owkin Centre. Now a senior artist, Elder, and cultural leader, Maria continues to be a generous mentor to artists of all disciplines across the country, as scores of book and CD acknowledgements, artist statements, and program notes will attest. Her current projects in writing and theatre continue to be in keeping with what she once stated: “My work is in community. Writing is just one of the tools that I used in my work as an organizer…. [But] I know what a storyteller is. A storyteller is a community healer and teacher.”*6

  By now, it must be evident to the reader here that teaching and mentoring is a big part of who Maria is. She has done this work her whole life, both formally and informally in the arts, in community, and in post-secondary institutions. She has worked as an instructor at the Banff Centre, the University of Saskatchewan, First Nations University of Canada, and Athabasca University, working in departments of drama, Native Studies, English, and law. As a traditional knowledge keeper, Maria has trained a lineage of formal and informal students, and she continues to mentor many of us as we move into our own mentorship roles as senior academics and artists. More formally, Maria has worked as the “Elder in Virtual Residence” at Athabasca University since 2006, and in recent years she also took on a position as cultural advisor for the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Saskatchewan.

  All this might come across as dizzying, and sometimes it is. The volume of it surprised even Maria when I shared my synopsis with her on the phone as I prepared this introduction, and we laughed about ourselves and other Indigenous women who all of a sudden feel tired when they stop to reflect on all the things that we do. Maria then told me a funny story about a radio program she used to listen to “as a kid.” Before she told the story, she rapped three times ominously on the table. She said that was how one of their favourite childhood radio programs would always start. The knocking, she said, would be followed by a deep, booming voice that warned of what might happen if one wasn’t ready to answer the door “when opportunity knocks.”

  “There were all sorts of awful things that happened to people who failed to open the door,” she said, “and it scared me so much I just kept taking every opportunity.” Listening to ourselves and to this story, we laughed even harder.

  The awards that Maria has accumulated because of her lifetime of “opening the door” are extensive. They are too many to list here but they include six honorary doctorates, the Order of Gabriel Dumont, a National Aboriginal Achievement Award, the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize, the Order of Canada, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellowship, a Chalmers Award, a Dora Mavor Moore Award, and an induction into the Saskatchewan Theatre Hall of Fame. Maria’s main desire out of all the accolades is that they might inspire other young Indigenous girls and women to be writers, and more. She knows the value of Indigenous role models because she remembers how inspired she was upon discovering the poetry of Pauline Johnson in the boxes of books her mother used to have shipped into their road-allowance home. What I find inspiring is that, in the midst of all the national and international attention, Maria has kept her head low and has steadfastly focused on nurturing the upcoming generations. It’s hard work and it’s not always popular, such as when she is compelled in her grandmotherly way to call attention to difficult issues in our communities (as she has had occasion to do over the years in places like her column with Eagle Feather News). More often, this grandmother place involves calling family together when something needs to be done.

  A glimpse of the now legendary Halfbreed Balls offers one final example of what it means to be part of the expansive community and production that is Maria’s legacy. The effort is substantial but Maria keeps going and so do we: as Cheryl Troupe has said, “Maria always swears she will never do a Halfbreed Ball again…until she does.” And so Maria has produced the Halfbreed Ball three times, the most recent being for the University of Saskatchewan when it hosted the international Native American and Indigenous Studies Association conference in 2013. The invitation for that ball read as follows:

  For more than 200 years, all visitors including Chiefs, explorers, adventurers and traders ranging from Big Bear, Sitting Bull, Sanford Fleming, Lewis Henry Morgan, David Thompson and a steady stream of lesser European Royalty were regaled with a “Halfbreed Ball” upon arriving or departing a Metis community. They feasted and danced when the buffalo brigades met on the prairies and when the York boat brigades arrived. Sometimes they danced on the prairie around a campfire, the dirt floor of a large log cabin or a frontier ballroom. The dances were always referred to as “aen ball Metif” or a “Halfbreed ball” and all you needed was a space, two or three or four fiddle players, and people who could “step” and they would dance until their moccasins wore out.

  Maria’s invitation listed the ten-course dinner that included gourmet traditional foods like pemmican soup, smoked fish, beaver and muskrat pâté, beaver tail, chilled moose nose, buffalo tongue, rabbit, tourtière, fricassee moose, fiddleheads and cattails, dandelion, fireweed, thistle and wild strawberry salads, and Saskatoon and blueberry pie. It promised an accompanying feast of Indigenous performers who would sing, read poetry, play the fiddle, jig, and give historical commentary between courses. The event would also include a Metis fashion show, co-created and emceed by the Metis material historian Sherry Farrell Racette.

  As producer, director, and executive chef and grandmother running this show, Maria needed to call on all her resources to make that Halfbreed Ball happen. She began with traditional protocols of giving tobacco and prayer cloth offerings to people who would hunt and harvest the food. She then called up some of the finest Metis visual artists in the country so we could adorn the hall with their original works. She worked with Jocelyne Pambrun as well as Karon Shmon of the Gabriel Dumont Institute to find the clothing that would represent the glory of the flower beadwork people through the centuries. She located cooks who knew how to work with traditional foods and she called up performing artists. And then she called in the rest of us—the extended group she considers family. A few days before the ball, we arrived from near and far, blowing in from all parts of the country. We immediately immersed ourselves in a flurry of cleaning, art installation, kitchen work, and rehearsal. When the night of the ball arrived, the professors, artists, health care providers, lawyers, and others who are part of Maria’s lodge were assigned new responsibilities as kitchen help, waiters, Metis runway models, stage managers, and performers.

  In the midst of all the chaos and—to be honest—the fair bit of backstage drama that ensued, the ball miraculously happened. We know from hearing about it in the days and years that followed that it left the audience with a profound sense of the spirit of Metis homeland. Those of us who worked in Maria’s temporary kitchen and theatre troupe left feeling as we do after ceremony: exhausted, exhilarated, and transformed. We carried away cherished stories of the power and chaos and calamities—stories that still make us double over in laughter when we retell them around the teapot as we work toward our next shared project.

  This, then, is what it means to be part of Maria’s large, extended family. The Halfbreed Balls are one reminder that she has trained us well, that she will continue to push us beyond what we think of as the limit of our capacities. In so doing, Maria is preparing us
for at least some of the responsibilities, the courage, and (seemingly) fearless innovation that she has demonstrated throughout her lifetime.

  As Halfbreed moves into this next phase of its life, and in the spirit of “aen ball Metif,” we all have occasion to celebrate. The young Maria who found herself dispossessed and then beginning to rebuild wahkotowin is now a great-grandmother, community-centred artist surrounded by multiple extended families and kin. She has generously shared the strength of her childhood foundations, moving spirit out from her beginnings on the road allowance to communities across the nation and beyond. For all of this we say kinanaskomitim, Maria: to you, to your lands, to your ancestors, and to the people that raised you. We are utterly grateful once again.

  Kim Anderson

  Guelph, Ontario, Canada

  March, 2019

  *1 Hartmut Lutz, Contemporary Challenges: Conversations with Canadian Native Authors. Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1991.

  *2 Deanna Reder and Alix Shield, “ ‘I write this for all of you’: Recovering the Unpublished RCMP ‘Incident’ in Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed” (1973). Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review. https://canlit.ca/article/i-write-this-for-all-of-you-recovering-the-unpublished-rcmp-incident-in-maria-campbells-halfbreed-19731. Pending print publication.

  *3 Ibid.

  *4 Some of this material was written into a story for Maclean’s magazine. See Maria Campbell, “She Who Knows the Truth of Big Bear.” Maclean’s, September, 1975: pp. 46–50.

  *5 Maria Campbell, “Introduction.” In Stories of the Road Allowance People, Revised Edition. Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2010, p. 4.

  *6 Quoted in Janet Witalec and Sharon Malinwski, Eds., Smoke Rising: The Native American Literary Companion. Detroit: Visible Ink, 1995, p. 103.

  Introduction

  THE HOUSE WHERE I GREW up is tumbled down and overgrown with brush. The pine tree beside the east window is dried and withered. Only the poplar trees and the slough behind the house are unchanged. There is a family of beavers still there, busy working and chattering just as on that morning, seventeen years ago, when I said good-bye to my father and left home.

  The graveyard down the hill is a tangle of wild roses, tiger lilies and thistle. The crosses are falling down and gophers scurry back and forth over the sunken graves. The old Roman Catholic church still needs repainting but because of the poverty of the congregation it continues to wait until another year.

  The blacksmith shop and cheese factory across the road have long since been torn down and only an old black steam-engine and forgotten horseshoes mark the place where they once stood. The store is still there, old and lonely, looking like the country around it, and, like the people it serves, merely exists. The French owners who came from Quebec are dead and their families have gone. It is as if they were never there.

  Grannie Campbell’s house is gone. The Halfbreed families who squatted on the road allowances have moved to nearby towns where welfare hand-outs and booze are handier, or else deeper into the bush as an escape from reality. The old people who were so much a part of my childhood have all died.

  Going home after so long a time, I thought that I might find again the happiness and beauty I had known as a child. But as I walked down the rough dirt road, poked through the broken old buildings and thought back over the years, I realized that I could never find that here. Like me the land had changed, my people were gone, and if I was to know peace I would have to search within myself. That is when I decided to write about my life. I am not very old, so perhaps some day, when I too am a grannie, I will write more. I write this for all of you, to tell you what it is like to be a Halfbreed woman in our country. I want to tell you about the joys and sorrows, the oppressing poverty, the frustrations and the dreams.

  Chapter 1

  IN THE 1860S SASKATCHEWAN WAS part of what was then called the Northwest Territories and was a land free of towns, barbed-wire fences and farm-houses. The Halfbreeds came here from Ontario and Manitoba to escape the prejudice and hate that comes with the opening of a new land.

  The fear of the Halfbreeds that their rights would not be respected by the Canadian government when it acquired the land from the Hudson’s Bay Company, along with the prejudice of the white Protestant settlers, led to the Red River Rebellion of 1869. Louis Riel established a provisional government at Fort Garry, Manitoba, but escaped to the United States in 1870 when troops arrived from eastern Canada.

  So with their leaders and their lands gone, the Halfbreeds fled to the areas south of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, and established the settlements of Duck Lake, Batoche, St. Louis and St. Laurent. There was no government in Saskatchewan at the time and no law and order, so they formed their own, fashioned after their way of life—the order and discipline of the great Buffalo Hunts. They elected Gabriel Dumont as their president, and with him eight councillors. They set up laws by which the people could live peaceably, and penalties if the laws were broken. They made it clear that they weren’t opposed to the Canadian government and would abandon their council as soon as the Territories acquired a true government and was able to establish law and order.

  Here, for a very few years they lived happily, but the 1870s and 1880s brought the settlers and the railroad, and just as had happened in Ontario and Manitoba their way of life was again threatened. They were squatters with no title to the land they lived on. They wanted assurance from Ottawa of their right to keep the land before the incoming white settlers encroached on them by using homestead laws. Our people believed the lands acts discriminated against them, stating that they had to live on the land and wait three years before filing a claim. They had lived on the lands for years before the lands acts had even been thought of, and didn’t believe they should be treated like newcomers. They sent many petitions and resolutions to Ottawa but again, as in Ontario and Manitoba, Ottawa was not interested and continued to ignore their existence.

  Finally, in 1884, they decided to ask the only man who could help them. Gabriel Dumont and three of his councillors rode to Montana to see Louis Riel who was living in exile. Riel returned with them to Saskatchewan to discover that it was not only Halfbreeds who had reasons to complain but white settlers and Indians as well. Because of pressing demands in the east, Macdonald’s Conservative government had cut federal monies going to the Territories. This left the Indians without the rations and farming assistance promised to them under the treaties. The white settlers had suffered one disaster after another including three years of drought—this, together with their dissatisfaction over the lands claims acts, had completely soured them against the federal government.

  This time petitions and resolutions went to Ottawa from white settlers, Halfbreeds and Indians. Again Ottawa ignored them. The Halfbreeds by now were angry and ready to take up arms but Riel and the white settlers didn’t want a rebellion. Riel believed there had to be a more peaceful way to make Ottawa realize the urgency of their requests. Dumont, however, had no faith in the federal government—he believed only an armed rebellion would give them what they asked for. He urged Riel to seize Fort Carlton and to declare a provisional government as he had done at Fort Garry in Manitoba. Finally Riel took Dumont’s advice and established a provisional government. He gave the North West Mounted Police at the Fort an ultimatum—to surrender or they would attack. Meanwhile, Dumont had gathered together a party of armed Halfbreeds and Indians, and without Riel’s knowledge approached the Fort. Crozier, the NWMP officer in charge of the Fort, had sent to Regina for reinforcements when he received Riel’s ultimatum. However, on seeing Dumont and his party approaching, Crozier decided, very foolishly, to take his inexperienced troops out against Dumont’s skilled sharp-shooters.

  This was the Battle of Duck Lake, a victory for the Halfbreeds, and was the beginning of the Riel Rebellion. The majority of white settlers didn’t want violence and withdrew their support after Duck Lake, but the treaty In
dians, who were starving because of Ottawa’s broken promises, supported Dumont and Riel. Poundmaker and Big Bear, chiefs renowned as warriors and respected throughout the Territories, brought their warriors to join forces with the Halfbreeds.

  After Duck Lake, Ottawa hastily formed a committee to examine Halfbreed grievances and issued land scripts to assure the Halfbreeds of their land claims. But these were issued purposely to a chosen few which caused a split within the Halfbreed ranks. Had the committee been formed earlier, the Battle of Duck Lake and the Riel Rebellion would never have happened.

  Meanwhile, eastern troops under General Middleton were being sent to Saskatchewan. The CPR line had not been completed and troops and supplies had to be transported on sleighs between unfinished points. Within a month, eight thousand troops, five hundred NWMP and white volunteers from throughout the Territories, plus a Gatling gun, arrived to stop Riel, Dumont and one hundred and fifty Halfbreeds.

  The history books say that the Halfbreeds were defeated at Batoche in 1884.

  Louis Riel was hanged in November of 1885. Charge: high treason.

  Gabriel Dumont and a handful of men escaped to Montana.