The title graphic of this website, 'A Métis Palimpsest.'

The Travel Layer

How To Use The Map | Starting Points | Process | Kinds Of Contemporary

How To Use The Map: To see what the map has in store, just run your mouse over the place names. If you'd like to see more, click on the link. Whether or not you choose to read the essay below, it is well worth reading at least the first paragraph, as it explains the overall concept of the layers in this site.

Starting Points: Compared to First Nations who were already here, non-Natives who came to Turtle Island to colonize it, and non-Natives who came to North America to escape where they came from, Métis see the land quite differently. Métis didn't and don't start from a remembered image of somewhere else that they are trying to make this land fit, whatever it takes analogous to the gory original version of Cinderella*. Nor did or do Métis start from a remembered image of somewhere else they hope to escape. Instead, Métis tend to see the land as a place of interleaved layers.

Other Métis scholars have made use of this layering metaphor which I make no claim to have discovered or invented. Recent examples include Brenda MacDougall in her book One Of The Family1 and Carol Leclair in her thesis on Métis Environmental Knowledge2. One of its happy features is that it does not demand the exclusion or erasure of native or non-native elements. It even allows the conceptualization of an anti-layer, the racist structures and beliefs that can render the other layers difficult to access or interpret. However, this metaphor is not without risk. It is important to fight the urge to rank the layers, and to bear in mind that these layers are not sealed off from one another. The layers are integrated with each other by memory, story, and family.

The early Métis needed to learn how to live in a full land, and its currency was and is in relationships. As MacDougall notes in the case of the Métis of Sakitawak, "Métis family structures are rooted in those of First Nations ancestors whose worldview privileges relatedness to and between land, people, spirits, and other living creatures"3. Ancestors live in particular places, calling them by specific names that they pass on to their descendants. Through these named and remembered places, Indigenous peoples remember and tie together past, present, and future, to partially paraphrase MacDougall4 as well as Keith Basso in his study of the Cibicue Apache5. The vehicle of these ties is not just passive memory or family interconnections. More importantly the vehicle includes a demand for active remembering and expression through stories and visits to the places. There are striking similarities between the practices of Sakitawak Métis, the Western Apache of Cibucue, and the practices of my own family who have relationships to, but a separate origin from, the Sakitawak Métis.

For my part, I grew up in a Métis family where these ties have not been shared or renewed with me. The stories have not been retold; even the word "Métis" was effectively verboten. Since my childhood, there have been important changes in other branches of my family that have opened up access to those stories and allowed me to learn my immediate family's past, which is how I could make the comparison to the Sakitawak Métis above. My family experience may or not be unique in detail (I fear it isn't unique at all). However, my need to engage in a process to become an actor of my own Métis identity as opposed to a passive recipient of the negative consequences of the racism I experience as a Métis is something that is shared with other Native people in general. It is a powerful, shared Indigenous experience, although not all of us survive it.

Process: "Engaging in a process to become an actor in my own Métis identity" sounds a bit glib. It was and is anything but. The starting point was simply learning that hidden term "Métis" and then working my way towards owning it. My cousins and I are the last members of the family who can register and receive "status"* under the Indian Act. This was the first identity choice I was overtly presented, because of belief in the myth that status Indians automatically get to go to university for as long as they like for free. The process involves reiterations of six major elements that I have been able to identify:

  • Overcoming the anti-layer of silence and deleted information.
  • Seeking out information, any information on Métis in Canada.
  • Overcoming acquired Red River myopia.
  • Learning about Métis origins and my family's genealogy.
  • Shifting from a sense of overwhelming loss to a realization of survival and gain from sorting these things out.
  • Disentangling my own understanding and sense of my identity from the pervasive mainstream anxiety about perceived "pernicious Métisness."

True to the interleaved, concurrent layers mentioned above, these elements are not exclusive or in order. Unidentified anti-layer stuff does still come up, luckily less and less often. Every now and again I can't set down a self-proclaimed source on Métis history or people that is part of the anti-layer because it's like a gruesome train wreck. These elements are not unique to my own experience, either. They are observable in the writings and storytelling of Métis Elders, scholars, and organizations.

Practically speaking, I couldn't bootstrap myself into this process, and my own family was not in a position to help me at the beginning. So I turned to the one thing I knew as constant, the land. Going for a long hike and going to visit familiar, pleasant places has been a key means of survival for me because home was often an unfriendly place to be. Through the land I was able to access the stories, all the more important to me as a writer. It also helped provide a structure for what might otherwise have been an unhelpful, chaotic mess of information. The places shown on the map are those where I experienced key events so far in this process.

Kinds Of Contemporary: Having set out the framework, let's have some fun with the concept of "contemporary" and through this get to exploring Métis relationships to the land in earnest. For me, the beginning of the exploration is in my own experience. As shown above, this is not a solitary experience at all, though it felt that way to begin with. Each act of exploration re-establishes my connections into the Métis networks of relationship, travelling back along the paths provided by distant relatives to finally, slowly, begin to re-connect with closer relatives. In other words, you could take this exploration in part as the story of how I rid myself at last of the mainstream sickness called "not knowing where the hell I am from one minute to the next."*

Here are four definitions of "contemporary" to bear in mind as you go along:

  1. Living or occurring at the same time.
  2. Belonging to or occurring in the present.
  3. A person living at the same time as another.
  4. A person of roughly the same age as another.

If Métis experience the land as a palimpsest, the land must experience people in the same way and to an even greater degree. As far as the land is concerned, my own visit to a place, and a visit to that place by the first Métis who ever emerged or the first Métis who ever made it to that place happened practically at the same time. Why, your visit there tomorrow would put you there in the middle of a crowd, and the land must be wondering how we can be so oblivious to one another. We practically walk on each other's heels, talk all at the same time and walk through and past each other.

The sense of "being at the same time" is a theme I have noticed among Métis I know personally and Métis authors. I have often heard other Métis tell stories of their ancestors as it if was happening right now, right here, while we listen and watch, and it was another Métis woman* who pointed out that I do the same thing myself, all unconsciously until that moment. Many Métis authors I have read seem to be writing in what anthropologists like to call the "ethnographic present," which allows a bit of Métis storytelling contraband into both non-fiction and fiction works. One of my favourite examples of this storytelling mode is in the original version of "The Origin Of Grey Ducks" transcribed from Marie-Louise Perron's Telling in Volume II of Métis Legacy6.

The four overtly designated layers of this website are each marked by their central feature, a map with acknowledged and discussed distortions. They are the Travel, Place, Métis Trail, and Story layers – and if you let them, they will take you places.

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I was born in Kelowna in February of 1976 three months premature. Whether getting born constitutes travelling from one place to another is not universally agreed on, but I figure no matter what you believe in that area, this counts because I had to travel between home and hospital. Older relatives insisted I be baptized in case things didn't work out, which of course means I was baptized Catholic. My mother, biological father and I lived in a house there until I was about three.

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My family lived in Victoria until I was around eight. The November before I turned five, my younger brother came along. What I remember most about living there was walking everywhere. My mother, brother and I never had access to a car, not least because my mother didn't have a driver's license. We never took the bus unless we were going to the doctor – so I was no fan of the bus! Another strong memory from that time was my mother's well-used Pyrex teapot and the canned milk she always puts in her tea. It was a big day the first time I got to drink tea with my Mom.

One of the quirks of my upbringing at this point is that my biological father absolutely insisted that I should be homeschooled. So until we moved onto the mainland, I saw almost no other kids besides my younger brother and was bored near to death by the Ladybird Reader series. I had already taught myself to read somehow, but it took forever to convince my parents of that.

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Nowadays this suburb of Vancouver is being inexorably absorbed by the city. My mother, biological father, younger brother and I were living in a house in the Walley district today colloquially known as Little India. This was where I finally got to go to school, and this is the place I found out our lives were very strange. We had no access to a car, and no bus money at all. By grade seven it was unavoidably obvious that my biological father had bigtime psychological problems and was seriously abusive. My mother and I at last had enough information to understand that my biological father's behaviour and our living situation were beyond not normal.

Actually, that severely understates the facts, which were that for reasons only he knew, my biological father was starving us to death. When I read accounts of the dreadful stuff people ate on the reserves when the bison were gone and the pass system was in place, I honestly understand what they were talking about. For a long while, what we ate was bannock and fried back bacon. Then we ran out of flour and back bacon, and my Mom and I couldn't find enough babysitting work to get more. So we ate oatmeal. Oatmeal three meals a day, for what seems like months, long enough I can barely stand the stuff even now. In the end, I was able to persuade Mom that we absolutely had to get out of there for good, before the end of grade seven.

There's another event that sticks out in my mind from this place. In grade four, we were given an assignment to draw a map on a 17 by 14 inch sheet of paper with a legend and the rest. This was a fun thing to do, it beat spelling hands down, and I knew just what to draw. I remember being so excited about it. My teacher was none too impressed, by what I handed in, however. He expected something much like the fold out road maps you buy at the gas station. He wanted to know where the different kinds of highways were, sky scrapers, bridges, and the rest. Now I know I couldn't possibly have made him such a map by following his directions, because I had never seen those things, in the sense of often enough and in enough detail for them to be part of a reality I could represent.

The elementary school I went to still exists, it's called Simon Cunningham Elementary, named for a former secretary of the school board, apparently. (No relation to the Métis Cunninghams of Calgary so far as my information tells.) The picture shows roughly what it was like before I left.


Picture courtesy of Surrey History: The Development Of Schools In Surrey (Most recent access on 2010-12-27)

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My class visited this crazy place on a school trip. It is a sort of open air museum made from a former Hudson's Bay Company fort, as its name implies. Mostly I remember being hungry on that trip. There was smoked salmon hanging from the rafters, and they were making stone ground bread, and they gave away a little container of fresh butter to one of the other kids. The staff were all white, wearing 'period dress' (I was old enough to menstruate by then and young enough to snicker at the term). There were some neat things though, like real slates with the little soapstone sticks you write on them with, and watching the blacksmith make square nails. I told my Mom about them, and she actually told me a Métis story, though I didn't know it was one then.

She told me her Pépé (Grampa) built a house for her Mémé (Gramma) when they got married, all out of wood, made just for her size, like a kid's house. That is, he built the place to the average height of much of my family even now: five foot nothing. He was that size too. Anyway, the point is, Pépé built a house without a single nail in it, even in the staircase. Mémé and Pépé are my Gramma's parents.

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This is my Mom's hometown, and it's where she, my brother and I wound up when we left my biological father for good. Compared to both Vancouver and Surrey, it is miniscule. When we arrived, Cold Lake was having its streets paved for the first time ever. You could walk from one end of town to the other in less than an hour, which I know for a fact because I did it numerous times. Holy culture shock.

My grandparents had been living there since Mom was tiny, and she had a ball putting my brother and I in school there, although we wound up in two different Catholic schools as the high school and elementary students were separated. My brother even wound up having some of the same teachers as Mom. Catholic school turned out to be a misery all it's own for me (I haven't been able to pass as straight since I was three, seriously, you can ask my mother, it caused her no end of stress). Worse yet, I had switched schools at the start of junior high and was not a preppie or a jock (child of the eighties!). This meant social death, frankly. I finished high school there, in the school shown below. It was a long, lonely time.


Picture courtesy of Lakeland Catholic School District #150 - Assumption. (Most recent access on 2010-12-27)

Ironically, in school at Cold Lake was the first time I ever heard of Louis Riel. According to the grade seven social studies text book in use there (it looked so old it could have been from the early sixties), crazy Louis Riel led a giant rebellion, got caught, got hung, and after that all the Métis and Indians vanished. I remember looking around the room in bafflement. It had only been a week, and I had already learned most kids in the school were Indians, Métis, or base brats. The majority of the class was – you guessed it – First Nations and Métis kids, including me all unwittingly.

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I spent five years or so in Edmonton, taking a degree in physics with a minor in mathematics. At first I actually rented a room from one of my relatives living in Sherwood Park, which was a huge mistake. It was a relief to move downtown; I lived right across from City Hall and the squat CN Tower where the trains don't run anymore. If you look at the City Hall picture, on the left side you can just see the apartment building I used to live in. You can also see the green advertising signs on the sides of the building in the CN Tower picture, just on the left. It was a grim place. A tenant had committed suicide by leaping from the 26th floor, and the elevator was forever getting stuck there.


Picture courtesy of National Council 4000: CN Vacates Downtown Edmonton's Landmark CN Tower, May 2008 (Most recent access on 2010-12-27)

Ironically, at that time this was not necessarily the nicest part of Edmonton to live in (maybe it still isn't). The street running along the right side of City Hall as you face it as the photographer did in the picture was the prostitutes' working street. After certain hours if you weren't buying you didn't walk there. There were a few bars, all with big signs reading "NO KNIVES."


Picture courtesy of City Hall Grounds, Summer 2009 - City Of Edmonton Photos (Most recent access on 2010-12-27)

Consciously speaking, I had no idea about Métis anything in those days. Nor any idea that the University of Alberta actually has an impressive Native Studies program, a great Native Centre, or courses exclusively about Métis history and culture.

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The town of Milk River isn't terribly close to the actual river, and it is under a semi-permanent boil water advisory. It is quite close to the border, and when you look south the Sweetgrass Hills look close enough to get to in fifteen minutes by car, yet are actually at least several hours away. The time I was there, I remember wishing to head out to those hills, not knowing what they were called, and never come back. I was there in the doldrums of August being maddened by the heat and the incessant racket of harvested fields crawling with grasshoppers and crickets. Really crawling.

My reason for being there was for a geophysical field school, which is surprisingly like geophysical field work for money. You hurry up and wait a lot, make ridiculous and consistent mistakes that screw up your data and are never found until you're back at the lab, and struggle to fix equipment without spending any money. Parts of it were really boring, yet I learned that geophysical fieldwork was right up my alley, in principle. You work outside for a part of the year doing interesting things mostly, and then spend the rest of the time writing software.

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It sounds okay when you read what I said about Milk River, but this was actually a horrible time in my life. I was horribly, horribly depressed and burnt out. There was barely enough cash available to me to pay rent and tuition, with no steady work in sight with this being my last year of my program coming right up. Later that year, one of my classmates would commit suicide. The whole class went to his funeral, and even though his coffin was there it was firmly closed. The presiding priest phrased part of his sermon in such a manner that it was clear he believed all brown people were going to hell, and preferably right away.

So the geophysics field school was a bright spot, especially my first visit to Writing On Stone, although I didn't appreciate that at the time.

The funny thing is, on this first visit, my class did the interpretive walk through a section of sandstone cliffs. It was summer, so we weren't allowed to do so without closed-toe boots on and 1L of water. In my trips back since, I have never been able to get back to this particular area, and I am beginning to think it is closed off to the general public. Thinking back, it's striking that there's not a Native person to be found among the interpretive staff there, not the first time I visited or since, which is probably a hint. Having learnt quite a bit about proper respect for sacred places now, if the area is closed off, that's probably as it should be. Unprepared people with no idea how to behave have no business in there – and I can vouch for that personally!

All of Writing On Stone is holy, but that day we were walking through a place it felt like you should get your shoes the heck off in. The places where mudstone nodules had fallen out were filled with offerings from First Nations folks who had come to pray, and so were the trees. The trees were covered in streamers of cloth.

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I have been to Ottawa just twice, even though I have been in the public service full time now for over eight years. The first time I went there as a delegate to the Forum for Young Canadians. That was a sight and a half. The First Nations delegation just about slaughtered me, understandably I see in hindsight, but at the time I had no idea how much internalized racist crap I had picked up from family and school. Luckily we all grow up! The other lowlight of my experience there was the Q&A session with Joe Clark. I sat at the front because I wanted to ask questions. The facilitators picked me out and made me sit in the back, "because my clothes were too informal." In other words, I looked poor, native, and totally out of place among all the bright and shiny rich white kids, and that was indeed who was left in the first three rows once the facilitators were done moving people around. Photographs, you see.

The second time I was in Ottawa in 1999, working a last ditch workterm, hoping for a tide me over until I landed a full time longer term geophysics job. It was a great job. I wrote geophysical software and did geophysical fieldwork. Unfortunately, I also had a landlady with a frumious gambling problem who stole my computer and every other valuable item I had to pawn them off, and my work term was not extended. Which meant I was sentenced to return to Cold Lake, because I had no money. When I climbed on the plane to Edmonton before Christmas that year, that was one of the worst days of my life.

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Wahnapitae is a very special place, and I had the good fortune to stay there while doing geophysical fieldwork for the federal government in 1999. When you're there, it feels like you've gone waaaay north, having started from Ottawa. In fact, it's barely north of Calgary relatively speaking. It is also smack in the middle of the Canadian Shield, one of the most beautiful places on the land you'll ever go, at least if you're a rock hound like me. (It was basically a flip of the coin in the end for me between physics and geology.) All of us on the work crew stayed at a hotel on the Wahnapitae reserve.

The fieldwork I was part of involved firing off dynamite in boreholes and measuring the vibrations. The data would be used to test the performance of software being used to image ore bodies in solid rock. I got to set off dynamite for days on end. For the most part I was on my own and getting firing signals by radio. So between shots I got to hike the immediate area, climb trees, and generally muck around. No driving endlessly back and forth on range roads among dead looking fields full of skeletons. It was a blast. (No pun intended, honest.) I also got to demonstrate my flare for fixing machinery on-site for no money.

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I live in Calgary right now, and when I came here after a very short sojourn in Toronto, I had worked two summer work terms there. Which meant I knew the town sort of, and how to survive there on very little money. Less than an hour after my arrival in mid November 2000, I got a job, a room to rent, and started working on getting my student loan payments reprieved for awhile. "Tried" is an important word here. These loans were from when private banks were allowed temporarily into the student loan business. The loan officer harangued me, declaring they'd drive me to bankruptcy, destroy my credit rating forever, etc., etc.

A Calgary headhunting firm called me up for an interview and then called me back after they called my references. "We thought you should know that for some reason, this reference is trashing you." This meant that whether I liked it or not, the geophysics career option had just closed for good. In geophysics, Calgary is a small town, and the word of a homophobic reference you don't recognize because you're naïve goes far. Live and learn, they say.

So in the end I did what any respectable university student with money problems does. I went back to university!

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The first job I got on arriving in Calgary from Toronto was writing geophysical software. While there I landed a job interview with a small firm based in Kingston. They flew me out there for an eight hour interview and two nights at the haunted Prince George Hotel, which you can see in the photograph below. The interview started going downhill almost immediately when one of the interviewers looked me up and down and said, "We're not sure you could do the physical work of this job." Then he pointed out how all the women's – err, in office positions – were filled. From there I was subjected to an evening out with the other employees. With them I was sunk by an inability to remember anything about the cartoon "Battle Of The Planets." (I wish that was a joke.)

Kingston is a very strange town, it's full of ghosts. When I was there it felt empty, and it was November, so there was convocation happening at the universities, and it wasn't time for people to take off for Christmas. Who knows. Maybe the idea of a town with an army base, a couple of maximum security prisons, and a giant mental hospital in it was working on my imagination.


Picture courtesy of Wikipedia: Kingston (Most recent access on 2010-12-27)

For the record, I didn't know anything about the Prince George Hotel being haunted until I was checking out and asked about the couple arguing loudly in the room across the hall from mine. At one point I considered calling the police. The clerk listened to my explanation and then said, "There was no one in the room across the hall from yours."

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Guess what, this place visit was a school trip! And it couldn't have been more different than Fort Langley. I don't know if you've been there or not, so I'll give a little description that you can skip if you have, and then contrast this experience briefly with my experience at Fort Langley.

As its name says, Head Smashed In is a buffalo jump, a cliff regularly used by the Piikani Nation of the Blackfoot Confederacy to hunt bison pretty much until horses were brought back to the plains. Its name is better translated "Where He Got His Head Smashed In" because it is named from the tragic fate of a young boy. He went to the bottom of the jump to watch the bison falling, but he was too close, and plains bison make moose look small. There is a small interpretive centre designed and run by members of the Piikani Nation, including the cafeteria.

The person showing us around was a man from Piikani, and he met us dressed in a ribbon shirt, a type of formal wear I had never seen before. And unlike the people at Fort Langley who pretended to be something they weren't, he was simply being himself. Instead of lecturing us, he told stories and jokes, both inside the centre and as he led us along the drive lanes the Piikani used to move the bison along to the jump. The jump itself ends in such a way that when you look at the edge on the approach, it doesn't look like the ground ends. It's quite uncanny.

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I have seen just about too much of Regina, no offence to Regina lovers intended. To me the place feels claustrophobic, and even though the bison sculptures all over town are impressive, that's no consolation. Of course, my perspective is very much coloured by the fact that the tap water there makes me sick.

I work for a federal regulator that holds hearings, and five times these hearings have been in Regina. My job assignments at the time were to those hearings as a specialist in "Aboriginal Matters" and "Aboriginal Protocol." The one means I have to read and analyze evidence. The other means when people need a quick crash course in how not to stick a foot in it with Elders, they call me. When the crash course doesn't seem to work, they call me to get in between them and pissed off Elders. The latter situation does happen. In one case, there was me, five foot nothing, dealing with a Dakota Elder over six foot tall and madder than a wet hen (I think that might be one of my Gramma's expressions).

If anybody had told me that was what I'd be doing when I was in Wahnapitae setting off dynamite...

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This is another place I have been to for work. and one of the nicer places to boot. It's no wonder all the First Nations agreed there should be no fighting there if anybody could help it. The town of Fort Qu'Appelle and the Treaty Four Reserve Grounds are separated by just one street, Boundary Avenue. The Reserve Grounds is the site of the Treaty Four Governance centre, which although the sixty foot tipi is definitely impressive, is not the most interesting place to visit there. Believe it or not, the All Nations Healing Hospital is.

As a rule, I stay away from hospitals. In my family hospital = where you go to die. That's exactly what had happened not so long ago to one of my great aunts. The Cold Lake hospital smells of chemicals and looks about as friendly as a dentist's drill.

The All Nations Healing Hospital is so different it doesn't seem like a hospital at all. Medicine people helped pick where it should be built, and then they helped design the building so as not to reroute a creek that runs through the site. Instead, the creek is allowed to run underneath the building, and its path is marked on the hospital floor by blue tiles. There are ceremony rooms, an area where traditional medicines are kept, a big sweat lodge out back, and a ceremony room. As you can tell, I was very impressed.

There is one more little aside to this story. The person who was showing my colleague and I around Fort Qu'appelle when I got to see the hospital is a very interesting man. He served as the last Indian Agent in Canada.

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Mosquito Reserve is a ways from North Battleford, one of several reserves all bunched together. The people there are Cree and Nakota, with Cree slowly becoming the majority language.

This was a very important trip for me, because I went there to take part in ceremony and ask an Elder for a spiritual name. By that time I had already been going to sweat lodge and becoming more involved in ceremony, so this was a turning point. You're definitely in for the serious haul once you draw spiritual attention to yourself.

This was quite unlike Cold Lake, where being in Catholic school you had to go to mandatory masses at certain times of year during school hours, and you were pressured to make a regular appearance at mass on Sundays. For my part, I always resisted this. Somehow I felt very strongly that how you set about building a relationship with the Creator is a big deal, and that meant it was imperative to make an informed decision. Being as I wasn't feeling especially Catholic and had decided to learn about other religions to get ready for the informed decision, I didn't go to mass if I could avoid it. My teachers said, "Go anyway." I was flabberghasted.

"You mean, basically tell the Creator a lie? Like right there in a sacred place no less? Are you crazy?"

They had absolutely nothing to say to that.

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This is the place where I ended up becoming a part of helping take care of a sweat lodge. Despite my unhappy Catholic school experience, there were aspects of being a priest that really appealed to me. The Catholic church wouldn't go for it, of course. In Edmonton, where the jaws of poverty and just general lousiness were closing in on me, I found myself looking into spiritual matters again, as people often do in times of general misery. Christianity was a non-starter, and the wiccans were doing stuff that sounded weirdly familiar. At which point I stopped working on the subject because I was so behind in rent that I got evicted.

Once things were a bit calmer after I moved to Calgary, I went back to work on the question. It was when I began to learn about Métis culture and native spirituality as opposed to the imported stuff when things finally started to make sense – by which I don't mean some brilliant epiphany. All this time I was sure about who I was, just baffled about where I was. Things stated making sense because I began to learn about where I was.

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I visited Petitot unwillingly in the fall of 2008. By then my knowledge of the Métis universe was much more developed, and other experiences had led me to conclude that like it or not, Dene country heartily dislikes me as a visitor. This trip is a good example, but also feel free to run an eye over the entries for Fort Liard, Yellowknife, and Colville Lake. Admittedly this may be partially a bad aftertaste from my experience of Cold Lake, which is part of Dene territory in Alberta. I'm not so sure.

The Petitot trip was work related. My workplace agreed with my colleague's suggestion that it should send representatives to the Petitot Gathering, an event set up by a committee of local and industry representatives. It is a knowledge sharing event. Even before I looked up whose territory this place was in (a new good habit), my alarm bells were ringing. To no avail. My colleague outranked me, and management thought it was a great idea.

The actual place the gathering was at is an ancient meeting spot on the banks of the Mbechola River, mainstreamingly renamed by a visiting priest for himself. When we arrived after a two hour drive following a flight where the pilot landed on two wheels, the greeters pointed us to a spot to pitch our tents. The spot in question was well away from everybody else at the event, on a gravel bed that had served as a parking lot for a work camp years before, scattered with deer and moose shit.

Speaks for itself, doesn't it?

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Fort Liard is near the forks of the Mbechola and Deh Cho Rivers, or as Métis may well still call them, the Rivière de Thé and Rivi&eagrave;re aux Liards. I have been to this town twice, both on work trips.

The first trip was for gathering information about what local people knew about the place I work via community meetings. The meeting in Fort Liard was – interesting. An hour in I was buttonholed by a couple from Newfoundland who soon let slip they were missionaries who had come to clean up the town. No matter what I tried, it was impossible to get away from them. My colleagues left me to suffer.

There are two grocery stores in Fort Liard. The Northern, which is one of the last remnants of the North West Company wherever you find one, and the band-run store with the one hotel in town attached. The hotel consisted of a number of trailers, and we were staying there. We ran afoul of local politics and the hotel owners by shopping at the Northern. When I flipped back the blankets that night, it became clear the advice to bring my sleeping bag was very good.

The second trip was a short escape from the Petitot Gathering, which was going badly. My senior colleague had run out of cigarettes, and the closest store was in Fort Liard. Nobody would give him any at the gathering. On top of that, the local folks had shot a moose, which they were conspicuously not sharing with anybody from industry or government. I knew this meant unequivocally, "piss off", however, my colleague felt that all he needed was more cigarettes and then things would work out. I figured any break from cold shoulder and watching people eat moose while we ate pork gristle was a good idea.

So we headed off for Fort Liard from northeastern British Columbia into the Northwest Territories, for cigarettes.

My colleague headed straight for the band store. Shockingly, it had been completely gutted, all was bare walls and bare floor except for a few racks of pop, cigarettes, lighters, and gloves. The hotel was gone.

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Colville Lake was another place on my itinerary for a work trip for gathering information about what local people knew about the place I work via community meetings. It is a tiny village above the Arctic circle, founded by Sahtu Dene attempting to resist residential schools and other efforts to assimilate them in the 1960s. Despite their best efforts, a missionary came with them anyway. Here is a postcard-esque picture of Colville Lake:


Picture courtesy of Legislative Assembly Of The Northwest Territories: Colville Lake (Most recent access on 2010-12-27)

The plan we had when we arrived was to have a meeting with the Chief and perhaps some councillors, and then a meeting with the community the next day. Mysteriously, everybody came down with the flu. The staff at the lodge we were staying at let us in, cooked one supper, and vanished. Nobody came anywhere near the place except the person who brought drinking water from the lake, and he filled the water tank from outside. We went to set up the community meeting, and found the hall absolutely trashed from one end to the other. We had to clear it, mop it, relocate the furniture, and make all the refreshments.

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I went to Brandon in order to attend the Ogamas Aboriginal Literary Festival in 2009, where my friend Sharron was on two of the panels. It temporarily threw me back to my University of Alberta days, when I had been up so late the night before that sitting down for a lecture, no matter how interesting, meant falling asleep. Nevertheless, I was awake enough to be frustrated with the lack of the sort of writing I'd love to hear. That said, for the record, my complaints were not about the Métis content levels. They were excellent.

When something inspires me to complain, even if only to myself, I try to do something about it. So you see, after the festival I dug out the draft of my novel that's been sitting on a shelf gathering dust, and applied to grad school.

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I came to Portage La Prairie way back in 2000 on the way to a date with a long weekend in Toronto. This involved a three day trip by Greyhound bus from Cold Lake. Three days means exactly that, for three days you are on the bus. On this particular trip, a huge blizzard was making its generous way from east to west. It had bludgeoned Ontario and was heading into Manitoba. The bus I was on was heading straight into it. The driver didn't seem at all phased by the weather until about 50 kilometres outside of Portage La Prairie, when the bus got stuck.

For nearly two hours, the driver moved the bus back and forth trying to get the bus dislodged. Some male passengers insisted on being let out to try clearing the snow from the rear wheels. Then the bus finally came loose, and the driver declared over the loudspeaker, "We'll be heading straight for Portage to wait out the storm."

There's something bad about that area, and such a long Geyhound trip isn't remotely good for you if your mental health is shaky. In August 2008, uncannily near where the bus got stuck when I was on it in 2000, a young native man was killed by another passenger in a murder so gruesome it has its own Wikipedia page.

Damn, that seriously gives me the willies.

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Me, I'm looking for the Métis Emergence Place. It isn't in Montréal (for my own reasons I think it's further north), but maybe mine is. Besides being the revered home of the best hockey team period ever (Go Habs Go!), it is the first place I have ever been where I actually felt at home. If we use mainstream logic, this is absurd. Luckily I learned to ignore mainstream logic early in life. My valuation of Montréal happens to be something funny I have in parallel if not exactly in common with my biological father. Montréal was the only place he ever had a good thing to say about in Canada, as he is from the Carribean. It's no wonder he loved it there, there's a huge, vibrant Carribean community, and he was doing something he loved there at the time. I do wonder how he persuaded himself to leave.

Not far away is Oka, where the fourth and final blow was struck to the "two founding nations" myth of Canada's creation and the place many of my Métis friends can trace their families back to. I understand that my own family is related to Ambroise Lépine, and his father came from Saint Jacques de l'Achigan, which is about an hour due north of Montréal by car. Sounds like there's a Métis family logic there to me!

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Creative Commons License A Métis Palimpsest by Carla A. Osborne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada License.