The Northwest is Our Mother by Jean Teillet: an activist political and social history of the Metis people
The One and a Half Men by Murray Dobbin: an extensively researched political biography of two Metis activists active from the 1930s through the 1960s
Half-Breed by Maria Campbell: a personal memoir showing the impact of Metis social and political history through the story of one Metis woman
OR, in reverse order....zooming out from the story of a few decades of a single life (Campbell), to one thread through political and social life of the Metis people over the course of two men's entire lives (Norris and Brady), to the story of a people (Teillet).
One book leads to another: Half Breed by Maria Campbell leads to The One and a Half Men by Murray Dobbin leads to The Northwest is our Mother by Jean Teillet
First I re-read Half Breed.
I read Maria Campbell's book many years ago, when I lived in Saskatoon. Even then, before she was perhaps technically an elder, she was an honoured elder Metis, a noted indigenous activist, and a legend. Our circles didn't touch, but that was because I was an unremarkable white juvenile activist who wouldn't have rated an introduction even if we had happened to be in the same place at the same time. Maria was a celebrity, someone who people would name-drop if she'd been at their baby shower or potluck, or especially if they'd rated an invitation to her place at Gabriel's crossing at Batoche.
What did I think of Half Breed on re-reading it more than a half-century after publication? First, how the book still resonates in so many ways. The vividness of Campbell's stories leap from the page, especially as she tells the stories of her childhood living as one of the 'road allowance people' in North-Central Saskatchewan in the 1940s and 50s. Those are stories of poverty and struggle, discrimination and official abuse -- but also of happiness and family and connection, at least until her mother dies and her father falls apart, leaving her and her younger siblings to struggle and ultimately be separated for many many years. Broken families are nothing new for indigenous peoples in Canada. Neither are the tough choices and unhappy circumstances that lead to sex work, addiction and often despair, as they did for Campbell in the 1960s.
Campbell overcame. She reclaimed her life and her heritage, became politically active, and wrote the story of her life in the early 1970s. In the process, she became one of the first indigenous voices to be published in Canada, and the fore-mother of a new literature.
So, how did this book lead me to One and a Half Men? When Campbell talks about the forces that destroyed her father's life, she talks about his deep disappointment with the failure of political organizing by the Metis people in Saskatchewan in the 1940s, and his disappointment with the noted Metis organizers Jim Brady and Malcolm Norris. She also talks of the many betrayals of the Metis by the CCF government (who are otherwise heroes of mine). It made me curious. I googled Brady and Norris, and discovered One and a Half Men, a political biography written by someone I had actually known in my long-ago Saskatoon days -- Murray Dobbin.
Murray wasn't someone I knew well -- he was of the notable political generation just ahead of mine. But the combination of a book by someone I knew and a history I did not made finding and reading this book irresistible.
One and a Half Men by Murray Dobbin
My initial reaction: Wow. What an amazing book.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that everyone should drop everything right now to read One and a Half Men. It's an extensively researched and competently written political biography, but it's probably not a book that will change how you see the world. It isn't written with ground-breaking literary quality. It isn't the self-expression of an oppressed people and it doesn't tell a universal story of interest to people everywhere in the world.
But writing One and a Half Men was an extraordinary act of respect and service to the Indigenous communities of Saskatchewan and Alberta. Murray Dobbin spent years diving into archives and interviewing friends, families, and political allies and foes of the legendary Metis political organizers and activists Malcolm Norris and James Brady. Because he did so, a detailed record exists of their decades-long political struggle from the 1920s and 1930s in Alberta (where they were responsible for the grudging creation of the Metis Settlements by the Alberta government) through the late 40s, 50s, and 60s in Saskatchewan where they nurtured the spark of Metis Nationalism through dark times while mentoring and inspiring future generations of Metis activists and leaders.
This book is an important historical record of one part of the long struggle of Indigenous peoples against colonial settler society. You can read it to learn more about the racism, neglect, hostility, and extraordinary vindictiveness* of mid-20th century government officials towards Metis and Indigenous peoples, particularly those who dared to advocate for themselves. More importantly, it allows people today to see and honour the strength and dedication of two extraordinary men who spent their lives in service to their people.
Metis people would undoubtedly themselves tell this story differently -- and next I should seek out The Northwest is our Mother by Jean Teillet to see how. But because Dobbin did the research, asked the hard questions, and donated his records to the Saskatchewan archives, researchers have much more detailed source information than they otherwise would.
* The supremely competent but politically outspoken Norris was fired from his Saskatchewan government job mere months before he qualified for a pension by the Liberal Ross Thatcher government -- who then went on to make sure that he was fired from his replacement job at the Prince Albert Friendship Centre. Norris died of a stroke soon afterwards.
The Northwest is Our Mother by Jean Teillet
In her introduction to One and a Half Men Maria Campbell explains that her immediate and visceral reaction to the book was that she did not want Murray Dobbin to write about her heroes -- even though Murray was a friend and the book was excellent. She did not want a white historian to tell Brady and Norris's story.
After reading Jean Teillet's history of the Metis People, I completely understand Campbell's reaction.
Teillet's book is the story of the Metis people, told from the perspective of the Metis people.
What does this mean?
The Northwest is our Mother is comprehensive and extensively researched, and tells the stories that are important to the Metis. One example: the book includes a few pages explaining the brief visit of a white grifter to the Forks in the early 19th century. Why? This is not a particularly notable event! But there is a traditional Metis song mocking this man and his pretensions, so of course it is of interest to the Metis to understand the song's origins. Another example: Teillet describes in detail the Metis perspective on what she calls "the Northwest Resistance" -- when the Metis' heart-breakingly reasonable requests of the Canadian government were met by Gatling guns at Batoche. She doesn't describe events during the Resistance that involved only First Nations peoples, even though those are important to understanding the overall arc of events. Teillet is telling the story of the Metis, not an objective history of Western Canada. A final example: Teillet focuses on a single decade of Malcolm Norris and Jim Brady's lives, the decade of activism and struggle that led to the creation of the Metis Settlements in Alberta. In doing so she gives a much better perspective on the importance of those settlements -- because despite the profound disappointment Norris and Brady felt at their limited land and their limited autonomy, the settlements remain to this day the Metis' only secured land base and so remain profoundly important to the Metis people.
But it's not only the content of Teillet's book that is striking. She speaks in a Metis voice. Her language is sometimes non-academic. She focuses on the perspective and experiences of the Metis in all situations. She includes stories about how these historical events impacted members of her family, and how those events are remembered today. In telling the story of the Metis she not only explains the origins and history of her people, she tells us what the Metis remember, what they valued and who they are.
Dobbin is alway sympathetic to his subjects, but he writes about Metis lives, Metis politics, and Metis history. He is always at at least one remove, the objective observer. Not to mention that the very title of his book is offensive: it is based on a historical story that positions the Metis people as 'other' and not entirely human:
"...in the early 1850s...he asked a Catholic priest about a nearby group of boisterous men. They were dark skinned but obviously not Indians. 'They are the one-and-a-half men,' the priest replied, 'half Indian, half white and half devil.'"
And while Dobbin researched and wrote within 10 years of Norris and Brady's deaths, and so had access to people who knew them and remembered events described in his book-- reading Teillet's book reminds me that the stories important to the Metis would not have been lost. Those men's families, their compatriots, their communities: they remember. They told and continue to tell their own stories, both as inheritors of the oral culture of their indigenous ancestors and as descendants of highly educated and literate French Canadians and Hudson's Bay traders.
The Metis did not need Murray Dobbin to tell Malcolm Norris and Jim Brady's story, any more than the Woman's Movement of the 1970s needed Murray to create a 'Men's Auxilliary' and hold bakesales to raise money for them (which he apparently did in his youth).
So, in the end, the most amazing and impressive of the three books is undoubtedly Teillet's. Not only does she tell the Metis stories about themselves that they need to know and remember, her book clearly explains to white Canadians just who the Metis are. Which makes it clear just how insulting it is when pretendians with some tiny random fraction of indigenous ancestry call themselves Metis.
