Crossings

Abstract

This paper analyzes personal and professional relationships among Métis people in Manitoba. It does so by positioning two stories alongside one another. The first concerns the author’s own experience, where the confirmation of Métis status relies upon the physical historical accounting of ancestral relationship to Indigenous bloodlines. The second concerns the author’s ancestor, Peter Fidler. Fidler documented much of the unexplored land west of Hudson Bay, and notably wintered with the Chipewyan tribe of Northern Saskatchewan (Allan 1987). He transcribed and incorporated traditional Indigenous mapmaking techniques into his works (Beattie 1985), which set him apart from other colonial surveyors. Fidler married a Swampy Cree woman named Mary and they raised a family of fourteen together. This paper argues that, while uneven geographical and historical relationships persist to the present day, Fidler’s work in negotiating identity and place at the Crossings (Number 2) 145 intersection of Cree and European cultures in Canada remain crucial points of understanding. Researching the foundations on which the nation of Canada was built requires asking very broad questions about power and territory. If these themes are applied to the interior region of the continent, inevitably the function Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) as a colonizing power is brought into question. The company was established in 1670 with the goal of trading furs out of the northern part of the continent, but soon adopted an administrative role over the territory as their trade and communication network expanded and their relations deepened with the Indigenous participating in the fur exchange. When Canada became a dominion in 1867, 150 years ago, it acquired the HBC’s claim to the unceded territories of the diverse Indigenous groups inhabiting what would now be called the Northwest Territories. They also inherited the imbricated history of the European traders and voyageurs who for centuries had lived in largely Indigenous world. Piecing together how that history has been handed down in the documentary record is problematic. This paper aims to interpret the lasting implications of the intermarriage of HBC fur traders and Indigenous people in what is today northern Manitoba. It explores the availability of archival and documentary records with respect to men and women and those of European and Indigenous descent, and the relevance for contemporary Métis forms of identity. One way of approaching the documentary record is to follow Ann Laura Stoler’s advice to “read against the grain” of the archive. This means rather looking closely at the information itself. The critical analyst looks at the availability of information and its structure of internal relationships (Stoler 2002; 2009). In following this method as I traced my own family history, I was able to get a picture of the inequality of records from the 1700s and 1800s in colonial Canada. The man whose presence in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta I hoped to uncover was Peter Fidler, a British mapmaker and surveyor 146 Crossings (Number 2) who spent a lifetime in the employment of Hudson’s Bay Company in the same time period. Although Fidler had various titles and roles within HBC, I was most interested in his early expedition work with the Chipewyan tribe of Northern Saskatchewan. Fidler’s embedded relationship with Indigenous communities is well documented (Haig 1991). The records appear to indicate that he attempted to make peaceful contact with Aboriginal peoples and work with them instead of simply exploiting their knowledge to benefit his employer and commandeer the land, which counters the idea of classic British colonialism. He is also of interest to me because he is my fifth greatgrandfather, and I am of Métis status as a result of his marriage to a Swampy Cree woman, Mary. Fidler’s professional and personal life tie together and can be crossexamined through a multitude of lenses. I initially came across his name as I was reading my lineage chart that had been constructed to prove that I have Indigenous blood. Although I had been in possession of the book for years, I had never researched my ancestors’ names. The availability of information between my male and female ancestors was striking. Only scant information was present about Mary’s daughter, Sarah, from whom I am descended, and who is responsible for a large percentage of her descendants living and dying in Winnipeg, Manitoba. On the other hand, Peter is remembered as a successful colonist, surveyor, mapmaker, explorer, naturalist, meteorologist, and for his ability to communicate with the Chipewyan tribe of northern Saskatchewan (Lindsay 1991; Allen 1987). When I say “remembered”, it must be clarified that he is remembered by other white colonists and their descendants in this way—through written word, otherwise perceived as “truth” in modern Western culture. In this respect, Julie Cruikshank has analyzed the difference between European and Indigenous forms of record making in her article “Images of Society in Klondike Gold Rush Narratives”. She notes that Europeans have equated documentary record with “truth” and castigated Indigenous oral histories as “myths” because they lack the apparent stability of written Crossings (Number 2) 147 information. What Cruikshank points out is that this discrepancy relied on colonial viewpoint, disregarding the complex social organization captured in First Nations’ oral stories and the way they frame and convey truths differently (1992). Thus, how he is remembered by the tribes he interacted with on behalf of his employer is likely very different, and also is inaccessible through the documentary history that the Métis certification relies on. Moreover, even as proving one’s Métis status is part of confronting the lasting power of colonialism that inheres in modern Canada, supporting that same claim to identity requires re-animating and legitimating the gendered, documentary record of the colonizer. There is some discussion to be had about the influence that Peter, Mary and Sarah had on my own identity. Such matters must be accounted for alongside the tendency for white European colonists to create records as they saw fit (Furniss 1999), and how the geographical notion of “place” ties in with Fidler’s life work and the company. I will touch on the mapmaking Fidler did when he was surveying Saskatchewan, Alberta and BC, and why it is important that he integrated Indigenous mapmaking techniques into the typical colonial mapmaking techniques of that time. More specifically, I will discuss the importance and creation of identity, the power struggles between the Hudson’s Bay Company and their Montreal-based rivals, the Northwest Company (NWC), as well as those between colonists and Indigenous peoples themselves. Within that context exists my family lineage, and I will touch on the power of those who record history and those who were at the mercy of the European colonization of western Canada. All of Fidler’s work, his marriage to Mary, a Swampy Cree woman, has gone into why and how my family ended up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, as well as creating a Métis bloodline. 148 Crossings (Number 2) Mary Maskagon and my Female Ancestors My genealogy was ordered through La Société Historique de SaintBoniface that mailed us an unmarked, bound book, and featured lists of names as well as a literal tree, which was mapped out to trace a very specific line. This was to provide physical proof of Indigenous ancestry. Most of the people that I could find information on were men, whereas many of the women seemed to only have date of birth and death, and not much was recorded from their lives. Their identities have been reduced to a maiden name, a few dates, and the names of their descendants. The men seemed to be of greater importance, enough to have made their mark in history, so to speak—it was the men that were assigned power and more importance placed on their identities over the women of the time. However, recent scholarship has questioned the conventional story that men wielded all the power in the early West. Kathryn MacPherson has surveyed scholarly literature on the Prairie west, showing how historians typically opt to portray the early settlement period as an “egalitarian” society with equivalent roles for men and women. However, this equality quickly breaks down when extended across class lines or to non-European women (Macpherson 2000; Fitzgerald 2007). The fur trade period is equally complex. Here, Silvia van Kirk and Jennifer Brown have revealed a different gender pattern, where European male fur traders relied upon and sought out women’s knowledge and social status through intermarriage (van Kirk 1983; Brown 1980). Viewed from the standpoint of 2017, my own identity has been shaped by women—Mary and Sarah, Mary’s daughter—as they are the direct reasons I can claim a blood link with the Métis, and why my family ended up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Unfortunately, Mary’s legacy has been reduced to the names of her 14 children with Peter and a handful of dates, and her given Indigenous name was not recorded. All searching I did was fruitless, even when searching her name in an academic journal database: she is simply remembered as Peter Fidler’s wife. Moreover, Mary’s maiden name varies depending on the source. My Crossings (Number 2) 149 genealogy book claims “Maskagon” (figure 1), whereas other sources claim “Mackagonne” (redriverancestry.ca; Wikipedia.com). My link to Mary runs through her eldest daughter, a woman named Sarah (or See-Lee-ah, which was her given Cree name). See-Leeah’s involvement with a British governor at an early age is presumably why there is relatively abundant information available about her life. This was supposedly common when it came to “mixed-blood” or “country born” girls, the terms used for the offspring of fur traders and Indigenous peoples (Kirk 2011). She married a man named James Hallet