Opening page in progress…

Defiant, the ships of the British Army poised their sails to complete their journey towards the far-flung coast. At the proper distance away from the shallow beach, the anchors slid quickly into the watery darkness and connected with the bottom of the Guinea Coast. Watching above from the slow gliding clouds, the silhouette of several dark teardrops left their larger hosts and meandered their way towards a long sandy break on the rocks. Determined, their final destination was finally within close view.

Men of war rode the sickening lift and fall of the immense silver water clutching and swaying their heavy oars from knee to chest, knee to chest, knee to chest. All eyes watched the contours of the distant horizon. Small fires fueled whiffs of smoke at various spots at the edge of the water. Shifting red coats moved about, out of place, along the grey stonewalls of the fortress. The encampments drew the eyes of the men to the dark forested background beyond the beachhead. Alien. Birds zipped and circled above the edge of the water, and the smell of the fires mingled with the hot, salty air of the Gold Coast. …

• Check out this free digitized source: http://archive.org.
• Primary source writing about the Red River Expedition:
  • Wrote The Soldier’s Pocketbook, 1869
  • Blackwoods December 1870
  • Directorate of History and Heritage 83/309: Narrative of the Red River Expedition: By an Officer of the Expeditionary Force, 1870
  • Library and Archives Canada, Manuscript Group 29-E111 Journal of the Red River Rebellion
  • Captain G.L. Huyshe. The Red River Expedition (London: MacMillan and Co.) 1871.
  • Colonel Wolseley’s official account: Correspondence relative to the recent Expedition to the Red River Settlement: with Journal of Operations, 1871. This wonderfully detailed source is full of implicit and explicit details about the RRE. So far, it is particularly interesting how the British and Canadian intelligentsia wanted to ensure the largely Canadian militia force, although augmented by a regiment of the British 60th Rifles, would be a display of  “imperial” power against Riel for the Canadian public. This small detail shows me the documentation from the period is full of promising details and perspectives for my handling of Wolseley. Now I have to keep making time to finish this part of the research so I can start writing the first chapter. Maybe I can have it finished before summer?

…The plot thickens

Comparative history is interesting because it connects stories that are usually separate along the similarities that have always been there.

I wonder if continuing the narrative of British imperialism in turn of the century Gold Coast with turn of the century imperialism in Western Canada would accomplish that same end? The issue is increasingly tricky since Canada and Ghana have quite a significant difference; namely that the colonizer left in Ghana while remaining in Canada. Nevertheless, did not the statesmen of the new Republican government in Ghana merely, or, maybe not so merely, inherit a European form of nationhood constructed by the British? The British origins to our Canadian federation is clear, and so I think there is some continuity there. I’m sure there is some problems with my thinking here. But what I am sure of is the shared attitudes and actions of the Anglo policy towards native populations in each area under foreign rule. Foreign rule ended in Ghana in 1957, but continues on to the present day here in Canada, and that is the key to everything in my efforts to construct any degree of comparative history in my work.

I’m thinking through the possibility of adding a string of Ghanaian colonial history that begins with the Wolseley expedition against Kumasi after the Red River Rebellion of 1870. Perhaps there is even a comparison to be made between the hinterland of the Northern Territories and the Canadian prairies in terms of a shared frontier landscape?

More later…

The Gold Coast Connection

 

And so i’ve often wondered, when thinking about how the same group of elite British officers galavanted about the Empire, how the experiences of Sir Garnet Wolseley during the Red River Rebellion in 1870 shaped his view of the British mission against Kumasi in 1874. The Dominion of Canada and the Gold Coast Colony in 1870 were just more outposts to the British Crown, whose agents were busy increasing their sphere of influence by “trade where they could, but by flag where they must”. The famous Robinson and Gallagher slogan is apt in both examples since the British began their involvement with trade on the brain, but ended it all with the bloody flag in their hearts.

In what few primary sources I’ve consulted about Wolseley and his activities in the late 18th C, he is the usual imperial soldier: career-oriented and perfectly sure of the manifest destiny his Queen and Country has across the world. His memoirs and such portray him even in terms of resurrecting any fears that Britain’s colonial rationale and reason d’être could ever fade.

So for me, I am considering a meaningful first chapter set in the Gold Coast just before the  man set out against the Ashanti in whatever Anglo-Ashanti War he led in 1874 that toppled Kumasi. His successes against Riel and the Metis undoubtedly shaped his confidence in his abilities in war based on logistics and manoeuvre. More so, both the Half-Breeds and the Ashanti were more savages in need of the treaty, the sword, the Bible, and the flag–usually in that order, but not necessarily.

I envision him maybe on his ship about to land on the coast, like in the painting abvove, or maybe he is in a expeditionary camp on the beach or further afield in the forest. He could be writing a letter to home; perhaps something intimate that could satisfy a deep look into the man’s personality and truest values. Interestingly, either situation could be symbolic of Britain’s feelings of poetic isolation while exercising their burden to civilize savages in the service of the Queen.

In his cabin, for instance, he could represent the technological master at the dawn of the Industrialized world. A man able to voyage great distances to prosecute any colonial war his handlers saw fit. He could reflect on the vast logistical achievement of the British Army; this as he faced a similar campaign but in wildly different physical environments. And in all this, I could show how the modern mindset is so satisfied and reliant upon expending wild amounts of energy to defeat nature: to carry all the great materiel of war along paths drawn on maps. Military strategies that do not reflect the human toll of a two month projection of power across an adverse landscape. The battle all soldiers face is first the field of war itself, then their own psychological determination, and then finally the other man who has defeated those already and is now able to kill you in earnest.

And then the natives, the aboriginals, the savages, and all the other nouns are able to fall into the same process of objectification, as things to control and master, describe and rule. People and the landscape all need to be measured, understood, and then controlled in Europe’s growing positivist imagination.

Wolseley could remember his campaign in Canada and see no difference between that place and its people and this new one in Africa. And with that clarity, the identity of Canada as just another imperial place on the map on the globe would have to surface. By seeing the arrogance and ultimate goals of the British through the eyes of this prototype British officer, a reader would have to admit the first and ongoing actions of the Crown in the prairies were the same as their mission in West Africa: to remove any resistance from local peoples by either the gun or diplomacy, and to create a new world at all costs.

Wolseley could imagine the expansion of a new society spreading across the globe. He could be offering premonitions about a industrialized, utopian society, and that proving the superiority of Britain on the imperial battlefield was the first step.

Then some continuity will emerge about the relationship between the Crown and Aboriginals in Canada. The Metis in my story could be both observers and agents to that relationship, as is historically accurate about their intermediary place between Settler and Indian society. And, because Metis culture descends matrilineally (largely Cree), I imagine many Metis shared in the impending and increasing loss of their way of life.

Hopefully, a reader would be able to relate somehow to the Metis people in my book and gain a stronger understanding of the existential hurt felt among First Nation people in Canada. More importantly, I hope the story would explain how many people see the Indian Act and the attitude of the government of Canada as a text-book colonial perspective towards non-European societies. I’m also hoping that because the Fleury’s in my story were not so harshly discriminated upon by the Residential School system, but instead ran from the Government in part to escape the ‘social services’, that their seeming affiliation to the rest of settler society would draw in non-Aboriginal readers into the story as well. After all, looking at a picture of the Fleury’s at RMH, they don’t look much different that the European migrants who struggled in the bush and in their poverty and social problems, too.

Thoughts on Idle No More and Theresa Spence

Simply put, what appears to central to the FN position goes beyond defending the fiscal management issue. That’s low lying fruit that will trigger the proper legal response. But I’m not sure what is really stake here even has a legal/political framework at any level in Canada. When the rhetoric of the movement is “INM”, it says a statement that the whole FN-Settler relationship is sick and broken for a thousand reasons that goes back well beyond Confederation, etc. I’m 100% sure Spence et al would not put their lives on the line to play chicken with the GOC over whether or not FN leaders were or ‘corrupt’ in some way.

I see a real source of debate in all of this in that on one hand FNs want the IA destroyed because it is a classic paternal, legal instrument that the British used in the empire to assimilate an indigenous population. Yet, FNs don’t want the IA removed to the extent that it forever eliminates their identity as a totally distinct society (to accidentally borrow a phrase). The path both sides agreed upon in the treaties forever hurt the continuity of FNs yet it created a new country. Was it worth it? The difficulty as many FN scholars etc see it lies in trying to move forward in the present by somehow disconnecting the paternal agenda but maintain the country’s recognition of FN as other nations so they can participate in the industrial/capitalist system with 100%, FN to Canada autonomy . That should be easy, right? It’s a part of the Curse of Development, like Jim Handy says.

How do we actually solve these problems? I see this like a family that’s tiptoeing around someone’s decades long cycle of addiction. Surely each member of that family has issues that must change but only one person is responsible for cresting the problem. There are outside observers who see the roots of the problem, and might try to speak out. But the while family has to admit the real problem and want to change. In our case, I am growing more and more convinced there needs to be a radical reawakening about the folly of our country’s colonial past in a way that 100% allows FNs to set the agenda at a discussion table. I can’t see any way around that. I’m not meaning the GOC needs to capitulate, but the absolute one issue in all colonized societies is recovering a tangible sense of autonomy, agency, and cultural dignity.

I believe the tangible answers to the questions will and can come later, after a deeper change of mindset in the political/educational arenas. I think the last thing FNs need is more oversight, but not because i think FNs don’t value or need fiscal accountability (all bureaucracy rightly does) but because the nature of the “oversight” relationship since day one has been intentionally destructive to the existence of the FNs. In that way, FNs are not like provinces that don’t have a severe existential crisis every time the PMO passes some shady omnibus bill.

Indeed, the West does rest upon a projection of power, and thats been the source of the problem since c1500! Its fundamental to say the European West has displaced the folks living on other continents. We all know the history is clear (enough) that all the major systems comprising what we call globalization are the result of Western hegemony over everyone else they ‘discovered’. 

But in the current discussion, what good is our study of History if we don’t actually hear its lessons?

To wit:

A major change here in N/America in the relationship between the historically dominant and marginalized societies must reject the current neocolonial system of GOC handouts and unfair administrative constraints determined by cyclical amendments to the IA. Again: increasing accountability etc will not solve the problems so long as the status quo prevails. And stubbornly requiring FNs to admit to accounting failings is like what social workers call blaming the victim amid the learned helplessness of living on the government purse for a life that has zero easy explanations and blame. For example, if a homeless person steals from s grocery store, wouldn’t it awfully callous and uninformed of us to point our fingers and say, “well, if you want to succeed in this world, son, you have to play by the rules. Now heres a fine and some jail time. Get a job!”

Same same. 

The whole arrangement between GOC and FN is dirty and if we were to measure the dirt on each side since c1876, who do you think will be blushing the most?

For a constructive imagining of the future GOC-FN relationship? If anyone really knew that, in any post-colonial setting, we wouldn’t have these long conversations. But because the bulk of postcolonial theorists underline the loss of agency among indigenous societies as the number one negative effect of imperialism everywhere, most in that camp talk about restoring agency as the number one goal for the future. After that, we all admit, it becomes a big head scratch of how to proceed. The idea of changing land ownership to fee simple is currently a main move with interesting consequences to the communal vs individual ownership of land, like you mentioned. Ya, in that way, the lives of FNs are forever changed. They might (must) have to accept some alterations to their essential anthropology to move forward. This is already happening in the moves by FNs to operate like European Nation-states and not completely like their unaltered traditions. Again, this phenomenon occurs in all postcolonial settings: changes to identity in a variety of ways have created a host of contradictions. 

In my mind and from various experiences over the years on the front lines (non-profits) and overseas (tuition for Abdul), the first steps forward even then will not immediately solve the problems and paradoxes set in motion by the Atlantic Slave Trade, its do-gooder son Colonialism, and its demanding, self-centered spawn, Development. Haha! But doing whatever we can to on one hand heal the shame of FNs and healing the Eurocentric myopia of the West must be the first step. On a fairly local scale, didn’t the civil rights movement try to speak to the great masses at the center that thought they were doing the best for their world by segregation but really were just perpetuating a disturbing relationship inherited from a previous bygone age?

Same same.

Both sides (but for somewhat different reasons) are tired of the handouts and top down arrangements built so long ago. And, for INM, who really knows what will arise in the near to distant future… That is why the major AFN and similar organizations are so elated that INM is a ‘grassroots’ movement, the outcome of populous driven change is messy, democratic, uncontrollable, and likes to fall on other precedents of public dissent that to some have been “illegal” but to others “liberating” — perhaps its just the kind of force the FN-GOC situation needs? FNs think so!

Migration of St. Denis/Fleury from St. Laurent de Grandin to Montana

These moves followed the turmoil at Red River in 1869-70. “…They sought a new life in a region unencumbered by settlers. They were a politically conscious group, most of whom had witnessed infringements on their rights by newcomers in Montana. They relocated to traditional lands further west to avoid discrimination, maintain their identity and culture, and diversify their economic activities.”  (Italic mine. The Free People – Li Gens Libres Diane Payment, 2009. p. 28)

I am interested in tying the experience of the broader Metis community illustrated above to the journey of the St. Denis from Saskatchewan to Montana. Specifically, how did these folks view themselves? Why did they seem to deliberately avoid involving themselves in the “political turmoil” that seemed to imbue the actions of the Metis in the area? The record shows they were comparatively much poorer than their neighbours; and I know they surrendered their many children (including the new-born Marie-Louis St. Denis) to the US authorities. Explore this alarming and heart wrenching move. If they had any of the ‘folk’ sentiments of their community, the loss of their children to the settler/Christian education system must have been a desperate move to keep their children alive, even if it meant loosing their culture. Here might be a chance to show how the loss of their family’s future reveals the depth of their Metis identity. Tragedy and mourning are occasions that shape exact clarity and truth. They must have suffered the whole way south. Did they decide to give up their children before they left? Along the way? At the last minute? Where did they go after their children were gone? Did they have any contact with them? They must have felt depths of failure and disorientation, in fact loosing their place in any future their way of life might have amid the Settler Society that was encroaching its way Westward. Never mind forever loosing your flesh and blood. How horrible.

New Post

Hi

First thoughts on chapter sketch

1. St. Denis/Fleury migration of 1872. The Metis settlement at the St. Laurent de Grandin Mission, near Ft. Carlton, on the Western S. Saskatchewan River, numbered 322, according to the 1871 HBC census of the area.

2. Instead of relocating more permanently to Batoche with the rest of the growing community, the St. Denis family migrated south to Montana via Cypress Hills; Marie-Louis St. Denis born along the way.

3. The abject poverty of the St. Denis family forced them to give up their children to US Residential school system; Marie-Louise St. Denis to Chemawa.

4. Marie-Louise St. Denis left Chemawa, and married Thomas Fleury in Montana.

5. Marie-Louise and Thomas Fleury moved to Alberta and lived in hiding from the Canadian government, knowing the aim of social services c1900 was to ‘integrate’ Indians into settler society. Flora Fleury, among a dozen or so surviving children, born in St. Paul, Alberta.

7. Marie-Louise Fleury took her daughter Flora Fleury to Calgary to marry a Chinese man named Kimmie Yee (in previous chapters weave his story of immigration to Canada and life in Calgary to this meeting).

8. Start family in Calgary: April and Tookson are born. Family moved to RMH… 

First Interviews

A short note to say that I completed the first three interviews a few weekends ago. Uncle Tookson, April, and her second cousin Gladys all had very interesting and unique things to say to me. Tookson had the most to say about Kimmie. This grandfather apparently did come to Canada but hid off to Vancouver to avoid the railway gangs. At any rate, Tookson emphasized this Chinese heritage over our Metis line.

Before I forget, I talked to my cousin Terri for the first time the other night  as well. The most remarkable thing she said was the Cree/Chinese magio-medicinal sharing between Kimmie (Cree medicine) and his mom (chinese medicine) when she eventually moved to Canada. This has enormous implications for the story that I will explore. Namely, that the family hid to protect its Metis heritage from the Government but that their actions also allowed a non-Western cultural synergy to occur, particularly around magical medicines, here in the Canadian plains. Whoa.

Bibliography…A Work In Progress

Today I’m going to start accumulating my bibliography of research for the book. I have a Word document on my computer but I think it is a good idea to post the literature on my blog instead. Far from the prying eyes of academic supervisors, the following list is inconsistently based around the Chicago Manual of Style.

Adams, D. W. Education for Extinction. 1995.

Adams, Howard. “Tortured People” (Penticton: Theytus Press, 1995, 2000).

—–. “Challenging Eurocentric History,” in Expressions in Canadian Native Studies, ed. Ron F. Laliberte et al., 41-53 (Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan ExtensionPress, 2000).

—–. “The History of the Métis Nation” (1936) in French. Translated in 1982. Based on interviews of the participants and witnesses of the Métis rebellion in 1885.

Ahern, William H. The Returned Indians. 1983.

Bourgeault, Ron. “Louis Riel: Hero of his People?” In Expressions of Native Studies, ed. Ron F. Laliberte et al., 222-26. Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan Extension Press. 2000.

——-. “The Struggle for Class and Nation: The Origin of the Metis in Canada and the National Question.” In 1492-1991: Five Centuries of Imperialism and Resistance, ed. Ron Bourgeault et al., 153-88. Socialist Studies, vol. 8 and 9 (Winnipeg: Society for Socialist Studies, Fernwood Publishing. 1992.) (U of C)

Brogden, Mike. Law and Criminal Labels: The Case of the French Metis in Western Canada (1990).

Campbell, Marie. Halfbreed (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1973).

Child, Brenda.  A Bitter Lesson. 1993.

Elis, Clyde. 1996. To Change Them Forever. 1996.

Coleman, Michael C. American Indian Children at School, 1850-1930. 1993. 

Department of Indian Affairs, National Archives of Canada, RG 10 Bluebooks, Item 50, March 12 1935.

Department of Indian Affairs, Interior, Agriculture, and Northwest Mounted Police. Canadian Sessional Papers, 1890s and thereafter into the early twentieth century.

Devine, Heather. “The People Who Own Themselves” (Calgary: University Press, 2004).

Elis, Clyde. 1996. To Change Them Forever. 1996.

Holtgen and Molen, 1989.

Hyer, 1990.

Lindsey, 1995.

Lowmawaima, 1993 and 1994.

Malmsheimer, 1987.

McBeth, 1984.

 

Olive, Dickason.  Canada’s First Nations (1992a) Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.

Palud-Pelletier, Noelie. Louis: Fils des Prairies (1983) trans. In 1990 and 2005 (Pemmican Publications)

Poirier, Thelma. The Bead Pot (Pemmican Publications).

Ray, Arthur J. “Periodic Shortages, Native Welfare, and the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670-1930.” In Shepard Krech (ed.) The Subarctic Fur Trade. (Vancouver: University of B.C.  Press) and Trade In The Industrial Age. (Toronto: University Press).

Szaszy, 1977.

Trennart, 1988.

Wall, Denis. The Alberta Metis Letters: 1930-1940 policy review and annotations (U of C)

Welsh, Christine. “Voices of Our Grandmothers: Reclaiming Metis Heritage,” Canadian Literature 131 (1991): 15-24

——. Keepers of the Fire (Montreal: National Film Board, 1994) with Christine and Signe Johansson (producers) and Norma Bailey (director), Women in the Shadows (National Film Board and Direction Films, 1993).

The Year of the Yee?

Greetings. I have started this blog to help me sort out the path towards writing my historical fiction about my paternal Metis ancestry. In starting this I can reflect that this is one of those moments in life that we start not really sure we will see the intended end. For me that end is a novel that dramatizes the migrations and struggles of my Metis family that settled in central Alberta amid the settling of the Western Canadian plains. I am drawn towards needing this book finished, and for a few very good reasons.

One: to pull together the narratives of my uncles, biological father, and aunt in a way that they never had as adults. My aunt April, the oldest of the Yee children, is my conduit and contact to their stories. Having spent two decades in counselling and herself working as a life coach in a corrections facility in Yellowknife, my dear aunt April has spent years trying to heal her broken family. Her brothers Tookson, Bingson (my dad), and Willy rarely see each other. Tookson and April live in Wetaskwin and have had recent contact but, as April says, Tookson hates the Fleurys and seems to despise April because she looks like her Metis mother. Instead, April tells me Tookson embraces the Chinese heritage of their father, Kimmie Yee, an immigrant from China who worked many years as a cook and is now buried in Wetaskwin. April gave up years ago trying to bring her brothers together for any occasion, big or small, and now lives a happy life with her dear Stan Mercredi, who he married decades ago in Yellowknife. They are so cute.

So my book will bring together those four children, at least in writing, and do what April has not been able to work out here in the real world.

The second reason for writing my book is that it will provide a long term way for me to work out my place in the Metis family and sort through my identity. WHy am I here? Where did I come from? THese are all questions that are requiring more adult answers, explanations that will help guide my trajectory for the next decade or so. There are loose ends or parts of me that seem out of place if you look at just my mother’s side of the family. So many. For now, lets start with a general feeling of, well, craziness, that seems to cause me to think differently than the rest. Or so it seems that way I guess. Life never seemed simple to me, and my single parent upbringing created many problems and contributed in a big way to chronic underachievement and low expectations for myself. Back to the crazy. How did I put it to April when I tried to describe this all to her? That as a youth I was a trench-coat wearing/cigarette smoking/guitar playing/misfit/high-school drop-out/poet/artist/snooker-playing/social outcast/broken family/insecure/weirdo/rebel kind of guy. These words did not fit my cousins or uncles, well not entirely. After all, as Douglas Coupland says, all families are psychotic.

After meeting April and hearing more about her siblings, including my dad, I have discovered the other half of me and why I have always been crazy. I feel like I belong with them and I feel out of place with my mom’s side of the family. That is not to say I feel not loved or wanted or that I don’t love or appreciate my Mom or her siblings, my uncles and aunt. The opposite. I wouldn’t be where I am without the kind of stability, support, and especially unconditional love they gave me.

What I mean is that each person is the sum of the two people that brought them into this world. And behind each of those parents stands generations of people that lived in a particular arc of time and experience of history. We are all standing in the stream of history, both in a broad way and in minute ways, we carry and are effected by the lives of individuals and the lives of the large forces of history. The simplest lesson in any history department is that all people and organizations need to know their past to understand their current identity and thus have the tools to know where to go in the future. For me, until I learned that my artistic impulses and overall peculiarities are direct connections to my dad’s family, I have never been at peace with thinking myself as a musician, artist, writer, or even mystic even though those features have been shaping my life for as long as I can remember.

Thus,…

To research Metis history in Western Canada and find the connections in that story to what I learned as a Masters of Arts student about Colonialism helps me know how my Metis ancestry and is bound up in the remarkable settlement of the plains of Western Canada.

To interview as many living relatives as I can about my Great-Great Grandmother and Father (Marie-Louise Fleury and Tom Fleury) reveals the personal connections between my ancestry and the little admitted experience of colonialism in Canada.

I think my first steps in these blog postings is to collect a bibliography of sources I will need to support the academic history end of the book. Moreover, I will set in motion the building thoughts and ideas for the book and its structure.