Putting Down Roots
Métis Agency, Land Use, and Women’s Food Labour in a Qu’Appelle Valley Road Allowance Community
- Publisher
- University of Manitoba Press
- Initial publish date
- Apr 2025
- Category
- Native American, Women's Studies, Prairie Provinces (AB, MB, SK)
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781772841053
- Publish Date
- Apr 2025
- List Price
- $25.00
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9781772841039
- Publish Date
- Apr 2025
- List Price
- $70.00 USD
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781772841022
- Publish Date
- Apr 2025
- List Price
- $27.95
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Description
Mapping Métis history and cultural heritage through women’s work
Centring kinship and the strength of women, Putting Down Roots reframes Métis road allowance communities as sites of profound resistance and resilience, restoring Métis life in places, times, and scholarship where it has been obscured by settler narratives. These communities were not peripheral spaces where Métis lived as squatters, but places where families culturally thrived by visiting each other, telling stories, sharing food, and providing mutual aid. With stories of Métis li vyeu (Elders) as its foundation, this innovative study reveals the agency embedded in the everyday actions of women’s work, which sustained Métis identity, family systems, and relationships to land.
Cheryl Troupe charts a century of Métis presence and persistence in the Qu’Appelle Valley, from the end of the buffalo hunt in the 1850s, through displacement following the northwest resistances, resettlement on fringe Crown lands, ongoing political activism and opposition to Canadian land-use practices, and finally the dissolution of the road allowance community along Katepwa Lake in the 1950s. Focusing on female kinship relationships and food production, Putting Down Roots illuminates the ways women created the stability necessary to adapt to the rapidly changing economic, social, and political conditions that defined this period of Canadian history.
Troupe’s sophisticated use of oral histories, archival sources, genealogies, photographs, and deep mapping links people and their stories to the spaces that are important to them. Adding a new dimension to the study of Métis history, Putting Down Roots brings to life the tremendous cultural strength that characterized Métis road allowance communities.
About the authors
Cheryl Troupe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan. She has a PhD in History and an MA in Indigenous Studies. Cheryl Troupe is Metis from north-central Saskatchewan.
Maria Campbell is a Métis writer, playwright, filmmaker, scholar, teacher, community organizer, activist, and elder. Halfbreed is regarded as a foundational work of Indigenous literature in Canada. She has authored several other books and plays, and has directed and written scripts for a number of films. She has also worked with Indigenous youth in community theatre and advocated for the hiring and recognition of Indigenous people in the arts. She has mentored many Indigenous artists during her career, established shelters for Indigenous women and children, and run a writers’ camp at the national historical site at Batoche, where every summer she produces commemorative events on the anniversary of the battle of the 1885 North-West Resistance. Maria Campbell is an officer of the Order of Canada and holds five honorary doctorates.
Other titles by
Other titles by
York THEA 3200 Pick Up
Trickster Tales and the Stories of Chief Thunderchild
Reasonable Doubt
Halfbreed
Keetsahnak / Our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Sisters
Life Stages and Native Women
Memory, Teachings, and Story Medicine
People of the Buffalo
How the Plains Indians Lived
Stories of the Road Allowance People
The Revised Edition
DraMetis
Three Plays by Metis Authors
The Book of Jessica
A Theatrical Transformation