"I Can Tell You Now": Métis Kinship Narratives in Community History Volumes
Date
2023-09-18
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Doctoral
Abstract
In the late twentieth century, community history volumes flourished across the Prairies as small pioneer towns sought to document their histories by collecting written contributions from residents who had lived there over the years, including descendants of "original" homesteaders. Biographical narratives of my Anglo-Métis maternal great-great-grandparents, George Kirkness (1857-1932) and Caroline McNabb (1862-1954), were published in two such volumes, A Homesteader's Dream (1981) and Communities of Courage and Cordwood (1986). Although as a genre, these volumes contain the very performances of settler triumphalism that have dispossessed Métis families of our histories, the personal narratives therein can also offer insight into Métis kin and community structures, cultural knowledges, relational philosophies, and political agency. George and Caroline's biographies reflect a time of unprecedented upheavals in the social fabric of Métis society, including two armed resistances, a mass migration westward, the rapid expansion of the colonial state into the Northwest, and the breakdown of cultural cohesion after the Resistance conflicts of 1885. I examine their biographies through the lens of wāhkōhtowin (kinship, or being in relation), reframing Métis "identity" away from linear individualist models and toward integrative, expansive, community-oriented ones which recognize the vitality of our ongoing relational practices and ways of being. Ultimately, despite generations of social stigma and erasure, the Kirkness family narratives illuminate complex relational dynamics within Métis familial networks at the Red River Settlement, Red Deer Hill, SK, and Cookson, SK. I adopt a layered and relational reading approach, analyzing these texts alongside archival documents and other material to consider how our kinship practices and responsibilities adapt and persist despite longstanding rhetorics of erasure, dislocation, and division. Through these readings, the entries are made legible as sites of memory expressing Métis kinship writ large, with all the attendant continuities and contradictions, tensions and solidarities, which continue to make our communities so rich and dynamic.
Description
Keywords
Métis studies, family history, Métis storytelling, Indigenous kinship, Indigenous literature, community history, local history
Citation
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Department
English
Program
English