Louis Riel Day and Métis nationhood

After reading Seeking the Center a friend of mine became curious about the description Métis that appears on the back cover of the book. She looked it up and asked me about it. "It means mixed race, right?" she asked. "Like mestizo."

Well, no. There's confusion about the designation Métis. On the one hand, yes, the French word métis, with a lower-case m, literally means mixed, often used to describe people of "mixed blood" - i.e., people who are bi- or multi-racial. But Métis, with a capital M, does not.

The Métis, as a people, have their roots in the North American fur trade, going back as far as the 17th century, when European fur traders and Indigenous people began forming alliances, often cemented by, or taking the form of, marriages between fur traders and indigenous women. The children of these marriages often intermarried among themselves, and over generations developed their own language (Michif) and culture. They became a large and influential group in the Canadian and American west, working not only as hunters, fur processors, pemmican manufacturers, and voyageurs, but as guides, translators, traders, merchants, and so on. Today they are recognized by the Canadian government as one of three Aboriginal groups - i.e., cultural groups that existed originally, before Canada itself: First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. The United States has never recognized the Métis as a distinct cultural group, although their northern plains homeland extends across the U.S.-Canada border.

The Métis are also, in the same sense as, say, the Ojibwe or the Cree, a nation, and one whose origin predates the arrival of the Canadian and U.S. governments to their homeland. Their sense of nationhood developed over the course of generations, and was solidified during the 19th century through a series of political/military events including the Battle of Seven Oaks (1816), the trial of Guillaume Sayer (1849), and the Métis resistances at Red River, Manitoba (1870) and in Saskatchewan (1885).

The Métis leader in the latter two confrontations was Louis Riel, a charismatic, spiritually inclined, and enigmatic man who envisioned a Native nation in North America. His forces were crushed both at Red River and at Batoche, Saskatchewan, by the Canadian government, then in its infancy. He himself was captured, tried, and hung for treason by Canadian authorities after the defeat at Batoche in 1885. 

Since 2008, the third Monday in February has been designated Louis Riel Day in the Canadian province of Manitoba. In other parts of Canada, Louis Riel, as well as Métis culture in general, are celebrated on November 16, the anniversary of Riel's execution. 

Here are some titles for further reading - by no means an exclusive list! - in order of publication date: 

• Strange Empire: A Narrative of the Northwest by Joseph Kinsey Howard (1952)
• Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870 by Sylvia Van Kirk (1980)
• Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country by Jennifer S. H. Brown (1980)
• The People Who Own Themselves: Aboriginal Ethnogenesis in a Canadian Family, 1660-1900 by Heather Devine (2004)
• One of the Family: Metis Culture in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Saskatchewan by Brenda Macdougall (2010)
• "Métis": Race, Recognition, and the Struggle for Indigenous Peoplehood by Chris Andersen (2014)

La belle Françoise: the evolution of a traditional song

"La belle Françoise" is a song that appears in Seeking the Center and on my Seeking the Center playlist. I think its background is interesting, and I want to share it with you. 

When I was writing Achille's main scene in Seeking, I looked for a song that could play a certain role in it. (I won't elaborate on that role, because I don't want to spoil the story.) I wanted a traditional voyageur song, because that is a major part of Achille's background and identity. (The voyageurs were the French Canadian paddlers of the birchbark canoes that carried trade goods north and west into the interior of North America, and brought back loads of furs to the companies in Montreal. They used traditional songs to synchronize their paddling. Most of these songs pre-dated France's first settlements in Quebec, so they date back to the 17th century or earlier.)

"La belle Françoise" appears in sources including Grace Lee Nute's The Voyageur and Thomas R. Draughon's Canot d'Écorce: Chansons de Voyageurs. Though it isn't the song most associated with the voyageurs, I chose it because of its minor key, which gives it a melancholy mood, and because of its lyrics, which dramatize the impending separation of two lovers.

In the song, Françoise weeps because her man must go to war, but he assures her that, if she waits for him, he will return and marry her. Their plight echoes the situations of some of my characters. Although it is not actual war that they are going to, they are facing unknown and sometimes hostile situations, away from their homeplaces.

You can listen to different versions of the song on YouTube. I chose Garolou's live version for my Seeking the Center playlist mainly because it makes an exciting finale. But it also represents a further evolution of the song that, although it doesn't pertain to Seeking, is interesting in its own right. 

Garolou was a French-Canadian group active in the 1970s that often took traditional French and French-Canadian chansons (songs) and gave them modern, rock settings. "La belle Françoise" was an early hit for them (mid 1970s). You can hear how they've contemporized it with a Vietnam-era anti-war message by inserting an intense version of "La Marseillaise." The Seeking the Center playlist version is from Garolou's 1997 live Réunion album.