Putting Down Roots

Mapping Metis history and cultural heritage through women's work

Centring kinship and the strength of women, Putting Down Roots reframes Metis road allowance communities as sites of profound resistance and resilience, restoring Metis life in places, times, and scholarship where it has been obscured by settler narratives. These communities were not peripheral spaces where Metis lived as squatters, but places where families culturally thrived by visiting each other, telling stories, sharing food, and providing mutual aid. With stories of Metis li vyeu (Elders) as its foundation, this innovative study reveals the agency embedded in the everyday actions of women's work, which sustained Metis identity, family systems, and relationships to land.

Cheryl Troupe charts a century of Metis 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 Metis history, Putting Down Roots brings to life the tremendous cultural strength that characterized Metis road allowance communities.