CarterSarah - Recollecting: Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands

R ECOLLECTING

T HE W EST U NBOUND:
S OCIAL AND C ULTURAL S TUDIES

Series editors: Alvin Finkel and Sarah Carter

Writing on the western halves of Canada and the United States once focused on the alienation of the peoples of these regions from residents of the eastern regions. The mythology of a homogenized West fighting for a place in the sun blunted interest in the lives of ordinary people and the social struggles that pitted some groups in the West against others, usually the elite groups that claimed to speak for the whole region on the national stage. The West Unbound series challenges simplistic definitions of the West and its institutions. It focuses upon the ways in which various groups of Westerners women, workers, Aboriginal peoples, farmers, and people of various ethnic origins, among others tried to shape the institutions and attitudes of the region. This series draws on a variety of disciplines and is intended for both university audiences and lay audiences with an interest in the American and Canadian Wests.

Series Titles

Expansive Discourses:

Urban Sprawl in Calgary, 19451978

by Max Foran

Icon, Brand, Myth:

The Calgary Stampede

edited by Max Foran

The Importance of Being Monogamous:

Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915

by Sarah Carter

Liberalism, Surveillance, and Resistance:

Indigenous Communities in Western Canada, 18771927

by Keith D. Smith

One Step Over the Line:

Toward a History of Women in North American Wests

edited by Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus

The West and Beyond:

New Perspectives on an Imagined Region

edited by Alvin Finkel, Sarah Carter, and Peter Fortna

Lives of Aboriginal Women of the
Canadian Northwest and Borderlands

edited by
S ARAH C ARTER
and
P ATRICIA A. M C C ORMACK

2011 Sarah Carter and Patricia A. McCormack

Published by AU Press, Athabasca University

1200, 10011 109 Street Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Recollecting : lives of Aboriginal women of the Canadian northwest and borderlands / edited by Sarah Carter and Patricia A. McCormack.

(The West unbound, social and cultural studies, ISSN 1915-8181)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Also available in electronic format (978-1-897425-83-1).

ISBN 978-1-897425-82-4

1. Native women Canada, Western History.

2. Native women Canada, Northern History.

I. Carter, Sarah, 1954

II. McCormack, Patricia Alice, 1947

III. Series: West unbound, social and cultural studies

E78.C2R4114 2011 971.00497 C2010-904523-8

Cover and book design by Natalie Olsen, kisscutdesign.com .

Cover image: Frances Nickawa during her early performance years: Sweet Heart (1924), Young Family Fonds, 94.094P/1. Courtesy of The United Church Archives, Toronto. Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printing.

Athabasca University Press gratefully acknowledges support received from the Royal Alberta Museum, Alberta Culture and Community Spirit, towards publication of this volume.

This project was funded in part by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons License, Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada, see www.creativecommons.org . The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. Please contact AU Press, Athabasca University at aupress@athabascau.ca for permission beyond the usage outlined in the Creative Commons license.

A volume in the The West Unbound: Social and Cultural Studies series:

ISSN 1915-8181 (Print) ISSN 1915-819X (Online)

C ONTENTS

I LLUSTRATIONS

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors thank all of the authors of the articles in this book for their patience with and enthusiasm for this project. We are grateful for the comments and suggestions of two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript. Thanks to everyone at Athabasca University Press, including Walter Hilde-brandt, Pamela Holway, Kathy Killoh, Tiffany Regaudie, Natalie Olsen, and Renata Jass, and to indexer Adrian Mather. We are particularly grateful to the Royal Alberta Museum, for providing the funding that permitted us to include colour plates in the book.

Recollecting

Map of the North American West

L IFELINES:
Searching for Aboriginal Women of the Northwest and Borderlands

Sarah Carter and Patricia A. McCormack

In 1841, a party of twenty-three families of colonists from Red River arrived at Fort Carlton on the North Saskatchewan River. They were headed for the Oregon Territory, where they were to strengthen British claims to that disputed land. One of the colonists was an elderly Cree woman named Saskatchewan. She was accompanying her son, William Flett, and his four children. George Simpson, governor of the Hudsons Bay Company, recorded this meeting in his diary:

This venerable wanderer was a native of Saskatchewan, the name of which, in fact, she bore. She had been absent from this land of her birth for 18 years; and on catching the first glimpse of the river, from the hill near Carlton, she burst, under the influence of old recollections, into a violent flood of tears. During the two days that the party spent at the fort, she scarcely ever left the bank of the stream, appearing to regard it with as much veneration as the Hindoo regards the Ganges.

Encountering passages such as this one in the sometimes somnolent and stuffy world of archival and documentary research is exciting, rewarding and frustrating. They provide glimpses of emotions and bonds to place, and they breathe life into and connect us with the past. They also leave us wanting to know more. Fortunately, the work of learning more about Saskatchewan is an ongoing project of her great-great-great-grandchildren, Vernon R. Wishart and his sister Shirley Wishart. Among other things, they have discovered that Saskatchewan was sixty-six years old

The story of Saskatchewan, or rather the brief glimpse we have of this woman, illustrates some of the themes and challenges that appear in many of the essays in this collection and that both motivate and constrain the authors. We know more about Saskatchewan Mrs. Flett than other Cree women of her generation because she appears in the documentary record, but only because something about her was sufficiently noteworthy or extraordinary that Simpson decided to write about it. It is a tantalizing portrait, but incomplete and filtered through Simpsons imperial eyes, as he compared her attachment to the Saskatchewan River to the Hindoo veneration of the sacred Ganges River. We do not know the reasons for her violent flood of tears, though we can guess.

Saskatchewans personal history defies and complicates the tendency to reduce complex colonial encounters to a straightforward opposition between the colonizer and the colonized, an engagement or clash between two sides. She married a labourer from Orkney, bore his children, and was immersed in and contributed to new networks of kinfolk of multiple ancestries. She sacrificed her intimate ties to her Cree family when she followed her husband to Red River when the newly reconstituted Hudsons We are fortunate indeed when we can discover for some women more to draw upon than just a paper trail, including the records of oral history and material culture. The editors of this volume wanted to find out more about women like Saskatchewan and, where possible, to look beyond the documentary record in researching their lives.