Living Metis in the city
This inquiry was held accountable to these questions: how do Métis individuals born and raised in urban environments practice, affirm, and express their Métis self-understandings in the city; how do our self-understandings situate within a collective; how do they contribute to individual and collective well-being; do these self-understandings enable us to live well and flourish in the city? Through the stories of six fellow Métis kin, I came to understand the complexities that are held within our experiences as urban-born-raised Métis as the culmination of the ancestral legacies, our own lived experiences, and the cultural continuity of the future. The research questions posed particularly, how do individuals practice their self-understandings in the city, was evident however, the process to arrive at this insight was not cut and dry nor straightforward. I have experienced a great deal of contemplation since these insights and have garnered responsibilities from this very aspect of the process. The responsibilities that are drawn from the insights include, creating spaces, exposing the mundane, building resiliency, relinquishing shame, and living our language. Moreover, I extend the discussion into relationships beyond our Métis community to the kinships in Treaty 7 and how these kinships are important to Métis practices in the city.
Creating Métis specific contexts
“There is so many things in the city that you can do to reconnect, it’s not about where you are, it’s about what I take, what I hear” (Charmaine)
Our research circle discussed the role of gathering, as Métis, to form a shared purpose and sense of belonging. As Charmaine shared above, where we are does not necessarily matter, but what transpires in that space allows us to connect and affirm relationships. My Métis kin have showed me that through our practices, we are constantly becoming Métis, it is never a stagnant process. This equates to places too. I think to the buffalo brigades that my ancestors would travel with. Setting up temporary homes was part of prairie life; the temporal way of living was not less meaningful than being sedentary as families and kin would be there with them creating Métis places wherever they went. The challenge for those of us living in the city, and for us, in the city of Calgary, is that we are no longer in a Métis specific places with only Métis kin insulating us. Of course, the historic Red River Settlement, the birthplace of my ancestors, was diverse in demographics however, there were communities within communities. With over 1.4 million residents extending over a large land base, finding Métis community can be difficult. Growing up with my father in political positions with the Métis Nation, I witnessed the power of Métis gatherings, and the role Métis specific contexts play in bringing people together. Later, with my own experiences as President for the Calgary Métis Local 87, I too felt the value of place for Métis gatherings and events. I learned from my Métis kin in this inquiry though, is the need for those contexts to have purpose.
Purpose can be something sustained or momentary. My doctoral inquiry, for example, was a momentary process, endured over numerous months for the purpose of exploring and understanding Métis practices in the city that express self-understandings. The circle never stayed physically solidified but was always recreated whenever we got together for the same purpose and with the same individuals. The city, in its vastness, forces us to create these places together. For us in the circle, this specific context was important for individuals to practice telling their stories and to share thoughts and feeling that they never had before. More importantly, practicing sharing with others that may understand their experiences was a key aspect in the efficacy of the shared experience. For our group, explicating the mundane bringing those practices to the forefront our own purview was a purpose that came upon the group. To reach into our experiences to assess our day-to-day for meaning in practices solidifies that process of becoming. Although our families may not have spoken about these ways of daily living, they were continued through generations.
From the onset of our first circle together, I felt the responsibility of creating these future places but I am stalled in thinking about the purpose, dynamics, and ethics of that this entails. I am intrigued by the question, how do Métis place-make in the locales they live? Thinking back to my sentence in the earth kinships section, '“when people dwell in a place overtime, they make sense of who they are through the making of that place” this provokes a curiosity to explore how Métis have contributed in making this place, Calgary, as to have a sense of who they are. I am cautious though as the ethical parameters alert me in questioning - how do we make place in a territory that is not ours, what agreements, if any, do we need to establish to do so?
In our last gatherings, we discussed the appropriateness and timing of disseminating this research. Then, we were not ready to share any information to the larger community. Now, as the kin have had the opportunity to review the dissertation, I can now share this knowledge with others with hopes that it allow others to have relationships with the stories that have been told and perhaps from there, spark their own discussions and places of story and self-understandings will take form.
Tapping into our resiliency
“That’s what I see here, a space where you can build resiliency, a space you can go and say I am a part of the space, its real, I can take guilt, shame, frustration off and be who I am, that what build resiliency, that’s so important when you talk about what’s going to happen after your doctoral work, it has to be maintained somehow, and maybe that will come out of your work” (Reg)
Connectedness to land and more-than-human beings and the ways in which we solidify those relationships in the urban environment is crucial to our self-understandings as Métis. All individuals in the research circle discussed their relationship with the city and feeling connected or disconnected, or both at times, to the natural environment. I was drawn to pay particular attention to the practices with land which were mostly conducted on individual levels. Through the work of Flaminio et al., (2020), the authors affirm the importance of gathering in Métis specific spaces, but also for the purposes of learning from land, sharing women’s teachings, and building community. Métis people rely on large kinship systems to formulate who they are as a cultural body. As Métis scholar, Chris Andersen (2014) stresses, we are a People with a distinct origin story, which sets a criterion for who is and is not Métis. My point here is that we are a collective, and we are Métis because we belong to a collective with a shared historical narrative. Living in cities does not betray this reality, it only challenges us to see ourselves as part of community that may not be visible. Flaminio et al., (2020), in their research study affirmed that Métis women, “learned that our identity as Métis women is interconnected with visiting together with Métis women and that visiting together positively impacts our wellness as Métis women. Métis women expressed that by bringing them together, they felt a sense of community with women” (p. 62). Well-being is consistent with community therefore, practices in the city that nurture and renew our relationships with land and other beings need to be facilitated within a collectivity as to promote a sense of togetherness. Like the outcomes of their research, this inquiry also illuminated the need to us to move from individualized notions of identity to a collective shared identity. Practices in the city need to focus on the strength of our kinship responsibilities to land and how interactions with our natural environment can bring Métis together to learn and nurture stronger relationships with all beings. Our ancestors were able to adapt to new circumstances because they had cultural knowledge harvested from our environments and a sense of community. The city is no different, as a ‘new environment’ we need to rely on the inheritances of our ancestors and the contemporary community for resilience and well-being.
Laying down the shame
“That I am open to myself and being okay with my past and with family and what they’ve done, I used to feel ashamed” (Charmaine)
A key component of resiliency is being able to engage in difficult conversations that may have been silenced or ignored for a long time, even possibly for generations, and re-story them so that the difficulties become less and less strenuous on our relationships. Our research circle shared with each other that many of our conversations were the first they had experienced. An unintentional impact of the inquiry was the possibility of healing to occur for individuals and families. The inquiry was not designed or geared toward promoting healing among individuals however, Métis kin discussed that the opportunity to share in the group allowed them to articulate difficult aspects of their lives and in turn come into a different relationship with those experiences. Okanagan scholar, educator, and activist Jeanette Armstrong (1996) states, “The Okanagan refer to relationship to others by a word that means "our one skin" (p. 463). For Armstrong, this includes our ancestors that have come before us, and current human kinships that are sharing in this life together. Without family and community, “the person is said to be ‘crippled/incapacitated’ and ‘lifeless.’ Not to have community or family is to be scattered or falling apart” (p. 465). Without our human kinships in these intimate circles, we risk experiencing lifelessness, or soul atrophy. Soul atrophy, as I discussed early in the dissertation, occurs when we are out of rhythm with who we are, with our truest self and as Armstrong (1996) points out, without our human kinships.
In a healthy whole community, the people interact with each other in shared emotional response. They move together emotionally to respond to crisis or celebration. They "commune" in the everyday act of living. Being a part of such a communing is to be fully alive, fully human. To be without community in this way is to be alive only in the flesh, to be alone, to be lost to being human. It is then possible to violate and destroy others and their property without remorse (Armstrong, 1996, p. 469)
Interacting in a shared emotional response induces a sense of safety so people can lay down their shame and other hurts and to engage in the world in full and lively ways. Métis individuals, families, and communities have and continue to suffer through colonization and the legacy of assimilation and genocide (Logan, 2015). Our people have witnessed and endured atrocities that still haunt them and will continue to do so until we, as a community, interact with a shared emotional response. I can see these ghosts in my own family and the relationships with the unresolved emotions was not healthy. Reg, during one research gathering, spoke about ghosts, “emotions and thoughts are ghosts [they] have protocol, and we have to respect them with those protocols and if we don’t, they’ll get the best of us”. My inquiry was not the place to take on this task, but I believe as a community, discussions pertaining to the implications of our experiences with colonialism and the trauma that still exists in our families and communities needs to be addressed so that we can live and thrive.
Living Michif through Michif
As I have articulated elsewhere in this dissertation, from the first gathering of our research circle, I knew that responsibilities were being pressed upon me. This part of the inquiry has been the hardest to settle into; mostly because I am overwhelmed with the large tasks at hand. Stories that have been gifted to me during this research journey need the care and attention they deserve. However, I am reminded – again – that I am not alone in this journey and at the very core of this work is bringing people together for a shared purpose and to continue to build our connections to ourselves, each other, and all beings in our city environment.
First and foremost, the role of language in creating and affirming who we are as Métis is essential. Although I have stated in the heading, living Michif in the city, we are all diverse in our linguistic heritages. With Michif, Cree, and Bungee speakers in our circle, I acknowledge the need to assert diversity within the Métis community as a large entity. Michif is at risk of becoming an extinct language. In the city of Calgary, there are programs that individuals can learn Treaty 7 languages, as well as Cree. Organizations have tried, over several years, to have Michif speakers host language learning sessions but the sessions are often short lived and not consistently available. One organization, Métis Calgary Family Services, has incorporated Michif into their preschool and kindergarten curriculum for many years, but nothing beyond that exists in Calgary. I can speculate why this might be, but more research to understand the environment and climate of Calgary is needed to make specific determinations as to the reasons why Michif is not being taught consistently in Calgary. We know who we are by the language we speak thus, generating language speakers is essential for the continuity of Michif worldview and identity. No one in our group could fluently speak Michif except for the Elders in our circle. In Camperville, Manitoba, there is success in building second generation speakers through the Mentor-Apprentice Program (MAP) (Mazzoli, 2020) where individuals are in an immersive experience with fluent language speakers to acquire linguistic capabilities. There are challenges to reinvigorating language speaking efforts, specifically with the low number of fluent Michif speakers. “With about 100–150 speakers, mixed Michif is thus nearly extinct, and research projects on the language should take this critical situation into account in setting up their research goals and methodologies” (Mazzoli, 2020, p. 59). This information is not new to me as I accounted for this in my master’s thesis in 2016. Since then, I have embarked on my own language learning journey however, my acquired skills seem irrelevant if I do not sustain my efforts. My dad was a Michif speaker and I owe it to him to do all that I can to help with the sustainability of our language.
Kinships in Treaty 7
Living in cities, outside of Métis territories, has implications on how we enact ourselves as visitors in other nations lands. Southern Alberta is not our ancestral territory, but part of the large geography that Métis people relied on to form alliances, extend kinship systems, trade and sell goods, and acquire food sources (Loyer and Voth, 2019). Although I am a born and raised Calgarian, my ancestors are not from this place therefore I have an obligation to act as if I am a guest in someone else’s home.
Southern Alberta does serve a long history for Métis through kinships, settlements, land scrip, and relationship with buffalo. When the Métis homeland map was released by the Métis National Council in 2018, controversy arose and the map was called into question (CBC news). The map, and its designation of what is Métis homeland, was a topic in many of my conversations especially when the land to which I reside is not Métis. Individuals were very vocal with their opinions of the map and rightfully so. A possible benefit caused by the release of the map, I believe, is that it became clear that critical conversations are needed between nations and communities that dwell and interact together in urban environments. Specific to Métis communities that are in territories of other nations, discussion is useful in determining how we can live well together. Living as Michif, Métis, means living our values which include wahkohtowin. The imposed dichotomy of First Nation and Métis people have caused long time riffs in places where kinship relations used to exist (Innes, 2008). Instead of seeing ourselves segregated from our relatives and kin, we need to acknowledge that many of us come from the same lineage and it was the tactics of the government that divided us in the first place (Fiola, 2015; Lawrence, 2004; Logan, 2015). Métis Peoplehood, is cinched together by the act of making relatives, people-people relationships (Andersen, 2014). The practice of making relatives is a process that is within Métis self-understandings and transcends the boundaries of city and is invoked as we reside in other’s territories.
Currently, the city of Calgary is the home to Métis Nation of Alberta (MNA) Region 3 main office, as well as the Métis Nation of Alberta Local 87 Centre, both arms of the Métis Nation of Alberta. The inquiry did not discuss membership to these political organizations in their stories nor any political activities they participated. Growing up in the Métis Nation of Alberta and having most of my community experiences at events hosted by the MNA in Calgary, I might be blind to see a different Métis community in the city. Is the MNA synonymous with community in this context? If we are not conceiving political organizations as pods for our becoming, what is the community we are creating and reaffirming for our collectivity. Research on urban experiences of Métis people is important to expand the understanding of Métis identity. Research on the collectivizing of Métis community is equally important to grow our conceptualization of how Métis commune, gather, and organize in the city (see Hancock, 2021 for this discussion).
Belonging to Calgary means honouring the relations of this territory and renewing those relationships on a regular basis. Learning from Reg in the oral knowledge system, while knowing the natural laws that come from this place, informs me that as a Métis, to practice who I am, is to honour the teachings of the people of this place. Having Reg and Rose Crowshoe guide the methodology of this inquiry was a small way in which I can be a good relative to my kin in this city. Understanding ourselves as Métis in this territory was not a direction the research took; practicing our own stories of our Métisness was most prevailing. There is a great need for research to be conducted, in Southern Alberta, that illustrates the kinship systems that exist between the Métis and the Nations of Treaty 7 (Devine, 2010/11; Hancock, 2021). The inquiry of this research scratched the surface in understanding our day-to-day practices in our Métis contexts and much is desired to understand our practices and how they are further informed by the traditions and customs of this place.
Conclusion
Cities can be carnivorous places; they can consume and encourage us to conform and assimilate into mainstream society (Burley 2013; Campbell, 2019; Logan, 2015). This causes feelings of disconnect and not belonging. Moreover, Métis historicity specifically, is a story of diaspora (Fiola, 2021; McCall, 2012) caused by colonial violence. Before 1885, and more significantly thereafter, some of our people fled their homes out of fear of being Métis and sought refuge away from our homeland. Particularly for us living in Calgary, we are acutely aware of our displacement. This displacement is felt in knowing we are in other nations territory, but also, that the Métis history in Calgary is only coming into the purview of understanding the city as inclusive of Métis historicity and lifeways. Cities are places of reconnecting and practicing our Métis self-understandings, but more work needs to happen to bring other Métis together to share in stories of resilience, everyday practices, and how we can act as a collective community that promotes the health and well-being of Métis in the city of Calgary and other urban environments. Métis educator and scholar, Robert Hancock (2021) calls to Metis researchers, “we can understand ourselves and recognize each other as Métis through a collective memory of dispossession of our homeland, and we do not have to delay our project until we have returned” (p. 49). The stories of our research collective are indicative that we have an inherent right to belong, we always have, and we always will. The Métis principle of wahkohtowin – being in relationship with a living universe reifies this. We are, kaa-waakohtoochik: the ones who are related to each other.