Mothers of the Resistance 1869–1870

This site recounts families generated by “half-breed women … having no coat of arms but a ‘totem’ to look back to.” Or so they were derided by Canadian man of letters, Charles Mair, in his divisive missive published as “From Red River” on page one of the Toronto Daily Globe of 4 January 1869.[1] As Mair’s comment indicates, Red River women were subject to being dismissed in the racist-patriarchal colonial system that had been inherited from England by the new Dominion of Canada, and that its founders (the Anglophones of Ontario at any rate) had embraced for their projected nation.[2] But, to state what should be an obvious point, Red River women were the mothers of Assiniboia — the district, and the country that was formerly known as Rupert’s Land but renamed by the Legislative Assembly of Assiniboia on 18 March 1870. Without those mothers, Louis Riel and others who resisted annexation to gain confederation could not have ‘fathered’ the province of Manitoba.

Aside from from being perpetual works in progress — sample family portraits with mistakes, omissions, and inaccuracies, both inherent and inadvertent — there are problems with these genealogies (still in the process of being uploaded to this site, and revisions will be ongoing).

First, the system of genealogical construction that is traditional in Western societies reflects the colonial, by way of privileging the patriarchal.[3] In the Red River instance, that system of construction is difficult to challenge let alone to escape. It is, after all, often only by tracing the the surnames of husbands and fathers through documents gathered and archived under the auspices, requirements, or benevolence of the colonial state that a genealogy extending much beyond a generation can be populated with women — some of whom are otherwise nameless. Further, it is by surname that a genealogy can be organized most readily into a coherent and readable whole that is amenable to cross-referencing and to identifying a woman’s step- and extended families. The genealogies uploaded as initial content for the pages of this site, therefore, reflect the colonial contexts, past and present, in which both the researched and myself-as-researcher are embedded. Conceivably, it should be possible to move beyond these initial constructions  and communicate maternal lineages at Red River more clearly. To date, however, that remains a project-in-waiting.

Second, these genealogies are cumbersome and not straight-forward lists of people who lived and died at Red River because families, then as now, were complicated. The people of the settlement were dynamic. They moved over time, within and without the settlement. Sometimes movement was temporary — to conduct a course of work, or attain an education for example. Sometimes movement proved permanent — when an individual, members of a family, or many members of an extended family relocated to another settlement. But sometimes some people moved back again, or their children did, or their grandchildren did (eventually, even generations-great-grandchildren might do so). As far as possible, places of residence are listed in the genealogies, though that life detail is often unknown.[4]

Third, Red River Settlement and other places of residence in the North-West were complicated. Their names changed — over time and according to what language was used to refer to them. And, at Red River the physical dimensions of parishes within the settlement, along with the outer limits of the entire settlement, changed over time as well. Boundaries shifted (during a relatively short period: beginning as a place of settlement in the colonial sense in about 1810 — but as early as 1792 if Chief Peeh-quaa-is/ Pa-Kwai-es/ Peguis’ first farming settlers at St. Peter’s Parish are acknowledged — and ending 1870). Places such as Portage la Prairie, St. Laurent, and Oak Point, though settled by people from, and related to people of Red River, were not necessarily part of Red River Settlement in terms of falling within its political boundary. The Legislative Assembly of Assiniboia, however, made sure those outlying settlements were included as of 1870 (see map, Reconstructing place, Red River 1870). By 1871 a significant discontinuity had been occasioned by the creation of Manitoba. New boundaries had been devised. Red River Settlement and the district of Assiniboia had ceased to exist in a formal, geopolitical sense. New names were applied across the landscape and old names were modified as territory was carved into new districts and locations were re-mapped as Canadian possessions.

Despite shortcomings, however, these genealogies can be used to recover a sense of the Aboriginal past in what is now Manitoba. The women listed are overwhelmingly Indigenous, through their maternal lineage, even if not marked as such. And, as far as paternal lineage, many of the “half-breed” women could have claimed ancestral heraldry as auspicious as any Charles Mair might have wished for himself.

For me, the genealogies reinforce the argument that Red River was a place of family and community that espoused a ‘perfect freedom.’ Individuals

fully engaged in a “shared world” as it was — not as it was ‘supposed’ to be — and thereby experienced heterogeneity as the norm. They were comfortably acculturated to pluralism. Multiple languages, different lifestyles and varied occupations were available from which to choose routes to realize personal destinies. They were not confined by ‘either or’ choices that were limiting or final.[5]

Red River was a place of interconnection (all of the families listed here link to one another): Where any boundaries that might have been posed by language, religion, and heritage were breached (in spite of colonizers’ determination to impose ‘othering’ culturalist typologies and adhere to systems of racialization). Where bloodlines were honoured (blood being understood as a metaphor for community, and lines as sympathies and inter-connections, sometimes familial, sometimes socio-economic and political),[6] with the many voices heard and accommodated democratically. Where the dominant pattern among the majority of settlers was not one of Indigenous women being progressively ‘phased out’ as suitable marriage partners on the basis of ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’.[7] Where women too were Otepaymsuak — “their own boss.”

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Notes:

[1] Excerpt, Charles Mair, “From Red River,” The Daily Globe (4 January 1869), 1:

“After putting up at the Dutchman’s [George Emmerling’s] hotel there [at the Town of Winnipeg], I went over and stayed at Dr. Schultz’s [John Christian Schultz], after a few days. The change was comfortable, I assure you, from the racket of a motley crowd of half-breeds, playing billiards and drinking to the quiet and solid comfort of a home.  I was invited to a dinner-party at Beſſs [sic: Bell’s? Begg’s?], where I found the Governor’s brother-in-law, a wealthy merchant here, Isabister [sic], and other Nor’ Westers. Altogether, I received hospitalities to my heart’s content, and I left the place thoroughly pleased with most that I had met. There are jealousies and heart burnings, however. Many wealthy people are married to half-breed women, who, having no coat of arms but a “totem” to look back to, make up for the deficiency by biting the backs of their ‘white’ sisters. The white sisters fall back upon their whiteness, whilst the husbands treat each other with desperate courtesies and hospitalities, with a view to filthy lucre in the background. …

The half-breeds are the only people here who are starving. Five thousand of them have to be fed this winter, and it is their own fault – they won’t farm. They will hunt baffaloes, drive ox-carts 500 miles up and 500 miles back to St. Cloud, at the rate of twenty miles a day: do anything but farm. Hitherto, it was so easy to live here that it didn’t matter whether they farmed or not; but the grasshopper put a stop to that last summer, and now they are at their beam ends. As for the farmers: Scotch, English and French, not one of them requires relief; other than seed wheat, which they are quite able to pay for. This is the true state of the ease here: but it does not lessen the claims upon humanity.”

The typography of the article — use of a double long s (ſſ ) — lends uncertainty to determining the host of the dinner party attended by Mair. The guests might have assembled at the home of George Bell of St. John’s Parish, if he had worked in the fur trade or was a descendant of the former cooper of the same name who had worked for the Pacific Fur Company in Astoria/ Oregon. But Bell was a relatively young man who appears to have arrived at Red River from Scotland, so seems an unlikely candidate.  It is also possible, and more plausible, that the dinner was hosted by Charles Begg (of Scotland) and wife Catherine Spence (Métis), who resided in in the parish of St. Clement’s / Mapleton. Begg was older and a former servant of the Hudson’s Bay Company. He was more likely than Bell to have formed contacts with Mair’s fellow guests at the party, they being: merchant A.G.B. Bannatyne (married to Annie McDermot), who was the brother-in-law of HBC Governor William Mactavish (married to Mary Sarah/ Sally McDermot); and possibly William Isbister married to Mary Anne Begg, who was Charles Begg’s daughter. The most obvious candidates for the ‘white sisters’ with falsely courteous husbands would be Agnes Campbell Farquharson, wife of John C. Schultz, and Elizabeth Louise McKenney, who was Schultz’s stepsister and who would, by September, be Mair’s wife.

Mair’s assertions regarding looming ‘starvation,’ among ‘half-breeds’ defy logic: it is hard to imagine, for example, how grasshopper’s were a more devastating occurrence to freighters than to farmers; or how Mair expected the farming “Scotch, English and French” (most of whom were Métis or belonged to Métis families), who required no relief “other than seed wheat, which they are quite able to pay for,” were to get any seed without freighters — whether overland or water-borne — bringing it in. That is, farmers were no more independently capable in the settlement than were freighters.

A Red River rebuttal to Mair’s letter, penned 1 February 1869, “by a half-breed … rightly indignant of the stupidities [of] … a certain Mr. Mair,” printed as “Letter from a half-breed (L.R.) to Le Nouveau Monde (reprinted from Le Nouveau Monde, February 25, 1869),” [translated to English from the original French, in W.L. Morton ed., Alexander Begg’s Red River Journal And other Papers Relative to the Red River Resistance of 1869-70 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1956), 399–402]:

“Please be so good as to give me a little space in the columns of your journal, in order that I too may write of Red River.

I cannot resist that desire since I have read the enormities which a journal of Upper Canada, the Globe, has just uttered, in publishing a letter of a certain Mr. Mair, who arrived in Red River last fall. This gentleman, an English Canadian, is, it is said, gifted in making verses; if such is the fact I should advise him strongly to cultivate his talent, for in that way his writings would make up in rhyme for what they lack in reason.

Scarcely a month after his arrival in this country, Mr. Mair desired to describe it and its inhabitants. He succeeded rather like the navigator who, passing by a league from the coast, wrote in his log: ‘The people of this country seemed to us to be well disposed ….”

I know some men who have more than two weeks’ experience and who say the opposite of this gentleman. He says finally: the city of Portage la Prairie is destined to become one of the most important in the country: however, I shall not speak to you of it until I have seen it.

And why not? You speak of a great many other things that you have not had time to see or know; that would be worth as much as the remainder of your letter; as much as the scarcely courteous terms, I will even say barely civilized, which you use in speaking of the ladies of the country, who certainly by all reports are equal to the ladies of your country.

Be it said in passing, Mr. Mair, if we had only you as a specimen of civilized men, we should not have a very high idea of them. If I wished to amuse myself by wielding the pen as you do for the sole pleasure of uttering follies to the world, I should have some amusing things to say on your account ….

L.R.” [“almost certainly” Louis Riel]

For more of Mair’s writing on Red River, see “Transcripts: The Red River Letters of Charles Mair“, “Transcript: Re: ‘The North-West Papers’ (Mair’s Letter to Macdougall)“, “Transcript: Re: ‘The North-West Papers’ (Mair’s Letter to Macdougall)“, “Transcript: Hamilton Spectator Re: Mair’s Letter to Macdougall“, and “Transcript: Mair (late of Red River) invents the Settlement, the Métis, and the Resistance for the Globe” (archive.org). For another of Louis Riel’s responses, mocking Mair for having his comeuppance at the hands of Annie BANNATYNE, see “un chien de Mer’ (Là-bas),” Songs of the Resistance (archive.org).

[2] For an indication of my orientation with respect to historiography, see Timothy J. Stanley, “Why I Killed Canadian History: Towards an Anti-Racist History in Canada,” Histoire sociale/ Social History, vol. 33, no. 65 (2000), 79–103; and “Historiography and Red River Settlement,” this site.

[3] Martha Addante, “Rupturing the Patriarchal Family: Female Genealogy in Disappearing Moon Café [sic: italics in source],” Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering 4, 2 (2002): 201–214.

[4] Locations at some points in time often can be traced on scrip affidavits and claims. Some of these can be viewed online, as digital images of microfilmed pages, through Library and Archives Canada LAC] (‘Collection search‘, select ‘Archive search’, enter ‘RG15’ followed by the desired ‘name’). With patience and perseverance, most of the collection can be viewed online (some records remain elusive), as digitized images of microfilm reels, through Canadian Heritage, North-West Territories Métis scrip applications (73 reels) and Métis and Original White Settlers affidavits (54 reels, some of which might not be relevant).

Update: For an excellent description of online Red River sources see Jackie Corrigan, “In Search of Red River Ancestors,” As Canadian As Can Be website (19 October 2022), https://hoguegirardin.wordpress.com/category/red-river-settlement/.

Difficulties: Please note that where, in these pages, a link to scrip is followed by “not available online” the link is to a LAC listing that was not accompanied by a digitized image at the time of compiling. [Whinging:] As well, LAC has attempted to update its online system, so links have been broken and it will take time before that circumstance is corrected on these pages. Updates: as of 8 March 2022 the LAC search function is proving less than optimal — for example the known scrip affidavit for William Falster (previously available as an LAC scrip affidavit) seems to have disappeared, and the known scrip affidavit of Alexander Favel (previously available as an LAC scrip affidavit) disappeared as well; as of 18 March 2022 the LAC databases (scrip, census, &c.) did not link to images, and the Canadiana.org images of scrip records did not load (the latter problem was resolved relatively quickly and an easier to view system update was installed); as of 9 July 2022 everything reliant on https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca was down. Unfortunately it appears there are plans to redesign the Canada census pages as well (see https://thediscoverblog.com/2022/07/); oddly, as of 13 July 2022 jpeg images of LAC scrip pages were still accessible online, and could be viewed one at a time by beginning at about http://data2.archives.ca/e/e001/e000010013.jpg. and increasing the final numerical sequence value in the address (to at least as far as /e.000029000.jpg.); as of 21 December 2022 none of the RG15 records nor any censuses were available to view; as of 4 January 2023 scrip record images took an exceptionally long time to load.

[5] Norma Jean Hall, ” A ‘Perfect Freedom’: Red River as a Settler Society, 1810–1870,” M.A. thesis (University of Manitoba, 2003), 75, 148, 168, further argues that colonialist Canada’s reliance on nationalism-as-dogma (a central tenet of fascism) was antithetical to diversity and pluralism (characterized as anarchy), so instead imposed “binary descriptions … amenable to being interpreted as proof of oppositional difference [that demanded eradication/ annihilation]. To those who agreed with the pronouncements of renowned British political theorist John Stewart Mill published in 1861, t he existence of such difference was believed antipathetic to the realization of practical nationhood. The viability of a polity was assumed to rest on its absolute unity — paradoxically, a unity sought through the imposition of terms of equally absolute division.” All of which was in keeping with ‘divide and rule’ colonialist policy (see On the Wedge of Empire this site).

[6] See Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Following the River: Traces of Red River Women (Hamilton ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2017), 17–18; entry for Sinclair, Elizabeth ‘Betsy’/ ‘Betsey’, “Other SINCLAIRs” this site, with note on the Red River language on kinship; and W.J. Healy, Women of Red River (1923), frontispiece, “Out and in the river is winding  The links of its long, red chain“.

[7] See Brian Martin Gallagher, “The Whig Interpretation of the History of Red River,” MA thesis UBCV (1986) pdf, who lays out a solid challenge to the notion put forward by Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties (1980); and Norma Hall, “Identifying and Quantifying Métis ‘Élite’: An Analysis of relative wealth, based on Red River Settlement censuses of 1835,” (2002; 2016).

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Header Image:

Derived from Johan Carl Kraus, “Acer Negundo,” Afbeeldingen der fraaiste, meest uitheemsche boomen en heesters, (1802), 116 (n 417), illustrating twigs, leaves, blossoms, and seeds of the Acer negundo, or Manitoba Maple, the only maple in North America with compound leaves.

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Compiled and edited by Norma J. Hall Ph.D (Canadian History)

Published 31 July 2016; revisions ongoing through 2022.