Ties undone : a gendered and racial analysis of the impact of the 1885 Northwest Rebellion in the Saskatchewan district

The Northwest Rebellion, in comparison to other North American civil wars, was short-lived and geographically contained, but for the people who lived through it, the residents of the Saskatchewan district, 1885 was a real and a frightening ordeal. By exploring micro-relations at the individual, family and community levels, and focusing on the connections between residents and ways that they related to each other, a portrait of the region emerges that reveals that Euro-Canadians and Aboriginals were linked to each other in many, and often subtle ways before the uprising. Drawing on personal papers, government and Hudson's Bay Company records, and oral histories, this study shows that race and gender were determining factors in how white, First Nations, Metis and mixed-blood men and women experienced both the conflict itself and its aftennath. Furthermore, its impact on residents' lives and society in the Saskatchewan territory was considerable and the effects long-lasting. Barriers, both physical and social, were created and solidified, and, although groups were still linked by the same family ties that bound them before the spring of 1885, the ways that they viewed each other changed after the rebellion. Mistrust and hostility that had not existed before, or that had been repressed, broke the bonds that connected racial groups, and sometimes families. The new order in Saskatchewan was one in which Euro-Canadians held power, and Aboriginals were second-class citizens barred from mainstream society. The rebellion accelerated white domination of the region, and acted as a catalyst for the racial divisions evident in Saskatchewan in the twentieth century

Portraits and Gravestones: Documenting the Transnational Lives of Nineteenth-Century British-Métis Students

The educational histories of mid-nineteenth century British-Métis students illuminate the transnational travels of British-Métis students and their roles in reifying and challenging British-imperial norms about race, class, and gender in the British Empire. In this paper, photographic and object-based artifacts are interwoven with family correspondence and other archival documents to explore the complexity of British-Métis children’s life stories and the extensive connections between elite British-Métis fur-trade families to kith and kin in North America and Britain. Studio portraits of British-Métis children and their gravesites represent both the best and the worst outcomes of elite educations for British-Métis children and youth. The studio portraits represent the norms of British middle-class respectability that elite British-Métis students learned at colonial and metropolitan schools as part of the imperial project. Gravestones and burial sites, on the other hand, reflect the possibilities and realities of death and trauma that were intertwined with fur-trade children’s boarding school education. By traveling to and living in Britain, British-Metis children challenged metropolitan understandings of the place and role of Indigenous peoples in the Empire and left their marks in Britain in their lives and their deaths.L’histoire de l’éducation des écoliers métis-britanniques du XIXe siècle éclaire les voyages transnationaux de ces enfants et leur rôle dans la réification et la contestation des normes impériales britanniques portant sur la race, la classe et le genre. Dans cet article, des artefacts, photographies et objets, s’associent à la correspondance familiale et à d’autres documents pour explorer la complexité des histoires de vie des enfants métis-britanniques et les liens étroits qu’entretenaient les familles de traiteurs de fourrures métis-britanniques avec leurs proches et leur parenté en Amérique du Nord et en Grande-Bretagne. Les photographies prises en studio des enfants métis-britanniques et leurs sépultures représentent le meilleur et le pire de l’éducation de l’élite des enfants et des jeunes métis-britanniques. La photographie de studio représente une norme de respectabilité de la classe moyenne britannique que les écoliers métis-britanniques assimilaient dans les écoles coloniales et métropolitaines en tant que partie intégrante du projet impérial. Les pierres tombales et les sites funéraires, de l’autre côté, traduisent les possibilités et les réalités de la mort et du traumatisme qui étaient indissociables de l’éducation des enfants dans les pensionnats de la traite des fourrures. Lorsqu’ils se rendaient en Grande-Bretagne pour y vivre, les enfants métis-britannique mettaient au défi les conceptions de la place et du rôle des peuples autochtones dans l’Empire et, par leur vie et leur mort, imprimaient leur marque en Grande-Bretagne