Finding Otipemisiwak by Andrea Currie

Author:Andrea Currie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press

NIIZHOZIIBEAN–TWO RIVERS VI

My French ancestors were the bad boys for whom the rough, nascent cities of Trois-Rivières, Quebec, and Montreal were too refined. They came to this country for adventure in the wilderness, and they kept going farther and farther west to find it. From the seventeenth through to the nineteenth century, the canoes of the voyageurs were present on the Assiniboine and Red Rivers.

This was not to the liking of the Assiniboine people, who moved farther west and southwest themselves into what is now North Dakota and Montana. By the second half of the nineteenth century, European settlement began in earnest along the banks of the rivers—and the original people who were in relationship with those rivers were becoming fewer and farther between.

Some of their descendants married the newcomers and became the founding families of the Métis Nation, settling along the riverbanks. Long, narrow lots provided the Métis with access to the river, fertile black soil for growing wheat, oats, barley, and vegetables, and some land back from the river for pasture. These lots also allowed for proximity to neighbours, essential to our communal way of life. This way of sharing the land met the practical needs of transportation, irrigation, and communication since the river was still the main thoroughfare, and the growing season was hot and dry. After the Hudson’s Bay Company sold these lands to the British Crown right out from under my ancestors, surveyors arrived from Ontario and tried to revise the apportioning of land using the square lots that were the norm there. Putting these surveyors on the run was one of the first acts of resistance of my people.

The Red River received its designation as a Canadian Heritage River in 2007. The Canadian Heritage Rivers System is administered by the federal, provincial, and territorial governments to conserve and protect rivers that provide the best examples of the historical and cultural role rivers have played in our country. The Sustainable Development agency of Manitoba is responsible for monitoring the well-being of the Red River. In its ten-year monitoring report published in 2018, it states that the Red has been “the site of numerous historical and cultural events.”23 One of the best known of those events involved my great-great-grandfather, Elzéar Goulet.

In 1869, Elzéar was a hardworking Métis man with a growing family, living in the bush not far from the Red River Settlement. He was the mail courier between the settlement and a community to the south known as Pembina. He travelled back and forth on the Crow Wing Trail, by dogsled in the winter and on horseback the rest of the year. “He was the Pony Express!” my mother told me, laughing.

Trouble was coming to the settlement. The government of John A. Macdonald had tried to install a governor in the territory, but the Métis prevented William McDougall from coming in. Macdonald intended to annex the territory, which they called Rupert’s Land, into Confederation and encourage more settlement. This plan did not go over well with those who already lived there.

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