Metis Pioneers by Doris Jeanne MacKinnon

Author:Doris Jeanne MacKinnon [Doris Jeanne MacKinnon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781772123630
Publisher: The University of Alberta Press

Marie Rose Delorme Smith, seen here sometime after her marriage to Charlie Smith. Photo undated. Shirley-Mae McCargar and Donald McCargar.

Writing from the perspective of a pioneer, Marie Rose concluded that, as a youngster, “our wants were few and simple; home industries supplied our need.”93 Life in the Prairie West as one of the first homesteaders necessitated that wants would have to be simple, and home industries must be made to supply basic needs. Even if one had great wealth, the availability of supplies necessitated a reliance on home industry. Yet readers really had little to suggest that Marie Rose’s home industries were in any way different from those relied upon by the new settlers to the Prairie West, and that those home industries were actually inspired by her Metis culture.

Although she seemed hesitant to identify herself as Metis and any of her home industries as linked to Metis culture, Marie Rose still wished to record intimate details of Indigenous culture, most often from the third-person perspective. Her descriptions of cultural practices such as the Sun Dance and Ghost Dance, and the rituals to honour a dead chief, were at times elaborate. One example includes her detailed description of sweat lodges:

There were some great medicine men and women among them. They built a round sweat house, making a hole in the middle. The frame was made of willow sticks and covered with buffalo hides so no steam could escape…They heated big rocks in the fire until red then rolled them into the house in this hole. They then poured cold water over these red hot rocks…They crawled in and you could hear them making all kinds of noise, groaning and singing. After they came out they would go to the lake or stream and jump in. It did not seem to hurt them, in fact it was healthy.94

There are glimpses of Marie Rose’s own travel and trading activities, in which she would have obtained her traditional remedies and home supplies, and where she likely witnessed the customs she described in various parts of her manuscripts. For example, there is one occasion when she began to tell readers about a trip her friend Kootenai Brown’s second wife, Ni-ti-mous, took, in which she travelled as far as Flathead country. In the midst of relating the story of Ni-ti-mous’s travels, the narration reverted to first person, and Marie Rose wrote, “We would be gone for three or four weeks. Sometimes a snow storm would catch us and then we would see hard times, no grass for the horses.” She continued,

On one of these trips we went right through to the Flathead country. We stayed with Flathead Indians for a week. They gave me some skins all ready tanned and a horse for paying them a visit. This is an Indian Custom.95

This excerpt provides some understanding of how she accessed her materials for traditional works when she lived in Pincher Creek, but it also demonstrates she was always hesitant to take full ownership of her close ties to Indigenous people.

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