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Cheryl Troupe and Doris Jeanne MacKinnon are co-editors of Métis Matriarchs: Agents of Transition, published by University of Regina Press

Metis women, generally of advanced age, hold a place of authority within extended family systems. They were, and continue to be, seen as matriarchs and respected for their age, experience, and reputation. Metis family stories and oral histories are filled with examples of older Metis women – aunties and grannies – who held a position of authority within extended families.

These women, known as matriarchs, provided formal and informal family and community leadership and were often sought for counsel and decision-making in social, economic and political matters. They helped mediate family affairs, making decisions for the family’s good. In many instances, matriarchs exhibited a clearly defined economic authority, acting in business affairs for their families. They often supported their families through domestic, farm and ranch labour or artistic production. They also fulfilled a family and community responsibility, acting as healers and midwives and providing care to children and adults in their immediate and extended families. They acted as cultural teachers, contributing to child rearing and passing on cultural values, stories, practices, and traditions. 

Matriarchs were also the ones who knew family histories and genealogies. In closely knit, extended families, it was essential to understand how individuals were related to one another so that marriages could be informally arranged and kinship networks remained strong. It was also the role of Matriarchs to informally, and sometimes more formally, monitor the actions and behaviours of family and community members, ensuring that social transgressions were known and dealt with and community values upheld. Through these activities, family matriarchs provided collective social control and stability to their family and community at a time when Métis faced increased pressure to assimilate and adapt. In fulfilling their roles, Matriarchs were both mothers of the nation and agents of transition, providing cultural continuity and stability and holding families and communities together through a period of immense change.

This collection is a series of qualitative case studies that follows a biographical approach. It provides an intimate examination of the lives of several Metis women from the early nineteenth century to today, providing glimpses into their everyday lives and helping us understand change and consistency in Métis family roles and responsibilities. The authors engage with a history that has the potential to expand our understanding of the critical contributions made by Metis women both during the height of the fur trade and the buffalo hunt and into the transitional period that followed. These stories reveal the agency of Metis women and the significant contributions they made throughout different stages of their lives that positioned them as matriarchs in their families and communities. This collection places Metis women in positions of authority within their family systems. These women were (or are) hardworking women who played critical roles in their families’ and communities’ social, economic, and political lives. These stories promote a positive image of practical Metis women, drawing attention to everyday actions where women saw what needed to be done to support their families and communities and then did it.

These women’s lives are stories of strength. Their stories detail women’s resilience, resistance, refusal, and adaptation in navigating and responding to immense social, political, economic and environmental change by the male-dominated, patriarchal and settler colonial Canadian State. These women responded to shifting fur trade economies and the buffalo hunt’s decline by looking for opportunities in an emerging agricultural economy. They resisted government intervention in their everyday lives in a growing settler nation that continued to displace, dispossess, and marginalize Metis in rural, road allowance and urban centres in the twentieth century.  They worked hard to provide for and protect their families and often made difficult decisions about resisting racism, sexism, and assimilation. These Metis women held steadfast to cultural values, traditional skills, kinship networks and relationships with the land to sustain their families and communities. These stories complicate the story of Canadian nation-building and add nuance to Indigenous responses to settler colonialism at a time of increased surveillance of and intervention into Indigenous lives and their subsequent marginalization and removal from the landscape. These women acted as agents of transition because of the myriad of roles they played in their extended families, most significantly, the role they played as Matriarchs.

These life stories demonstrate a breadth of experience and commonality, yielding essential insights into the collective experiences of Metis women as matriarchs of their families and communities. Indeed, they bring new light to the historical experiences of Metis in the fur trade and development of Western Canada. This collection of stories draws attention to the role of Metis, and Metis women in particular, in settlement of the West, as farmers, ranchers and labourers.

This collection offers lessons on the enduring importance of Metis matriarchs in their families and in shaping current identities. The matriarchs examined here speak to the diversity, fluidity and resilience of Métis identity, history, and culture. The authors, many of whom are Métis and connected to the profiled women, have used a family-centred approach, exploring the archival and oral records, the stories of Métis elders and family, as well as treasured pieces of Métis material culture left behind in families, museums and private collections. Their stories demonstrate the transmission and retention of Métis culture and identity across generations and the significant contributions Métis women matriarchs made to their families and communities as they adapted to dramatically changing times. It is hoped that their stories and methodological approach will inspire others to look within their own families for examples where women acted with strength and agency in their everyday experiences, further stimulating new research with and about Metis women as matriarchs.

The women featured herein lived in what was considered the North-West Territories during the nineteenth century, and what became Western Canadian provinces in the early twentieth century; as a result, there is a commonality of experiences for many Métis women, but there is also nuance and diversity in their everyday lives, in how they responded to, resisted and refused settler colonial intrusion and the ways they persisted in the face of the many transitions that infringed on their traditional ways of life. There is also a commonality in how these women assumed authority in providing family and community leadership and made decisions in the best interests of their extended families by drawing on their cultural understandings and experiences.

The women explored in this collection represent real and symbolic examples of the strength, resilience and agency of Metis matriarchs. They embody resistance to the colonial and patriarchal ideology that has inspired systemic violence perpetrated against Indigenous women and girls. This systemic violence has persisted since the imposition of forced displacement of Indigenous peoples and the historic interference of their societal structures. The evidence of strong Metis communities that emerged through generations and supported the transmission of cultural knowledge evidenced in the lives of the Metis women explored in this collection invites us to expand our exploration of Metis history further. These stories challenge and disrupt the narrative of the Canadian State that has long dominated the presentation of the lives of Indigenous women. They invite us to appreciate and to further explore the roles of Metis matriarchs as agents of transition, both during the fur trade when the Metis developed as a nation and into the present as they continue to serve integral roles as knowledge keepers and leaders of their Metis communities.

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