Putting Down Roots

Métis Agency, Land Use, and Women’s Food Labour in a Qu’Appelle Valley Road Allowance Community

Cheryl Troupe

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781772841053
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: History

Mapping Métis history and cultural heritage through women's work

Centring kinship and the strength of women, Putting Down Roots reframes Métis road allowance communities as sites of profound resistance and resilience, restoring Métis life in places, times, and scholarship where it has been obscured by settler narratives. These communities were not peripheral spaces where Métis lived as squatters, but places where families culturally thrived by visiting each other, telling stories, sharing food, and providing mutual aid. With stories of Métis li vyeu (Elders) as its foundation, this innovative study reveals the agency embedded in the everyday actions of women's work, which sustained Métis identity, family systems, and relationships to land.

Cheryl Troupe charts a century of Métis presence and persistence in the Qu'Appelle Valley, from the end of the buffalo hunt in the 1850s, through displacement following the northwest resistances, resettlement on fringe Crown lands, ongoing political activism and opposition to Canadian land-use practices, and finally the dissolution of the road allowance community along Katepwa Lake in the 1950s. Focusing on female kinship relationships and food production, Putting Down Roots illuminates the ways women created the stability necessary to adapt to the rapidly changing economic, social, and political conditions that defined this period of Canadian history.

Troupe's sophisticated use of oral histories, archival sources, genealogies, photographs, and deep mapping links people and their stories to the spaces that are important to them. Adding a new dimension to the study of Métis history, Putting Down Roots brings to life the tremendous cultural strength that characterized Métis road allowance communities.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: “Down There in the Valley”: Introducing Bob and Margaret
• Chapter Two: Daughters of the Country: Women’s Labour in the Métis World
• Chapter Three: Petitioning for Rights and Taking Up Agriculture
• Chapter Four: Asserting Sovereignty to Secure Land
• Chapter Five: Securing Land Tenure: North-West Half-Breed Scrip and Homesteading
• Chapter Six: “We Got Our House Built by Seneca Roots”: Life on the Road Allowance
• Chapter Seven: Going Hunting Rabbits: Women’s Labour in Feeding the Family
• Chapter Eight: Contesting Government Intervention into Harvesting Spaces
• Chapter Nine: “This Is a Michif Road”: Métis Labour and Relief
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index