Defining Métis

Timothy P. Foran

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780887555114
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

Defining Métis examines categories used in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Catholic missionaries to describe Indigenous people in what is now northwestern Saskatchewan. It argues that the construction and evolution of these categories reflected missionaries'changing interests and agendas.

Defining Métis sheds light on the earliest phases of Catholic missionary work among Indigenous peoples in western and northern Canada. It examines various interrelated aspects of this work, including the beginnings of residential schooling, transportation and communications, and relations between the Church, the Hudson's Bay Company, and the federal government.

While focusing on the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and their central mission at Île-à-la-Crosse, this study illuminates broad processes that informed Catholic missionary perceptions and impelled their evolution over a fifty-three-year period. In particular, this study illuminates processes that shaped Oblate conceptions of sauvage and métis. It does this through a qualitative analysis of documents that were produced within the Oblates' institutional apparatus—official correspondence, mission journals, registers, and published reports.

Foran challenges the orthodox notion that Oblate commentators simply discovered and described a singular, empirically existing, and readily identifiable Métis population. Rather, he contends that Oblates played an important role in the conceptual production of les métis.

CHAPTER 1

Saint-Jean-Baptiste in an Evolving Mission Network

The centennial of Saint-Jean-Baptiste mission at Île-à-la-Crosse occasioned the publication of the first book-length history of a Catholic mission in western Canada—Germain Lesage’s Capitale d’une solitude (1946). Commissioned by the Vicariate Apostolic of Keewatin, the book presented a collective portrait of the priests, nuns, and lay brothers who had staffed Saint-Jean-Baptiste over the previous century. Its avowed aim was to inspire missionary vocations by introducing Catholic readers to paragons of service, devotion, and charity: “Légeard, the long-suffering one, faithful servant of the Sacred Heart”; “Rapet, the kind-hearted one”; “Pénard, the philosopher, historian, and linguist”; “Dubé, a father to the schoolchildren”; “Labelle, the jack of all trades”; “Bowes, the builder”; “Agnès, Dandurand, Nadeau, Eugénie, model mothers with boundless hearts.”¹ Saint-Jean-Baptiste thus served as a showcase in which to display the diverse talents and qualities required for the extension of God’s kingdom on earth. It represented the ideal harmonization of these talents and qualities, a harmonization that gave rise to a “Christian city” within a vast expanse of pagan wilderness. The isolation—or “solitude”—of this city underscored the sacrifice of its founding citizens and reminded readers that the work of evangelization was far from complete, for beyond loomed a hinterland where the light of Christ had still to penetrate.²

While arguably effective as a rhetorical strategy, Lesage’s emphasis on isolation obscures the historical connectedness of Saint-Jean-Baptiste to regional, national, and global processes. The mission belonged to a network that conveyed people, information, funds, and freight over vast distances. This network operated under ecclesiastical aegis and existed for the fulfillment of Christ’s mandate to evangelize the nations.³ It was sustained—and gradually extended—through collaborative interaction between lower clergy in the mission field, local superiors, regional prelates, and international administrative and financial bodies. This chapter examines the role of Saint-Jean-Baptiste within this network during the latter half of the nineteenth century, charting the mission’s rise as a central node (1846–66) and its decline into marginality (1867–98). In the process, the chapter speaks to a broader transformation of the Catholic mission network in which Saint-Jean-Baptiste was embedded.

The founding of Saint-Jean-Baptiste represented a critical step in the extension of the Catholic mission network into Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory.⁴ Since his installation as the first resident bishop in the region in 1822, Joseph-Norbert Provencher had confined his personnel to the environs of his administrative headquarters at Saint-Boniface in the Red River Colony.⁵ The principal reason for this confinement was the HBC’s ban on missionary activity in its chartered territory beyond the colony—a subject that will receive further consideration in the next chapter. This ban was lifted in 1839 when the governor and committee of the HBC invited the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society to establish posts at Norway House, Moose Factory, Cumberland House, and Fort Edmonton. The following year, the Company permitted the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) to deploy a catechist to The Pas on the Saskatchewan River.⁶ Determined to curb the spread of evangelical Protestantism in the interior, Provencher adopted a program of expansion beyond the confines of the Red River Colony. On 20 April 1842, he dispatched Jean-Baptiste Thibault—a thirty-two-year-old secular priest from Lévis, Lower Canada—on horseback across the western plain in search of a strategic location for a missionary beachhead.⁷ Thibault established his residence seventy-five kilometres west of Fort Edmonton on the southern shore of Lac Sainte-Anne.⁸ From there, he reconnoitred eastward along the North Saskatchewan River between Fort Edmonton and Fort Carlton.⁹

Thibault’s attention shifted northward after his visit to Fort Pitt in the winter of 1843–44. There he encountered “a few sauvages from Île-à-la-Crosse” who expressed keen interest in receiving his ministrations.¹⁰ Yet due to pressing obligations at Lac Sainte-Anne and Saint-Boniface, Thibault was unable to travel to Île-à-la-Crosse until the following year.¹¹ He arrived by canoe on 9 May 1845, and was warmly received by seventy-three-year-old Roderick McKenzie—Chief Factor of the English River District at Île-à-la-Crosse.¹² Over the next two weeks, Thibault visited approximately eighty “Montagnais” families living within the vicinity of the HBC fort.¹³ He taught them to recite prayers in French and marvelled at their eagerness for further instruction. “All of them, from the youngest to the oldest, show an incredible zeal to learn to serve God,” he reported to Provencher on 24 May. “Although my work is sometimes very hard, I must admit that it is greatly softened by the sense of consolation I feel among sauvages who are so docile and so eager to know the way to heaven.”¹⁴ Envisaging mass conversion, Thibault urged his bishop to deploy missionaries to Île-à-la-Crosse without delay.¹⁵ On 26 May, he took leave of his catechumens and continued northward to Portage La Loche.¹⁶

Thibault’s report persuaded Provencher to establish a permanent mission at Île-à-la-Crosse. In April 1846, the bishop commissioned the two youngest priests in his jurisdiction to lay the foundations of the mission—twenty-seven-year-old Louis-François Laflèche (a secular priest from Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade, Lower Canada) and twenty-two-year-old Alexandre-Antonin Taché (an Oblate from Rivière-du-Loup, Lower Canada).¹⁷ The latter commission marked a departure from Provencher’s exclusive reliance on secular clergy to undertake missionary work.¹⁸ The bishop believed that the launch of missions sauvages beyond Red River required a degree of discipline, cohesion, and financial stability that only a religious community could provide.¹⁹ He had consequently appealed to the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate in May 1844. Having only recently established an institutional presence in Canada—at Longueuil (1842) and Bytown (1844)—the Oblates did not have sufficient numbers to deploy a hefty contingent into Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory. Nevertheless, Josepheugène-Bruno Guigues—the superior of Oblates in Canada—received instructions from the Oblate General Administration to choose two of his personnel from Longueuil to serve under Provencher.²⁰ Mindful of the HBC’s aversion to “foreign priests,” Guigues narrowed his choice to the few Canadian recruits in his otherwise entirely French community.²¹ Taché seemed an obvious candidate for, despite his extreme youth, he had already displayed an aptitude for teaching and an earnest desire to serve in the west.²² He reached Saint-Boniface in the company of his new superior, Pierre Aubert, on 25 August 1845. The two Oblates spent the following months ministering to the local Catholic population until Taché received his assignment to Île-à-la-Crosse.²³

On 8 July 1846, Taché and Laflèche boarded HBC barges at Fort Garry and set out upon the tortuous waterways that conveyed the Portage La Loche Brigade to Île-à-la-Crosse each summer.²⁴ Having obtained free passage through an agreement between Provencher and George Simpson—governor of the HBC’s trading territories in British North America—the young missionaries descended the Red River into Lake Winnipeg and sailed northward to the source of the Nelson River. After a brief sojourn at Norway House, they crossed the northern end of the lake to Grand Rapids and proceeded up the Saskatchewan River to Cumberland House. They then ascended the rapids of the Sturgeon-Weir and crossed over Frog Portage to the English River (known today as the Churchill River). On 10 September, Taché and Laflèche reached Île-à-la-Crosse after travelling 1,600 kilometres in just over two months.²⁵ With winter steadily approaching, the missionaries postponed constructing a residence and accepted McKenzie’s offer of temporary room and board at the HBC fort—a cluster of houses and stores enclosed within a palisade. There they spent five months studying Cree and Chipewyan under the tutelage of McKenzie’s resident interpreter.²⁶

In spring, Taché and Laflèche began physical work on the mission and entrusted their labours to the patronage of Saint John the Baptist.²⁷ They settled into a crude log cabin that McKenzie had offered them as a gesture of goodwill. Located approximately one and a half kilometres south of the HBC fort, the cabin stood on the long-abandoned site of the NWC fort near the tip of the peninsula. It measured eleven by seven metres and had yet to be caulked, such that the elements found their way into every nook and cranny. The missionaries therefore spent two weeks filling chinks with mud and hay, then plastering the interior with a mixture of earth and ash.²⁸ At one end of the cabin, Laflèche built sleeping quarters and an alcove for the sacrament. The remainder of the “maison-omnibus” served as kitchen, refectory, parlour, confessional, choir, and nave.²⁹ These functions tended to intersect and to blend awkwardly, as Oblate missionary Vital-Justin Grandin later recalled in his description of Masses officiated by Taché in 1848:

The missionaries celebrated Mass in the same apartment in which they cooked their meals, boiling their fish in a cauldron suspended over the chimney fire…. So, after communion, the celebrant would turn toward the congregation to say “Dominus vobiscum” [“The Lord be with you”] only to see his surplice-clad cantor gripping the cauldron with the help of a rag and swirling it around to prevent its contents from burning, all the while offering the congregational response [“Et cum spiritu tuo,” meaning “And with your spirit”].… Father Laflèche thus fused the rather disparate roles of cantor and cook while Father Taché did his best to keep a straight face.³⁰

In order to lessen their reliance on the provisioning services of the HBC, Taché and Laflèche cleared a garden plot and so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: From sauvage to métis: The Evolution of Missionary-Made Categories at Île-à-la-Crosse
• Chapter 1: Saint-Jean-Baptiste in an Evolving Mission Network
• Chapter 2: Oblate Perceptions of the Hudson’s Bay Company
• Chapter 3: Oblates and the Beginnings of Residential Education
• Chapter 4: Oblates and the Categorization of Indigeneity
• Conclusion: La civilisation moderne: The World Came Seeping In
• Acknowledgements
• Appendix: The Evolution of a Catholic Mission Network: Saint-Jean-Baptiste and Its Outposts, 1852–72
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index