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Red River Poetics: Toward a Métis Literary History
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- Author / Creator
- Tétreault, Matthew J M
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The study of Métis literature is a growing field in Canada, related to broader Indigenous literary studies, but also reflecting the emergence of a distinct Métis body of writing. However, there has been a tendency to compartmentalize the field into particular categories, be it through language, publication history and production (historical vs. contemporary), genre, and so on, which has hindered its broader reception and recognition as a distinct national literature. This dissertation contributes to the fields of Métis literary studies and Métis studies by providing the first literary history of the Red River Métis. It offers a comprehensive overview of Métis writing in French and English over the last two centuries, and troubles easy categorization, by surveying, mapping out, contextualizing, historicizing, and analyzing Métis literary production through its rise, ruptures—linguistic and cultural shifts—and resurgence.
Borrowing from methodologies of Indigenous literary nationalism, this literary history offers a balance of close textual analysis, historical readings, and contextualization as it presents a history of Métis writing. It centres Métis texts and scholarship in the interpretive framework of Métis literature and, without suggesting a linear development, narrates the rise of a Métis literary tradition. Admittedly incomplete, as an entirely comprehensive literary history is “impossible,” this dissertation also strikes a balance between the focused analysis of “canonical” texts, which emerge from the historical survey, and the encyclopedic survey of other Métis texts and writers which form the connective tissues of the body of Métis literature.
In Chapter One, I examine the songs of Pierre Falcon, and show how they remain key texts (both oral and written) that not only inform historical and contemporary articulations of Métis nationalism but also reveal important stylistic and poetic elements that echo in the works of subsequent writers. In Chapter Two, I survey the writing career of Louis Riel and follow a thread of home and kinship in his poetry to demonstrate how there remains much work to be done assessing his copious poetry and prose through contemporary methodologies. In Chapter Three, I begin to link historical and contemporary Métis literary production by examining the rise of literacy in the North-West, and reveal how, although attenuated, Métis literary production persisted at the turn of the 20th century, by surveying the careers and select excerpts of texts from writers such as Alexander Kennedy Isbister, Sara Riel, Louis Schmidt, Alexandre DeLaronde, as well as writings by L’Union nationale métisse Saint-Joseph du Manitoba, and briefly, Jim Brady. Chapter Four reveals how in the mid 20th century, Métis literature was largely kept alive through the labours of women, such as Marie Rose Smith, Marie-Thérèse Goulet-Courchaine, and then re-invigorated by Maria Campbell and Beatrice Mosionier. Chapter Five presents a broad survey of the last thirty-odd years of Métis literary production, and analyzes select texts from Joanne Arnott, Gregory Scofield, Marilyn Dumont, Rita Bouvier, and Katherena Vermette to consider not only how dispossession, settler-colonialism, language loss, and violence, but how processes of cultural and historical recovery also mark contemporary Métis literature.
Métis writing offers a critical glimpse into how Métis writers have historically perceived themselves, how they perceive themselves now, and how they will likely perceive themselves and the world in the future. While one of the aims of this project is to map out the body of Métis writing, I dwell on notable texts to consider how they shape, re-shape, build, and trouble what we have come to see as Métis literature, and I recognize the emergence of a Métis literary tradition. -
- Graduation date
- Fall 2022
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Library with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.