Boots on the Ground

Hello and welcome to Boots on the Ground.

Thank you for joining me here today as I present my research into intergenerational trauma and

how it has transformed my life. My goal is to have policy makers, researchers, frontline works,

and educators take my work and apply it in the real world to help mended the causes of modern

Indigenous homelessness, addiction and prison population statistics, domestic abuse numbers,

and so on; hence, the name of the pod cast Boots on the Ground.

I’m not saying I have a blanket solution to these very serious social issues, but I do offer a new

way to address these issues and a new way to look at them.

I’ll start my lecture by asking three questions

Throwing money at Indigenous populations to help heal the symptoms of

intergenerational trauma is like trying to mend a broken arm by taping a dollar bill

against it. Why do settler-state governments like Canada continue to do this? Why don’t

settler-state governments try to address the historical processes of colonization that first

injured Indigenous populations and caused these problems, recognize them, make

amends, and move forward in genuine solidarity? And why don’t we shift the focus to

recovery of Indigenous identity that was lost in the processes of colonization instead of

simply trying to warehouse homeless Indigenous peoples in the present day?

I ask these three questions because I believe in addressing the root causes of intergenerational

trauma we can as a nation can greatly reduce homelessness, prison tallies, and addiction statistics

among Indigenous peoples and I use my own life story as evidence.

--But I’m getting ahead of myself; I guess I should introduce who I am and then work forward—

****My name is Jesse Thistle. I am Cree/Metis/Scot from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.

Currently I am the President of the Aboriginal Students’ Association at York University. I am an

undergraduate at York perusing a Specialized Honours degree in History with a specific focus on

19th and early 20th century Metis and First Nations history in the Northern Plains region.

University has been good to me; I have received many honours and awards from the hard work I

have put in over the last few years. I won’t go into details as the bio I provided for this webinar

lists a few of my achievements and I do not want to brag.

*****

My story begins with my Metis-Cree Mother and my Metis/Algonquin/Scot father. From

what I have been told, my mother suffered greatly at the hands of my abusive father. After more

than a half decade of domestic violence, my mother abandoned my father, brothers and I. She,

after all, was 16 years old when she had my oldest brother Joshua, 17 when she had Jerry, and 18

when she had me. It is little wonder why she ran when one considers that she was a child having

children; this, combined with the strain of hard-core addictions and an abusive husband, forced

her to flee for her wellbeing. I do not hold any grudges against her. It was only after I

reconnected with her during my stay in a rehab facility for my own addictions that I understood

the degradation and personal hell that addictions can play in a person’s life. There were times I

wished I could have run away from it all, as she had done thirty-two years earlier, and in

recognizing my own desire to flee from it all, I came to forgive her.

Her decision to leave us, however, left me and my brothers in the sole custody of our

father. His addiction to speed and booze meant he was always on the hunt for money and

struggling to keep the better part of his mental faculties from slipping into a drug-induced

psychosis. It was no environment to raise children in. One day, my father, suffering from dope

sickness, decided to rob multiple convenience stores by way of get-away taxi. Upon running out

of the second store with a fistful of money, the cab driver knew what he was up to and called the

police. He was quickly apprehended. From what I have heard from my brother Josh, Dad never

informed the police that my brother and I were left unattended at the apartment for fear of losing

us. My brother Jerry has an alternate story where my Father was picked up for being intoxicated

in a bar, where, after three days in custody, he broke down and told authorities we were left

unattended in the apartment. Either way, it took me many years to understand why Dad didn’t

tell anyone we were there, but I eventually came to the conclusion that my father did it because

he loved us. I figure he thought if he didn’t tell anyone about us being at the apartment he hoped

he could post bail, get out of jail, and take us away without Children’s Aid being involved;

thereby preserving the nucleus of our dysfunctional family. Unfortunately for him and us, things

did not turn out as he had planned, and regardless of his intentions, his misunderstanding of the

severity of the situation left my brothers and I grossly neglected. Notwithstanding, his desire to

rescue us did exhibit a twisted form of protection guided by fatherly love. And as fantastically

desperate and unrealistic as his rescue plan was, it is the only love I have ever known from the

man.

After the first couple of days of my father’s botched robbery attempt, or arrest at the bar,

my brothers and I became very hungry. Knowing there was a hockey arena across the street, we

went and begged in front of it for change; we bought hot dogs and shared bites amongst

ourselves, each taking our turn trying to quell our hunger. My brother Jerry has recently

informed me that we also broke open cans in the apartment with rocks and shared the contents

between ourselves. This pattern of begging, staving off starvation, breaking open cans, and

returning to an empty apartment continued for some time until authorities knew we were left

alone. Once they understood what had happened, the police and child services took us into their

custody. I was three years old. I do not recall most of what happened as I was much too young to

remember the tragic events surrounding our adoption into my paternal grandparents’ home in

Toronto. But my brothers do, and both remember what happened differently, as one might expect

in the memories of traumatized children under the rigors of time and pressure. When I look back

at my horrible childhood, its little wonder I ended up addicted, homeless, and fighting for my

life.

*****

Jail and streets was where my resentments towards my parents, my Indigenous culture, and my

lot in life ultimately cast me. It was 2006, I was one-hundred-and-thirty-eight pounds and

incarcerated at Maplehurst Jail in Milton, Ontario. I was there for myself robbing a convenience

story just like Dad had done in 1980. At six foot two I looked like a walking skeleton. After

more than eleven homeless years on the streets I had eroded my health (my leg was infected with

gangrene after a failed surgery), my mind, and my spirit to a mere shadow of my former self. My

broken teeth were rotted out from constant crack cocaine use and my muscles had atrophied,

eaten away by a steady diet of stolen whiskey and mouthwash. Addictions to alcohol and drugs

had taken root within me just as they had taken root in my mother and father, and just like they

had destroyed my nuclear family thirty-two years earlier, they threatened to destroy me as well.

Maplehurst, as treacherous a jail as it is, was the one thing that scared me into wanting to

change, and for that I am thankful. After hearing a guy beaten to death over a bag of chips a

couple of prison ranges over my decision to get sober and end the cycle of addiction and crime

that had dominated my family for generations was a no-brainer. My desire to change, apart from

being fueled by my cowardly fear of violence, was also motivated by the fact that the

punishment for my robbery called for an incarceration term of three and a half years in a federal

penitentiary. Fortunately for me, my sentence could be commuted into a one year’s stay at a

minimum security drug and alcohol treatment facility, whereby I was to complete the treatment

without incident or relapse. The judge who offered me the chance to change knew, as everyone

who knew me then, that I was a criminal by consequence of my addictions and situation —not by

career choice. I jumped at the opportunity he presented me with.

That treatment was the hardest thing I ever did in my whole life, and I suspect it will

remain that way for the rest of my days. It was run like a Christian military boot-camp from hell.

From sun up to sun down I did chores, went to workshops, prayed, sang Bible hymns, took

education classes, cleaned, ran 10 kilometers daily, took hygiene courses, studied, did modules,

cooked meals for the whole compound, washed mountains of dishes, and many, many more

things too numerous to mention. Every night I collapsed in my bed exhausted, and every day I

counted as the days of my sobriety lengthened. The judge had extracted his pound of flesh with

his decision; one day at the treatment facility was like ten days in federal prison and he knew it.

The old fox had tricked me, but in the best possible way. As time passed I grew stronger, first my

body, then followed slowly by my mind.

Days turned into months and the treatment facility eventually offered me the chance to

get my GED in return for all the hard work I was putting in. I had always wanted to get an

education but it was unattainable for me –living on the streets and all— and here it was, falling

into my lap. I studied furiously for three months and took the test and to my surprise I aced it!

The administrators and I were both shocked. Based on my GED performance they decided to

enroll me in the Academic Bridging program for mature students at Carleton University, where

again I got the highest mark in my class. With high grades in tow I applied to York University

where I was accepted in 2012.

*****

Now that you know my story and what me brought me to university, I can begin with the second

half of the lecture; my research into intergenerational trauma.

******

To begin:

While I was on the streets and in jails across Canada I noticed that there were a lot of Indigenous

people like me who had fallen on rough times, who were addicted and in and out of the prison

system. I wanted to know why? What had brought us all here? And why weren’t the rest of

Canadians experiencing the same social issues as Indigenous people? And why it was so

prevalent among my own people—the Metis? It burned within me throughout my life and

everyone I asked along the way gave me an evasive or half-thought through answer. I came to

the conclusion that no one knew, and no one had the answers, and no one really cared enough to

investigate. Not satisfied with this, I began taking Indigenous history courses at York University

to see if there was some historical cause to these social ills, something from the past that might

help explain the present situation of Canada’s Indigenous homeless, and why I myself had ended

up frightened, homeless, and addicted. I was also trying to resolve past resentments and fears

because I didn’t want to end up back on the streets using. Rehab had taught me to face my

resentments to prevent relapse by applying AAs 4th step moral inventory (which I’ll explain later

in this lecture), but it just wasn’t enough—I was hanging onto sobriety by the skin of my teeth.

Eventually, I ended up in Dr. Victoria Freeman’s Aboriginal HIST class 3546 where she had an

assignment that asked the class to situate themselves, and their families, within the context of

Canadian colonization. I got an A+ on the paper, but more importantly, I began investigating my

family’s role in Canadian history which I did with the help of my Aunt Yvonne Richer-

Morrissette out in Saskatchewan. Impressed by my paper, Victoria sent it to Dr. Carolyn

Podruchny, a specialized expert in the field of Metis history. When I met with Carolyn she said

she didn’t read my paper but would help me research my family by taking me on in a directed

reading course on Metis history where I built a family tree and proofed it off of an older tree my

Aunt Yvonne had already compiled. Carolyn then got me to read primary and secondary

historical documents that related to the history of my ancestors in the tree. Carolyn also helped

me by hiring me onto her SSHRC project, entitled: Tracing Métis History through Archives,

Artefacts, Oral Histories, and Landscapes: Bison Brigades, Farming Families, and Road

Allowance People where I did extensive field work in Saskatchewan. While these events were

transpiring, I met with Dr. Stephen Gaetz and Allyson Marsolais at the Homeless Hub for a

research position after friend Dr. Jenepher Lennox-Terrion at the University of Ottawa suggested

I seek them out. Stephen and Allyson hired me right away after hearing my story, and at the end

of our meeting handed me a book with an article on intergenerational trauma within homeless

Indigenous populations in Canada. Upon reading the article I came to see that my life as a

homeless addict had been the tail-end of a long process of historical colonization.

All of these above events, which occurred almost by happenstance, had given me the basis to

begin my deep investigation into the cause and effect relationship between intergenerational

trauma and homelessness and addiction within my and my family’s life. The resulting conference

paper that came from this research I will now read to you.

*****

Archives as Good Medicine: Rediscovering Our Ancestors and Understanding the Root Causes of Intergenerational Trauma

Introduction:

To understand my family’s, the Morrissette clan’s, intergenerational trauma, one must first

appreciate the macro geopolitical historical context out of which its seed germinated. Prior to

1870, the main hub of Métis life was at Red River Settlement (RRS), located at the forks of the

Assiniboine and Red River where present-day Winnipeg is situated (RRS existed from 1816 until

1869).1 In 1869, after two centuries of reciprocal fur trading between First Nations, Métis, and

Europeans, the HBC sold Rupert’s Land to the Dominion of Canada without consulting its

Indigenous inhabitants.2 Rupert’s Land was a huge area of land (roughly one-and-a-half million

square miles) that drained into Hudson’s Bay and which had been arbitrarily granted to the HBC

for the company’s exclusive enterprise by the English King Charles II in 1670. The HBC charter

expired in 1869 and hence the territory was sold to Canada.3 Resenting the fact that their land

had been sold without any dialogue, the Métis took up arms against Canada and mounted the

1869 Red River Rebellion4 under the leadership of Louis Riel.5 After a series of negotiations the

Métis agreed to enter Confederation with Canada, which created the province of Manitoba, but

through a succession of broken government promises, the Métis eventually lost Red River to a

massive deluge of Canadian settlers during the 1870s. These settlers displaced Métis through the

land policy of the Dominion of Canada’s Department of the Interior which heavily favored

incoming Euro-Ontarian settlement by giving them the choice agricultural land around Winnipeg

                                                                                                                         1 Bill Nelson, in Contours of a People, eds. Brenda Macdougall, Nicole St-Onge, and Carolyn Podruchny. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), xxxii. 2 Neil McLeod, Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties to Contemporary Times, (Saskatoon: Purich Publishing Limited, 2007), 35. 3 Ibid., 80. 4 The term “Rebellion” has been popularly used by scholars and non-academics to denote both the 1869 and 1885 Métis Resistances, throughout this paper we will preserve the antiquated use of “Rebellion” and understand it to mean “Resistance” so as to preserve the words, tone, and integrity of our informants’ testimonies. 5 Olive Patricia Dickason, and William Newbigging, A Concise History of Canada’s First Nations: Second Edition. (Toronto: Oxford Press, 2010), 177-78.

while stalling Metis land claims until 1872. By 1873, forty thousand acres around Winnipeg had

been taken by the new settlers, a displacement that pushed many landless Métis into

Saskatchewan.6 At Batoche, Saskatchewan, in 1885, the Métis would again rise to take up arms

to defend their land against the ever-expanding nation-state of Canada. However, the Métis were

not successful at Batoche and suffered a crushing defeat on May 9-12, 1885. Sadly, Canada had

suppressed the Northwest Resistance by sending a mechanized industrial army comprised of

thousands of well-armed soldiers and R.C.M.P to fight against hundreds of ill-equipped Métis.7

Despite the heroic press that later praised the Canadian “victory” as “glorious” and “bravely

won,” in reality Batoche was a lop-sided vulgar display of state power perpetrated by Canada

upon Métis families—old men and children, wives and daughters, husbands, brothers, and

cousins—who were killed trying to protect their homes, land, families, community, and

livelihoods.8 The devastating, and tragic, loss at Batoche is where we trace the root genesis of the

Morrissette family’s intergenerational trauma.9 Below is a guide that will help the reader track

the Morrissette genealogical path of intergenerational trauma from me and my mother in the

present, back to our ancestors who were at Batoche during the Northwest Resistance.

A breif note on methodology, the main source of data compiled for this paper comes from Métis

Elders who are decendants of Morrisette-Batoche veterans whom we interviewed over the 2013

and 2014 summer seasons. To collect the interviews, Dr. Carolyn Podruchny, myself, my mother

Blanche Morrisette, and Aunt Yvonne Richer-Morrissette, travelled across Saskatchewan to

historical sites relevant to the 1885 Northwest Resistance, met with and recorded informants, and

treated the prairie landscape and its people’s knowledge like a vast archive of data. I am deeply                                                                                                                          6 Dickason and Newbigging 218. 7 Howard Adams, “Ottawa Invades the Northwest, in Prison of Grass, (Toronto: New Press Toronto, 1975), 89-110. 8  Ibid.  9 Lawrence J. Barkwell, Veterans and Families of the Northwest Resistance, (Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2011): 1.

indebted to these women for their their mentorship and help, cooperation and support, and

without which I could never have accessed the Morrissette oral history repository—Marcee

(thank you in Michif). Moreover, when our team visited the land where the history took place

and then treated the testimony of Métis and First Nations Elders like primary historical

documents, and afterwards triangulated their data off one another, the historiography that was

recovered and that was generated was astounding. These two methods when combined

demonstrate a viable and concrete Indigenous methodology for mining new historical data,

which, in turn, has the power to reclaim lost Indigenous historiography and also represents a

profound new way to construct Indigenous identity and Social History.

*****

“Don’t tell them you’re Métis or they’ll hang you,” Jeremie Morrissette, my Métis/Cree

grandfather, said to my brothers and me before he sent us east with my dad in 1979. We would

eventually end up in the custody of the Catholic Children’s Aid Society to be later adopted by

my paternal Métis/Scot grandparents after my father committed a series of desperate robberies

and then disappeared. The destruction of my nuclear family was but the most recent ripple in an

ocean of colonial trauma suffered by my family—Métis from northern Saskatchewan; and my

grandfather’s cautious goodbye underscored that ugly truth. I eventually came to understand his

fearful words but not until I had succumbed to my own fear, spending many homeless years

addicted and trapped in the revolving door of crime and incarceration. Eventually I got clean and

found my way to university. It was at York University where I would start to dig into the archive

of my family’s past and finally understand the context of Jeremie’s warning. My first year as an

undergrad was tough; I exhaustively worked the twelve steps of Alcoholics/Narcotics

Anonymous (AA/NA) trying to remain sober, but they just did not dig deep enough to resolve

the underlying “systemic rage” that had been with me since childhood.10 I knew if I did not rid

myself of it that one day I would be back on the streets using, so I decided to try something

radical to prevent relapsing: I combined AA’s principles with historical research.

Step four of AA clearly states that one must compile an extensive moral inventory of

one’s past actions.11 The moral inventory is pivotal to long-term recovery because it provides

understanding of illogical or hurtful addiction behavior that is otherwise incomprehensible.12

Understanding, in turn, helps addicts come to terms with their past, allowing for personal

forgiveness, which sets the stage for later amendment-making, and finally liberation from

addiction.13 In my second year at York, instead of starting on AA’s 4th step principle, like I had

in the past with limited results, I got the idea to retrofit it to my family’s genealogy, placing the

template over our collective history of unresolved trauma stretching back to the 1885 Métis

Resistance at Batoche. Placing the template of moral inventory-building over my ancestors’

actions clearly showed me that my parents’ decision to let my brothers and me go into adoption

was part of a long historical trend of intergenerational trauma and their actions made sense in

that context. Seeing the long pattern stretching back generations, I came to forgive my mom and

dad and it was in this way I used archives as “Good Medicine.”

Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, in her ground-breaking research with the Lakota,

defines historical/intergenerational trauma as “cumulative trauma,” explaining that “[it is]                                                                                                                          10 Lee Maracle coined this phrase in I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism (Vancouver: Press Gang, 1996, originally published in 1988), 12.

11 William Griffith Wilson & Robert Holbrook Smith, Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism, 4th edition (Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2002, originally published in 1939), 59.  12 Ibid. 13 Ibid.

collective[,] compounding emotional and psychic wounding both over life span[s] and across

generations. [It is inherited] Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).”14 Cumulative trauma,

according to scholar Peter Menzies, sabotages Aboriginal decision-making, facilitating the

breakdown of personal, family, and community networks across time.15 It manifests itself in the

form of homelessness, anxiety disorders, mental health issues, alcohol and substance abuse,

depression, suicide, low self-esteem, criminal activity, sexual abuse, loss of identity, child

abandonment, misogyny, and many other serious social maladies that are significantly higher in

Aboriginal communities than that of the general population of Canada.16 Shannon Novak and

Lars Rodseth posit that intergenerational trauma is borne out of collective incidences of extreme

physical, social, and cultural violence, and that those who “witness” such overt trauma become

“carrier groups” or “carrier individuals” who pass trauma on to offspring17—the most vulnerable

of whom are children.18

Tracing the direct bloodline on my mother’s (Blanche Morrissette, b: Jan 1, 1957) side,

back to those who would be considered “carrier individuals,” or “witnesses of collective of

violence,”19 I found nine veterans of the 1885 Resistance, three individuals on her patrilineal

side, and six on her matrilineal side, who could be considered the carrier group. The one

genealogical strand containing six witnesses extends back through my maternal grandmother,

Nancy Ann Morriesette nee Arcand (1910-1987), to her father and mother, St. Pierre Arcand

(first witness, 1876-1960), and Cecile Montour (second witness, 1872-1915). During the 1885

                                                                                                                         14 Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, “The Return to the Sacred Path: Healing the Historical Trauma and Historical Unresolved Grief Response among the Lakota through a Psychoeducational Group Intervention,” in Smith College Studies in Social Work, 68, 3 (1998): 288. 15 Peter Menzies, “Understanding Intergenerational Trauma from a Social Work Perspective,” in The Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 27, 2 (2007): 367.  16 Ibid., 371. 17 Shannon A. Novak & Lars Rodseth, “Remembering Mountain Meadows: Collective Violence and the Manipulation of Social Boundaries,” in Journal of Anthropological Research, 62, 1 (2006): 10. 18 Menzies, 371. 19 Novak & Rodseth, 10

Resistance both were children: St. Pierre, age nine, lived in Batoche and Cecile, age thirteen,

lived close by in S. Laurent.20 According to descendants, St. Pierre actively participated in the

fighting during the battle of Batoche, May 9-12, 1885.21 St. Pierre’s granddaughter Yvonne

Richer-Morrissette (my mother’s sister) recalls a story she heard from him as little girl:

Pierre was just a young boy in 1885 in Batoche, he told us that he was 9... . He said he used to go around picking up rocks and bringing them to each niche dugout [rifle pit]. Because they were fighting in these dugouts and they ran out of bullets and they had been using nails and whatever they could use to make bullets and he’d pick up these rocks and bring them to each pit and he said that they didn’t, well, nobody would really pay attention to him because he was just a little boy.22

Among those family members who St. Pierre joined in battle were his father Francois Arcand

(witness three, 1848-1923), his mother Philomene Berard (witness four, 1843-1906), along with

many uncles and cousins.23

Yvonne Richer-Morrissette also goes on to say that St. Pierre had the grim job of picking up

corpses at night with the other Métis boys using a “stoneboat sled”:

[H]e…They’d go around picking up the dead at night, they would make a big bonfire and they would burn the bodies. There was that one story, he said ‘One time a head came out of the fire.’ Well him being a young boy and being desensitized and everything he started kicking the head around, the boys were using it like a [soccer] ball.24

                                                                                                                         20 Library and Archives Canada. Census of Canada, 1891. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: Library and Archives Canada, 2009. <http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/census-1891/index-e.html>. Series RG31-C-1. Statistics Canada Fonds. Microfilm reels: T-6290 to T-6427. 21 Interview, Jesse Thistle & Carolyn Podruchny with Yvonne Richer-Morrissette & Blanche Morrissette, Poundmaker Reserve, Saskatchewan, June 21, 2013. (Internal transcription number 0382)  22 Ibid. 23 Lawrence Barkwell, Veterans and families of the 1885 Northwest Resistance, 2009, pg. 2. http://www.metismuseum.ca/media/db/07158 (Date assessed: August 3, 2013). 24 Interview, Jesse Thistle & Carolyn Podruchny with Yvonne Richer-Morrissette & Blanche Morrissette, Poundmaker Reserve, Saskatchewan, June 21, 2013. (Internal transcription number 0382).

Whether supplying the battlefield during the day with rocks, or collecting bodies and playing

soccer with their heads at night, there is little doubt that St. Pierre was a child witness to extreme

violence and passed on a germ of trauma to his descendants.25

Cecile Montour, our second witness to trauma, was present at her family home on March

22, 1884, when her father, Abraham Montour (witness five, 1832-1916), planned with

Resistance leaders Gabriel Dumont and Andre Nault Jr. the effort that would erupt the following

year.26 Also present would have been Cecile’s mother, Abraham’s wife, Marie Page (witness six,

1835-1922).27 Cecile would have been thirteen when she watched her father, uncles, brothers,

first cousins, and other male relatives and friends fight at Duck Lake, Frenchman’s Butte, Fish

Creek, and Batoche, only to lose and become dispossessed.28 The opening battle at Duck Lake

claimed her first cousins Jean-Baptiste Montour and Joseph Montour.29 My aunt, Yvonne

Richer-Morrissette, indirectly recalls how Cecile Montour (my great-grandmother) would have

seen her father apprehended after the Métis loss in Batoche:

[M]y great-grandfather Abraham Montour—he had the chance of escaping to Montana—and he didn’t go. No he didn’t. He got arrested and went to Regina but he was let go after three days or something like that. They used to do the meetings at his house in Batoche. You see, a lot of these stories were passed down mostly from my grandfather, St. Pierre Arcand.30

Cecile, like St. Pierre, had witnessed the total collapse of the Métis cause in 1885, and along with

it the wholesale destruction of their kin networks, family supports, and community connections.

Aunt Yvonne paints a sad portrait:                                                                                                                          25 Ron Eyerman, “The Past in the Present: Culture and the Transmission of Memory,” in Acta Sociologica, 47, 2 (2004): 162. 26 Maggie Siggins, Riel: A Life of Revolution, (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1994), 339. 27 Lawrence Barkwell, Veterans and families of the 1885 Northwest Resistance, 2009, pg. 17. http://www.metismuseum.ca/media/db/07158 (Date assessed: 21 September, 2013)  28 Ibid. 29 Walter Hildebrandt, The Battle of Batoche: British Small Warfare and the Entrenched Métis, Ottawa: National Historic Parks and Sites Branch, Environment Canada, Parks Canada, 1985. 30 Interview, Jesse Thistle & Carolyn Podruchny with Yvonne Richer-Morrissette & Blanche Morrissette, Wanuskewin, Saskatchewan, June 22, 2013. (Internal transcription number 21130623 114517)

The whole place was looted. The houses were burnt and looted. There are so many stories I remember after the rebellion my Mushom [Grandfather] would talk about it of how the people were starving. He said ‘The children were starving.’ They simply lost everything.31

Societal implosions on this scale are what Brave Heart has deemed the “genesis” of

“intergenerational trauma,” which is a natural reaction to massive group trauma, the seed of

which is planted in the following generations.32

The second “carrier group” who witnessed and were traumatized by extreme violence

extends back through my grandfather Jeremie Morrissette’s matrilineal line. His mother,

Marianne Ledoux (witness seven, 1869-1967), was sixteen in 1885 when she became a veteran

of the Battle of Batoche.33 Marianne (my great-grandmother) was Louis Riel’s cousin, his

resident cook, personal friend, and part of his close inner circle.34 On May 10, under heavy fire

from General Middleton’s troops, the town of Batoche was devastated;35 among those almost

killed in the barrage was Marianne. Yvonne Richer-Morrissette recounts the family memory:

Well from what I remember from the stories she would tell she said that they just starting advancing and they were firing on the houses and she said a lot of the people had already started to evacuate but they weren’t prepared yet. They hadn’t all left.36

Caught off guard, Yvonne Richer-Morrissette explains, the young Marianne was rescued “in the

nick of time” by her level-headed housemate Louis Riel:

[T]hey first started firing [and] the first bullets were firing in upon the houses, and she said that Louis picked her up and threw her through the window to save her and she crawled out into the bushes. She used to tell us if it wasn’t for him she wouldn’t be alive.37

                                                                                                                         31 Ibid. 32 Brave Heart, 288. 33 Lawrence Barkwell, Veterans and Families of the 1885 Northwest Resistance, 2009, pg. 15. http://www.metismuseum.ca/media/db/07158 (Date assessed: July 29, 2013)  34 The Leaderpost, Regina Saskatchewan, 27, 10 (1960): 3. 35 Joseph Kinsey Howard, Strange Empire: The Story of Louis Riel, (Toronto: Swan Edition, 1965, originally published in 1952), 393. 36 Interview, Jesse Thistle & Carolyn Podruchny with Yvonne Richer-Morrissette & Blanche Morrissette, Wanuskewin, Saskatchewan, June 22, 2013. (Internal transcription number 0384) 37 Interview, Jesse Thistle & Carolyn Podruchny with Yvonne Richer-Morrissette & Blanche Morrissette, Poundmaker Reserve, Saskatchewan, June 21, 2013. (Internal transcription number 0382)

Martha Smith (my first cousin twice removed), Marianne’s granddaughter and caretaker for

twenty-eight years, corroborates Yvonne Richer-Morrissette’s testimony and details the urgency

of the moment and what happened next:

[G]randma said they had left bread on the counter and in the cupboard [but] she [Marianne] had to run into the bush with the kids. Grandma said she always wished she would’ve brought the bread with her because she had to feed the kids… [A]fterwards the soldier came [and] burnt the houses. She always wondered ‘Did they eat the bread?’38

Hiding in the bushes with a brood of hungry children and wishing for bread, Marianne would

most certainly have been traumatized during the Battle of Batoche. She had watched her father

Joseph “Toomeetoon” Ledoux (witness eight, 1828-1931) enter battle with her uncles, brothers,

male in-laws, cousins and friends, at Duck Lake, Fish Creek, Cutknife Hill, Frenchman’s Butte,

and Batoche.39 Her mother, Isabelle Mistawasis-Belanger (witness nine, 1845-unknown), would

also participate in the war effort by making bullets by melting down utensils, kettles, and

buttons.40 Marianne’s losses were staggering and, as indicated by descendants, it is believed that

she may have lost as many as six close relatives; among them were Isidore Dumont and Augustin

Laframbois.41 According to Yvonne Morrissette-Richer and Blanche Morrissette, Marianne had

helplessly watched as her male kin were “hunted…down like dogs,”42 only to be “captured and

hung.”43 Sadly, Marianne would have also lost her friend, and rescuer, Louis Riel, who was hung

                                                                                                                         38 Interview, Jesse Thistle & Carolyn Podruchny with Martha Smith, Park Valley, Saskatchewan, June 23, 2013. (Internal transcription number 20130624 140411)  39 Lawrence Barkwell, Veterans and families of the 1885 Northwest Resistance, 2009, 17. http://www.metismuseum.ca/media/db/07158 (Date Assessed: February 3, 2013) 40 Interview, Jesse Thistle & Carolyn Podruchny with Yvonne Richer-Morrissette & Blanche Morrissette, Poundmaker Reserve, Saskatchewan, June 21, 2013. (Internal transcription number 0382) 41 Yvonne Morrissette-Richer & Lawrence Barkwell, “Marianne Morrissette,” The Virtual Museum of Metis History and Culture: Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies and Applied Research. http://www.metismuseum.ca/resource.php/00001 (Date Assessed: September 21, 2013) 42 Interview, Jesse Thistle & Carolyn Podruchny with Blanche Morrissette, Duck Lake, Saskatchewan, June 20, 2013. (Internal transcription number A100_0369) 43 Interview, Jesse Thistle & Carolyn Podruchny with Yvonne Richer-Morrissette, Wanuskewin, Saskatchewan, June 22, 2013. (Internal transcription number 21130623 114517)

far away from his people on 16 November 1885 in Regina.44 This final loss must have been

devastating for Marianne.

The death of Riel and the collapse of the 1885 Resistance marked an end to Métis sovereignty

in the Northwest, and the nine aforementioned witnesses who saw its downfall would be haunted

by collective trauma for the rest of their lives. Martha Smith details this truth in an encounter

Marianne had seventy-six years after the Resistance ended:

They came to the house to put her [Marianne] on the show ‘Top Challenge’ after they saw her in the Leaderpost [newspaper]. That was a show on CBC. She refused to go on the show because she said ‘They hung Cousin Riel they are not going to hang me too.’ So she would not go.45

She was clearly still traumatized. With residual accounts such as these (no doubt thousands more

exist) it was inevitable that the Métis trauma would be passed down en masse to their children,

crystallizing over time into what Ron Eyerman calls a “foundation narrative” or “master frame”

of pain, loss, and dispossession.46

Foundation narratives, according to Eyerman, form individual and collective identity as

well as societal orientation, and they have the power to turn tragic loss into triumph.47 If given

the chance, a group can glorify past traumas creating healthy foundation stories which empower

survivors; however, if that grieving process is not cultivated or is largely restricted the carrier

group becomes stagnant or static, unable to evolve away from the trauma.48 In effect, they get

left behind as victims, re-traumatized over and over as they mentally revisit harmful events.49

Martha Smith’s husband Leonard Smith perfectly captures the ‘frozen’ effect that gripped the

                                                                                                                         44 Howard, 470. 45 Interview, Jesse Thistle & Carolyn Podruchny with Martha Smith, Park Valley, Saskatchewan, June 23, 2013. (Internal transcription number 20130624 140411)  46 Eyerman, 162 47 Ibid. 161. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid.

Métis people after 1885: “You see the rebellion was never over [for the Métis of Batoche].”50

Blanche Morrissette illustrates the “never over” mentality by showing its glaring effects on her

family and childhood:

I was ashamed of my culture because it was… well nobody else lived like us. It was like 100 years before from the past. Tourists would come and take pictures of us all day and night and say ‘Look at them.’ We’d think ‘This is our yard.’ You don’t do that…And the same thing when we were in the wagon and we traveled. We always traveled by wagon [as late as 1978] and they were always taking pictures of us.51

Infused with so much unresolved trauma, Métis time had come to a screeching halt. Novak and

Rodseth state that in such circumstances sometimes descendants of the carrier group will

“abandon narratives that emphasize specific time…in favor of ones in which time is compressed,

distant events are ‘remembered’ as if they occurred here and now.”52 That is exactly how

Yvonne Richer-Morriessette recollects the distance of time between her childhood and the tragic

resistance effort:

[W]hen we were growing up the stories of the rebellion were always around us, they were alive. I can remember when I was young I thought it had just happened. The thing was we could talk about it and ask all kinds of questions but we were told not to tell anybody it because if they knew we were related to Louis Riel we would be hanged.53

The inability of the carrier group to move beyond the trauma of the 1885 Resistance and create a

healthy foundation story was sadly caused by the Canadian government’s wholesale persecution

of the Métis of Batoche post Resistance.54

During this epoch, various levels of government actively scattered Métis families so that they

could not rely on old consanguineal, affinal, or fictive kin networks.55 These directed dispersal

                                                                                                                         50 Interview, Jesse Thistle & Carolyn Podruchny with Leonard Smith, Park Valley, Saskatchewan, June 23, 2013. (Internal transcription number 20130624 140411) 51 Interview, Jesse Thistle & Carolyn Podruchny with Blanche Morrissette, Fish Creek, Saskatchewan, June 17, 2013. (Internal transcription number 100_0368) 52 Novak & Rodseth, 3.  53 Interview, Jesse Thistle & Carolyn Podruchny with Yvonne Richer-Morrissette, Wanuskewin, Saskatchewan, June 22, 2013. (Internal transcription number 21130623 114517) 54 Olive Patricia Dickason & William Newbigging, A Concise History of Canada’s First Nations: Second Edition, (Toronto: Oxford Press: 2010), 225.

efforts forced some Métis to change their names; others fled south to Montana, north to the

Mackenzie River area, and even as far east as Abitibi, Ontario; and a few hid among relatives in

nearby reserves.56 Some of them were able to return to the area after a generation or two, take

homesteads, or live along road allowances.57 The unlucky ones ended up on forced labour

camps, ironically called “experimental farms.”58 The effects were widespread and clear: the

cohesive Métis carrier group could not adequately grieve the trauma of 1885 and most, if not all,

lost their economic status.59 Martha Smith explains the effects of this one-two punch:

[T]he Métis were not allowed to have a lot of stuff after the rebellion. It was kind of like they weren’t allowed anything. [They lost the] road-houses or whatever the stopping houses, the stopping places, that after the rebellion that was taken away from them… before [that] they were the storeowners. They were the ones who were among the rivers... They were the wealthy ones that provided for the immigrants and provided for everything, they were the store keepers and when that was all gone then all they became the labor force for the incoming immigrants and the homesteaders.60

Financially limited in almost every way, Métis wealth, prestige, and social standing crashed from

respected to denigrated in one generation. Yvonne Richer-Morrissette recounts the near-caste

milieu she faced growing up:

Michifs [term for French-descended Métis] were at the very bottom and then you had the Half-Breeds, then you had the Indians, then white immigrants, then French whites, and then English. In all of the social latters the Michifs were the ones that were looked down upon the most. We had the biggest oppression. I think—in all—because you had it from everywhere…When we were going to school we didn’t want anybody to know where we lived or that we were Michif.61

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Maria Campbell, Halfbreed, (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1973), 7-12. 58 Personal communications, Nicholas Vrooman, outside the remains of a forced labour camp near Lebret, Saskatchewan, June 19, 2013; and Maria Campbell, St. Louis, Saskatchewan, June 25, 2013. 59 Dickason & Newbigging, 225.  60 Interview, Jesse Thistle & Carolyn Podruchny with Martha Smith, Park Valley, Saskatchewan, June 23, 2013. (Internal transcription number 20130624 140411) 61 Interview, Jesse Thistle & Carolyn Podruchny with Yvonne Richer-Morrissette & Blanche Morrissette, Wanuskewin, Saskatchewan, June 22, 2013. (Internal transcription number 0384).— Interview, Jesse Thistle & Carolyn Podruchny with Yvonne Richer-Morrissette & Blanche Morrissette, S. Laurent , Saskatchewan, June 23, 2013. (Internal transcription number 0386).

This was the highly stratified and static world that Jeremie Morrissette and Nancy Arcand had

inherited from their carrier parents, and which they bequeathed to their children; and this was the

world that I was born into on 19 July 1976.62 Within three years of my birth the bonds of

“wahkootowin,” helping each other in a good way,63 that had woven our Sash together for over

two hundred and fifty years finally unraveled and my brothers and I, along with many other

cousins, were placed into adoption. My family was crushed under the weight of so many

unresolved traumatic years.

And now, with my new historical perspective, I again applied the 4th step of AA, which

clearly states that one must fearlessly compile an extensive moral inventory of one’s past

actions.64 When I did this for my ancestors I saw the root causes of the intergenerational trauma

that had been passed from the carrier group, onto to my grandparents, parents, then onto me. I

could see their inability to heal from the trauma brought on by systematic persecution by the

government. And I could see why homelessness, addictions, mental health issues, misogyny, and

abuse had wreaked havoc on me, my brothers, my mom and dad, culminating in our adoption. I

could finally see why I was so damn angry and I finally understood what Grandpa Jeremie meant

when he said: “Don’t tell them you’re Michif or they’ll hang you.” Then I reread the AA step

and a word jumped out at me—a word I never saw before—I saw the word “fearlessly.” I had

read the step a thousand times before and the adjective “fearlessly” never meant anything to me,

but there it was, and now it meant everything. For the first time in my life I am not afraid: I know

my family, I know our history, and I am no longer filled with a deep rage, or resentful of the

past. I have come to forgive history and in doing so I have found personal freedom. It is in this

                                                                                                                         62 Campbell, 173. 63 Brenda Macdougall, One of the Family: Metis Culture in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Saskatchewan (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 129. 64 Wilson & Smith, 59.  

way that I have used archives as “Good Medicine,” and I strongly urge other children of

colonialism to do the same.

*****

A final closing word

Only through understanding the implications of historical trauma within Indigenous

historiography can the incomprehensible manifestations of intergenerational trauma - prison

populations, homeless statistics, addiction populations, child service numbers, and inflated police

report statistics, just to name a few - make sense, be remedied, and be moved away from.

Moreover, for this healing process to be effective, historical understanding of colonial trauma

must be internally digested within Indigenous individuals and communities. To that effect, when

I presented my initial findings to my Metis kin, regarding the impingements intergenerational

trauma has had on us, I witnessed an immediate positive transformation: my mother went back to

school and graduated college – at 56 years old I might add, my once homeless and addicted uncle

Ralph is sober and in University and helping others into recovery and housing stability, relatives

have stopped abusing substances, sons are forgiving mothers, and daughters forgiving fathers,

family members who have not spoken in years are now reconciling long held differences, my

Daniel brother emerged from a mental health facility and is now living on his own for the first

time in a very long time, and my brother Jerry is newly sober as of December 22nd, 2014. What

is more, my family members have only know about the effects of intergenerational trauma for a

little over a year and, as time passes, it seems that the rate of community healing is accelerating,

not slowing down. So, I implore you - policy makers, researchers, frontline works, and educators

- take my work of intergenerational trauma, take the template that I have developed to recover

Indigenous identity, take it and apply it in the real world, on real individuals, and I am sure you

will have a real tool to combat contemporary Indigenous homelessness. To that end, I implore

you, to get your Boots on the Ground.