Mixed Race Studies

Kaa-tipeyimishoyaahk – ‘We are those who own ourselves’: A Political History of Métis Self-Determination in the North-West, 1830-1870

University of Victoria, British Columbia
2014
394 pages

Adam James Patrick Gaudry

Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of Indigenous Governance

This dissertation offers an analysis of the history of Métis political thought in the nineteenth century and its role in the anti-colonial resistances to Canada’s and Hudson’s Bay Company governance. Utilizing the Michif concepts of kaa-tipeyimishoyaahk and wahkohtowin to shed light on Métis political practices, this work argues that the Métis people had established themselves as an independent Indigenous people in the nineteenth century North West. By use of a common language of prairie diplomacy, Métis had situated themselves as a close “relation” of the Hudson’s Bay Company, but still politically independent of it. Nineteenth century Métis had repeatedly demonstrated their independence from British institutions of justice and politics, and were equally insistent that Canadian institutions had no authority over them. When they did choose to form a diplomatic relationship with Canada, it was decidedly on Métis terms. In 1869-1870, after repelling a Canadian official who was intended to establish Canadian authority over the North-West, the Métis formed a provisional government with their Halfbreed cousins to enter into negotiations with Canada to establish a confederal treaty relationship. The Provisional Government of Assiniboia then sent delegates to Ottawa to negotiate “the Manitoba Treaty,” a bilateral constitutional document that created a new province of Manitoba, that would contain a Métis/Halfbreed majority, as well as very specific territorial, political, social, cultural, and economic protections that would safeguard the Métis and Halfbreed controlled future of Manitoba. This agreement was embodied only partially in the oft-cited Manitoba Act, as several key elements of the agreement were oral negotiations that were later to be institutionalized by the Canadian cabinet, although were only ever partially implemented. These protections included restrictions on the sale of the 1.4 million acre Métis/Halfbreed land reserve, a commitment to establish a Métis/Halfbreed controlled upper-house in the new Manitoba legislature, a temporary limitation of the franchise to current residents of the North West, and restrictions on Canadian immigration to the new province until Métis lands were properly distributed. While these key components of the Manitoba Treaty were not included in the Manitoba Act, they remain a binding part of the agreement, and thus, an unfulfilled obligation borne by the contemporary government of Canada. Without adhering to Canada’s treaty with the Métis people, its presence on Métis lands, and jurisdiction over Métis people is highly suspect. Only by returning to the original agreement embodied by the Manitoba Act can Canada claim any legitimacy on Métis territories or any functional political relationship with the Métis people.

Read the entire dissertation here.

“No more kiyams”: Métis women break the silence of child sexual abuse

University of Victoria,  British Columbia, Canada
2004
146 pages

Lauralyn Houle

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF SOCIAL WORK In the Faculty of Human and Social Development

“No more kiyams” Métis women break the silence of child sexual abuse, is a glimpse into the lives of four M&is women who were raised in an Aboriginal community and who speak to the effects and the obstacles of trying to heal from an abuse that affects not only them, but also their families and communities.

As Métis people, the women in this thesis bring to light, the generational abuses that affect the healing process. They give a picture of how healing is a very personal journey but at the same time a collective process. Rose, Betsy, Angela and Rena provide us with insight into why healing from child sexual abuse needs to address a cultural perspective. Rose became a victim of a respected elderly uncle. Betsy and Angela’s fathers were their abusers. For Rena it was her stepfather, grandfather, and cousins; how does one send all those significant people to jail? In addition, remain a ‘part’ of family and community. The Métis are raised to be very proud and loyal to family and community. We do not heal alone.

This work is about honouring individual strength and gifts in order to heal. It speaks to healing that is not in isolation from identity as a Métis or in isolation from one’s community. This thesis is about acknowledging the strengths of Métis women by giving voice to their stories, their dreams, and their lives.

Read the entire thesis here.

The Planter’s Fictions: Identity, Intimacy, and the Negotiations of Power in Colonial Jamaica

University of Victoria, Canada
2010
127 pages

Meleisa Ono-George

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Art In the Department of History

By the latter quarter of the eighteenth century, as the movement against the slave trade increased in Britain, Creoles, those of British ancestry born in the West Indies, were increasingly criticized for their involvement in slavery. Simon Taylor, a Jamaican-born planter of Scottish ancestry who lived most of his life in the colony, attempted to negotiate competing and often contradictory sensibilities and subject positions as both British and Creole.

One of the central challenges to Taylor’s negotiation of identity was his long-term relationship with Grace Donne, a free mixed-race woman of colour. An examination of their relationship highlights the ways binary discourses and exclusionary practices devised to create and reinforce rigid racial boundaries were regularly crossed and blurred, even by an individual like Simon Taylor, a person well placed to benefit from the policing and maintenance of those boundaries.

Table of Contents

• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE
• ABSTRACT
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• DEDICATION
• 1. IDENTITY, INTIMACY AND PERFORMANCE
• 2. SIMON TAYLOR AND HIS WORLD.
• 3. A RELATIVELY PRECARIOUS POSITION
• 4. “WASHING THE BLACKMOOR WHITE”: INTIMACY AND POWER
• 5. CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Introduction: Identity, Intimacy and Performance

Here lie the remains of the Honorable Simon Taylor, a loyal subject, a firm friend, and an honest man. Who after an active live, during which he faithfully and ably filled the highest offices of civil and military duty in this island, died.
—Inscription on Simon Taylor’s gravestone, Lyssons, Jamaica.

Shortly after his death in the summer of 1813, the body of Simon Taylor was exhumed from its burial place at his Prospect Pen estate near Kingston, Jamaica, and moved sixty kilometers away to another family estate in St. Thomas-in-the-East. The means by which his body was carried to St. Thomas created a stir in the sugar colony. The body of Simon Taylor, one of Jamaica’s wealthiest settler at the time of his death, was moved to its final resting place on the back of a mule-drawn cart. The Lieutenant-governor of Jamaica, Edward Morrison, wrote in a local newspaper that the whole process “was done in not a very decent manner.” It was an insult to the memory of Simon Taylor, a leading figure and planter in the colony, for his body to be carried to its final burial on a “common mule cart.” During his life, Taylor had worked to embody the very definition of respectability in the colony. The son of a Scottish merchant and Jamaica-born mother of British ancestry, Taylor was born in St. Andrews parish, Jamaica on December 23, 1738. Besides a short period when he attended Eton College in England as a child and studied business in Holland, Taylor spent most of his life in Jamaica where he worked his way up the ladder of colonial society from an estate attorney to the owner of several plantations and over two thousand slaves. From custos and head of the militia to his involvement in the Jamaican House of Assembly, his administrative roles in Jamaica established him firmly within the plantocracy, a small group of large plantation owners who controlled most of the wealth and political life in Jamaica. To many of the colonial elite Taylor was, as his gravestone reads, “a loyal subject, a firm friend, and an honest man.” The focus of this study however is not Taylor’s embodiment of colonial respectability, but rather the ways in which his life reflected the conflicts and complexities of eighteenth century Jamaican slave society. Using the letters of Simon Taylor written to his family, friends, and business associates from 1779 until his death in 1813 as my principal primary source, this thesis will explore colonial identities and the place of interracial intimacy in slave society. I begin this project by setting out the main theoretical arguments that frame and inspire my work. These arguments revolve around three main ideas—the precarious nature of racial and national identity formation in the colony; the colonial anxieties that developed in Jamaica; and the importance of examining social performance and intimacy in order to understand representations of identity and claims of power and cohesion. These are the themes woven throughout this chapter and the focus of this project…

…The multiple and conflicting understandings of difference that proliferated in the late eighteenth century suggest the need to move away from a binary model of analysis of race to one that engages with the spaces in-between—the “uncertain crossing and invasion of identities” that occurred in Jamaica, and the contradictions and anxieties that emerged from this crossing. Boundaries established in racial discourse that separated the “races,” although at times firm, were incomplete and routinely crossed in day-to-day interactions between individuals. The large number of mixed-race people in Jamaica by the end of the eighteenth century and the substantial amount of property bequeathed to them by their white fathers attests to how frequently racial divisions were blurred. As Catherine Hall argues, “it is not possible to make sense of empire either theoretically or empirically through a binary lens: we need the dislocation of that binary and more elaborate, cross-cutting ways of thinking. Although the language of self/other and master/slave is very useful in understanding national and racial identity formation and power, such dichotomies cannot fully capture the complex and nuanced interactions of people, especially in colonial “contact zones” like Jamaica. “Cross-cutting ways of thinking” are needed in the examination of Jamaican slave society in order to understand the detailed hierarchies of race and difference and the complicated movements and exchanges between individuals in the colony…

…Chapter three examines Simon Taylor’s relationship with his housekeeper, Grace Donne. The framework of intimacy will allow me to explore and illuminate the contradictions between the ideals of British respectability that Simon Taylor attempted to maintain, especially under a metropolitan gaze, and his feelings of affection towards Grace Donne and his mixed-race family. In addition, I will attempt to situate Grace Donne, a free woman of colour who lived with Simon Taylor for thirty-six years, as a central actor in his life, despite her conspicuous absence from his letters. I use the story of Simon Taylor and Grace Donne as a case study to show the ambiguities inherent in Jamaican slave society and to highlight the ways in which intimate interracial relationships threatened to undermine the hierarchies needed to maintain slave society. On occasion, sentiment as much as skin colour or class was the basis on which alliances were fashioned, boundaries crossed, and power negotiated…

Read the entire thesis here.

Trans/formative identities: narrations of decolonization in mixed-race and transgender lives

University of Victoria
2007
114 pages

Sarah E. Hunt

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Interdisciplinary in the Department of Women’s Studies and the Department of Anthropology

This interdisciplinary research paper explores story and metaphor of “trans/formative identities” as a basis for challenging normative racial and gender categories. Autoethnography is used as a method for weaving the author’s own experience as a mixed-race Indigenous person with academic research and theory. The discussion is contextualized by an analysis of institutionalized colonial relationships framing Indigenous knowledge in academia and the role of Indian status in defining Indigenous identity. Six mixed-race and transgender or genderqueer people in Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia are interviewed and the themes from their shared experiences are used as the basis for further understanding trans/formative identities. These themes are: irony; contradiction and impossibility; stories of home and family; naming and language; embodied negotiations, contextual selves, and; artistic visions.

Table of Contents

• ABSTRACT
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• DEDICATION
• SECTION One: Introduction
• Section Two: Impacts of colonial deconstruction of indigenous knowledge and emerging indigenous research methods
  • Indigenous knowledge in academia: historical and personal contexts
  • Methodological approaches to thesis research
  • Situating myself as an Indigenous researcher
  • Working in my own community contexts
  • Morality and narrative: collaboration and dialogue
  • Film as a tool of representation
  • Alto ethnography and identity in relation
• Section Three: Representations of indigenous identity and emerging discussions of trans/formative subjectivities
  • Assigned identities and their representations
  • Empowering subjects: emerging discussions of racial and gender identities
  • Trans/formative representations of the symbolic domain
• Section four: themes of trans/formative identities
  • Understanding metaphor: themes and stories
  • Thematic exploration of interview dialogue
• NOTES ABOUT THE VIDEO
• REFLECTING BACK: LESSONS LEARNED AND LINGERING QUESTIONS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• APPENDIX A: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
• APPENDIX B: ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR VIDEO DISTRIBUTION

Read the entire thesis here.

My People Will Sleep for One Hundred Years: Story of a Métis Self

University of Victoria
2004
106 pages

Sylvia Rae Cottell, B.F.A.
Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies at the University of Victoria.

“My people will sleep for one hundred years when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back.”
Louis Riel

As a result of the current political debate that surrounds the definition of Métis, the issue of Métis identity on both community and individual levels is often challenged in a public forum. Metis people outside of the areas considered the main hubs of Metis culture are likely to be faced with a myriad of different factors that impact their identity, including lack of community connections and limited contact with Métis cultural influences. There is a need to openly voice the diverse experiences of being Métis in order to affirm the experiences of many Métis people. This autoethnographic study aims to provide an account of an experience of being Métis and to salvage a sense of identity after many generations of assimilation. Autoethnography provides the freedom necessary for the representation of cultural values that are beyond the traditional assumptions of academic discourse (Spry, 2001) and aims to engage the reader on an emotional level. A purpose of this study is to validate the experience of many Métis readers and to enhance the level of culturally relevant practice provided to Métis individuals and communities by counsellors.

Read the entire thesis here.