‘Under Trying Domestic Circumstances’

Abstract

This article considers a collection of Plains Indigenous beadwork donated to the Royal Saskatchewan Museum by the Canadian author and collector Mary Weekes (1884–1980). Taking the rural cottage where she acquired her collection as a contact zone, the analysis considers how Weekes developed unusually intimate settler–Indigenous friendships that forced her to confront her complicity in colonial practices of dispossession and assimilation. It also interrogates how her dedication to Saskatchewan’s marginalised Indigenous peoples at times irreconcilably conflicted with her own marginalised status as a woman with persistent professional ambitions. Moreover, the article contends that Weekes’s domestic circumstances and exchanges of labour therein offer insight into the reproduction of settler identity in twentieth-century Saskatchewan and the simultaneous (and not necessarily oppositional) resistance of Indigenous dispossession.