Reviewed by: Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People by Michel Hogue Émilie Pigeon Hogue, Michel– Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People. Regina: University of Regina Press, 2015. Pp. 328. Michel Hogue’s 2015 monograph develops a masterful paradigm-shift in the field of Metis studies, whose contributors often frame their analyses from either side of the forty-ninth parallel. In contrast, Hogue presents a transnational history of a geopolitical space imbued with continuous affirmations of Metis peoples’ sovereignty and mobility, from the 1870s until the early 1900s. Hogue approaches the borderland as an analytical framework and researches the legacies and transformative effects of settler state policies in Canada and the United States on Metis people across the Great Plains. This book argues that the creation of the Canadian and American border dividing Indigenous territories required the categorizing of Indigenous nations using the construct of race. Colonial governments reinforced the identity categories they created in response to the expressions of Metis sovereignty they witnessed. In so doing, Metis and the Medicine Line offers a nuanced look at a historical nation too often conceived of as “Canadian.” It highlights the historical survival strategies of Metis people confronting two settler-state projects based on Indigenous land dispossession and implemented by violence. Relying on a remarkable breadth of archival research, a testament to the mobility of his research subjects, Hogue incorporates state and provincial archive materials of fifteen locales, transcending the often-cited national limits to histories of the Prairies/Great Plains. He crafts a historical account that followed the movements, seasonal patterns, and survival strategies of Metis men and women, whose primary mode of subsistence was in the midst of irreparable collapse. The wide-ranging body of research encompassed in this monograph assembles diverse materials such as government documents, oral histories, missionary records, military documents, tribal histories, and diaries, to name only a few examples. [End Page 207] By centering the study on the biography of Antoine Ouellette and his spouse, Angelique Bottineau, Hogue skilfully reconstructs the legal decisions increasingly imposed on Metis people as the 1800s advanced to a close. Laws and decisions made by military leaders preoccupied with clearing the land for the advance of white settlers systemically disadvantaged Metis people, transformed the borderland landscapes, and broke up Indigenous kinscapes. The study of the treaty-making policies of Canada and the United States, and their effects on Metis families, such as the Ouellettes, Azures, and Gladues, shows that both countries used Metis mobility and traditional territorial claims in a political game of dispossession. The social history methodologies deployed in this monograph sheds light on the explicit effects of state policies on the health, happiness, and lifeways of Metis people. Hogue highlights the frustrations of individuals whose histories of mobility and sovereignty did not fit into the Western categories of life, labour, and identity. The historical accounts of the lives presented throughout demonstrate the very real and lived consequences of being an outsider, or an obstacle, to statecraft. Metis conceptions of their ancestral territory did not acquiesce to the imaginary of the colonizers. Ancestral claims to territory that transcended the forty-ninth parallel were systematically denied, often by violence or economic means. Hogue’s historical analysis highlights a renewed focus on the importance of the forty-ninth parallel’s Indigenous appellation as the Medicine Line. Indeed, Metis men and women, and people of many other Indigenous nations, came to conceive of the border that divided the Canadian and American Prairies as the Medicine Line. It was a space imbued with power, and one that military forces did not cross. The choice and the ability to cross the Medicine Line was an assertion of Metis sovereignty. In the 1870s, as Hogue demonstrates, the frontier offered new economic survival strategies and opportunities to Metis families willing to use that space to their advantage. This ideological positioning is especially important in light of the timely discussions undertaken on the topic of settler colonialism found throughout Metis and the Medicine Line. The increasing reliance by nation-states on violence, removal, dispossession, economic marginalization, starvation, and race-based discrimination, proved to be most disruptive...
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Dec 14, 2016
Alexis B Moraitis + 1
Open Access