The Puzzle of the Morrissette-Arcand Clan: A History Of Metis Historic and Intergenerational Trauma

Metis History;Intergenerational Trauma;Family History;Historical Trauma;Genealogy

Thistle, Jesse

University of Waterloo

关键词: Metis History;    Intergenerational Trauma;    Family History;    Historical Trauma;    Genealogy;   

Others  :  https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/10012/10872/1/Thistle_Jesse.pdf

瑞士|英语

来源: UWSPACE Waterloo Institutional Repository

【 摘 要 】

This thesis explores how members of the Morrissette-Arcand clan, a Metis roadallowance family from Saskatchewan, endured intergenerational trauma since being displacedfrom Red River in the 1870s. It frames Metis history using Maria Campbell’s metaphor of akinship puzzle, one that was intact before colonization and scattered after 1869. Accordingly, itshows how the Metis suffered repeated attacks on their free trade economy, sovereignty, andmobility following the transference of Rupertsland to Canada. These pillars, contends this thesis,formed the basis of nineteenth-century Metis society from its inception during the rise of Metispeoplehood (1780–1821), into a period of increased prosperity of Metis life (1821–1869), andending with the dispossession period (1869–1980). Oral history interviews, newspaper articles,census material, scrip records, Hudson’s Bay Company and Northwest Company fur tradejournals as well as genealogical research, secondary monographs, journal articles, and onlineweb resources are used to tell the two-hundred-year history of the Morrissette-Arcand clan.Based on this research, I conclude that the loss of Red River as a homeland, the destruction ofthe bison, the 1885 Northwest Resistance, and the Metis’s subsequent displacement onto roadallowances in the twentieth century was traumatic for the Morrissette-Arcand clan.