Red River women subject of book
Lorri Neilsen Glenn follows the Red River back in time to bring to light generations of strong women who were an important part of the fur trade and through history in her new book.
Neilsen Glenn is a professor emerita at Mount Saint Vincent University and a mentor in the University of King’s College MFA program for creative non-fiction.
She is currently on a book tour to support her latest work, “Following the River: Traces of Red River Women.” On Tuesday, she spoke to Faculty of Education students at the University of Lethbridge, followed by a reading from her book Tuesday night.
The stories have been stitched together from newspaper articles, museums collections and archives.
“The whole thing was prompted by my centenarian aunt Kay, who had told us her grandmother had died in a steamboat fire,” Neilsen Glenn said. “I wanted to know what that story was about.”
While researching these histories, she kept stumbling across interesting stories of Indigenous women and started to collect those as well.
“It’s sort of two threads throughout the book,” she said. “One is the reason for and the location of my great-grandmother’s death. The other is a search for Indigenous women who made a difference in the Red River area, and whose lives are not always recorded.”
Neilsen Glenn said sometimes there was very little to go on, and was complicated by a number of different factors, including people changing their names or the spellings of their names.
“It was a mystery,” she said. “There was a little bit here, and a little bit there. I had to cross check and look at different sources to verify the information.”
The work was further hampered by the status of women and Indigenous people during those times in Canadian history.
“Indigenous people in general, and women in particular, were not often deemed important enough to document,” she said.
Using some basic facts about the women she was studying, she was then able to look at historical accounts to get a better sense of what their lives may have been like.
“Rather than just finding out (a person) was born in the 1830s, it meant nothing until I knew what it was like in the 1830s in the Red River,” she said. “So then I read a lot about that era so I could find out what they ate, where they travelled, and where they lived. It’s almost like I had to fill in all the negative space.”
One story which stood out for Neilsen Glenn involved Anne McDermot Bannatyne, who was born in 1832 to an Irish Catholic father and Metis mother, and married to Andrew Bannatyne.
Anne was known for the strength of her character, and in one example she confronted celebrated Canadian poet Charles Mair for some unpleasant things he had written about Metis women which appeared in the Toronto Globe — a widely read newspaper at the time.
“He wrote a scathing article about “half-breed” women in Red River, biting at the backs of their white sisters,” said Neilsen Glenn. “So the next time Charles came to the Red River, and came into Anne’s husband’s store for a copy of the newspaper, she was ready for him with a whip.
“She pulled his nose and whipped him, and said ‘You don’t talk about us like that.’”
Neilsen Glenn said she hopes readers will see the strength of these women in history, in spite of how they were historically portrayed.
“They were key to the fur trade,” she said. “They were sleeping dictionaries, they were pack horses, and savvy about living in the bush. They pretty much kept these fur traders alive in many cases.
“And whether it was in the 1700s or well into the 1900s, they were very strong, and they have not received the attention they deserve.”