My mother’s secret
His ancestors’ heroism as Métis rebels became a burden for his mother — and a lesson for Canadian reconciliation
Adapted from a speech to the Foodbank of Waterloo: My mother is still living, but this is a eulogy of sorts. This is my feeble attempt to sum up her life experience with a handful of, no doubt, ill-chosen words; the kind of exercise normally undertaken from the pulpit or at the graveside, and in my case made all the more difficult by the passage of time and the shame that has shrouded some key chapters in my mother’s story.
My mother is still living, but she is lost now to Alzheimer’s; and lost, too, is the opportunity to talk to her about our family history and the role race played in her life.
My mother is still living, and what follows is her story . . . or at least part of it.
We start at the home of my mother’s great aunt, Marguerite Dumas Caron.
Marguerite’s whitewashed, stucco’d log home still sits on a high bluff overlooking the North Saskatchewan River. The valley below — even today — teems with game and the river with fish; the land is rich and sprawls in every direction under a seemingly endless prairie sky.
It’s easy to understand why the Métis, who settled there after abandoning the rich valley lands of the Red River, were prepared to die defending this last stake as a “homeland.” Even today, there is something both guileless and beguiling about the land. It’s the kind of place that, in the words of Johnny Cash, you can breathe “air that ain’t been breathed before.”
Marguerite, by all accounts, was a woman of uncharacteristic strength and will, traits that those who know my mother would immediately recognize. Anyone who ever crossed swords with Rita Jeanne Dumas would appreciate the maxim that history doesn’t always repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Marguerite is a heroine to the Métis. Her husband, Jean Caron, and her sons fought the Canadian Army in the Northwest Rebellion. So, too, did her brother, my mother’s grandfather, Joseph Patrice Dumas.
Marguerite’s home was burned to the ground by Canadian troops during the Battle of Batoche, where the Métis made their last stand. (The home that sits on the bluff today was built on its charred foundations the year after the guns had fallen silent, and it was occupied by the Carons until well into this century.)
Marguerite became a Métis heroine in the hours before Batoche, during the Battle of Fish Creek. A tiny force of Métis soldiers, fighting alongside a handful of Dakota warriors, were being overwhelmed at Tourond’s Coulee by a massively superior force of Canadian soldiers advancing on the Village of Batoche.
I stood on the lip of that coulee this summer, now a still and peaceful spot surrounded by fiery yellow fields of canola, and tried to imagine the fear that must have gripped the vastly outnumbered, poorly armed Métis soldiers as they surveyed the Canadian forces.
Marguerite surely knew fear, too. She could hear the gunfire and artillery from her home in Batoche, and knew that the Métis were running out of ammunition and in desperate need of reinforcements. She knew she would likely lose her husband and her sons if something was not done to turn the battle.
The story goes that Louis Riel, the head of the provisional government and the leader of the rebellion, was on his knees in the village church when Marguerite burst in on him, roused him from his religious stupor, demanding that he send reinforcements to the coulee.
“Get off your goddamn knees and stop praying,” she railed. “If you don’t send reinforcements, I’ll go myself.”
Riel did send reinforcements, and the Battle of Fish Creek was, indeed, turned, with the Canadian commander halting his advance and withdrawing from the field. That, of course, did not alter the inevitable outcome of the rebellion or the tragic path of the Métis people in the many decades that have followed.
I find the story of Marguerite Dumas and her brother, Joseph Patrice, fascinating, even inspiring. And I’d be less than honest with you if I didn’t confess to a great and unexpected sense of pride, even delight, that two such incredible characters, people who played such central and integral roles in a crucial chapter of our country’s history, can be found in my humble family tree.
What I find even more notable, though, is that it is not a story I ever heard from my mother.
My brother has spent the last several years piecing together our family’s story, and it’s only been through his efforts that we have come to know Marguerite and Joseph Patrice. And it was at my brother’s urging that we travelled together to North Saskatchewan in this, the 150th anniversary of Canada’s nationhood.
Standing in our family homestead, now a national historic site, I could not help but wonder how this could be? How was it that this chapter of our family story had not been celebrated; in fact, had been suppressed by the very people who should have been proudest of it?
“My mother grew up in a society that was inherently racist. You will not understand any part of my mother’s story if you do not understand that first.” DANA ROBBINS SPEECH TO FOODBANK OF WATERLOO
The simple answer is that race, specifically my mother’s mixed race, was a forbidden topic in our childhood home, as it had been in her own home when she was a child.
My mother grew up in a society that was inherently racist. You will not understand any part of my mother’s story if you do not understand that first.
This is not something my mother, who never got past the fifth grade, could articulate at an intellectual level, but it was something she knew with absolute certainty at an emotional one.
And so she spent her life brazening it out, hoping always that if she said often enough that her family was French and German, with some Dutch thrown in, that would expunge the Cree blood that also coursed through her veins. And for the most part it did. There are only a handful of instances from my childhood when I remember my mother’s race being questioned — at least publicly. When I was 6 or 7, I remember a friend’s mother snidely introducing me as “Rita Robbins’ boy, you know, that Indian-looking woman.” I recall the sense of panic I felt upon hearing my mother described that way, and I recall her sense of devastation when I recounted it to her that afternoon.
Race is a difficult and complicated subject for me. And I want to make clear here that throughout my life I have enjoyed the great privilege that all dominant classes enjoy in their societies. I am not standing here today suggesting for a moment that my life is in any way illustrative of the broader Métis experience in Canada. Quite the opposite, actually.
My father’s Anglo/Irish stock was all anyone needed to know about my brother and me. I may have my mother’s Cree blood, but it’s really only of late that I’ve acknowledged and embraced that part of my family narrative. The truth is that our Métis ancestry has never been a mechanism by which people have identified me or by which I have identified myself.
So this, in all the ways that matter, is my mother’s story, not my own.
In a speech to the United Nations in September, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke with refreshing candour of Canada’s troubled relationship with Indigenous peoples, and the stark manner in which our history of colonialism has impacted these communities.
“For First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples in Canada,” said Trudeau, “those early colonial relationships were not about strength through diversity, or a celebration of differences. For Indigenous peoples in Canada, the experience was mostly one of humiliation, neglect and abuse.” Humiliation. Neglect. And abuse. The prime minister went on to cite a litany of social ills that have flowed from that dysfunction into the present day — everything from the lack of potable water on reserves to the tragic rates of suicide among Indigenous youth and, of course, the now well-documented and tragic history of murdered and missing Indigenous women.
As tragic as that shopping list of government and societal failure may be, I’d suggest that what is missing is an overarching understanding of the role of endemic poverty in Indigenous communities; an appropriate point of reflection at an event such as this morning’s, as we struggle to understand the relationship between diversity and hunger, that most pointed expression of poverty.
Even a casual observer would be struck by the disproportionate weight of poverty borne by First Nations and Métis communities. Consider some recent media:
Indigenous children are more than twice as likely to live in poverty than other Canadian children.
Indigenous children living on reserves in Manitoba experience rates of poverty as high as 76 per cent.
The life expectancy of Indigenous citizens is five to seven years shorter than the life expectancy of non-Aboriginals;
Infant mortality rates are 1.5 times higher among First Nations;
Tuberculosis rates among people living on reserves are 31 times the na- tional average.
And, finally — and this one I always find most jarring — First Nations youth are more likely to end up in jail than to graduate high school.
If all of this were true only of First Nations and Métis, it would be damning and deplorable. But study after study shows that the relationship between poverty and visible minorities in Canada is indisputable. Some studies show the rates of poverty among “racialized communities” are twice the Canadian average, and that such groups account for more than 60 per cent of impoverished people living in our largest cities.
In his speech to the UN, Trudeau opined that “Canada remains a work in progress.” And to that I would add that we have accomplished much as a nation, much of which we can be justifiably proud; make no mistake, I am a proud Canadian. But much of the heavy lifting in our nation building is still to be done.
Inclusion must be at the heart of that work. And meaningful reconciliation with our First Nations, Métis and Inuit must be our shared commitment.
When I returned from Batoche this summer, my first stop was at my mother’s nursing home. I told her about the trip, what my brother and I had learned about Marguerite and Joseph Patrice, and I told her we should be proud to come from such stock.
As is her nature now, Mom sat quietly, never uttering a word, and watched me while I spoke.
If this was a movie, I would tell you that some small part of my recitation penetrated my mother’s consciousness, and that she gave her son some signal of comprehension, perhaps a smile, maybe an almost imperceptible nod of the head. But this isn’t a movie. And I know in my heart that no part of that story was understood. The telling of it came too late for Rita Jeanne Dumas.
My mother is still living, but she will never know the pride our family has in our rediscovered Métis roots.
This is my mother’s story. Dana Robbins is vice-president and group publisher for Metroland Media, a sister company of the Toronto Star.