Writing Our People Back into History: A Year in the Life of John James Fidler

Abstract

This article considers the ways in which the creation of the category “half-breed” in federal legislation and policy acted as a means of eliminating Métis in the nation-building period in Canada. In connecting Métis family histories, methodologies, and theoretical approaches to situate the 1909 diary of Anglo-Métis farmer John James Fidler and the larger Fidler family, continuities in Indigenous familial, social, economic, and land-based connections are revealed to persist. The history of Métis farmers on the Prairies at the turn of the twentieth century is a little-known area of both Canadian history and Métis studies but reveals critical aspects of Métis land use, mixed-agriculture, kinship, gender, and sociality. Sources such as John James’ diary, used in conversation with genealogical reconstruction, census, and scrip documents, provide valuable insights into a little-known period and lifeway, an example of what Elder Elmer Ghostkeeper calls “living with the land.”