Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/144909
"It wasn't a rebellion," Amundson says in deference to the modern Metis, who reject a word that implies they were mere rabblerousers against authority. "It was more like a civil war. These were people fighting for their homeland. That is something people don't understand to this day." The West was effectively ungoverned in 1885, and all in a flux. The bison were gone, land speculators were everywhere, settlers imminent. Unable to win any assurances for their future in the new Dominion, the Metis took military control of their territory between the arms 26 W E S T W O R L D p22-27_MetisCountry.indd 26 >> of the Saskatchewan River. Chiefs Big Bear and Poundmaker, whose people were starving, were meanwhile staging actions of their own at Fort Pitt and Fort Battleford. In central Canada, it suited the MacDonald government to propagandize the unrest as an all-out rebellion – the perfect excuse to tame the West with gunpowder. Military buffs have been picking the carcass of the Fish Creek battle for 125 years. So here are a few more bones. Major General Frederick Middleton led the Dominion militia. The complacent 60-year-old Brit, a veteran of the New Zealand Wars and the Indian Rebellion, felt superior to his indigenous foes. He allowed embedded journalists to file reports of his troop movements to the eastern papers, smugly assuming the Metis didn't read them. His supplies got stranded on a ferry, stuck fast on a sandbar. He brought a barge to get his men across the river, but forgot oars. And so on. As Amundson sums it up: "Middleton, he got his ass kicked." Middleton would not make the same mistake at Batoche a few weeks later, where the Metis were routed, their dreams of homeland dashed. Frankly, I find military history often distracts from much more important questions. Such as why government troops were ever sent to shoot at a people whose key demands were little more than official bilingualism and freedom of religion. We return to the boats for the last short leg of the day, descending past the village of Fish Creek and its sadly neglected wooden cathedral. After an hour, Speer waves us in to our camping place for the night, a gorgeous sand flat of wolf willow and chokecherry that the Metis called Petite Ville. The Metis followed the bison all summer, then sat out the winter in camps like this. Somehow, despite having lived along this river most of my life, I have never heard of Petite Ville. Bathed in warm evening light, its mood is much more lovely than any battlefield. "This is the very last place where the Metis lived a bison-hunting lifestyle," says Amundson. Thirty or 40 families, or hivernants, wintered here each year in longhouses, with windows of oiled bison parchment. We set about making it lively, at least for one night, fanning out to set up our shelters of nylon and aluminum. Cloaked by the waist-high grass are holes deep enough to swallow a Smart car. Amundson explains these are the remnants of refuse pits that lay under the floors of the Metis houses – each an archaeological trove. Among the finds are thousands of seed beads, the tiny glass decorative beads the Metis still use in traditional clothing designs. Speer and his crew turn back sod to lay a fire and feed us hearty bison stew and wild rice. (Speer tells me later he even brought pemmican, forgetting to serve it in the rush of feeding the multitudes.) The clear, cold night carries a tang of fall. Our sleepy teenagers are waking up and reveal themselves to be choir singers of a calibre that would have impressed the very musical Metis. SUMMER 2012 4/13/12 12:01:05 PM