Abstract
Cheryl Troupe’s Putting Down Roots: Métis Agency, Land Use, and Women’s Food Labour in a Qu’Appelle Valley Road Allowance Community is a significant and methodologically sophisticated contribution to Métis history, Indigenous studies, and family history. Through community-based research, collaborative mapping, and careful archival and genealogical analysis, Troupe documents the persistence, adaptability, and agency of Métis families in the Qu’Appelle Valley from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. Rather than framing Métis history primarily through dispossession, trauma, or destitution, the book centers family, kinship, and everyday labor as the foundations through which Métis people maintained their relationships to land, place, and one another in the face of sustained colonial intervention.
Putting Down Roots offers a compelling example of how interconnected collectives of families, rather than the state or the individual, can serve as the primary unit of historical analysis. Troupe demonstrates that Métis responses to colonialism were fundamentally relational. Decisions about settlement, land use, labor, mobility, and resistance were made through kin networks that spanned generations and extended across regions, including present-day Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Montana, and the Dakota territories. Kinship is not treated as an anecdotal supplement to political or economic narratives, but as a central sources of historical knowledge that illuminate how Métis communities understood belonging, responsibility, and continuity.
A central intervention of the book is Troupe’s challenge to the assumption that Métis connections to land were severed through attempted dispossession and assimilation. Drawing on oral histories, genealogical records, and community-based maps, she shows how Métis families actively reconstituted their communities in marginal and makeshift spaces, particularly road allowances. Road allowances were places set aside for future road systems but not currently in use; these spaces were used by Métis families after dispossession through Métis scrip. These communities, however, were not accidental or purely reactive settlements. Rather, families selected these locations strategically, prioritizing proximity to relatives, access to resources, and the ability to sustain social and economic relationships. Road allowances emerge in Troupe’s analysis as places of persistence and resistance, collective landscapes shaped by kinship ties and intergenerational knowledge of land, rather than as temporary or failed settlements.
This reframing is especially important given the long-standing tendency in both popular and scholarly accounts to portray road allowance communities through a deficit lens. Poverty, hardship, and marginalization are not avoided in Troupe’s account, but they are contextualized within a broader narrative of resilience and persistence. By foregrounding family histories and community memories, Troupe offers an alternative interpretation of road allowances as spaces of resistance, continuity, and cultural vitality. These were places where Métis lifeways endured, adapted, and were actively reproduced through family labor, caregiving, and knowledge transmission.
Women’s labor is central to this story, and Troupe’s sustained focus on gender is one of the book’s most significant contributions. Women’s kinship networks and food-based labor are shown to be foundational to both family survival and community cohesion. Activities such as gardening, gathering, food preservation, sewing, beadwork, rug making, and caregiving were not merely domestic tasks, but essential forms of economic production and social reproduction. This emphasis on the centrality of women’s labor underscores the importance of looking beyond formal employment records or male-dominated political narratives to understand how communities functioned and endured.
Troupe’s analysis reframes resistance as something enacted through everyday practices. Maintaining gardens, sharing food, caring for Elders, teaching children how to harvest and preserve resources, and sustaining kinship obligations all emerge as acts that anchored families to place and affirmed Métis identity. These practices were deeply gendered, but they were also collective, involving men, women, children, and Elders in interconnected roles. Gender, kinship, and labor are inseparable in Troupe’s account, offering a model for historians interested in integrating feminist and Indigenous methodologies.
Methodologically, Putting Down Roots is exemplary in its integration of community-based history, genealogy, and Historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS). In Chapter 1, Troupe frames Indigenous sense of place through story, emphasizing that narratives passed through families are a primary means by which Métis people understand identity, belonging, and history. The research was conducted in close collaboration with community members, particularly Bob Desjarlais and Margaret Harrison, whose family-based maps of the Qu’Appelle Valley provide the spatial foundation and orientation for the book.
The use of HGIS is especially significant for grounding these community-provided maps within historical survey records, land titles, scrip documentation, and genealogical data. This approach demonstrates how spatial technologies can be used not to override family knowledge, but to strengthen and contextualize it within other historical documentation. Troupe’s mapping work shows how family histories, when anchored to place through HGIS, can reveal long-term patterns of settlement, mobility, and kinship that are otherwise obscured in colonial archives. Mapping becomes a relational practice that visually represents family networks across time and space, reinforcing the centrality of kinship to Métis history.
The early historical chapters situate family labor and land use within the broader Métis economic and political landscape. Troupe contextualizes women’s work within the buffalo hunt economy, emphasizing values such as minimizing waste, sharing resources, and sustaining collective responsibilities. These values, she shows, were carried forward into later periods as Métis families adapted to changing economic conditions. The book traces the emergence of more permanent settlements in the Qu’Appelle Valley in the 1870s, highlighting how families drew on existing kin networks to navigate shifts away from large-scale bison hunting.
Community history is particularly prominent in the discussion of petitions submitted by the Métis in the later decades of the 1800s, where they asserted land rights and demanded recognition. These petitions are framed as collective political actions rooted in family and community relationships rather than individual claims. Troupe shows that families repeatedly articulated their long-standing occupancy, land use, and sovereignty, even as they were excluded as a collective from Treaty 4. The petitions underscore the role of family networks in organizing political action and sustaining a shared sense of responsibility to land and future generations.
Troupe’s analysis of the Dominion Land Survey, the scrip system, where Métis were offered either land or money in exchange for relinquishing their land rights, and homesteading further illustrates the centrality of kinship to Métis strategies of survival and resistance. She demonstrates how imposed survey systems conflicted with Métis land tenure practices, which were oriented toward kinship-based geographies rather than abstract legal subdivisions. Families responded strategically, sometimes registering land claims, sometimes identifying as farmers, and sometimes taking scrip under conditions of uncertainty and coercion. These decisions were often made collectively, with an eye toward supporting extended family members and maintaining proximity to kin.
The consequences of these policies were profound. Scrip speculation, homesteading requirements, and discriminatory enforcement practices led to widespread dispossession and movement into road allowances. Yet Troupe consistently resists portraying the Métis as passive victims. Instead, she highlights how families reorganized themselves spatially and economically, often consolidating into larger kin-based settlements where resources, labor, and caregiving could be shared. Her analysis underscores the importance of examining how families adapt structurally under colonial pressure, rather than assuming linear narratives of breakdown or decline.
The chapters detailing labor on road allowances provide an important perspective on how Métis communities navigated ongoing colonial interference in their way of life. After being displaced and dispossessed through scrip and related policies, the Métis were resourceful and resilient, combining wage labor, resource harvesting, and domestic production to sustain themselves. Harvesting Seneca root, picking bison bone, seasonal farm and domestic work, and the production of handicrafts were all organized through kinship networks. Women and children’s labor, often overlooked in historical accounts, is treated as integral to family economies, while Elders are recognized as knowledge holders and cultural anchors.
Food production and sharing receive particular attention in Chapter 7, one of the highlights of the book. Women’s work in feeding families through hunting, fishing, gathering, gardening, preserving, and sharing food is shown to be central to both physical survival and social cohesion. Meals, celebrations, and food exchanges reinforced family bonds and community obligations. Preservation techniques such as drying, smoking, salting, and storing food in root cellars highlight intergenerational knowledge transmission and long-term planning, key concerns for family historians interested in how households managed risk and scarcity.
Troupe also addresses the increasing criminalization of Métis subsistence practices through conservation and wildlife regulations. These policies disrupted family economies and placed additional burdens on women and elders responsible for provisioning households. Despite surveillance and enforcement, families adapted, sometimes by altering harvesting practices, sometimes by evading authorities, and sometimes by organizing politically to secure permits or exemptions. These responses further illustrate how family-based strategies shaped Métis resistance to colonial governance.
The final chapters addressing the Great Depression and relief policies reveal the enduring consequences of colonial jurisdictional ambiguity for Métis families. Municipal and provincial governments often resisted providing relief, framing Métis families as outside settler society and unworthy of support. Troupe documents the racism embedded in these assessments and shows how relief policies often sought to reshape Métis families into settler norms rather than addressing their actual needs. Proposals for farm colonies and removal reflect ongoing attempts to control Métis family life, culminating in traumatic relocations elsewhere in Saskatchewan, even though full removal was never implemented in the Qu’Appelle Valley.
Overall, Putting Down Roots is a richly textured, family-centered history that makes a substantial contribution to scholarship on Métis communities and Indigenous family life. By centering women’s work, kinship, and everyday practices, and by using HGIS methods to ground community-based maps provided by Métis collaborators, Cheryl Troupe makes a lasting contribution to Métis historiography and to Indigenous, feminist, and historical geography scholarship. The book stands as a model for ethical, community-engaged research and affirms the importance of Métis communities telling their own histories, rooted in land, relationship, and responsibility. The book stands as a powerful affirmation of the Métis enduring connections to land, place, and one another.
