As museums come under increasing pressure to repatriate Indigenous cultural items, Métis author Gregory Scofield has gone to rescue them himself.
In the hushed third floor of the Royal B.C. Museum, Métis author Gregory Scofield walked from glass box to glass box, absorbing the stories told by the dioramas, carvings, masks, regalia, vessels and tools.From the time he was a kid — the kid who liked to ask questions, who listened to Métis stories while his auntie sewed and beaded, who loved history books and visits to Fort Langley and museums — Scofield had noticed something was missing.
Much of what Scofield had learned about Métis culture from grade school history books was disparaging, focused on Louis Riel and the resistance of 1885. In his bright, airy Victoria apartment, the pieces Scofield calls “the grandmothers” have found a place, many of them after a century of being lost in a diaspora far from their homelands in Canada.
The first grandmother Scofield brought home was an altar cloth dating to around 1850 or 1860, its provenance expressed in its materials: glass beads tiny as grains of sand, strung on sinew and couched in linen thread. The piece is a sweeping garden of leaves in shades of green, buds and wild roses in bloom that lead the eye up, as if to heaven. There is hope, vitality and beauty in the piece.
“The 1840 to 1850 pieces reflect a time in our history where many of the Hudson’s Bay men were in ‘country marriages’ with Métis women. They created for their families, and used their husbands, sons and uncles as canvases,” said Scofield. Scofield has worked closely with The Gabriel Dumont Institute in Saskatchewan throughout the process, publishing resource guides to Métis floral beadwork and moccasins, a book of poetry on Louis Riel, and a memoir featuring the voices of his mother, Dorothy, and adopted auntie Georgina, at whose kitchen table he learned to bead, and where he learned to listen and tell stories.
“It’s really showing that, in spite of all the negative ways in which we have been portrayed, the beauty of the things that Métis people could make and do even under the most dire circumstances.”
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