The Seven Oaks Reader , livre ebook

THE SEVEN OAKS READER
the
SEVEN OAKS
READER

Myrna Kostash
Foreword by Heather Devine
N E W EST P RESS
COPYRIGHT MYRNA KOSTASH 2016

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication - reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system - without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
The Seven Oaks reader / edited and with a preface by Myrna Kostash.
Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-926455-53-2 (paperback). ISBN 978-1-926455-54-9 (epub). ISBN 978-1-926455-55-6 (mobi)
1. Seven Oaks, Battle of, Man., 1816. 2. Fur trade - Manitoba - History. 3. Manitoba - History - 19th century. I. Kostash, Myrna, editor, writer of preface FC 3212.4.S48 2015 971.27'4301 C 2015-906615-8 C 2015-906616-6
Editor: Don Kerr Index: Judy Dunlop Book design: Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design Author photo: Arete Edmunds, ArtLine Photography

NeWest Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for support of our publishing program. This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada. # 201, 8540 - 109 Street Edmonton, Alberta T 6 G 1 E 6 780.432.9427 www.newestpress.com
No bison were harmed in the making of this book.
Printed and bound in Canada
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16
CONTENTS
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
Cast of Characters
ONE : In the Beginning
The Fur Trade Wars
M tis
Lord Selkirk and His Settlement
TWO : Colony 1811 12
Selkirk s Plans Go Ahead
Preparations to Leave Scotland
Winter on the Bay 1811 1812
They Walk to the Forks July 1812
They Reach the Forks
Wintering Over 1812 1813
THREE : The Colony in Crisis 1813 15
Third Sailing
At the Settlement
Proclamation
Pemmican War
Skirmishes
FOUR : First Destruction of the Colony
The Campaign Intensifies
Colony Under Attack
Colony Destroyed
Lose the Battle, Win the War
Overview 1815
FIVE : Colony Winter/Spring 1815 16
Elusive Peace
Lord Selkirk s Defense
A Troubled Spring
Attacks and Counterattacks
Showdown at Red River
SIX : The Battle of Seven Oaks
M tis on the Move
Governor Semple Musters His Men
The Battle of Seven Oaks
Who Fired the First Shot?
Meanwhile, Back at the Fort
Fixing Blame
The Ballad of Pierre Falcon
SEVEN : Aftermath
Lord Selkirk Strikes Back
A War of Words
The Selkirk Colony Rebuilds, Again
Missionaries at the Forks
The Coltman Commission
The Coltman Report
In the Courts
Denouement
Finale
EIGHT : The Historians
Summing Up
NINE : Legacies
Settlers
M tis Nation
EPILOGUE
Chronology
Biographies of Cited Writers
Works Cited
Further Reading
Permissions
Image Credits
Index
FOREWORD
The Battle of Seven Oaks . . . or, How My Ancestral Uncle Got Arrested, and How My 5th Great Grandfather Lied on the Witness Stand to Get Him Out of Trouble
As a descendant of some of the participants in this notorious event, and as a professional historian of Canadian Native history, I ask myself what approach I should take to welcoming the reader to this most recent, and truly unique, narrative of the Seven Oaks saga.
One of my ancestral fifth - great - grandfathers was a Canadien freeman named Antoine Peltier dit Assiniboine. Apparently in the service of the North West Company during the Seven Oaks crisis, he married a Native woman, Marguerite Sauteaux, la fa on du pays. Her son, Pierre Bostonnais Pangman, grew to be one of the M tis chefs at Red River, and was arrested for his activities against the Hudson s Bay Company. His stepfather Antoine Peltier dit Assiniboine was called as a witness in the Selkirk Trials, and I have read the trial transcripts prompting me to carry out a more detailed contextual study of the Battle of Seven Oaks, with particular emphasis on the familial links among the participants.
What Myrna Kostash has accomplished in The Frog Lake Reader and The Seven Oaks Reader is not merely a reinterpretation of historical facts. Instead she has deconstructed, reordered, and supplemented the existing historical narratives in order to permit an examination of the meaning of how historical events get interpreted and re-interpreted over the years. She has forced readers to interrogate the relative validity of the existing versions of the Seven Oaks story by breaking apart each separate narrative into discrete snippets of information, not unlike pieces of a storyboard. She then sorts these isolated narrative remnants into groups according to elements of the plot that each piece of information represents. The elements are then combined into a new chronology of events that presents all of the differing perspectives, side by side, for the reader to compare and contrast. Some additional, contemporary commentary is also provided as a chorus that gives the reader some insights into the modern-day impact of this important event.
The contemporary commentary is one of the most compelling reasons to read this book. Few historiographical analyses reflect on the long-term, modern-day, consequences of historical events except in an abstract and general fashion. But the Seven Oaks Reader is also about private family tragedy and community decline, and the oral stories and songs shared and preserved by M tis people in the confines of their communities. One discovers, very quickly, that the memories - and the wounds - of this event are still fresh.
Some readers will no doubt be surprised and even angry to learn a few details about Seven Oaks that seem to have been overlooked by their teachers and professors in the past. Others will appreciate being exposed to the significant elements of a large body of historical information without having to hunt through libraries and websites to find each article and book.
But, as one learns quickly after even a cursory examination of the extensive historiography of this conflict, just about everyone - the participants, the contemporary observers resident in Red River, the partisans of both the Hudson s Bay and North West companies, and the descendants of the M tis and AngloScots combatants - has strong opinions on the subject. The modern-day professional historians who have sifted through those surviving accounts, and written their own assessments of Seven Oaks over the last two hundred years, also have convincing and intense perspectives on these events. These scholarly writings feature numerous facts that have been dutifully unearthed, carefully analyzed, and logically presented. But they are re-constructions of historical events. And they have their own implicit biases. Scholars are as shaped by regional, class, and racial biases as other writers might be, except that they are possibly more adept at obscuring their partisanship by the methodological tools at their disposal. If historians privilege the written eyewitness accounts of non-Indigenous men over those of M tis and First Nations participants, and denigrate (or ignore entirely) the oral accounts of these events that continue to be passed down through generations of Red River residents, they are guilty of producing incomplete and inaccurate histories. And these scholarly histories are as much opinion pieces - in their own academic way - as anything that John Halkett, Samuel Wilcocke, or Mercator penned in order to move public opinion in the cities of the Canadas and Britain. They can also be as emotionally manipulative as any ballad by Pierre Falcon, or any mise en sc ne painted by C.W. Jeffries.
What I like about Kostash s approach is that it is fundamentally egalitarian - democratic, if you like. Myrna does not privilege the different pieces of information, according to source or perspective. Instead, she puts it all out there, and lets the reader evaluate the bits for themselves. In doing so, the reader is forced to reflect on how the event has been shaped, and how the shaping of this history has impacted Western Canadians today.
Heather Devine
University of Calgary
October 2015
PREFACE
Modelled after my Frog Lake Reader (NeWest Press, 2009), The Seven Oaks Reader gathers together a wide diversity of texts with differing perspectives to narrate a controversial historic event, in this case the battle between armed settlers and armed M tis buffalo hunters on 19 June 1816 at The Forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers in what is now Winnipeg. The death of twenty-one settlers and one M tis led to no conclusive judicial outcome but has reverberated down through the generations of descendents of both communities as a formative event in their history in western Canada. As a born and bred western Canadian who has lived most of her life in Alberta, I was nevertheless ignorant of this legacy incident and so I set out to find as many sources for its telling as I could.
An initial treatment of these materials was broadcast in 2011 as Incident at Seven Oaks on the CBC Radio Ideas program (produced by Kathleen Flaherty), and it is from that program that I have used excerpts of interviews with Jack Bumsted, Ron Bourgeault, and Lyle Dick.
More than a textbook or anthology of voices, the Reader works as a drama of interplaying, sometimes contradictory, contrapuntal narratives. Given that some of the narrative dates to 1816 and that the historians themselves began publishing histories of Manitoba as far back as the 1850s, it is unsurprising that, from an editorial point of view, there are inconsistencies and even infelicities of word usage and spelling. So, one reads of both the Hudson Bay Company and the Hudson s Bay Company, of North-Westers and Nor Westers (agents and employees of the North West Company), of Bois Brules and B