Cheryl Troupe, Putting Down Roots: Métis Agency, Land Use, and Women’s Food Labour in a Qu’Appelle Valley Road Allowance Community, Winnipeg, Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press, 2025.
It began with a hand-drawn map, a drive through southern Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley, and conversations with Métis elder and storyteller Bob Desjarlais. Nearly two decades later, Putting Down Roots: Métis Agency, Land Use, and Women’s Food Labour in a Qu’Appelle Road Allowance Community is complete. Even if I didn’t know it at the time, this book began in the early 2000s when I was fresh out of undergrad. I was working with the Gabriel Dumont Institute, a Métis cultural and post-secondary educational institute, and was tasked with interviewing Métis elders and storytellers for an oral history project.
This is also where I first met Margaret Harrison. She and Bob are foundational to this work. Each graciously shared their stories and gifted me maps—one hand-drawn and the other a hooked rag rug, a traditional Métis art form and cultural practice—to share their presence and experiences growing up in the Katepwa Lake road allowance community as they remembered it.
Top Image : Bob Desjarlais’ hand drawn map of Katepwa Lake Road Allowance community. Bottom Image: Margaret Pelletier Harrison hooked rug depicting road allowance home on Katepwa Lake, 1940s.
Road allowances are narrow strips of land measuring 66 feet wide that were set aside in Canada’s Dominion Lands Survey for future roads. They were never meant for settlement or agriculture. Yet in the late nineteenth century, displaced prairie Métis began occupying these marginal spaces, as well as unclaimed Crown lands near First Nations reserves and the edges of growing towns and cities. These became known as road allowance communities, and their residents as “road allowance people.”
Though often seen as peripheral, impoverished and temporary, road allowance communities were sites of Métis resilience and resistance.
Though often seen as peripheral, impoverished and temporary, road allowance communities were sites of Métis resilience and resistance. They were places where cultural continuity and connection to the land endured, and where everyday practices—particularly women’s work in food production—sustained families and affirmed Métis identity.
In Putting Down Roots, I use oral histories, family genealogies, and mapping in a community-engaged approach that traces the history of the Qu’Appelle Valley Métis and examine how these road allowance communities persisted. I do this by using Bob and Margaret’s maps as a jumping-off point from which to scrutinize the land-based food systems that connected families and reinforced gender roles in the community. I use their maps to anchor the book’s broader narrative of Métis history in the Qu’Appelle region and reflect the deep connections between storytelling, memory, and land.
I start with an examination of Métis social, economic, and political life between 1850 and 1870, with a focus on women’s roles in food production and shifts in mobility and settlement in the Qu’Appelle Valley prompted by the decimation of the buffalo. Women’s labour in feeding their families, contributing to the fur trade, and sustaining kinship ties provides crucial insight into the everyday functioning and resilience of Métis communities. Mapping women’s work within specific places reveals their central role in maintaining familial and community stability. In the Qu’Appelle Valley, Métis women quite literally “put down roots” in their gardens, growing what they needed and harvesting the natural environment to feed their families, while maintaining and reproducing cultural knowledge that anchored their families to the land.
Putting Down Roots examines the emergence of Métis political assertions regarding land and sovereignty within Canada’s evolving national framework, with an emphasis on agency and resilience as core Métis values. It highlights women’s foundational roles in enabling political action in the 1870s, during a time when families began to live in the Valley on a year-round basis, marking economic adaptation and a reorganization of land use within familiar territories.
Putting Down Roots also investigates the extent to which Métis adopted agricultural practices from the 1880s onward, while continuing to assert their sovereignty and resist settler colonial land policies in both individual and collective ways. The Métis’ determination to maintain autonomy is evident in their opposition to instruments of dispossession, such as the Dominion Lands Act, the Dominion Lands Survey, the Homestead Policy, and the scrip system. These tools increasingly constrained Métis land access and prompted prolonged efforts to secure title to the lands they already occupied.
Métis experiences with the scrip system in the Qu’Appelle Valley mark a turning point in the narrative, as Métis efforts to gain legal land title through scrip were largely unsuccessful and ultimately led to widespread displacement from parcels of land they owned onto the road allowance. However, Métis relocation to road allowance lands surrounding the Qu’Appelle Lakes was not a retreat. Instead, it is interpreted as a reassertion of Métis agency and cultural continuity. Families remained within their homeland, preserving kinship ties and maintaining cultural and economic practices. Even as they engaged in the settler economy, Métis families did so on their terms, continuing to work as family units. At the same time, women supported household economies through sewing, domestic work, and harvesting local plants such as Seneca root and berries.
The enduring role of women in shaping Métis identity and family life persisted well into the twentieth century, highlighting both continuity and adaptation in gender roles and family structures, while emphasizing women’s knowledge of harvesting and food practices as a key aspect of cultural survival.
On the road allowance, women’s everyday labour and the social and cultural importance of food production, preparation, and sharing were significant. The enduring role of women in shaping Métis identity and family life persisted well into the twentieth century, highlighting both continuity and adaptation in gender roles and family structures, while emphasizing women’s knowledge of harvesting and food practices as a key aspect of cultural survival.
Life on the road allowance was not easy. Métis increasingly came into conflict with state agents, such as conservation and fisheries officers, in the context of increasing regulation and surveillance of Métis livelihoods. Métis subsistence users responded to these pressures with adaptability, finding ways to continue harvesting and other land-based practices despite restrictions. Notably, this period saw the emergence of women in public activism. Their participation signals both the continuation of longstanding political strategies and a shift toward reaffirming women’s leadership and agency in the face of colonial intrusion.
By the 1930s, Qu’Appelle Métis relied heavily on municipal and provincial relief. The subsequent rehabilitative efforts of Saskatchewan’s CCF government under the leadership of Tommy Douglas and intensified municipal and provincial efforts to remove Métis from the road allowances brought Métis lives under direct government surveillance and firmly into public view, increasing the racism that they already faced from their settler neighbours. For many, these colonial pressures ultimately severed Métis connections to the land and broke apart extended family settlements, leading to the dissolution of the road allowance settlement in the Qu’Appelle Valley.
Through the lens of women’s labour, these communities show how Métis people resisted colonial disruption not only through organized action, but by sustaining culture, kinship, and autonomy on the margins of the settler state.
Qu’Appelle Métis faced tremendous upheaval. However, they adapted by creating communities in the overlooked gaps of the colonial land system. These makeshift road allowance settlements enabled them to stay within familiar territories, preserve kinship ties, and maintain cultural practices that were often beyond the direct reach of the Canadian state. This perspective challenges the dominant narratives of Métis history, which often center on prominent male leaders such as Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont. While the political efforts of these more famous leaders remain important, the history of road allowance communities reveals a different, but equally vital form of resistance: one embedded in daily life. Through the lens of women’s labour, these communities show how Métis people resisted colonial disruption not only through organized action, but by sustaining culture, kinship, and autonomy on the margins of the settler state.
Cheryl Troupe