 excited to introduce our next speaker here. She's somebody that I met, well I met Brenda 12 years ago when I was a we undergrad, Carleton University, walking around thinking I knew a lot of things, and when I met Brenda she explained to me many different times in many different ways that there's a lot more to know, and it was one of the most important lessons that I learned while I was here at Carleton as you know we only hold one piece of the story as an important piece, but it's only one part of the story, so I have something to read. Brenda since 2010 has been the Chair in Matri Research at the University of Ottawa, where she also holds an associate professorship in the Department of Geography. Her career has been spent studying Mati history and culture from the inside, seeking ways to express Mati history from the perspective of a Mati worldview and set of understandings. She works to understand traditional kinship practices as the foundation of all social and political behaviors within Mati communities, and throughout the course of her career she's worked in Mati communities in North Dakota, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, researching their histories and documenting the connections and relationships between family members as a lens to understand both Mati society. So I'm really pleased to introduce Brenda McDougall. Yeah, you wanted left, remember? Thanks, Benny, and thank you for coming today and for the opportunity to speak, and I was really excited by listening to David this morning. So I'm in a geography department, I'm not a geographer. I'm actually trained in native studies with a historical background. So I'm a bit of a fraud there for that little bit. And because I'm a historian, I actually don't do ethics research processes. I don't have to go through research ethics boards. I don't have to fill out the forms. I don't engage in any of that and I'm pretty relieved not to do it. I've helped my students through the process and I'm happy I've not done it myself. But I don't want you to think that because something is historical that somehow that mitigates you from having a responsibility to think ethically or to behave ethically with archival sources and with the lives of the people that are found inside of archives. So while technically I don't work with live human subjects as described in ethics applications, I work with the dead, I very much feel that I have a responsibility to the families, to the individuals, and to the communities that I work with because I'm writing their history. I'm trying to track down sources that they have left or that have been left about them that reflect something about who they are. And so I wanted to spell a couple of myths maybe. And one of them is that we didn't leave written records, that indigenous people don't leave written records. We have lots of written records. We need to start paying attention to the archival traces that we created, that our ancestors created, and not ignore them. That doesn't mean that we don't use oral tradition or that we don't work with our elders or learn stories. But we also have to consider the legacy that exists within the archival repositories spread across this country, spread across North America, and sometimes in Europe. So the material I work with primarily is, in fact, church records. I rebuild genealogies. And I do that as a way to try and get at how people lived relatedness. How did they function in a community of related human beings? What does an extended family kinship look like? How does that extended family kinship spread out over a geographical space? How do families break apart and come back together at certain times of the year? Or maybe a generation later? And what does that mean in terms of their processes? So while I don't follow a formal ethical process in an institutional way, I work with traditional people from where I'm from. And so the very first teaching that I received became very much a part of the first research that I ever did, which is Huakotuin, the idea of all my relations. So Huakotuin is a Kree word. It was taught to me in Saskatchewan. I probably only know a little bit about what it actually means. But the basic principle is we are all related within our community. And that the process of building community and then in turn of building nation is to go out and create relatives. And the most pitiful human being in the world is one who's alone. And so to go forth and to create as much family as possible. So this notion of an extended kinship as opposed to a nuclear family. That's the first place that you have to start with if you're working with an indigenous worldview. Certainly if you're working with a Métis worldview, is to start considering not just the parents and the grandparents and the kids and the grandkids, but who are the aunts and uncles? What does the auntie look like? What does the uncle look like? Who are all of the mushums or grandfathers in the community? Who are all the cookums in the community? And how do they interact with one another? And believe it or not, you can find this material in archival sources. There is a there's a deep rich legacy of information about indigenous family structures within archives. One of the principles of Huocotun is reciprocity. So reciprocal relationships, looking after one another without an expectation of anybody looking after you. But because you are generous, because you are kind, because you have good intentions, people in turn will look after you if they can when you are struggling. And so, B Medicine, an anthropologist, a Sioux anthropologist from South Dakota, did a great deal of writing about the reciprocal family nature that is inherent across indigenous cultures, but she of course focused on her community, the Dakota Sioux. And another, there's some, you know, this is where indigenous writers, right, she's 20th century, but a 19th century indigenous writer was Ella Cara DeLoria. She's the great aunt of Vine DeLoria, if you've ever had to read Vine's work in classes now. Ella Cara DeLoria described basically Huocotun, although in her language, it's Teoshpe, she described it as the essence of being a human being. Right, so our very humanity is embedded in family. And we are not humans, we are not fully human, unless we understand our relationship to people. But it's not just a relationship, it's a responsibility. Right, so we talk about indigenous rights, which are important conversations to have. But we also need to talk about what our responsibilities are to one another. Because if we don't enact our responsibilities, our rights don't mean anything. And so reciprocity, humanity, responsibility, and, and fundamentally being respectful. And if you show respect, you receive respect, that's part of that reciprocal relationship. It's not just things that you can that you can support people with, it's the respect that you can show them. That is reciprocal. And so by thinking about these things, every time I pick up an archival document or try to understand somebody's historical behavior and actions, if I start to think about these things, I get a sense of how they made decisions. Right, because it's one thing to, to know facts, you know, we can all know facts. Leroy Riel had a resistance in 1885. That's a straight up fact. Why did he do it? What was his motivation? What was his, what was his thought process as he did these things? Those are the interpretive frameworks that we put around historical content. And as we know, indigenous history up until maybe the 1960s was written primarily from a Western white academic lens. And so people's motivations were always framed within those Western frameworks, as opposed to within an indigenous framework. And more specifically within the framework of the place that they came from, the nation that they belong to, the community that was the foundation of their relationships. So you start in those places and start to work your way out in terms of, that's that's my process, right? That's, and, and so my ethical responsibility in that process is what are my values? I believe in Wakotuen. I believe in these structures. I was raised within them. I didn't know the word for it until I was an adult, but I understand them. And so what is my responsibility? What is my reciprocity? And as long as I carry those frameworks with me, I'm an ethical person. So you can institutions can mandate things. But if you don't, if you don't behave ethically, if you don't have it in you, it doesn't matter what what any institution tells you in terms of what the rules are. You'll find a way to violate them. So they're a nice guideline, but you actually have to embody it first. So I do genealogy, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna walk you through this family. I'm not gonna. So this is a pretty standard genealogy. And, and I'm gonna do this to try and explain and give examples of some of the things that I mean about what a worldview functions or how it could function. So this is the family of Elizabeth Monroe Fisher. She's at the bottom. She's a little bit bolded off to the side there. She she's from the the great the South Southern Great Lakes region, her family, the fishers, but her extended kinship, which includes Lafomboise, Langlades, host of other families. They exist since the 1700s between Michelin Mackinac, which is now Mackinac Island in Michigan, Green Bay and Prairie du Chien on the Mississippi River. And so Elizabeth is one of my favorite people. I have lots of favorites. But she's one of my favorites, because she actually wrote her life story. She wrote newspaper articles about what she referred to as the old pioneers of Michigan. She wrote about her family. So she she embedded them within this narrative of being a pioneer of being an original settler to a place. But if you actually start to read her memoirs and then place it within the framework of her genealogy, you start to see that she's actually telling the history of Adelaide and Ojibwe women and their relationship to fur traders over time. And so she she doesn't ever name her female relatives, but you can actually start to pick out who she's talking about based on the life experience as she describes it. So just to give you a sense, this is Elizabeth. She's the older lady sitting off not with the child on her lap, but sitting off to the side. And this is four generations of her family, her daughter, her granddaughter and her great granddaughter. About the 1890s, 1880s somewhere in there. So Elizabeth was born on the 24th of April in 1810. She starts to appear in the historical record when she is baptized in 1821. So she's baptized almost 12 full years after she was born. And and her birth certificate actually is a really long notation about how that came to be. And so it's a really interesting document. She was baptized at St. Anne's in Detroit. She was baptized in front of her mother and her godparents who were named as Joseph Roulette, who eventually becomes her brother-in-law and Madeleine Lafombois of Mackenac, who is her great aunt. The notations in this baptismal registry state that her father, Henry Monroe Fisher, is not present. And tracking him down, well, he's not present because he didn't want to be involved in the War of 1812. So he went to Red River. So he was actually further west at the time that his daughter was was baptized. And he actually never saw her from the time that she was two years old, until she was married in 1824, I believe at the age of 14. You might be able to read it closer. I'm not quite that. It's very small. So Henry and Henry Monroe Fisher and Elizabeth's mother, Mary Ann, were married by a civil judge. So they weren't married in the church. This is all in the baptismal registry. And Elizabeth was originally privately baptized. So somebody in the community baptized her at birth. But she didn't, there was no opportunity to see a priest until they went to St. Ann's. And Henry Monroe Fisher is described very clearly as not being present at the baptism. However, Fisher is a prominent fur trader. He started his career with the Northwest Company at Mackinac or Michelin Mackinac. He continues to trade for the Hudson's Bay Company in Red River. And a whole group of his descendants actually end up in the Quapel Valley of Saskatchewan. I first met Henry Monroe Fisher, and I always describe them as meeting them, because I feel like I know a lot about them by the time I actually read something. I first met Henry Monroe Fisher, even though he's been dead for a very long time, through one of his great, great, great granddaughters in the Quapel Valley. She told me all of everything that they knew in the family about the fishers. What she didn't know actually was about Michelin Mackinac, and she didn't know about the connection to the birds. So I've been able to go back and provide that kind of information to the family in Quapel by knowing this stuff in the east. So that's also, I think, part of the ethical responsibility of behavior is giving things back, right? So I was fortunate enough to be told these stories. She was a student of mine. She was just sharing information, and so I made sure that I had a way of providing that back to her. And I've done that as much as possible. Sometimes it's hard when you lose touch of where people moved, but, you know, it happens. It eventually happens. It all eventually comes back. So just quickly returning to the genealogy, Henry Monroe Fisher's first wife was not Elizabeth's mother, but was, in fact, a woman by the name of Madeleine Goche. And Madeleine is the daughter. She's a French Adawa descent, and she is the daughter of Fertred and an Adawa woman. And most of these people are, in fact, descended from the Adawa nation. So this is a form of maintenance that comes out of the Adawa as opposed to Cree or Dene, further west, or Ojibwe. But through the interconnections of all of these families, we start to see a network of trade relationships. We start to see a network of relationships into First Nations communities. At the same time, we start to see the evolution of a distinct community. As people start to move away from their European and First Nations ancestor and start to live amongst themselves and interact amongst themselves. And central in everything I've ever done on Métis people is the core of women at the kinship network. So they're not, you know, they're not just mothers and grandmothers. They're actually the people that are holding the entire family structure together. Because when you do, who in the room has, you know, a crazy relative who does genealogies? Or is the crazy relative, right? There's an explosion of genealogical interest these days. And what that might mean. And people, you know, spend a lot of time on ancestry. I do too. Sometimes I just lurk to read the comments. Because they're so interesting. I don't, and by the way, I'm gonna help myself. I don't know much about my own family. My sister does that. So I get to dabble around in other people's information. So and I kind of, you know, it's a puzzle. I kind of enjoy this. But I'm being a little sidetracked by not focusing. So what we start to see is this core group of women. She talks a lot about, she almost never talks about the men that she's related to. She always talks about her mother, her grandmother, her great aunt, and the women going back in time. And so there's this idea that we don't know a lot about indigenous women. It's very much like the notion that we, you know, we don't leave written records. It's a myth. We actually know a lot. We just actually have to pay attention to what people are saying. We have to listen. We have to read and we have to ask questions. And they're all there. But it takes more time. It's really easy to know the history of Henry Momnero Fisher because he's a fur trader. It's very easy to know the history of Charles Langlade because he's a fur trader. And because they leave these long histories of economic and political and military types of behaviors. And because historically men wrote about men. These were the stories of great men. And I'm not saying that there aren't, you know, really wonderful scholars now who are male who do female history. Of course there are. But the foundation of history is great men history, right? The kings, the emperors, the, and then it just sort of trickles down from there. So this is about getting away from that idea of a great man. Even in indigenous history, we don't need to talk about great men. We need to talk about what the kinship looks like. Because those men have power because of who they're related to. So fur traders go off and they do their thing. They might, as Henry Momnero Fisher did, he might start in one place and end up in another. His family never left the place that they were from. When Henry Fisher left to go to Red River, he took two of his sons, Alexander and Henry Jr. And he left his daughters behind with their mothers. So the Fisher family spreads, the surname spreads because those boys go with their dad and they engage in the very same occupation that he engaged in. Elizabeth remains with her mother, with her great aunt and her grandmother, and with her half sister, Genevieve, or Jane. And it's through Jane that she becomes the sister-in-law of Joseph Roulette. And so it, her God father then gets reincorporated into her kinship system via her sister. And so when you do, if you ever engage in Métis genealogies, you're going to see a lot of this fold over. Paying and using sacramental records is important because finding out who the God parents are tells you more about that extended kinship system. Because these are not random individuals that are chosen. These are people that are very important in the community that then knit and bind people together over time. So I've done analysis, analyses of God mothers, for instance. How, how often one woman might end up as a God parent to a series of children. And I've, at Michelin Mackinac from early 1720 until maybe 30 years later, there are several women who are God parents to thousands of children. First Nations, Métis, and French or Scottish. So these women, you have to think, if they are serving that often as Godmother, this is phenomenal information. This tells us something about their prestige. This tells us something about how the community saw them and how they were responsible for all of these people. Because God parenting, of course, is very serious in the, in this era, right? This is an important position. This isn't, you know, an accident. You are responsible for the well-being of these people that you agree to be a God parent to. So two people figure very prominently in the stories of Elizabeth Baird and her, her stuff is online at the Wisconsin Historical Society, actually. You can actually read everything she wrote online. But she talks a lot about Mrs. Lafambois and Mrs. Schindler. Trace Schindler is her grandmother and Madeleine Lafambois is her great aunt. And these women were powerful traders in their own right. Both of them were widowed. They had been married. Madeleine was married once. Her husband was murdered. And she took over his trade and built an empire of trade on Mackinac Island. She was prominent in the War of 1812. And she is, I would say, single-handedly responsible probably for all of the Lafambois that exist across Western Canada now. And there, and in the United States they're the raspberries. There's a whole branch of families known as the raspberries. And Trace Schindler, she became Schindler by her second marriage and he died. He got ill and died and she took over his trade. So the idea that women didn't have an economic role or that it was sort of confined to what is typical of being female, whatever that, you know, might historically be defined as. I see examples all the time of women who trade. In Western Canada women who buffalo hunt or who control the caravans. So these are jobs that are open to women. And in particular women who seem to have an ability to build networks of relationships and work very hard. Madeleine eventually retired from the fur trade. She sold her interest in the fur trade to the American Fur Company and she opened a school on Mackinac Island because she, while she could not read or write, she wanted children to be able to read and write. And her sister Trace and her niece, Elizabeth's mother, worked in that school and they worked with children. So I never expected to study women specifically. I never expected to study kinship specifically. But these were the teachings that were given to me by the by the elders that I work with in Saskatchewan. And so this is the place that I ended up. And I think that's also one of the responsibilities I have then as a scholar is to follow the path that they've been laying out for me. And it turns out that I'm actually really a nerd and I like it. So I'm happy to do it. So when I was trying to understand what Kothuin though, I wanted to know what some of the traditional stories might be around it. And so there are all of these traditional stories about humans marrying animals, you know, in the time before now. And so I was really excited because this book came out of Labrador last year, The Man Who Married a Beaver. I'm familiar with the story of the woman who married a beaver. So it can be back and forth in gender. The beaver stories tend to be in the east. If you're on the Great Plains, there's relational stories with buffalo. If you're in the north, it's probably more likely caribou. But I've also heard stories of people who are married to dogs. Dogs are so important in traditional culture that some of the earliest stories are actually relationships to dogs. And so I became a little bit obsessed with the story of the woman who married a beaver because that's the first one that I encountered. And I've read most of the translations of it. I've asked people about it. And I'll just tell you really quickly and abbreviated synopsis of the story. There's a young woman who went out to fast on the land and after a while a young man came along and interrupted that fast. And they spoke for a long time and he eventually over the course of that conversation asked her to marry him and to come away with him and live with him. And it took a little bit of persuasion, but the young woman eventually did go to live with him, sorry, and left her family. She thought he was kind. She felt he was a good provider. She really quite appreciated him. He asked really only one thing of her when they when they went back to his lodge. And that was that she she actually not contact her family again, but that she stay at the lodge with him and that he would then provide her with everything that she could ever want. He would bring her cloth and tobacco and silver jewelry, beads, ribbons, pots, any kind of metal implement, including knives. Anything she needed, he would he would make sure that she never and food, of course, she would never ask for anything. And that she and she was happy with that as a young bride. And as a woman, she had children. She was very content in her new life. She was happy with the children. And so she was happy to to grant that request for their marriage. And as they grew old together as her children matured, she did start to think their behavior was a little bit weird or strange. Maybe that's a better word. And every so often they would leave the lodge, they would go out amongst humans, they would get some of these things that she had asked for, ribbons or mirrors or whatever. And they would return home and they always came home with these new very lovely things. And she never really asked about it, but she just felt it was strange. They could be gone for days, they could be gone for months, and then all of a sudden they would reappear. And it took her a few years to finally figure out that she was in fact married to a beaver. And she was living in a beaver lodge and her children were beavers. And what was happening when they went out was that they were sacrificing themselves to hunters. So they would be hunted. And hunters were responsible for leaving all of those gifts for the beavers as a part of their ethical responsibility when they hunted. So they would leave tobacco, they would host ceremonies, they would feast properly, and they would leave all of these gifts and offerings to thank the beaver for giving up their lives. And really what was happening here was the basic foundation of family. This is all about the reciprocity. And it starts in this place. And so one day her kids got married as they do, they went off on their own as well. And her husband and she grew old together. And he finally died and he never came home. And so she was in the lodge and she was thinking this is longer than he's ever been gone. Not really sure what I'm supposed to do. So she sat there and she waited and started to think about what she might do next. And then she heard human voices outside the lodge. And so she called out to them and these hunters broke through the lodge and they pulled her out and they were surprised to have, you know, pulled out this elderly lady. And I imagine that she looked something like this. It's described that she was, had silver hair, that she was covered in silver jewelry, that she had all of these beautiful clothes and adornment. And so she realized at that point in her life that her job now was to go back to her own community and to talk to her community about the relationship that they would have with beavers. That the issues of reciprocity, that as long as you looked after your relationship with those animals, they would provide themselves to you. The minute you were disrespectful or didn't leave the appropriate offerings or didn't feast the animal after you killed it, those animals could become angry and upset and they could withdraw their favors because they were not being honored. They weren't being respected any longer. And so she spent the rest of the remainder of her life giving these teachings. And these are the fundamental teachings of family, right? The fundamental teachings about how to be a good relative come from this story about the woman who married a beaver or the man who married a beaver or whichever story or narrative you want to follow. And so it's a fundamental teaching. It's a fundamental reflection of Huacotun, to understand this and to behave as properly as you can, to learn the lessons of being a good relative, of being a human being. And this really provides a narrative framework for understanding how relatives are expected and encouraged to behave amongst one another. It explains the mechanisms for creating family, right? You get married, you have children, but you don't separate yourself from those people. And so embedded in the story is a blueprint for a healthy life, but it's also a warning. It provides the warning about the consequences if you don't live a healthy life. And so these stories tell us about the ethical responsibilities that we're supposed to have to one another. So I'm going to leave you with one more family and genealogy to sort of reinforce maybe some of this. Of course, I'll answer questions. So I'm going to pronounce La Liberté the way that they pronounce it at home. I'm from Saskatchewan. And I know a lot of the La La Birdie family. That's how they pronounce their name. I actually never realized it was La Liberté until I came east. Of course, I can read, but I'm used to the La Libertés. So this is one of the first families that I started to work with. They are from Northwestern Saskatchewan. So Northwestern Saskatchewan, as a fur trade region, was known as the English River District. It's the entire west side of the northern half of the province. So from Green Lake in the south, if you ever look at a map and I didn't bring one, Green Lake is the southern boundary and the northern boundary of the English River District would be what is now the border with the Northwest Territories. And it extends across the Alberta border into places like Cold Lake and the Athabasca. So it's sort of, it's fairly, but now it's, you know, the province comes through. So Alberta Saskatchewan kind of divides up the old territory. The patriarch of the family is Pirish La Liberté. So I'm going to start with him. He's a fur trader. He was not literate. He never wrote any documents. But he's described a lot in Hudson's Bay Company records because they got annoyed with him. And whenever you're an annoying person, people write a lot of things about you. So because he pissed them off, there was volumes of information about him and little tidbits about his family. And it was only in reconstructing the genealogy that I, that I saw the way that some of the, his children behaved as well. So in 1890, Pirish La Liberté was 73 years old, still working. He had married Sarah's in back in the early 1830s, late 1820s. And Sarah's in was born in the Northwest. Pirish was actually born at Prince Albert. You've ever heard of Prince Albert's Saskatchewan? That's marked as the north. It's not the north. That's just sort of the gateway to the north. But Sarah's in was born up in the La Loche district of Saskatchewan. Anyway, in 1890, when he was 73, he was the father of nine children. And he announced to the Hudson's Bay Company at Isle of Cross, which is the district headquarters that he wanted to retire. He felt he had done his time. He was a postmaster at Portage La Loche, or La Loche now, and La Loche was in the news. So it'll give you a sense of where it was. This is where the school shouldn't took place in the north. And so this branch of the Lalliberty family had always sort of been in the La Loche district of the English River District, so very far north. And La Loche is important because it is the last fur trade post before you cross the Athabasca, before you cross the height of land into the Arctic. And so it's a staging site for voyagers to transfer goods and furs. So it's one of the most important places in the English River District trade system. And the man in charge of the post is, from Western standards, illiterate. He doesn't read, he doesn't write. He can't keep the post journal, which is part of the job of a postmaster, one if his son-in-law does it for him, because he can't do it. So he wants to retire. He wants to go south. He wants to go to Green Lake where some of his sons are working, where some of his daughter-in-laws are from, and he's going to take Sarah's in. She's still alive. And he also has a plan. It's kind of one of those retired but not retired situations. What he wants to do is he wants to move freight between Prince Albert and Green Lake. And he wants to work with his sons in this freighting business. So he wants to open his own, he wants to be an entrepreneur and do his own thing. But he also wants a pension from the company which he has worked for for 50 years. So the reason he's so represented in the records is because they're talking about this pension. So they give him a pension, reluctantly give him a pension. Companies are cheap, even in the 19th century, maybe worse. They reluctantly give him this pension. And they expect that when he's working he will look after their interests and not work with competing companies. And there are competing for trade companies. So he says, okay, I can do that. So he moves to Green Lake, Sarah's in goes with him. And he begins this freighting business. So Sarah's in descends from this family. She's the oldest daughter of Antoine Morin and Pelage Boucher. Every Lalliberty and Morin in northern Saskatchewan descends from these two particular couples. That's your surname. These are your great grandparents. So it doesn't matter if you're on a First Nations reserve or if you're in a Métis community, everybody descends from these two couples if you hold those two surnames. So let me tell you, I get a lot of calls from people who have Pelage Boucher in their family. And they want to talk about her. I don't know very much about her because she is a little bit enigmatic, but she was born on the Athabasca in the early 1800s. She is very likely the sister of a woman who married into the Riel family. And so Louis Riel's line comes from her sister. So there's this network of families. This is the other thing about Métis people. There's this idea that somehow it's this random collection of people. These are really intricate webs of kinship that Métis exist within. This is not random association. These are not just mixed blood people, quote unquote. These are people who are embedded in networks of kinship over time in generations. When I did the work on northern Saskatchewan, I found five generations of families that were intermarried with each other. So back to these guys. So Peerish and Sarazan by the time 1890 rolls around have 13 children. Not all are still alive, but most of them all are. Most of them continue to live in the English River District. Only one son went further east to Cumberland House to trade. That's Antoine who's married to Matilda Collings. Everybody else functioned somewhere between Meadow Lake and La Loche. And they are intermarried with Cree, with Denae. They are French. They are Scottish. But they function as a solid integrated family unit over time. All of the sons become fur traders. This is the other thing that's kind of key to Métis history. Sons become fur traders. You're the descendant of a fur trader. You work in that economy. Daughters marry fur traders. And so it becomes an economy of scale that is also an economy that is a uniting factor in how people behave and the choices that they make. And so two years after he retired, the Hudson's Bay Company starts talking about him again because he's actually trading against the company's interests. And more importantly, his sons are starting to venture out on their own, even though they have contracts with the HBC. Some of them are starting to do their own thing as well. So he's got one son who's supposed to be managing cattle on the Métis Partage. He's got two other sons who are postmasters. One who stays at La Loche. One who's at Green Lake. And several more sons work out of Ilocross proper. And so as they're having this discussion about whether or not they should cancel the pension because they're actually earning their own money now, the chief factor at Ilocross actually says about peer-ish, and this is I'm just going to quote this directly. He has a huge part of his family married and settled in the vicinity of Green Lake. And by his keeping a small stock of goods, which are actually sold by some of his sons under his inspection, his sons are kept from taking outfits for trade term to oppose the Hudson's Bay Company from the merchants at Prince Albert. And as we gain by the transactions in more ways than one, it's advisable to allow him to keep his pension. So in fact, although he's violating the terms of his pension, although he's irritating to them, he continues to receive his pension for another five, six years until he passed away. So the influence of peer-ish as the patriarch of this family extends to his sons, but it extends past his sons to his wife's relatives, the morons. It extends into the Cree and the Denei communities. And he's actually able to keep control of a large part of the fur trade either for himself or in a way that benefits the Hudson's Bay Company. And he's able to mobilize these things not just because of what his sons do, but because of the strategic choices they made when marrying their daughters off. That's the wrong way to say it, but it came out that way. These are all arranged marriages, right? These are not random. These are not love matches. There's no such thing as a love match historically. Maybe now. Granted that. But these parents are picking who their kids marry. And they're making very strategic and controlled choices about what alliance networks they want to extend themselves into. So my last thing, a couple last things. So this is just to show you how complicated it can get. These are just like, this is the Moran and Dela Ron family. And they went back and forth and intermarried over two and a half generations. My husband was really mad at me when I made him make that chart. Because so much easier, right? But I wanted to be able to explain this. I'm not going to explain it to you. I just wanted you to see how I always sort of joke that Métis genealogy or the Métis family tree isn't a tree. It's a stump. And he came up with a better analogy. He said it's like a rose bramble. You guys just keep doing this all over the place. I mean, you're so interwoven with one another. It doesn't make sense after a little while. And it's true. Métis people can go into almost any part of this country and meet somebody that they descend from the same people from. And it creates this instant connection. So I want to make a little plug for archives. So this is William Henry Jackson. This is actually one of my favorite photographs because it's just so, quite frankly, so damn sad. He was the secretary to Riel in 1885. And he knew Riel in 1860. And when he was nearing 100, he lived in New York City. And he had been keeping papers. And he couldn't keep his rent any longer. And he was turned out on the street with his papers. Several hours after this photograph was taken, the garbage man came by and picked up everything. So we have, think of what we lost, right? He kept everything anybody ever wrote. And it's all gone now. So keep your papers. Give them to people. And use archives. And use archives in conjunction with working with traditional knowledge holders. Because the minute you do that, it opens up a way of reading history that isn't just about writing a counter narrative, but in fact, comes from our traditions, is informed by our worldview and says something about us that nobody else has said before. So I'm going to stop there. It was a sad way to end. I know, I'm sorry. I always say I'm down. Usually people end on a high note. You took us down a sudden. I could jake. I want to thank Brenda for that. She began her presentation by saying that she thinks she may only know a little bit about Wakotuin, about that responsibility that we have to each other. And I can tell you that in the past 12 years that I've known Brenda in my personal journey, on my academic journey, I've fallen into a number of holes. And Brenda has always been there to reach down into the darkest pit and bring me back up. In times when I had nothing to offer her. And when I would ask her why she would always do that, why she would always be there, for me, she would say, because it's my responsibility. And now I'm here at Carlton in a position where I want to live in that same way. I want to help the students that come here. And I want to make them feel comfortable. And I want to be that person that can teach them about Wakotuin. So I just want to thank Brenda for that. We have time for a few questions, maybe two questions, that we could field. So I'll open it up to the room. And if anybody has anything that they'd like to ask, Brenda. Actually, which I thought was really amazing watching this is my brother married Amaran. And then divorced Amaran and married Ola Liberty. I'm not joking. I really want to know more about this tree, because it's interesting. Oh, the data project? Oh, so online, it's called the Digital Archives Database Project. If you Google that, you'll find it. I should have put the URL up. But I can leave that for people. So since I've been in Ontario, I've been gathering as many church records as possible. We have a team of students who have been transcribing them for the last seven years. And they are all available online in their transcribed form. So we're just putting online another set of records this summer, most of the Northern Ontario records, but also stuff from Michel Macanac's already online. And a lot of the Red River parishes are online. But we started working with some of the Ontario records as well, so those are available. So it's not a complete set of anybody's records. They're sort of cherry-picked by me, because they're things that interest me. But also online, along with that is my colleague, Nicole Saint-Ange, is going up this summer will be the Voyager Contract Database. It already exists online, but we're creating a new interface for it. And Mike Evans at UBC, Okanagan transcribed for trade records. So those are all online from anything east of the, sorry, west of the Rocky Mountains in the lower mainland. Thank you very much.