In the hushed third floor of the Royal sa国际传媒 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.
He was aware, too, of a significant absence. That absence was another story.
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.
“There was no presence in these places for us as Métis people. As a young person searching for my identity, and searching for my connection, searching for family and a place of belonging, there was really nothing that was reflected back,” said Scofield, a Red River Métis of Cree, Scottish and European immigrant descent, whose Métis heritage goes back to the community of Kinosota-Reedy Creek, Man.
That’s where his great-great grandmother Mary bombed around in her Model-T, chewed snuff, hunted with a .22, and provided food and coats and warmth for her family. That’s where his great uncle fiddled, and where the people of his family had presence, and place, and history.
“As I got older and started visiting museums, I noticed that the Métis, specifically Western Canadian Métis, really had no presence in these institutions, absolutely no presence.”
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.
“That began to shape my approach to my own identity,” said Scofield. “I wanted to know about family, about histories, to find people to talk to to get pieces of our story.”
As Scofield made his way through the First People’s exhibit at the Royal sa国际传媒 Museum that afternoon in 2015, he came upon a case displaying women’s Victoriana sewing implements: crochet hooks, tatting hooks, needles, thimbles, pincushions, lace — and something else that stopped him cold.
“Smack dab in the middle of this collection of Victoriana was a really beautiful Métis pouch. Tiny beads on black velvet. Probably a tobacco pouch,” said Scofield. “It was like one of our own grandmothers sitting among all these Victorian ladies. She didn’t belong there.”
Misplaced, misidentified, silenced. He felt a rush of emotion.
“I wanted to reach into that case and take her out. She wasn’t in the right home.”
Scofield left the museum with a mission: “I want to bring our grandmothers home.”
Now an associate professor in the writing department at the University of Victoria, and author of the upcoming book kôhkominawak ocihcîwâwa Our Grandmother’s Hands: Repatriating Métis Material Art (Gabriel Dumont Institute Press), Scofield has spent years searching the globe for Métis material art and bringing it home.
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 sa国际传媒.
Museums around the world are under pressure to return Indigenous artifacts to their places of origin, and the repatriation of cultural objects has become an important part of the conversation around decolonization and reconciliation. For many First Nations, what museums call “artifacts” are, in fact, ancestors. While museums grapple with their own colonial history and processes, there are ancestors still waiting to come home.
There was no playbook for how to bring the grandmothers home — or how to find them.
“I started hunting eBay, Etsy, antique stores, online auctions. I looked wherever I could,” said Scofield
Pieces emerged in the U.K., France, the U.S., often hidden, mislabelled and misunderstood.
He found a finely wrought Octopus bag, something Métis women made for their husbands to hold tobacco, tinder, pipes and tools, with a collector whose specialty was vintage designer handbags — Louis Vuitton, Hermes and the like. She had picked up the collection in the U.K., and thought the Octopus bag was “a really clumsy piece of Victoriana,” said Scofield.
As the pieces came, so did conversations with curators, historians, collectors and elders. Scofield had to learn to assess and identify pieces, to determine their provenance, to conserve and house them.
Among the grandmothers are tobacco pouches, watch pockets, beaded caribou-hide dancing shoes, smoking hats, a child’s beaded jacket, Métis sashes, a beaver top hat, a fiddle. Sitting with Scofield among these embodied spirits is like sitting in a village, surrounded by its inhabitants and their stories.
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.
Scofield recalls the moment that he unpacked it, and let its energy fill the room. This wasn’t just an artifact or an object — it was both spiritual and material, filled with intention and emotion, a being still in existence, whose story was captured in the design.
“The pieces in the collection hold all of those energies — they not only hold the geographies of where they originate from, they hold the energies of the women who created them. The sound of the baby crying, the sound of the wood stove crackling or the sound of women’s voices and stories being told.”
The pieces are primarily western Canadian, from 1840 to about 1910, a span of history that illuminates generations of Métis women. They aren’t just art works, or utilitarian pieces, but expressions of love, strength and resistance, said Scofield.
“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.
The pieces began to change after the 1885 Northwest Resistance, as Métis faced increasing discrimination and were stripped of their lands.
“Around 1900, we start entering a period where we had been dispossessed of our homelands. In Western sa国际传媒, there was an incredible amount of poverty, loss of land, loss of language, loss of culture, loss of community,” said Scofield. “The pieces begin to tell stories of women sewing so they could buy food, and clothes for their families.”
Some pieces left sa国际传媒 with husbands who abandoned their Métis wives and families and returned to Europe. Some travelled with Métis women who moved overseas with their husbands. Others were sold or traded for survival when the Métis were driven out of their traditional lands.
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.
Karon Shmon, director of Métis culture and heritage at the institute, said the importance of Scofield’s work can’t be overstated.
“He is not only repatriating this work, bringing it back to where it came from, he is changing the narrative about those objects by explaining them through an Indigenous world view.”
Understanding the spirit of those items, and respecting and honouring the ancestors who made them, is of great importance to the culture, said Shmon.
“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.”
Shmon said that she is grateful to those who have safeguarded the pieces over the years, but their journeys were not always made by choice.
“If you had to feed and clothe your family, and the only thing left of value was a beaded piece by your grandmother, you might have sold it because you had no other choice.”
Scofield said calling the pieces grandmothers “takes them from being just objects of material art and it gives them their history back, it gives them their stories back, it gives them their spirits back.”
For Scofield, one of the biggest responsibilities is accessibility. Scofield doesn’t feel the grandmothers belong to him.
“I’m simply the caretaker of these pieces, until they have a place among the Métis Nation in one of our own cultural institutions, where they are going to be safe and they are going to be looked after and made accessible to the community.”
Scofield often sits for tea with the grandmothers.
“I joke that I am living with all these old ladies,” he said.
As he sits among them, he can imagine what his own formidable great-great grandmother Mary would say about all this. She was known to leave the community where the family lived in the early 1900s and come back from Winnipeg with armloads of coats to keep all the kids warm: “She might say, ‘My boy, that’s a nice beaded bag but you should sell it so we can get the grandkids some coats.’ “
As he sits with them for the company they give, and the stories they tell, he sometimes considers what it would have meant if the grandmothers had never been taken away.
“I wonder what it would have been like for me when I was growing up, if I had been able to go somewhere and look at Métis pieces that were connected to my background, and connected me to them.”
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