Spirit gifting: Ecological knowing in Métis life narratives

Abstract

In Spirit Gifting: The Concept of Spiritual Exchange , Elmer Ghostkeeper offers poignant insight into the ways that expanding capitalist modes of production have challenged the maintenance of Metis traditional ways of knowing, living, and being. Ghostkeeper situates his upbringing as being rooted in the maintenance of sacred and cyclical relationships with human relations, with the land as a relation, and within an ethics of kinship obligation to the land’s other, non-human, inhabitants. Similar discussions on Metis ways also appear in the stories of two other Metis people – Victoria Belcourt Callihoo and Herb Belcourt. Like Ghostkeeper, Belcourt Callihoo and Belcourt offer personal accounts of the transitions that they and their respective Metis communities have undergone as a result of the changing human landscape in what is presently, and most widely referred to and known as, Alberta. This paper thus begins with its own offering. In order to reciprocate and honour the gifts that they each give through sharing their stories, I share a bit of my story as a gift. I also do so to provide some insight into my investments in undertaking such writing and research. After doing so, I turn to reflect on Belcourt Callihoo, Belcourt, and Ghostkeeper’s articulations of Metis ways as living in a symbiotic relationship with the land. Then, with an emphasis on Belcourt and Ghostkeeper, I address the implications of the arrival of industrial capitalism to the authors’ lives and the impacts of this on the maintenance of what may be called their “Metis traditional knowledge” systems. Lastly, the paper argues that such stories should have greater influence in the political spectrum of Metis peoplehood and Metis political activism.

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