Songs Upon the Rivers: The Buried History of the French Speaking Canadiens and Métis from The Great Lakes to the Mississippi Across to the Pacific by Robert Foxcurran, Michel Bouchard, and Sébastien Mallette (review)

This hefty book requires some effort to read because its purpose and trajectory remain unclear. Is this a history of the Pacific Northwest laid out to salvage its French heritage and Canadian roots? Or, is the aim bigger: to imbed French-speaking people into the histories of the fur trade, western settlement, intermarriage with Indigenous people, and state-building? Or is it to consider definitions of cultural mixing and Métis heritage so fraught in the present? The text is a hybrid of popular account layered with uneven scholarly critique. The authors' insistence on a glaring Francophone gap in North American history would surprise academic readers, familiar with two decades of scholarship that places French-speaking North Americans and Métis people at its heart. The new scholarship of Robert Englebert, Michel Hogue, Melinda Jetté, Paul Mapp, Lucy Murphy, Carolyn Podruchny, Brett Rushforth, or Nicole St-Onge (to name only a few) laid against a founding generation of scholars like Carl Eckberg, Jacqueline Peterson, Gilles Havard, and Susan Sleeper-Smith, has fundamentally shifted what we know and who we think matters in North America.

The three authors spend much energy beating a tired, old straw man, focusing their outrage at popular culture in the nineteenth century and at dated Anglo-American scholarship fifty, sixty, and seventy years old. Criticizing Bernard DeVoto from 1940 or William Goetzmann from the 1970s is no longer necessary. That section ends with an odd misreading of Richard White's influential Middle Ground (1991). White examined a particular place, the Great Lakes pays d'en haut, to analyze a particular people and diplomatic relationships, and makes no claim that that system translates to other places. And, his work is thirty years old. Old, nationalistic, popular fur trade history did ignore French speakers and contemporary textbooks are hardly better, but new scholarship is.

Once they move past that beginning, Foxcurran, Bouchard, and Mallette make arguments about a group of people they label Canadien, meaning originally from French Canada. Those Canadiens offered up a "trans-territorial and truly multicultural identities" that could "adapt to shifting conditions over an immense and diverse landscape" (49), suggesting the need for a broader framework. The authors take issue with "creole" or "Métis" as descriptors of a group of people whose French roots were equally significant to their mixed race heritage. As they point out themselves, identity and how people live it is as varied as the words we have tried to use to describe it. Canadien might feel as foreign to a St. Louisan proud of her French heritage now just as Creole might not fit a bison-hunting French-Lakota family on the nineteenth-century plains.

The authors lay out intertwined histories of three different threads of French identities that emerged out of the colonial past: Acadiens, Canadiens, and a broadly defined group of Métis. That argument, their efforts to move past narrow definitions of who fits each of these categories, and their discussion of identities that were "flexible" (110) rather than kin or nationbased, are useful. The book uncovers a fresh cast of characters as we move from the St. Lawrence, to the Great Lakes, to the US territories of Michigan and Wisconsin, to St. Louis, up the Missouri River, and into Indigenous communities in the Pacific North West and British Columbia, carrying French language, fur trade business, making kin with a range of Indigenous people, and Catholic practices. The Missouri River Robidoux brothers, for example, are French-speakers from Canada, they have generations of intermarriage with Native people at the core of their identities, and they end up in the United States.

The last chapter could...