Metis Pioneers: Marie Rose Delorme Smith and Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed by Doris Jeanne Mackinnon (review)

In Metis Pioneers, Doris Jeanne Mackinnon details the role two particular Metis women played in western Canada's transitional period from the fur trade economy to sedentary agriculture and industrial capitalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marie Rose Delorme Smith and Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed were both born in 1861 to Metis and Euro-American parents who occupied influential positions in the fur trade. Mackinnon argues that Smith and Lougheed adapted the skills and kinship connections rooted in the fur trade to navigate the transition to new economies. While both women publicly fashioned themselves as Euro-American "pioneers," Mackinnon argues, Smith and Lougheed retained essential components of their experiences and identities as Metis women in order to adapt to new western societies.

Underlying Smith and Lougheed's biographies is the Red River Rebellion, which Mackinnon weaves into the text without much contextualization. While Mackinnon discusses how both Metis and settler men in Smith and Lougheed's extensive kinship networks participated in the rebellion, the author does not fully explain the political and economic stakes of these events for the broader Metis community to which Smith and Lougheed were connected. Another pitfall is Mackinnon's contradictory claims about the "social capital" (xxvii) Smith and Lougheed "continued to contribute" (xxvii) to their marriages and, more broadly, post– fur trade societies. Though Mackinnon claims that this social capital was rooted in their Metis identities and connections, her sources indicate an opposite reality: that their socioeconomic authority, at least in the eyes of their (predominantly male) contemporaries, was tied primarily to the influence Smith and Lougheed's fathers enjoyed in the fur trade. To the author's credit, Mackinnon demonstrates throughout that the "social value" (338) of the labor expended by Indigenous and Metis women in fur trade economies has been inadequately documented by contemporary historical actors and historians alike, due largely to the "unidentifiable monetary value" (338) of this labor.

Mackinnon makes clear that her purpose in telling the personal histories of these two Metis women is done so not in the service of either Canadian settler nor British imperial history. Rather, Metis Pioneers commemorates the two Metis women whose methods of survival in increasingly settler colonial spaces both reflected and shaped the much longer history of dynamic Metis identities and means of endurance. Metis Pioneers is an analytically sophisticated biography that succeeds in balancing local and family histories with broader historical processes that both shaped and were shaped by dynamic ideas about Metis and Indigenous identities. Readers interested in Metis women's history as well as the social history of the late Canadian fur trade will find this text as engaging as it is informative.