Halfbreed Book

What a powerful memoir. I gather that it has been on high school reading lists, but it was new to me. Published in 1973 when Maria Campbell was only 33, it recounts her life growing up on the road allowance in a large Métis family, struggling with the complexities of poverty, racism, shame, and misogyny. I thought it was amazing. What a remarkable, insightful woman.

It's written in a simple, engaging style that, weirdly, reminded me of reading the 'Little House' books as a child, particularly when Campbell is recounting her childhood, complete with mule rides to school and her father heading out to his traplines. Except that the people whose stories are foregrounded in the Little House books of course were displacing and dehumanizing the indigenous peoples. 100 years later Maria Campbell's people were vilified and criminalized for scraping out a subsistence living in the mid-20th century that bore some resemblance to the existence of white 'pioneers' of the previous century. And Maria, who could have passed for Laura Ingalls Wilder in some of the childhood anecdotes, faced a dark and uncertain future shaped by systemic racism by the time she was an adolescent. A strange cognitive dissonance.

I was happy to read the newer edition, which includes a terrible but important episode from Campbell's teen years that was censored when the book was first published. The afterword and introduction are also interesting. It feels discouraging to see how much has remained the same, reading a book that was published the year before I was born. But I was heartened by the introduction, reviewing Campbell's work, accomplishments, and changes she has seen since then.