Reviews for Halfbreed

The average rating for Halfbreed based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-03-06 00:00:00 Peter Collins Just when you think things can't get any worse for a mixed race Native/Caucasian woman, they do. Campbell's memoir is simply brutal - a series of cascading heartbreaks one after another. Growing up in a world where neither the whites nor the Indians want you around, the half-breeds of Canada in the mid 20th century existed in a purgatory that looked a lot more like hell. Chalk this up to one of those reads to remind me never to complain about anything I might think is really going wrong in my life. 10th book read of 500 Great Books by Women

Review # 2 was written on 2020-04-12 00:00:00 Ned Hill 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.