I’m currently eyeballs deep in writing, exploring some really fun Métis futurisms, alternate histories, historical fantasy, and even a superhero story!
I have to keep most of this close to my chest right now, but I want to share the briefest of peeks at one of my short stories! I am hoping to have these done by the end of December, and because this is for my MA thesis, I want to defend by May of 2019. So it’ll still be a while after that until the collection is published BUT I may submit some of these to other publications in the meantime, and if I do, I’ll let you know!
Alright, here is the beginning of a story I wrote about a Métis superhero in the mid 20th century.
Michif Man
Excerpt from a talk by Shelley Vogel, “Michif Man from Lac Ste. Anne: Microhistory or Mythology?” presented at the 2020 Native American And Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) annual conference in Toronto, Ontario.
It could be said that the origin story of Michif Man from Lac Ste. Anne began with a goring by a radioactive bison, but if we begin there, can we understand the man behind the mythology?
We are all familiar with certain academics who have written extensively on Michif Man as a “modern trickster tale”, classifying the accounts as “Indigenous storytelling”. Some have allowed that he may have been an actual person, whose exploits were exaggerated for dramatic effect. Our research however has been able to demonstrate that the stories we do have may have in fact been downplayed to make them seem less extraordinary.
Although we focused on a short period of time from 1955 – 1960, and on what were a series of relatively minor episodes centred on a population at the margins – namely Lac Ste. Anne Métis living in Edmonton in the mid twentieth century – we did not take an episodic microhistory approach, but rather engaged in a limited but systematic microhistory analysis.[ii] It was absolutely necessary to reconstruct individual and social relationships in a restricted geographical setting using archival records, as this was the only way we were able to demonstrate that Michif Man did in fact, exist.
Imagine if you will, a tornado: forming, touching down, and wreaking havoc. The forces that create a tornado are mostly invisible to us. When we witness the power of this phenomenon, we are seeing the way in which these invisible forces affect whatever they come into contact with. Take this slide for example. We cannot see the winds, but we can witness all the detritus they have picked up including Dorothy’s little house there, and that very surprised cow, twirling round and round in the maelstrom! Though invisible to our human eyes, there are ways to track these forces, using modern weather imaging technologies that see in ways we are not capable of.
For this project, we did not use doppler radar or satellite data. Rather we dove into the archives and found mysteries; unexplained events and unsolved crimes, miracles and mayhem. News reports, police case files, insurance claims, interviews. We began to see a distinct pattern of absence at the centre of all these events that tied them together.
Like the reoccurring character of Not Me in this Family Circus cartoon, it is clear someone was causing things to happen. In the comic, it was almost always the children at fault, but in the case of the events we tracked, Not Me seems to be a real, and if not literally invisible figure – family assure us that, unlike H.G. Well’s Invisible Man, Michif Man was not capable of vanishing from sight – then retroactively unseen.
The vast lacunae in any official documentation for Michif Man has stymied most traditional historical research, forcing our team to rely almost entirely on interviews with his aged relatives who, for reasons we do not fully understand, are the only ones who remember him directly at all. Of the two documents we could find to prove he existed, one was in a personal collection, and the other in an archive that had yet to digitize and dump their collection. In every other instance, where collections were updated and the paper copies destroyed, it seems the people in charge of digitization uniformly failed to include any documents related to Michif Man.
Thus, we were able to obtain a hard copy of a baptismal certificate from the Lac Ste. Anne parish for Solomon François Gabriel Callihoo dated January 8, 1923, and a receipt for antibiotics for the same person, which was in the possession of his sister who paid the bill and kept it in the (forlorn) hope of one day collecting, both pictured here. No vital statistics information seems to exist beyond this.
Relatives have informed us that Michif Man was known to them as “Franky”.
Franky was born to Ann-Marie Belcourt and Solomon Callihoo at the Lac Ste. Anne Métis settlement in Alberta, sometime in 1922. He had six older brothers and one younger sister, all of whom have complete vital statistics records. Interviewees seem to agree that Franky was “a massive pain”, who often engaged in daredevil behaviour resulting in broken bones and other injuries. This could be a result of attempting to stand out among seven siblings and many more cousins in the community. His attention seeking behaviour eventually wore on his parents, who sent him at 13 to work a trapline with a great-uncle in the Northwest Territories, near Fort Smith. His return at 16 coincided with the outbreak of World War II. Franky apparently took a neighbour’s horse and rode in to Edmonton to enlist, and began his wartime service as a sapper with the Royal Canadian Engineers, one year before Tommy Prince was to join the same outfit.
The neighbour, Baptiste Letendre, was Franky’s mother’s second maternal cousin. Baptiste’s grandson told us that his grandfather complained about the loss of his horse until his passing in 1972. This is a picture of Baptiste with his horse, whom he named Jim.
No one knows what became of Jim.
We have considered that it may be possible some records related to Franky could exist in physical form in Normandy, but our SSHRC grant could not cover the related expense of verifying this. Other research teams should consider that as Frankly lied about his age when he enlisted, he very likely also lied about his name, so it may be impossible to link him to any records at all.
Interviewees indicate that Franky returned to Lac Ste. Anne between 1946-1949, with substantial disagreement on the exact timing. He probably moved to Edmonton around 1951 and did odd jobs. His risk-taking behaviour had apparently not lessened, and he was prone to fights. However, interviewees note that in almost all cases, the fights were begun by white men, to whom the sight of Métis enjoying themselves was apparently a goad too intense to bear. He was arrested for being drunk and disorderly on a number of occasions. Somehow, he was able to get his hands on one of his many mugshots, which he presented to a cousin as a tongue-in-cheek gift. This is the only known photo of Michif Man. As you’ll note, he was tall, extremely well dressed for a man of his meagre means, and quite handsome, even with one eye swollen shut.
We now know from declassified documents, that the U.S Army conducted a number of highly unethical tests in western Canada from the 1950s onward. In 1953, six kilograms of zinc cadmium sulfide was sprayed over Winnipeg, and then a decade later, in Medicine Hat, and Suffield.[iii] Suffield bore the brunt of the worst tests, as in 1964, a radioactive material phosphorus-32 and a deadly nerve agent, VX, were sprayed over the town.[iv] Canada also subjected 3000 volunteers at the Suffield military base to mustard gas experiments during the second world war.[v]
It has yet to be revealed which government was involved in irradiating a small group of plains bison at the Elk Island National Park in early 1955, or what the purpose of the experiments may have been. We also have no idea what Franky was doing there, that he managed to be gored in the right buttock by one of the radioactive bison. The date on the receipt for antibiotics is April 13th, and we posit that it would have taken him four to six weeks to recover from his wound. By late May of 1955, Michif Man had been born. For some reason, stories about him taper off after 1960, which is why we ended our research there.
We agree with Sabyasachi Bhattacharya that history from below “means more than just the enlargement of the scope of history” and that it “may involve a break with the nationalist paradigm”.[vi] In this case, we believe that tracking the history of Michif Man allows us to continue to challenge the long-standing characterization of Métis peoples as passive (re)actors to colonization, and reiterate that The People Who Owned themselves engaged in extraordinary actions of personal and communal agency.
5 Comments
laurajanerinaldi · September 11, 2018 at 11:43 am
I love this. I could see it as a comic book, similar to the one that was done about a Chinese super hero, that should have been. Gene Yang, wrote The Shadow Hero, based on a superhero from the 1940s. https://www.vox.com/2014/7/9/5883931/heres-why-comic-artist-gene-yang-made-a-1940s-superhero-chinese
wendy wood · September 11, 2018 at 12:02 pm
Well I am hooked. Will look forward to the entire piece. Thanks for posting.
Jody · September 11, 2018 at 3:17 pm
I absolutely loved this piece and really hope we will be able to read more soon. This would make for an awesome comic too!
Kara · September 17, 2018 at 12:31 am
I’m directly related to this man and I’ve never heard of him lmao
âpihtawikosisân · September 17, 2018 at 9:10 am
Wait…don’t tell me in that mashing up common names from Lac Ste. Anne I actually managed to replicate a real couple and their kids…because that would be spooky 😀