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Cowboys! Native Studies Speaker Series

The Department of Native Studies would like to invite you to the first event in our annual Native Studies Speakers Series.

Chris Andersen, a professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta, and current Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity visiting fellow, will be speaking on masculinity in mid-twentieth century Saskatchewan Métis communities, in a presentation entitled:

Métis cowboys and gendered relations of domesticity:
Unearthing (and complicating) a photographic archive of post-WWII Parkland, Saskatchewan
Wednesday, Sept 24, 12:00-1:00 Kirk Hall 145

The accompanying photograph shows a teenage years photo of the famous Métis fiddler Jean-Baptiste Arcand (nicknamed “Big John”) dressed as a cowboy, a popular meme for demonstrating masculinity in mid twentieth century rural western Canada. This photograph is interesting, however, not just for the extent to which Big John was (or was not) successful in embodying that meme but rather, for the mid-century gender relations it potentially effaces. If much of the photograph’s awesome power stems from its apparent ability to represent “the real”, this presentation seeks to frame and contextualize that “realness” within the gendered relations of mid-century Métis communities that, in ways material and symbolic, made it possible. This not only complicates the life history within which scholars might position Métis masculinity, it provides a more complex accounting of the density of everyday rural Indigenous life in post-WWII Saskatchewan. In short, the talk seeks to contrast the “official story” of mid-century “halfbreeds” in the Parkland region of Saskatchewan with the memories of those who were there and who “lived it” and the meanings, nearly a half century onward, that they make of it.

Omeasoo Butt PhD ABD
Community-University Institute for Social Research (CUISR)/ History Department/ Native Studies Department/ Station 20 West Community Engagement Office
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon SK
(306) 716-8265 omeasoo@me.com

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."
T.S. Eliot

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