I remember trying to tell part of this story for another conference some time ago. I name this as story because while it is informed by some poring through the dusty "facts" of a long reach of history, it is best understood as story, the imagining of events in the lives of individual people; people as ordinary and extraordinary as you and me, and my mother and father. That first time, I wrote a scholarly middle so I could hang together a beginning and an end that were about mother and who she was and, consequently, me and who I am. That beginning and end were fun to write and feel. A little too full of my own writing to be very worried about the imposition, I read the beginning, the following section to my colleague, Liz Bird, who comes from England.

"Bones, marrow, blood. Genes and chromosomes. Amino acids and sunlight. Dead matter leaping to life. Life leaping to consciousness. From time to time we learn who and what we are. Some small piece of the idiosyncracy that is identity is illuminated by light reflecting off water flowing from the heart of an unknown world. In canoe country, I feel this sense of connection, wondering how it was when first we came, or perhaps before they came. The country is in my blood. And my course on the Frontier Heritage becomes more and more an exploration of the mysterious mosaic of ethnic and racial realities and myths that makes us Americans. For me, teaching the course has become an exploration of the mysterious mosaic within myself, as well as a discovery of the history that is in each of us."

She said, kindly, "I like it, but you know we don't really believe in that blood stuff. That's American."

I felt a little provincial and a little embarrassed at being so new. And, a little irritated with my friend from England. A few weeks later, in an entirely different context, I referred to her and her husband as English. She laughed and informed me that they weren't English, they were Brits and Graham wouldn't like being called English. Of course, Romanized Celts, the Britons of Brittany and the British Isles, still after more than a millennium bridle at being named for their Anglo-Saxon conquerors, still keep track of who Birds and Tobins really are. I think of Marlowe on the Thames about to begin telling the story of the heart of darkness, saying:

"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."
....
"I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago--the other day. . . . Light came out of this river since--you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker--may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine--what d'ye call 'em?--trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of these craft the legionaries--a wonderful lot of handy men they must have been, too--used to build, apparently by the hundred, in a month or two, if we may believe what we read. Imagine him here--the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina--and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages, ..."

The losers, the savages, become the Britons, make themselves over in the image of their conquerors, and then, fall to the Angles, Saxons and Jutes except among the clans in Wales, Cornwall, Scotland and Ireland, places where Birds, Tobins, and their ilk persist. Perhaps there is a bit of blood to be thought about. Some connection between the land built from the dust of the ancestors' bones, and the people who are of the land.

Which brings me back to mom and my story. My mother is full of stories. She has been telling me them for 83 years and I am not weary of them. In fact, like many men of my generation, I'm just beginning to hear the stories women tell. I haven't got time today to tell you even one of her stories, but I must tell you what she says when I ask her what she and her family are. She always laughs at the question and says "We're French, French-Canadian, you know, Tom, Canuckanuck," laughing some more. Because, I've been listening more, reading more, and because I love the sounds of words, I've learned why the Cree word for tobacco mixed with red willow bark, kinickinick, and the word my mother uses to name her people sound alike. To find out, I had to learn a very small bit of Ojibwe, from Father Baraga. But more of that later.

The relationships between story, legend and history flower in increasingly complex ways in my own experience. For sometime now I've been exploring what happens as I move my own historical focus away from the lives of the rich and famous, away from the tales told by winners, (who do spend an inordinate amount of time engaged in the equivalent of the Packers or Bulls fans running around with their index fingers pointed skyward and proclaiming something about primacy), to an exploration of tales told by losers which turn out to be oral and familial. Which is to say, I do come from a long line of losers.

Let me begin by picking up a tale in media res, on Christian Island, on Georgian Bay, in Huronia, near ice-out time, in 1649. The people, Hurons, were starving and sick after a winter of dying. They had fled to the island after raids by the affiliated Iroquois tribes, armed with Dutch and British muskets, destroyed their villages, burned their churches, slaughtered their missionaries. To survive the winter they had eaten of each others' flesh, giving with each dying, sustenance to survivors that seems, in some strange way, in keeping with the ritual cannibalism of their new religion. They did not think of themselves as proxies fighting a war for European "powers," or as martyrs to the faith. They knew they were the people of this place. There had been 11,000 of them growing corn in fields so vast that members of Champlain's party had complained that there was some danger one could disappear in the corn fields of Huronia. There were now two hundred of them. Others had fled as well, but Huronia had passed, the people were no more of this place. They had been conquered. They fled across the rotting ice, into the woods, two hundred mile cross country, to Quebec, to Sillery, and eventually Trois Riveres and Longueil. Among them was Catherine Annenontak. She fled her father's death and the annihilation of the Huron nation by Iroquois armed with Dutch and English muskets. The orphan and 200 other women and children were led to Quebec by the Jesuit missionaries who had been "converting" them. She was carried, being only a year old. She was on her way to an Ursuline convent in Quebec, to be raised in the French way to marry a French man. She did; he was a peasant from Poitou in Saintonge. His Celtic forbearers, the Santoni of Gaul, had met a similar fate at the hands of Julius Caesar and his legions a millennium and a half earlier. (Caesar 192)

On September 23, 1662, Jean Durand, peasant from the town of Doeuil in the province of Saintonge, having completed his three year contract to earn his way to New France, took to wife Catherine Annennontak, daughter of the late Nicolas Arendankir captain of the Hurons of Georgian Bay. She was "reared and taught in the French manner" by Madam de la Peltrie and Marie de l'Incarnation at the Ursuline convent in Quebec, so that she "could someday marry a Frenchman." The Jesuits of Canada dowried her for marrying her Frenchman, giving 350 livres to the newlyweds. She was fourteen years old entering her first marriage.

The problem with beginning in the middle of things is that every once in a while, you have to turn around. And this is such a moment. In sliding past the Celtic roots of my French peasant forbearers, I've been ignoring my father's people, the Bacigalupos. Amongst the legionnaires who subdued the Santonis were Romanized Celticized Ligures. The Ligures hadn't fallen to the Romans until about 172 B.C. (David, 60)They'd aided Hannibal in an effort to throw off the yoke of Roman rule, as the Santoni would join Commius and the Gallic tribes against Caesar in 52 B.C. Most of Hannibal's allies had been punished 20 years earlier, but the Ligures, "who occupied virtually impregnable positions" held out. They even outlasted the Sardinian and Corsican. Crossing the Bay of Genoa was a good deal easier than taking the hill fort at Piande Pretti , above Genoa. I imagine it as place where the druids, male and female, kept the faith even after the Roman conquest and Christian hegemony. It was and is the Plain of the Priests, home to the Bacigalupo (kissing or swinging wolf) clan, whose warriors ran naked and shouting to meet the Romans in the final battle. Now two centuries later, serving in the legions of Caesar, as Roman law required, the Ligurian Celts "civilized" the Santoni savages, silvans, woods dwellers. It is the first time my father's people, nascent Italian peasants, met my mother's people, nascent French-Canadian villain, habitant, chicote. But the Romans were tolerant of the local traditions in those early days, and even after Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, the Santoni stayed Celts. Not until Rome fell and the Irish Celts brought civilization and Christianity to the Santoni would the Beltane fires stop and the druids disappear from among the people of the woods.

Now let us return to Catherine and Jean. From this blood and bone, from these genes and chromosomes, from the policies of Champlain and the Recollets and Jesuits, of church and state, spring 12 generations of people of mixed blood. Mixed offspring married mixed offspring, and in Quebec no one kept track. In the west, moving up the lakes they were called bois brûlé, "burnt wood," coureurs de bois, "woods runners," voyaguers, "canoemen." Catherine and Jean's son, Louis, the first of my "mixed" ancestors, was among those who went. As they moved west to the plains, spreading from the Missouri basin to the Arctic, these "French-Indians" came to see themselves as people apart, as the Métis , the mixed.

The Métis were not only of mixed blood but of mixed culture and their lifestyle depended upon the river, the hunt, the fur trade and a pattern of primitive agriculture suited to a semi-settled people. Their life style was midway between that of the nomadic Indian food gatherers and that of the Europeans, the economic base of which was agriculture.

. . . These Métis are the true Natives of Canada. Indians and Europeans were immigrants -- only the millennia separated their penetration into the New World. The meeting of the two races produced a mixture which was not from another land, but whose sole roots were in the New World. (Sealey and Lussier, 1975, p. 9)

So the Métis of Canada have come to see themselves. But how did, and do, the dominant Anglo cultures of the United States and Canada view people of mixed blood? The answer to that question varies over time, but it ends where most questions about the preservation of "native" cultures in the Americas have ended; in the fight to maintain some sense of identity, some connection with tradition, some sense of what the elders have to say in the face of every kind of pressure to capitulate to the dominant cultures. The case of the Métis is especially difficult because neither the dominant cultures nor the native cultures wanted the Métis to endure or prevail. Additionally, the Métis' connections to French Catholic culture further alienated this people from Anglo Protestant culture.

Robert Thomas, Head of American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona, poses he issue nicely in his after word to Peterson and Brown's The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis.

"The question of identity (is) in a very broad and simplistic sense, the answer to the question, 'Who am I?', or, on the level of the group, the answer to the question 'Who are we?' ... if one ponders the enormity of the answers to those questions one can see that he or she has stepped into a profound sphere of human life. Individuals, no matter how sophisticated, cannot explicitly answer about themselves...(or)...their "people." Such questions are too all encompassing. No human being is that self-aware."

In exploring such questions about identity historians are now arguing that to come to real understandings of the ways in which the frontier experience shaped the characters of North Americans, we will have to turn away from Turner and Roosevelt's construction of the past as the drama of "manifest destiny" and spend more time studying the portrayals of the experiences of specific groups in specific frontier locales.

Lyle Dick, for example, in " The Seven Oaks Incident and The construction of a Historical Tradition, 1816-1970" explores the way history and myth are made. He raises fundamental questions about "objective" history, questions which are based on the careful analysis of the way in which amateur historians and professional historians portray the Métis people of Canada. He points out that in contrast to nineteenth century amateurs' preservation of competing interpretations of both the people and events at Seven Oaks, professional historians pictured the Métis "as the inherently flawed product of an unsound racial mixture." He concludes that the "transformation of Seven Oaks historiography from Red River pluralism to Anglo Canadian romance ... to myth" has become "ideological bedrock, ... stubbornly resistant to revision."

Finally, attempts to understand the role played in forming "national character, aboriginal and non-Anglo European groups like the Métis and Metisto suffer from the Anglophone bias that characterizes most histories of North America. That history is, in the main, a tale told by the "victors" which gives short shrift to the perspectives of Native Americans, Spaniards and Frenchmen, let alone groups of mixed languages and cultures. Peter Charlebois summarizes this situation in the introduction to his Life of Louis Riel.

"Canadians have easy access only to English-language books and newspapers of those times. Newspaper accounts of the battles were written to sell newspapers. History textbooks to this day start with the false premise that it was the white settlers who had the right to the land. ... Some of the books on these events have been written so as not to offend anyone: others frankly promote racial, religious and national prejudices. More recently, scholarly works treat all events and people equally, on the false premise that one may write without presuppositions, trying so hard to be fair that they are unfair. The facts of life and history are that all people and events are not of equal importance, that people do things for reasons and most often aren't afraid to say what they are.

Charlebois is a least partially right. We do need to consider the way in which the stories we tell and told about the experiences of the pioneers and the natives, reveal the under stories of racism, imperialism, and nationalism that are the legacy of European settlement in North America. However, attempts to redress the imbalance of the self-congratulatory boosterism, and unabashed racism and imperialism of Turner's thesis, have their own limitations if all they produce is narrowly focused empirical studies of marriage patterns or trade arrangements in frontier communities. It is too easy to slip into views of people and events which are atomistic, and which while they give a clearer sense of the economic causes of events, or of the cross cultural similarities in the experiences of indigenous people as they are exploited or overrun, mask the common ground of the lessons of freedom taught and learned by and from the land and the people as they came together. Here, though deeply flawed by his underlying racist genetic theory, Marcel Giraud's two volume The Métis in the Canadian West (1986), comes closer to the truth in portraying the emergence of the Métis on the fur frontier .

"From among these individuals who henceforth were dedicated to the primitive existence, a new class of men emerged in the West which, under the name of 'gens libres', 'hommes libres', or 'freemen,' established between white and native the last and most complete link in their unification. Nearer to the Indian than to the employee in the post, more intimately associated with his nomadic ways, the freeman let himself be absorbed irrevocably into the country where the voyageur were often content with temporary residence. He even developed confused aspirations of local patriotism of which the first settlers in Manitoba would soon experience the effects. To the regions in which he wandered, surviving by his own resources, independent of the trading companies, he was attached not only by the modalities of his existence, but also by the Métis family he had created, by the blood relationships that united him with the native tribes, and finally by the nature of the country whose majestic spaces or wooded horizons he had come to love."(p. 264-65)

The fact is that the Métis of Canada have not found the task of maintaining their identity easy, but it is equally the fact that the Métis of Minnesota, by and large, disappear. Métis images and identity have been woven into the tapestry of Canada. At the border, near Red Lake Falls, Minnesota, Turtle Mountain, North Dakota, and Fort Benton, Montana, a few mixed threads blend the peoples of Canada and the United States, who are in their terms neither Canadian or American, but are the New People of the Americas. These thin border threads are what is left of identity for the Métis of the United States. I am of these people and the Celticized Ligures and the Santoni. Threads on the borders of civilizations' tapestries. Cisalpine Gaul, Breton, Huron warrior/hunters overrun in turn by Roman, French, British, Canadian, American city dwellers and farmers, in the name of progress. We persist in trying to know who we are.

My name is Durand. At least a part of my name is. If then, as now, I'd be Thomas David Charles Durand-Bacigalupo. What's in a name, after all? Thomas for my name changing, doubting father; David for my Piandi Pretti [Plateau of the Priests, (for which gods - Druids of the Cisalpine Gauls] peasant grandfather (who did end his life suffering, they said, from dementia, trying to run naked to battle death in the Celtic manner); Charles for confirmation and Uncle Charlie, Grandma Bacigalupo's brother who had a mistress and drove his peasant brother-in-law into his room above the dynamo at St. Kate's and away from his sister and his nephews and nieces because Davido's English wasn't good enough; Durand for my unknowing Métis mother, Gertrude Lillian, grand daughter of second half- cousins who married in the Métis way.

Thereby hangs a tale, etymologically, from the French

Dur is the root, an adjective meaning hard, becomes the noun dureté, hardness which metaphorically becomes cruelty, or duree wear or duration. Durabilite is durability and durable is durable. Dur also names tough customers and hard material. Durcir, to harden, which is inflected to durcissement, hardening, which yields, as verb again becomes noun, durcee, duration, or if it stays a verb in its new form, durcee, to last. Similarly durer, to last or endure, carries hardness to action giving us, with further inflecting, durete hardness turning cruel. From this comes the adverb durant, during, measuring the time that hardness persists. (It is suspected that the Durands of Doeuil are descended from "a certain Bernard Durant who was living in 1065 in Dampierre on the Bontonne (sic?) ... a village 13 kilameters (sic) southeast of Doeuil" who with his wife and sons "donated a piece of property to the church of St. Cyprien, directed by Hugnes Rabiol, some land with trees, bounded by Humbert Arduin's house and the Boutonne (sic?) forest. From the same root flow endurer, endure; endurant, resistant; endurcir, to harden; endurci, obdurate; endurcissement, obduracy; and peasants who, like the rocks, give up slowly, their obduracy, their resistance, their essence, to William Vollman and Ignatius of Loyola's stream of time. All of this extends to durillon, callus or corn, suiting peasant wood-cutters from Doeuil, and, in the plural, cursing Gertrude Lillian's feet in her later years - almost as if, as a child, she'd walked in moccasins from Christian Island in Georgian Bay, across the black ice, through the woods to Quebec and the Ursilines.

Bacigalupo which means swinging wolf or kissing wolf and hangs another tale. After what. "The name is as common as Smith in Piande Preti," Tomasso the first said. "Why Ma didn't even change her name when she got married." More kissing Cousins? Or is it much older? A clan name? The wolf clan meeting the Romans naked, howling defiance in the face of advancing civilization and death, their druids keeping the faith, and the knowledge another thousand years, beaten back past the mountains, living amidst the Santoni's alien grapes.

Understanding happens over time and, often, comes by accident. I've wondered about the kinickinick - canuckanuck similarity in consonant outlines for over a decade, meaning to look it up. Consonants change less than vowels and the similarity marks my mom's name for her people as being derived, borrowed from Alqonquin. So I wonder. And then the accident. I am in the Water's Edge Store at Blue Fin in Tofte. Just above the Cross River on the North Shore of Lake Superior. As usual, the Lake and the time alone with Barbara have slowed me and focused me. And as usual, I am drawn to the books. I see Father Baraga's dictionary of the Ojibwe Language and the kinickinick - canuckanuck question jumps to mind. Baraga whose cross names the Cross River, blown across the lake from La Pointe and the Apostles, builds the cross to mark his safe arrival, writes the earliest dictionary of Ojibwe, choosing orthography since rejected by linguists, but closer to the way French/Algonquin ears and tongues heard and said the words of the Cree and Ojibwe. I look for kinickinick and find:

kiniginige whose root is kiningina, to mix.

Kiniginige - I am mixing together objects of different kinds

Sounds and meanings, shifting as language and peoples meet and mix, driven by each groups stretching of their language and borrowing from the language of the other, using metaphor to cover the new reality, the new thing/person/place they must name. I say the words rapidly, to approximate fluency, and try to imagine each pair of ears, each tongue trying to word the new people, the new tobacco, the new blendings. Keniginige, kinickinick, canuckanuck - things mixed, the preferred bend for calumet ceremonies, the new people translates to Métis, French for the mixed people, becoming French Indian in the polite parlance of the time or in the racist English of then and, sadly, now, half-breed. So are born the mixed metaphors for the mixing of people and cultures. The Anishanabeg say, according to Baraga, kinigabimin, we are all mixed together. They speak of how the people came together, how the Ojibwe came to be. They included all who were in this place, and of it. We need to learn their language. These poems grow out of my effort to learn these lessons.