Cheryl Troupe

Cheryl Troupe, Putting Down Roots: Metis Agency, Land Use, and Women’s Food Labour in the Qu’Appelle Valley Road Allowance Community. University of Manitoba Press, 2025.

Cheryl Troupe’s Putting Down Roots records the resilience of the Metis community of the Qu’Appelle Valley Road Allowance, demonstrating how kinship networks and gendered labour sustained the community through the various challenges presented by Canadian expansion and settler colonialism. By exploring the evolution of the Qu’Appelle Metis from established, multi-vocational residents in the mid-nineteenth century to sustained community in the mid-twentieth century, Troupe fills a time period often overlooked in the scholarship. In addressing this lacuna, Troupe revises the established narrative of this period of Metis poverty by making the case that resilience, innovation and endurance founded in family relationships and established labour practices is what defined this era for this community. Troupe’s book also offers a novel model of how to combine Indigenous methodology, oral sources, and more conventional elements of the historical craft to present a persuasive narrative. Her expert use of oral history and documentary evidence, and her ability to take her guided experiences on the land and translate these into HGIS mapping methods are especially impressive, demonstrating that Indigenous and traditional academic methods can be used together to enhance our understanding of the past without privileging one over the other. A thoughtful, passionate, well-written and innovative book, Troupe’s Putting Down Roots will be a foundational text in Metis and Prairie history for many years to come.