Jackson Pind & Cheryl Troupe

Jackson Pind, Students By Day: Colonialism and Resistance at the Curve Lake Indian Day School. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025.

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.

Jackson Pind, Students By Day: Colonialism and Resistance at the Curve Lake Indian Day School. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025.

Students by Day is a deeply researched community-accountable history of the Indian Day School at Curve Lake First Nation, Ontario, in operation and under the control of the Department of Indian Affairs and the Methodist and United Church of Canada from 1899 to 1978. In this first scholarly monograph on the Day School experience, Pind weaves together archival research with oral history interviews to develop analysis is equally attentive to the destructive impacts of assimilation programs and community demands for access to high quality education. Pind argues that the Curve Lake Indian Day School was most effective when First Nations teachers were involved, when community (rather than the Department) made decisions about the school, and when the school environment included Anishinaabe language and culture. Pind’s research methodology follows an ethic of archival advocacy that prioritizes Curve Lake band members’ access to all federal and United Church of Canada records; all source materials used are available and keyword searchable through a website, a key companion piece to the book. The engaging writing style and easy access to the book’s primary archival sources make this book one that will be excellent for teaching.

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.

Twenty-five years in the making, Putting Down Roots begins in community histories told to Troupe around kitchen tables by the descendants of the first Métis families to establish themselves in the Qu’Appelle Valley. What results is an extraordinary history of Métis-land relations in a Road Allowance Community. Starting from the fur trade forward, Troupe explores Métis-specific experience of settler colonialism and resistance in Western Canada, clearly elucidating the complicated nature of the scrip system and how its failed implementation by the federal government was responsible for pushing the Métis to the road allowance. Significantly, Troupe argues that road allowance were spaces where a Métis worldview and cultural thrived despite economic poverty.  Drawing from and contributing the fields of food history and women’s and gender history, Troupe demonstrates how Métis women especially played an important role in kinship networks and food-based labour that anchored these families to the land. Her skillful use of Historical GIS systems results in maps which make clear the continuing Métis connection to this land even as settler surveys and settlements threatened their very existence. Beautifully written, this book will draw a broad audience and is highly suitable for students of History, Indigenous Studies, History and Women and Gender Studies and related disciplines.