The Red River Jig Family Network
This project was co-developed with Dr. Suzanne Steele and Dr. Michelle Porter, alongside other Métis community members who shared their knowledge with us.
The Red River Jig Family Network (RRJFN) project addresses the loss and continued threat of loss of cultural and storied knowledge and the interruption of knowledge transmission among the Métis peoples. Drawing on a visiting way methodology, it engages with geo-genealogies (a concept developed by Dr. Steele) across time and place, and centres ethically responsive, Indigenous-led transdisciplinary knowledge co-creation.
The Métis peoples, at the heart of the North American continent, have faced persecution and displacement since the Red River and Northwest Resistances of 1869–70 and 1885. Pushed off their land, often forced to hide their culture, the Métis peoples have seen significant disruption of their family and community networks. Many Métis (though certainly not all) have lost a sense of belonging and home. This project therefore emerges from the following question: how can memory and connection, and a sense of belonging and home, be strengthened among a scattered peoples?
Co-developed with community, this project proposes that a singular tune, dance, and story—the Red River Jig—can be used to identify, strengthen, connect, and evoke memory, and thus (re)create community and a sense of belonging and home for Métis peoples well into the 21st century. The Red River Jig is a tune, dance, and story that is emblematic of the Métis nation. Emerging at the heart of the continent, with the peoples, the rivers, and the lands that make up the prairie Métis families, it continues to be played, danced, and storied at contemporary Métis events, even though its familial and place-based elements have faced considerable decline. Using visiting way methods and Indigenous mapping practices that engage with both kin and place, the project will focus on the co-creation of knowledge through research-creation practices, while sharing knowledge in the present and for future generations. It is advocating for a culturally relevant, music, dance-, and story-centred, land- and kin-based approach to (re)connecting a displaced people.
In conversation with debates among Métis Studies scholars related to nationhood, peoplehood, and mobile kinship networks, this project also examines the social imaginaries and geographies through which the Red River Jig became central to the development, survival, and continuation of a nation. It responds to/engages with critical research on home by de-centring Eurocentric values and patterns of living. In doing so, it examines how the tune, dance, and story continues to sustain, strengthen and renew the Métis Nation and considers how it can and will sustain Métis culture for future generations. Though it builds on previous work in anthropology, ethnomusicology and geography, this project is an intervention into past approaches to the study of Métis dance and music, explicitly addressing the legacy of extractivist research. With a predominantly Métis research team, it places past, present, and future relationships at its heart, with a goal of building a knowledge-sharing community that will enhance the flourishment of Métis music, dance, and story practice.
Responding to the need to connect across great distances, the project’s outputs centre community-engaged research-creation. The project will include a website—a digital gathering of belongings—that will function as a project hub and directional aid to the project and its outputs. These will include recordings of the Red River Jig (sound and audiovisual—with capabilities for community responses to the recordings); community-created zines, podcasts, and maps; overviews of our visits; and other publications, bibliographies, and literature reviews created as part of the project.