November 4 - Western Canadian Lecture

Department of History, Classics, and Religion presents:
Western Canadian Lecture

November 4, 2026
4:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.
Tory BW-1 
Reception to follow!

“We got our house built by Seneca Root”: "Métis Labour in the Settler Economy” by Professor Cheryl Troupe

Drawing largely on the oral record, this talk examines how Métis families actively shaped their livelihoods within Saskatchewan’s expanding settler economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Amid dispossession and agricultural settlement, families drew strategically on seasonal farm labour, land-based economies such as digging Seneca root, and women’s artistic production. These histories foreground Métis agency, showing how families mobilized their labour, knowledge, and relationships to sustain their households, maintain connections to land, and create economic possibilities within a changing colonial landscape.

Cheryl Troupe is an Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Community Engaged and Collaborative Historical Research in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Métis communities in Western Canada, particularly the intersections of land, gender, kinship, and community. She is a citizen of the Métis Nation–Saskatchewan and a member of Gabriel Dumont Local #11 in Saskatoon.

Her award-winning book, Putting Down Roots: Métis Agency, Land Use, and Women’s Food Labour in a Qu’Appelle Valley Road Allowance Community, draws on oral histories, genealogy, and community-engaged research to reframe Métis road allowance communities as sites of agency and resistance. Centring women’s labour, it examines how everyday practices sustained family, culture, and relationships to land amid dispossession and poverty.