My Métis grandmother, Lenore Clouston, gave me my first book about Louis Riel and the Métis people when I was three years old. She had not known her heritage until she was in her twenties, and she did not want her children or grandchildren to grow up without this knowledge. So I grew up proud of this heritage and when my grandmother took us to pow-wows, jigging contests, and square dances, I heartily participated. I even learned to fiddle with my grandfather so I could participate as a musician during the celebrations and parties at my grandparents farm.
As a teenager I watched my mother’s writing career blossom as she worked with Indigenous communities, edited stories, and developed Indigenous resources and books for the United and Anglican churches of Canada. We regularly had Indigenous Elders at our supper table, sometimes staying at our house for days at a time.
Lower Fort Garry, built by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1830, figured prominently in my childhood, though it was not just a pleasant place to visit. I have deep and conflicted connections to the place. While I enjoyed many family and school trips to this National Historic Site, and my husband and I had our wedding pictures taken there, it was also where Treaty 1 was signed between the Ojibwa, Swampy Cree of Manitoba, and the Crown. I remember family discussions about how ancestors from my Scottish grandfather's side would be working on the inside of the Fort and how my Métis and Swampy Cree relatives lived and supported the Fort from the outside. I remember that as a child, those walls were significant, and represented more than simply a boundary. This unequal and racially charged divide was all part of me, part of my heritage.
My grandmother lived with these cultural clashes in her own community and marriage. Her husband was Scottish and she was Métis. Because of this, she understood the complexity of this culturally diverse community and worked tirelessly towards reconciliation for the future generations—often saying that it was the grandchildren and great grandchildren who would accept all peoples
as equal.
When my grandmother was in her fifties and sixties, she started a large project she called “Louis Riel’s Dream.” She began with five sketches that she intended to turn into five paintings. These paintings were to highlight the history of Western Canada through the stories of the Indigenous peoples. The first painting was to depict a community of First Nations peoples on the prairies before meeting Europeans. The second painting was to show the first meeting of First Nations people with European settlers. The third and fourth paintings were to depict the rise of the Métis Nation and the conflicts rising out of the clash of cultures. The fifth and final painting was to show multicultural peoples standing hand in hand in a circle, and tosymbolize a coming together of peoples, regardless of races, gender, or colour. My grandmother never finished this project, and all that remains are two unfinished paintings. The sketches, sadly, were lost in a fire.
Because I was so compelled by my grandmother’s project— her artwork and her inspiration from Louis Riel—when I was commissioned to write a Piano Quintet for the Agassiz (B.C.) Chamber Music Festival in 2015, I decided to complete her art project musically. I sought collaboration with members of my family, using the prose of my mother, Joyce Clouston, to start each of the five movements of the piece, and inviting my sister Andrea Carlson and my aunts Lisa and Lana Clouston to contribute art works to display at the concert. The premiere was a wonderful and collaborative event. Composing the piece was both a musical completion of my grandmother’s five-painting plan, and also a celebration of my grandmother.
The prose offers some insights about who my grandmother was, how she worked on her art, her struggles and her discovery of her Métis heritage. The prose also connects my grandmother with my mother and me–we all explore similar themes in our art. Mama’s Painting: Louis Riel’s Dream begins with the following prose that my mom titled “Mama’s Painting”:
Late at night I awoke
Mama in the kitchen, working intently
On what looks like an empty page.
Suddenly the lines join
Forming an image
A child emerges, smiling in black and white.
I love my mother’s description of how my grandmother worked late at night, after all the children were in bed, and how the lines seem unrelated until they suddenly make sense. It described how my grandmother would begin each of her works—sketching on a blank page. This also resonates with how I begin writing music—with a blank page.
For me the most meaningful moment in the prose comes when my own mother remembers my grandmother talking about how the women in her family had no names. The following is an excerpt from the beginning of movement III, titled “Rise of the Métis Nation”:
. . . But the women. The women had no names, they had no faces.
They were Swampy Cree. I know that now, but I found it in the archives. And, I can’t go anywhere in this country to find out where my ancestors, the women, were from.
My mother was Swedish. And she was the first white woman in the family in five generations. She was ashamed of us. She was prejudiced. She insisted my father was Scottish. But, look at him. Look at his picture. He looked like Chief Pontiac.
So mama drew the women, their faces, beautiful faces, emerging out of darkness.
“So mama drew the women….” My mother’s description of my grandmother’s actions sums up part of how my grandmother worked through the conflicts in her life. She drew, she painted, she sculpted, she created stained glass windows. She encouraged her children and grandchildren to create art, and she also founded a community art centre to enable others to create art. She understood the need for reconciliation through art.
As my grandmother felt the need to draw and paint the faces of Indigenous women, and my mother feels the need to write down the stories of women and others, I feel the need to tell the stories of women and my heritage through music. I grew up with my grandmother’s paintings on our walls, and a favourite of mine depicts an Indigenous woman reading a prayer book. It wasn’t necessarily someone my grandmother knew, but it was important for
her to draw a woman in our heritage who was nameless and faceless. This woman is a treasured part of our family and a treasured part of our heritage.
The vision of my grandmother continues to be something for which I feel our communities should strive. We live in a time where racism and the fear of others continues. Yet I can see changes. Many of us are reaching out to others who are misunderstood or feared in our society and in our families. There is still a long way to go, but the vision of my grandmother offers one way of working towards a possible future where all can live together in harmony, reconciled to one another.
