Louis Riel

[Hans-Joerg]

Does somebody perhaps have ABC or maybe even a recording of "Louis Riel" (named after the hanged Canadian Meti-Leader)?

[magroibin]

X: 258
T: Louis Riel Reel
M:4/4
R:reel
C: Andy DeJarlis
L:1/8
S:Patti Kusturok Lamoureux OTFFAS Fiddle Workshop 2005
Z:Alf Warnock
K:G
|: "Em"EFED B,DEF|G2E2 BAFE|"D"D2F/{G}F/D A,2DE|FAdB AFD2|
"Em"EFED B,DEF|G2E2 BAFG|"D"ADFA BAFA|"Em"GE{F}EF E4:|
|:"Em"BcBA Bded|B2c/2B/2A BGE2|B2c/2B/2A Bdef|[1 "Em"ge"D"fd "Em"e4:|[2 "Em"ge"D"fd "Em"e2ef|
|:"Em"g2gf e2ef|geBe geag|"D"fd2d d3e|fdAd fdef|"Em"g2 (3agf e2ef|
geBe g4| "Em"gfed "D"cBAF|[1 "Em"GE{F}ED E2ef:|[2 "Em"GE{F}ED E4|]

[Hans-Joerg]

Super! Thanks very much, magroibin!

[MTGuru]

K: EDor

[Hans-Joerg]

A friend of mine had sent me a doc. about the Meti. What impressed me deeply was seeing Indian clothed couples dancing to reels and a fiddler in Indian clothes. It is contradictory to this long-learned usual Western-sujet. In the Great Lakes area white men ("working" for the Hudson Bay Company) had married Indian women and a cultural mix and an identity of its own occured. Their fiddling style seems to be a bit similiar to Cape Breton. It could "stretch" the repertoire of uilleann pipers.

[s1m0n]

The HBC wasn't very great lakes-focussed; that route was monopolised by Quebecois courier de bois until after the english conquest of Quebec. At the time of the conquest, the Hudson's Bay Company had been trading in the north and northwest via Hudson's Bay for nearly a century. It's the second-oldest corporation in the world, (after the Dutsh East India Company, btw). The HBC built a chain of chain of 'stations' from James Bay across the prairies to the Rocky Mountain foothills.

It was customary for the HBC's white employees to have native 'bush wives' for their two or three year posting. When they were done, most would sail back to Scotland and the Orkneys (where many came from), marry a white girl, and forget about their bush wives. Some did stay and stay with their native wives; David Thompson (of Thompson River fame) was one who did.

Their children were the first wave of Metis.

Post conquest, the HBC started using the great lakes route. The factors (the boss) would usually be scots, and they'd travel in canoes and 'york boats' paddled by Quebecois Voyageurs. It was possible to get out and back to Montreal in a couple of seasons, and because they were travelling in the cargo vessel (instead of sending furs to await the annual ship in the warehouse on James Bay) they tended to spend less time in the west. However, it must have been enough time to make the last generations of first-generation Metis french-speaking, or rather bilingual, with French as their white language. Anyway, it's the scots connection that's responsible for the scots/cape breton flavour to their fiddle tunes and reel-based dances.

In the pic below the guys with paddles are Quebecois Voyageurs, the scots HBC factor (dressed like a boss) and his personal piper Colin Fraser, also scots, and perhaps one or two other scots employees of the HBC. However, the passage goes on to say that the piper married Nancy Beaudry. Beaudry is still a very common name in Quebec, but if Fraser met and married her in the west, she would likely have been Metis. His daughters born in the west were almost certainly Metis.

Colin Fraser [1805-1865] from Kirkton, Sutherlandshire, was recruited in the Orkney Islands by Simpson’s father. He arrived at York Factory in 1827 and beat out two other candidates to win the £30 a year job as Simpson’s personal piper. According to some old papers of the Laird MacGillis of Williamstown and John MacDonald of Garth, who were together in the Red River area, Fraser married Nancy Beaudry, by whom he had a large family, from Bethsey born at Fort Carlton in 1833, to Caroline born at Slave Lake in 1859.

One anonymous and possibly apocryphal story refers to a Cree who heard Colin Fraser play at Norway House and reported to his chief: "One white man was dressed like a woman, in a skirt of funny colour. He had whiskers growing from his belt and fancy leggings. He carried a black swan which had many legs with ribbons tied to them. The swan’s body he put under his arm upside down, then he put its head in his mouth and bit it. At the same time he pinched its neck with his fingers and squeezed the body under his arm until it made a terrible noise."

[PJ]

A popular tune from the Metis repertoire is "Drops of Brandy". However, the version played by the Metis fiddlers is not the slip jig that we're familiar with. In terms of rhythm it's closer to a 'slide'.

I can't find a written version of Drops of Brandy (the Metis tune) anywhere online. Any help?

[jqpublick]

The HBC wasn't very great lakes-focussed; that route was monopolised by Quebecois courier de bois until after the english conquest of Quebec. At the time of the conquest, the Hudson's Bay Company had been trading in the north and northwest via Hudson's Bay for nearly a century. It's the second-oldest corporation in the world, (after the Dutsh East India Company, btw). The HBC built a chain of chain of 'stations' from James Bay across the prairies to the Rocky Mountain foothills.

It was customary for the HBC's white employees to have native 'bush wives' for their two or three year posting. When they were done, most would sail back to Scotland and the Orkneys (where many came from), marry a white girl, and forget about their bush wives. Some did stay and stay with their native wives; David Thompson (of Thompson River fame) was one who did.

Their children were the first wave of Metis.

Post conquest, the HBC started using the great lakes route. The factors (the boss) would usually be scots, and they'd travel in canoes and 'york boats' paddled by Quebecois Voyageurs. It was possible to get out and back to Montreal in a couple of seasons, and because they were travelling in the cargo vessel (instead of sending furs to await the annual ship in the warehouse on James Bay) they tended to spend less time in the west. However, it must have been enough time to make the last generations of first-generation Metis french-speaking, or rather bilingual, with French as their white language. Anyway, it's the scots connection that's responsible for the scots/cape breton flavour to their fiddle tunes and reel-based dances.

HBC was involved in running battles for control of the fur trade with at least two other companies - The XY Trading Company and The Northwest Trading Company. La Verendrye (1685-1749) was an explorer and occasional HBC honcho who had one fort built in what is now downtown Winnipeg but because of the danger of other companies seeing a map with the fort located on it, he instructed the cartographer to put the fort in the middle of the junction of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. We've been looking for a couple of hundred years and we've never found it. La Verendrye left the area before the fort was built so it could have been a one-room shack, or it could have been a real fort. No-one knows.


There are a lot of connections here with the Orkneys, a lot of last names and quite a few street names in Winnipeg come from there.


I live in Winnipeg (one of the centres for Metis people) and the largest settlement of French people outside of Quebec is here, in St. Boniface (now a suburb of Winnipeg). St. B. was settled officially in 1818, and is the birthplace of Louis Riel, who is a local hero. He's the reason there is a place called Manitoba. A lot of intermarriage took place and the Metis tend to be francophones. I'm not an expert in Metis History but there are a lot of great Metis fiddlers around here. They like to screw with folks like us (Irish and Scots trad. musicians) and so call a reel a jig and a jig a reel. Sometimes they mean it, sometimes they don't. But it's great music. I don't have a lot of it myself but I can check with the Metis Federation and see if they have anything online.

Here's a couple of links about St. Boniface and Louis Riel;

http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/mb_history/29 ... ance.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Riel


Mark

[s1m0n]

A few years ago I was working for a social service non-profit which was asked to put on a series of workshops for a native organization out here. Generally, 'white' agencies are thrilled to get such a request, because (from our perspective) many native groups can be pretty stand-offish. No doubt from theirs we're bossy and don't listen.*

The talks were held in a community centre shared by a number of groups, one of which was an urban Metis pride/cultural organization. They'd started a Metis stepdancing group for youth, who were meeting at the same place. They had a number of quite enthusiastic youth, and they had a volunteer leader, but neither the leader nor the youth had any idea how to do the dances they wanted to dance. They had a recording of the Red River Jig**, which is often considered the unofficial Metis anthem. It's a reel, btw, as jqpublick warned above.

Anyway, they had the music, and the volunteer leader being a retired military man, and he must have figured that 'step-dance' isn't all that far from 'quick-step', so he had them doing what amounted to drill to this music to keep them going until they could find someone who knew how to stepdance, Metis-style.

A little while later I was doing what gets called in the trade a 'booth day' at a mall that was hosting a social service fair targetting my agency's demographic. That meant I spent the day manning a table handing out info and explaining to people what we could do for them. It's common for these things to have entertainment to draw a crowd, and the entertainment is usually also drawn from yet other community organizations. That day, one of the groups was the same metis youth stepdance group, still doing some quite complex drill to the Red River Jig, and still calling it stepdancing. It wasn't quite as lively as the wheelchair squaredancing group that followed them, but their execution was far more crisp.

*The smartest thing I did, purely by accident, was to invite an outside speaker. He was a lovely older gentleman of Iranian/Afghan extraction, who started his talk by identifying himself and where he was from, speaking with dignified, old-world manners. They LOVED him. From the audience's POV he wasn't white, he was brown, and his brown was the next best thing to red. He was a big hit, but then I'd never known anyone who didn't like this man. He'd been a professor of literature before the Iranian revolution, and who'd had to start over in Canada in later middle age.

** From the Fiddler's Companion:

GRANDE GIGUE SIMPLE, LA (The Great Single Step Dance). AKA and see "Red River Jig." French-Canadian, Jig (3/4, or 6/4 and 3/2 time). D Major. Standard or ADAE. One part (Carlin): ABCD (Reiner & Anick): ABCCD (Remon & Bouchard). This melody is probably the most popular and famous solo step-dance tune for virtuostic stepping in French-Canadian tradition, though it is in actuality not a jig ('gigue') but a reel. It is performed at a variety of tempos, depending on the taste of the fiddler or the step-dancer for whom it is played. Made up of repetitive phrases, the melodic line is somewhat free-form, states Guy Bouchard, and each fiddler seems to have his or her own version. Métis fiddlers from Manitoba play it under the title "Red River Jig." Source for notated version: Louis Boudreault (Québec) via Lisa Ornstein [Reiner & Anick]. Carlin (Master Collection), 1984; No. 101, pg. 63. Reiner & Anick (Old Time Fiddling Across America), 1989; pgs. 60-61. Remon & Bouchard (25 Crooked Tunes, Vol. 2: Québec Fiddle Tunes), 1997; No. 17. Green Linnett GLCD 3042, La Bottine Souriante - "Chic and Swell" (1988. Learned from Pierre Laporte, "who believes that his interpretation is fairly similar to that played by the late Jules Verret). Voyager VRLP-322, Louis Boudreault - "Old Time Fiddler of Chicoutimi, Québec" (1977, 1993).

RED RIVER JIG. Canadian, Breakdown. Canada, Manitoba. A Mixlydian ('A' & 'B' parts) & D Major ('C' part). Standard. ABBCC. The tune is derived from the famous French-Canadian step-dancing tune "La grande gigue simple," and is a Métis fiddling favorite under the "Red River" title. The Red River flows through Manitoba and the Métis lands. Source for notated version: Stuart Williams (Seattle) [Phillips]. Phillips (Traditional American Fiddle Tunes), Vol. 1, 1994; pg. 196.