MǪ́LAZHA

A Métis clan weathers bitter cold, ethnic bias, and sexual molestation in Canada’s Northwest Territories in this memoir.

Hardy, whose father was a White Canadian and mother was a Métis of mixed European and Shúhta Got’ıne First Nation ancestry, looks back to the 1850s in tracing his family’s history in Fort Norman and other subarctic villages. The author chronicles several generations of forebears: the women bearing heroic numbers of children and the men working as fur traders, clerks, and managers for the Hudson Bay Company. He moves on to his boyhood in Fort Norman, where he traveled by dog sled and absorbed the Métis cultural stew: Families still trapped and hunted but embraced Christianity and prized formal education. The book’s centerpiece is Hardy’s adolescent experience at a Roman Catholic boarding school, where he lived in a dormitory whose supervisor repeatedly raped him and other boys. (He includes a blistering indictment of the church for covering up such crimes.) Later chapters describe his career as a lawyer and Métis rights advocate and plumb the damage wrought by the molestation ordeal, which manifested in his alcoholism and failed marriage. Much of Hardy’s labyrinthine account consists of dry genealogical information that will be of interest mainly to family members. But there are also intriguing snippets of frontier history and lore: an episode of famine and cannibalism; his grandfather’s killing of a moose with a knife; and tales of the monstrous “Náhgáneh” bushman. The author also paints a revealing picture of social tensions, exploring how the Métis uneasily navigated White bigotry and Indigenous resentment and the antagonisms between Catholics and Anglicans. (Before his wedding, Hardy’s Catholic Métis grandfather had to sign a contract guaranteeing that he would let his wife and children practice Anglicanism.) Hardy’s prose, usually lucid and workmanlike, is searing in conveying his victimization at school—“It was about thirty years until I started losing the rotten smell of his body, which was ground into my senses”—and lyrical in evoking nature. (“There would be” the northern lights, “swirling like paintbrushes, spreading colour across the skies, which were filled with bright stars that glittered like diamonds.”) Beneath the reams of family factoids, readers will get an authentic and sometimes harrowing view of life in the Northwest Territories.

Vivid stories of anguish and survival that are sometimes obscured by genealogical minutiae.