“All kinds of people have written books about half-breeds before,” said Maria Campbell in a 1973 interview with the Leader-Post, “but nobody who is a half-breed has written a book before.” Half a century ago, there were very few books published in Canada written by Indigenous authors. Aside from the work of Mohawk poet E. Pauline Johnson, most Canadians had likely read about Indigenous people only through the words of settlers.
That changed when Campbell published her memoir, Halfbreed. At the time, she was a mother of four living in Edmonton, deeply involved in the nascent Métis political movement that defined the 1960s. The book reads as an expression of her activism—a desire to represent her people and reveal the racism and dispossession that had pushed them to the margins and to galvanize them to work together in order to fight oppression.
