Sample Answer
Reclaiming Voice and Selfhood in Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed
Introduction
Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973) is widely recognised as a foundational text in contemporary Indigenous literature in Canada. Written from the perspective of a Métis woman reflecting on her childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, the memoir offers a powerful interrogation of identity formation under colonial pressure. Campbell’s narrative does not simply recount personal experience. Instead, it exposes the structural forces that shape Métis life, including racial classification, gendered violence, legislative exclusion, and cultural dispossession. Through its form and content, Halfbreed challenges dominant narratives about Indigenous peoples while asserting Métis presence, voice, and survivance.
This essay argues that Halfbreed interrogates identity through a deeply gendered lens and through a narrative structure rooted in Indigenous storytelling practices rather than Western autobiographical conventions. Campbell presents identity not as fixed or individualistic, but as relational, shaped by land, kinship, colonial law, and memory. Gender is central to this process, as Métis women experience colonialism in ways that are distinct from Métis men, particularly through domestic labour, poverty, sexual violence, and state intervention. The narrative structure of Halfbreed reinforces these themes by privileging cyclical memory, communal experience, and political testimony over linear self development.
The essay also makes brief comparative reference to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Shellshaker, which similarly uses Indigenous narrative strategies to foreground gendered Indigenous resistance and embodied memory. Together, these texts demonstrate how Indigenous women writers reshape literary form to articulate identity on their own terms.
Contextualising Maria Campbell, the Métis, and Place
Maria Campbell is a Métis writer from northern Saskatchewan, born in 1940 near Park Valley. The Métis are a distinct Indigenous people in Canada, with ancestry that includes First Nations and European settlers, particularly French and Scottish traders. Métis identity is not simply mixed heritage but a political and cultural identity shaped by shared history, language, kinship systems, and resistance, most notably through events such as the Red River Resistance and the North West Resistance.
The Métis historically occupied a precarious position within Canadian society. They were often excluded from treaties made between the Canadian state and First Nations, while also denied the rights afforded to settlers. This political marginalisation intensified during the mid twentieth century, the period in which Campbell grew up. During the 1950s, Métis communities faced severe poverty, limited access to education, discriminatory policing, and child welfare interventions. Amendments to the Indian Act and provincial policies contributed to displacement and the erosion of traditional livelihoods.
Although Métis people were not governed directly by the Indian Act in the same way as status First Nations, they were deeply affected by its logic. Racial categorisation, surveillance, and the prioritisation of assimilation shaped everyday life. Campbell’s memoir reflects this context, showing how legislation and policy translated into hunger, housing insecurity, and internalised shame. Identity in Halfbreed is therefore inseparable from political history and structural exclusion.
Identity as a Site of Struggle and Resistance
One of the central concerns of Halfbreed is the violence of imposed identity. The term halfbreed itself is a colonial label that reduces Métis people to racial mixture rather than recognising them as a distinct nation. Campbell does not reclaim the term uncritically. Instead, she exposes how it functions as a tool of degradation while also documenting the process through which she comes to understand herself as Métis.
Throughout the text, Campbell describes her childhood confusion about belonging. She is made aware, from a young age, that she is neither fully accepted by white society nor protected by Indigenous legal recognition. This liminal status produces a fractured sense of self, reinforced through schooling, religious instruction, and public encounters with authority figures. Teachers, priests, and social workers become agents of colonial categorisation, teaching Campbell that her community is inferior and destined for failure.
However, identity in Halfbreed is not only shaped through exclusion. It is also sustained through family, storytelling, and memory. Campbell frequently returns to her mother’s strength, her grandmother’s teachings, and the resilience of Métis women. These figures anchor identity in relational bonds rather than external validation. In this sense, identity emerges as collective rather than individual, grounded in shared experience and survival.
This understanding aligns with Indigenous conceptions of selfhood that resist Western notions of autonomous identity. Campbell’s narrative demonstrates that to be Métis is not simply to possess certain traits, but to carry history, responsibility, and connection. Identity is therefore both wounded and resilient, shaped by colonial harm but not defined by it.
