This talk, drawn from Putting Down Roots, examines Métis land dispossession in the Qu’Appelle Valley through the implementation of the Dominion Lands Act and related policies of survey, homesteading, and scrip. These settler colonial policies imposed new systems of land tenure privileging individual ownership, agricultural labour, and strict homestead requirements, undermining Métis relationships to land grounded in kinship networks, mobility, and river-lot settlement. Survey and title regimes fragmented Métis landholdings, while scrip accelerated their transfer to settlers and speculators. Displaced from titled land, many Métis families relocated to the road allowance—marginal spaces set aside in the Dominion Lands survey for the creation of roads—where they built communities and maintained enduring connections to traditional territory.
Dr. Cheryl Troupe is an Associate Professor in History at the University of Saskatchewan and a citizen of the Métis Nation – Saskatchewan. A community-engaged researcher, her work centres Métis voices and perspectives in examining Métis road allowance communities in twentieth-century Western Canada. Her research merges oral histories, family genealogies and mapping to focus on the intersections of land, gender, kinship and how stories are connected to specific places. She is co-editor of Metis Matriarchs: Agents of Transition published by the University of Regina Press in 2024, and the author of Putting Down Roots: Métis Agency, Land Use, and Women’s Food Labour in a Qu’Appelle Valley Road Allowance Community published by the University of Manitoba Press in 2025.