by Doris Jeanne MacKinnon
HERITAGE HOUSE PUBLISHING
2023/$32.95/320 pp.
The Premier and His Grandmother offers a compact and accessible history of the Métis people broadly, and of an important Métis family specifically. This family tree includes several high-profile branches, including the first Indigenous person to be appointed to the Canadian Senate, Richard Hardisty; his niece, an artful and gracious Calgary socialite, Isabella Clark Hardisty; her husband, an influential businessman and politician, James Alexander Lougheed; and their grandson, the 10th premier of Alberta, Peter Lougheed.
Doris Jeanne MacKinnon acknowledges early on that many people are surprised to learn Peter Lougheed was of Métis descent. His paternal grandmother, Isabella Clark Hardisty, was the daughter of Métis parents and spent her formative years in the northern district of the Mackenzie River. Later, in Calgary, she and her husband James became a power couple. During this time, Isabella remained publicly discreet about her Indigenous identity. MacKinnon writes, “the reality was that as a pure survival strategy and as a way to avoid discrimination, some Métis people constructed a public persona as non-Indigenous people. This meant that some descendants of Métis people were often simply not fully aware of the history of their Indigenous ancestors. Even if they were aware, as was Peter Lougheed, it was often the case that Métis people did not perceive a freedom to openly express their Indigenous ancestry even into the 1970s.”
The book begins by exploring the history of Isabella Clark Hardisty and goes on to examine Peter Lougheed’s Métis ancestry and the influence that ancestry may have had on the formation of his identity. Midway, the book addresses the reality of life for Métis people in Alberta, both before and during Lougheed’s time as premier. Later chapters explore the complexities of Métis identity, and how Isabella’s and Peter’s identities may have shaped their respective roles as leaders in their community and the province.
MacKinnon writes about these subjects with abundant citations and engagement with other relevant historians. But while she’s certainly a capable scholar and historian, her writing is clear and comprehensible to a general audience. She also writes with an admirable economy. In a short book she efficiently elucidates over 150 years of the Hardisty/Lougheed family tree. Perhaps most importantly, MacKinnon draws the reader along by writing with an engaging narrative style. The book is a welcome and unique contribution to the history of the fur trade, the Métis people and Alberta’s formation as a province. It leaves one thinking about the multiple dimensions of identity and how they shape historical characters and their roles in public life.
Andrew Torry is a curriculum designer for the City of Calgary.
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