Cheryl Troupe is a citizen of the Métis Nation – Saskatchewan and a member of Gabriel Dumont Local #11 in Saskatoon. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research centres on twentieth-century Métis communities in Western Canada and merges Indigenous research methodologies with Historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS) to focus on the intersections of land, gender, kinship, and stories.
Troupe’s first book, Putting Down Roots: Métis Agency, Land Use, and Women’s Food Labour in a Qu’Appelle Valley Road Allowance Community uses oral histories, family genealogies, community-engaged research, and digital history methodologies to connect people and their stories to the spaces that are important to them, privileging Indigenous value systems, perspectives, and worldviews. Her work reframes Métis road allowance communities as sites of resistance and resilience where liminality and poverty are not synonymous with atrophy. These communities were not merely peripheral spaces where Métis lived as squatters on Crown land, but places where families lived according to a Métis worldview and culturally thrived despite economic poverty. Examining these communities through the lens of women’s work—particularly in food production—she considers their resilience and resistance embedded in everyday actions to maintain culture, family systems, commonly held values, and connections to the land.
Utilizing this same technique of deep mapping, Troupe is working with various Métis and community partners to deep map Métis place-making in the city of Saskatoon, shedding new light on urban Métis history in the city. In addition, she is working with digital humanities scholar, Dr. Jim Clifford to map the process of settler colonialism in Saskatchewan, revealing the myriad and nuanced ways Indigenous peoples were removed from the land, transforming the landscape into settler colonial and private property. She is currently the Director of the History Department’s CoLab – Centre for Community Engaged and Collaborative Historical Research which works with community partners to hire and train students to work on community-designed historical research projects.
Select Works:
Cheryl Troupe. Putting Down Roots: Métis Agency, Land Use, and Women’s Food Labour in a Qu’Appelle Valley Road Allowance Community. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2025.
Cheryl Troupe, and Doris Jeanne MacKinnon, editors. Métis Matriarchs: Agents of Transition. Regina: University of Regina Press, 2024.
Cheryl Troupe and Janice Cindy Gaudet. “Closing Thoughts: River Women Collective’s Reflections on the Final Ceremonial and Artistic Installation of Walking With Our Sisters. In Rematriating Justice: Honouring the Lives of Our Indigenous Sisters, edited by Jennifer Brant and D. Memee Lavell-Harvard, 121-136. Demeter Press, 2024.
Cheryl Troupe, “Métis Stories and Women’s Artistic Labour in Margaret Pelletier Harrison’s
Margaret’s Rug.” In Prairie Interlace: Weaving, Modernisms, and the Expanded Frame, edited by Michelle Hardy, Timothy Long and Julia Krueger, 55-64. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2023.
Cheryl Troupe, “Re/Storying Metis Road Allowance Communities,” part of Metis Talks by Rupertsland Centre for Metis Research 18 November, 2021, on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THZyuBxCr3U
Cheryl Troupe, Roundtable: Transferring Knowledge, Shushkitew Collective Saskatoon Gathering 23-24 September 2022, on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAwfm8sPyus
Stevenson, Allyson, and Cheryl Troupe. “‘From Kitchen Tables to Formal Organization: Indigenous Women’s Social and Political Activism in Saskatchewan to 1980.” In Compelled to Act: Histories of Women’s Activism in Western Canada, edited by Sarah Carter and Nanci Langford, 218-52. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: University of Manitoba Press, 2020.
Amanda LaVallee, Cheryl Troupe, Tara Turner. “Negotiating and Exploring Relationships in Métis Community-Based Research.” Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching and Learning. 2: 1 (July 2017): 167-182.