Living Through Extinction: The Métis Buffalo Hunting Memoir

Abstract

Today, L’espace de Louis Goulet and The Last Buffalo Hunter are primarily understood as historical documents, and both works are valued by scholars for their ability to convey facts about late-nineteenth century Métis life. In contrast to this approach, this thesis offers an aesthetic analysis of these works, one that considers the passage of these narratives from the oral tradition to the written form, along with their formal, thematic, rhetorical, and descriptive devices. Through this mode of analysis, this reading argues that these works use the medium of storytelling in order to grapple with the conflicts and contradictions that arose within the buffalo hunting Métis community due to the role that these hunters played in the extinction of the buffalo. L’espace de Louis Goulet calls our attention towards the Métis oral tradition in order to reflect the author’s own immersion into, as well as his eventual disconnection from, the prairie landscape. Ultimately, Goulet’s narrative is concerned with questions of how one survives and what one survives as within a milieu that one’s own actions have devastated. The Last Buffalo Hunter evokes the tradition of Western autobiography in order to subvert the expected narrative of self-formation through economic activity in favour of a narrative that intertwines economic growth and communal sustenance with environmental decline and communal dissipation. Both narratives conclude with their narrators going blind and bankrupt, and the thesis ends on a consideration of this subject position in relation to anthropogenic extinction events.