Dr. Cheryl Troupe
Dr. Cheryl Toupe is a citizen of the Métis Nation – Saskatchewan and a member of Gabriel Dumont Local #11 in Saskatoon. She is an Assistant Professor and the Director of the History Department’s CoLab – Centre for Community Engaged and Collaborative Historical Research 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 recent 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 reframe Métis road allowance communities as sites of resistance and resilience where liminality and poverty are not synonymous with atrophy. 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.