Maria Campbell (26 April 1940 - )
 
Maria Campbell is a Métis writer, playwright, filmmaker, scholar, teacher, community organizer, and valued Elder. The author of Halfbreed (1973)[i] a memoir that has been foundational to Indigenous literature in Canada, Campbell is known for the innovative and meaningful ways in which she has been able to blend social justice and art with activism, environmental justice, and politics. She has been described as “a person of hard, steady work fuelled by a love for her people and a commitment to justice” and a leader whose “community responsibilities are intricately woven [into her] work” (Anderson viii). Throughout her life she has collaborated with numerous Indigenous writers and activists, advocated for the recognition of Indigenous people in the arts, authored several books and plays, written and directed scripts for a number of films, and worked tirelessly to improve life for Indigenous women, children, and families on the street, in poverty, or otherwise at risk.
 
Campbell was born on 26 April 1940 on a trapline in northwestern Saskatchewan and grew up in a road allowance community.[ii] Her memoir, Halfbreed, details the effects of inter-generational and historical trauma that led up to and ultimately produced what she calls an impoverished community which held no hope for the future, inhabited by a generation of people that was completely beaten, ashamed, and heart-broken (8-9). Although she details having been lucky to experience a grounded early childhood—a part of her memoir that is rich with stories about her siblings, her grandmother’s teachings, her relationship with her parents, and endearing anecdotes from her younger years—Campbell was forced to grow up quickly at age twelve when her mother passed away; as the oldest of eight children, Campbell struggled to take care of her siblings and provide them with the material and emotional support they needed while her father was working. Because, moreover, the Métis right to hunt and trap for food was not yet recognized by the Canadian state (and would not be recognized until the 2003 Powley decision), the Campbell family found themselves frequently visited by the RCMP—on one occasion her father was sent to six months in jail after a hidden cache of meat was found and seized; on another, Maria Campbell was brutally raped by a Mountie in her own home.
 
The compounding effects of grief, loss, trauma, poverty, and her grandmother moving out to live with relatives took their toll on Maria Campbell as she struggled to navigate her early adolescence. Eventually she quit school in order to split her time between working odd jobs and caring for her siblings. With the hopes of providing a better life for her brothers and sisters and preventing them from being forced into foster care, Campbell married into what she thought was a well-to-do white family at age 15. She was quickly disillusioned. Although her choice did temporarily save her siblings from being taken away and sent to foster homes, it ultimately had disastrous results. Only a few months into the marriage, her husband began to drink heavily, abuse her physically and verbally, and be absent from home for days at a time. He eventually phoned social services to take away the children Campbell had been raising as her own, before moving her and her only daughter to Vancouver with him, where he eventually abandoned the family.
 
Towards the end of the autobiography, Campbell briefly sketches out survival tactics, including drug and alcohol use, that she employed in order to survive. Eventually this led to a breakdown and then admission to a hospital in Alberta, where she began to slowly recover. The connections and friendships that she made during her recovery period fostered her growing sense of political consciousness and led her to realize how crucial the need for leadership and change in Indigenous communities across Canada was.
 
So began a period of reflection, recovery, and healing—one that ultimately took Campbell into activism, community outreach and development, politics, and social work and justice. In the early 1960s Campbell began helping and housing women who were struggling to make ends meet or get back on their feet, and in 1963 she co-founded the first halfway house for Indigenous women in the country followed by the first women and children’s emergency crisis center, in Edmonton, where she was then living. Campbell’s dedication to helping women in crisis, women coming out of prison, and women dealing with violence and drug addiction, led to the production of her first film, Edmonton’s Unwanted Women (1968), which became a healing tool for women of all ages who shared stories of difficulty and hardship.[iii] This was followed by Many Laws (1969), a handbook that grew out of her work as a community organizer and her experiences in the city, which drew attention to the challenges many Indigenous people face when they move to urban spaces.
 
In her early thirties, as she began coming to terms with what had transpired in her own life, Campbell wrote Halfbreed, which was first published by McClelland & Stewart in 1973. The initial print-run of 4,500 copies sold out almost immediately, with professors across Canada eager to integrate Campbell’s memoir into their classes in a period where little Indigenous (and much less Métis) content and was being taught at the post-secondary level. Despite Halfbreed’s success, the section in Campbell’s memoir that detailed her rape by the RCMP—a key component to her narrative that contextualized her unravelling and contributed to the narrative’s overall coherence—had been edited out at the last minute for being too “libellous” and for fear that the RCMP would get an injunction to stop the book’s distribution.[iv] Later re-discovered in Campbell’s original manuscript by settler scholar Alix Shield, the RCMP “incident” was re-inserted in an updated and revised 2019 edition.
 
After Halfbreed, Maria Campbell went on to write numerous books, anthologies, plays and theatre productions. In 1979, she became a writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, a position she later continued at other institutions, including the Regina Public Library (1980-81), Persephone Theatre (1983-84), the Prince Albert Public Library (1985-86), the Whitehorse Public Library (1994-95), the University of Saskatchewan (1998-99) and the University of Winnipeg (2008-09). During this time she produced the first ever all-Indigenous theatre production in Canada, Flight (1979), which interwove Indigenous art and culture with modern dance, drama, and storytelling. A decade later, she co-authored The Book of Jessica: A Theatrical Transformation (1989) with settler playwright and actress Linda Griffiths, which became an award-winning play.[v]
 
Campbell’s contributions beyond literature and theatre to television and film have been impressive as well. She wrote the script for The Red Dress (1978), a National Film Board production directed by Michael Scott, which takes up issues of cultural identity, sexual assault, family, and the ongoing impacts of colonialism, and she has been involved as a writer and director in many other films. In 1984, she co-founded Gabriel Productions, a film production company which produced 34 community documentaries between 1984 and 1997. She also co-produced the television show, My Partners My People (1987), which aired on CTV for three years and, more recently, she voice acted in the stop motion animation TV series Wapos Bay on APTN.
 
Despite her accomplishments as an inspiring writer, public speaker, and educator, Campbell does not consider herself a writer per se but a community worker who has healed herself and others through writing and storytelling.[vi] Campbell has held talks and interviews on several radio series and has been a guest speaker at multiple conferences and universities across Canada, where she has discussed issues related to women and youth in crisis, community development, and justice. She is an officer of the Order of Canada, holds several honorary doctorates and other awards, and has been a creative writing instructor, professor, and cultural advisor at countless institutions.
 
Now a great-grandmother, Campbell is at the centre of a large kinship network of five children and their extended families, as well as many others.
 
Selected Works:
 
Texts:
Campbell, Maria, editor. Achimoona. Fifth House, 1985.
---. Halfbreed. McClelland & Stewart, 1973. Revised Edition, 2019.
---. People of the Buffalo: How the Plains Indians Lived. Illustrated by Douglas Tait and Shannon Twofeathers, J. J. Douglas, 1976.
---. Little Badger and the Fire Spirit. Illustrated by David Maclagan, McClelland and Stewart, 1977.
---. Riel’s People: How the Métis Lived. Illustrated by David Maclagan, Douglas & McIntyre, 1978.
---. Stories of the Road Allowance People. Illustrated by Sherry Farrell Racette, Theytus Books, 1995.
Campbell, Maria, et al. Keetsahnak: Our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Sisters, U of Alberta P, 2018.
Griffiths, Linda, and Maria Campbell. The Book of Jessica: a theatrical transformation. Coach House Press, 1989.
 
Stage Plays:
Campbell, Maria, writer. The Alley. Saskachewan Native Theatre Company, 2001.
---, director. Flight. Regina Centre for Arts, 1981.
---, writer/director. Flight. Jubilee Auditorium Edmonton, 1979.
---, co-writer. Jessica. 25th Street Theatre Saskatoon, 1982.
---, co-writer. One More Time. 25th Street Theatre Saskatoon, 1995.
---, writer/director. Uptown Circles. Joe Duquette High School, Saskatoon, 1984.
 
Films:
Campbell, Maria, writer/director. A Centre for Buffalo Narrows, 1987.
---, writer/director. Cumberland House, 1986.
---, writer/director. Edmonton’s Unwanted Women, 1969.
---, writer/director. Joseph’s Justice, 1994.
---, writer/director. Journey to Healing, 1995.
---, writer/director. La Beau Sha Sho, 1994.
---, co-producer. My Partners, My People. CTV, 1987.
---, writer. Red Dress, NFB, 1977.
---, writer/director. Road to Batoche, 1985.
---, writer/director. Sharing and Education, 1985.
 
Works Cited:
Anderson, Kim. “The Grandmother Place.” Halfbreed, McClelland & Stewart, 2019, pp. vii-xxi.
Campbell, Maria. Halfbreed, McClelland & Stewart, 2019.
“Community Based Research and Aboriginal Women’s Health and Healing: A Workshop with Kim Anderson and Maria Campbell,” Prairie Women’s Health Centre of Excellence (PWHCE), 29 November 2004. http://www.pwhce.ca/pdf/CommBasedSaskatoon.pdf Accessed 23 June 2020.
Gingell, Susan. “One Small Medicine: An Interview with Maria Campbell.” Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 83, 2004, pp. 188–205.
Hillis, Doris. “Maria Campbell” Plainspeaking: Interviews with Saskatchewan Writers, Coteau Books, 1988, pp. 39-64.
Hoy, Helen. “‘When You Admit You’re a Thief, Then You Can Be Honourable’: Native/Non-Native Collaboration in The Book of Jessica.” Canadian Literature, issue 135, Spring 1993, pp. 24-39.
Jacklin, Michael. “Collaboration, Circulation and the Question of Counterfeit in The Book of Jessica.” The Dalhousie Review, vol. 93, no. 1, 2013, pp. 121–139.
Jefferess, David. “Whose Story Is It, Anyway? Or, Power and Difference in The Book of Jessica: Implications for Theories of Collaboration.” English Studies in Canada, vol. 29, no. 3/4, 2003, pp. 220–241.
Lutz, Hartmut. “Maria Campbell.” Contemporary Challenges: Conversations with Canadian Native Authors, Fifth House Publishers, 1991, pp. 41-66.
Perreault, Jeanne. “Writing Whiteness: Linda Griffiths’s Raced Subjectivity in The Book of Jessica.” Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 60, 1996, pp. 14–31.
Reder, Deanna, and Alix Shield. “‘I write this for all of you’: Recovering the Unpublished RCMP ‘Incident’ in Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973).” Canadian Literature, vol. 237, 2019, pp. 13-25
 
Endnotes:

[i] Halfbreed was originally published in 1973; however, the updated 2019 version has been referenced in this biography.

[ii] In chapters 1-3 of Halfbreed, Campbell details how legal, historical, political, and economic policies systemically oppressed Métis peoples, causing many to settle on Crown lands along the road lines where land had no price and no value. Here they set up a community of what would become known as the “Road Allowance people” (8), consisting of a collection of cabins, huts, and barns built by poor Métis families like Campbell’s who had  neither a “pot to piss in” nor “a window to throw it out” (26). For more on Campbell’s thoughts regarding road allowance communities see the abovementioned chapters in Halfbreed or her interview with Hartmut Lutz, pp. 44-45.

[iii] For more on what shaped the community outreach and healing Maria Campbell began in the 1960s, see “Community Based Research and Aboriginal Women’s Health and Healing: A Workshop with Kim Anderson and Maria Campbell,” pp. 6-7.

[iv] Editorial choices and revisions that ended up silencing certain types of trauma in order to make narratives more palatable for their intended readership and more absorbable into Canada’s dominant literary landscapes have been around for as long as Indigenous literature has existed. For more on the constraints and struggles Campbell has faced with editors and publishers, see her interview with Lutz, pp. 42-46. For a more detailed overview of Halfbreed’s publishing history as well as a discussion of the missing pages and the new 2019 edition, see Reder and Shield’s “‘I write this for all of you’: Recovering the Unpublished RCMP ‘Incident’ in Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973).”

[v] The Book of Jessica has received much critical attention regarding the ethics of storytelling, appropriation and theft historically associated with Indigenous-settler collaborative works. For a more on the matter, see Jeanne Perrault pp. 14-31, Helen Hoy pp. 24-39, David Jefferess pp. 220-241, and Michael Jacklin pp. 121-139.

[vi] In an interview with Lutz, for example, Campbell stated, “I don’t think of myself as a writer. My work is in the community” (41). For a deeper discussion of how Campbell views herself as a writer/storyteller/translator and what has inspired her to write, see Lutz pp. 41-42, Hillis pp. 56-57, and Gingell pp. 199-201.
 
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Maria Campbell entry by Lara Estlin, July 2020. Lara completed her BA in the Department of English at SFU and then went on to complete her MA (English) at UBC.  She worked as a research assistant for The People and the Text from 2018 to 2020. 
 
Updated by Eli Davidovici in April 2024. Eli is completing his M.Mus. at McGill University.
 
Please contact Deanna Reder at dhr@sfu.ca regarding any comments or corrections.