Maria Campbell's Halfbreed. Reclaiming the Excised Passage

Abstract

In a 1989 interview, Métis author Maria Campbell complained to Hartmut Lutz that a section of her autobiography, Halfbreed, first published in 1973, was removed by the publisher against her wishes. During a chance meeting with Campbell in Dublin in 2017, and following Indigenous protocols, Deanna Reder and Alix Shield asked her for permission to search for early versions of Campbell's text. With Campbell's blessing, Alix Shield conducted an archival search for any early material, and discovered the excised passage that revealed that when Campbell was a teenager, she had been raped by RCMP officers. This article includes the found text and discusses the impact of its excision.