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This is the fourth in our 2025 Haunted Heritage blog series. See all the entries in the series here.

When you arrive at Batoche, Saskatchewan, the South Saskatchewan River gently winds through the prairie, carrying centuries of stories. At its core stand the St. Antoine de Padoue Church and Rectory, witnesses to daily community life and the violence of 1885. For Métis people, these are more than heritage buildings; they are places where our ancestors’ resistance to the Canadian state is engraved into the walls, where bullet holes still mark the Rectory, and where faith, loss, and resilience converge.

Being at Batoche as a Métis person means engaging with a layered memory of grief, resistance, survival, and hope. Walking through the church or looking out at the river is not just about “visiting” a historic site. It’s about connecting to the ongoing story of Métis identity, which has always been both contested and deeply rooted.

The Littoral Nature of Métis Identity

Métis identity has always been littoral—developed at the edges where land meets water. Our communities formed in the Red River Settlement, maintained through not just the waterways but through land-based trade with Red River carts, kinship, and the movement of people. Batoche itself is an area characterized by the river-lot system, where long, narrow strips of farmland connected families to both the land and the river (Ens & Sawchuk, 2018). The merging of land and water, rootedness and flow, shapes our sense of belonging.

In The Black Shoals, Tiffany Lethabo King (2019) examines how Indigenous identity is often closely linked to land. In contrast, Black identity is connected to the ocean and its memories of the Middle Passage (King, 2019). Building on this metaphor, Métis identity exists in the current: we move with the river, but also against it. We are shaped by colonial currents that have separated us from First Nations’ land-based spirituality and connection, while also rejecting us from settler society, forcing us to forge a new life within the waterways (Adams, 1989; Andersen, 2014). As traders, go-betweens, and resisters, we have always had to navigate against colonial waters, claiming space in the in-between.

Standing at Batoche, with the sound of the river near the church, evokes this littoral truth: that Métis belonging has always been both fluid and rooted, both allowed and challenged, both downstream and upstream.

The Church and Rectory as Tesseract

The St. Antoine de Padoue Church and Rectory are not just heritage landmarks. They are, in a way, tesseracts—multi-dimensional spaces that blend past, present, and future. Based on Kai Recollet’s response to T. L. King in the Black Shoals Dossier, we might view Batoche as a place where time vibrates and oscillates between different temporalities (King et al., 2023). Recollect describes objects and spaces as dimensional rifts that hold both memory and potential, resonating between what was lost and what may yet emerge (King et al., 2023).

Inside the church, one might sit in the pews and feel the weight of prayer, colonial imposition, and Métis persistence, near where Louis Riel declared his provisional government. At the Rectory, the walls bear visible scars: bullet holes from the Gatling gun fired by Canadian troops, some of which have been repaired over time but remain visible in photographs that show the same image at different times (Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2005). These scars raise a question: from whose perspective do you see this place? Is it the gaze of the RCMP, imagining victory over rebellion? Or the gaze of the Métis, envisioning sovereignty and survival?

For Recollet (2021), these multi-dimensional rifts may not only be wounds but also echoes of hope, connecting us to places where futures can still be envisioned. At Batoche, the vibration includes both the execution of Louis Riel as a so-called traitor and what Gerald Vizenor (2008) calls the survivance of Métis nationhood, which resists erasure.

Haunting, Optimism, and Regeneration

Batoche is haunted, but not in a way that traps a past spectre in the present. The haunting here is active and future-oriented: it reminds us that we live within histories of resistance, loss, and renewal that will continue to unfold. To walk the site is to occupy a liminal space where past and future blend. You carry the memory of the Resistance, the sorrow of defeat, and at the same time, the optimism of renewal.

This sense of haunting resonates with what Tina Paphitis (Paphitis, 2020) describes as “haunted landscapes,” where the spectres of the past persist in place, producing both unease and meaning. In her framing, hauntings can be co-opted into heritage consumption, folded into ghost tours or commodified narratives. My experience at Batoche runs parallel but also diverges from this account. At Batoche, the haunting is not merely about ghostly presence or commodified folklore but tied directly to colonial violence and Métis survivance. Where Paphitis’s (Paphitis, 2020) “spectral accretions” can sometimes be absorbed or overwritten by official heritage stories, the bullet holes in the Rectory and the continued vitality of Métis culture insist on a haunting that resists closure (p. 343). Here, haunting becomes a vibration of futurity: not simply the persistence of the “no longer” but an insistence on the “not yet,” the ongoing regeneration of a Métis Nation.

Heritage interpretation often concludes at a gift shop. At Batoche, even this space becomes meaningful: shelves laden with beadwork, sashes, and stories represent Métis renewal, a return to the land and river as sources of identity. These tangible symbols of culture challenge the idea of disappearance. They affirm that Métis futurehood is alive, present, and vibrant.

Conclusion

The St. Antoine de Padoue Church and Rectory at Batoche are not mere remnants of colonial destruction. They are living symbols within a web of memory, identity, and future hopes. They serve as reminders that Métis identity is formed at the margins of land and water, driven by the currents of trade, kinship, and resistance. Additionally, they act as tesseracts, intertwining past, present, and future into a vibration that affirms Métis survival and resurgence.

To stand here is to feel that vibration: to see bullet holes as both scars and openings, to hear the river as both obstacle and sustainer, and to imagine Métis futures shaped not by colonial denial but by our own continuance.

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Andrew Wiebe is a Two-Spirit (Red River Michif, MMF) PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Find out more about his research and publications here.

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References

Adams, H. (1989). Prison of grass: Canada from a native point of view (Rev. ed). Fifth House Publishers.

Andersen, C. (2014). Métis: Race, recognition, and the struggle for indigenous peoplehood. UBC Press.

Ens, G. J., & Sawchuk, J. (2018). From New Peoples to New Nations: Aspects of Metis History and Identity from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-first Centuries. University of Toronto Press. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442621497

Fiola, C. (2021). Returning to ceremony: Spirituality in Manitoba Métis communities. University of Manitoba Press.

Gabriel Dumont Institute. (2005, September 21). Old Catholic Church (rectory) at Batoche* [Photograph]. Virtual Museum of Métis History and Culture. Https://www.metismuseum.ca/resource.php/04270. Virtual Museum of Métis History and Culture. https://www.metismuseum.ca/resource.php/04270

King, T. L. (2019). The black shoals: Offshore formations of Black and Native studies. Duke University Press.

King, T. L., Latty, S., Lumsden, S., Recollet, K., & Scribe, M. (2023). The Black Shoals Dossier. Lateral: Journal of Cultural Studies Association, 12.1. https://csalateral.org/issue/12-1/black-shoals-dossier/

Paphitis, T. (2020). Haunted landscapes: Place, past and presence. Time and Mind, 13(4), 341–349. https://doi.org/10.1080/1751696X.2020.1835091

Vizenor, G. R. (Ed.). (2008). Survivance: Narratives of Native presence. University of Nebraska Press.