This December marks the 57th anniversary of the death of Malcolm Norris: Métis patriot, champion of Indigenous rights, and committed socialist. Born in St. Alberta, Alberta on May 25, 1900, the young Norris attempted to join the North-West Mounted Police in 1917 because he wanted to help Canada suppress the Bolshevik Revolution in Siberia. He was ultimately too young to join the Siberian Expeditionary Force, but over subsequent years he travelled around the province hunting, trapping, and trading, where he was confronted by the horrible conditions of poverty and underdevelopment that the Canadian government imposed on northern Indigenous and Métis communities. Through these experiences Norris became, in the words of Leah Dorion, “a true Indian socialist.”

Soon Norris would meet Métis leader Jim Brady, another socialist activist. Brady’s tiny shack in LaRonge, Saskatchewan, 150 miles north of Prince Albert, contained the complete works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. In the 1930s, the men would work together with other Métis activists including Pete Tomkins, Joseph Dion, and Felix Callihou to organize the first Métis organization in Canada, the Association des Métis d’Alberta et des Territories du Nord-Ouest (Alberta Métis Association). Brady also helped found the Métis Association of Saskatchewan and the Métis Association of LaRonge.

In Alberta, Norris and Brady’s organizing efforts played a major role in securing the first and only Métis land base in Canada.

For Norris and Brady, the struggle for socialism was inextricable from the struggle for Indigenous rights. Their vision of social and economic democracy was rooted in the Métis experience of violence, racism, and dispossession at the hands of the Canadian state for decades prior, including after the 1870 Red River Resistance, the 1885 Northwest Resistance, and the implementation of the scrip system, North America’s “largest land swindle.”

In his book The One-and-a-Half Men: The Story of Jim Brady and Malcolm Norris, author Murray Dobbin writes: “[Norris and Brady’s] 30-year socialist commitment sprang from the turbulent, white settler society of the 1920s and 1930s. Both men remained close to white socialists. Yet the struggle for socialism was taking place in the white world of Canada, and Brady and Norris’ racial consciousness—their identification with past native struggles—drew them into the colonized native world as well.”

What did socialism mean to Norris and Brady? As Dobbin explains:

Their choice to join the native struggles was partly a result of their commitment to socialist principles. Socialism in Canada, as a struggle for social and economic democracy, inherited the mantle of the Métis struggles in the 1800s for democratic rights. Just as the modern workers’ movement had roots in the rebellions of 1837, the twentieth century Métis’ anti-colonial movements were the continuation of an unfinished national struggle… For Brady and Norris, the struggle for socialism and the struggle for Métis national liberation became one and the same—a struggle for the human rights of the Métis people.

The 1930s were marked by an upsurge of Métis nationalism, primarily led by the “Big Four”—Tompkins, Dion, Norris, and Brady. The 1870 resistance had been based in Manitoba, and before that in Saskatchewan, but the newest wave of Métis resistance was centred in Alberta.

Many Alberta Métis had first-hand experience of state violence. “Persecuted by new Anglophone Canadians as well as old, treated to racist abuse and outright brutality, the Métis of Manitoba were gradually forced to abandon their birthplace,” writes Dobbin. “They fled south to Pembina in the United States, to the Saskatchewan River Valley and to the agricultural mission settlements around Fort Edmonton.” Many of those who stayed in Manitoba and Saskatchewan were relegated to road allowances: areas set aside for future road construction where impoverished Métis managed to eke out a living.

Norris and Brady took the lead in pressuring the government for Métis land settlements in Alberta. They were resisting a new wave of dispossession: Ottawa planned to transfer Crown lands to the provincial government, which wanted to open the land to homesteading. When the Crown lands were administered federally, they were available to the Métis, who had “squatter’s rights”—and little else. The Métis were deprived of medical services, schooling, and government relief, their communities were devastated by malnutrition and disease, and their ability to survive through hunting was constrained by increasing government regulation. All of this “threatened Métis self-sufficiency and their ability to live outside the influence of white society.”

Nevertheless, they had land on which to live. If Crown lands were transferred to the provincial government, the Métis wouldn’t even have that. Under provincial jurisdiction, they would likely be forced off to make room for white settlers, just like in 1870 and 1885. “The government would do nothing to protect the Métis as prior occupants and they would be pushed out,” writes Jean Teillet, author of The North-West Is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel’s People, the Métis Nation. “It was an old story and everybody knew the plot.”

Local Métis communities approached Joseph Dion, a teacher at the nearby Keehewin reserve, for help in lobbying the government to recognize their land rights. Dion brought Norris and Brady into the struggle. In 1932, the group formed into the Métis Association of Alberta. They dropped the pejorative term “half-breed” from their vocabulary and focused their organizational efforts on acquiring a provincially recognized land base for the Métis Nation. They believed that land settlements would “give them the ability to provide for their homeless and destitute families, education for their children and better medial attention.”

The founding of the Métis Association represented a political rejuvenation of the national movement. Norris, who embodied the more militant wing, captured the energy well in a letter: “You lament that we have no Riels. Joe, we have plenty of Riels and it only requires a little fanning of a spark that would become a flame… I love a good fight and I’m not afraid to meet any Damned White Man that ever drew breath.”

Norris and Brady’s leftist politics, and their connections to Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and Communist Party officials, led to “red-baiting tactics and outright hostility” from the provincial government. The government also tried to disrupt the movement. They attempted to discredit Brady, telling his followers that he didn’t speak Cree, and they offered to make Joseph Dion chief of his old band and give him a large farm if he relented. The bribery attempt failed.

The Catholic church lined up with the provincial government to condemn the Métis land movement. Church leaders warned its members about “radicals” in their midst. In a message to Dion, Norris ridiculed the “radical” label, writing, “Good God, Joe, if it is radical to tell the truth about the conditions prevailing among our people… then I am, you are, we are all Reds.”

By 1934, the Alberta government could no longer ignore Métis demands. That year, the government appointed a royal commission to “inquire into the conditions of the Métis.” All three commissioners were white Protestants.

In a written submission to the commission, crafted by Brady and Norris, the Métis laid out their analysis of government repression, their people’s struggle for local democracy, and the need for systemic change:

The history of the Métis of Western Canada is really the history of their attempts to defend their constitutional rights against the encroachment of nascent monopoly capital. It is incorrect to place them as bewildered victims who did not know how to protect themselves against the vicious features which marked the penetration of the white man into the Western prairies… We are on much firmer ground when we refer to the glorious tradition of the Métis in fighting for a democratic opening of the West than in representing them as an utterly primitive people incapable of protecting themselves… The Métis problem is basically related to the general problem of the economic and social needs of the Canadian people. The hardship, poverty and suffering of the great majority of the Métis people in a country of great natural resources is forcing to the forefront of our administrational affairs the issue of government measures to cope effectively with the economic and social problems of the people as a whole. It is becoming more evident that such measures as are needed and demanded by the Métis population are impossible within the present framework of provincial administration.

The Ewing Commission took a “pathological” approach to the problem of Métis land and rights. They viewed the social and economic ills in Métis society as a sickness to be treated, not the consequence of the Canadian state’s longtime efforts to deny the Métis people self-determination and political independence. Certain issues they simply ignored. For instance, the Métis leaders wanted to voice their opposition to the registration of trap lines, but “both the premier and the chairman of the committee adamantly refused to hear the Métis leaders.” This led Brady to accuse the government of “duplicity and fraud.”

The commissioners displayed a racist attitude toward the Métis at the commission.

White witnesses, regardless of their positions on questions, were accorded polite and patient treatment at all times. The Métis executive members, particularly Norris, were given rude, impatient and often openly hostile treatment. On several occasions Norris was simply interrupted, his points ignored or disallowed… Throughout Norris’ efforts to answer their questions, he was interrupted and ridiculed.

In one exchange, the commissioners and a clergy member saw fit to argue that “half-breeds” did not deserve education. Bishop Breynat of the Catholic Church stated, “I don’t think [the half-breed] should be given too much education. Too much is bad for some of them… I think just until they are 13 or 14 years old probably.” To which Chairman Ewing replied, “I agree with you there, too much would be a bad thing.” It is clear that the commissioners viewed the Métis as a lesser people, which helps explain why they scorned the idea of Métis self-government.

Ultimately, the Alberta government caved to pressure and created twelve Métis settlements in the province’s north, away from the settler population, under the 1938 Métis Population Betterment Act. After creating the settlements, the government continued to search for ways to undermine their political autonomy, diminishing the size of land grants, claiming certain administrative powers, and controlling funding. Two of the 12 never attracted much settlement; two more, Cold Lake and Wolf Lake, were simply retracted by the province in 1960 to establish the Primrose Lake Air Weapons Range.

In short, “Alberta set up the Métis settlements to owe their jurisdiction, authority and power to the province.” However, the Métis Association had successfully wrested land from the provincial government, which was no small feat. To this day, the settlements in Alberta remain the only Métis land base in Canada.

Norris and Brady’s tireless organizing, and their commitment to a socialism rooted in Canada’s material history and conditions, remain an example to the Canadian left today. All socialists in Canada should look to the struggle of Malcolm Norris and Jim Brady for guidance and inspiration.

Owen Schalk is a writer from rural Manitoba. He is the author of Canada in Afghanistan: A story of military, diplomatic, political and media failure, 2003-2023 and the co-author of Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy with Yves Engler.