Echoes of the Road Allowance

When visiting Back to Batoche Days, July 19, 2025, I stopped at the Batoche National Historic Site Museum. A field of flags gently moving in the wind first caught my eye; one a Canadian flag, another carried the infinity symbol of the Métis Nation. The monument to Louis Riel, a reminder of resistance, vision, and the cost of leadership stood close by. For a moment, I stood still. There is something about this place that asks you to listen. The land speaks. So do the people who return here year after year. 

Inside the museum, I saw Arnolda Dufour Bowes standing beside a weathered wooden door, framed by tall red willows that reached upward like memory itself. At first glance, it looked like nothing more than wood and lace. But standing before it, the air felt different, as if the space itself held breath. “That door is from my father’s old house in Punnichy. It is still standing, and when I was given permission to take it, I knew it had to become part of this story,” Arnolda says. 

The door is the threshold into her exhibition “Apples and Train Tracks.” Inside, the scent of wood and earth mixes with the quiet weight of memory. The work is built from reclaimed pieces of her father’s Road Allowance home, with red willow branches, poetry, and painted canvases. It is a place where personal memory meets collective history. Every board, photograph, brushstroke are part of a living archive of the Road Allowance Métis. 

One side of the gallery holds a narrow wooden walkway. Along the fence posts are photos of Road Allowance families from Erin Ferry, Saskatchewan, each one fixed in place, a marker of belonging. At the far end sits a section of train track. On it, a short film plays, images and sound brought together pulling you into a time when displacement was an everyday reality. The recording tells of the Métis families who lived on Crown land, who were pushed to the edges of towns and farms, and later moved under government programs. 

“This is our history,” Arnolda says. “Told from us, not about us.” In her voice, there is both the gravity of truth and the steadiness of someone who knows that telling it is an act of survival. Arnolda’s sister, Andrea Haughian, created some of the paintings in the exhibit. Her style, abstract realism, carries the texture of lived experience. The collaboration between the sisters is a form of cultural expression, showing how identity is shaped and carried by family as much as through history. 

Her work is not only about the past. It is also about how identity moves forward. In one painting, a father and his young child stand hand in hand at the edge of a long red train. The boy looks upward, his small figure tethered to both the man beside him and the steel that stretches across the canvas. Above them, the prairie sky opens wide, a reminder of both freedom and uncertainty. The painting holds a quiet truth: identity is carried in these intergenerational moments, in the act of holding on even when the world is shifting around you. 

Walking through the exhibit, I thought about how identity is not a single moment but a layering of stories, memories, and relationships. Arnolda’s installation makes that truth physical. As I moved through, I saw the faces, and felt the grain of the wood under my hand. “It is not about getting sympathy, but empathy,” Arnolda told me. 

As I left the gallery, I turned back to look at the door one more time. It stood open, framed by the red willows, an invitation and a reminder. Identity, like that doorway, is something you step through again and again. Each time, you carry a little more of the story with you. 

For me, visiting Arnolda’s exhibition was not just about seeing art. It was about feeling the weight and beauty of a people’s story told in their own voice. It was about understanding that identity is not something fixed on a page or hung on a wall. It is something lived, reclaimed, and shared.