Metis Pioneers Marie Rose Delorme Smith and Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed Haudenosaunee is remarkable as one of is remarkable as one of a very few early North American Indigenous poets and fiction writers public inquiries demonstrating the contributions Metis women made to the building of the Prairie West Doris Jeanne MacKinnon compares the survival strategies of two Metis women born during the fur trade one from the French speaking free trade tradition and one from the English speaking Hudson's Bay Company tradition who settled in southern Alberta as the Canadian West transitioned to a sedentary agricultural and industrial economy