A Girl Called Echo Omnibus

Pemmican Wars
Red River Resistance
Northwest Resistance
Road Allowance Era

Katherena Vermette’s graphic novel, A Girl Called Echo, originally appeared as a series published in four separate volumes between 2017 and 2021. The story of Echo Desjardins takes place on two dimensions of time, contemporary and historical. In “real time”, she’s a Métis teenager living in Winnipeg and trying hard to find her place in her new school while dealing with a challenging home life. Echo’s mom is currently in a treatment centre, she has a disabled younger brother, and Echo finds solace in her attic bedroom, plugged into her iPod, listening to her mom’s playlists. This Omnibus edition covers the years from Echo’s first days at Winnipeg Middle School to the very proud moment of her graduation.

School is often an isolating experience, but her Canadian history class, in which she learns about the events which affected the Métis people, becomes a portal to a time-travelling adventure which takes place in “historical time”. In the opening pages of the first book of the series, Pemmican Wars, it’s 1814, and we see Echo standing on a rock in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley as a thundering herd of bison sweeps down. It’s the first of many such experiences in which she lives through and is witness to a series of critical events in the history of the Métis people. The struggles of the Métis to maintain their freedom from the Canadian government’s colonial rule, the ongoing encroachment of their ancestral lands by settlers, and the survival of their culture, are told in the four volumes which comprise this omnibus edition. Pemmican Wars begins in 1814 and culminates with the 1816 Battle of Seven Oaks.

The second and third volumes, Red River Resistance and Northwest Resistance, detail the settlement of immigrants from Eastern Canada who gradually displace Métis families who have lived on the prairies for generations. The bison which Echo saw at the beginning of Pemmican Wars are all but gone, and the Métis’ traditional way of life is threatened. Louis Riel offers hope to his people, but, at the beginning of the series’ fourth volume, Road Allowance Era, Riel is on trial for his defiance of the Canadian government and insistence on the rights of his people to their ancestral lands.

Throughout the four stories, Echo learns more and more about her own family’s history and the Métis’ active participation in the struggle to remain free people with a distinct culture and a will to survive, despite all odds. She develops a sense of pride in her heritage, an understanding of injustice, and a belief that she and the Métis nation to which she belongs have a future.

In previous issues of CM, detailed commentary on the text and graphics of the four volumes comprising this omnibus edition have been reviewed in detail, and each volume received a “Recommended” rating. However, compiling the four volumes into a single omnibus edition is a wise move, enhancing the flow of the narratives of both Echo’s personal story and the historical events. The omnibus edition also contains several format changes. Each volume concludes with content specifically connected to that volume’s historical focus. For example, Pemmican Wars contains the recipe for pemmican, along with the lyrics to “La Chanson de Granular”, telling of the Battle of Seven Oaks. Red River Resistance concludes with the Métis List of Rights, Northwest Resistance provides a short biographical sketch of Gabriel Dumont (the Métis military leader during that conflict), and the Road Allowance Era presents facsimile illustrations of the scrip which was supposed to allow the Métis a claim to their land. Each volume contains a clear Timeline of the historical events depicted in the story as well as full-page maps of the areas in which the events of each volume took place. This historical content is presented in greater size and clarity than in the individual volumes and enhances the reader’s understanding of where and when events took place.

Two other noteworthy additions are the “Foreword”, authored by Dr. Chantal Fiola, and an essay entitled “Kinscapes and A Girl Called Echo”, written by Dr. Brenda McDougall. Both women are Indigenous academics (Fiola is at the University of Winnipeg and McDougall at the University of Ottawa) with a special interest in the Métis culture and history. Although both offered interesting perspectives on Echo’s story and the nature of Métis identity, I thought that the discourse level of both pieces of writing was at a level which might not be accessible to most adolescent readers of this graphic novel.

At $38.00 for the trade-paper format, the omnibus edition is a more economical purchase for cash-strapped school libraries than purchasing the four individual volumes. As indicated in the reviews of the single-published volumes, A Girl Called Echo Omnibus is a worthwhile acquisition, not only for high school libraries, but also for classroom teachers of Canadian History and Indigenous Studies.