Felice Gladue – Metis Alive

Felice Gladue of Metis ALIVE

Roots: St. Laurent, MB

Now calls home: Beaumont

Felice Gladue is passionate about bringing our Metis history and culture ALIVE through engaging cultural learning experiences, high energy Metis dance workshops and a variety of traditional skills workshops and material art. At Metis Aliv, we offer multi-sensory and interactive Metis learning experiences with hands on exploration of our extensive artifact collection as well as a trapper tent Metis exhibit.

Our family comes from the Metis community of St. Laurent, Manitoba and we are related to the Coutu’s, Lagimodiere’s, Brosseau’s, Lavalle’s and Desmarais’. Our great great grandfather, Pierre Henri Coutu owned a butcher shop in the Red River Settlement (present day Winnipeg) in the 1860s. His wife, Marie Catherine (nee Lagimodiere) was Louis Riel’s first cousin. Riel was a good friend of the family often helping out on the family farm or butcher shop. Our grandparents Hector and Suzanne Coutu spent over 10 years collecting family stories and compiling our family tree as well as writing a book called Lagimodiere and their Descendants. Metis ALIVE honors and continues the work our grandfather Hector Coutu started over 45 years ago.

Metis ALIVE strives to keep the traditional skill of capote making and embroidery ALIVE. We collect high quality vintage wool blankets and repurpose them into capotes. Capotes are the coats our Metis voyageur and trapper ancestors made made from trade wool blankets during the fur trade era. We also create mittens, pouches, leggings, vests and even doll clothes from vintage wool blankets. Each piece is hand stitched and decorated with hand embroidery which is a traditional skill many Metis women practiced in the 1800s and early 1900s to help support their families.

Felice currently lives in Beaumont with her Metis Cree husband and their two children. She has her Bachelor of Education and has taught for over 20 years.