10.59962 9780774865081

A People and a Nation

New Directions in Contemporary
Métis Studies
EDITED BY JENNIFER ADESE

AND CHRIS ANDERSEN
© UBC Press 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior
written permission of the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: A people and a nation : new directions in contemporary Métis studies /
edited by Jennifer Adese and Chris Andersen.
Names: Adese, Jennifer, editor. | Andersen, Chris, editor.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200366971 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200367102 |
ISBN 9780774865067 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780774865081 (PDF) |
ISBN 9780774865098 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCSH: Métis. | LCSH: Métis—History. | LCSH: Métis—
Social conditions. | LCSH: Métis—Social life and customs.
Classification: LCC FC109 .P46 2021 | DDC 305.897/071—dc23
UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing
program of the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund), the
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and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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To Métis graduate students, present and future.
May you continue to carry the stories of our Nation

forward and make our voices heard in spaces that
were for far too long willing to ignore us.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: A New Era of Métis Studies

Scholarship 3
Chris Andersen and Jennifer Adese
1 | Peoplehood and the Nation Form: Core Concepts

for a Critical Métis Studies 18
Chris Andersen
2 | The Power of Peoplehood: Reimagining Metis

Relationships, Research, and Responsibilities 40
Robert L.A. Hancock
3 | The Race Question in Canada and the Politics of

Racial Mixing 67
Daniel Voth
4 | Challenging a Racist Fiction: A Closer Look at

Métis–First Nations Relations 92
Robert Alexander Innes
5 | Restoring the Balance: Métis Women and

Contemporary Nationalist Political Organizing 115
Jennifer Adese
6 | Alcide Morrissette: Oral Histories of a Métis Man on

the Prairies in the Mid-Twentieth Century 146
Jesse Thistle
viii Contents
7 | “We’re Still Here and Métis”: Rewriting the 1885

Resistance in Marilyn Dumont’s The Pemmican
Eaters 170
June Scudeler
8 | Mary and the Métis: Religion as a Site for New Insight

in Métis Studies 188
Paul L. Gareau
9 | Building the Field of Métis Studies: Toward

Transformative and Empowering Métis
Scholarship 213
Adam Gaudry
Contributors 230
Index 233
Acknowledgments
At the 2015 annual gathering of the Native American and Indig-

enous Studies Association (NAISA) held in Washington, D.C.,
the co-editors and a number of the authors in this volume came
together with other scholars working in Métis Studies for a pre-
conference gathering. The idea for this book grew out of that
meeting, and the editors would like to acknowledge the early
advice of the attendees, in particular Adam Gaudry, Brenda Mac-
dougall, and Nicole St-Onge. We would also like to extend our
gratitude to the staff and faculty of the Department of Sociology at
the University of Toronto Mississauga; the School of Indigenous
and Canadian Studies at Carleton University; and the Faculty of
Native Studies at the University of Alberta. Jennifer would spe-
cifically like to acknowledge Anna Korteweg, Robin Gray, Maria
Hupfield, Jerry Flores, Peter Thompson, Pauline Rankin, Peter
Hodgins, and Kahente Horn-Miller; Chris would like to acknowl-
edge the professional support of Lana Sinclair, Reg Cardinal, Bev-
erly Findlay, Janet Delorme, Freda Cardinal, and Jordan Cook.
We are also indebted to the enduring support of our families and
friends. Jennifer wishes to acknowledge the supportive contributions
and caretaking of Sampson Adese, Lois Seib, Malissa Phung, Ger-
aldine King, Claudette Morin Cardinal, Al Lenny, and early child-
hood educators J.A., Z.C., and F.L. Chris is grateful for the continued
support of Agnieszka Andersen. We would also like to acknowl-
edge the authors who have contributed chapters for the book.
ix
x Acknowledgments
We have greatly appreciated reading your thoughtful and engag-

ing chapters and working with you over the past few years. And we
would like to extend our deep appreciation to Darcy Cullen and
the team at UBC Press, who have proven themselves a diligent,
committed, and responsive editorial team. Many thanks.
Introduction: A New Era of
Métis Studies Scholarship
Chris Andersen and Jennifer Adese
At one time, research on Métis issues was confined mostly to the

narratives of non-Indigenous historians, but as more Métis schol-
ars enter the field and as Métis communities increasingly define
research priorities, Métis studies has taken a distinctive and posi-
tive turn toward research by and for the Métis people.1 This intel-
lectual turn has been spurred by a growth in the number of Métis
scholars over the past two decades, as evidenced by this volume,
which is predominantly by Métis authors – the first of its kind. It
has also been influenced by an explosion in the Métis population
between 1996 and 2006, which has caused the federal, provincial,
and municipal governments to look to Métis communities with
renewed interest. Alongside these intellectual and policy shifts,
several important Métis court cases – including the Powley rul-
ing (2003), Manitoba Métis Federation v Canada (2013), and Daniels
v Canada (2016) – have wound their way through the Canadian
legal system, ending in Supreme Court of Canada rulings that
have altered the political landscape of Canada–Métis relations.
At a more foundational level, however, these developments were
instrumental in raising the public profile of – along with debates
about – Métis issues, particularly the complexities of Métis
identity.
Debates over Métis identity typically assume a binary form. On
the one side are peoplehood-based arguments that look to the
core of Métis peoplehood (to the collective culture, history, and
politics practised by Métis communities across the Métis Nation’s
3
4 Chris Andersen and Jennifer Adese
prairie homeland). On the other side, are more racialized argu-

ments that take many historical instances of racial mixing in much
of what is now called the United States and Canada and conflate
them with historical and contemporary Métis communities, who
understood themselves as bounded political communities defined
not merely by mixedness. Followers of this view often accuse pro-
ponents of peoplehood-based arguments of exclusion and lateral
violence or internal colonialism. Lost in these relatively hardened
positions are sustained discussions of the actual social and politi-
cal contexts within which the Métis people and their communi-
ties have lived in the past and live in today. A historically rooted
understanding of Métis peoplehood, we argue, is directly relevant
to thinking about Métis identity in ways that respect Métis self-
determination and political power (though we note that the con-
tinued dominance of discourses around “mixedness” complicate
the ability to remove them completely from academic debate, even
one as peoplehood-based as is this one).
Métis Studies: A Portrait of a Field and Its Genealogy
Métis studies has seen rapid transformation over the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, and through its evolution it has moved from
a historically focused topic area to a more diverse field, expanding
broadly to encompass a greater range of topics of interest to Métis
scholars and communities. Nonetheless, Métis studies as a schol-
arly field of inquiry has been afflicted by the nagging presence of
racialization throughout its genealogy. Such scholarship, whether
in single-author monographs or in edited collections, has largely
taken for granted the link between Métis identity and mixed-
ancestry origins. The majority of previous writings about Métis
have reflected an inability to reconcile their investment in racial-
ized discourses of mixed-racedness with Métis people’s existence
as a distinct Indigenous People. Instead, the works enclosed here
utilize a peoplehood-based analysis of Métis issues, as reflected
in the methods and approaches that scholars in this volume have
adopted.
Introduction 5
The field of Métis studies evolved out of earlier scholarship on

Métis issues undertaken primarily by historians, and later ethno-
historians, rooted in even earlier scholarly efforts that took for
granted mixed-raced identity as the basis of Métis experience.
This scholarship explored issues related to what “Métis” meant
and who the Métis people are in a manner similar to more recent
scholarly works. This early work was generally informed exclu-
sively by analysis of the Subarctic fur trade and the “opening
up” of the Canadian west through the so-called Riel Rebellion in
1869–70 and the North-West Rebellion in 1885. Throughout much
of the twentieth century, Métis issues were investigated utilizing
conventional historiographical methodologies, focused in particu-
lar on the role of the Métis leader Louis Riel, who was hanged by
the Canadian state in 1885 for his role as leader of the Northwest
Resistance. These histories were undertaken in the tradition of the
“great man of history” school, so Riel’s political movements and
life experiences were the lens through which many came to under-
stand Métis people more broadly.
During the field’s initial development, little scholarship on Métis
issues was synergistic but instead consisted of fairly isolated exam-
inations that have since come to be regarded as classics (e.g., Mor-
ton [1973], Stanley [1936/1992], Giraud [1945/1986]). Perhaps the
most extensive treatment of the Métis was that of French historian
Marcel Giraud, whose monumental two-volume, 2,000-page-plus
The Métis of Western Canada stood as the historiographical standard
on the origins, flourishing, and eventual (political) demise of the
Métis. In the 1970s and early 1980s, however, four PhD theses were
completed that fundamentally altered the methodologies and con-
clusions through which Métis studies had until then been exam-
ined. Sylvia Van Kirk (1983), Jennifer Brown (1980), Jacqueline
Peterson (1981), and John Foster (1973) each explored the origins
and rise of Métis communities in the Upper Great Lakes and on the
Northern Plains, their relationship to the fur trade, and the gender
relations therein. These advancements in the study of the Métis
people came together in 1985 in the first edited collection on Métis
studies, coedited by Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer Brown and
titled The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America.
This volume was groundbreaking in that it brought together for
the first time many of the top scholars investigating Métis issues.
It documented, in great detail and with lasting sophistication, a
number of issues pertaining to the origins of the Métis, includ-
ing the internal complexity of the Red River locale (i.e. language,
marriage patterns, religious differences, material culture, etc.),
their diasporas, and other issues that continue to shape the way
that scholars talk about the Métis today.
Despite various debates regarding Canadian obligations to
the Métis (culminating in a classic debate between Tom Flana-
gan [1991] and Doug Sprague [1988] on whether the Métis left
Red River because of economic self-interest or were forced out
by colonial intrusion) and continued analyses of Métis economic
dynamics (Tough 1996; Ens 1996), the most in-depth examination
of Métis issues in the 1990s is likely the 1996 Royal Commission on
Aboriginal Peoples. Among its various emphases, the commission
formalized and officially sanctioned the notion of “other Métis,”
meaning those communities who have recently started self-
identifying as Métis based, often, on the mixed ancestry of their
communities. The deep racialization of the logics that undergird
these self-identifications continue to play themselves out in more
recent scholarship.
In recent years, a number of anthologies have been published
pertaining to Métis issues, geographies, and identities. In 2007,
Ute Lischke and David T. McNab coedited The Long Journey of a
Forgotten People: Métis Identities and Family Histories, which made
use of the common trope, coined by Métis political leader Harry
Daniels in the 1970s, about the Métis being a forgotten people. The
book includes scholarship on so-called eastern Canadian Métis
communities, locates early Métis origins in British military per-
sonnel and their mixed-blood descendants, explores legal dynam-
ics in the production of Métis identity, and features one especially
poignant autobiographical account of Métis identity. What is per-
haps most interesting is the volume’s use of a racialized notion of
the Métis, based on a Métis-as-mixed discourse, which diminishes
Introduction 7
the historical presence of the Métis people of the Northern Plains.

It engages in fairly direct historical revisionism – through which
historical individuals, communities, and activities are rendered
Métis by virtue of their supposed “mixedness” – rather than rec-
ognizing the central importance of the notion of connection to a
historically self-ascribing Métis community (Lischke and McNab
2007).
In 2012, Nicole St-Onge, Carolyn Podruchny, and Brenda Mac-
dougall coedited Contours of a People: Métis Family, Mobility, and His-
tory. This comprehensive volume, the heir apparent to Peterson and
Brown’s (1985) The New Peoples, is a comprehensive account of his-
torical Métis ontologies, particularly as they related to the Métis’
fundamental mobility and the manner in which this fact of historical
mobility fails to square with how the Canadian state, then and now,
understands appropriate (and legal) land use and occupancy by the
Métis. The collection is geographically expansive in scope, ranging
from the Great Lakes to British Columbia to the upper regions of the
United States. This largely historical volume must be appreciated for
the sophistication of its theorizing, the creativity and expansiveness
of its empirical evidence, and the rigour of its methodologies. How-
ever, while Contours represents a great leap forward in terms of how
we theorize the historical Métis community and Nation, many of its
chapters remain in the clutches of racialization, incorporating broad
ranges of mixed communities who did not understand themselves
as “Métis” until quite recently, which clouds the analyses of several
otherwise fine studies (St-Onge, Podruchny, and Macdougall 2012).
In 2013, Christopher Adams, Gregg Dahl, and Ian Peach coed-
ited Métis in Canada: History, Identity, Law and Politics. This edited
collection brought together leading scholars in a number of
related fields of research – including history, anthropology, politi-
cal science, sociology, and Aboriginal rights law – to explore in a
multidisciplinary fashion the various elements through which the
idea of Métis identity has been constructed in the academy and
the policy field. The editors make the point that recent trends in
legal jurisprudence (particularly the celebrated Supreme Court of
Canada Powley decision) have reconfigured how we think about
Métis identity in Canada. With several exceptions, however, the

edited collection continues to rely on an explicit Métis-as-mixed
discourse, even though it undertakes a more sophisticated analysis
of the Métis Nation’s own strategic use of racialized discourses
(Adams, Dahl, and Peach 2013).
Most recently, the field of Métis studies has undergone an
explicit bifurcation in which, on the one hand, an increasing num-
ber of individuals, organizations, and communities in eastern
Canada (particularly in Quebec and the Maritimes) are beginning
to make ahistorical claims to Métis identity (See Andersen 2010;
Leroux and Gaudry 2017; Leroux 2018). Such claims are solidly
rooted in racialized discourses. Several scholars affiliated with
these movements have begun to publish scholarship in support of
these claims as well relying heavily on racialized discourses. On the
other hand, and partly in reaction, Métis scholars have begun to
write according to a more explicitly nationalistic position but also
in an effort to elucidate precisely what it is that makes the Métis a
distinct Indigenous People. While this bifurcation has so far mostly
taken place in the context of online media (Facebook and Twitter
debates as well as various blogs and so on), it is beginning to spill
over into academic scholarship (see, for example, Bouchard, Fox-
curran, and Malette 2016). It is within this latest context that we
see this volume making its most lasting contribution, as a timely
intervention during a developing, historically important debate.
The Métis People, in the Singular
In the spirit of previous edited volumes, we see the scope of this

volume as geographically, theoretically, methodologically, and
empirically expansive. However, we would nonetheless like to
take the opportunity here to set out a trajectory for what we mean
by Métis peoplehood historically and today, including Métis gen-
esis on the Northern Plains, the rise of Métis economic and politi-
cal power, the growth of Red River as a metropolis, and the Métis
people’s eventual political marginalization following the North-
west Resistance in 1885. In contrast to the previously mentioned
Introduction 9
edited collections, this volume supports the idea of a single Métis

people, a position that has support in Canadian constitutional law
as well as international law as it applies to Indigenous Peoples (see
Andersen 2014; Chartrand and Giokas 2002).
What does it mean to position the Métis as a Nation and as a
people? Nations are often positioned as a form of political con-
sciousness grounded in (perceptions of) common roots and terri-
tory (Anderson 1991), and their associated nationalism embodies
the cultural and political symbols, discourses, traditions, and myths
that anchor and (re)produce these perceptions of origins and com-
monality (see Andersen 2008). Theorists of nationalism tend to link
it to the growth of modernity and its associated industrialization
and, as Chris Andersen notes in this volume, tend to position it
within western and central European processes of modern liberal
state building and legitimation in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries (see Anderson 1991; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm
1990). Though we separate the term geographically from its typical
European positioning, “nation” is used in this volume as a form of
political consciousness rooted in an emphasis on common origins.
In contrast, we use “peoplehood” (in juxtaposition to the more
biologically rooted discourses around mixedness) to emphasize
the broad relations of Indigenous diplomacy that tied together
Indigenous collectivities in storied relationships of time and
place. Explained further by Andersen in his chapter on people-
hood, suffice it to say here that we use “peoplehood” not only to
refer to “real” sets of social relations that existed (and still exist)
but also to better understand how Indigenous collectivities inter-
acted with one another and with the encroaching colonial powers.
This is an important point, since we are not suggesting that other
concepts (such as biological notions of race that sit at the root of
Métis-as-mixed discourses) cannot conceivably be used to analyze
these social relations. Instead, our point is that such concepts do
not reflect the manner in which people(s) understood themselves
historically, nor do they provide compelling analyses today.
It is in this analytical context that we position the Métis as an
Indigenous People who rose to prominence on the Northern Plains
of what is now western Canada and the northern United States

at the beginning of the nineteenth century. One of many Indig-
enous Peoples with postcontact origins, the Métis people were part
of the Neyihaw Pwat (the Iron Alliance) in partnership with the
Saulteaux, the Cree, and the Assiniboine (Innes 2013, 43–69). Like
other alliances of this time and place, the members of the Neyihaw
Pwat relied on one another for economic, political, and military
support, and the different bands intermarried heavily. This broad
alliance marked Indigenous life on the Northern Plains from the
eighteenth century onward.
The Métis became a powerful force on the Northern Plains by
the middle part of the nineteenth century. Resisting, first, the Hud-
son’s Bay Company (HBC) and, later, the Canadian state, the
Métis pushed back against the HBC’s presumed control of the
region and then led two armed resistances against the Canadian
state, prevailing in the first one in 1869–70 and suffering military
and political defeat in the second, in 1885. We thus use the term
“Métis,” in the context of this book, in association with key events,
leaders, geographical territories, economies, land tenures, artistic
styles, languages, and perhaps most importantly, kinship connec-
tions and diplomatic relations with other Indigenous Peoples (see
Peterson and Brown 1985; Peterson 1987; Sprague 1988; St-Onge,
Podruchny, and Macdougall 2012 for discussions of this history).
Bearing this in mind, we likewise position the descendants of the
Métis Nation as being represented (though imperfectly, to be sure)
through the combined efforts of the Métis National Council and its
provincially based affiliates in British Columbia (the Métis Nation
of British Columbia), Alberta (the Métis Nation of Alberta), Sas-
katchewan (Métis Nation–Saskatchewan), Manitoba (Manitoba
Métis Federation), and, until recently, Ontario (Métis Nation of
Ontario). These provincial affiliates were born from the sustained
effort of the Métis, throughout the twentieth century, to ensure
that the Métis people and concerns were not forgotten in the mael-
strom that is Canada’s political landscape. In the latter decades of
the twentieth century, the council and its members continued to
actively resist the erasure of the Métis from the political landscape
Introduction 11
by engaging in various nation-to-nation policy relationships with

municipal, provincial, and federal levels of government (Sawchuk
1998; Weinstein 2007; Troupe 2009; Adese 2016).
Thus, the chapters here explore the intricacies of the Métis peo-
ple and our communities, both recognizing and supporting the
existence of Métis peoplehood. These multidisciplinary contribu-
tions additionally explore the current complexity of Métis identity
in relation to ongoing North American settler colonialism while
at the same time affirming the continuity of a collective Métis
peoplehood. This book is unique in that it focuses specifically
on issues relating to Métis peoplehood in the contemporary era.
It places emphasis on the necessary historical and contemporary
connection to pre-colonial and pre-state Métis collectives. By cen-
tring this volume on the collective belongings that produce Métis
peoplehood, these works individually assert that the Métis belong
to a historically bounded and identifiable Indigenous People – the
Métis Nation – whose ongoing existence must be respected as the
Métis narrate our history and our contemporary existence.
Embracing a diffuse and complex nationalist Métis narrative,
the works in this volume explore the differing experiences of
Métis communities, identifying the common threads that connect
the Métis people through time and space and respecting the past
and present limits that the Métis have placed on their communi-
ties. The contributors represent many disciplinary traditions and
explore Métis peoplehood through diverse disciplinary method-
ologies. By examining these elements of Métis sociality, they allow
for a more sophisticated understanding of the Métis people as an
Indigenous People who have long understood ourselves this way.
The contributors forge a new path for thinking ethically about
the Métis people. The chapters that follow act as a series of sign-
posts that signal major changes in the field of Métis studies. The
authors are young and early career scholars whose cutting-edge
work is transforming common (mis)conceptions of the Métis people.
With diverse disciplinary training, these Métis intellectuals map the
many layers of the change facing the Métis people as we increasingly
enter into mainstream political discourse. The chapters themselves
introduce a deeper complexity to the contours of the conception of

Métis peoplehood. They emphasize both the broad commonalities
of Métis experiences rooted in the contemporary tendrils of Métis
peoplehood and the specific histories that productively complicate
and build on Métis peoplehood.
The Chapters
In Chapter 1, Chris Andersen challenges Holm et al.’s (2003)

replacement of nationhood with peoplehood in the context of
their peoplehood matrix and argues instead that the two concepts
are in fact analytical mirror images of each other, insofar as peo-
plehood situates external relations between peoples while nation-
hood remains conceptually useful for evaluating internal features
of a people. Together, Andersen argues, these paired concepts pro-
vide great analytical sophistication for the growing field of Indige-
nous studies, and his chapter ends by setting out a conceptual lens
for thinking about Métis identity in the context of Métis people-
hood. In Chapter 2, Robert Hancock applies Robert K. Thomas’s
peoplehood perspective to Métis politics and political organiza-
tions. By outlining the possibilities of adopting a peoplehood-
based model of Métis politics, rather than a more typical approach
based on Western models of nationalism, Hancock suggests the
Métis can escape the trap of state recognition in favour of col-
lective self-identification in Indigenous contexts. Using the con-
cepts of wahkohtowin (being a good relative) and niwahkomakanak
([all] my relations), he demonstrates that a Métis political identity
predicated on the peoplehood model best reflects the profoundly
relational character of Métis identity and its roots in the kinship
networks of the Northern Plains.
In Chapter 3, Daniel Voth explores how the positioning of the
Métis people as mixed effectively frames the Métis people as less
threatening to the Canadian settler political order; in doing so,
such a practice politically disempowers the Métis people. The
chapter carefully traces these effects and then concludes by offer-
ing emerging alternatives for conceptualizing Métis politics. He
Introduction 13
suggests that analyzing racial mixing as a strategic political tool

empowers some while disempowering others. Moving past this,
scholars can better appreciate the nuanced way racial mixing man-
ifests within both the theory and practice of politics in Canada to
undermine Métis and other Indigenous peoplehoods in service of
the settler state.
While Voth discusses the way that discourses of racial mixing
undermine the Métis people and politics, in Chapter 4, Robert
Innes examines the close social and political alliances between the
Métis and other prairie Indigenous Peoples, a reality that is evi-
dence not only of Métis peoplehood but also of its interrelatedness
with other political traditions. He suggests that an examination
of Métis–First Nations relations demonstrates that the empha-
sis placed on the supposed racial difference of the Métis people
from First Nations ignores the fact that these groups shared many
cultural characteristics and often lived together in multinational
bands and hunting brigades. Innes argues that while the Métis,
Plains Cree, Saulteaux, and Assiniboine were culturally different
from one another, they were not as culturally distinct as existing
scholarship makes them out to be.
Jennifer Adese, in Chapter 5, contends that in spite of their
notable contributions to the landscape of Métis nationalist politi-
cal organizing, Métis women have been largely erased from pre-
eminent records of Métis political history. This erasure is linked
to a long history of sexism that, as a key technique of coloniza-
tion, has contributed to the dispossession of Métis women. Adese
challenges the erasure of Métis women from, in particular, John
Weinstein’s 2007 account of Métis political history, Quiet Revolu-
tion West: The Rebirth of Métis Nationalism. While Weinstein’s work is
indeed comprehensive, Adese argues, it is centred on the accom-
plishments of Métis men in politics, paying minimal attention to
Métis women’s position within the Métis Nation and thus Métis
women’s struggle within nationalist political organizing through-
out the twentieth century. Adese argues that rather than aban-
doning Métis nationalism, Métis women have worked to create
a more inclusive vision of contemporary Métis nationhood that
confronts colonization’s gendered fracturing of the Métis Nation

and its attending debasement of Métis women.
In Chapter 6, Jesse Thistle’s account of several defining moments
of one Métis man’s life in Saskatchewan echoes the claims made
by Hancock in his chapter and moves away from Adese’s focus on
political history to delve into Métis microhistories. Through the
presentation of three microhistories contained in stories told to
him by Alcide Morrissette, which provide important oral history
insights into Métis experiences in the twentieth century, Thistle
offers a poignant analysis of the historical context that gave rise
to the stories. Utilizing this provocative research methodology,
Thistle presents intimate Métis experiences while also exploring
the macro sociocultural impacts on Métis microhistory.
In a related vein, in Chapter 7, June Scudeler addresses other
forms of Métis storying by applying a Métis peoplehood, nation-
centred reading practice to Métis poet Marilyn Dumont’s 2015
book The Pemmican Eaters. Here, Scudeler rejects the lens of
hybridity and instead uses Métis ways of knowing to consider
how Dumont uses the poetic medium to provide a Métis-centred
account of the Northwest Resistance in 1885. Her chapter reposi-
tions Métis writers and scholars as creators of knowledge rather
than as objects of study and, in doing so, celebrates Métis literary
contributions to Métis peoplehood.
In Chapter 8, Paul Gareau explores how scholars have long por-
trayed the Métis as ambivalent about their Catholic identities. His
chapter explains how an uncritical understanding of religion has
led to a misrepresentation of Métis experiences and worldviews.
By soliciting insight from religious studies to help redefine the cat-
egory of religion, Gareau outlines a theoretical framework to exam-
ine the flexibility of Catholic popular devotion, specifically through
the Virgin Mary, and in the process reveals that the Métis are doing
religion in ways that are decidedly not ambivalent but rather reflect
the sovereignty and self-determination of Métis religion.
Adam Gaudry’s concluding chapter situates Métis studies
scholarship in the wider landscape of Indigenous studies. Gaudry
argues that Métis studies scholarship must develop its own people-
specific history that is legally and politically distinct from most of
Introduction 15
the other Indigenous Nations. While the Métis have much in com-
mon with other Indigenous Peoples historically and politically,
they are subject to different Canadian laws and limitations than
First Nations or Inuit, so Métis-specific teaching and research is
necessary. Gaudry concludes by proposing a number of recom-
mendations to allow for the growth of a self-conscious field of
Métis studies, one that collectively nurtures the development of
Métis-focused scholarship.
This book is the first of its kind, anchored as it is in a com-
plicated, robust discussion of Métis peoplehood and authored
by Métis scholars. A focus on Indigenous peoplehood not only
extends the usual discussions of peoplehood beyond nation state-
hood) – it pushes back against deeply racialized contours within
the conceptual sediment of Métis studies. We believe that such
arguments, often (though not always) well intended, mischarac-
terize the character of Métis sociality, historically and today. They
do more than that, though: we think that they more fundamen-
tally mischaracterize the meanings, contours, and boundaries of
indigeneity and Indigenous sociality entirely (since the logics that
racialize the meaning of “Métis” similarly racialize our under-
standings of all Indigenous Peoples and all indigeneity). More-
over, the wide variety of disciplinary traditions from which our
authors write means that readers are being offered a broad multi-
disciplinary lens through which to view the complexity of histori-
cal and contemporary Métis peoplehood. Together, these chapters
make a distinctive contribution to our understanding of the Métis
people in ways that allow us to face many of our contemporary
challenges in a rapidly changing social and political landscape.
Note
1 Throughout this volume, readers will find some variation with respect to
the spelling of “Métis” as either accented or unaccented. We, the
co-editors, have chosen to use “Métis” with an accent, which is an
increasingly common practice even among Anglophones; other authors
opt to use “Metis” to avoid over-emphasizing Frenchness. For more on
this question see Chris Andersen (2014) and Brenda MacDougall (2012).
References
Adams, Christopher, Gregg Dahl, and Ian Peach. 2013. Métis in Canada:
History, Identity, Law and Politics. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.
Adese, Jennifer. 2016. “A Tale of Two Constitutions: Métis Nationhood
and Section 35(2)’s Impact on Interpretations of Daniels.” TOPIA: Cana-
dian Journal of Cultural Studies 36: 7–19.
Andersen, Chris. 2010. “Mixed Ancestry or Métis?” In Indigenous Identity
and Resistance: Researching the Diversity of Knowledge, edited by Brendan
Hokowhitu, Nathalie Kermoal, Chris Andersen, Anna Petersen, Michael
Reilly, Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez, and Poia Rewi, 23–36. Dunedin, NZ:
University of Otago Press.
–. 2008. “From Nation to Population: The Racialization of ‘Métis’ in the
Canadian Census.” Nations and Nationalism 14(2): 347–68.
–. 2014. “Métis”: Race, Recognition, and the Struggle for Indigenous Peoplehood.
Vancouver: UBC Press.
Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Bouchard, Michel, Robert Foxcurran, and Sébastien Malette. 2016. Songs
upon the Rivers: The Buried History of the French-Speaking Canadiens and
Métis from the Great Lakes and the Mississippi across to the Pacific. Montreal:
Baraka Books.
Brown, Jennifer. 1980. Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in
Indian Country. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Chartrand, Paul, and John Giokas. 2002. “Defining ‘the Métis People’:
The Hard Case of Canadian Aboriginal Law.” In Who Are Canada’s Aborig-
inal Peoples? Recognition, Definition, and Jurisdiction, edited by Paul Char-
trand, 268–304. Saskatoon: Purich.
Ens, Gerhard. 1996. Homeland to Hinterland: The Changing Worlds of the
Red River Metis in the Nineteenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.
Flanagan, Thomas. 1991. Metis Lands in Manitoba. Calgary: University of
Calgary Press.
Foster, John. 1973. The Country-born in the Red River Settlement, 1820–1850.
PhD diss., University of Alberta.
Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press.
Giraud, Marcel. 1986 [1945]. Metis of the Canadian West, vols. 1 and 2.
Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme,
Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Introduction 17
Innes, Robert. 2013. Elder Brother and the Law of the People: Contemporary Kin-
ship and Cowessess First Nation. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
Leroux, Darryl. 2018. “‘We’ve Been Here for 2,000 Years’: White Settlers,
Native American DNA and the Phenomenon of Indigenization.” Social
Studies of Science 48(1): 80–100.
Leroux, Darryl, and Adam Gaudry. 2017. “White Settler Revisionism and
Making Métis Everywhere: The Evocation of Métissage in Quebec and
Nova Scotia.” Canadian Ethnic Studies 3(1): 116–42.
Lischke, Ute, and David McNab, eds. 2007. The Long Journey of a Forgotten
People: Métis Identities and Family Histories. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press.
Morton, Arthur Silver. 1973. A History of the Canadian West to 1870–71. 2nd
ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Peterson, Jacqueline. 1987. “Gathering at the River: The Métis Peopling
of the Northern Plains.” In The Fur Trade in North Dakota, edited by
V. Heidenreich, 47–70. Bismark: State Historical Society of North Dakota.
–. 1981. The People In-Between: Indian-White Marriage and the Genesis of Métis
Society and Culture in the Great Lakes Region, 1680–1830. PhD diss., Univer-
sity of Illinois at Chicago.
Peterson, Jacqueline, and Jennifer S.H. Brown, eds. 1985. The New Peoples:
Being and Becoming Métis in North America. Winnipeg: University of Mani-
toba Press.
Sawchuk, J. 1998. Métis Politics in Western Canada: The Dynamics of Native
Pressure Groups. Saskatoon: Purich.
Sprague, Doug. 1988. Canada and the Métis, 1869–1885. Waterloo, ON: Wil-
frid Laurier Press.
Stanley, George. 1992 [1936]. The Birth of Western Canada: A History of the
Riel Rebellions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
St-Onge, Nicole, Carolyn Podruchny, and Brenda Macdougall, eds. 2012.
Contours of a People: Métis Family, Mobility, and History. Oklahoma: Uni-
versity of Oklahoma Press.
Tough, Frank. 1996. “As Their Natural Resources Fail”: Native Peoples and the
Economic History of Northern Manitoba, 1870–1930. Vancouver: UBC Press.
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1870. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Weinstein, John. 2007. Quiet Revolution West: The Rebirth of Metis National-
ism. Markham, ON: Fifth House.
1
Peoplehood and the Nation
Form: Core Concepts for a
Critical Métis Studies
Chris Andersen
Over the past four decades, Métis studies has continued to unfold
as a field, and in the last decade especially its scholars have sought
out fresh areas of research, employed new analytical lenses, and have
built theoretical and methodological bridges with a wider array of
longer established academic disciplines. As part of this evolution,
a progressive series of new core concepts has foregrounded our
seemingly endless attempts to establish Métis studies’ legitimacy
as an academic field. During this evolution, while Métis studies
scholars have often employed more bird’s-eye-view concepts such
as peoplehood and nationhood, they have tended to conflate them
in analytically one-dimensional ways. This tendency to conflate has
proceeded largely apace with the broader field of Indigenous stud-
ies, which Métis studies is partly embedded in and allied with.
In this broader context, one strand of theorizing peoplehood
and nationhood has resisted their conflation. Tom Holm, Diane
Pearson, and Ben Chavis (2003) have argued, for example, that
the idea of nationhood is too encumbered with the freight of
modern teleology and the hierarchically centralizing tendencies of
modern state building to offer a useful framework for understand-
ing Indigenous sovereignty. The authors instead present a people-
hood matrix as a viable alternative to nationhood. Keying in on
their intriguing argument, this chapter is organized around the
idea that an important omission lies at the heart of this matrix, the
revelation of which will prove useful for Métis studies scholars as
the field of Métis studies continues to grow and unfold. Namely,
18
Peoplehood and the Nation Form 19
by unnecessarily dismissing the analytical utility of nationhood,

Holm and colleagues fail to appreciate the explanatory potential
of analytically pairing it with peoplehood. Given the nascent but
growing character of the field of Métis studies, this is perhaps a
particularly important distinction to make (more on this below).
In the context of the need for analytical clarity, this chapter
thus argues that far from existing in juxtaposition, the concepts
of nationhood and peoplehood represent mirror images of the
social relations they analyze: nationhood may (and as far as the
nationalism literature goes has overwhelmingly tended to) focus
on how we imagine ourselves internally, while peoplehood ana-
lytically encourages the exploration of our external interrelation-
ships. These two concepts gain their fullest explanatory potential
when used in tandem. I argue, in fact, that together they possess
great potential as a core analytic framework for Métis studies.1
The chapter is divided into four parts and a conclusion. Part one
undertakes a close reading of Holm and colleagues’ original formu-
lation of the peoplehood matrix, emphasizing its relationship to
sovereignty and its emphasis on the distinctiveness of Indigenous
sociality. Part 2 then explores the authors’ brief discussion of Indig-
enous nationhood. Expanding on it (and pointing out a contra-
diction that sits at the core of their argument), I demonstrate how
Indigenous nationhood can be retheorized in a manner that renders
it essential to peoplehood, though not as they constructed it. Here,
I position it as a crucial internal manifestation. Then, Part 3 presents
a similarly retheorized account of the “Holm model,” positioning
peoplehood as an external/analytical manifestation of nationhood
(rather than as a necessary alternative to it). Finally, I situate Indige-
nous peoplehood’s potential for thinking about historical and Métis
sociality and for shaping the future directions of Métis studies.
Part 1: The Peoplehood Matrix
The peoplehood matrix draws on the insights of Cherokee scholar

Robert K. Thomas’s (1966–67) work on group identity. Holm
and colleagues (2003, 15) suggest that their model can serve as
20 Chris Andersen
a core concept in Indigenous studies in that, to a greater degree

than other concepts such as race, ethnicity, or even nationhood, it
“reflects a much more accurate picture of the ways in which Native
Americans act, react, pass along knowledge, and connect with the
ordinary as well as the supernatural worlds.” Situated in these
larger aspirations, the authors emphasize four equal and interact-
ing elements: language, sacred history, place and territory, and
ceremonial cycles.2 In addition to the space they spend in explain-
ing the concepts themselves, they stress the importance of avoid-
ing analysis of any one of these elements in isolation – their overall
relationship is one of relationality and co-constitution.
For the purposes here (for reasons I’ll describe further, below),
there is no need to spend a lot of time detailing the principles
inherent in each of the elements, except to suggest that each is used
to differentiate Indigenous peoplehood from “Western” modes of
thinking, living, and relating (to other human beings, to other-
than-human beings, and to nature more broadly) and to differen-
tiate peoplehood from concepts used to describe these aspects of
indigeneity. In Part 3, I suggest the need for more specificity about
the historical eras from which peoplehood principles emanate and
why we need to pair peoplehood with nationhood (rather than
dismissing the latter). This specificity and differentiation also per-
mits a more expansive discussion of what separates the two con-
cepts. For now, however, my focus is exploring what they suggest
is the peoplehood model’s utility to Indigenous studies.
In addition to its utility as an ethnological tool, Holm and col-
leagues (2003, 15) position the peoplehood matrix in explicit rela-
tionship to Indigenous sovereignty and, by obvious extension, as
a critique of non-Indigenous claims to sovereignty. Exploring the
Western “evolutionary ladder” of human organization – from band
to tribe to chiefdom to state – they demonstrate that the hierarchi-
cal thinking of these and related modes of relating to the world
has visited devastating impacts on Indigenous collectivities that
fail to organize our collective selves according to such modalities.
As one example, they trace the colonial deployment of policies
used to deny the ownership and rights of Indigenous territories, in
particular the juridical diminishment of “Indian treaties,” which

set them apart from treaties between apparently more “legitimate”
states (Holm, Pearson, and Chavis 2003, 16).
Finally, the authors argue that the value of the peoplehood
matrix stems in part from its ability to account for and reflect
Indigenous knowledge and philosophies, in particular our rela-
tionality – “between human beings, animals, plants, societies, the
cosmos, the spirit world, and the function of other natural, even
catastrophic, occurrences” (Holm, Pearson, and Chavis 2003, 18).
Indigenous peoplehood, they explain, allows us to sustain such
relationships in the face of both explicit and implicit attempts
by colonial authority to erase them. Seeking to cement its utility,
they emphasize the peoplehood matrix’s possible application to
various issues pertaining to Indigenous social relations, including
literature, policy studies, linguistic studies, political participation,
economic activities, and land use.
Since its inception, the peoplehood matrix has enjoyed a broad
use in the critical engagement of Indigenous issues. Its logic has
been used to underpin or justify such objects and fields of study as
treaties (Contreras 2008), Anishininaabeg studies (Pitawanakwat
2018), identity (Hannel 2015), self-determination (Jobin 2013) and
Indigenous resiliency (Cushman 2011; Holm 2009), rhetorical sov-
ereignty, and Indigenous literature more generally (Stratton and
Washburn 2008), and to disassociate western from Indigenous
nationalism (Justice 2006; Martin 2012). Similarly, we might eas-
ily understand the power of a peoplehood-type matrix to explore
the complex (and complicated!) contours of Métis sociality, con-
temporarily and historically – that is, the broadening range of
theoretical, methodological, and empirical contexts that are
increasingly being drawn on to make sense of this sociality and to
push back against the increasingly racialized discussions that have
attempted to discursively grip these historical relations.
The peoplehood matrix thus represents an important interven-
tion because, in essence, the authors are doing no less than creat-
ing an alternative language of power that sits in direct tension
with many of the hierarchical assumptions encoded into the fabric
22 Chris Andersen
of terms such as “race” and “nationhood.” More to the point, they

argue – convincingly – that Indigenous peoplehood was some-
thing well understood by colonial powers, since their colonial
projects were and remain specifically modelled on its denial, on
the “attempt to strip from indigenous groups each of the four
aspects of peoplehood through the means of territorial dispos-
session, assimilation, religious conversion, or outright extermina-
tion” (Holm, Pearson, and Chavis 2003, 17).
Convincing though it is, however, the analytical power of their
argument is impoverished by its dismissal of Indigenous nation-
hood. The implicit juxtaposition of peoplehood and nationhood
is especially strange insofar as nationhood has come increasingly
to stand as a core analytical concept during the last two decades
of growth in Indigenous studies and Métis studies. In Part 2, I
explore in more detail their critique of nationhood, paying par-
ticular attention to the contradiction that stands at its heart.
Exploring this contradiction affords an opportunity not only to
demonstrate the individual utility of the nation model, long made
extensive use of by Indigenous scholars in their critiques of settler
colonialism, but also to demonstrate the potential in pairing it
with a retooled conception of peoplehood to broaden the theoreti-
cal, methodological, and empirical horizons of Métis studies.
Part 2: Indigenous Nationhood – Imagining

Ourselves Internally
Holm and colleagues’ critique of nationhood, though brief, hinges

on two basic elements: the nation’s hierarchical and thus teleologi-
cal assumptions and its supposed lack of permanency. Regarding
the first, the authors argue that the nation’s relationship to West-
ern hierarchies – in particular statehood – makes it difficult to
conceive of it outside of the constitutively powerful influence of
such organizational forms, hence the seemingly natural couplet of
the nation-state. This is not an unreasonable assumption – indeed,
much of the core Western literature on the inception and growth
of the nation explores its relationship to the growth of modern
states. Additionally, Holm and colleagues (2003, 17) raise a second

objection, namely, that the nation lacks the durability of people-
hood: “Nations – which are primarily viewed as the territorial lim-
its of states that encompass a number of communities – do not
necessarily constitute a people nor do they have the permanency
of peoplehood.” They continue: “Nations may come and go, but
peoples maintain identity even when undergoing profound cul-
tural change.”
Their firm preference for peoplehood over nationhood not-
withstanding, their discussion of nationhood is remarkably brief.
Indeed, they simply present the term with little extended analy-
sis about its meaning or its relationship, if any, to peoplehood.
Moreover, the little analysis they undertake reveals an interesting
contradiction in that they position the nation as both sturdy and
unstable. That is, on the one hand, the authors emphasize its dura-
bility by underscoring its link to statehood (i.e., nation-states)
while, on the other, they point out its instability by stressing the
impact of colonialism on Indigenous nationhood. They suggest
that, together, these characteristics render nationhood unsuitable
as an anticolonial Indigenous studies concept. Though I think
this can be fairly positioned as a weakness in their argument, I
want to instead emphasize how this contradiction allows us an
opportunity to think more broadly about how their model can
be reconfigured to include nationhood while losing none of the
explanatory power they attribute solely to peoplehood (more on
this in Part 3).
First, though, let’s dig further into the soil of their nation-
hood discussion. In doing so, it is fundamentally important to
understand that nations – at least in their modern sense – are not
things but rather political projects (Andersen 2014; Denis 1997)
produced through the collective efforts of (in some cases, consti-
tutively powerful) claims makers. Critical race theorist Stuart Hall
(1995), for example, positions the nation as a modern system of
cultural representation based on a claim to cultural unity or homo-
geneity rooted in apparently common historical experiences and
collective sentiment that suture together otherwise pre-existing
24 Chris Andersen
tensions, fissures, and internal differences. Among the most pow-

erful claims makers in this context include state actors,3 most of
whom have at their disposal a number of tools for producing and
legitimating specific claims to unity (at the expense of others) and
who employ a narrow range of discourses about “our” past and
present to do so (see, for example, Mackey 2002).
Positioning the nation as a system of cultural representa-
tion anchored in a hierarchical claims-making process allows us
to understand the importance of contrary claims like those for-
warded by or on behalf of Indigenous Peoples. State-based claims
to representations of nation often possess the ability to normal-
ize as universal what are otherwise partial and ultimately arbitrary
assertions to human sociality and collectivity. Whether based on
sex, class, sexual orientation, able-bodiedness, race, or indigene-
ity, over time these claims come to elevate and officially “fix” only
a narrow range of the full spectrum, and these categories in turn
congeal and eventually calcify to become the everyday, largely
unspoken bedrocks of truth on which settler collectivities base
their claims.
Indigenous nationhood belies the teleology that striates settler
nation narratives about their origins and contemporary validity,
emphasizing as they do the centuries of symbolic and physical
violence that lie at the root of virtually all such claims (i.e., unity,
liberty, tolerance, equality, and so on). Nevertheless, that settler
nations were (and remain) rooted in a relatively narrow fraternity
is as apparent in the hearts and minds of those who originally con-
ceived of themselves nationally as it was (and, again, remains) in
their broad policies toward those to whom such fraternity was not
extended. Like other nation-states, for example, Canada and the
United States have enacted a wide spectrum of policies to formal-
ize the apparent differences between Indigenous and non-Indig-
enous individuals and collectivities, and these policies are rooted
deeply in the racist discourses and sentiments that shaped their
horizons.
If we understand nations as systems of representation that
are produced rather than simply apparent, Hall (1995) suggests
numerous rhetorical forms through which nationalist discourses

can be produced and sustained, including stories, icons, sym-
bols, rituals, and foundational myth, and these rhetorical forms
are often paired with an emphasis on continuity, traditions, and
origins (often invented). These rhetorical forms are experienced
both as a matter of common-sense logic and in deeply embedded
sentiment, both of which lurk near the surface of everyday life, to
be stoked during national happenings. Conversely, however (and
though more difficult for many to envisage), there are those who
can equally envisage various moments and instances within and
through which Indigenous claims to political legitimacy unsettle
and reveal the fragility of settler nationalist discourses.
It is in this spirit of unsettling and revelation that Indigenous
studies scholars have employed “Indigenous nationhood” to
counter the claims of settler nationhood. Though debates exist
about whether Indigenous Nations predate modernity and colo-
nialism or whether tribes only became nations with the onset of
modernity (see Simpson 2000 and Lyons 2010 for contrasting
views on this issue), Indigenous nationhood has come to sit at the
hub of a broader set of discourses on the historical and contem-
porary political legitimacy of Indigenous sociality. For example,
Indigenous studies literary scholars have utilized nationalism as
a conceptual touchstone for exploring the richness and distinc-
tiveness of tribal or national literary traditions (see Justice 2005;
Womack 1999; Weaver, Womack, and Warrior 2006), while others
have positioned it as a marker of autonomy separate from self-
government and therefore manifestly non-Western in its character
(for a now classic statement on this, see Deloria and Lytle 1984).
The robust debates that characterize the discussion of nation-
hood in Indigenous studies ably demonstrate that nationhood
need not exist in tension with the peoplehood matrix as delineated
by Holm and colleagues. It does, however, need to be stripped of
its Western teleology and apparently natural links to modern state
building in exactly the context that they detail. In this vein, Indig-
enous studies scholars as diverse as myself, Taiaiake Alfred (1995),
Duane Champagne (2007), Kristina Fagan (2004), Daniel Justice
26 Chris Andersen
(2005), Scott Lyons (2010), Audra Simpson (2000), and Andrea

Smith (2008) have demonstrated how Indigenous nationhood can
be made to sit in stark contrast to a nationhood tethered to state
building. Certainly, positioning indigeneity only in the context of
contrast or difference is not without its risks (see Andersen [2009]
and Hokowhitu [2009] for a discussion of these issues) but, none-
theless, we might see how “imagining ourselves collectively” (to
borrow Benedict Anderson’s famous phrasing) in a national form
requires none of the teleology and hierarchy or, conversely, fragil-
ity with which Holm and colleagues burden it.
Perhaps another way to think about this is to understand that
the interconnected components of the peoplehood matrix posi-
tioned as central to Indigenous peoplehood – language, history,
ceremony, and territory – are actually more fruitful for explaining
the analytical components of Indigenous nationhood. Indeed, the
core thinkers of the modern or constructivist camp of the nation
form view the nation and nationalism primarily as internal forms
of collective identification. For example, Benedict Anderson’s
(1983, 6) classic (and optimistic) understanding of the nation
positions it as an imagined community rooted in an internal hori-
zontal comradeship that is (if we reverse his original formulation)
sovereign but limited. Ernest Gellner (1983, 57, emphasis added)
defined it as an “establishment of an anonymous impersonal soci-
ety, with mutually sustainable atomised individuals, held together
above all by a shared culture.” And Eric Hobsbawm (1990) defined
it, following Gellner, primarily as “a principle which holds that
the political and national unit should be congruent.” In short,
“nation” is used in conceptual congruence with the boundaries
of the state, modern state building, and the internal people, pro-
cesses, and structures that it comprises.
Though the doyens of nationalism scholarship have overwhelm-
ingly positioned nationalism in terms of its internal dynamics,
one might well ask what is stopping us from employing “nations”
and “people” interchangeably? At one level of logic, it is certainly
possible to do so and, indeed, scholars who write about nation-
hood and peoplehood often do (see, for example, Wallerstein
1987). Likewise, other authors have used “people” as an overarch-

ing category to encapsulate concepts such as race, ethnicity, and
nation (see Lie 2004). Yet, as I hope this chapter makes clear, I see
their conflation as a missed opportunity to understand not only
the analytical power of the nationhood form for Indigenous col-
lectives but also the distinctive diplomatic relationships that con-
nected them that are largely lost in nearly all major discussions of
nationhood, Indigenous or otherwise. This is perhaps particularly
acute in the context of the nascent state of the field of Métis stud-
ies, which remains mired in debates about racial or national defini-
tions of the term (see Andersen 2014; Leroux and Gaudry 2017).
The answer to my own question about interchangeability is nei-
ther simple nor straightforward – like most things, much depends
on context. One way to think about these issues analytically is
to ask an additional (and, at first glance, parenthetical) question:
If we believe in the analytical utility of the peoplehood matrix,
to what era or eras do we look to discover principles to derive our
contemporary imaginings of peoplehood and nationhood? As it
turns out, and for reasons that will become apparent, exploring
the question of the historical power of Indigenous peoplehood
reveals its analytical distinctiveness from, but deep relationality
with, nationhood. In the interests of improving our understand-
ing of both analytical concepts, Part 3 explores them in more
detail.
Part 3: Peoplehood – Turning the Lens Outward
How might we situate the peoplehood matrix to retool it in a man-

ner that positions its central tenets in terms of its external context?
Certainly, part of the attractiveness of the peoplehood matrix is
that, in contrast to much of the historiographical labour on Indige-
nous collectivities, Holm and colleagues spend little time justifying
their use of “peoplehood.”4 Indeed, for all their complex discus-
sion of the factors that constitute their model, the authors spend
oddly little time exploring why these factors collectively make up
an Indigenous people, as opposed to any number of markers of
28 Chris Andersen
collective consciousness (race, ethnicity, and so on), nationhood

included. This lack of precision helps explain why the principal
elements of their matrix might seem so familiar to students of
Indigenous nationhood, those of the Métis included.
Like all attempts to build a novel analytical framework, the
matrix argument is both schematic and arbitrary (though, impor-
tantly, not random). Yet we can derive from the analysis a thread
for thinking about the idea of peoplehood in a more extended
and complex manner, particularly by undertaking a close reading
of how Holm and colleagues tether it to sovereignty. To recap,
their concern with the inefficacy of the nation model stems from
its presumed attachments to modern state building and, with it,
the seeping of colonialism onto our peoplehood, at once empha-
sizing its durability and instability. Since historical Indigenous
collectivities were defined as “other than states” (i.e., tribes), their
treaties were or could not be treated the same as those signed with
other, apparently more legitimate collectivities (like those with
other Western nation-states). Instead, they argue that the founda-
tions of colonialism are bolted to a framework entirely dependent
on our presumed (political? cultural?) difference.
In this context, peoplehood (in opposition to race, ethnicity, or
nationhood) is said to possess an endogamous ability to persevere
in the teeth of colonialism. For example, Holm and colleagues
(2003, 17) detail the durability of Cherokee peoplehood despite
the high rate of intermarriage, cultural modification, and “the rise
and fall of the Cherokee Nation during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.” Indeed, they argue that peoplehood pos-
sesses its own inherent sovereignty that predates and thus perhaps
serves as a basis for any subsequent nationalism. More importantly
for the discussion here, they suggest that peoplehood “serves to
explain and define codes of conduct, civility, behavior within a
given environment, and relationships between people” (Holm, Pear-
son, and Chavis, 17, emphasis added).
We may draw from this conceptual mapping two analytical
traces helpful to a repositioning of peoplehood. The first is their
insistence that peoplehood existed prior to colonialism, cultural
modification, or profound cultural change. The second is that

peoplehood is observable in its ability to regulate relationships
between people. They likely understood the latter in terms of the
governing of individual members of a people, but “relationships
between people” can also be thought of in a broader sense as a
central tenet of peoplehood: its ability to enter into formal rela-
tionships with other similarly minded peoples by means other
than using force (see Andersen 2014; Webber 1995). Thinking rela-
tionally (as the authors encourage us to do), they go on to detail
the use of peoplehood as a litmus test for understanding historical
and contemporary Indigenous relationships with nation-states (in
their case, the United States). In other words, drawing on prin-
ciples in existence prior to the impact of full-blown colonialism,
Indigenous peoples regulated our relationships in complex, for-
mal ways with those who were not us. Let me explain.
Much of my own empirical work is concerned with examining
how concepts such as nationhood and peoplehood are (mis)used
by historians and ethnohistorians in their analysis of historical
Indigenous sociality. I have made the argument in various con-
texts (see, particularly, Andersen 2014) that peoplehood serves
as a valuable analytical framework for exploring historical Indig-
enous sociality because it requires that attention be paid to the
specific relations of power that existed during specific historical
eras rather than to the categories of analysis that make or might
(be made to) make sense today. Thinking in terms of the speci-
ficity of historical relations of power in a given era, peoplehood
as a concept is useful for analysis to the extent that it is distinc-
tive from all other categories of collectivity, due to its ability to
produce and have what respected legal scholar Jeremy Webber
(1995, 628–29) termed, more than two decades ago now, inter-
societal norms, or customs that enable “the parties to establish
stable expectations regarding each other’s conduct and provided
grounding for criticizing the conduct … when it departed from
the norms.”
A nation is a normative order in all the aspects detailed by Holm
and colleagues in that it holds the ability – like communities,
30 Chris Andersen
kinship groups, or even families – to produce internal norms. In

contrast, a people – and this is what I suggest sets it apart from
other forms of sociality – possesses the singular ability to compel
a competing people or peoples to coproduce intersocietal norms
that reflect neither collective’s internal norms but instead reflect
their formal relationality.5 An extended example of the creation
and use of intersocietal norms can be explored in Richard White’s
(1991) analysis of the Upper Great Lakes tribal landscape in the
immediate postcontact era, and in Robert Innes’s (2013) extended
discussion of Northern Plains kinship relations in the mid-nine-
teenth century (see also Vrooman 2012). In a similar way, the
solemnity of the various treaty-making processes – whatever their
subsequent (dis)avowal – also lends itself to thinking in terms of
intersocietal norms between peoples.
Like nationhood, then, peoplehood represents a powerful
claim to political legitimacy. Unlike nationhood, however, peo-
plehood claims are not made simply with respect to members of
the nation but rather in the context of those of other peoples.
Peoplehood is thus fruitfully understood as the external mani-
festation of (our) nationhood, not its replacement. Hence – and
here, again, I disagree with Holm and colleagues – while a people
rarely exists without a nation, nations (or, at least, nationalism)
can certainly exist without an accompanying peoplehood or, at
least, a fully mature one. Within a specific colonial context, they
can also exist in the face of diminished settler recognition. One
of the most deliberate projects of colonial powers has been their
concerted effort to diminish our Indigenous peoplehood by dis-
mantling and attempting to dismiss the intersocietal norms that
governed previous interactions among us. Holm and colleagues
ably detail how the very tethering of the settler nation with mod-
ern statehood formalized its contempt for Indigenous people-
hood through a dismissal of treaties (for those who were able to
enter into them) or their subsequent diminishment in juridical
discourse but also through the widespread marginalization of the
peoplehood-based interactions that had shaped centuries of prior
interaction.
Does this mean, then, contrary to Holm and colleagues’ claims,

that contemporary Indigenous collectivities – nations or otherwise –
are not also peoples? It does not, but it does mean that the strength
of our peoplehood (at least vis-à-vis settler nation-states) has unde-
niably been diminished (Corntassel [2003] details the number of
definitions of Indigenous Peoples that include this specific impact
of colonialism as a key feature).
However, let me quickly add two caveats to this observation,
which in the interests of space I will only sketch here. First,
whether or not our contemporary peoplehood matches its histori-
cal power, we may nevertheless draw on cognate historical eras
to form normative principles for our contemporary nationhood
and peoplehood discussions,6 not because our precolonial identi-
ties are more “authentic” than today’s but because we were at the
height of our power in controlling our own destinies in a way that
we are not today.
Second, the failure of contemporary settler nation-states to act
honourably according to the intersocietal norms embedded in the
formal diplomacy (whether through treaties or other instruments)
of the past does not mean that, as Indigenous Peoples, we should
not continue to act in a manner that honours intersocietal norms,
in our interactions with the land, with one other, and, where pos-
sible or relevant, with colonial nation-states. Indeed, while settler
nation-states continually fail to recognize and meaningfully act on
their responsibilities to Indigenous Peoples, we have continued to
show respect for intersocietal norms, and a growing literature has
demonstrated how Indigenous Peoples have continued to relate to
colonial powers in peoplehood-based modalities, even following
the full impact of colonialism in the twenty-first century.
Part 4: Métis Studies, Writ Political
As noted in the Introduction to this volume, until about a decade

ago much of what passed for Métis studies was firmly rooted in the
academic discipline of history, which tended to position the Métis
as pawns in larger imperial (and, later, national) games: first as the
32 Chris Andersen
tools of the North West Company in 1816 and later as primitive

foils for the growth of the Canadian state. More recent discussions
in the field have begun to include Métis communities in their dis-
cussions (see, for example, Macdougall 2013) while critiquing the
dominant lenses through which most people continue to (mis)rec-
ognize Métis identity (see Andersen 2014). Most recently, the field
of Métis studies has taken a turn toward discussing apparently
“Métis” organizations purporting to represent “hidden” commu-
nities that have started to seek formal recognition from the vari-
ous levels of the Canadian state (see Gaudry 2018 and Leroux and
Gaudry 2017 for a discussion of this phenomenon).
A major prong of this discussion has been about the supposed
exclusionary logics of the term “Red River Métis,” which, the argu-
ment goes, discounts the colonialism and racism faced by these
apparently much older “Métis” communities. Aside from the deep
racialization of their arguments, proponents of this line of think-
ing have tended to speak very much in the context of a presence–
erasure binary, using the “hidden in plain sight” logics through
which their ancestors – whom, they suggest, were Métis by virtue
of their mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous ancestry (despite
their never themselves self-identifying as Métis) – hid their culture
and identities, often for centuries, only to reappear, in the context
of a fully formed liberal recognition ecosystem, as Métis.
These debates and discussions tend to take place on social
media (Facebook and Twitter in particular) and consequently
lack the rigour and reasoned argumentation of peer-reviewed ven-
ues. Nonetheless, it has become clear that the underlying logic of
these arguments does not begin with what I regard as the clearest
and most compelling example of Métis peoplehood, in 1870s Red
River. Rather, the arguments are deeply embedded in the racial-
ization discourse described earlier in which “Métis” becomes a
default contemporary identification for describing historical mis-
cegenation processes that occurred in the vast expanse of the his-
torical Indigenous territories that Canada now claims as its own.
This constitutes a fundamentally wrongheaded way to approach
these issues, since it displaces the actual historical presence of
Indigenous peoplehood in favour of emphasizing the heartbreak-

ing but otherwise ubiquitous impact of colonialism on five centu-
ries of community building and destruction.
Instead, the peoplehood matrix offers a more logical – not to
mention relational – way forward, not simply in the context of the
elements crucial to understanding the complexity of Indigenous
peoplehood but also because it offers a lens to understand Métis
politics in a more dignified, more historically accurate, and more
diplomacy-centred manner than what is currently littering the
discursive field of Métis studies. The obvious example often used
is the relationship between the Métis people and the emerging
Canadian state. Positioning this relationship as the positive core
of Métis peoplehood, Paul Chartrand and John Giokas (2002,
279) emphasize both the internal and external practices:
The Métis people of the northern Plains are thus the only Métis
people because they were [t]he only group that was able to or-
ganize a civil government, to defend itself against Canadian in-
trusion, to make its place in the economic niches of the West
along with Indian nations, and to insist that Canada not annex
the West without dealing with it. The Métis nation has symbols
associated with this history, including “Falcon’s Song,” the “na-
tional anthem” proclaiming military victory against the settlers
in 1816, a distinctive flag, unique languages, music, and art, and
the well-known symbol of its economic independence, the Red
River cart. It is the Métis nation which is mentioned in the Con-
stitution, in the terms of the Manitoba Act, 1870, and whose
rights were recognized in statutes and orders-in-council from
the early 1870s until well into the twentieth century.
However, examples of these diplomatic politics need not cen-

tre the colonial state, though given the extent to which historical
research is tied to surviving archival records, this is often the case.
Lawrence Barkwell (2017), in contrast, notes numerous examples
of Métis Great Plains diplomacy, either in the context of their place
in the Nehiyaw Pwat (mentioned above) or in their own dealings
34 Chris Andersen
with other Indigenous Peoples, particularly the Dakota.7 Barkwell

(2017, 5) notes, for example, that at “the peak of his career, in 1844,
Cuthbert Grant had successfully negotiated a peace settlement
with the Sioux, traditional enemies of the Cree and Saulteaux and
consequently of the Métis. The peace lasted for seven years, until
the battle of Grand Coteau.” The emphasis of diplomatic relation-
ality that sits at the core of peoplehood represents a substantive
change from claims that rely on the poststate control benevolence
of the Canadian state to recognize and attempt to correct perceived
historical injustices that have severed people from their (possibly)
Indigenous communities. This is what should serve as the core
and as a touchstone for Métis studies, writ large (and political).
Peoplehood and the Nation: Analytical Allies
The point of this chapter was to explore, critique, and extend the
extraordinarily fruitful insights of the peoplehood matrix pro-
duced by Tom Holm, Diane Pearson, and Ben Chavis. This model
is particularly useful for its disavowal of Western political prin-
ciples, whose legitimacy is tied to the teleological and hierarchical
ontologies of modern nation-states. Likewise, the broad corre-
spondence between Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies
and the similar experience of colonialism enhance its explanatory
potential. However, I have also attempted to unpack their puz-
zling and unnecessary analytical dismissal of nationhood, arguing
instead that far from requiring us to dismiss it, peoplehood repre-
sents a useful external analytical path to trod on. Toward that end,
I situated the analytical relationship between nationhood and
peoplehood as two sides of the same coin – nationhood concerns
itself with imagining itself internally while peoplehood is useful
for exploring external relationships with other peoples.
If we take seriously the principles governing our historical
peoplehood at its zenith, they can and should continue to serve
as an appropriate touchstone for working through debates about
our contemporary collective Indigenous selves, rather than simply
reaching into the past and borrowing whichever historical facts or
precedents are deemed most expedient. This means paying more

attention to particular issues such as gender equality (which has
not always been the case), but it also means being vigilant about
the tendency to uproot historical categories from their complex
roots for their contemporary simplified and (necessarily) decon-
textualized use. The ability to do this will depend on an expanded
discussion of which visions of our historical peoplehood are
appropriate, which elements we will seek to bring forward, and
which will be left behind.
Though perhaps controversial, understanding peoplehood and
nationhood in light of this point is crucial. Indeed, it can be no
other way: we live in material circumstances and social relations
almost entirely alien to those that characterized our historical peo-
plehood. There are no easy solutions here, but understanding the
importance and the congruity of nationhood and peoplehood will
give us an opportunity to live up to the potential of the people-
hood matrix – to avoid the hegemonic discourses that characterize
the conceits of settler nation-states. Together, these two concepts
constitute a powerful analytical framework for Métis studies theo-
rizing, far more so than either could on its own.
Notes
1 Bear in mind that I am not suggesting that they are separate things
(though, as I argue later, they can possibly be); rather, I separate them
here for analytical purposes. This is an important distinction to note,
since my point is neither that nationhood is a concept specific only to
Indigenous collectivities (an obviously nonsensical position to take)
nor, perhaps more importantly, that Indigenous collectivities need ever
have used the terms “nation,” “nationhood,” or “nationalism” to self-
describe their collectivities. Instead, the terms “nation” and “people,” as
I employ them here, are analytical ones that assist those working within
the academic field to make sense of the social relations we study, rather
than an attempt to reveal the categories of practice through which
Indigenous collectives made and make sense of our social worlds (see
Bourdieu 1990; Brubaker and Cooper 2000). As I will note, a failure to
distinguish analytically between nationhood and peoplehood not only
overinflates the conceptual bandwidth of what nationness is and does,
36 Chris Andersen
it concomitantly unnecessarily limits how we might understand the ana-

lytical power of peoples, peoplehood, and the social relations they
encapsulate.
2 Corntassel (2003) offers an important extension on this original model.
Though his work summarizes and integrates literature on nationalism,
indigeneity, and peoplehood by adding precision to the relationship between
indigeneity and nationhood, it does not affect the overall tenor of the people-
hood matrix, and as such does not affect this chapter’s argument.
3 In the interests of space, I will set aside the problems of positioning “the
state” as a singular or monolithic form of power. See Abrams (1977).
4 My discussion of Indigenous peoplehood focuses mainly on people-
hood rather than what specifically makes us Indigenous – when
Indigenous collectivities rise to the level of peoplehood. For a broad
discussion of the “Indigenous” in “Indigenous peoplehood,” see Anaya
(1996), Andersen (2014), and Corntassel (2003).
5 Additionally, this seems to me more precise than Anaya’s understanding
of peoplehood, which stresses internal distinctiveness and attachment
to ancestral communities (Anaya 1996, 3) rather than relational
distinctiveness.
6 To draw from historical principles, however, is obviously not to be lim-
ited by it or them.
7 My thanks to Nicole St-Onge for pointing out this information to me.
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2
The Power of Peoplehood:
Reimagining Metis Relationships,
Research, and Responsibilities
Robert L.A. Hancock
Metis conversations about identity, belonging, and community

are ongoing in family and community settings. As part of my own
attempt to contribute to these conversations, I have argued else-
where for the centrality of kinship and relationships more generally
as expressed in the value of wahkootowin (being a good relative)
(Hancock 2017). Here, I want to build on that analysis by consider-
ing the links between identity and community and their implications
for research, drawing on the work of Metis and other Indigenous
scholars. As I see it, there are a number of overlapping projects to
which I am seeking to contribute: decolonization at the personal
level, community building and community development, and aca-
demic research, including the emerging field of Metis studies.
The ideas I am discussing in this chapter reflect a series of ongo-
ing and overlapping conversations with my relatives, in a broad
sense. By this I mean not only my mother and my auntie, my
connections to the stories of my ancestors, but also my academic
relatives – colleagues and students – including our Elders Barb
Hulme, Christine Welsh, Jeannine Carrière, and the late Saman-
tha Sansregret. These conversations have taken place far from the
Metis homelands, on Lək̓ ʷəŋən territory at the University of Victo-
ria mainly, and focus on the questions of what it means to be Metis
outside of those homelands; how we recognize and take care of
one another, including how we relate to each other; and how we
are to hold ourselves and one another to account. The answers we
come to for these questions have serious implications for Metis
40
The Power of Peoplehood 41
families and communities and also speak to the responsibility of

Metis researchers and scholars to ensure that our work engages
with our relatives outside the academy.
I also need to be explicit from the beginning about my stakes
in the discussion that follows. I am a Metis man, born and raised
in Lək̓ ʷəŋən territory to an English Canadian father and a Metis
mother, who was also born in Lək̓ ʷəŋən territory after her father,
my grandfather, left the family homestead in Treaty 8 territory at
the beginning of the Great Depression. A key aspect of this dis-
location has been my family’s disconnection from the Cree lan-
guage, my grandfather’s first language, which he refused to pass
on to my mother and her siblings.1
These facts shape the work I do in numerous ways, affecting the
questions I ask and the answers that resonate with me, as much as
I hope that they also allow me to connect with and participate in
the wide range of discussions in Metis families, communities, and
organizations. The work I do starts from the question not only of
my obligations as a member of my family and my community but
also of the obligations that arise because I am living in another
people’s territory (Voth and Loyer 2019). At the same time, as
Metis we know how to do this in a good way, about being good
guests along with our ancestors’ reputations for being good hosts.
At one level, it is about working to recover practices of relating
and diplomacy, practices that have been undermined by the Cana-
dian state and its narrative of the land belonging to all “Canadi-
ans”; at another level, at its core, it is about asking, and answering,
the question: How are we to live, how are we to create allies, in
places where we do not yet have relatives?
In significant ways, this move represents a step beyond past
approaches that foreground the events and experiences of the peo-
ple at Red River, one that has emphasized development in the Metis
core as paradigmatic of Metis experiences at the expense of those
people living elsewhere. I am not arguing that there are multiple
Metis nations; rather, I am looking to shift the emphasis to include
the communities that emerged when people left Red River after
the Canadian military expeditions. It comes down to a fundamental
42 Robert L.A. Hancock
question about Metis identity: Are our identities tied to a specific

place, or are they orientations, ways of being, webs of relationships
(St-Onge and Podruchny 2012) that can be practised elsewhere?
Finally, in the context of a multidisciplinary project seeking to
develop a field of Metis studies, I need to offer some context for
the contributions I am trying to make. I have been trained as a his-
torian and anthropologist but have spent a considerable amount
of time with political theorists, which has influenced the literature
with which I am most comfortable engaging and shaped the con-
tributions I feel most confident about making. I also find myself
currently working as an academic administrator, asking and being
asked what students and communities want to know and need
to know. The answers are relatively straightforward in the Metis
context: when I am asked to make presentations in community,
interest has been focused mainly on issues of law and identity, and
when I engage with students I hear most often that they want to
learn more about kinship, reciprocity, and masculinity and about
healthy relationships between genders and across generations.
These responses guide the work that I have been doing and shape
my thinking, which is reflected in this chapter, by connecting it to
the needs of community members on and off campus.
I raise these questions humbly and provisionally, as a beginning
language learner who is also in the early stages of reconnecting
with and reclaiming the knowledge of my ancestors, whose trans-
mission between generations was disrupted by colonialism. At the
same time, I am hopeful that offering these contributions in this
way will foster connections with other Metis relatives. My work
is not meant to be prescriptive; instead, I am interested in con-
tributing to conversations (at home, in community, and on cam-
pus) about what motivates and shapes our work as Metis scholars.
What does it mean to do research “as a means of asserting intel-
lectual sovereignty and honoring my relations” (Hunt 2016, 28)?
What are the implications for our research when we (re)centre the
values of wahkootowin?
I see my contributions in this chapter coming from two dis-
tinct but related directions. The first is through the elaboration
of an Indigenous model of collective identity formation, based

on the work of Robert K. Thomas in dialogue with that of Chris
Andersen, that I think promises to make significant contribu-
tions to Metis projects and conversations about how we relate to
one another, to our shared histories, and to our Indigenous rela-
tives. The second is through a discussion of some of the potential
connections between this model and the value of wahkootowin,
which I think presents significant opportunities both for Metis
communities and for Metis researchers. My goal is to contribute to
a number of conversations, in communities and in classrooms, by
bringing the work that has been shared with me in these settings
into dialogue with other Indigenous approaches to similar issues.
At their roots, I think that the questions in both of those con-
texts are actually asking not just what we need to know to form
healthy families and communities but also how we are going to
live given what we are learning. My relatives, along with stu-
dents and community members, are also asking me to share my
academic expertise and skills in these settings. So, when I think
of the kinds of questions and analyses that motivate me, and the
kinds of interventions I can and need to make, I think in terms of
how we will build on the innovative historical analyses that are
being done (e.g., Gaudry 2014; Fiola 2015, etc.) in order to work
in and with our communities and to support their aspirations. At
the same time, Andersen’s work on peoplehood has been crucial as
a foundation for future work, not just academic research but work
in communities and in courtrooms as well. It plays this central role
because he lays bare the understandings and assumptions held by
others, doing important work so that the researchers who come
after him are not obligated to recapitulate the resolution of earlier
arguments as the starting point or justification for our own work.
The Concept of Peoplehood
I will focus on one aspect of Andersen’s work as my jumping-off

point, not only because I think that it promises to have a signifi-
cant impact in Metis communities but also because I am confident
that it will make a significant contribution to research in and with

Metis communities: the idea of peoplehood. The intervention that
I want to make is relatively simple: while Andersen seeks to intro-
duce analytical complexity and precision to the terms “nation-
hood” and “peoplehood,” by using the formulation “nationhood
or peoplehood” (e.g., 2014a, 91) or “nationhood/peoplehood”
(e.g., Andersen, 103), he runs the risk of collapsing this essential
distinction. However, I am interested in thinking of peoplehood
as an Indigenous concept distinct from Western notions of nation-
hood and nationalism, as another option for our communities to
consider as we come to terms with our own identities and aspira-
tions, both individual and collective, and our relationships among
ourselves and with other Indigenous groups.
Andersen’s definition of peoplehood rests on five criteria. The
first is prior presence, or the existence of a particular people in a
particular place before the arrival of the colonial or colonizing
state, which he places “at the heart of my argument for Métis peo-
plehood” (Andersen 2014a, 20). This orientation to the Canadian
state links Metis peoplehood to other Indigenous experiences and
has to be understood in conjunction with the second criterion, the
role of history, both as an internal resource and as a form of resis-
tance to external narratives. In terms of the latter, historical anal-
yses offer alternatives to colonial narratives “that marginalize or
attempt to altogether erase our prior presence. It is to these early
eras of intersocietal norm production that we must look for nor-
mative principles of contemporary engagement” (Andersen, 20).
In terms of the former, a historical perspective offers Metis
today opportunities to examine our communities and experiences
at a time when relationships with outsiders were premised on
mutual recognition rather than colonial domination:
Whether or not our contemporary peoplehood matches its his-

torical power, we may nevertheless look to cognate historical
eras for normative principles for our contemporary nationhood
and peoplehood negotiations – not because pre-colonial social
relations are more “authentic” than social relations today but
because we were powerful enough that imperial powers and

later colonial nation-states were forced to negotiate rather than
simply intervene militarily or legislatively.
(Andersen 2014a, 206)
Taken together, the historical knowledge of long-standing rela-

tionships with particular lands form the foundation of Andersen’s
model. Andersen’s next two criteria relate to internal and external
perspectives, speaking to how we are known as Metis by how we
relate to others and by how we understand ourselves.
The third criterion is the importance of intersocietal norms and
of practices of external relations, as found in the “evidence of his-
torical peoplehood in the formal interrelations between peoples
(including but not limited to imperial powers) prior to the impo-
sition of colonialism” (Andersen 2014a, 107). These norms also
extend to the ways that the Metis conducted diplomacy with colo-
nial powers:
Indigenous claims to political recognition must be anchored in

political principles and relationships based on diplomatic rela-
tions that forced imperial powers to negotiate – rather than
simply legislating their own norms onto those of Indigenous
communities. This is not to suggest that Indigenous agency or
resistance ends when this happens, but, nonetheless, the impos-
ition of colonial legislation is qualitatively different from that
co-produced in the context of intersocietal norms.
(Andersen, 131)
The fourth aspect is related to individual and community

self-consciousness:
I position peoplehood as a distinct kind of political community

that finds its roots in its historical relationality with other
peoples and in its ability to produce and have respected interso-
cietal norms that govern expectations of behaviour. If it is not
already obvious, I present the concept of peoplehood in direct
contrast to post-colonizing claims to Métis self-identification

and, potentially, even official classifications.
(Andersen, 130–31)
In this approach to the connection between individual and collect-

ive identities, we can see a link to the work of Ghostkeeper (2007),
Adese (2014), and Todd (2016, 2017), among others, that concep-
tualizes relationships beyond those between humans to include rela-
tionships with all the other beings and the lands and waters – all our
relations (Voth 2015, 3) – a point to which I will return below. Ander-
sen 2014a, 199) ties this self-consciousness to the very possibility of
having political relationships with other peoples: “Being Métis (at
least politically) is about peoplehood, and thus it is first and fore-
most about historical and contemporary political self-consciousness
and struggles as – or, at least, as part of – the Métis in their ability to
produce formal, people-to-people relationships.” Self-consciousness
in this way is tied to both internal and external perspectives: we
know who we are, we know who our relatives are, we know that we
are not related (yet) to others we meet (Hancock 2017).
The fifth and final criterion is connections over distance: “A
peoplehood-based framework, attentive to a core/periphery dynamic
present during this era, encourages analyses of geographically dis-
persed allegiances and alliances and the magnitude and significance
of Métis peoplehood at the far reaches of its influence” (Andersen
2014a, 149). Throughout the elaboration of these criteria, there is a
central emphasis on our relationship with the past, with what we
were capable of in earlier times, in terms of demands for external
recognition and respect; we know who we are because of the ways
we relate and have related with others, both Indigenous and colo-
nizing. There is also a focus on legal and governmental contexts:
Andersen offers a Metis approach that acknowledges the primacy of
the relationship with the Canadian state (e.g., through court cases)
in its formation and orientation.
At the same time, we can also step back to a different concep-
tualization of peoplehood, one that parallels some of the argu-
ments Andersen makes but that also offers other perspectives on
the issues he raises, in particular a distinct approach to collective

Indigenous identity that focuses on understandings internal to the
community. The second idea of peoplehood that I am working with
comes from the work of Robert K. Thomas, a Cherokee scholar.
Originally trained as an anthropologist, he went on to play a cen-
tral role in the development of Native American/American Indian
Studies as an academic discipline, in large part through his role in
the growth of the department of American Indian Studies at the
University of Arizona (Deloria 1998). In Metis contexts, Thomas
is perhaps best known for his afterword in Jacqueline Peterson
and Jennifer Brown’s The New People (1985), where he notes that in
some cases put forward in the book “we get the feeling of a strong
sense of peoplehood” among the Metis (Thomas 1985, 245).
Thomas proposed his peoplehood model as an explicitly
Indigenous organizing concept, based on what he identified as
four common elements of Indigenous survival, though he also
expressed some pessimism about prospects moving forward. The
four elements are:
1 a distinct language, even if it simply functions as a holy

language;
2 a unique religion, even if it is their own special version of a
world religion;
3 a tie to a particular piece of land, a homeland and a holy
land;
4 a sacred history which tells you who you are and why you
must survive as a people.
(Thomas 1990, 13)
At the same time, Thomas identified some flexibility and nuance in

his approach. First, he noted that “to some peoples one of these
above four features may be a more important symbol of their
peoplehood than the other three” (Thomas, 15). Second, he recog-
nized that “among some enduring peoples the very absence of, or
the losing of, one of these important four symbols can, in itself,
become a strong symbol of peoplehood” (Thomas, 16). These
extensions are particularly crucial in the Metis context because of

the differential impacts of colonialism on our families and com-
munities. A model based on these insights recognizes the import-
ance of memories of loss in shaping current identities for those of
us whose relationships to our lands, languages, and communities
have been interrupted by colonial interventions.
Thomas’s approach has also been amplified and built on by
other Indigenous scholars. Jeff Corntassel (2003, 92) expands
Thomas’s definition of language to include other expressive meth-
ods, “such as artwork, dialects, unique community expressions,
and indigenous place names” and locates the power of the con-
cept of peoplehood in “its non-linear construct and flexibility
across time and place” (Corntassel, 93). He also stresses its value
in terms of its utility in creating self-image and self-identification
beyond state structures (Corntassel, 92).
Tom Holm, Diane Pearson, and Ben Chavis focus on three
other aspects of Thomas’s concept in their work to develop an
Indigenous model of sovereignty that can form the core of an
academic discipline. The first is what they call Thomas’s expan-
sive and inclusive definition of peoplehood, seeking explicitly to
move beyond the limitations of Western political concepts: “His
formulation went beyond the conventional notions of grouping
human beings as members of classes, polities, cultural units, races,
or religious groups. He deliberately chose the term ‘peoplehood’
to transcend the notions of statehood, nationalism, gender, eth-
nicity, and sectarian membership” (Holm, Pearson, and Chavis
2003, 11). The second is what they characterize as the internal
focus of the model: “Thomas’s model of peoplehood is an accu-
rate and functional academic definition based on internally gen-
erated information. Moreover, it reminds us that the essence of
Native American knowledge is the understanding of how things
are interrelated and are continuously interacting” (Holm, Pear-
son, and Chavis, 20). The third is what they identify as Thomas’s
avoidance of reductionist thinking while still constructing a holis-
tic model: “The four interlocking aspects of peoplehood demon-
strate the futility of this kind of reductionist thought. No single
element of the model is more or less important than the others; the
environment is an aspect of peoplehood. Consequently, deduc-
tive reasoning cannot really reduce group behavior to a single
cause” (Holm, Pearson, and Chavis, 15). They conclude that, “in
the final analysis, the factors of peoplehood make up a complete
system that accounts for particular social, cultural, political, eco-
nomic, and ecological behaviors exhibited by groups of peoples
indigenous to particular territories” (Holm, Pearson, and Chavis,
12). Corntassel (2003, 94) concurs, arguing that “after surveying
several existing conceptual frameworks of indigenous peoples, it
is clear that Holm [and colleagues’] model of peoplehood offers
the most promise in terms of its non-Western approach to iden-
tity, its flexibility, comprehensiveness, and allowance for cultural
continuity and change.” I would also stress the importance of its
internal character, in that it focuses on meeting the needs identi-
fied by the community itself rather than on responding to external
expectations or state demands for recognition (Coulthard 2007).
At the same time, Thomas’s model, and in particular his empha-
sis on the fact that loss of one of the components can be a binding
factor, works well in a Metis context because of its openness to
the fact of diaspora: we can understand ourselves and recognize
each other as Metis through a collective memory of the dispos-
session of our homeland, and we do not have to delay our project
until we have returned. However, the orientation I am working to
elaborate is not totally open-ended: we still need the connection,
across both time and space, which kinship can provide. Thomas’s
emphasis on the internal aspects of peoplehood – how we identify
and relate to ourselves – effectively balances Andersen’s external
focus on the Metis as a people among other people and on how we
relate to others, including the Canadian state.
Implications and Applications of the Peoplehood Model
Given the potential contributions of the peoplehood model to

Metis projects of community building, the issue becomes one of
what we are going to do with it: How are we going to build on its
insights about collective identity in ways that reflect Metis values

such as wahkootowin? What does the model help bring into focus
or bring back into focus? What do we need to do to, as Metis indi-
viduals, families, and communities? I am arguing that taking it
seriously has implications both for community and political proj-
ects and for academic research: how we view ourselves collectively
as Metis shapes our goals and our perception of what is possible
and what is desirable. This is as true for academic and scholarly
research as it is for community-building projects.
In the political realm, Shalene Jobin (2013, 602) argues that
“an important function of any people is not only their internal
governance and relationships with each other but also the diplo-
matic relationships they have with other peoples”; she posits that
“peoplehood is an alternative to conceptions of nation-States as
the only option of authentic self-determination” (Jobin, 602; see
also Jobin 2014, 15). In this context, Indigenous diplomacy with
outside groups becomes the formation of alliances through the
development of kinship relationships that can be understood as
ways of turning strangers into relatives and of defusing threats
(Macdougall 2010, 9–10). In contrast, as Andersen (2014a) dem-
onstrates, the Canadian state has relied on assimilation of Indig-
enous people as its preferred method to diffuse the threat posed
by difference, a project that is always bound to fail; his model of
peoplehood reads as defensive in light of this context. Corntas-
sel (2003, 94) argues for the importance both of a new concep-
tual definition of the project of peoplehood and of a strong and
explicit connection between that new definition and projects that
bring it to life for Indigenous people:
Clearly the gap between praxis and theory must be closed if the
global indigenous rights discourse is to move beyond technical,
definitional approaches and towards more substantive issues of
self-determination, land rights, and promoting cultural integ-
rity. A new definitional framework not only documents the
interrelationship between these key factors but it voices in-
digenous peoples’ community-based priorities regarding
homeland autonomy, language rights, importance of oral hist-

ories, and ceremonial cycles.
This insight about the need to ensure we move from research or

discussion to action is an important prod in our work of defining
and deploying the concept of a Metis studies project. In thinking
through the absolute importance of the peoplehood project,
Thomas (1990, 30) asked: “Do we have to model after the worst
features of American society, a society in evident decay and
decline? How can we take into our own hands the control of our
destiny?” In his work in a specifically Metis context, Andersen
(2014a, 98) raises the same issue from a slightly different perspec-
tive, asking why Metis would want to recapitulate a model, of
nationhood, developed in a different time and different context
for different purposes. Each of these approaches speaks to the
need for a new analysis, a new project that moves beyond exter-
nally imposed constraints and limitations to meet internal Metis
needs in ways that resonate with Metis values.
From my perspective, one of the most powerful aspects of the
peoplehood model is that it does not determine or demand a politi-
cal structure in the way nationhood does, being linked as it is in the
Western project with the state model, in which each nation strives
for its own state structure. Attempts to move in the direction of
nationhood and nationalism draw us into contests of recognition
with nations and states whose rules and parameters we are unable
to set or even influence in significant ways (Coulthard 2007). In
this context, an emphasis on an internal kinship-based identifica-
tion based on Thomas’s version of the peoplehood model is not
merely a refusal or a turning away from the national model, as that
would still centre something else. Instead, it should be seen as a
start from a positive position, of saying: “We know who we are,
and we know who our relatives are” (Hancock 2017). In contrast,
the nationhood model shifts emphasis to external recognition and
validation, with Indigenous groups seeking to enact state struc-
tures and supports to bolster their claims to legitimacy. In this set-
ting, validation comes from outside and is either transactional or
zero-sum depending on the specific setting. In further distinction

from the national model, peoplehood approaches emphasize rela-
tionships rather than boundaries as their founding move, based
on conscious choices about how the world is to be engaged with.
By thinking relationally, focusing on kinship and alliances rather
than descent, peoplehood models shift the discourse from the past
to the present to the future and change emphasis from citizenship
in terms of abstract rights and responsibilities to embodied par-
ticipation from the family to the community.
In his analysis of the concept of peoplehood, Thomas also offers
a model for moving forward, based on communities identifying
and supporting dreamers and visionaries and building relation-
ships between intellectuals and Elders. In the former context, he
argues that
the American founding fathers were great dreamers. They were

thinkers and writers as well as politicians. At this point in hist-
ory, I think that we Indians desperately need such kinds of men
and women. I would suggest that those Indians involved in
tribal government begin to ponder, develop, and speak and
write about our dreams to us, the Indian public. (Perhaps such
a course of action might even goad Indian academics into writ-
ing to their fellow Indians, as well.) We need some founding
fathers in these days.
(Thomas 1990, 30)
Thomas’s clichéd invocation of “founding fathers,” while fitting to

some degree with his rhetorical strategy, unfortunately over-
shadows his more important call for Indigenous scholars to engage
with their communities. He sketches an outline of a project or pro-
gram that certain members of our families and our communities
are already undertaking and reminds us to ensure that our work
has to connect researchers and Elders:
At this point in history, I think our main job is to survive Amer-

ica; as we did the glaciers, droughts, invasions, conquest, and
so forth. If I am right that means we must attend to the social

and cultural strength of our tribes, engage only in protective
measures vis-a-vis the general society, and place Indians in key
institutional niches of the system as “scouts.” If this analysis is
correct then an alliance must be forged between Indian “intel-
lectuals” and elders.
(Thomas, 10)
Both of these calls are premised on the foregrounding of relation-

ships between people, across generations and, where necessary and
mutually beneficial, across societies and cultures. At the same time,
neither Thomas nor Andersen explicitly address kinship in their
models; perhaps it is taken as a given in their models, either as a
component or as a foundation, but it is clear from my reading that
kinship is crucial both for the peoplehood model and for the appli-
cation of that model in the Metis context. Neither explains how
these aspects transmitted between family and across time and space;
for Metis scholars such as Brenda Macdougall (2010, 125), “after
reconstructing the genealogies of the northwestern Metis, it is diffi-
cult to see how family – extended or otherwise – was distinct from
community,” a connection based on the value of wahkootowin.
The Role of Kinship
One model for making the connection between peoplehood and

wahkootowin comes from Cherokee literary theorist Daniel Heath
Justice’s work on kinship and its role in the collective identity of
Indigenous people, where he has argued that “Indigenous com-
munities are shaped by principles of kinship, and kinship itself is
a delicate web of rights and responsibilities” (Justice 2008, 154).
He stresses that kinship is an action, not merely a thing:
The recognition of some sort of relationship between and

among peoples – the ever-contextual contours of kinship –
returns us to the physical realm of the participatory. At their
best, these relationships extend beyond the human to
encompass degrees of kinship with other peoples, from the

plants and animals to the sun, moon, thunder, and other ele-
mental forces. The central focus of Indigenous nationhood, then,
is on peoplehood … the relational system that keeps the world in
balance with one another, with other peoples and realities, and
with the world. Nationhood is the political extension of the so-
cial rights and responsibilities of peoplehood.
(Justice, 151–52)
In this formulation, kinship is the glue that binds people together,

which binds a people together, providing a mechanism that is
absent in Thomas and Andersen. In this case, a focus on relation-
ships and on our relations, living the values of wahkootowin, is
one way forward.
This approach aligns in significant ways with the approach to wah-
kootowin outlined by Cree political theorist Matthew Wildcat. He
has identified three aspects that come together under that concept:
First, it references the act of being related – to your human and

other than human relatives. Second, it is a worldview based on
the idea that all of existence is animate and full of spirit. Since
everything has spirit it means we are connected to the rest of
existence and live in a universe defined by relatedness. Third,
there are proper ways to conduct and uphold your relationships
with your relatives and other aspects of existence. Thus, wah-
kohtowin also includes the obligations and responsibilities
people have to maintain good relationships.
(Wildcat 2018, 14)
Drawing together ideas of relationships and responsibilities, Wild-

cat’s formulation offers a strong foundation both for research and
for projects in other realms.
At the same time, Metis scholars have worked to identify and
elaborate a research approach that privileges Metis understand-
ings and experiences of kinship and relatedness (e.g., Adese 2016).
This approach has (re)centred the value of wahkootowin, and
a key question that emerges from it focuses on those whom we

choose to include rather than whom we choose to exclude. I am
confident that we have the conceptual tools we need to rebuild
communities and relationships, both interpersonal and diplo-
matic, given that “understandings of relatedness and belonging
are profoundly political acts of self-determination” (Hancock
2017, 21). The approach I am proposing builds on the work of
Metis scholars such as Macdougall, who describes her approach
to research as “an expansion of a Native Studies perspective that
offers family, land, and identity as necessary tools for understand-
ing an Aboriginal worldview. All three elements are essential in
our conceptualization of relatedness and are embodied in the
common invocation ‘all my relations’” (Macdougall 2010, 2; see
also St-Onge and Podruchny 2012, 68; Voth 2015, 3).
Specifically, Macdougall’s work centres on the role that wah-
kootowin has played in Metis concepts of identity. She has devel-
oped a concise description of the concept while also cautioning
against a tendency to reduce it merely to “relationship”:
As much as it is a worldview based on familial – especially an

interfamilial – connectedness, wahkootowin also conveys an
idea about the virtues that an individual should personify as a
family member. The values critical to family relationships –
such as reciprocity, mutual support, decency, and order – in
turn influenced the behaviours, actions, and decision-making
processes that shaped all a community’s economic and political
interactions. Wahkootowin contextualizes how relationships
were intended to work within Metis society by defining and
classifying relationships, prescribing patterns of behaviour be-
tween relatives and non-relatives, and linking people and com-
munities in a large, complex web of relationships. Just as
wahkootowin mediated interactions between people, it also ex-
tended to the natural and spiritual worlds, regulating relation-
ships between humans and non-humans, the living and the
dead, and humans and the natural environment.
(Macdougall 2010, 8)
Centred on the concepts of interconnection and relatedness, she

has demonstrated that engaging with the ideal of wahkootowin is
crucial for understanding the experiences of Metis families as
based on intentional choices made by people in response to con-
crete challenges (Macdougall, 56–57). This is as much true for our
work as researchers and community members today. The wide
scope of interconnectedness outlined by Macdougall – extended
to ancestors, nonhuman beings, and the lands and waters – is mir-
rored in the work of other Metis scholars (Voth 2015, 3; see also
Adese 2014; Ghostkeeper 2007; Todd 2016, 2017).
Wahkootowin and Research
The idea of kinship – particularly the idea that it connects beings

and mediates relationships in ways that differ significantly from
Western models and approaches – has significant implications
both for understanding ways of relating and relatedness today
and for interpreting the actions and choices of our ancestors.
This is particularly important as we seek to flesh out the aspects
of the peoplehood model by undertaking historical research,
either in the archives or in the oral histories of our families and
communities.
For example, Macdougall (2010, 83) cautions that “the fluidity
of familial boundaries or allegiances should not be mistaken for
casualness or informality within wahkootowin … Rather, the struc-
ture and organization of wahkootowin is visible within the family
structures that are revealed by a community’s genealogical config-
uration and its members’ behaviour toward one another, which in
turn provide clues to evaluate local beliefs.” In her conceptualiza-
tion, “as an expression of cultural identity, wahkootowin provides
structure to society; infuses institutions with meaning; establishes
protocols and frameworks for interaction and behaviour; is the
foundation for pursuing any economic, political, social, or cul-
tural activity; and is essential for the creation of an alliance” (Mac-
dougall, 7). As researchers, we also have to find a way to live up to
these ideals in the current setting, both in our relationships with
our ancestors through oral and historical sources and in our rela-
tionships with our families and communities.
Macdougall and Heather Devine, in their own ways, each stress
the importance of researchers being attentive to the ways that
kinship-based values, including wahkootowin, influence behav-
iours in ways that do not necessarily accord with current Metis
practices. For example, Devine argues that
kin obligations generally superseded other commitments, re-

sulting in social, economic, and political behaviours that, to the
modern observer, may seem at times to be unfair, counter-
productive, and even illogical.
Understanding how privileges and obligations of kinship
operate in societal contexts, and accepting the idea that the
actions of people in the past were often motivated by kinship
obligations, is key to understanding Euro-Canadian and In-
digenous behaviours in the period prior to the twentieth cen-
tury. That many of the descendants of both Euro-Canadian and
Indigenous groups continue to operate in the context of kin-
based “communities of interest” today, makes this study both
timely and appropriate.
(Devine 2004, 16–17)
Macdougall and Devine can be read not only as critiquing

presentist approaches to Metis history – that is, readings that
unproblematically impose current models and assumptions on
past practices – but also as advocating for Metis scholars to do the
work of decolonizing ourselves, of coming to an awareness of, and
taking account for, the ways that our thoughts and actions have
been influenced and affected by colonialism. Undertaking this
work is essential, so that we can more clearly differentiate between
the ideas and actions of the past and those of the present and also
work to think through the ways in which we live those patterns
and practices in the present. In this sense, I see this approach as
arguing for neither strict continuity nor discontinuity but as call-
ing researchers to enter into a relationship with the past in a way
that works in conjunction with the peoplehood orientation and

the value of wahkootowin: How did our ancestors understand
themselves, and how do we understand ourselves given what we
know about the past? How would our ancestors recognize us?
The impetus for and importance of Metis-focused Metis research
is clear and compelling. Metis scholars have advocated for an
approach to research that meets the needs of communities today
and into the future. For example, Gaudry (2014, 2) identifies a nar-
row, externally focused approach to Metis history that has serious
implications for how individuals and communities are seen today:
The vast majority of the literature on Métis history and political

thought does not examine how Métis understood themselves,
or how Métis understood their relationship with other peoples.
Rather, it seems preoccupied with detailing “how the West was
won” and how the Métis nation’s authority faded out of exist-
ence after the loss of our homeland in the 1870s, and the sup-
posed political decline of Métis after 1885.
Unless we do the work of determining our own relationships and

the obligations that come with them, we run the risk of causing or
contributing to further problems in the present and in our attempts
to work together. This also speaks to the central importance of
undertaking the work to decolonize ourselves, given not only our
responsibilities to our families and our communities but also the
importance of working together to counter ongoing attempts of
the Canadian state to define and legislate Metis identity and rights:
Neither the government nor the courts have yet worked out
who is legally part of “the people.” We believe that scholars of
Metis history have an obligation to contribute to this process of
defining Metis historical roots. Today’s land and comprehen-
sive claims processes, with their need to clearly define territor-
ies, do not accurately reflect eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
mindsets of fur trade communities and their inhabitants.
(St-Onge and Podruchny 2012, 60)
At the same time that St-Onge and Podruchny raise one specific
discontinuity that plagues Metis research they also gesture toward
an issue that Andersen raises around the importance of context
and continuity in working through Metis relationships:
What is required … is a history from below. Undertaken in a

Métis historical context, this means a history in between: be-
tween the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, of course, but
also between structure and agency; between the local, the
regional, and the global; between Indigenous peoples and
whites; and between commemorative, scholarly, and commun-
ity histories. Failure to do so leaves us explaining twenty-first
century Métis social relations by reference to nineteenth-century
events and their immediate aftermath, as though the twentieth
century – which bore witness to some of the most profound
ruptures in social relations ever experienced – had never
happened.
(Andersen 2014b, 630)
The challenge can move in both directions; we can also misapply

our twenty-first century assumptions and understandings to analy-
sis and interpretation of the past.
Moving Forward
The relationship between the peoplehood model and the concept

of wahkootowin seems particularly crucial as a foundation for the
sort of work that Gaudry, St-Onge and Podruchny, and Andersen
are calling for. Research, when guided by these principles, is both
an act of resurgence and a critical component of other resurgence
projects. For example, Corntassel (2012, 89) argues that
a peoplehood model provides a useful way of thinking about the

nature of everyday resurgence practices both personally and
collectively. If one thinks of peoplehood as the interlocking fea-
tures of language, homeland, ceremonial cycles, and sacred
living histories, a disruption to any one of these practices threat-

ens all aspects of everyday life. The complex spiritual, political
and social relationships that hold peoplehood together are con-
tinuously renewed. These daily acts of renewal, whether through
prayer, speaking your language, honoring your ancestors, etc.,
are the foundations of resurgence. It is through this renewal
process that commitments are made to reclaim and restore cul-
tural practices that have been neglected and/or disrupted.
Reflecting on the materials she collected through her research,

Jobin (2014, 234) finds that “throughout the stories is the princi-
ple of Cree society adapting – learning new things, trading for
new items or technologies, exchanging medicines and ceremonies
from others. In this principle, certain protocols guide how new
information is gathered and where information is gathered from.”
In this way, the idea that wahkootowin represents a form of resili-
ence can be read as a validation of Thomas’s criteria for people-
hood, specifically as a part of what he called the sacred history, or
what Holm and his colleagues identified as a rejection of reduc-
tionist thinking:
The interviews attest to the continuities of Cree peoplehood and

economic practices. ᐊᐧᐦᑯᐦᑐᐃᐧᐣ (wahkohtowin) emerged as a key
concept to understand economic relationships: They transcend
human-to-human practices and include a myriad of relations
among nonhuman beings, spiritual beings, Cree people, and
non-Cree people. In turn, different economic practices serve dif-
ferent objectives. They serve to establish, maintain, or restore
relationships or engage with an opposing relationship. These
practices, which have continuity from pre-contact Cree society
to the present are enacted in the institution of the giveaway and
trade/exchange. These are acts of resilience.2
(Jobin, 195)
At the same time, we need a shared understanding of, or orienta-

tion to, the work we are trying to do. Harold Cardinal (2007, 74)
offers a Cree perspective on the process of undertaking the work

of reconnecting with family and community:
At the onset of my learning experience, they [the Elders] said to

me: Our ways are so rich. We have so much in terms of know-
ledge, ceremony, and process. If you are now coming home try-
ing to find yourself and locate yourself in our conceptual world,
you have to have a theoretical framework; you have to know
how you measure, how you judge what you see, how you assign
values, how you determine what is right, what is wrong. If you
don’t have that conceptual framework, the problem that you
will run into is what in white language is called “the rule of
man,” where every man makes up his own rule, and it changes
with every individual that comes along, so you’re forever walk-
ing around in circles, not knowing where the hell you’re coming
from or where you’re going. To avoid that, they said, you have
to become familiar with our conceptual and theoretical
framework.
The value of wahkootowin and the peoplehood model represent

two of the key conceptual frameworks in this sense, in that they
can guide and give shape to the work that people do in terms of
finding and recognizing relatives and building community. Jobin
(2014, 210) explores the implications of this perspective and
stresses the importance of ensuring that our research be balanced
with our work for and responsibility to our communities, recount-
ing a perspective that was shared with her by one of the Elders she
interviewed:
Walter’s words explain the issues and show that the natural
agency of nonhuman beings and processes continues,
without human involvement, to restore balance on the earth
(for example, naturally occurring fires), and also the value in
the intellectual work in ways to restore ᐊᐧᐦᑯᐦᑐᐃᐧᐣ (wah-
kohtowin) in our current lived reality. This intellectual work
can be prolific, but it is fruitless unless it is lived out; even
though it will be fraught with the dissonance created in know-

ing that this resistance still lies within a hegemonically oppres-
sive system. Interestingly, perhaps these resistive actions may
provide temporary relief from colonial dissonance.
There is also an opportunity to restore balance in academic set-

tings, for Metis scholars to enact wahkootowin with other research-
ers by collaborating and undertaking work that meets the needs of
Metis families and communities today. For example, Andersen
(2014a, 209) proposes research strategies that
ask us to begin with the assumption that the Métis are an (In-
digenous) nation – a people – rather than digging through the
material and conceptual wreckage wrought by colonialism,
looking to piece together clues about our mixedness. However,
we still live in a colonial country. At least in the immediate fu-
ture, as Métis we are unlikely by the mere logic of our argu-
ments to shed ourselves of the racialized weight with which we
have been saddled. Rather, we must look to allies and potential
allies to play their part in counterbalancing the burden of a
century and more of scholarly orthodoxy. Scales balance meta-
phorically as well as literally, and peoplehood offers a more
powerful and more just fulcrum than the racialized
alternatives.
Historical research is a crucial part of peoplehood projects, veri-

fied not by reference to scholars or the courts but to the know-
ledge and memory of our families and our Indigenous relatives
and allies. Historical research also plays a role in our individual
and collective projects of decolonization, but without being
guided by wahkootowin – without being good relatives – we run
the risk of going astray.
Through this chapter I seek to contribute to a conversation
about our responsibilities as Metis people based on an engage-
ment with the concept of peoplehood and an appreciation of the
importance of kinship as reflected in the value of wahkootowin

for guiding our work in the present and in relation to our ances-
tors in the past. Justice (2008, 166) offers a striking portrait of the
potential for growth and flexibility in Indigenous communities,
grounded in practices of kinship and relating:
The living kinship traditions and literatures of each People …

rather than being perceived as a frozen set of principles or
texts of merely ethnographic interest, are instead seen in their
own enduring beauty as a strong but flexible structure that
gives guidance for community even in the winds of change.
The green cedar bends with the wind and endures; when the
sapwood dies and the tree grows rigid, sometimes even the
slightest wind can bring it crashing down. Dead wood burns
too quickly; green wood warms longer. Trusting in the princi-
ples of kinship and their relevance to our lives today and to-
morrow keeps our work flexible; because the roots are strong.
We won’t always agree with one another, and that, too, is a vital
aspect of this work: it’s important to remember that dissent is
an important aspect of self-determination. Debate and discus-
sion are time-honored intellectual and social practices shared
in the older political traditions of most indigenous peoples in
the Americas, with status conferred on eloquence not
coercion.
In my experience, this portrait resonates with Metis understand-

ings as they have been shared with me by my family and by stu-
dents and community members. It speaks to issues of research as
well – how do we relate to and interact with one another and to
the work we are called to do as researchers and scholars who are
always simultaneously members of families and communities?
While I do not have any concrete ideas for specific research strat-
egies, I have a deep commitment to working with my relatives,
and with students and community members, to explore some ways
of moving forward.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Shalene Jobin, for sharing her unpublished disser-

tation with me, and to Joshua Smith, for our ongoing conversations
about the work and legacy of Bob Thomas. The Metis students at
the University of Victoria, especially David Parent, Wyatt Schiefel-
bein, Tami Schiefelbein, and Lydia Toorenburgh, and their ongo-
ing conversations about Metis research, relationships, and ethics
have played a fundamental role in both motivating and shaping
my work in this area. Earlier versions of the arguments made here
were presented at the Canadian Political Science Association con-
ference in Edmonton in 2012 and the 2nd Métis Studies Workshop
in Washington, DC in 2015.
Notes
1 I acknowledge the Anishinaabemowin speakers among my relatives; at

the same time, engaging with the Cree language is a fundamental aspect
of my own work to decolonize myself.
2 Jobin (2014, 67–68) locates her work in the context of four characteris-
tics of a Cree peoplehood model (language, territory, ceremonies, and
“bringing past to the future”) and situates wahkootowin in a constella-
tion of Cree values and norms (consequences, natural and enforced
[212–22]; thinking about all [222–27]; civility, showing respect to all of
creation [227–34]; learning through observation [234–43]; protocol
and proper procedures [243–47)]; gift giving [247–55]; and “we are all
relatives” [256–60]) derived from an economic context but just as
applicable in other parts of life, including research. However, I am
unable to explore this further here.
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3
The Race Question in Canada and
the Politics of Racial Mixing
Daniel Voth
At the 2007 Manitoba NDP premier’s dinner, the tall and hand-
some member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for Rupertsland
and minister for culture, heritage and tourism strode up to the mic
to kick off the flagship fundraiser for “Today’s NDP.” Eric Robin-
son, a member of Cross Lake First Nation – a former broadcaster,
and coauthor of the no-holds-barred book Infested Blanket: Cana-
da’s Constitution, Genocide of Indian Nations – had built a reputation
inside and outside the Manitoba Legislature for being a strong
and thoughtful advocate for Indigenous Peoples within the settler
political system (Robinson and Quinney 1985). Speaking first, and
at length, in Cree, Robinson then translated his opening remarks
into English. He told the room of mostly non-Indigenous progres-
sives that it was about time that non-Indigenous people should
have to sit in a room and be talked at in a language they don’t
understand and made to wonder “what the hell is going on?” The
joke was pointed, well delivered and got a hearty laugh and round
of applause from the room. Then Robinson introduced the digni-
taries in attendance, starting with the Chiefs of the First Nations,
then senior cabinet ministers, and then a selected few MLAs. Each
one was thanked for his or her commitment to Indigenous issues
and for advancing the interests of First Nations people within gov-
ernment. Each one got a raucous round of applause. When Rob-
inson came to Métis MLA for Selkirk, Greg Dewar, he pointed
out that the Métis also have a strong voice in Greg at the caucus
table and that Greg, being Métis, represented at least half of First
67
68 Daniel Voth
Nations interests. The room erupted in laughter. No further expla-

nation was needed. The joke was easy to get.
I didn’t think Robinson’s joke was all that funny, and when
Dewar and I exchanged glances, it seemed he didn’t either. But
the cues to the room were clear: “Métis” means mixed Indigenous
and non-Indigenous, and because Dewar was Métis he repre-
sented only part of the interests of “full” Indigenous Peoples (First
Nations), who, in contrast, must not be mixed. That this light-
hearted ribbing was being done by a First Nations man made it all
the safer for the room to laugh. That Robinson made the joke, or
that the room laughed, was not likely malicious. Rather, it alludes
to a deep and contrived level of comfort with knowing what racial
mixing creates in the Canadian experience.
This chapter explores that feeling of knowing and presents the
argument that racial mixing has been deployed regularly in Cana-
dian politics as a pernicious means to unify the settler political com-
munity. While I illustrate that the Métis are not the only targets of
this process, I also make clear that my people become an example of
the efficacy of achieving unity via the logics of racial mixing. I also
aim to support the work of other scholars trying to build the small
area of race politics in my field, Canadian political science. If we an-
alyze racial mixing as a strategic political tool that empowers some
while disempowering others, we can better appreciate the nuanced
way racial mixing manifests within both the theory and practice of
politics in Canada to undermine the peoplehood of the Métis, and
other Indigenous Peoples, in the service of the settler state.
In what follows, I trace the use of race and racial-mixing dis-
courses through key texts in Canadian political thought and polit-
ical culture to outline the various contextual understandings and
state-centric uses of race. By tracing these uses through political
science texts, I aim to elucidate, in detail, how racial mixing is
operationalized over time toward the political end of resolving a
persistent unity crisis in settler Canada. I start by situating race
and its meanings in political science. I then examine Lord Dur-
ham’s 1839 report to establish racial mixing as a political concern
and link it to André Siegfried’s 1907 examination of the Canadian
The Race Question in Canada and the Politics of Racial Mixing 69
race problem. I then trace the way Kenneth McRae’s contribu-

tion to political fragment theory also deploys a form of this racial-
mixing logic in service of his theory. I wrap up by showing how
the politics of racial mixing insidiously seep into the works of
James Tully, Alan Cairns, and John Ralston Saul, in strikingly
similar ways. I conclude by pointing out the folly and dangers of
not appreciating racial mixing as a political tool.
A great deal has been penned on the process of debunking race
as a biological scientific endeavour while appreciating race as a
social scientific phenomenon that manifests in tangible ways in
the lives of racialized peoples.1 This attention is warranted because
race, as a social construction with political ramifications, is a lived
experience in people’s lives that confers benefits and power to some
while punishing and disempowering others (Vickers 2000, 47–49;
Thompson 2008, 204; Fleras 2014, 58; Tolley 2016). However, the
attention paid to race within the disciplines of the social sciences
has not been consistent. Several scholars have insightfully pointed
out that Canadian political science has not treated race or racial
mixing with the degree of importance that it deserves. The result
is that while Canadian political science has several key pieces on
the politics of race in Canada, this area of study remains less devel-
oped than, say, headline subfields such as parties and elections,
federalism, or Canadian identity. My intention here is to help bring
the political consequences of long-standing discourses on race and
racial mixing into sharper view. By examining the politics of racial
mixing that seemed so normal, natural, and pedestrian at the NDP
fundraiser, one can appreciate the joke as an expression of a long-
standing unity problem within the formation and entrenchment of
the settler Canadian state that continues to violently reverberate in
the lives of the Métis and other Indigenous Peoples.
“A Struggle, Not of Principles, but of Races”
It has been pointed out that the study of Canadian politics does
not pay enough attention to the politics of race. As Jill Vickers
(2000, 25) argues: “At least in English-speaking countries, political
70 Daniel Voth
science has had little to say about ‘race’ … In Canada … ‘race’ has
been seen mostly as a problem which exists somewhere else.” In
what remains an important piece on the subject, Debra Thompson
(2008, 535) argues that while “the dominant narrative in Canadian
society generally denies the relevance of race, political science has
internalized this myth to a greater extent than other disciplines in
the social sciences which … have better incorporated discussions
and analyses of race.” Thompson adds that “though not all subfields
within political science are the same, discussions of race are relatively
absent in the bulk of the literature” (Thompson, 530). And Nisha
Nath (2011, 162, 181) deepens our understanding of this gap by argu-
ing that Canadian political science appears to be “sift[ing] ‘race’
out” from scholarly engagements with identity. Even in the wake of
Erin Tolley’s important 2016 study of racialized media coverage in
Canadian politics as well as other insightful and boundary-pushing
work by Jill Vickers and others in the field, the understanding of the
politics of race remains weak in the discipline.
That being said, Thompson’s point that the discipline has inter-
nalized race as irrelevant and absent from the literature needs to
be treated with care. Race has been a central discourse and pre-
occupation for a long time in settler Canadian politics. Founda-
tional Canadian political texts and discourses have agonized over
the race problem. These works contributed to the racialization of
peoples while also normalizing race relations in politics. Thus, as
many critical race scholars in other disciplines have pointed out,
over time race has come to be seen as normal and natural in politi-
cal life. While I share Thompson’s deep concern that race is treated
as irrelevant, its absence is likely linked to Canadians being skilled
at not using the word “race” when talking about race in Canadian
politics. We can get a better sense of this phenomenon if we inter-
rogate the way different scholars and thinkers have discussed the
processes and results of racial mixing over time.
One of the key texts in which this process of racialization occurs
is the oft-quoted Report on the Affairs of British North America by
John George Lambton, the first Earl of Durham. Lord Durham
was dispatched to British North America in 1838 to investigate
certain questions on the “form and future government” of British

North America. Lord Durham, or Radical Jack as he was some-
times called, was sent in the wake of the Rebellions in Upper and
Lower Canada. One of the most recited parts of Durham’s Report
(1982, 13) was his statement that “I found two nations warring in
the bosom of a single state.” However, it is more fruitful to quote
a bit more of that section in order to understand what Durham
viewed as the problem in the Canadas:
I expected to find a contest between a government and a people:

I found two nations warring in the bosom of a single state: I
found a struggle, not of principles, but of races; and I perceived
that it would be idle to attempt any amelioration of laws or in-
stitutions until we could first succeed in terminating the deadly
animosity that now separates the inhabitants of Lower Canada
into the hostile divisions of French and English.
(Durham, 13, emphasis added)
Perhaps precisely in keeping with Thompson’s assertion, race is

not what most Canadians or political scientists pull out of this pas-
sage. And perhaps they are right not to. Should we look on Dur-
ham’s frequent assertion of racial conflict the same way we would if
his phrasing were used today? Some caution is required here. Many
scholars have pointed out that it is folly to force contemporary con-
cepts back through time (Brown 1985, 196–97; Skinner 1966; Skin-
ner 1969, 53). However, Durham’s use of “race” is, in important
ways, consistent with both the construction of race by Europeans
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the broader British
discourse on the way “race” was deployed in many colonial contexts
around the world. Consider a part of Stephen Cornell and Douglas
Hartmann’s (2007, 33) fulsome discussion of the differences and
similarities between the concepts of race and ethnicity:
Race and ethnicity often overlap. Ethnicity refers to perceived

common ancestry, the perception of a shared history of some
sort, and shared symbols of peoplehood. Race refers to a group
72 Daniel Voth
of human beings socially defined on the basis of physical char-

acteristics. A human group might well meet both sets of criteria
at once … What is more, a group may move from one category
to the other over time. To the English of the 18th and much of
the 19th centuries, the Irish, although the same color as the
English, were a distinctly inferior race.
In addition, race usually includes the process of imposing categor-

ies of value and meaning by a powerful group onto another group.
With these considerations in mind, Durham’s treatment of
French-speaking Catholic colonists fits much of what one would
expect to see if reading his report through a lens informed by
European constructions of race.2
Indeed, in Damon Ieremia Salesa’s (2011, 39–40) study of racial
intermixing in the Victorian world, he argues that “it was in the
omnivorous, bio-cultural contemporary sense that the Report
used race – an aggregate of ‘physical, moral, and political’ qualities –
and such a racial view of Canadian affairs was common.” If there
is a Canadian politics of racial mixing, it is necessary to appreciate
who or what is being racialized to understand who or what is sup-
posed to be changed in the process of mixing.
Several scholars have noted the bluntness that Durham (1982)
offered in his racial assessment of pre- and post-1760 French colo-
nists. He described the French as living a backward and outmoded
life, in which they “made little advance beyond the first progress in
comfort” and that “under the same institutions they remained the
same uninstructed, inactive, unprogressive people.” He chastised
them for cultivating land “in the worst method of small farming”
while clinging “to ancient prejudices, ancient customs and ancient
laws, not from any strong sense of their beneficial effects, but with
the unreasoning tenacity of an uneducated and unprogressive
people,” adding that “the conquest [of 1760] has changed them
but little” (Durham, 20–21). The masses had not been exposed to
the “institutions which would have elevated them in freedom and
civilisation”; they remained, instead, an “old and stationary soci-
ety, in a new and progressive world” (Durham, 21).
Durham (1982, 149–50) declared that because the French could

not read the literature emerging from the British Empire in their
own language and because they were separated from the intellec-
tual changes of France, “there can hardly be conceived a national-
ity more destitute of all that can invigorate and elevate a people,
than that which is exhibited by the descendants of the French in
Lower Canada, owing to their retaining their peculiar language
and manners. They are a people with no history, and no literature.”
Through this process of racializing the French, Durham extols the
virtues of English racial superiority in industry, manners, land
management, literature, government, and global affairs, argu-
ing that “the French could not but feel the superiority of English
enterprise; they could not shut their eyes to their success in every
undertaking in which they came into contact, and to the constant
superiority which they were acquiring” (Durham, 27).
I share David R. Cameron’s (1990, 6) view that “Durham was
an enthusiastic British imperialist who saw the hand of God and
destiny in the ultimate domination of the entire North American
continent by the English people.” As Cameron points out, Dur-
ham saw the North American continent’s “almost boundless range
of the richest soil which still remains unsettled, and may be ren-
dered available for the purposes of agriculture” as a right of the
English by virtue of their racial greatness (Durham 1982, 9–10).
These covetous statements are made by Durham without mention
of these lands being the territories of self-determining Indigenous
Peoples. Durham would go on at some length to say that “the
country which has founded and maintained these Colonies at a
vast expense of blood and treasure, may justly expect its compen-
sation in turning their unappropriated resources to the account
of its own redundant population; they are the rightful patrimony
of the English people” (Durham, 9–10). However, Cameron, and
others, miss the extension of Durham’s ideas about English racial
superiority to Indigenous Nations in the “new” world. If he could
assign a disempowering racial inferiority to the French in Lower
Canada, Durham would have surely found that Indigenous Peo-
ples possessed next to no European features, characteristics, or
74 Daniel Voth
customs and would likely have concluded that they were hardly
peoples at all. While Durham did not examine relations between
Indigenous Peoples and settlers, the extension of his racial analy-
sis beyond his primary subject appears to be uncomplicated given
the racial framework he projects onto the French in Lower Canada.
For my purposes here, taken together, Durham’s racial analysis
and the political response he prescribes are the starting point of an
important intellectual trajectory that will reappear in other impor-
tant works analyzing the Canadian settler state’s unity problem.
It is well known that Durham lamented that successive imperial
governments had not taken steps to forcibly assimilate the French.
However, one of the less examined formulations of this lament
alludes to racial mixing. In his report, Durham complains that
intermarriage was rare among the races, pointing out that those
who broke from this separation were seen as “renegades from
their race” (Salesa 2011, 39). Durham (1982, 26, emphasis added)
argues that “the two races thus distinct have been brought into
the same community, under circumstances which rendered their
contact inevitably productive of collision. The difference of language
from the first kept them asunder.” Not stopping there, Durham lauds
the absence of sectarian conflict while at the same time pointing
out that “religion formed no bond of intercourse and union … But
though the prudence and liberality of both parties has prevented
this fruitful source of animosity from embittering their quarrels,
the difference of religion has in fact tended to keep them asunder.
Their priests have been distinct; they have not met even in the
same church” (Durham, 27). Nor could education be counted on
as a means to get the races to mix, leading Durham to ultimately
conclude that “the differences thus early occasioned by education
and language, are in no wise softened by the intercourse of after-
life; their business and occupations do not bring the two races into
friendly contact and co-operation, but only present them to each
other in occasional rivalry” (Durham, 28).
Thus, one component of his racial analysis of the Canadas prob-
lem is that the races did not mix biologically, or socially, thereby
removing an avenue for one race to extinguish the other (Durham
1982, 40). The absence of racial mixing entrenches the distinction

between the races. Durham makes clear his views on the matter
when he argues: “Unhappily, however, the system of government
pursued in Lower Canada has been based on the policy of per-
petuating that very separation of the races, and encouraging these
very notions of conflicting nationalities which it ought to have
been the first and chief care of Government to check and extin-
guish” (Durham, 40). The point here is that a pillar of Durham’s
thought in the report is not only that the Canadas face a racial
problem but also that the steadfast refusal of the races to mix, or for
the government to mix them forcibly, perpetuates that problem.
The upshot of this view for students of race politics is that had the
races mixed, the inferior race would have been extinguished by
the superior one.
Indeed, Durham’s recommendations for the colony aim to do
exactly that, and his policy proposal is as violent as one might
expect. He recommended that a popular assembly should govern
a combined colony of Upper and Lower Canada, with an execu-
tive being responsible to the assembly on issues of a local concern.
Given that a combined colony would have a larger population of
English settlers, the result would have placed the assembly in the
control of the superior English race, thereby beginning the pro-
cess of extinguishing the inferior one. A laudable lesson from Brit-
ain could guide the process: “The experience of the two Unions
in the British Isles may teach us how effectually the strong arm of
a popular legislature would compel the obedience of the refrac-
tory population; and the hopelessness of success, would gradually
subdue the existing animosities, and incline the French Canadian
population to acquiesce in their new state of political existence”
(Durham 1982, 158, emphasis added).
This description is an unambiguous act of violence on a people
and shares a great deal in common with the frame of domestic
sexualized violence. Here, the inferior race must “acquiesce” to
the violence being done to them in the service of harmony and
for the good of the collective. This harmony is more important
than the needs or aspirations of the constituent parts. But within that
76 Daniel Voth
acquiescence one of the parts ceases to exist, becoming first paci-

fied and subservient and then indistinguishable within the greater
whole. The sexualized component comes in the use of intermar-
riage and childbirth to effect this obliteration and from the expec-
tation that the weaker party will accept the violence being done to
them for the good of the coupling, all the while being obliterated
through the violence. Framed differently, if the races will not mix,
they will be forcibly mixed, and the superior one will win out,
thereby solving the disunity problem. This is not just racial mix-
ing as a solution to disunity, it is an advocation of violence born of
racism to secure the stability needed to build a settler state.
Thus, racial mixing emerged as early as 1839 as both a key con-
cern and a unifying tool in what would become the political proj-
ect of Canada. However, it would not be the last time a European
would come to what was known as British North America and
remark on the race question.
“Think of the Indian Civil Service, and You Will

Understand Better the Rulers of Canada”
When the French geographer André Siegfried came to Canada in

1898 to study Canadian social and political life (he was on a world
tour and returned twice before 1906), he engaged in a form of
inquiry that was not unheard of in his time. Alexis de Tocqueville
had visited the United States in 1831 to study and provide com-
ment on American life. And Marcel Giraud would do something
similar in the 1930s and ’40s for his 1945 book on the Métis. Sieg-
fried’s book was very much part of this tradition.
The work produced from Siegfried’s visits, Le Canada, les deux
races: Problèmes politiques contemporains, published in 1906, was
published in English as The Race Question in Canada in 1907. A
reprint edited by Frank Underhill in 1966 corrected several trans-
lation errors and provided a contextualized call to revisit Sieg-
fried’s first book on Canada. Siegfried’s work provides another
explication of Canada’s ongoing engagement not just with
context-specific discourses on race for the Canadian community
but also with the problems for Canadian unity when mixing of
the races is absent.
On Canada’s problem, Siegfried (1978, 14) had this to say: “In
the first place, and above all, it is a racial problem. Great Brit-
ain conquered our French possession in the New World, but she
failed either to annihilate or to assimilate the colonists whom we
left behind.” Here, as was the case with Durham, “race” is used to
frame the French Catholic and English Protestant populations.
Underhill argues in his introduction that “race” as it is used by
Siegfried is not consistent with how race was being researched in
the 1960s. However, in light of the definitions above, Siegfried
did seem to see Canada as confronting an internal racial problem
that he thought was fundamental to the survival of the country. It
was Siegfried’s (1978, 184) view that the English in Canada under-
stood themselves to be members “of the superior race.” Thus, by
looking at Siegfried’s work through a lens sensitive to racial poli-
tics, it is possible to discern not only the continued influence of
race in settler Canada’s identity and unity crises but also the way
racial mixing became a key element in conceiving the Canadian
problem.
Siegfried, again in keeping with Durham’s views, saw the church
as a major impediment to the mixing of the races. Reflecting on
the Quebec Act, Siegfried saw it as a treaty as much as a law, made
necessary “in a bilingual country in which two races live side by
side without mingling” (Siegfried 1978, 20). But on the other side
of Siegfried’s Durham-esque assimilative responses to Canadian
unity, Siegfried appreciated that there were a great many complex-
ities that lend themselves to resisting mixing. He remarked that
for threats like “dispersion and absorption,” the response seems to
be “that the Church, profoundly convinced that to keep the race
French was to keep it Catholic, came to look on isolation as the
chief safeguard for a racial individuality threatened on all sides by
the advances of the New World. Therefore it is that it has put out
all its efforts to segregate its flock from the rest of America” (Sieg-
fried, 25). In this formulation, the Church comes to be the central
body championing a policy of keeping the races distinct.
78 Daniel Voth
The threat of assimilation was seen to be so pernicious that Sieg-

fried (1978, 25–26) commented that the movement of a person
from being a Catholic to becoming a Protestant “involves gener-
ally the passing of the convert into the ranks of the English body:
the two things go together. In order to prevent these defections, the
Catholic Church has done everything in its power to lessen the
contact of the two races.” Much of this was operationalized by
maintaining distinct languages, the transcendence of which was
strongly discouraged by the Catholic church. The threat of learn-
ing English and increasing linguistic dualism meant “the strong-
hold of the Church is open to new attacks in the shape of the
social intercourse that ensues between the two races, and above
all in mixed marriages” (Siegfried, 26, emphasis added). Realizing
that having two races living together in cities makes policing the
purity of the races difficult, Siegfried observed that “the Church …
has reserved all her strength for the prevention as far as practi-
cable of marriages between Catholics and Protestants” (Siegfried,
26). These mechanisms were the starting points for protecting the
French race in North America.
While there is an emphasis in Siegfried’s thought on the role
that mixed marriages play in perpetuating the French people
as a Catholic people, it is by no means the only time this line of
thinking about racial mixing manifested itself in Siegfried’s work.
Rather, discouraging mixed-race marriages was but one part of a
system protecting the French race from being subsumed by the
English race. Education also served as part of the state-built bul-
wark against racial mixing. While English Protestants at best tol-
erated the clerical education offered in Quebec, Siegfried (1978,
61) also argues that “a secret desire to blend the two races, together
with an avowed fear of the power of the Church of Rome, are the
dominating motives of the English in regard to the schools.” Sieg-
fried believed that the English would use education as “a crucible
for the creation of a new race, united in language, customs, and
thought” (Siegfried, 15). Thus, elements of the apparatus of the
settler state were deployed to protect the French in Quebec while
the English bided their time, waiting for a moment when the state
could be used to mix the races, thereby ending discord in settler

Canada.
These are just parts of Siegfried’s thought. However, they
reveal a key element of the racialized logics in settler Canadian
politics that might be better seen as part of a longer tradition.
If one reverses the perspective slightly, an additional insight can
be gleaned. From an English perspective, resistance to mixing is
clearly seen by Siegfried as part of the now long-lamented problem
of building a unified settler state in Canada. Framed differently, if
only the races had mixed, there would have been an opportunity
to bring to a close a backward and inferior people in the interest
of creating a new, unified race in Canada. Here again, this thought
contains important threads from Durham’s report, in which racial
mixing, by coercion if not by consent, produces the political com-
munity so desired by settlers.
Siegfried remarked that the English, even in Quebec, thought
of themselves as conquerors stuck with a race they could not extin-
guish. It was in light of this point that he stated: “Think of the
Indian civil service, and you will understand better the rulers of
Canada” (Siegfried 1978, 185). Importantly, as understandings of
race changed over time and the Quebec provincial state grew and
became empowered and entrenched, the Québécois would cre-
ate a regime that sought to keep Indigenous Peoples of that land
in the same conquered state that the English had desired for the
French in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
“Contacts with the Indian and Eskimo Populations Have

Played a Negligible Part in Shaping Either Fragment”
At the same time that Underhill was editing The Race Question in
Canada and distancing himself from Siegfried’s use of “race,” a new
approach to describing and explaining Canada’s political culture
was emerging. Certain adherents of the fragment theory of politi-
cal culture that emerged in the 1950s and ’60s used explicitly racial-
ized understandings of peoples but, importantly, without using
the word “race.” This marks an important shift in the genealogy of
80 Daniel Voth
thought on racial mixing. Whereas Durham and Siegfried wrote

about their subjects using the language of race, in the remaining
works under examination race is an unspoken element of under-
standing the settler Canadian state.
Fragment theory seeks to explain the United States, Canada,
Quebec, and other current and former European colonies as ideo-
logical fragments of their respective metropoles. The theory traces
how fragmented European ideologies give rise to political culture
in new societies. Central to the theory is the premise that ideas
originating in Europe were altered or truncated in the process of
moving to North America. Great effort is made to explain why
the United States had little or no socialist tradition while Canada
had a stronger socialist tradition.3 In Kenneth McRae’s 1964 con-
tribution on the Canadian fragment, he tries to make sense of the
emergence of the English and French fragments.
While I share Debra Thompson’s view that there is much that
paying attention to race can tell us about the formulation of the
fragment thesis, the focus here is on racial mixing in McRae’s
thought. Though McRae (1964, 255) discusses the “métis” in Red
River as a “New Nation” that was “culturally more Indian than
European, credulous, easily aroused, yet superbly disciplined by
the skill and coordination required for the annual buffalo hunt,”
it is his treatment of the interaction of the English and French
fragments with Indigenous Peoples that is of interest. McRae
racializes Indigenous Peoples explicitly in his description of Euro-
Indigenous interaction. He argues that “the French and English in
North America faced indigenous populations that were sparse in
numbers, simple in culture, and relatively decentralized in tribal
organization” (McRae, 263). Here, early in his engagement with
the potential non-European influences on settler peoples, McRae
creates a racialized understanding of Indigenous Peoples as a
less culturally sophisticated people. Without ever using the term
“race,” or being explicit about what comparator is being used to
determine what “simple” means, McRae describes a people with-
out complex and rich cultural traditions, a consistent and ongo-
ing frame that compares Indigenous Peoples to the richness of
European and Canadian cultures and finds them lacking. McRae

uses the notion that settler-Indigenous intermarriages were rare as
evidence that “contacts with the Indian and Eskimo populations
have played a negligible part in shaping either fragment” (McRae,
263). He points specifically to the absence of French intermar-
riages and the abandoned policy of francisation.
McRae then notes that the English fragment also had “little
contact” with Indigenous Peoples. Though he does note that
where mixing did occur – namely, with the Métis – the result was
essentially the same: the mixing had little impact on the politi-
cal culture or trajectory of the English fragment. McRae believed
this because he thought that as English agrarian society emerged,
Indigenous hunting, gathering, and fishing societies retreated.
However, this belief is tempered by a mixing narrative:
The organized agrarianism of the English fragment thrust all

opposition aside and refused any form of accommodation with
an alien way of life. Throughout the formative years of the Eng-
lish fragment this attitude was reflected in official policy, which
until very recent times condemned the Indian and the métis to a
non-competitive, sheltered, subsidized, but essentially neglect-
ed and uneducated existence on reservations of his own. In the
most immediate sense this policy stemmed from a simple de-
mand for economy in governmental expenditure, but it also
seems to reflect the underlying propensity of the English fragment to
shrink from closer contact.
(McRae 1964, 263–64, emphasis added)
Thus, the absence of the mixing of the races, without saying

“races,” is a key component of McRae’s understanding of the
ideological integrity of the English and French fragments. Note,
though, that “mixing” is used by McRae as an explanatory factor
in a strikingly similar way to the previous works under investi-
gation: had there been a stronger settler desire for racial mixing,
there would have been a higher possibility that the ideas and
nature of the fragments would have been changed into something
82 Daniel Voth
new. Indeed, as McRae notes, this was exactly the case for the
Métis in the west. It was simply in opposition to the expansion of
the confidently superior agrarian English fragment that the Métis
had no hope of mixing.
All of Them Are Métis, and Gaudry’s Métis-ization

of Canada
What begins to emerge through all of this is a temporally unbounded

fixation with racial mixing, as well as a sense that racial mixing can
facilitate the political emergence of a single, new, unified, settler
Canadian political community. Anxiety over the viability of the
political community (or communities) remained a focus in Cana-
dian politics well into the early 2000s (Kernerman 2005). Events
such as the election of the Parti Québécois in 1976, the first refer-
endum on Quebec sovereignty in 1980, and the patriation debates
all contributed mightily to an ongoing scholarly concern about
the viability of a single settler Canada. In response to these events,
and the incredibly successful Indigenous protest movements that
stretched from 1969 to the mid-1990s, Alan Cairns authored a
work titled Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State in
2000. The book made numerous problematic assertions and was
roundly criticized by a new generation of Indigenous scholars;
however, it also advanced a highly particularized, yet seemingly
benign, understanding of the potential of racial mixing for saving
the Canadian political community.
Cairns lived, worked, and researched during the settler unity
crises of the second half of the twentieth century. In keeping
with this experience, his work reflects anxiety about Indigenous
Peoples not developing deep bonds of common citizenship with
Canadians. This concern was in response to the rising discourse
and politics of Indigenous nationalism. Throughout the book,
Cairns assesses the nature of this nationalism and its threat to
the life of the settler Canadian state. He deploys intermarriage
between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples as a means to
move Indigenous people away from their culture and land bases
and closer to a common citizenship with settler peoples. The

Métis people, defined as already mixed, embody this potential
in Cairns’s thought. With the Métis being the products of racial
intermarriage and already landless and urbanized, Cairns is able
to neatly conclude that the Métis are particularly poor candidates
for nationhood and, by extension, are an example of a people ripe
for common citizenship. Cairns relies in his thinking on cities to
knock down non-Canadian identities and weaken sentiments of
Indigenous nationhood. For him, urbanization is a success story
in which Indigenous Peoples are exposed to several things: the
power of Canadian culture, increased access to Canadian eco-
nomic prosperity, and a higher likelihood of intermarriage with
non-Indigenous people. The result of all of these factors is, in
Cairns’s thought, that the Métis people come to make the laud-
able decision to enter the majority society. Framing this explicitly
in terms of success, Cairns (2000, 185) states that Indigenous Peo-
ple “moving to the cities may be looked on by future generations
as pioneers, as though they then become settlers of the new age.”
In Cairns’s thought, intermarriage, or racial mixing, had an
important and by then well understood role to play in this pro-
cess. He argues: “The differential weight, in terms of both power
and numbers, of the interacting Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal soci-
eties almost inevitably means that a significant minority of the
former, with intermarriage often being the bridge, will merge into the
majority society” (Cairns 2000, 65, emphasis added). Through-
out the book, he stresses how important understanding intermar-
riage is to the question of building bonds of Canadian unity. The
implication of this line of argumentation is fairly clear: if there
were more racial mixing, we would see fewer troublesome Indig-
enous Peoples agitating against a common Canadian identity.
The orientation of his argument is fundamentally Durham-esque.
Just as Durham sought to use, in Cairns’s words, “the differential
weight, in terms of both power and numbers” of the English to
make a singular racial soup which would cook up into a unified
Canada, Cairns deployed the same logic toward the same end. For
Durham, the French might be nominally French but otherwise
84 Daniel Voth
extinguished; for Cairns, the same was true of Indigenous Peo-

ples. In light of the expression of these remarkably similar ideas,
independent of the passage of time, one can begin to appreciate
why the curés discussed by Siegfried were so adamantly opposed
to interracial marriages.
For those wishing to resist the notion that Cairns was not talk-
ing about race, consider this: Cairns never seriously entertains the
possibility that his racial causality might run in the other direction –
that an interracial marriage would beget an Indigenous child.
Thus the same kernel of thought found in Durham’s work can be
seen in Cairns’s work. Racial mixing – be it biological, social, eco-
nomic, or political – will contribute to the extinguishment of the
weaker and outmoded people. For Cairns’s argument to be true,
Indigenous People must have biological properties that cannot
survive the act of intermarriage. They can be bred out of existence.
With these works in mind, one can begin to better understand
the political dangers that racial mixing poses for the Métis. In
all of these discourses, the Métis people come to be the poster
children for racial mixing, the living embodiment of what non-
Indigenous academics and policy makers have been talking about
since before there was a Canada. Scholars, politicians, lawyers,
judges, and lay folk all feel they have an intrinsic understanding
of what the Métis people contribute to Canadian unity in part
because Canadians have been fixated on using racial mixing as a
tool to escape difficult problems of settler state building for a very
long time. Thus, “Métis” becomes “mixed” without any uneasi-
ness about the power dynamics involved in that transgression.
This thought is so pervasive in Canadian political science that
otherwise helpful works unintentionally get tripped up by it.
Consider James Tully’s foundational work, Strange Multiplicity:
Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity, published in 1995. I agree
wholly with Adam Gaudry (2013, 82–83), who argues that Tully
provides a helpful and robust framework to appreciate the consti-
tutional relationships between Indigenous and Canadian peoples
through the deployment of treaty. But Tully also uses the log-
ics of racial mixing to frame his conceptual development. Tully
uses the Oedipus story to point out that European constitutional

myths possess troubling moments of imposing constitutions on
others. Tully (1995, 22) argues that Oedipus’s imposition of a
foreign constitution on Thebes “blinds him to the injustice that
lies at the foundation of his rule.” It is only Antigone, “the child
of the crossing of native and newcomer cultures,” who is able to
fully grasp the injustice of the situation. According to Tully, it is
Antigone’s cultural mixing, the power of her hybridized world-
view, which allows her to appreciate and articulate the injustice of
misrecognition.
After framing the power conferred on Antigone by her mixed-
ness, Tully explains why he uses Bill Reid’s Spirit of Haida Gwaii
in his thought. He gently outlines the complex positions of the
occupants of the boat. Importantly for my purposes in this chap-
ter, Tully (1995, 25, emphasis added) argues that
the questioning, contestation and renegotiation of their cultur-

al identities seem plain for all to see. Is this not the constitution-
al game they are playing as they vie and squabble for position,
both in the Canoe and in Haida mythology? The chief signals
this Derridean feature because, although a Haida chief is usual-
ly a man, he is called laana augha, village mother, so he must act
like a mother in caring for the common good if s/he is to secure
respect and authority. All the passengers are Métis, exhibiting the
non-identity of cultural identities: the dogfish and mouse
women, the bear mother, who is part human, the wolf with his
human forepaws and the others, for they are other-than-human
persons who take off their furs and feathers at home and con-
verse like human persons.
If one were to swap out a different Indigenous People into this

section, would it make more sense than the use of the Métis? If it
were to read “All the passengers are Mohawk,” how would the
reader react? I would argue – with no small amount of confusion.
They would be confused because there is no reason why the occu-
pants would be Mohawk and so far from the territory of the
86 Daniel Voth
Haudenosaunee. Would it help to keep the passage consistent

with the peoples from which the carving emerges? If he had writ-
ten “All the passengers are Haida,” the reader could probably gloss
over this framing without much thought, but it is not particularly
clear what meaning is to be gleaned from pointing out they are
Haida. However, if the passage were changed to “All the passen-
gers are mixed,” only then does the section make sense.
Being mixed in this intellectual moment imbues the “Métis”
people with a particular cultural perspective by virtue of their
mixedness. Tully’s telling of Antigone’s mixed position in the
Oedipus story is a familiar one to Canadians – indeed, so much
so that “Métis are mixed” can be deployed as a foil for a Cana-
dian constitutional narrative even though a completely differ-
ent Indigenous People from a completely different place has
been imposed onto Haida stories. Said differently, there are no
buffalo in that boat, yet the occupants become Métis. A reader’s
familiarity with Tully’s misstep does not, generally speaking,
interrupt Tully’s argument. Instead, Tully imposes a foreign
constitution, albeit unintentionally, on both the Métis and
the Haida in his analysis, an act that he was explicitly writing
against.
Thus, when Adam Gaudry pointedly critiqued John Ralston
Saul’s 2008 book, A Fair Country, for “imagining a mythical ‘métis’
union between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, based
on cultural mixing in the early moments of Canadian history,” he
was not only touching on a recent activity in political thought but
also giving chase to a recent iteration of a much older tradition of
operationalizing racial mixing in the service of settler Canadian
state building. Drawing from the work of Chris Andersen, Gaudry
(2013, 77) points out that “Saul assumes that the Métis people are
defined by cultural and biological mixedness, instead of being
defined as a coherent sociopolitical entity with a common cultural
formation, history, and set of values.” Gaudry is absolutely right
that there is a desire on the part of Canadian political theorists
to use Métis people “in a way that fits within Canada’s vision of
itself” toward a unifying “multicultural métissage” (Gaudry, 66, 75).
I would add that this trend is wrapped up in a long-standing

fetishization of racial mixing as a political unity tool.
Indeed, Saul (2008, 8) must have felt comfortable and at ease
when he said: “There is a perfectly straightforward foundation to
these four centuries of shaping Canada. Anyone whose family arrived
before the 1760s is probably part Aboriginal.” This jumping off point
makes a great deal of sense in a country where Saul’s fetishization of
what he describes as “physical intermingling” has been an intellec-
tual and political preoccupation since at least the release of the Dur-
ham report in 1839 (Saul 2008, 8). In spite of the 169 years between
Durham and Saul, they both manage to locate in the physical inter-
mingling of peoples a path out of a divided settler polity, perennially
bereft of a legitimate or just way of dealing with difference.
Perhaps already sensitive to the racialized argument he was
advancing, Saul tried to head off criticism in an appropriately
named chapter “Marrying Up.” In it, Saul (2008, 8) insists that he
“is not making a racial argument that links blood and character.”
I would offer that he is making an argument that was framed in
exactly those terms in a different era. He is also making an argu-
ment that links blood to a particular political outcome. As many
scholars of race point out, the categories and meanings imposed
by ostensibly biological traits and actions can change over time.
What one witnesses in Saul’s argument is not only the way race as
a concept ceases to be something people talk openly about over
169 years but also how the same argument can be deployed using
different language to try to solve a similar problem. Blood mix-
ing is still a “magical mechanism” that Saul uses to resolve Cana-
dian unity debates.4 Indeed, his work should perhaps be seen as a
much delayed kick at the can of 1960s fragment theory, in which
McRae professed that no mixing occurred to change the frag-
ments. Here, Saul simply argues the opposite; mixing did hap-
pen, and it blended the peoples into a Métis civilization. Unity
problem solved.
So when the audience laughed at Eric Robinson’s joke about Greg

Dewar in 2007, they did so, in part, because a kernel of political
88 Daniel Voth
discourse that feels safe, normal, and natural lies at the centre of
the joke. And there is a reason they felt that way. Successive gener-
ations of settlers have grown up with narratives that make the joke
feel familiar, so much so that even as expectations of language use
change, to the extent that race is no longer something people feel
they should talk about, the operationalization of racial-mixing
discourses continues to saturate settler politics and settler politi-
cal concerns.
The problem for the Métis people is that we appear to be the
living embodiment of that process that has been written about for
at least 169 years. Importantly, all of this literature matters because
it advances the violent, heteronormative, gendered disempower-
ment of the Métis and other Indigenous Peoples. As set out in
the works above, racial mixing is thought about in ways designed
to erase peoples through heterosexual physical intermingling –
to use Saul’s language. This intermingling process must unfold
with the wombs of women serving as the crucible for birthing
successive generations of physically intermingled children. Here,
women’s bodies are placed in between the realization of a unified
political community and being trapped in a fractured settler state.
All of this serves the point made by Chris Andersen in his
path-breaking book and articles: every time the Métis people are
reduced to being a mixed people, we are seen to be less Indig-
enous and less of a people (Andersen 2014). I would add to this:
by virtue of the attack on our indigeneity, we are also seen as less
threatening to the settler Canadian state. The result is that racial
mixing is used as a tool to disempower and pacify indignant
peoples – a tool that has continuously been sharpened for nearly
two hundred years.
Every time a settler rises up to claim an identity on the basis of
a mixed ancestry, they use the politics of racial mixing to empower
themselves while disempowering the Métis people. Every time
other Indigenous Peoples diminish our indigeneity on the basis
of being mixed, they unwittingly disempower themselves while
empowering our common oppressors, because if being mixed
makes the Métis less Indigenous, then the same logics can be used
against all other Indigenous Peoples, Status or non-Status, who

are also mixed. The ramifications of an operationalized racial mix-
ing, for all Indigenous Peoples, is that as “dominant society” blood
increases, one’s ability to be Indigenous ought to decrease, and as
skin becomes whiter, so too should one’s political community.
The politics of racial mixing is something that humans have
created. Racial mixing cannot do anything, which is why Saul,
Cairns, Tully, McRae, Siegfried, and Durham all had something
to write about. Mixing was never going to accomplish the task
successive generations of scholars and policy makers wanted it to,
namely, solve settler Canadian political unity crises. However, this
failure has not stopped attempts to use racial mixing as a tool of
Indigenous disempowerment in service of political unity.
Return with me for a moment to that NDP fundraiser. I’ve
argued here that, like a lot of jokes, there was more to Robin-
son’s barb than what was on its face. But also think about the
room in which this joke was told. It was filled with a premier, min-
sters of the Crown, elected officials, organizers, activists, party
stalwarts, talented spin doctors, and future political leaders, all
powerful people involved in governing the territory of the Métis
Nation. The laughter that rang out was filled with political power
that undercut Métis peoplehood in our own territory. So the next
time the joke about the Métis representing half of First Nations
interests is told, or the Métis being mixed of this or that, will you
laugh? Or will you work to stop our disempowerment and push
back against almost two centuries of racial political thought in
what is commonly called Canada?
Notes
1 For a nuanced discussion about the pitfalls of focusing on this debate,

see Mahtani (2014, 22–26).
2 Jarett Henderson (2013, 345) offers a nuanced interpretation of the way
that “race” was taken up by French Patriotes during Durham’s tenure in
the Canadas. He points out that “in white Lower Canada, differences of
race were more often than not located in and expressed through cul-
tural references to the French or English races and not their whiteness.”
90 Daniel Voth
This being said, more attention ought to be paid to the way Durham
comes to racialize white French settlers in ways that are coded as physio-
logical. Durham’s description of their lack of industriousness and their
intellectual failings are all components of categorization, which the
process of racialization relies on for the production of racialized sub-
jects. From this perspective, the whiteness of French settlers may not be
the axis on which the process of racialization is charted; however, that
does not mean the French are not being racialized. For more on this
discussion, please see Henderson (2013, 2018).
3 For an excellent re-examination of this thesis, please see Ajzenstat (1990).
4 Please also see the draft paper presented by Paul Chartrand (2001) that
explores this point’s legal and constitutional dimensions.
References
Ajzenstat, Janet. 1990. “Durham and Robinson: Political Faction and

Moderation.” Journal of Canadian Studies 25(1): 24–38.
Andersen, Chris. 2014. “Métis”: Race, Recognition, and the Struggle for Indig-
Brown, Jennifer. 1985. “Diverging Identities: The Presbyterian Métis of
St. Gabriel Street, Montreal.” In New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in
North America, vol. 1, edited by Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer Brown,
195–206. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
Cairns, Alan. 2000. Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State.
Cameron, David. 1990. “Lord Durham Then and Now.” Journal of Cana-
dian Studies 25(1): 5–23.
Chartrand, Paul. 2001. “Confronting the ‘Mixed-Blood Majic’: Towards
a Definition of ‘Métis’ for Purposes of Section 35 of the Constitution Act
1982.” Paper presented at the meeting for the Canadian/Indigenous
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Empire, Independence and the Struggle to Abolish Irresponsible Gov-
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in British Debates about the Colony of Lower Canada, 1828–1837.” In
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Ottawa: Golden Dog Press.
4
Challenging a Racist Fiction: A Closer
Look at Métis–First Nations Relations
Robert Alexander Innes
Scholars have gone to great lengths to emphasize the racial

and cultural differences and tensions between the Métis and First
Nations people. For early twentieth-century scholars, race was the
primary signifier of the difference between the Métis and First
Nations people (Giraud 1986; Howard 1974; Innis 1930; Mor-
ton 1939, 1957; Stanley 1936). Since the 1970s, historians have
attempted to move away from race; however, race was still embed-
ded in their analyses (see Brown 1980; Dickason 1985; Foster 1976,
1985; Peterson 1978, 1982, 1985; and Van Kirk 1983). As Brenda
Macdougall (2012, 424) points out: “So-called mixed people
in North America have proven to be a challenge to intellectual
thought since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and con-
temporary scholarship on Métis history continues to struggle with
how to describe this new people.” In addition, the ways in which
politicians have defined First Nations and the Métis people have
had profound impacts on their rights. So effectively have colonial
actors employed racialized notions of Métis and First Nations peo-
ple that they have distanced the cultural similarities they share,
leading many Indigenous People to internalize this racist fiction.
One result of the internalization of these racial notions has been a
determination by Métis and First Nations political organizations
and individuals to draw hard cultural boundaries to highlight the
distinction between them. This has led some scholars to advocate
for a different approach to conducting Indigenous history. As J.R.
Miller (1988, 19) noted over thirty years ago: “Investigators of
92
Challenging a Racist Fiction 93
both Indian and Metis history topics really must ask themselves
how much longer they are willing to allow obsolete statutory dis-
tinctions that were developed in Ottawa in pursuit of bureaucratic
convenience and economy to shape their research strategies.”
Scholars, politicians, and the general public have used race as
the starting point for their explanations of the Métis people. How-
ever, race has not been applied to First Nations in the same way,
even though many were also of mixed white-Indigenous ancestry
and had in the prereserve period integrated various European cul-
tural practices. At the same time, the cultural similarities between
the Métis and First Nations people are ignored. Again, as Mac-
dougall (2012, 425) states: “Canadian scholars, like their American
counterparts, have been overly and unproductively preoccupied
with race at the expense of culture and the categories within each
cultural ontology that establishes who and how people are real.”
Chris Andersen (2014) has forcefully and accurately argued against
the notion of the Métis being understood simply as mixed-race
people, because it suggests that any mixed-race person is Métis,
which acts to undercut Métis culture and a sense of peoplehood.
Andersen explains why the way race has been applied to the Métis
has larger implications for all Indigenous People in Canada:
In conversation with academic colleagues and policy actors, I

am often asked why I (or anyone else) should care so much that
Métis are so widely understood as mixed. Have not fur trade
historians, literary scholars, and others already extensively
documented numerous instances of Métis mixedness? More
plainly, don’t many/most Métis just look more mixed? And ha-
ven’t many Métis community members and even leaders also
emphasized our mixedness? What’s the big deal? The big deal –
and why other Indigenous peoples and communities in particu-
lar should care – is that the racialization of the Métis has never
begun nor ended with us. Indeed, despite its specific impacts
on our communities and our peoplehood, racialization has
never been about us. Instead it has been part of a larger set of
colonial projects through which administrators have attempted
94 Robert Alexander Innes
to usurp all Indigenous territories upon which colonial nation-

states such as Canada have been produced and legitimated and
Indigenous peoples displaced and dispossessed.
(Andersen, 10–11)
The Métis people have been constructed and portrayed as racially

distinct from First Nations. Because of their whiteness, white peo-
ple placed them above First Nations people in their white-created
racial hierarchy, disregarding the intermarriages that took place
between First Nations and white people. With their racial distinc-
tion “established,” it became much easier to assert that a distinct
cultural difference existed between the Métis and First Nations
people. This was aided in part by scholars’ tendency to describe
Indigenous People, especially those on the Northern Plains, in
tribal terms, overlooking the fact that bands were their social,
cultural, and political centre. Scholars have extrapolated interac-
tions at the band level to the tribal level, ignoring the autonomous
natures of band societies.
The Métis, Plains Cree, Saulteaux, and Assiniboine people were
closely related. Following Indigenous cultural protocols, each incor-
porated people from the other cultural groups into their bands to
create multicultural bands, which only could have happened if they
possessed shared cultural practices. Though there have been a few
scholars who discuss, to some degree, the relations between Métis
and English Halfbreeds, there has not been much attention given
to the level of interactions between Métis and First Nations.1 As I
will show, an examination of Métis–First Nations relations demon-
strates that emphasis on the racial difference of the Métis people
from First Nations and the tension between them belies the fact
that these groups in the prereserve period, and into the postreserve
period, shared many cultural characteristics, such as kinship prac-
tices. What becomes clear is that the Métis people are Indigenous
not only because of the inherited ancestral lineages from First
Nations but also because of their shared cultural practices.
Tensions between the Métis and First Nations are viewed by
many as typifying their relationship. Scholars have pointed to
the frustration expressed by the Plains Cree, Assiniboine, and Saul-

teaux about Métis buffalo-hunting practices as the source of, and
an example of, the conflict between them and the Métis prior to
the reserve period. For example, Laura Peers (1994, 186) states that
the “Métis hunts continued to deplete the dwindling bison herds,
and, under such conditions, decades-old resentment against them
escalated into real hostility.” She doesn’t actually provide any evi-
dence of the “decades-old resentment”; nonetheless, the Plains
Cree, Assiniboine, and Saulteaux concerned about Métis hunting
practices, according to John Milloy (1988, 107) and Greg Camp
(1987, 42), attempted to settle the situation by expressing their
concerns to fur traders, keeping the Métis under surveillance, and
subjecting them to “annoyances” or lighting prairie fires. How-
ever, considering the central importance of the buffalo to their
own economic, social, and spiritual well-being, it is surprising that
there are no accounts of the Plains Cree, Assiniboine, and Saul-
teaux waging war on the Métis. That the Plains Cree, Assiniboine,
and Saulteaux fought many battles against other First Nations is
well documented. Although there may be references to conflict
between the Plains Cree, Assiniboine, and Saulteaux and the
Métis, there are no actual accounts of any battles. This suggests that
the Plains Cree, Assiniboine, and Saulteaux treated the Métis differ-
ently than, say, how they treated the Blackfoot, where stolen horses
could spark a violent response. The fact that historians have never
presented evidence of any actual warfare between them and the
Métis, in comparison to what has been documented between them
and other Indigenous groups, points to the level of the relationship
the Plains Cree, Assiniboine, and Saulteaux had with the Métis.
This is not to say that relations between the Plains Cree, Assini-
boine, and Saulteaux and the Métis were always smooth. Jessica
Kolopenuk (2017) points out, for example, that in the nineteenth
century the relationship between Chief Peguis’s band and the
Métis in the Red River region was marked by tension and that
those tensions persisted for some time. There is no indication,
however, that this characterized Saulteaux–Métis relations in general.
The tensions that Kolopenuk describes do seem to point to the fact
that Métis society was structured much like that of the Plains
Cree, Assiniboine, and Saulteaux, that their relations occurred at
the band level. That is, socially and politically they were organized
in bands, or what Nicole St-Onge and Brenda Macdougall (2013)
call brigades. The bands were semiautonomous, kin-based entities
that came together in times of need, such as in buffalo hunts and
warfare, and though these bands in general were linked through
kinship, there were times that conflict did arise.
The existence of tensions between bands was not uncommon;
however, these tensions are usually portrayed as being on a tribal
or national level, a portrayal that serves to erase the autonomous
nature of the bands. Laura Peers provides an example in describ-
ing relations between the Assiniboine and the Saulteaux. She
argues that the two groups did not get along. She cites John Tan-
ner – an American who was kidnapped as a youth by the Shawnee,
adopted into the Odawa, and ended up living in Red River – who
said that “something of our dislike [for the Assiniboine] may per-
haps be attributed to the habitually unfriendly feeling [that] exists
among the Ojibbeways” (Peers 1994, 44). She further cites the
explorers Lewis and Clark, who stated in 1804 that a partial state
of war existed between the Saulteaux and Assiniboine (Peers, 44).
Yet, Peers fails to note that at the same time Tanner and his family
were living with the Cree and Assiniboine in the Pembina Moun-
tain region they were “more or less intermixed with each other”
and had learned the other’s language (Tanner 2000, 132). Mean-
while, Harold Hickerson details how the Cree were not happy with
the presence of the Saulteaux. However, even though Hickerson
notes a tension between the Cree and the Saulteaux, he does men-
tion that they launched a joint attack against the Sioux (Hicker-
son 1956, 310). That scholars have often used interband relations
as examples of intertribal relations perhaps helps to explain this
seemingly contradictory evidence.
Though the Cree, Assiniboine, and Saulteaux shared many
cultural beliefs and practices, there were still times when conflict
arose. For example, Tanner (2000, 79) describes an incident of
perhaps mistaken identity, in which someone or some people from
a Cree band threatened members from his band “on the account of
some old quarrel [that they had] with a band of Ojibbways.” This
particular conflict is described as being between the Cree and the
Ojibwe, but clearly it is only between two bands, not two tribes,
highlighting that interrelations were a band consideration and
not a tribal one. That conflict would arise between bands from
two different cultural groups is not surprising. As David Rodnick
(1939, 409) points out, conflict between bands from the same cul-
tural group was also common. He states that tension arose among
Assiniboine bands and states that “inter-band feuds of momen-
tary duration took place occasionally. These, however, were con-
flicts between two large families, rather than actual band affairs.”
Though Rodnick mentions disputes as being short in duration,
there is certainly nothing to suggest that the conflict Tanner
describes with the Cree band was anything but a minor short-term
issue. This does not mean that bands from various groups could
not have had long-term disputes or feuds, as perhaps was the case
between Peguis’s band and the Métis.
The close relations between the Métis and Plains Cree, Assini-
boine, and Saulteaux bands meant that the latter were unwilling
to wage war against the Métis, even though the Métis were infring-
ing on an important social and economic resource. These ties help
to explain why there were Métis who fought alongside their First
Nations relatives in battles against other First Nations groups.
The level of tension and the different treatment – vis-à-vis other
Indigenous groups – between Plains Cree, Assiniboine, Saulteaux
and the Métis has been glossed over by scholars, whose work has
unjustifiably emphasized differences between First Nations and
the Métis. Any tension that occurred between the Métis bands
and the Cree, Assiniboine, and Saulteaux bands does not appear
to have been any more significant than tensions that occurred
between the bands of these First Nations.
The reason for the lack of warfare was likely kinship ties between
the groups. The close relations between First Nations and the
Métis is highlighted by the degree of intermarriage. For exam-
ple, Chief Poundmaker’s mother is reputed to have been Métis.
Chief Okanase (Little Bone), or Michel Cardinal, was of Saul-

teaux/Métis ancestry and had many wives who were either Saul-
teaux or Métis or both, and he had a number of prominent sons,
including Louis O’Soup (Devine 2004, 120). Chief Gabriel Coté,
or Pigeon, was the son of a Saulteaux mother and a Métis man
(Barkwell and Longclaws 1996, 95–96, citing John Tobias).
Heather Devine (2004, 132) suggests that Chief Cowessess may
have been Marcel Desjarlais, who was of Saulteaux and Métis
ancestry. Although the Métis had developed a separate culture, it
contained enough common points with Plains Cree and Saulteaux
cultures that they were able to marry into these bands without any
significant disruptions to either group.
In her 2006 article, “Uncertain Margins: Métis and Saulteaux
in St-Paul des Saulteaux, Red River, 1821–1870,” Nicole St-Onge
demonstrates that scholars overlooked Métis–Saulteaux relations
during the mid-nineteenth century in St. Paul des Saulteaux,
located on the western edge of the Red River colony. The relations
described in her article provide a counterpoint to the strained rela-
tions that existed between Peguis’s band and the Métis described
by Kolopenuk, underscoring their shared cultural similarities
while highlighting the autonomy that existed among the bands.
St-Onge states that scholars since the early 1980s have accepted
the notion that the Métis “had endogamous tendencies by the
early and mid-nineteenth century with men occasionally bringing
native-Indian wives into the community and Métis women also
occasionally incorporating Euro-Canadians, white merchants and
voyageurs in the fold” (St-Onge, 3). Some scholars, such as Laura
Peers and Sarah Carter, have alluded to intermarriages between
the bands of Plains Cree, Saulteaux, and the Métis. However,
Peers points to economic reasons for the intermarriages and does
not mention cultural similarities while Carter describes the multi-
cultural bands as Plains Cree, which implies that those who mar-
ried into a band assimilated into that band’s culture.2
By examining church and census records, St-Onge shows in
contrast to previous research that there was actually a higher rate
of intermarriage between the two groups than previously thought
and places these intermarriages within the context of shared kin-

ship practices. The prominence of the notion of Métis endogamy
emphasizes the cultural differences between the Métis and Saul-
teaux and other First Nations groups. This difference is epitomized
by the mischaracterization of buffalo hunting as belonging to the
Métis and fishing, trapping, tapping for syrup, and salt making
belong to the Saulteaux. However, as St-Onge points out, Métis
women who married Saulteaux men became involved in Saulteaux
economic activities. The intermixing of these two groups “indi-
cates that, prior to 1870, ethnic identities were fluid, relational and
situational” (St-Onge, 9). The Métis and Saulteaux shared suffi-
cient cultural kinship practices to allow for the incorporation of
new members: “Given the practices of incorporation and inclu-
siveness of both the Métis and Saulteaux, there was no reason or
necessity in the course of their lives for residents of the Northwest
to limit themselves to one identity” (St-Onge, 9). Significantly, St-
Onge states: “If mechanisms existed in both Métis and Saulteaux
communities to incorporate European outsiders into extensive
family networks, it was all the easier for people already closely
allied to merge with either or both communities as circumstances
dictated” (St-Onge, 9).
St-Onge challenges the perception of Métis–First Nations rela-
tions in important ways. That First Nations and the Métis inte-
grated Europeans into their groups is well accepted, yet the idea
that First Nations and the Métis could join each other’s bands
because of their shared cultural understandings has not been
given much consideration. Scholars have simply ignored or at least
downplayed the similar cultural kinship attributes that the groups
shared. However, as St-Onge (2006, 10) states, an “initial conclu-
sion advanced here is that converging histories, economic pursuits
and kinship ties were blurring the ethnic distinction between the
Métis and their close allies, the Ojibwa-Saulteaux, and perhaps
others, as the nineteenth century progressed.” Scholars’ inability
to see the cultural similarities reflects a tendency to highlight the
cultural differences between First Nations and the Métis people.
That tendency itself has been fuelled by an implicitly racial view
of these groups. St-Onge’s findings, then, are significant because

they help to explain how Métis individuals could be incorporated
into bands and even become leaders. Conversely, as St-Onge and
Carolyn Podruchny (2012, 81) make clear, Métis bands also incor-
porated outsiders in the same way: “As with other multicultural
bands, the Metis web allowed for the incorporation of outsiders –
including new Indian bands or incoming fur trade employees –
via marriage and fictive kin practices, such as god-parenting and
adoption.”
The existence of close relations and similar cultural features
among the Métis and Plains Cree, Assiniboine, and Saulteaux
are illustrated both by the fact that many bands contained Métis
members and the Chiefs’ desire to have the Métis included in
treaties. During Treaty 4 negotiations in 1874, for example, Chief
Kamooses (also spelled “Kanooses”) requested that the Métis be
included (Morris 1991, 119). Two years later, at the Treaty 6 negoti-
ations, Chief Mistawasis also requested that his Métis relatives be
included (Morris, 222). In 1881 in the Cypress Hills, Chiefs Lucky
Man and Little Pine made similar requests (Hogue 2002, 10). That
same year, the governor general, the Marquis of Lorne, visited
the North-West Territories and met with First Nations leaders at
Fort Qu’Appelle. The spokesperson for the assembled Chiefs was
Louis O’Soup, a headman for Chief Cowessess and later Chief of
the band himself. Among the list of grievances O’Soup presented
to Lorne was a request that the Métis be included in the treaties
(Carter 2003).
Even after the government refused to enter into treaty negotia-
tions with the Métis, many simply joined their relatives in bands
that had been recognized as “Indian.” In 1876, after Treaties 4 and
6 had been signed, O’Soup continued to request that the Métis be
allowed to take treaty. As he told James Walsh, the superintendent
of the North West Mounted Police at Fort McLeod, they “regarded
them as their brothers of the plains and were not inclined to part
company with them now” (Hogue 2002, 119). O’Soup’s and other
leaders’ multiple requests for the inclusion of the Métis into treaty
fits with the reality of many bands in the Northern Plains. For
Indigenous Peoples, kinship was of great importance, and they

simply did not accept white notions of race. As Michel Hogue
makes clear: “Ethnic or racial designations, or the questions of
blood that underpinned them, were less compelling than consid-
erations such as relatedness or kinship and the fulfillment of the
responsibilities that flowed from such connections” (Hogue, 119).
The irony of all of this is that Louis O’Soup – who was himself
Saulteaux, Métis (from his dad), and Assiniboine (from his mom),
and who had at one point offered to send assistance to Riel in
Batoche and had agreed to help the Turtle Mountain Saulteaux
and the Métis in their attempts to gain legal recognition from
the US government – was never considered anything but a First
Nations man.
O’Soup lobbied for the inclusion of the Métis into treaty.
According to M.G. Dickieson, however, whom Hogue cites, the
Cree and Assiniboine Chiefs gathered at Qu’Appelle were against
the idea of including Métis in treaty (Hogue 2002, 122). However,
Hogue does not say who those Chiefs were, and it is not clear if
that is because Dickieson did not provide the names (and, if he did
not, why he would not provide them). However, the government
would have been more than happy to grant the wishes of anony-
mous Chiefs to exclude the Métis, because this happened to fall in
line with the government’s own desires. At any rate, Hogue does
make it clear that some Chiefs did want to exclude the Métis, and
if these views were presented to Dickieson, they demonstrate the
autonomy of the bands. This highlights the fact that a central gov-
erning structure, which was supposed to exist among tribes, did
not exist among the Plains Cree, Assiniboine, Saulteaux, and the
Métis people. Political authority rested with the bands, and bands
made decisions that best suited their own interests.
Many bands on the Northern Plains were multicultural in
nature. In this sense, “multicultural” does not mean the phenome-
non described by Susan Sharrock (1974), in which Cree and Assini-
boine folks came together, formed bands, and created a singular
hybridized Cree–Assiniboine culture. In this case, “multicultural”
means people from various cultural groups being incorporated
into bands with everyone’s cultural integrity intact, or at least rela-

tively intact. According to Hogue (2002, 119):
The dislocation of disease, war, and trade in the early to

mid-nineteenth century promoted complex patterns of merger
among various Plains people, and particularly among the Crees
[Plains Cree], Plains Ojibwas [Saulteaux], Assiniboine, and
Plains Metis who occupied territory jointly, intermarried, and
collaborated in matters of hunting, trade, and war. These pat-
terns had, by the 1870s created a complex, deeply mixed ethnic
landscape across much of the northern plains.
This kind of interaction between these groups would not have

been possible were they not closely linked by kinship and culture.
These groups were able to intermix because of their shared under-
standing of the way kinship should be enacted. Intermarriage did
not happen to the same extent and in the same way that it did with
folks from other cultural groups, where individuals would marry
in or be adopted.
That the Métis had many cultural similarities with their First
Nation relatives is highlighted by the way they were perceived by
some outsiders. For example, in the Cypress Hills, many Métis
presented petitions to lobby the government for reserves. As
Hogue (2002, 125) explains: “Although the Metis petitioners had
carefully distinguished themselves from Indians, Colonel Dennis
claimed that the Plains Metis who inhabited the Cypress Hills-
Wood Mountain region, ‘differ[ed] but little, excepting in name,
from the Indians.’” Though the Métis were culturally different
from other Indigenous Peoples on the Northern Plains, they were
not distinct. Nonetheless, their indigeneity was tempered by their
perceived whiteness, as Dennis argued that the government should
not enter into treaty with them because to do so would keep “them
in their semi-barbarous state.” This common racialized view of the
Métis, that they were racially inferior to white people but superior
to First Nations, would shape the way white people viewed the
Métis and First Nations to the present. Nonetheless, even though
Dennis accepted the racialized view of the Métis as being different

from their First Nations kin, he could not distinguish their cul-
tural differences so readily.
Hogue also provides examples of Métis interactions with and
among First Nations that varied little from the ways that First
Nations interacted with one another. In Montana, in 1877, the US
Cavalry launched a war against Chief Joseph’s Nez Perce people.
During this conflict, the Métis assisted the Nez Perce. At one point
during a snowstorm, some twenty Nez Perce came upon a Métis
camp, where they were provided with food, shelter, and clothing.
When US Cavalry scouts found them, the Métis refused to hand
them over (Hogue 2015, 130). “Throughout the conflict,” Hogue
explains, “a number of Assiniboine and Gros Ventre enlisted to
support the [US Cavalry General] Miles’s efforts to capture or kill
any of the Nez Perce refugees, whereas Plains Cree, [Saulteaux],
and Metis camps offered some shelter to those making their
escape” (Hogue, 130). A number of Nez Perce made it safely to
the Cypress Hills on the Canadian side. O’Soup himself married
one of the Nez Perce women who made it to Canada.
For many communities, relations between the Métis and First
Nations in the twentieth century continued pretty much as they
had in the nineteenth century. By way of an example, consider
the twentieth-century interactions between people on Cowessess
First Nation and the neighbouring Métis community of Marieval.
Intermarriages between the two communities were common. In his
book, Treaty Promises, Indian Reality: Life on a Reserve, Cowessess
Elder the late Harold Lerat describes how his grandfather’s brother
Pierre Lerat married a Métis woman, Cecil Desjarlais, became
enfranchised, and took scrip for $160. Later, however, Lerat decided
he wanted to be a treaty “Indian” again, which was allowed on the
condition that he pay back the scrip money using his, his wife’s,
and his children’s annuity payments (Lerat 2005). Another Cowes-
sess Elder talked about his people’s interaction with the Métis: “My
aunts married Métis people. We used to go visit them. My mother
and them were close … You see, the Métis lived over there on the
other side of the [Qu’Appelle] river” (Innes 2013, 110–11).
In another example, a veteran of the Second World War who

grew up in Marieval married a Cowessess woman. She lost her
status upon marrying him but regained it after the Indian Act
was amended in 1985. The veteran himself gained Indian status
as well, because his mother, too, was originally from Cowessess
(Innes 2000). In my own family, my grandfather Samson Pelletier,
who was from Cowessess, in 1939 married my grandmother Rose
Agathe Pelletier (her maiden name was Pelletier as well), a Michif-
speaking Métis woman from Marieval who gained Indian status
and band membership after the marriage.3
The presence of the Roman Catholic Church on Cowessess and
other activities no doubt contributed to the continued relationship
between Cowessess and Marieval people. Cowessess members and
the Métis Marieval people were Catholics and attended the church
on the reserve. That the two communities shared the same church
meant that the priest at times advocated on their behalf. This was
especially true in the 1930s, when jobs and money were scarce.
The priest sent a letter to Ottawa requesting that Indian Affairs
increase funding: “The Indians are generally poor, the halfbreeds
living around them are poorer still, so our chances of collecting
money among them are small indeed” (Lerat 2005, 125). Though
this request was made as much to benefit the Church’s collection
plate as it was to assist parishioners, it does show that people from
both communities attended the same church on the reserve and
suffered similar social and economic difficulties. In fact, in 1934
the church records showed that 134 Cowessess families and 34 Métis
families attended church at Cowessess (Lerat, 125). Many Marieval
Métis are buried on the reserve. In addition to attending church,
Cowessess and Marieval people socialized together by going to
dances, playing baseball, and engaging in other activities.
There is no doubt that the presence of the Métis added a certain
complexity to intra-Indigenous relations. This complexity was due
in no small part to outsiders’ attempts to understand the impact
of the racial makeup of the Métis. Scholars have purportedly
tried to understand the Métis by concentrating on their cultural
rather than racial attributes, but many have nonetheless implicitly
categorized the Métis as a racial category distinct from First

Nations people. For example, the Métis are frequently described
as cultural brokers, cultural mediators, or bicultural because of
their ability to straddle First Nations and European cultures. They
were also buffalo hunters or farmers, French-speaking Catholics,
fiddle players, wore sashes, and jigged. However, First Nations
were also cultural brokers, cultural mediators, and were bicultural
or even multicultural. There were many First Nations people and
groups who, to varying degrees, acculturated themselves to vari-
ous European practices and values – including learning to farm,
converting to Catholicism (or other Christian religions), playing
the fiddle, wearing sashes, and even jigging. In addition, many
First Nations were also of mixed First Nations and white ances-
try. No matter the degree that they adopted European cultural
practices or intermarried with white people, these individuals or
communities are not usually viewed as anything less than First
Nation; their indigeneity is not questioned. The difference is that
historical and contemporary outsiders have viewed the Métis and
First Nations through racialized lenses.
Scholars, and others, have typically associated the Métis’ Métis-
ness with their level of whiteness. This tendency is evident, for
example, in John Foster’s (1994) notion of the “proto-Metis.” Fos-
ter centres the creation of the Métis on the French freemen, inde-
pendent fur traders or, as he calls them, “outsider adult males”
who in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries married
into Cree and other bands in the Athabasca region and formed
their own bands consisting of French freemen and their wives and
children. According to Foster, it was the French freemens’ ethos
that was the underlying motivation for the creation of these new
bands. This ethos “emphasized the necessity of being a man of
consequence in one’s own eyes and in the eyes of one’s fellows,”
referring to the other French freemen (Foster, 9). In other words,
French freemen were described as having a large degree of asser-
tiveness in contrast to First Nations males. Foster described these
bands as proto-Metis because they were too Indian and not quite
white enough to be considered full-blown Métis.
One of the issues with Foster’s approach is that it leads people

to think more about European cultural influences in the creation
of the Métis to the neglect of Indigenous cultural influences.
This dissociates the indigeneity from Métis cultural expressions
and heightens the racial differences between the Métis and First
Nations. No matter how desirous the French freemen were to
make it on their own, the reality is that if they could not demon-
strate a sufficient level of acculturation to guarantee their families’
survival in their social, cultural, and political milieu, they would
not have been able to form their own bands. In other words,
the French freemen would have had to become bicultural. First
Nations women played a significant role in the acculturation pro-
cess of the freemen.
By emphasizing the European cultural influences on Métis
cultural formation, scholars have erased the significance of First
Nations culture and the role of First Nations and Métis women on
Métis cultural development. Brenda Macdougall (2006, 437–38)
describes the role that women had in the development of Métis
culture:
As Aboriginal women married outsider adult male fur traders,

they brought to their marriages attitudes and beliefs – indeed,
a worldview – about family and social life that influenced the
creation of a Métis socio-cultural identity. Furthermore, that
these families lived in the lands of their maternal relatives and,
as was the case of the Île à la Crosse Métis and spoke the lan-
guages of those maternal cultures certainly shaped their
worldview.
Macdougall further states: “Far removed from emerging centres of

Red River and non-Native settlement, in regions such as north-
western Saskatchewan the reality was that family life, and in par-
ticular these female-centred family networks,” were central to the
advent of Métis culture (Macdougall, 456). It was the women’s
kinship links that enabled new bands to be established, and it was
the maintenance of these links that allowed the bands to survive.
By highlighting the role of First Nations and Métis women, Mac-

dougall not only challenges the emphasis placed on the French
freemen but also sheds light on the importance that First Nations
cultural practices had in Métis cultural development. The weight
given to Métis whiteness has overshadowed First Nations culture
in the emerging Métis culture. I suggest that this overshadowing
is due to the scholarly tendency to view Indigenous People at a
tribal level – not a band level – and to view the Métis in racial
terms instead of cultural terms.
Though there has been a move recently to convey Métis cul-
tural differences without linking them to racial differences, in
some cases scholars’ attempts, without sufficient explanations,
result in descriptions that reinforce racial differences. For exam-
ple, St-Onge and Podruchny (2012, 81) state that the “Metis were
unique among other multicultural tribes because they embraced
the opportunities that the expanding capitalist system provided …
the fur trade business needed the Métis as experienced suppli-
ers, entrepreneurs, labourers, and middlemen in order to func-
tion effectively.” Though there is no doubt that the Métis played a
significant role in the fur trade, statements such as these, without
the proper context, given the way the Métis have been written
about in the past and thought of by many currently, can be inter-
preted as referring to different racial attributes among the Métis
and First Nations. For many, capitalist societies are seen as being
more advanced than precapitalist societies. To state that the Métis
were unique among other Indigenous People on the Northern
Plains – without any acknowledgement that First Nations peo-
ple also participated in the fur trade in many of the same roles
as the Métis, because of their acceptance of capitalism – can be
seen as unwittingly reinforcing a racial hierarchy based on dif-
ferent racial characteristics. Considering the extent to which the
Plains Cree, Assiniboine, and Saulteaux were intimately tied to
the fur trade as middlemen, suppliers, labourers, and consumers
(see Ray 1974, 1980), the assertion that the Métis were unique in
embracing capitalism requires more context so as not to imply
racial distinctiveness.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the legal status of the

Métis, as J.R. Miller suggested, has guided the scholarly agenda
and popular conceptions of the Métis. The Métis as a group did
not sign treaties with the Canadian government, nor are they con-
sidered “Indian” under the Indian Act. As a result, the Métis fall
under a different legal classification than First Nations. Unlike
First Nations, the Métis, until the recent decision in the Daniels
case, were the responsibility of provincial governments.4 Many
outsiders dismissed the legal arguments put forth in Daniels that
the Métis should be considered Indians under section 91(24) of the
Constitution Act, 1982 (see Gibson 2001), because they viewed the
Métis as “not Indian,” regardless of their close relations or cul-
tural similarities with First Nations. Some First Nations people
also hold the view that the Métis are not Indian; from this per-
spective, it follows that Indians are more culturally Indigenous
than the Métis and therefore have a stronger claim to Indigenous
rights, thus raising the issue of cultural authenticity. For some
First Nations leaders and First Nations people of Métis ancestry,
then, acknowledging the close relationship with the Métis or their
own Métis ancestry could be viewed as detrimental in terms of
rights and entitlements.
This is not to suggest that no First Nations leaders acknowledge
their ties to the Métis. In September 2007, for example, comments
by Richard John, the former Chief of One Arrow First Nation,
illustrate that the close ties between First Nations and the Métis
have not been forgotten by some contemporary First Nations.
According to Blair Stonechild and Bill Waiser (1997), the Métis
forced Chief One Arrow and other First Nations people to partici-
pate in armed conflict against the Canadian government at Bato-
che during the 1885 Resistance. A news story appeared in Eagle
Feather News about the reinternment of One Arrow at his reserve
from his Winnipeg grave, where he had been buried after dying
in Stony Mountain Penitentiary after being sentenced to prison
for his part in the Resistance (Lagimodière 2007, 6). In the story,
John challenges Stonechild and Waiser’s version of the history of
his ancestor. According to John’s family history, Chief One Arrow
willingly joined the conflict. John notes: “There are friendships

[between residents of One Arrow and the neighbouring Métis at
Batoche] right through to this day. We help each other and it has
been that way from prior to 1885” (Lagimodière 2007, 6). Though
there are tensions that do exist between contemporary Métis and
First Nations communities for a variety of reasons, the examples
of One Arrow and Cowessess show that people have memories
that counteract dominant narratives of Métis and First Nations
tensions being rooted in racial and cultural differences.
The cultural similarities shared by the Métis, Plains Cree,
Saulteaux, and Assiniboine were as great as those shared among
First Nations. The Métis probably shared even more cultural
similarities with the Plains Cree and Saulteaux than the Assini-
boine did. However, the Plains Cree, Saulteaux, and Assiniboine
were placed into the racial category of “Indian.” The meaning of
“Indian,” Plains Indians at that, was reduced to a monolith; all
Indians were alike, and since the Métis were not placed into the
Indian category, they were not like Indians. They were not placed
into the Indian category because they were part white racially
and therefore viewed as being not as primitive as Indians but not
quite as civilized as white people. Neither white nor Indian but a
new race of people, the Métis could not be seen as similar to First
Nations.
This is all a racist fiction. This fiction benefitted the govern-
ment’s aim to undermine Indigenous rights, primarily Indige-
nous land rights, and to keep government costs for Indigenous
People to a minimum. With the emerging dominance of social
evolutionary thought in the nineteenth century, it was quite easy
to implement and maintain this fiction. Racist scholarly works
then justified the continuation of racist political policies that
reinforced this racist fiction. As a result, the kinship and other
cultural practices that the Métis and the Plains Cree, Saulteaux,
and Assiniboine historically shared and performed, and in many
cases still do, received little attention or acknowledgment by non-
Indigenous and Indigenous scholars, educators, politicians, and
the general public.
In the last thirty years, the discussion of Métis ethnogenesis

has developed a sophistication that offers a more complex view of
Métis history. The simplistic and racist images of the Métis people
promoted by early scholars have been brushed aside and replaced
with an image of the Métis people exercising agency in light of
economic, political, and social challenges. Recent studies have
attempted to move toward describing the process of Métis ethno-
genesis as a cultural development, yet most continue to describe
this process from within a racialized context. The scholarly focus
on the Métis for the most part continues to highlight the differ-
ences between the Métis and First Nations people. In addition,
many scholars, as they have with First Nations, tend to view Métis
cultural expression as a monolith, precluding the possibility of
a diverse range of Metis cultures. However, this approach does
make sense in light of “Métis” being included in the Constitu-
tion Act, 1982, but, as Jennifer Adese (2016, 9) points out, without
defining its meaning. And it makes sense in light of the recent
increase in the number of groups asserting a Métis identity, espe-
cially in Quebec and the Maritimes (see Gaudry and Leroux 2017).
The result has been many groups and individuals centring race as
the primary indicator of their Métis identity.
Certainly, the Métis, Plains Cree, Saulteaux, and Assiniboine
were culturally different from one another. However, examining
the ways in which they interacted offers an opportunity to pro-
vide a more nuanced and clearer picture of pre- and postreserve
Indigenous societies to uncover their similarities. Their interac-
tions were guided by their understanding of how to deploy their
cultural protocols, which included how to create and maintain
kin ties. By viewing the Métis, Plains Cree, Saulteaux, and Assini-
boine as band societies, we can see how the bands exercised their
autonomy in various ways and recognize, for example, that the
conflict that occurred among their members was not necessarily
emblematic of intertribal relations. This understanding allows us
to make the case that though the Métis, Plains Cree, Saulteaux,
and Assiniboine were culturally different from one another, they
were not culturally distinct from their relatives.
Notes
1 For notable exceptions on First Nations-Métis relations, see McCrady

(2006) and Hogue (2002). However, these and other studies do not
make connections between their relations and cultural similarities. On
Métis–Half-Breed relations, see Spry (1985). Also, for a thorough over-
view of the scholarly discussion about Métis–English Half-Breed rela-
tions, see O’Toole (2013, 143–203).
2 For example, Peers (1994, 67) asserts: “In response to these [economic]
pressures, the Ojibwa developed several coping mechanisms … A few
began living with plains [sic] Cree, freeman, and Métis families, sharing
the special skills and advantages of those groups.” Sarah Carter (1990, 45)
states that “Plains Cree bands in the district covered by Treaty Four …
included Saulteaux, Assiniboine, and mixed-bloods among their number.”
3 Rose Pelletier was my mom’s stepmother. My biological grandmother
Elizabeth Pelletier (also her maiden name; she was from Cowessess)
passed away shortly after my mom was born in 1933 from complications
from tuberculosis.
4 For recent discussions on some of the significant issues Daniels raises,
see Adese (2016), Gaudry and Andersen (2016), Vowel and Leroux
(2016), and Todd (2016).
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5
Restoring the Balance: Métis
Women and Contemporary
Nationalist Political Organizing
Jennifer Adese
In the 2007 book Quiet Revolution West: The Rebirth of Métis Nation-
alism, John Weinstein offers a comprehensive look at the emer-
gence of the contemporary Métis Nation. The Métis Nation is
a nation of people whose homelands stretch from the northern
shores of Lake Superior, northward, and westward, across a vast
terrain of prairie, parkland, and forest. Weinstein examines the
Métis Nation’s birth in its bustling hub of Red River; the Métis
Nation’s economic and social influence in wider peripheral and
interrelated communities; its suppression by the Canadian govern-
ment in the late nineteenth century; and, finally, what he argues
has been the steady path to its rebirth in the latter decades of the
twentieth century, which culminated in the formation of the pres-
ent national Indigenous organization, the Métis National Council
(MNC).1 Weinstein’s work contains one very stark omission: the
role of Métis women in the historical and contemporary landscape
of Métis political organization.
It is important to critique this work given its treatment by
the MNC as a definitive account of the history of Métis national
politics and nationhood. No account can be a definitive source
without considering the role of Métis women as political activ-
ists. That Weinstein does not offer tangible consideration of Métis
women’s contributions to politics is not surprising. Political orga-
nizing, as a mechanism for Métis women to voice their concerns,
has been limited by the unique challenges they face in living at the
nexus of the interlocking oppressive systems of sexism, racism,
115
116 Jennifer Adese
and classism, much of which have been imported into their lives
through colonization. Yet Métis women’s contributions to Métis
politics and their work in practical decolonization is worth more
than the footnote they are given in Weinstein’s work. In this chap-
ter, I argue that Métis women have steadily increased their politi-
cal activism and today work as vocal advocates for themselves and
the wider Métis Nation and, thus, for Métis nationhood. However,
the near wholesale erasure of Métis women from such a lauded
public account of Métis political life extends, rather than works to
ameliorate, Métis women’s displacement, oppression, and margin-
alization in both Métis and Canadian societies.
I reject the narrow scope through which the history of Métis
politics has been viewed and portrayed and take Métis women’s
experiences of displacement, oppression, and political activism
seriously. Further, I critique the misogynist construction of Métis
nationhood. Academic studies of Métis political organizing and
Métis governance tend to be overwhelmingly focused on Métis
men’s efforts and perspectives (see Sawchuk 1995, 1998, 2001; Fla-
nagan 1990; Pocklington 1991; Dubois and Saunders 2013, 2017).
As politics are cast as the near exclusive terrain of Métis men, Métis
women’s contributions both to political organizing and to expres-
sions of Métis governance are largely eclipsed. In deploying a Métis
feminist approach to contemporary Métis politics and political his-
tory, and by looking beyond texts such as Weinstein’s, I reveal the
significant impact of Métis women on Métis political organizing
and on Indigenous politics more widely, arguing that Métis women
have played a vital role in the development of Métis–Canada rela-
tions. In particular, I examine the role of Métis women in nationalist
political organizing in the late twentieth century, focusing on Métis
women’s national organizational formation at the time of the patria-
tion of the Canadian Constitution and in its immediate aftermath.
I begin with a focused discussion of Weinstein’s work before
outlining a basic history of the Métis Nation’s dispossession
by the Canadian state. I then discus Métis women’s activism in
the mid-twentieth century which demonstrated Métis women’s
increased commitment to challenging sexism within the Métis
Restoring the Balance 117
Nation and within Canada more widely. I then focus on the rapid
development and formalization of Métis women’s political activ-
ism from the late 1970s to the present, paying special attention
to the entrenchment of “Aboriginal peoples” within section 35
of the Constitution Act, 1982. It is at this point and in its wake
that Métis women’s vision of their relationship to broader Métis
nationalist organizing became apparent. While anchored in sup-
port for Métis nationalism and self-government efforts, women’s
collectives came together in more widespread organizing efforts,
efforts concerned with confronting and addressing the legacies of
Métis women’s dispossession from their place within family, com-
munity, and national life. Contrary to Weinstein’s erasure of their
contributions to the Métis Nation, Métis women are not now, nor
have they ever been, quiet.
A Métis Feminist Approach to Political History
For the past decade I have been involved with Métis women’s
political organizing in various capacities – as a political activist,
cousin, friend, helper, and, researcher. As early as the Fall of 2006,
I served as a women’s representative in the Women’s Secretariat
of the Métis Nation of Ontario, as an alternate to the board of
the national Métis women’s political advocacy body, and as a del-
egation member, along with other Métis women, to a number of
National Aboriginal Women’s Summits (NAWS). In these spaces,
working alongside other Métis women, I bore witness to the strug-
gle of Métis women in the male-dominated Canadian political
arena. I have also felt, first-hand, the palpable sexism that threads
its way through Métis political life. At the same time, I have been
deeply moved by Métis women’s express resilience in the face
of marginalization. My approach to researching Métis women’s
political organizing has thus been deeply informed by a growing
sense of myself as a Métis feminist.
To be a Métis feminist is in many ways to bring together one’s
lived experience as Métis with “an analysis of how social systems
work to privilege men and disadvantage women” (LaRocque 2007, 57).
118 Jennifer Adese
To extend this observation to the study of Métis political history is

to address how Métis women, as Indigenous women, “experience
political oppression in a number of ways” (LaRocque, 54). In the
context of this chapter, it means addressing how Métis women have
been alienated “from constitutional processes and from positions
of leadership in white and Native male-dominated institutions”
and acknowledging that Métis women “have not enjoyed auto-
matic inclusion or leadership roles in the public sphere of either
Canadian society or in the upper echelons of national Aboriginal
political organizations” (LaRocque, 54). At the same time, a Métis
feminist political historiography can and should also challenge
prevailing narratives about Métis women in the political historical
record.
According to Susan A. Miller (2008, 16): “The primary distin-
guishing characteristic [of Indigenous historiography from West-
ern historiography] is that Indigenous projects are designed as
service to an Indigenous people or community … Service takes
many forms, and even a simple narrative of past events can serve a
people’s needs.” For Miller (2008, 16), a historical narrative “might
refute stereotypes or anti-Indigenous narratives that shape outsid-
ers’ treatment of the community and its members.” The historical
narrative presented here is also part of a much larger research
project intended to work in service to Métis women, the Métis
people, and the Métis Nation. Weinstein’s book contributes to
the narrow view that Métis political activism has been the sole
terrain of Métis men. Yet Weinstein’s book elides Métis women’s
visible contributions to the contemporary landscape of the Métis,
and wider Indigenous, politics. The work entrenches the sex-
ist erasure of Métis women, which is a hallmark of patriarchal
colonization.
On the Erasure of Métis Women from Métis Nationhood
As discussed separately by Chris Andersen and Robert Hancock

in this volume, there is a direct connection between notions of
Indigenous peoplehood and Indigenous nationhood. Indigenous
or “tribal” nationhood is different from nation-state national-

ism in that Indigenous nationhood is, at its core, about people-
hood; it is about “the relational system that keeps the people in
balance with one another, with other peoples and realities, and
with the world” (Heath Justice 2006, 24). For some Indigenous
scholars (Thomas 1990, 14; Heath Justice 2006; Andersen 2014),
Indigenous nationhood is therefore the political expression of
Indigenous peoplehood. As Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Jus-
tice (2006, 24) writes, it is the “extension of the social rights and
responsibilities of peoplehood.” Indigenous nationhood is not
born from the colonizer’s paradigm of nationalism but is rather
“a concept rooted in community values, histories, and traditions”
(Heath Justice, 24). It also “asserts a sense of active sociopoliti-
cal agency, not simply static separatism from the world and its
peoples” (Heath Justice, 24).
Indigenous Nations thus exist as small nationalities, and in
spite of colonization they continue to “survive when they are part
of large nations and are surrounded by large, very different major-
ity groups” (Thomas 1990, 14; see also Heath Justice 2006, 25). As
will be discussed, while the Métis people have been devastated
by colonization, we have maintained our distinct Indigenous peo-
plehood for hundreds of years, a peoplehood that has been con-
sistently expressed in political terms as Métis nationhood. Métis
political history received substantial attention in 2007 when Wein-
stein published Quiet Revolution West. The book offers a focused
discussion on the political history and identity of the Métis Nation
and the formation of the Métis National Council (MNC) and its
intervention in the contemporary landscape of Indigenous–Canadian
political relations, in part derived from Weinstein’s first-hand
experience working within the MNC. It opens with an introduc-
tion to the formation of the Métis Nation, and while it does not
provide a comprehensive history of Métis ethnogenesis, it never-
theless offers readers a base point for understanding that the Métis
were born as a new people indigenous to the prairie and park-
land they inhabited. The Métis Nation emerged as a new nation
of Indigenous People that, like other Indigenous Nations, would
120 Jennifer Adese
come under great threat with the expansion of a multidirectional

and multipronged colonizing project.
Throughout the 1800s, the Métis were subjected to waves of
aggression from French Catholic missionaries, British settlers and
churches, and the Canadian military and government (in 1869 and
again in 1885). The early arrival of French Catholic missionaries in
1818 at Red River, the social and economic core of the burgeoning
Métis Nation, took place alongside the merging of the Northwest
Company (NWC) and Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in 1821 – a
merger that saw the HBC work to monopolize the fur trade and
constrain Métis economic and political agency (Bourgeault 1992,
54). At the same time, the HBC and British settlers introduced
Anglicanism to Métis lives in Red River. Religiosity and the emer-
gence of capitalism (Bourgeault 1992) thus worked in tandem.
While historians have taken contradictory views on the role of the
Catholic Church in Métis life at Red River, it is undeniable that
it sought to “excise the Native cultural traits it found so alien to
its European worldview” (Duval 2001, 66). The Catholic Church’s
interest in the Métis people stemmed from its desire to use the
Métis as “raw material for a new Francophone prairie culture,
bleached of all traces of the Indigenous influence” (Duval, 67).
At the same time, the HBC was offering a large land grant to the
Anglican church “sufficient to make it the largest owner of real
estate in the [Selkirk] colony” in an effort to assimilate the Métis
and assert economic (trade) dominance over the region (Shore
1991, i). Despite these goals, the Métis managed to maintain their
cultural distinction and at the same time successfully fended off
the rising and ebbing tides of HBC attacks; they would soon,
however, face a much more damning threat.
Ontario settlers (anglophone and of English and Scottish
descent) arrived in Red River and surrounding areas at a rapid
pace. They were intent on making a life for themselves in “what
they perceived as an extension of Ontario” (Gaudry 2014, iii). In
1869, a representative of the newly formed Canadian government
sought to gain entry to Red River for the purposes of surveying
land for settlement. The Métis rebuked the effort and in response
“formed a provisional government with their Halfbreed cousins

to enter into negotiations with Canada to establish a confederal
treaty relationship” (Gaudry, iii). To protect themselves and assert
their right to continue governing themselves, the Métis and Half-
Breed people (who emerged as a small yet distinctive people from
intermarriage between Indigenous People and British people)
came together to form the Provisional Government of Assiniboia
(Gaudry 2014). Under the leadership of John Bruce (who would
quickly be succeeded by Louis Riel), the Provisional Govern-
ment proceeded to undertake a good-faith attempt at treaty mak-
ing with the Canadian government. The Provisional Government
“sent delegates to Ottawa to negotiate ‘the Manitoba Treaty,’ a
bilateral constitutional document that created a new province of
Manitoba, which would contain a Métis/Halfbreed majority, as
well as very specific territorial, political, social, cultural, and eco-
nomic protections that would safeguard the Métis and Halfbreed
controlled future of Manitoba” (Gaudry, iii).2
Under the name “Canada First,” a group of pro-Canadian set-
tlers gathered with the intention of overthrowing the Provisional
Government. They worked to strategize an attack on Fort Garry.
When Riel’s people were made aware of the plans, they arrested
the plotters. Some of the arrestees escaped in January 1870, while
the rest were released in February 1870 on the condition that they
agree to cease interfering in the governance of the Red River set-
tlement. In defiance, they continued to agitate against Riel and
the Provisional Government, and soon a number of them were,
once again, arrested and imprisoned. Irish Protestant Orange-
man Thomas Scott – an arrestee who was known to be violent,
aggressive, and insulting toward the Métis guards – regularly
made vocal threats on Riel’s life (Sprague 1988). He was convicted
for treason and subsequently executed by firing squad on March
4, 1870. Scott’s execution had a profound impact. As Fred Shore
(1991, 103) points out:
Alive, Thomas Scott was just one more Canadian colonist in

Rupert’s Land whose personal ambitions had been frustrated.
122 Jennifer Adese
Dead, Thomas Scott was a flame to ignite the hearts of Ontario’s

Orangemen. His death could motivate them to take up arms in
order to wrest the North-West from the hands of the “savage”
Half-Breeds who had dared to thwart the march of empire.
Scott’s death garnered much attention and spurred Canadian

patriots to action.
A number of these patriots found their way into the Red River
Expeditionary Force (RREF) (the Wolseley Expedition, as it
would be commonly known), which had been dispatched by the
Canadian government to Red River in the wake of Scott’s execu-
tion. According to Alexander Begg, a journalist and newspaper
editor writing from within Red River at the time, the RREF oper-
ated in contradiction to what it claimed to be doing. Begg wrote
that the force’s composition, made up of British imperial soldiers
and volunteer members from Ontario and Quebec, “became nec-
essary to ensure that the force did not become a punitive expedi-
tion from Ontario.” At the same time, “the whole tone and temper
of the expedition, indeed, from the commanding officer down,
was hostile to the Métis and punitive in intent” (quoted in Morton
1956, 143; see also Shore 1991, 150). Newspapers from as far afield
as New York reported that members of the RREF had commit-
ted a “reign of terror” on their arrival, openly assaulting, raping,
and killing Métis people (Barkwell 2008, 2). In spite of a binding
agreement with Canada under the Manitoba Act of 1870, which
acknowledged the Métis people’s right to live within their own
homeland, this reign of terror led many Métis to flee in fear for
their lives, moving northward and westward to other Métis com-
munities at Batoche, Willow Bunch, St. Albert, and Lac Ste. Anne
(Bourgeault 1992; Payment 1996). In many ways, this violence
would be repeated at Batoche in 1885, when the Métis, under the
leadership of Louis Riel, again found themselves under attack.
Colonization and the legacy of dispossession has had, and
continues to have, a particularly brutal impact on Métis women
(Van Kirk 1983; St-Onge 2004; Iseke-Barnes 2009; Macdougall
2010). The distinct culture that emerged in the vast expanse often
referred to as the “Northwest” through the late 1700s and into the
1800s was “necessarily rooted in the homeland and worldview of
maternal relatives rather than paternal ancestors” (Macdougall
2010, 4). Métis families and communities were historically matri-
organized and matrilocal, meaning Métis women’s kinship ties
laid the foundation for the communities’ structuring (Brown 1983,
42). Contrary to male-dominated accounts of Métis nationhood,
given that the Métis were born in the indigenous homelands
of their maternal relations, it is no surprise that Métis women
occupied the familial core of their people (Macdougall and St-
Onge 2013). Within matriorganized, kinship-based families, the
Métis lived in balance; each family member carrying their own
roles and responsibilities. Métis women filled the obvious role of
life givers to future generations, a role that also meant that they
were central to transmitting to future generations Métis ways of
being, seeing, living, and knowing. Métis women were the source
of their children’s first words, often in Michif and other related
languages. They taught ceremonies, prepared food, built houses,
harvested crops, picked medicines, and made clothes (Van Kirk
1983, 109–10). Additionally, Métis women “were also skilled hunt-
ers, trappers, and fishermen,” and “built their own cabins, made
snowshoes, and ran dog teams” (Campbell 2012, xxiv).
Métis women became especially well known for their clothing.
Métis women adapted the embroidery skills they learned from
Catholic nuns to produce clothing decorated with elaborate, floral-
inspired beadwork. It is due to the bead-working skill of Métis
women and the beauty of the Métis peoples’ clothing and acces-
sories that the Métis came to be associated with another name –
the Flower Beadwork People. The positive reception that Métis
women’s bead working received allowed them to intervene in the
fur trade economy in unique ways and also allowed them to cre-
ate their own unique economies by selling and trading what they
made (see Van Kirk 1983; Blady 1996, 1997; Troupe 2009; Farrell
Racette 2004).
Métis women were also active participants in buffalo hunt-
ing, the cornerstone of early Métis life (Callihoo 1960; Van Kirk
124 Jennifer Adese
1983; Macdougall and St-Onge 2013; Gaudry 2014; Mackinnon

2018). In oral accounts shared with the Alberta Historical Society,
Victoria Belcourt Callihoo (1865–1956) talked about her experi-
ences growing up in the Métis community of Lac Ste. Anne. She
reflected on her participation in buffalo hunting, noting that
some Métis women served as scouts on buffalo hunts. Other Métis
women followed hunters, with the children in tow, skinning the
buffalo and preparing the meat for drying and pounding. They
then helped prepare pemmican, a food staple for eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century life (Belcourt 2006, 200–3). At the end of a
hunting day, wooden carts were arranged in a protective circle
around the children and older people; Métis women occupied
a second circle in front (Campbell 2012, xxiii). Although Métis
women were not overtly involved in the decision-making processes
of the buffalo-hunting brigades, their role within the buffalo hunt
demonstrates their place as “the nurturers and protectors of the
nation” (Campbell, xxiii). In every aspect of Métis life, women
were vital, amassed great respect, and provided necessary balance
in Métis families and societies, which, by 1816, had emerged as a
distinct Indigenous nation anchored in Red River (see Andersen
2014, 111–12).
This strong matrilineal connection meant that Métis women
were active in the daily life of Métis fur trade society. Over time,
the careful egalitarian balance of Métis life was eroded by ideas
circulating more widely among non-Indigenous fur traders, via
the church’s influence on Métis communities, and by settler-
colonizer beliefs that women were innately inferior to men. Ron
Bourgeault notes in his work on sexism, racism, and capitalism
in the fur trade that British and French colonizers came to dis-
parage Métis women, who were characterized as innately inferior
to Eurowestern white women (Bourgeault 1992; see also Payment
1996, 20). In January 1869, Charles Mair, a Canadian national-
ist, poet, and later member of the Treaty 8 Half-Breed Commis-
sion, issued a deeply disparaging Toronto Globe article, in which he
offered his opinion on Red River Métis society. Mair opined that
so-called half-breed women have “no coat-of-arms but a ‘totem’
to look back to, [they] make up for their deficiency by biting at

the backs of their ‘white’ sisters” (Barwell 2008, 15). Mair argued
that Métis women were embittered because they were not “fully
white”; he suggested that Métis women suffered from knowledge
of their inferiority to white women and thus acted out against the
source of their jealousy.
Métis women did not receive Mair’s words warmly. When he
reappeared in public in Red River in the wake of the article’s pub-
lication, one Métis woman pulled on his nose, while others yanked
on his ears (Hargraves 1871, 456). Other Métis women took to writ-
ing public letters, and Annie Bannatyne, one of the most promi-
nent women in Red River Métis society, publicly confronted Mair.
Eyewitness accounts report that Bannatyne approached Mair in
the post office when he came in one Saturday afternoon. With the
store full of people, Bannatyne, horsewhip in hand, grabbed Mair
by the nose and “administered five or six strokes of the whip to his
body: ‘There,’ she told him, ‘you see how the women of Red River
treat those who insult them’” (Dugas 1905, 27). In many ways,
Métis women’s responses to Mair’s insults reflect the way in which
mistreatment emboldened them to take public action. This incli-
nation to action, I argue, persisted throughout the next hundred
years and was evident in Métis women’s push for political organi-
zation and recognition by the Canadian government.
Before this, however, the Métis experienced even greater mar-
ginalization and violence under the auspices of Canadian nation
building. In the year following Mair’s article, the RREF’s arrival in
Red River saw Métis women experience Canada’s state-sanctioned
gendered violence first-hand. Historian Lawrence J. Barkwell
(2008, 19) notes that RREF soldiers murdered Laurette Goulet,
the seventeen-year old daughter of Elzéar Goulet (a member of
the tribunal that convicted Ontarian Thomas Scott and sentenced
him to death). Goulet “died after being assaulted [raped] by four
drunken soldiers” (Newman 1991, 56).3 Goulet’s horrific death at
the hands of Canadian RREF soldiers was a direct result of sex-
ism, racism, and colonization. These experiences of debasement
among Métis women and their descendants give some indication
126 Jennifer Adese
of the ongoing racism, sexism, violence, abuse, poverty, and ill

health they have experienced, propelling them toward a culture of
political activism that is meaningfully shaping Métis communities
and the contemporary landscape of Métis politics today.
This background is necessary to understand why Métis women
have become increasingly visible in the landscape of Métis politics
and governance. Political organization has proven invaluable for
bringing Métis women together to talk about their common expe-
riences of racism, sexism, and colonization and to advocate for the
meaningful address of these egregious harms, in the Métis Nation
itself and within Canadian society. In the twentieth century, Métis
women began to gradually make their way into burgeoning local
and provincial Métis associations and soon came to play a cen-
tral role as founders of and participants in provincial and national
pan-Indigenous women’s organizations. This concerted involve-
ment served to amplify Métis women’s voices, foregrounding a
cumulative history of political activism that has recently resulted
in the formation of an autonomous Métis women’s national politi-
cal organization that engages directly with the Canadian federal
government on issues relevant to Métis women and girls but truly
remains committed to restoring balance within the Métis Nation.
Organizing in the Mid-Twentieth Century
Métis people contested colonial strategies of displacement and

marginalization long before Canada became a country. Despite
Canada’s formalization as a nation and the subsequent dispos-
session of the Métis Nation at Red River in 1870 and Batoche in
1885, Métis efforts to assert their nationhood have never wavered.
The first half of the twentieth century saw the transformation of
Métis resistance into different kinds of political organizing rooted
in older systems of governance. In the early twentieth century,
several local associations and provincial organizations formed in
Métis communities (Dobbin 1981; Pocklington 1991; Barron 1997;
Sawchuk 1998; Saunders 2013; Dubois and Saunders 2017). The
mid-twentieth century saw an explosion of Indigenous political
organizations, composed of a wide array of Indigenous commu-

nities and nations that allied with one another to bring them-
selves into contention with the Canadian state. Simultaneously,
there was an eruption of pan-Indigenous women’s organizations,
many of which began to “focus more heavily on issues of gen-
der” (Huhndorf and Suzack 2010, 5).4 The gradual rise in women-
focused Indigenous organizations soon came to have an impact
on the Métis Nation.
In Saskatchewan, beginning in the 1930s, Métis women from
a number of connected Métis families and communities moved
into Saskatoon, where they started attending meetings of the
burgeoning male-dominated Saskatoon Métis Society. Although
Métis women were not initially vocal politically, as Cheryl Troupe
(2009, 107–8) notes, they contributed to the organization’s efforts
by raising funds for the society through bingos, bake sales, and
dances. For Troupe, this reflected a “nineteenth century politi-
cal traditio[n] that included public male leadership, supported
by the community’s women” (Troupe, 112). Métis women also
“contribute[d] to Métis political organization by maintaining their
traditional social and political roles of supporting male leaders,
organizing social events and visiting in the community to encour-
age political participation” (Troupe, 112). As social and economic
situations changed for Métis women in Saskatoon, however, they
began using social gatherings as sites for discussions about poli-
tics and how they might advocate on their own behalf. These early
conversations and networking provided a foundation for more
formalized political organizing.5
In separate interviews, Métis Elders Annie Lavallie and Rose
Fleury reflected on their knowledge of Métis women in politi-
cal organizing. In an interview with Margaret Jefferson for the
Gabriel Dumont Institute in 1982, Lavallie recounted that her
role as the first secretary-treasurer of the Saskatoon Métis Soci-
ety created tension within in her home. She noted with regret: “I
didn’t stick to it long enough because my husband was—he didn’t
like me leaving home, and I was so much away from home. I’m
sorry I didn’t stick with it.”6 Fleury, in an interview with Brenda
128 Jennifer Adese
Arnault for the Saskatoon Native Women’s Association, recounted

that her grandmother became involved in the society in the 1930s
and stayed involved into the 1940s. Her grandmother attended
the Saskatoon Métis Society’s big annual meeting and banquet at
the (now Delta) Bessborough in Saskatoon and was “very much
involved with the Métis women.”7 The gradual involvement of
Métis women in politics within Saskatchewan was echoed within
Alberta. Although Métis women remained primarily concerned
with their important role within the domestic sphere, they also
began to have clear roles in the public life of Métis activism.
As social gatherings gave rise to the politicizing of Métis wom-
en’s voices on their own terms, women became active at the local
and provincial level in urban and rural spaces, and they founded
pan-Indigenous women’s organizations. One such Métis woman,
Bertha Clark-Jones, from Clear Hills, Alberta, cofounded the pro-
vincial organization the Voice of Alberta Native Women’s Soci-
ety. Clark-Jones’s effective work in the society would eventually
lead to her becoming, in 1974, the first president of the Native
Women’s Association of Canada, the first nationally focused pan-
Indigenous women’s organization. Clark-Jones’s involvement in
province-wide organizations and, later, nationally oriented politi-
cal activism reflected a shift in how Métis women were viewing
their relationship to one another and to other Indigenous women.
Although Métis women in various places in Alberta, much like
women in Saskatoon, were active in male-dominated locals, Clark-
Jones’s partnership to create the Voice of Alberta Native Women’s
Society demonstrates that, at least in Alberta, Métis women were
cognizant of the need to form good alliances with other Indig-
enous women and to advance both shared and separate causes.8
While the society was not specifically focused on Métis women’s
concerns, it drew on the collective strength of both non-Status
Indian women (women excluded from holding Indian status
under Canada’s Indian Act legislation) and Métis women.
Taken together, this instance of local organizing in Saskatoon
and Clark-Jones’s efforts with the Voice of Alberta Native Wom-
en’s Society demonstrate the ways in which Métis women were
becoming more politically mobile. Further, they demonstrate that

Métis women deployed two notable strategies. First, they main-
tained their involvement in male-dominated Métis associations.
In 1978, for example, Métis women such as Connie LeMotte (Pon-
teix) and Cecile Blanke (Swift Current) secured positions as local
presidents within the Association of Métis and Non-Status Indi-
ans of Saskatchewan. While locals throughout Métis provincial
associations were still disproportionately filled with Métis men, at
least in Saskatchewan women could increasingly be found filling
a number of roles, from vice-president, to treasurer, to secretary
(New Breed Journal 1978, 18).
In addition to stepping into leadership roles within mainstream
organizations, Métis women also began taking steps to form
women’s-specific provincial committees and associations intended
to work within the provincial Métis bodies. Women such as Clark-
Jones also initiated the formation of pan-Indigenous organiza-
tions with other Indigenous women. Soon, however, a third option
appeared as it became clear to some Métis women throughout
the 1970s and into the early 1980s that insofar as pan-Indigenous
women’s organizing was effective in cultivating a voice for Indig-
enous women more broadly, Métis women’s unique concerns were
being obscured. At the same time, and in spite of headway made
within male-dominated provincial organizations, Métis women
faced opposition in having their concerns heard within provincial
associations.
Organizing in the Context of the Constitution
The development of Canada’s new constitution in the late 1970s and

into the early 1980s was a major turning point for Métis women’s
political organizing. The new constitution would ensure that Cana-
dians could amend it without requiring Britain’s formal assent, and
it was intended to sever remaining formal political ties with Brit-
ain. Indigenous Peoples from many different communities raised
serious concerns about the new constitution. Indigenous Peoples
were concerned about how Canada would behave in regard to its
130 Jennifer Adese
inherited obligations from a number of major treaty agreements

between Indigenous Nations and Britain. People were also con-
cerned about Indigenous land rights and the illegal occupation
of lands never formally ceded to Canada by Indigenous Peoples.
In response, Indigenous activists formed delegations to Ottawa
to lobby the government for some form of recognition within the
Constitution.9
Métis people began to expand, refine, and focus their politi-
cal organization structures. The Métis provincial councils came
together to precede a series of three First Ministers’ Conferences
held in 1983, 1985, and 1987 on the matter of the constitutional
inclusion of Indians (First Nations), Inuit, and the Métis as Aborig-
inal peoples in the newly drafted Constitution Act, 1982. Together,
provincial associations from British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatch-
ewan, and Manitoba created an advocacy body to represent the
wider Métis Nation, the Métis National Council (MNC) (Edwards
1983; Weinstein 2008; Adese 2016). The MNC became one of four
national organizations involved in constitutional negotiation pro-
cesses at the conferences. Meanwhile, Métis women were expected
to channel their participation in the process through the goodwill
of the male-dominated organizations. The leaders of the four orga-
nizations, along with government officials, were of the attitude
that women could be represented by the four organizations and
did not require their own separate voice in constitutional negotia-
tions (McIvor 2004, 110).
Métis women were encouraged to channel their concerns
through the MNC, and, in turn, the MNC was given one hundred
thousand dollars by the government to consult with the women
“and get their input as to what their main concerns are in reference
to the constitution” (Beatty 1984, 12). Twelve women attended
a meeting during the MNC General Assembly in Winnipeg in
November 1983, and it was there that they agreed that they needed
to find a way to ensure that Métis women had a voice in the con-
stitutional process. They discussed the formation of a women’s
organization in the MNC, a mechanism that would allow them
to formally present Métis women’s concerns in the constitutional
process (Beatty 1983, 8). The MNC tasked Louise Medynski, from
Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, with facilitating the meeting in con-
sultation with Métis women. In January 1984, the MNC hired
four women, one from each of the four provinces – Rose Boyer
(Saskatchewan), Katherine Moka (British Columbia), Joyce Sin-
clair (Alberta), and Joyce Gus (Manitoba) – to form an acting
Métis Women’s Association. They were also tasked with running
workshops in their communities and aggregating Métis women’s
concerns (Beatty 1984, 12). They submitted reports to the MNC,
which would consider whether to use them during constitutional
meetings.
A number of women began to realize that in order to ensure that
their concerns were not being disregarded by the men, who con-
tinued to dominate the MNC structure, they would have to seek
alternative options. As Marge Friedel of Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta,
stated to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP)
in May 1992, during the course of the First Ministers’ Conference,
Métis women grew frustrated with male-dominated organizations
and wanted to ensure that Métis women’s “voices are heard, that
our experiences are understood and that our expectations are
given a respectful and responsible hearing” (Green 1992, 110).10
A couple of major factors, then, led to Métis women seeking
greater representation in the constitutional moment. First, while
Métis women (such as Clark-Jones) had worked under the auspices
of the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), many
Métis women felt that the NWAC predominantly focused on First
Nations women’s concerns. NWAC’s primary focus was address-
ing gender discrimination within the Indian Act, something Métis
women were not affected by. Second, some Métis women objected
to the government’s attempt to funnel their concerns through
male-dominated organizations. These factors contributed to the
emergence of not one but two national Métis women’s organiza-
tions, organizations that would, from the outset, take different
approaches. As the final First Ministers’ Conference meetings con-
cluded, Métis women across the Métis Nation’s homeland real-
ized the necessity of establishing their own representative body
132 Jennifer Adese
outside of the MNC. In 1986, Friedel and others formed Women

of the Métis Nation (WMN). Six years later, on October 26, 1991,
Sheila Genaille of Alberta formed the National Métis Women of
Canada (NMWC) and the following year folded it into the incor-
porated Métis National Council of Women (MNCW). In contrast
to WMN, this second organization remains linked to the MNC.11
In spite of different approaches – outside and within the MNC –
both organizations felt that a Métis women’s organization sepa-
rate from the pan-Indigenous NWAC “would better articulate
the views of Metis women” (Green 1992, 119). Both organiza-
tions pushed for inclusion in constitutional consultations. Nei-
ther organization was, however, initially successful. In 1992,
thanks to Métis women’s agitating for a voice in male-dominated
Métis organizations and the Canadian government, funding
was approved by the federal government and funnelled to the
provinces for Métis women to travel to the First Ministers’ Con-
ference on the Constitution in Charlottetown, Prince Edward
Island (McIvor 2004, 110). The federal government determined
that the funding would, however, be channelled through the
male-dominated MNC.
As Sharon McIvor (2004, 110, n8) recounts, the MNC “allo-
cated its $250,000 to the MNCW” while WMN, the older of the
two organizations and the one that stood apart from the MNC,
was excluded and would receive “none of the funds.” According
to Mary Wiegers (RCAP 1992c) however, “the last batch of money
that came down from Joe Clark’s office for constitutional talks was
never handed down to the Métis women” at all. She maintains that
the executive of her province (Saskatchewan) felt that it could
“spend the money without any communications with the Métis
women” (RCAP 1992c). Claims such as Wiegers’s point to two
things. First, they suggest that despite the MNC’s commitment
to Métis women, the enduring problem of resource transmission
through the levels of the organization and its provincial affiliates
hampered Métis women’s involvement. Second, it also alludes to
some of the tensions between Métis women working within the
MNCW/MNC and outside of those groups.12
Its position outside the formal structure of the Métis National

Council emboldened WMN to push back against the MNC/
MNCW’s silence on the matter of the proposed subsection 35(5)
within the Constitution, a subsection that affirmed Indigenous
self-government. Women of the Métis Nation and its president,
Marge Friedel, expressed concerns that this section would affirm
Indigenous self-government rights as collective rights in a man-
ner that would put individual protections from sex and gender
discrimination upheld in the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms
in jeopardy. The inclusion of section 35(5) would mean that rather
than having both gender equality and self-government, Métis
women would be left with no ineffaceable protections against gen-
der discrimination.
In her 1992 presentation to RCAP on behalf of WMN, Frie-
del was scathing: “We find this definition [of Indigenous self-
government] repulsive and terrifying, but we were not able to
voice our concerns and the Métis National Council offered no
opinion whatsoever on this issue. This is the organization that
purports to represent us as women” (RCAP 1992b). She noted
that WMN would have intervened to raise this matter but had
been excluded from participating on their own behalf as a rec-
ognized, representative voice for Métis women in constitutional
talks. Mary Wiegers, president of the provincial Métis Women of
Saskatchewan made similar statements to the RCAP, questioning
whether self-government included all Métis people or just a hand-
ful of Métis people (RCAP 1992c). Wiegers particularly critiqued
the MNC’s structure, asserting that the limited inclusion of Métis
women through the MNCW did not amount to a dedicated space
for the equal representation of Métis women (RCAP 1992c).
Métis women from WMN were therefore thrust into an increas-
ingly tense situation as they were accused of impeding Métis self-
government. They, on the other hand, felt that the formation of
the MNCW was part of the MNC’s effort to restrict Métis women’s
activism. For Melanie Omeniho of WMN, the MNC was “in the
process of negotiating self-governance while they actively try to
exclude their female counterparts” (RCAP 1993). In her statement
134 Jennifer Adese
to the RCAP, she reflected on her organization’s efforts to host a

conference on the topic of self-government. The conference was
meant to bring “Métis women together from all over Canada to
share their experiences and to help establish a self-governance
model” that recognized the need for Métis women’s equality
(RCAP 1993). The greatest impediment to the gathering, she
noted, were “attempts to sabotage the event prior to the date of
the conference”:
Métis women from our communities received threatening calls

from the women’s group that is affiliated with the Métis Nation-
al Council. Métis women from all over Alberta called to say
how intimidated they were feeling. The innuendos that were left
with them caused many women a great deal of anxiety. Some
women chose not to come because they worried about the ban-
ishment they may face within their small-knit communities.
(RCAP 1993)
Omeniho’s words, like those of Wiegers and Friedel, are pow-

erful. They were concerned about the re-entrenchment of sexism
within Métis self-government models and about the lack of a clear
representative space for Métis women within proposals for Métis
self-government. The MNC’s refusal to engage with the most
established Métis women’s representative body, and its decision
to instead form an “in-house” Métis women’s profile that did little
to challenge section 35(5) reveals the strategic sexism exercised by
the MNC in its efforts to retain control over Métis women’s politi-
cal organizing. In spite of the MNC’s attempts to manage Métis
women, Métis women had found their political voice and were
going to use it publicly.
The Aftermath
Métis efforts to bring about constitutionally entrenched self-

government and Métis women’s work toward achieving equal-
ity within self-government provisions came to an end when the
Charlottetown Accord was defeated. The postconstitutional

moment reveals much, however, about the discussion of self-
government. The MNCW, under Genaille’s leadership, would
soon find itself in conflict with the government of Canada and with
the MNC over access to funding and gender equality. The orga-
nization once upheld by the MNC and used to stifle the efforts of
WMN soon launched a legal battle that revealed the underbelly of
illusions of women’s equality within the MNC.
Between 1996 and 1999, the government transferred over $600
million to a number of Indigenous organizations, including the
MNC. In the case Métis National Council of Women v Canada (Attor-
ney General) (2005), Genaille claimed that the MNCW had been
excluded from funding for the “Pathways to Success” employ-
ment program, a program created by the federal government to
support Indigenous employment initiatives.13 While the case did
not confront the MNC directly, in the course of it Genaille argued
that the federal government’s funding of the MNC through the
program and the MNC’s misappropriation of funds without allo-
cated funding for the MNCW, was a violation of section 15 gender-
equality rights. Genaille contends that the MNCW was excluded
from having direct access to funding because of their subsidiary
position within MNC, and that the exclusion was a violation of
section 15 of the Charter’s gender-equality provisions. Genaille
and another complainant, Joyce Gus, argued that “the MNC is
an inherently male-dominated organization that marginalizes
the interests of women and actively seeks to exclude the MNCW
from participating in all aspects of the Aboriginal employment
programs.” The exclusion of MNCW led to it parting ways with
the MNC.
The case is telling. Had WMN not continued to agitate against
sexism in Métis self-government attempts outside of the MNC, a
Métis self-government model that did not tangibly include consul-
tation with Métis women and that offered no clear commitment to
recognizing the protections ensconced within section 15 gender-
equality rights might have become constitutionally protected.
Métis self-government could have conceivably been formulated
136 Jennifer Adese
without ensuring that Métis women would continue to be pro-

tected under section 15 gender-equality rights. Had WMN not
resisted adoption of a self-government approach unclear about
its relationship to section 15 rights, Genaille and the MNCW
would not have had any external recourse through which to have
their voices heard. Had the self-government rights of the MNC
writ large been affirmed through a ubiquitous section 35(5) self-
government resolution, without deference to Métis women’s
equality rights, Métis women would have had little to no route to
address the discrimination they experience.14 The MNCW’s slow
realization of the MNC’s lack of interest in Métis women’s equal-
ity reinforced WMN’s position. It also supports the theory that
the MNC sought to strategically use the MNCW to control Métis
women’s political activism.
Following the MNCW’s split from the MNC, the MNC attempted
to revive Métis women’s political participation within its walls. In
1999, the MNC Women’s Secretariat (MWS) was formed with rep-
resentatives from each of the provincial organizations – Ontario,
Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia – that
make up MNC’s governing membership. From 1999 to 2009, Rose
marie McPherson, a multilingual Michif woman from Manitoba,
held the role of National Spokesperson of the Métis Women’s Secre-
tariat and was an active voice within MNC. In spite of McPherson’s
efforts, the Secretariat would be short-lived within MNC as once
again, MNC’s top-down attempts to engineer Métis women’s politi-
cal role would prove inadequate. In 2010, the 1999 MWS formally
merged with WMN (and had in fact already been operating under
the name of WMN) and re-emerged as an autonomous, national col-
lective of Métis women working both inside and outside of MNC
structures. This collaborative organization, Les Femmes Michif Oti-
pemisiwak–Women of the Métis Nation (LFMO–WMN), works
with the provincial Métis women’s organizations in each of the Métis
Nation provinces. LFMO-WMN is a fully incorporated, independent
organization that participates within the governance structure of the
MNC and holds a seat on the MNC’s board of governors. The cre-
ation of LFMO-WMN marked a turning point in that, finally, Métis
women had a political body independent of the MNC as well as

an entrenched seat in the MNC’s governing structure.
As the secretariat transitioned into LFMO–WMN, Omeniho
replaced McPherson, filling in as interim president. Through an
election and re-election in 2013 and 2016, Omeniho continued as
president. A Métis woman from Alberta, Omeniho was notable
for her public speaking on the oppression that Métis women face
and as a long-standing activist at local, provincial, and national
levels. Omeniho was a central figure in bringing LFMO–WMN to
the forefront of Métis women’s activism. She actively represented
LFMO–WMN at five federally sponsored National Aboriginal
Women’s Summits, in Cornerbrook in 2007, Yellowknife in 2008,
Winnipeg in 2010, Membertou First Nation in 2014, and Toronto
in 2017. Omeniho worked diligently to ensure that delegates from
each of the member provinces were in attendance at each meeting
and that they worked collaboratively on building policy papers
specific to Métis women in the areas of education, traditional
knowledge, economic development, and violence against Indige-
nous women. On this latter point, at the third of these gatherings,
a particularly poignant and important one, LFMO–WMN joined
other women’s organizations to call on the provincial premiers to
support a national inquiry into the obscenely high rates of Indig-
enous women who go missing and/or are murdered. Since then,
LFMO-WMN has been an active voice in round tables and other
meetings, making calls on the federal government to launch an
inquiry into the matter.
Toward a Fuller Picture of Contemporary

Métis National Politics
LFMO–WMN is the latest example of Métis women’s political

organizing at the national level, and it appears, at least so far, that
it has finally realized Métis women’s goal of having a clear and
independent voice in national Indigenous political organizing.
LFMO–WMN continues to give a voice to the past, present, and
future of the women of the Métis Nation, and it is indeed built on
138 Jennifer Adese
an impressive legacy: Métis women rose from local and provincial

organizing to express themselves on the national stage, belying
Weinstein’s portrayal of Métis national politics.
On June 15, 1993, in statements made to the RCAP at the Edmon-
ton, Alberta gathering at Cherrywood Inn, Omeniho reflected on
the centrality of Métis women to the Métis Nation, the struggle of
women to be elected to positions within the MNC, and the utter
unacceptability of Métis women’s exclusion from the political land-
scape. Omeniho argued: “WE all had mothers and grandmothers.
We were taught to respect and honour these women in our lives.
In many traditional families these women played significant roles
in our upbringing. To reject the women of our communities and
not value their input is to be disrespectful of our grandmothers and
mothers that came before us” (RCAP 1993). To reject the input of
Métis women is to uphold sexist ideologies introduced to Métis
society and entrenched within Canada, and these ideologies cause
immense harm to Métis women, families, communities, and the
Métis Nation. To write their story out of the political history of
the Métis Nation is unacceptable.
In spite of all of the challenges that Métis women face, they have
never relinquished their role in ensuring that the Métis Nation is
balanced – even in the face of the complicity and overwhelming
silence of Métis men and, at times, outright suppression by them.
Métis woman have also laboured to ensure that everyone is equally
respected within the Nation. As Omeniho (RCAP 1993) argues,
Métis Nation governance must “include all people, Elders, our
women and even our youth.” Métis women have persisted in orga-
nizing to give voice to their experiences but also to ensure that all
voices are heard within the Métis Nation. They recognize that it is
their responsibility to build a Nation in which all future generations
of Métis are respected and valued.
There is much to be lauded in Weinstein’s account of Métis
political history and nationalism. But we cannot forget that
there is much to be learned from Métis women’s activism that
enacts a wider vision of Métis history, of the Métis fight against
colonialism, and of the Métis struggle for justice. That the
MNC tacitly condones a misogynistic telling of its own rise to

prominence – and at a time when it presumes to assert its own
supremacy and transform itself into a governance structure for
the Métis – renders it worthy of criticism. Weinstein’s exclusion
of Métis women who have made monumental contributions to
restoring the balance of the Métis Nation – women such as Mel-
anie Omeniho, Marge Friedel, Mary Wiegers, Sheila Genaille,
and Bertha Clark-Jones – is inexcusable. While some of these
women, such as Clark-Jones, allied with non-Status and Status
First Nations women, and others, such as Friedel and Omeniho,
have worked within the specific framework of Métis women’s
organizing, their valuable contributions to Métis national poli-
tics are incontrovertible.
Indeed, Métis women are not now nor have they ever been
quiet. Métis political activism, and indeed Métis peoplehood
expressed politically as the Métis Nation, has never simply been
the battleground of Métis men. At great personal and professional
cost, Métis women have been vocal and potent advocates for Métis
women’s concerns. Métis women have always been active within
the Métis Nation and, more importantly, have always resisted the
damaging implications of colonization. Métis women’s politi-
cal organizing confronts the marginalization of women in their
communities and in organizations that purport to represent them
while simultaneously advancing recognition of Métis as a distinct
people.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the activist work of a number

of Métis women whose efforts to advocate on behalf of Métis
women and future generations of the Métis Nation have greatly
inspired me. I thank them for their mentorship, guidance,
friendship, and kinship, and I hope that this small offering in
acknowledgment of their effort does some justice to their pres-
ence in the landscape of Indigenous politics. Heartfelt thanks
to Melanie Omeniho, Victoria Pruden, Rosemarie McPherson,
140 Jennifer Adese
Julie Pitzel, Lorelei Lanz, Linda Boudreau, Lisa Pigeau, and

Annette Maurice for the gifts that you have each given me –
your time, your kindness, and your wisdom. I love you all.
Lastly, this chapter is dedicated to five inspiring Métis women –
the late Elder Marge Friedel, who helped me find my way home;
my late cousins Rose Bortolon and Millie Little, who welcomed
me and shared stories with me; my late Auntie/Kokum Helen
Lenny, who showed me who I was; and last, but never least,
my late grandma Myrtle Lenny, without whom I would not be
here.
Notes
1 The Métis National Council is a political advocacy body and aspiring

governance body for Métis people. It represents one of three constitu-
tionally protected Aboriginal people. I use “Aboriginal” here as it is
the language that exists in s.35 of the Constitution itself.
2 See also Manitoba Act, 1870, 33 Vict, c 3, “An Act to amend and con-
tinue the Act 32 and 33 Victoria, chapter 3; and to establish and
provide for the Government of the Province of Manitoba,” May 12,
1870.
3 The gang rape and murder of Laurette Goulet is one of two recorded
accounts of sexual violence against Métis women in the context of the
RREF. For all the exhaustive studies of the events of 1870, a concerted
focus on the gendered dimensions of the Reign of Terror remains to be
undertaken.
4 Between 1965 and 1975, more than fifteen different local and prov-
incial Indigenous women’s organizations were established in addi-
tion to national organizations such as the Native Women’s
Association of Canada and Indian Rights for Indian Women (see
Henderson 1975).
5 See, for instance, the Saskatoon Native Women’s Association, Metis
Oral History Project, interviews, S-643 to S-709, Gabriel Dumont Insti-
tute of Native Studies and Applied Research Virtual Museum of Métis
History and Culture. http://www.metismuseum.ca/browse/index
.php/101.
6 Annie Lavallie, interview with Margaret Jefferson, August 20, 1982,
SAB, S-189, http://www.metismuseum.ca/resource.php/00997.
7 Rose Fleury, interview with Brenda Arnault, March 27, 1984, SAB,
S-151, 22. http://www.metismuseum.ca/resource.php/01062.
8 The society faced criticism for not having a more concerted rights-
based focus and for being more engaged in bake sales, bingos, and
home economics (see Carlson and Steinhauer 2013, 64).
9 The most prolific of these efforts was the Constitutional Express, led
by George Manuel, president of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs (see
Manuel and Derrickson 2015).
10 The RCAP was established in 1991. It was created by an official Order-
in-Council and mandated “to investigate and propose solutions to the
challenges affecting the relationship between Aboriginal peoples (First
Nations, Inuit, Métis), the Canadian government and Canadian soci-
ety as a whole” (LAC, n.d.).
11 In statements before the RCAP in 1992, Genaille details the MNCW’s
role within the MNC, distinguishing the MNCW from other Métis
women’s organizations, noting that the MNCW had taken a path of
working within the MNC’s structure (RCAP 1992a). Although Gen-
aille participated in the Charlottetown Accord meetings in August of
1992 and was photographed with the the MNC’s leadership (see Wein-
stein 2007, 135), statements made to the RCAP on May 28, 1992, by
Mary Wiegers, president-elect of the Provincial Metis Women of Sas-
katchewan raise questions about the extent of the MNCW’s involve-
ment (RCAP 1992c).
12 This tension is reflected in Genaille’s later statements to the RCAP,
wherein she elaborates on the MNCW’s distinct role as a voice for
Métis women while questioning the RCAP’s acknowledgement of
WMN. She refers to WMN as more limited than her organization and
as only representative of the “concerns of a very small group of women
in Alberta” (RCAP 1992a).
13 Métis National Council of Women v Canada (Attorney General) (F.C.), 2005 FC
230, [2005] 4 FCR 272, http://recueil.fja-cmf.gc.ca/eng/2005/2005fc230
.html.
14 The case was lost in part because the court ruled that the MNCW, as an
incorporated body, did not hold individual gender-equality rights.
Part of the ruling also held that there was no evidence that the MNC
did not represent Métis women and that there was no support for the
MNCW. Whether Genaille and other Métis women with the MNCW
were “duped” by the MNC or whether the MNCW’s influence had
waned by the time the matter under question was at hand requires
further study.
142 Jennifer Adese
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6
Alcide Morrissette: Oral Histories
of a Métis Man on the Prairies
in the Mid-Twentieth Century
Jesse Thistle
Alcide Joseph Alphonse “Tawtum” Morrissette was a Michif

man born on July 20, 1932, somewhere between Mattes and Deb-
den, Saskatchewan, in a canvas tent, on a cart trail that is long
gone. “Michif” is an ingroup ethnic term and language that
French-Cree Métis on the Prairies call themselves and speak, both
contemporarily and historically; it is how Alcide and his siblings
identified their kin and people when this chapter was written.
Alcide died from cancer on March 31, 2017, with his family by his
side, in an old age facility in Saskatoon. He was eight-five years
young. Alcide was my uncle and was the best natural storyteller
I have ever encountered in my five short years of field research
collecting oral histories from Métis and Cree Elders across west-
ern Canada. All the tales Alcide told me and my research team –
myself; my mother, Blanche Morrissette; and my aunt Yvonne
Richer-Morrissette – remain the property of his family, who reside
on Beardy’s First Nation, Saskatchewan. I am merely a steward of
their stories. This chapter, then, is my effort to preserve and inter-
pret Alcide’s mid-twentieth-century Métis life through the oral his-
tories he most graciously shared with us in 2014.1 It is my eulogy
for a man who held vast knowledge about Métis people and who
had the foresight to let me record it.
The “realist” prose employed throughout the body of this chap-
ter is that of literary nonfiction, a kind of writing common in
Italian microhistories. It is used to make the reader feel and under-
stand not only Alcide’s life as he lived it but also how he told and
146
Alcide Morrissette 147
remembered it as an old man (Ginzburg 1993, 23). Also, I use the

language of literary nonfiction because it allows me, an Indigenous
storyteller, to best relay how I understood his life as it was told
to me. Choices were made, sentences were paraphrased and reor-
dered, and flourishes were added to enhance the emotional impact
of Alcide’s voice, but all the data is drawn from our 2014 interview.
Woven between the narrative vignettes are brief academic analy-
ses, which, hopefully, will illuminate some of the daily activities
of Michif men on the Prairies in the mid-twentieth century. The
first story, “Horses,” depicts Alcide and his grandfather St. Pierre
as they transport a herd of horses to a white farmer near Rosth-
ern, Saskatchewan. The oral history helps illuminate Métis gen-
erational kin dynamics as well as the equine training most Michif
boys received in the 1930s and ’40s. The next story, “Alcide’s First
Car,” is set in 1948, when he was sixteen. In it, Alcide builds a fence
for local Debden Swedes, who pay him forty dollars and a car. The
narrative offers a window into the liberating effect mobility had
in one Métis adolescent’s life in the postwar era. The third and
final story, “The Digger Machine,” is set in the early 1950s and sees
Alcide venture out of his community for the first time looking for
work; it is primarily about the Métis’ harsh labour conditions in
the postwar period. It is, unfortunately, also a loss-of-innocence
narrative in which he comes to understand that Métis life in west-
ern Canada is expendable. In other words, this chapter lays out
one man’s life – as historian John Brewer says good microhistories
must do – and lets you decide what is significant or remarkable
about this “everyday” Michif person (Brewer 2010, 88).
“Horses” (1944)
“There was only two of us to start,” old Alcide said as he scratched

his granite chin, recalling memories of his youth. His chin was
remarkable – strong, chiselled, peppered with silver-black stub-
ble, and decorated with a few random scars, likely from holding
his ground in some dust-up in his distant twenties. “Yup, origin-
ally, it was only me and my sister Bernadette,” he recalled. “We
148 Jesse Thistle
stayed on the cart trail there, just on the other side of Mattes and
Park Valley. I was born there in 1932. Oh, we must’ve been there
four years.”
Alcide’s Michif accent was thick and pulled me in straight
away, filling me with awe. I think I’ve finally found a real Michif, I
reflected. The old guy just said he was born on a cart trail!
Images of Red River carts, teams of oxen and horses,
free-roaming bison, and of a time much older than Alcide him-
self danced across my brain.
“But I’m not that old,” he interjected, as if he knew exactly
what I was thinking. “I’m only eighty-two. And I’m talking
about the 1930s and ’40s. We did have some modern stuff back
then: ice cream, cars, civilization—”
Aunt Yvonne interrupted and explained her older brother’s
way of life. “Alcide lived with Mushoom [Cree and Michif term
for grandfather]. St. Pierre Arcand and his fourth wife, Lottie,
on the road allowances. Mom and Pop, your grandparents,
were always on the go trying to survive – hunting, fishing,
working – they had no time for kids, really. Mushoom was more
stable.”
“Yes, that’s where I grew up,” Alcide said, “with Mushoom
and Lottie on Crown land in Mattes. My mom and dad weren’t
around too much.”
I pulled up my chair knowing that this interview was the
most important of my young career.
“Tea, young feller?” he offered.
“Sure, Uncle, I’d love some. Mom, Auntie?”
“Yes please,” they said in union, each staring at their iPhones.
With that, Alcide turned from the kitchen table and shuffled
across the linoleum floor, like Yoda and Gandalf all rolled into
one. He put on the kettle, lined up four teacups, and broke out
his best box of Red Rose.
Alcide’s kitchen in Beardy’s First Nation was bright, freshly
painted, and full of old family photos. Pictures of Alcide, his
wife, Louise, his two daughters, and a son hung on the wall in
frames in various scenes. One picture had them in front of
mountains, most likely taken in Vancouver on a visit to see my

Aunt Cecile, but most were set against the gentle backdrop of
my people’s homeland, the parkland of northern Saskatchewan.
Everyone looked so happy and relaxed and gave off the impres-
sion that Alcide had lived a full life, that he was a good father.
My research team – consisting of me, Aunt Yvonne, and Mom –
found ourselves in Alcide’s home in June 2014, after we had
asked other Métis and Cree Elders who to interview for pertin-
ent historical information on the 1885 Resistance. Everyone al-
ways told us that Alcide Morrissette, our very own kin member
over near Duck Lake, had the best stories and that he could give
us the answers we were looking for. They said his mind was still
sharp like a young man’s, much better than the other Elders his
age. So, one day my mom called Paulette (Alcide’s daughter),
who arranged for us to come see him, and here we were – record-
ing devices on – listening to the master storyteller himself.
The teacups Alcide put in front of us looked like they were
from Ikea or something. White, narrow at the bottom, brim-
ming with lifeless monotony and cheap Scandinavian design. I
watched as my teabag steeped and drifted aimlessly, bumping
against the side of my cup, releasing itself in the stillness of the
boiling water.
“Milk, cream, sugar?” Alcide offered as he pushed the condi-
ment containers in front of us. This last gesture was his real in-
vitation into his storied world, a motion telling us that we were
now welcome and visiting in the Métis way.
“When I was twelve,” he began, “I rode a stallion and team
of horses right from Whitefish Lake down to here – Duck Lake.
It took us three days – Mushoom and I. He rode in a buggy, I
on a horse.”
Alcide looked down at his aged hands, opening and closing
them. I wondered if they still possessed the youthful vigour
they’d had on that voyage with his grandfather.
“We stopped after the first night, this side of Canwood – we
took the old highway. That’s where we pitched our tent and had
a little sleep.”
150 Jesse Thistle
Aunt Yvonne nodded, picturing her eldest brother and

grandfather huddled around a midnight Saskatchewan fire, sip-
ping on tea like we were now doing in Alcide’s kitchen. My
mom was busy fiddling with the broken video camera I’d
dragged from Toronto. She gave up soon afterward. The cam-
era remained idle the rest of our trip.
“Yes, come morning, I rode that black stallion,” he con-
tinued, “and every time I met another horse on the road he went
crazy and bucked all over the place – legs kicking wildly into
the air. But, you see, back in those days, I was a real
cowboy—”
“So?!?” Aunt Yvonne shouted. “It didn’t bother you that the
stallion was so wild – it could have killed you!!?” Her interrup-
tion was not so much bad manners, though, more like a kid
who’s caught in the throes of a delightful bedside story and
can’t help herself from squealing. Alcide knew then that he had
the three of us hooked.
“That’s right, it didn’t bother me – not one bit. I just hun-
kered down, dug in my boots, and whipped the piss out of
him!”
At the image of Alcide beating the horse, the room exploded
into laugher – the deep side-splitting kind that fills one’s soul
and makes life worth living.
“Yup, I turned him around strongly,” Alcide went on, “then I
thrashed him over and over and drove him mental. Ka Ka Ka!
I had to show him that I was boss. Oh, he reared up and tried
to buck me off, alright, but I had this army saddle, and there
was a handle on it – that was what kept me on. I guess I was
about twelve years old, somewhere around that age. You see, St.
Pierre taught me how to break horses.”
As Alcide spoke of taming the stallion, he gripped his right
hand around an imaginary army saddle handle between his
legs, and I saw then the rugged Michif boy he once was. His
clever eyes glinted in the kitchen light.
“I rode all the way down to the lake here then into the horse
hall. That’s where me and Grandpa sold them horses to some
white farmer. And you know what? I didn’t even get twenty-five
cents!” Alcide’s half-smiling-half-frowning face revealed the ut-
ter disbelief he felt toward his Mushoom’s stingy business
practices.
“Grandpa ripped you off? Oh, he was a dirty bugger, wasn’t
he?” Yvonne added.
“He sure was – the cheapskate!” Alcide just sat there at the
kitchen table, palms up, jaw dropped, waiting for payment –
payment that was now some seventy-years overdue.
“Can you imagine,” his eyes and mouth still wide-open in
shock, “that my dear old Mushoom did that to me?”
We giggled. Alcide collected himself, cracked a sideways
grin, and delivered his final thought.
“You know,” he said, “the old man did teach me about horses,
and pretty good too, so I guess I ain’t that mad at him, but I
still want my twenty-five cents, damn it!”
Analysis A
The short story “Horses” about Alcide Morrissette’s youth along

the road allowances in northern Saskatchewan tells us a few things
about everyday Métis life in the early 1940s (Eckert and Jones
2002, 8). Most striking, however, are the role grandparents played
in raising Métis children and the equine training young Michif
boys received from their male relatives – their fathers, uncles, and
grandfathers (Morrissette and Morrissette 2014). Author Maria
Campbell in her memoir Halfbreed confirms the significant role
grandparents held in raising Métis children in the 1940s and ’50s
(Campbell 1973, 17–18). Campbell notes that her Cheechum (pater-
nal grandmother; kokum is another, more general, Cree and Michif
term for grandmother) lived with their nuclear family in a log
cabin on a homestead plot in Park Valley, Saskatchewan, and that
she had taught Maria many of the life skills she needed to survive –
sowing, harvesting, cooking, Indigenous ceremony, and diplo-
macy (Campbell, 17–18). She states that her cheechum looked
after the domestic sphere, along with her mother, while her father
152 Jesse Thistle
was out on the trapline six months of the year obtaining meat for
the family (Campbell, 53). Cheechum’s role resembled, in a femi-
nine way, the role Alcide’s mushoom played in his upbringing:
“Pop … [was] always on the go trying to survive – hunting, fish-
ing, working … He had no time for kids really. Mushoom [raised
Alcide because he] was more stable.”2 Moreover, according to
Campbell, in times of hardship, grandparents – both maternal and
paternal – would serve as lifelines, relieving the hunger of their
extended families by “bringing [them] food they had … sav[ed] …
The smells would be heavenly, because at that time of the year our
sole diet was wild meat and potatoes” (Campbell, 53).
Claude Petit, a Métis veteran of the Second World War, further
underscores the social importance grandparents held in raising
Michif kids, describing his adolescence in Duck Lake, Saskatch-
ewan, in the early 1940s. “My parents were [always away],” Petit
states, “and I was [always] staying at my Grandmother’s at Duck
Lake” (Dorion 1996, 107). The stability of Alcide’s grandfather is
recalled further in the testimony of Métis Elder Maurice Blondeau,
who grew up with his grandparents on his grandfather’s land just
outside the village of Lebret, Saskatchewan, in the 1930s. “There
were a lot of Métis people living along the road allowance,” he
notes, “just outside the town of Lebret. They called it Little Chi-
cago. We lived on 15 acres of land my grandfather had purchased”
(Dorion, 12). Blondeau goes on to state the key role his grand-
father had in teaching him life skills: how to pick Seneca roots,
fight against local French kids, and have tea and visit in the proper
Métis way (Dorion, 16). The tea Alcide offered us in his kitchen,
then, seems to be a formal Métis social skill he learned from his
grandfather, just as Blondeau had learned it from his granddad.
Lastly, St. Pierre and Lottie, Alcide’s grandparents, are known
to have taken in other Métis children, as is the case with their
grandson Larry Arcand. Larry recalls his grandparent’s interven-
tion in the late 1940s: “I was adopted out at about a month old
to my Grandpa Pierre Arcand and his fourth wife ‘Grannie Lot-
tie’ Gray so I never knew my blood parents” (Park Valley History
Committee 1992, 182). Indeed, grandparents served as a strong
wahkootawin (kinship) link, holding Métis families together in the

postwar period as parents laboured elsewhere, outside of home
communities.
Horses, as we saw in Alcide’s first story, dominated Métis life in
northern Saskatchewan in the 1940s and earlier. Alcide’s equine
training, which he received from his mushoom, seems to reflect a
Métis reliance on horses, unlike local white farmers, who, by 1940,
had transitioned to trucks, tractors, or cars to assist with farm
labour (Park Valley History Committee 1992, 47 and 42). The cen-
trality of horses in Métis life is also reflected in the Debden com-
munity history, Wilderness to Neighbourhoods, in the toils of Alcide’s
Auntie Bella and Uncle Damas Arcand. The Arcand family remain
a major Michif clan in the Debden area today. The book entry
reads: “They [Bella and Damas] did their farming with horses …
[They] had to haul water from sloughs with horse and stoneboat
sleds” (Park Valley History Committee, 179). The life of George
Arcand in the 1940s, as recalled by his daughter Bernadette, fur-
ther underscores the importance of equines in Métis living post-
1940: “Dad cleared some of his own land and worked for different
neighbours around Park Valley. Everything was done by hand or
horses” (Park Valley History Committee, 181).
John Gaudry’s Métis family, who had come to Park Valley from
Willow Bunch, Saskatchewan, in the 1920s, provides the best
comparison to the horse drive Alcide and St. Pierre embarked on
in 1942. The Gaudry’s herd was far bigger than old St. Pierre’s:
“They [John’s father, his grandfather, and his sons] would trail
100 to 150 horses at the time, selling and trading them along the
way to settlers and trappers … They made the last horse drive
from the south in 1930” (Park Valley History Committee 1992,
282). Although the Gaudry’s horse drive was twelve years ear-
lier than Alcide’s 1942 experience, and went from south to north,
opposite to St. Pierre’s drive, it still shows how equine herding
was practised by generations of Métis males in the early and mid-
twentieth century. John’s entry in Wilderness to Neighbourhoods
confirms the intergenerational nature of male equine training
and expertise: “John was raised a cowboy [by his father] … The
154 Jesse Thistle
Gaudry quarter [is] where John, with the help of his sons … built
the corrals and chutes, [and held] stampede[s]. His sons, Robert
and Wilfred, soon became good at roping and riding wild bron-
cos” (Park Valley History Committee, 282). Breaking and riding
broncos, it appears, was a skill most Métis boys in Debden in the
postwar era could do – something taught to them by their fathers
or grandfathers – just like Alcide’s story had depicted.
By looking at Alcide’s youth through the oral story “Horses”
and then comparing his experiences to other Métis youth from
Saskatchewan in the 1930s and ’40s it becomes clear that 1) grand-
parents were a central socializing force in Métis life in parkland
Saskatchewan and 2) horse training was a skill passed down
through generations of Métis men. Horses, however important
prior to 1945, would lose some of their prominence by 1950, as the
automobile transformed the scope and range of young Métis lives
on the postwar Prairies.
“Alcide’s First Car” (1948)
“It was a hard life back then,” Alcide said. “We only had horses.
No cars.”
He rocked back and forth in his chair, as if remembering the
hardship of the road allowances. Me, Aunt Yvonne, and my
mom looked at each other and felt bad that we couldn’t do any-
thing to protect him from the harmful memories of tuberculo-
sis, back-breaking labour, and government neglect that had
held him and our people in perpetual poverty in the mid-
twentieth century.3
“Do you want to stop, Uncle? It’s okay.” I tried to comfort
him, but it only made him angry.
“No, no, no – this is how it was, and it’s about goddamn time
they knew the truth!”
The fury that coloured his eyes, I knew, was the same fighting
spirit that had allowed him to endure all those hard years. I re-
membered back to when I saw that same look in my mother’s
eyes whenever she talked about life in Erin Ferry road allowance,
or when she recalled being teased at school for bringing rabbit

heads for lunch. She and her siblings always wanted to eat the
fancy white-bread sandwiches the French kids ate, but they never
got the chance. All they got in their gunnysacks was bannock,
roasted animal heads, and a world of prejudice, teasing, and
shame. Sometimes, they even got split lips and black eyes.4
“But that all changed for me,” Alcide exclaimed, breaking
out of his aggravation, “because I went to work for the Swede.”
He closed his eyes and clasped his hands together as if praying,
as if savouring a sweet memory. He filled his lungs with air and
released it slowly, his head bowed in reverent thanks. He looked
up with a toothy smile.
“One day,” Alcide continued, “at the end of summer, the
Swede gave me a car.”
The gasp that my mom and aunt gave off emphasized the
importance of what Alcide had just said. It was an incredible
story, almost unbelievable, of a poor Michif boy, but sixteen
years old in 1948, receiving his first car, a car that other road
allowance Métis at that time – even grown men and women,
for that matter – could only dream of. The life-altering act of
kindness bestowed by the Swede upon young Alcide cannot
be overstated. It represented a chance for Alcide to venture
beyond his impoverished world, a chance for him to become
something more than he was, a chance for him to escape the
road allowances.
“‘I want to give you this car,’ the Swede said to me, ‘because
you’re walking everywhere, and you’re a very hard worker.’” Al-
cide’s body began trembling, underscoring the raw, grateful
emotion he still felt some six decades later.
“‘Okay, good enough for me,’ I said. So I took the keys.”
Alcide grabbed in front of him as if to snatch the keys out of
thin air.
“It was that simple?” Aunt Yvonne inquired. “You got a car
and learned to drive, just like that?” I could tell that Auntie was
just as confused as I was by the abrupt, anticlimactic nature of
Alcide’s life-changing story.
156 Jesse Thistle
“Yes. It happened just like that; that’s how my new life began.
And, just so you know, I already knew how to drive. I worked
for all kinds of white people driving tractors as a farmhand, but
they were just small tractors, not big like my car. Mine was an
old Model A, and it rode just like a caboose, square like.”
The motion Alcide made with his knees enacted the bumpy
rides he went on in his car looking for jobs in Prince Albert,
Saskatoon, North Battleford, and beyond, jobs that, before the
Swede’s generosity, would’ve been outside the range of his iso-
lated world around Debden.
“They had sent me into the field the day before.” Alcide’s face
was now beaming with pride. “I was working way in the back
and couldn’t see anything. Then the Swede went to PA in the
middle of the day and bought a new truck and drove it back
before I saw it. The next day, he came to me and said, ‘This is
how much we owe you’ – he dangled the keys right in front of
me – because I built them a whole new fence for their
four-quarter pasture land. And I built all the corrals and fen-
cing around the barn with new lumber and everything. So, I
grabbed those car keys and, by gosh, they even gave me forty
dollars on top! Boy oh boy. When I started it up, it went “rum
rum rum” and, by gosh, I put it in first gear, then second gear,
then high gear, then I drove it straight to Debden and drank ten
glasses of beer!”
As Alcide said this last bit he rubbed his stomach, smacked
his lips, and chuckled to himself. The taste of those 1948 beers
still fresh on his tongue. A look of deep satisfaction rested on
his wrinkly face.
Aunt Yvonne, in shock, scrambled for her words, trying to
understand Alcide’s first drunken car ride. “Um … um … You
went and got drunk and drove around? But what about a
licence?”
“No, I didn’t have no licence.” Alcide leaned back and
stretched his arm forward like he was resting it on a car wheel.
I could almost see the cigarette dangling between his fingers. “I
left Debden and drove to Canwood and walked into the RM
[rural municipality] and slammed my hand down, ‘I want a

driver’s licence.’ By golly, they told me it was five dollars. Right
away I paid it, and right away they give it to me. No questions
asked. Then I bought the plates for my car – it cost fifteen dol-
lars. That’s a lot of money in them days. I then went to the gas
station and filled it plum-full and drove back to Debden and
drank another five or six beers and cruised around all day until
10 p.m. Afterward, I saw my brother-in-law Bud Barrone walk-
ing down Railroad Street, and he told me about a dance in El-
dred – Alec Isbister’s party. Alec was a good guy, and there were
girls there, so off we went!”
Analysis B
“Alcide’s First Car” is an oral history that provides a flashlight

understanding of the importance of vehicle mobility in an adoles-
cent Métis’ life in the postwar era.5 It is a narrative of how a car
changed the trajectory of Alcide’s life and helped him escape the
road allowances of northern Saskatchewan. The story began with
a recounting of the hardships endured by Saskatchewan Métis
along the road allowances. “Tuberculosis, back-breaking labour,
and government neglect,” the narration describes, “held” Alcide
and other Métis peoples “in perpetual poverty” in the 1940s. The
memory of his hardship on the road allowance, as told in the
story, got Alcide and Blanche Morrissette angry: “The fury that
coloured his eyes, I knew, was the same fighting spirit in my moth-
er’s (Blanche’s) eyes whenever she talked about life in Erin Ferry
road allowance.”
Historian Laurie Barron (1997, 195) agrees with the account’s
appraisal of Michif poverty and calls Saskatchewan’s rigid 1940s
social hierarchy a “caste system,” one that gave the Métis no
chance of social or economic advancement (Iggers 2005, 102).
Although Barron is talking about a region four hundred kilome-
tres to the north, near Green Lake, Saskatchewan, the Braudelian
structures he illustrates certainly apply to Métis society in the
central Saskatchewan parklands around Debden (Barron, 195).
158 Jesse Thistle
Yvonne Richer-Morrissette confirms Barron’s class observation

and articulates how an impenetrable caste system “held down”
Métis people in Park Valley in the 1950s: “Michifs were at the very
bottom. Then you had the Indians, then white immigrants, then
French whites, and then English. In all of the social ladders, the
Michif were the ones that were looked down on the most. We had
the biggest oppression. I think – in all – because you had it from
everywhere.”6 Appreciating the macrocontext of prairie Métis class
dynamics, scholar Georg Iggers (2005, 102) points out, is key to
teasing out and understanding the microfreedom Alcide’s Model
A car represented.
Iggers explains that microhistorians must articulate the condi-
tions of everyday life while attending to the material and political
conditions in which they were experienced by small actors (Iggers
2005, 102). Historians must contextualize the “micro [details]
within the macro” context so they can get a full appreciation of
what they are actually writing about, otherwise the microhistory is
essentially incomplete (Iggers, 102). If we take Iggers’s macrohis-
tory template and apply it to its fullest extent in “Alcide’s First Car,”
then we must contextualize not only Métis class dynamics as they
relate to Alcide’s local neighbours but also all of Saskatchewan’s
material and social economy after the Second World War. To that
end, historian Joy Parr (1999) notes that Canada’s postwar econ-
omy was a “command economy,” one in which steel, iron, and rub-
ber were federally controlled and tightly regulated. Consequently,
the production of new cars and other manufactured goods slowed
to a standstill outside of supplying a beleaguered Britain or basic
needs in Canada. Labour was also regulated in most nonvital
sectors, again in an effort to support Britain or to keep Canada
going. Distribution of goods and domestic consumption of food-
stuffs also lagged after the war, and credit lending was nonexistent
until at least 1950. Canadians, according to Parr, could not borrow
money for large purchases such as fancy new cars or bigger homes.
Canada’s postwar economy, Parr asserts, was still reeling from its
immense output during the Second World War; Canadian indus-
try did not “boom” in the 1940s – this is a common misconception
of the country’s postwar output – as happened in US manufactur-

ing after 1945 (Parr, 28).
Moreover, Saskatchewan, northern Ontario, and Nova Scotia –
the regions hit hardest and abandoned by Canada financially dur-
ing the Great Depression – were still more or less stuck in the
hardships of the 1930s (Parr 199, 27–28; Dobbin 1985, 8). Scholar
Murray Dobbin (1985, 8) describes the “lean” world Alcide and
other Indigenous Peoples, as well as settlers, lived in in northern
Saskatchewan in the late 1940s: “There was no … social services …
no modern housing, no sanitary infrastructure, no communication
system,” and no electricity. Cars and other manufactured goods,
then, were luxury items reserved for the well-to-do – most regular
people in Saskatchewan, even settlers, simply did not have easy
access to them (Parr 1999, 22). It is true: some wealthy farmers
and urbanites in Saskatchewan did buy cars, tractors, trucks, and
other farm equipment after 1945, but most went without, relying
on horsepower or technologies they had retained since the 1920s
(Dobbin 1985, 8). All this postwar material scarcity makes Alcide’s
receiving a gift car an incredible unlikelihood. What is more,
when we evaluate the “caste system” that Michif were locked into
in the mid-twentieth century, alongside these material strictures,
the possibility of young Alcide obtaining a car at sixteen becomes
even more fantastic.
In teasing out the full value of the car in Canada’s lingering
command economy of 1948, and by appreciating the rigid social
conditions (Barron’s caste system) in which the story takes place,
we come to fully comprehend what Alcide meant when he stated:
“But that all changed for me.” Alcide meant that the car, quite liter-
ally, liberated him from his impoverished material circumstances
and social bondage along the road allowances – or so he thought.
Contextualizing the micro within the macro also explains why
Yvonne and Blanche gasped in astonishment when Alcide told
them he had been gifted a car in 1948 for building the fence. In
today’s terms, it would be equivalent to someone paying you with
a Lamborghini or a luxury mansion for building them a large fence –
something that was not lost on Yvonne and Blanche. Moreover,
160 Jesse Thistle
an appreciation of some of the social and economic structures

that held the Métis down in the 1940s also clarifies why Alcide
not only “shook and bowed his head in reverence” while telling
his story but also went and got drunk after receiving his car. The
meaning of Alcide’s celebration, through this broader sociologi-
cal lens, is amplified and takes on even more significance. He was
not simply getting drunk and going dancing at Isbister’s party, as
the story could be read without proper contextualization, he was
celebrating “his new life,” with all its extraordinary new possibili-
ties. Indeed, Iggers’s macro prospectus allows for an illumination
of the historical context behind some of the “everyday” minutia
(Eckert and Jones 2002, 8) contained within “Alcide’s First Car,”
which, as it turns out, sets the stage for the labour market and loss
of innocence contained in the next story.
“The Digger Machine” (1954)
“Big River was the place to go for work back then,” Alcide said
as he recalled memories of his early twenties and the jobs he
could now reach thanks to his Model A. “I drove up there and
got work for six months on the CNR, for a section foreman.”
Alcide’s recollection reminded me of stories I’d heard from
Uncle Paul of how Grandpa Jeremie had worked setting ties for
the CNR in the 1950s.7 I wondered if Uncle Alcide had worked
beside his father then. The sharp “ting” of a sledgehammer strik-
ing a railway spike echoed in my ear, the smell of creosote in my
nostrils. One missed strike, I imagined, and your arm would be man-
gled for life.
“That sure was a dangerous job,” Alcide said as he rubbed
what appeared to be a disfigured wrist. “Luckily, I wasn’t there
too long. When the power chainsaw came out, I, along with the
other half-breed fellas, started cutting pulp wood.” I searched
Alcide’s eighty-two-year-old frame for past lumberjack experi-
ence and saw that his chest and biceps – even at his age – were
more muscular than mine. His hands, too, looked powerful,
like swollen catcher’s mitts chewed up by a junkyard dog.
I bet he’d kill me in an arm wrestle.

I pictured Alcide snapping my forearm in half – a compound
fracture, bone popping out – like Jeff Goldblum did to that guy
in The Fly.
“I got eight dollars a day cutting pulp,” Alcide said as he
raised his mighty index finger, as if pointing to an arm-
wrestling battleground somewhere between us on the table.
“I worked in Camp 8 for the pulp mill when it started at
Prince Albert in the mid ’50s. But I left there too – work
wasn’t to my liking. Next, I was in Hinton and was there for,
oh, three years.”
The transience of Alcide’s work life was now clear to me.
Wherever the work was, so too did he and other young Métis
men venture. From what Alcide said, they had no other option
but to leave the road allowances and travel long distances
looking for employment. Their sojourning took them all over
the Prairies and British Columbia. An image of my Grand-
father Jeremie entered my brain. He wore a leather horse har-
ness and was pulling tree stumps from the roadside.8 Uncle
Paul had told me that stumping was something grandpa was
forced to do regularly for a relief cheque (welfare) from Mr.
Thiessen, the man in charge of the rural municipality of Can-
wood. According to Uncle Paul, Thiessen ran the municipality
with an iron fist, and any man who failed to work under his
relief program was denied help from the government. Some
Métis families, from what Paul said, had even starved under
the tyrant. If you didn’t pull stumps, beautify the local golf
course, or clear the highway of brush and make it look pretty,
you got no relief – period. Grandpa Jeremie, it appears,
couldn’t risk starvation, with his large family of eight kids and
wife, Nancy, eking by on Erin Ferry road allowance – they
depended on him to eat.9 Once, when I asked my Auntie Joey
about it all, she began crying, recalling images of her emaci-
ated dad harnessed up like a Clydesdale, pulling stumps for
Thiessen’s pennies. “Those Métis men,” Auntie Joey sobbed,
“were treated like livestock.” As I sat listening to Alcide in his
162 Jesse Thistle
kitchen, the memory of Auntie Joey’s cries pierced my soul

(Josephine Morrissette 2013).10
No wonder Alcide and his buddies fled across the continent. I
would’ve too.
“I left Hinton,” Alcide said, trying to lasso me back into the
conversation, “because the work had ended there. Then I went
to High Prairie and got a job on an oil rig.”
There was a long pause in his speech, and the look on Al-
cide’s face changed, as if he were about to tell me something
important. He furrowed his brow as tears formed in the cor-
ners of his milky eyes. “One day, while I was working on the
rig, a Métis guy lost his balance and fell through the digger
machine.” Alcide’s mouth quivered, and silence hung heavy in
the room.
“We were putting in a pipeline … and that accident …
that … that was too much for me. It scared the heck out of me
to see the grinder wheels all covered in blood, all red – I could
see his head in there, it was all demolished.” The nervous laugh-
ter Alcide let out did little to conceal the trauma he still felt.
My mom leaned over and rubbed her brother’s shoulder.
“I just about passed out, Fe Fe [my mother’s Michif nick-
name].” His voice, now a whisper, warbled. “I wandered off the
jobsite, somewhere, anywhere, and stood completely still for an
entire day, just like a statue. I was in shock. Somehow, I made
it to the liquor store and bought myself a big bottle of vodka,
and I sat underneath a tree and started drinking – slowly, slow-
ly, slowly – remembering what I’d just seen.”
Alcide touched his thumb against his lips and pitched his
head back like he was swilling that bottle of vodka. He looked
me right in the eye – the look of a petrified man.
“I sat there drinking from morning until night until I couldn’t
walk. I probably fell asleep there on the ground – I can’t re-
member. When I came to, I got up and drove to the office and
told them I quit. It was too much for me – seeing that we were
expendable labour and everything – so I drove back home to
Debden. It took me an entire year to recover from that.”
Analysis C
“The Digger Machine” is an oral history about Métis mobility

and labour conditions on the Prairies in the early 1950s. Specifi-
cally, it is Alcide’s initial quest for work and his subsequent disil-
lusionment when he comes to see that Métis life on the Prairies
is expendable. Of all the stories in this collection, “The Digger
Machine” evokes the strongest, most grotesque imagery: mangled
arms, compound fractures, and bodies chewed up by machinery.
There are three reasons, I can see, that he mentioned these extreme
images. First, the graphic impressions force the listener to experi-
ence the dangerous and violent labour conditions that sojourning
Métis often endured in the postwar era. Second, they make the
listener comprehend, truly, the physical, psychological, and emo-
tional consequences of living in that world. Third, they help the
listener parse the embodied knowledge reflected in the physicality
of Alcide’s wrists, torso, eyes, and arms – his corpus – and recorded
in his scars, emotion, and wrinkles (Parr 2010). In Sensing Changes,
Joy Parr (2010, 1) points out how explicit oral histories can help us
access “unwritten” data embodied in the text of our beings: “Our
bodies are instruments through which we become aware of the
world beyond our skin, the archives in which we store that knowl-
edge … beyond speech, often outside of conscious awareness.”
Italian microhistorian Carlo Ginzburg (1993, 22) notes that
vivid realist imagery, when deployed in microhistoria and oral
histories, can help readers or listeners parse out the motivations
and living conditions of the actor or actors being profiled. These
jarring images can demonstrate that the stakes are high and that
death, misery, and hardship, too, are facts of life. Along with the
insights from Parr’s theorizations of embodied knowledge, schol-
ars can study this imagery to shed new light on the “everyday life”
conditions of subjects which then allow access to “repressed” and
traumatizing information (Ginzburg, 22–24; Parr 2010, 22–23).
Ginzburg employs this literary approach with his protagonist,
Menocchio, in The Cheese and the Worms, when the distant pope
burns him at the stake after he is found guilty of being a heretic at
164 Jesse Thistle
his Inquisition trial (Ginzburg, 22–23). Although not as extreme

as Menocchio’s fiery demise, Alcide’s “disfigured wrist” and
“chewed up” hands reveal the physical toll postwar jobs on the
Prairies had on him and other Métis men.
Transient working conditions in western Canada not only led
to mangled Métis bodies, as “The Digger Machine” shows, they
also had a heavy psychological impact on Métis minds. These
risky and traumatic work environments left many – like Alcide –
disillusioned at their labour prospects and value as Indigenous
People. This teleological loss-of-innocence narrative begins with
a description of the hope and mobility Alcide’s car provided him.
As a young man, he ventured forth and worked at various odd jobs
in Big River, Prince Albert, Hinton, and beyond over the course
of five years. The story ends with Alcide, twenty-two, fleeing an
oil rig after witnessing a horrific accident – a Métis colleague is
killed by a giant drill bit. “That was too much for me,” Alcide said
of his traumatic experience, “it scared the heck out of me … see-
ing that we were expendable labour and everything.” The incident
destroyed both Alcide’s sense of self and his naive innocence and
sent him running back to the road allowance for refuge.
In his essay “The ‘Grab-a-Hoe’ Indians,” historian Ron Lal-
iberte (2006, 319–20) states that many Métis men in the 1950s
were transient, travelling thousands of kilometres for low wages
in harsh work environments, often without adequate housing –
a description that fits Alcide’s travels almost perfectly. Laliberte,
it should be noted, was describing northern Saskatchewan Métis
who ventured seasonally to work in Alberta’s southern sugar beet
industry; he was not talking about the oil or logging industry
where Alcide worked (Laliberte, 305). Be that as it may, Laliberte’s
article still provides a good understanding of Métis mobility after
the Second World War. And yet, Laliberte’s piece fails to address
the mental and emotional issues many Métis labourers endured as
they travelled far from home and were exploited by their postwar
employers (Laliberte, 314).
Maria Campbell’s book Halfbreed (1973), on the other hand, does
offer a rich illustration of the psychological impacts of transient
labour on Métis minds in the 1950s. Campbell begins by describ-

ing a series of jobs she engaged in across western Canada after she
left her Park Valley home in 1954 – waiter, underage housewife,
cook in a Chinese café. The stress of moving from place to place
looking for work, details Campbell, left her “feeling utterly alone”
and isolated (Campbell, 137). Eventually, she says she turned to
drugs and prostitution to grapple with the psychological strain of
“being trapped in the life” of a listless Métis person born without
privilege or hope (Campbell, 137). To Campbell, as she describes
them, just as in Alcide’s case, the dangerous work environments
she encountered, hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometres away,
were better than the poverty of the road allowances (Campbell,
130–50).
In an ending similar to “The Digger Machine,” Campbell comes
to the realization that Métis people in postwar western Canada
were not valued and that their lives were disposable (Campbell,
143). She says of her time as a “working girl” in Vancouver that she
“stayed away” from her “own kind” as a “survival strategy.” She
points out that she avoided Métis people because she could not
risk sharing scarce resources in such harsh living conditions. Many
Indigenous People died on the streets trying to help one another
with their addictions, and settlers, Campbell imparts, just let them
waste away. She realized then the true value Canadians placed on
Indigenous lives and did so by watching other Indigenous People
die, just like Alcide had. Lastly, Campbell states that in her grim
realization she feared for her life, and it impelled her to flee for
safety (Campbell, 143–47), something Alcide also did when he saw
the demolished head and understood that he could be next. The
psychological impacts of Campbell’s and Alcide’s postwar work
environments, then, even though divergent in the kind of labour
performed and their locations, seem to mirror one another in their
effect on Métis mental health.
This brief survey of “The Digger Machine’s” grotesque prose,
along with a comparative analysis of Laliberte’s and Campbell’s
pieces, illustrates the difficult labour conditions young, mobile
Métis ventured into in the postwar period. It also reveals how
166 Jesse Thistle
these dangerous postwar jobs traumatized young Métis workers,

stripping away their innocence. Alcide’s story and Analysis C,
when read together, can be called a microhistoria/oral history of
postwar Métis emotions, and it is the only one of its kind in this
chapter. A lean work, perhaps, as no studies of 1950s Métis emo-
tions yet exist (I had no other Saskatchewan parkland literature
to draw from) but a historic documentation of mid-century Métis
trauma and memory nonetheless.
This chapter lays out the mid-twentieth-century life of one
Michif man, Alcide Morrissette. It employs realist, nonfiction, lit-
erary prose to relay Alcide’s experiences, as told to my research
team in June 2014. The academic analyses that follow each of these
three microhistories help interpret the information contained in
Alcide’s adventures. The opening story had Alcide and his Mush-
oom St. Pierre escort a herd of horses from Whitefish Lake down
to Duck Lake, Saskatchewan, to sell to a white farmer. The narra-
tive reveals both the importance of grandparents in Métis society
and the equine training Michif boys received from their fathers,
uncles, grandfathers, and other male Elders in the mid-twentieth
century. The second story focuses on Alcide receiving a car, which
changed his life for the better. The oral history underscores the
importance of mobility and how it was a liberating force for Métis
youth after 1945. The last story sees Alcide leave his community
for the first time in search of work. Along the way, he becomes
disillusioned and realizes his Indigenous life meant little to domi-
nant settler society. More specifically, though, the story shows that
Métis life in the dangerous work environments of western Canada
in the 1950s was expendable.
My uncle died on March 31, 2017, as I was drafting this chap-
ter. His death, although expected, was still hard for me to accept
and caused me to obsessively listen to the recordings I had done
with him in 2014 and 2015. I remembered that when I met with
Alcide both times I had a clear goal in mind: record the stories of
the 1885 Resistance that had been passed down to him from his
grandparents, Marianne Ledoux and St. Pierre Arcand. In the first
interview, Alcide was sharp, and he did, indeed, have many oral
histories from his kokum and mushoom. By the time of the second
recording, however, he had lost his mental faculties after a series
of chemotherapy treatments, compounded by the loss of his wife,
Louise. I now know that the first interview was my only opportu-
nity to collect the most important historical information he pos-
sessed: the stories of his own mid-century life – his journeys, his
joys, his history– history that I almost missed. Many times, in the
first recording, while he was trying to tell me about his life, I inter-
rupted him, talked over him, or tried to steer him toward what
I thought was pertinent historical data. In my blind ignorance,
however, Alcide remained patient and kind, and he told me about
his journey; he gave me just enough to write this chapter. I do not
know if I will ever forgive myself for not listening like I should
have that day in 2014, or what other treasures he may have had,
but I am grateful for the time that I spent with him, and I am
thankful for the lessons he taught me and for the rich history he
so graciously shared.
Notes
1 All of Alcide’s stories within this essay come from a single interview:
Alcide Morrissette and Paulette Morrissette, interview with Jesse This-
tle, Blanche Morrissette, and Yvonne Richer-Morrissette, Beardy’s
reserve, Saskatchewan, June 23, 2014 (internal transcription number
20140623_205212).
2 Morrissette, and Yvonne Richer-Morrissette, Beardy’s reserve, Saskatch-
ewan, June 23, 2014 (internal transcription number 20140623_205212).
3 See Thistle (2015).
4 Josephine Morrissette, interview with Jesse Thistle, Blanche Morris-
sette, and Yvonne Richer-Morrissette, Edmonton, Alberta, June 27,
2013 (internal transcription number 20140627_162523).
5 The idea of a flashlight view on the past comes from Chris Andersen’s
untitled Week 4 lecture, held on February 1, 2017, in his course, NS 503 –
Everyday Métis Life in Mid-Century Canada. He noted that scholars
must not make simplistic explanatory assumptions about life or its
complexities. His critique was offered in response to a conclusion I
had made that North American masculinities have diminished because
of postwar industrialization. The most one can hope for, Andersen
168 Jesse Thistle
noted, was for an illumination of the past, or a flashlight view of things;

it is impossible to conclude, as I wrongly did, that masculinities had
been “attacked” by the rise of industrialization. All we can do as schol-
ars is shine a light on possibilities and present them – we cannot make
definitive conclusions.
6 Yvonne Richer-Morrissette and Blanche Morrissette, interview with
Jesse Thistle and Carolyn Podruchny, Wanuskewin, Saskatchewan,
June 22, 2013 (internal transcription number 0384); and St. Laurent,
Saskatchewan, June 23, 2013 (internal transcription number 0386).
7 Paul Morrissette, interview with Jesse Thistle, Saskatoon, Saskatch-
ewan, June 20, 2015 (internal transcription number MVI_0319).
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Josephine Morrissette, interview with Jesse Thistle, Blanche Morris-
sette, and Yvonne Richer-Morrissette, Edmonton, Alberta, June 27,
2013 (internal transcription number 20140627_162523).
References
Barron, Laurie F. 1997. Walking in Indian Moccasins: The Native Policies of

Tommy Douglas and the CCF. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Brewer, John. 2010. “Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life.”
Journal of the Social History Society 7(1): 87–109.
Campbell, Maria. 1973. Halfbreed. Halifax: McClelland and Stewart.
Dobbin, Murray. 1985. “Prairie Colonialism: The CCF in Northern Sas-
katchewan.” Studies in Political Economy 16: 7–40.
Dorion, Leah. 1996. “Claude Petit.” Remembrances: Interviews with Métis Vet-
erans. Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute.
Eckert, Andreas, and Adam Jones. 2002. “Historical Writing about Every-
day Life.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 15(1): 5–16.
Ginzburg, Carlo. 1993. Translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedes-
chi. “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It.” Critical
Inquiry 20(3): 10–35.
Iggers, Georg G. 2005. “From Macro- to Microhistory: The History of
Everyday Life.” In Historiography of the 20th Century: From Scientific Objec-
tivity to the Postmodern Challenge. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University
Press.
Laliberte, Ron. 2006. “The ‘Grab-a-Hoe’ Indians: The Canadian State and
the Procurement of Aboriginal Labour for the Southern Alberta Sugar
Beet Industry.” Prairie Forum 31(2): 305–24.
Morrissette, Alcide, and Paulette Morrissette. 2014. Interview with Jesse

Thistle, Blanche Morrissette, and Yvonne Richer-Morrissette. Bear-
dy’s Reserve, Saskatchewan, June 23, internal transcription number
20140623_205212.
Morrissette, Josephine. 2013. Interview with Jesse Thistle, Blanche Mor-
rissette, and Yvonne Richer-Morrissette. Edmonton, Alberta, June 27,
internal transcription number 20140627_162523.
Park Valley History Committee. 1992. Wilderness to Neighbourhoods: Stur-
geon Lake, Lake Four, Park Valley, Rabbit Bluff, Stump Lake, and Millard Hill.
Debden: Friesen Printers.
Parr, Joy. 1999. Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in
the Postwar Years. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
–. 2010. Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953–
2003. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Thistle, Jesse A. 2015. “Vicarious Trauma: Collecting the Herd,” Active History,
November 3. http://activehistory.ca/2015/11/vicarious-trauma-collecting
-the-herd/.
7
“We’re Still Here and Métis”:
Rewriting the 1885 Resistance in
Marilyn Dumont’s The
Pemmican Eaters
June Scudeler
“You have to give them credit, these moniyaw [white person], are
pretty good storytellers,” Marilyn Dumont sardonically notes in
her poem “On the Surface”:
Colonization is a
superimposition to lay one image on top of another
to cover groundcover to alter the
appearance of.
(Dumont 2001, 192)
Dumont equates Canadian colonizers’ version of history to a pal-

impsest that obliterates Indigenous histories. She rejects official
settler versions of Canadian history in her poetry by telling a Métis
history, particularly of the 1885 Resistance. Dumont explains that
while she writes “back to the history I have learned … it is also a
way of creating a new history too” (Andrews 2004, 147). Dumont
privileges Métis ways of knowing – encompassing epistemologies,
histories, stories, language, spirituality, legal systems, and artistic
practices – in her poetry. She writes for, rather than about, Métis
people, particularly in her 2015 collection The Pemmican Eaters:
“My intent in this collection is to recreate a palpable sense of the
Riel Resistance period in Métis history and evoke the geograph-
ical, linguistic/cultural, and political situation of Batoche during
this time through the eyes of those who experienced the battles, as
170
“We’re Still Here and Métis” 171
well as through the eyes of Gabriel and Madeleine Dumont and

Louis Riel” (Dumont 2015, 83). Dumont’s poems about Madel-
eine and Gabriel Dumont, Louis Riel, and buffalo are stories of
recovery that provide a Métis account of history. They are also a
very personal history as Gabriel Dumont is her relative.
Dumont grounds her writing in wâhkôhtowin, “the Cree [and
Métis] value of kinship or interrelatedness” (Reder 2007, ii), which
encompasses the human and other-than-human worlds. Relation-
ships with other people and other-than-human beings are based
on reciprocity, an integral part of kinship responsibility. Dumont
moves beyond a human-centric view of history to include Métis
kin “li bufloo.” By using wâhkôhtowin, I situate Dumont’s poetry
as Métis resurgence, as she expresses how Métis ways of know-
ing grow and change across time and space. Leanne Simpson
(Anishinaabe) (2011, 17) emphasizes that the “building of diverse,
nation-culture-based resurgences means significantly re-investing
in our own ways of being,” including artistic- and performance-
based traditions. While poetry may not immediately spring to
mind as a form of resurgence, Warren Cariou (Métis) (2014, 35)
argues that Indigenous poetry can “give us the tools to help us
see beyond the boundaries that colonization had put in place.”
Like the prairie horizons of the Métis homeland, poetry empowers
readers, and specifically Métis readers, to imagine outside official
colonial history. Readers are encouraged to “interactively partici-
pate in the stories behind the poems much as a listener interac-
tively co-created the story the storyteller tells” (De Ramirez 2003,
82–83). Stories are alive, asking us to carry forward their message,
a responsibility that is integral to wâhkôhtowin.
Janice Gould (Koyoonk’auwi/Maidu) sees Indigenous poetry
as unique because of the “truth-telling it embodies, in the par-
ticular kinds of insights Indians bring to this question of who we
are or what we are about as a nation. I agree that one function of
American Indian poetry has been to ‘resist cultural erasure,’ and to
remember our histories clearly as a way to resist both amnesia and
nostalgia” (Gould and Rader 2003, 10). Dumont’s fierce poetry
resists the erasure of Métis people. For example, she negates
172 June Scudeler
John A. Macdonald’s derisive assessment of Métis as savage and

unsophisticated pemmican eaters. Pemmican, a high-protein mix-
ture of buffalo and Saskatoon berries, is integral to Métis sover-
eignty. Pemmican not only provides food for Métis people and
for “voyageurs who manned the York Boat brigades and canoes
that carried furs to the east” (Anderson 2006, 211), Métis people
also traded pemmican across the Medicine Line, stressing our self-
conception as a free people. Pemmican and buffalo are so funda-
mental to Métis life and sovereignty that in 1814 “the governor of
the District of Assiniboia (the name of the land containing the Red
River Settlement and a large surrounding area deeded to Lord Sel-
kirk by the HBC) issued a proclamation that banned the export
of pemmican and other provisions, except by licence from him”
(Dahl 2013, 114). The proclamation was a pivotal moment in Métis
nationhood, as it inspired the Métis in what is now Manitoba to
organize themselves to fight for their rights.
Dumont documents the decimation of the buffalo and her con-
nection to the 1885 Resistance. In her introduction to The Pemmi-
can Eaters, a title inspired by John A. Macdonald’s name for the
Métis, Dumont tells the story of her family’s discovery of their
connection to Gabriel Dumont, Louis Riel’s “general.” Inspired
by the resurgence of Indigenous politics in the late 1960s, some
members of Dumont’s family “dared to speculate” that they might
be related to Dumont (Dumont 2015, 1). This reclamation was
sparked by her older brother’s copy of Sandra Lynn McKee’s
Gabriel Dumont: Indian Fighter (1973), a “popular history book sold
in gas stations and little gift shops along the Trans-Canada High-
way” (Dumont, 1). She was initially dismayed by Gabriel Dumont’s
photo on the book’s cover, his “balding head, rugged face, ratty
beard and buffalo-hair lined vest so dominated his chest … His
eyes were intense and disarming. I saw no resemblance between
him and my father” (Dumont, 3). But she eventually recognized a
resemblance between her father and a suited Gabriel Dumont: “I
don’t think my father or any of us knew how much family pride
would stem from recovering the knowledge of our lineage, but
I do remember my father’s posture straightening and his face
lighting as more of his children showed interest in our connection

to Gabriel Dumont” (Dumont, 3).
Writing about The Pemmican Eaters is a personal experience for
me. My Métis ancestors were part of the 1885 Resistance and took up
arms under Gabriel Dumont’s command. My Métis grandmother
told my mom stories about Cuthbert Grant, Louis Riel, and Gabriel
Dumont that she had heard from her grandmother Marie-Rose Ver-
mette (Henry) (1859–1938). Marie-Rose was on the band list of the
Muskeg Lake Cree Nation. But after 1885, “R” for “rebel” appeared
after her name (Barkwell 2011, 261). Her father was Joseph (José)
Vermette (1832–85), who was one of Gabriel Dumont’s nephews.
He died at the Battle of Tourond’s Coulée on April 23, 1885, from
a shot in the head (Barkwell, 261). Marie-Rose Vermette’s husband,
Jérôme Henry (b. 1856), was a spy for Gabriel Dumont and provided
him with the Canadian army’s marching plan at Clark’s Crossing
on April 17, 1885. He is described as “fair-complexioned” and was
a teamster for Middleton’s troops, which enabled him to give infor-
mation to Gabriel Dumont (Barkwell, 140). Jérôme Henry’s brother
Pierre states that Jérôme Henry “was wounded about 10 a.m. [at
Tourond’s Coulée] near Salomon Boucher who dressed his wound”:
There were forty-two left on the night of the battle. Right at the
beginning, Jérôme Henry, along with Isidore Villeneuve, wants
to climb over the fence to observe the approaching enemy who
have stopped to fire. Jérôme Henry, on his knees, shoots, and at
the same moment, receives a bullet in the back of his shoulder.
He is able to drag himself in the bottom, in this bluff, but he is
unable to fight. It was the enemy’s first shot.
(Barkwell, 140)
I wonder at the anguish Marie-Rose Vermette must have felt as her

father was killed and her husband wounded at the battle, an
anguish that Dumont captures in her poetry.
The Pemmican Eaters begins with “Otipemsiwak,” which Dumont
translates as “the Free People,” one of the many words for Métis
people (Dumont 2015, 8). While “Macdonald / swilling spirits /
174 June Scudeler
was in some crystal case of glory,” Riel dreamed of the dawn “on its
unseen bone / was lifting / above the fire” (Dumont, 7). The seem-
ingly otherworldly description of seeing a bone-like sun is a mes-
sage across time from Riel to Dumont, who one evening discovers
a piece of birch bark

and something more
like a petrified limb
lay in the palm of a snowdrift
(Dumont, 7)
Dumont is linked to Riel’s “envisioning of / what was inside the

dimness” and
how he dreamt of it ascending

on its unseen limb
how he wanted it to reflect
like water
(Dumont, 8)
Riel sees a future for the Métis in bleak times, leaving a path for
others to follow to better times.
Riel’s contemplative mysticism in “Otipemsiwak” is followed
by the highly ironic “Letter to Sir John A. Macdonald,” reprinted
from Dumont’s A Really Good Brown Girl (1996):
Dear John: I’m still here

and halfbreed,
after all these years
you’re dead, funny thing
(Dumont 2015, 9)
The opening lines portray an unbroken lineage of Métis ancestors

despite Macdonald’s westward expansionism:
the railway you wanted so badly

there was talk of shutting it down
and part of it was shut down

…
after all that shuttling us around to suit the settlers,
we’re still here and …
(Dumont 2015, 9)
Dumont’s ellipsis at the end of the first stanza isn’t a loss of thought
but a pause to take stock of the numerous ways the Métis are still
an integral part of the history of what is currently Canada.
In the second stanza, Dumont reiterates how “that goddamned
railroad never made this a great nation” (Dumont 2015, 9), par-
ticularly as most Indigenous Peoples would have a decidedly
jaundiced view of Canada’s “greatness.” “Riel is dead / but he just
keeps coming back” (Dumont, 9). She highlights the duplicity of
the Canadian government:
because you know as well as I

that we were railroaded
by some steel tracks that didn’t last
and some settlers who wouldn’t settle
and it’s funny we’re still here and callin ourselves halfbreed
(Dumont, 9)
Dumont plays with multiple levels of meaning in her poem, par-

ticularly with the term “railroaded.” Macdonald’s railroad, plagued
with financial difficulties despite copious Canadian government
aid, was used to quickly move Canadian troops closer to Batoche.
She also puns on the word “railroad” (to unfairly force someone to
do something) to highlight the unfair treatment of the Métis.
Her series of buffalo poems counteract “Letter to Sir John Mac-
donald,” as buffalo are an integral part of Métis sovereignty. By
writing as the buffalo, Dumont explores how they are not rele-
gated to the past but are still a vital part of Métis ways of knowing.
Dumont explains: “Through my research on the bison and Indig-
enous conceptions of the bison’s origins, I have crafted poems
‘Notre Frères,’ ‘Li Bufloo,’ and ‘You Wanted to Treat Them as Buf-
falo’ from Gabriel Dumont’s perspective and from stories of the
176 June Scudeler
Arapaho, which say that the bison emerged from and returned to
deep bodies of water on Turtle Island” (Dumont 2015, 85). The
buffalo are integral to Métis culture not only because of the suste-
nance they provided but also because they “also formed the basis
of the Métis economy, military, lands and governance structure”
(Anderson 2006, 208).
Dumont’s buffalo series are elegiac honour poems that connect
buffalo with famed buffalo hunter Gabriel Dumont. Inspired by
Leroy Littlebear’s (Kainai) “buffalo consciousness,” Tasha Hub-
bard (nêhiyaw/nakawe/Métis) (2015, 24) calls the buffalo “the
first people.” She centres the important contributions of Indig-
enous artists in a “clearing space” for the buffalo’s return (Hub-
bard, 29). Dumont’s poetry is a vital part of making space for the
return of buffalo kin, who offer the Métis spiritual and physical
sustenance. Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe) (2002, 154) also posi-
tions the buffalo as protectors of Indigenous People because “the
buffalo relatives, the older brothers, stood up and took the killing
for the younger brothers, the Native peoples.” Buffalo not only
feed, clothe, and shelter and are integral to ceremonies, they also
gave their lives to ensure their human kin continued.
In “Notre Frères,” the first poem in the series, Dumont (2015, 10)
references Russell Freedman’s 1988 book Buffalo Hunt: “They were
born beneath the water, in the deepest depths of the lake.” Buf-
falo, so integral to the Prairies, paradoxically come from the water:
We were born beneath the water

In the darkest depth of the lake
We rise, our hooves rumbling
Spewing lake water, muzzles dripping
(Dumont, 10)
By using “we” instead of “they,” the buffalo create their own nar-
rative of their birth.
Dumont plays up the liminality of the buffalo by using water
and earth imagery but also by having the seemingly long dead
buffalo tell their own story as they hope that Gabriel Dumont will
call them, “his brothers / riding his swiftest buffalo runner / aim-
ing [his rifle] Le Petit” (Dumont, 10), so that they can offer them-
selves to their kin.
Dumont usually writes free verse poems, but in “Notre Frères”
she uses the pantoum form, in which the second and fourth lines
in each stanza repeat, to “convey a sense of the eternal universe
with its recurring pattern of lines” (Dumont 2015, 85). Using the
pantoum form illustrates how the Métis are part of the buffalo
cosmos. Woods Cree playwright Tomson Highway explains how
the Cree language – on which Michif, one of the Métis languages,
is partly based – uses inanimate and animate words. He explains
that people, animals, or even rocks and trees are animate while
they are alive “and have a place of equality on that circle of liv-
ing, breathing beings.” But once they die, they are “‘translated’
into another form of energy where they migrate to another part
of that circle” (Highway 2015, 16, 17). The buffalo are both part of
the animate circle and the inanimate circle because they are living
beings but also spirits who are telling their stories in Dumont’s
buffalo series.
But who is the “their” in “pulling the universe in their sway?”
Are the buffalo referring to themselves in the third person, seeing
themselves as a small portion of the cosmos? The previous lines
include Gabriel Dumont, his buffalo runner, and his rifle, Le Petit.
Although it appears the buffalo refer to Gabriel Dumont rather
than to just themselves, I believe the buffalo don’t distinguish
between the human and other-than-human worlds, the land on
which they travel, and the larger cosmos. Everything is connected,
especially the Métis and our buffalo kin. The buffalo are a gift, but
it is a reciprocal relationship. The poem begins and ends with the
line “we were born beneath the water,” symbolizing birth, death,
and rebirth.
In “Li Bufloo,” Dumont continues the theme of kinship found
in “Notre Frères.” Dumont (2015, 11) writes as the buffalo, “who
came from the buffalo wallows … by the backbones of our greater
ones.” The Métis and other prairie Indigenous People are their
children, who appeared “after the Dog days, the horse and the
178 June Scudeler
gun” (Dumont, 11), “speaking our language – / the same language

as water / the same language as grass” (Dumont, 11). Plains Cree
people used dogs, as their helper companions, before the horse
appeared in the nineteenth century.1
The buffalo guard the land as they “cradle buffalo rocks / our
children” (Dumont 2015, 11), accentuating the symbiotic relation-
ship between the Métis and the buffalo. In “Hearts on the Ground:
Buffalo Genocide in the 19th Century,” Tasha Hubbard (nêhiyaw/
nakawe /Métis) writes of her experiences with the Manitou Stone,
also known as the Buffalo stone, which was located on the highest
hill near Hardisty, Alberta. She tells the story of how the Buffalo
stone was stolen from its place, which is a sacred site for Cree
and Blackfoot people. When it was stolen in 1866, Lieutenant But-
ler described how “the Indians … were loud in their expression
of their regret. The old medicine men declared that its removal
would lead to great misfortunes, and that war, disease and dearth
of buffalo would afflict the tribes of Saskatchewan” (Hubbard
2015, 304).2 Dumont examines how the buffalo and their rocks are
waiting:
when will Gabriel call us back?

when will he put his ear to the ground
to find us once again?
(Dumont 2015, 11)
They buffalo plaintively call to Gabriel Dumont, hoping he will

restore their vast numbers to the Prairies. The buffalo see them-
selves connected not only to Dumont but also to the universe:
our great heads swiping side to side pulling the universe in our sway
the Milky Way twisting in our horns shaking bright burning dust
to earth
(Dumont 2015, 11)
As in “Notre Frères,” the buffalo are connected to the cosmos as

they travel through the Milky Way, shaking stars to earth. The
Buffalo stone is also a piece of meteorite; the buffalo are mani-

festing themselves on Earth as the Milky Way twists in their horns.
“How to Make Pemmican” shows the labour-intensive process
that goes into creating the Métis food staple. The poem is stark in
its description:
Kill one 1800lb buffalo

Gut it
Butcher it
Slice the meat in long strips for drying
Construct drying tripods and racks for 1000lbs of wet meat
(Dumont 2015, 12)
Dumont uses a mater-of-fact tone in her account of the

pemmican-making process. But the simplicity of her words accen-
tuates the labour and skills of the pemmican makers, including
drying the buffalo meat “while staving off predators for days”
(Dumont, 12). The poem ends on an unexpected note:
Cut buffalo hides in quarters

Fill with hot dried meat, berry and suet mixture
Sew quarter-hide portions together with sinew
Bury in cache for later mmmh.
(Dumont, 12)
The “mmmh” at the end of the poem indicates the reason for all
the work: the sheer joy of eating the pemmican and sustaining
family and community. Rather than merely being an inanimate
object, pemmican supports life. The buffalo offer themselves to
their Indigenous kin so they can live and thrive through trade,
food, and ceremony.
Buffalo hunting gives the Métis skills to almost defeat the Cana-
dian forces at Tourond’s Coulée and Batoche. Dumont is inspired
by Gabriel Dumont’s assessment of General Middleton’s troops
in “I Wanted to Treat Them as We Would Have Treated Buffalo.”
Dumont addresses her relative, asking him what he meant by his
180 June Scudeler
words. She knows that “the hunter” in Dumont “imagine[s] these

men predictable as les animaux” (Dumont 2015, 13), a not very
flattering depiction of the Canadian troops. Dumont is famous
not only for his buffalo-hunting techniques but also for his superb
military skills:
Was it because you know you could ride a buffalo runner, its neck
outstretched in full gallop on the heels of a herd holding the muzzle
loader upright till the last second to drop a wet slug down the barrel,
thrusting your gun forward to dislodge the shot while pulling the
trigger all at the same time
(Dumont, 13)
The long sentence-like structure accentuates the danger and the

speed of the buffalo hunt. Métis buffalo hunting demanded great
agility. Not only did the hunters need a highly trained horse, they
also had to reload their flintlock short-barrelled guns by pouring
gunpowder down the barrel. A hunter would “spit a rifle ball,
which he carried in his mouth, down the muzzle, the saliva form-
ing a seal in order to allow the shot to be fired. Rapping the butt
on the hunter’s saddle would set the charge. Next he would fill the
priming pan with powder and would then pull back the hammer.
While holding his gun upright … the hunter would choose a tar-
get” (Anderson 2006, 211). Incredibly, this complicated process
was undertaken while on a galloping horse.
Gabriel Dumont was the captain of the Batoche area buffalo
hunts, a testament to his prowess. Clearly, for Gabriel Dumont,
the Canadian troops did not have these skills. Dumont spells out
how connected Gabriel Dumont was to the prairie:
you knew alone on the prairie, you could make a shelter and
clothing
from their hides and food from their hides and food from
their flesh and tools from their bones, you knew the vibration of
their hooves riding in the midst of them, the
feel of their hides – dry and coarse, you knew their snorting, the
stone weight of
their bodies, their bulging terror-struck eyes, the taste of their
marrow, their sweet
smoked jerky
(Dumont 2015, 13)
The rhythm of the buffalo hunt and of the seasons gave the Métis
some predictability in their lives. Dumont’s use of repetitive
phrases and words – “food from their hides and food from their
flesh” – mimics galloping hooves but also the excitement of the
hunt. While Dumont is describing buffalo hunts, her description
illustrates Gabriel Dumont’s prowess as a military leader.
Gabriel Dumont’s statement about Middleton’s men also shows
his considerable military skills. His victory over Canadian forces at
Tourond’s Coulée was successful because of his use of “guerrilla tac-
tics and superior marksmanship” (Préfontaine 2011, 5). Dumont posi-
tioned 150 Métis, Dakota, and Cree in a ravine on the left bank of
the Saskatchewan River. He ordered his men not to attack until all
of Middleton’s troops were in the coulée; then the trapped soldiers
could be shot at like buffalo “milling and dying in the Indian pounds
like his youth” (Woodcock and Miller 2003, 203). Although the Cana-
dian forces outnumbered the Métis forces, the Métis and their allies
managed to defeat them. However, Dumont captures the despair of
the near extermination of the buffalo and the invading hordes of set-
tlers by again using the story of the buffalo going into the earth, but
Gabriel Dumont hopes the settlers would disappear from the Prairies.
The buffalo cycle ends with Dumont’s lamentation for the loss
of “Les Animaux”: “gone, uncle they’re gone / and something in
us goes too following after / les animaux, those who you ‘called’ as
if they were your brother” (Dumont 2015, 14). The near extermina-
tion of the buffalo profoundly affected the Métis; a part of us also
died. Dumont repeatedly uses kinship terms in the poem, even as
the buffalo have moved to another circle or “plane” of existence:
“les animaux, the brothers that have left us / they have moved to /
182 June Scudeler
another plain” (Dumont, 14). Dumont poignantly shows the dev-

astation of the buffalo who were a
moving sea of brown

backs, a rippling
ground
(Dumont, 14)
When Gabriel Dumont surveys the prairie
now, you see only a few stumps feeding on grasses

now, their great size is swallowed by the bigger prairie
prairie, that once seemed like it couldn’t hold all
les animaux, their sound like distant thunder will never reach
your ears again
(Dumont, 14, 15)
Dumont’s placement of words on the page is very deliberate. The

spaces in the lines echo the loss felt by the Métis, the spaces left on
the prairie by the vanishing buffalo now being filled by the invad-
ers, who are the “new herds” but not the relatives “that fed and
clothed us and gave us reason to dance” (Dumont, 15). In her cycle
of buffalo poems, Dumont captures the devastating loss of the
buffalo and the settler invasion of the Prairies.
Dumont changes the Canadian version of the 1885 Resistance
by highlighting the importance of Métis women. She honours
Madeleine (Wilkie) Dumont, who worries about her husband in
“You Are Riding for the Border Tonight” as he flees to the United
States for safety after Batoche. Madeleine Dumont was born in
1840 and married her husband in 1868. She was a teacher for the
children of Batoche and was known for her hospitality and com-
passion to those less fortunate than herself. During the 1885 Resis-
tance, “she helped remove the injured from the battlefield, nursed
the wounded, and distributed the meagre rations and supplies.”
She later joined her husband, sister, and brother-in-law in Mon-
tana, where she died from tuberculosis and “complications from a
fall from a buggy” in October 1885 (Barkwell 2011, 268).
In the poem, Madeleine Dumont worries that a single shot by

Les Anglais “will make your life bleed berries / on the ground
around you … slumped in what they / think is surrender / droop-
ing slack-death / before them” (Dumont 2015, 50). Her fear for her
husband is palpable. You can imagine her, full of terror and uncer-
tainty, replaying the images of her husband’s death in her head.
She urges her husband to seek safety across the Medicine Line:
so ride, Gabriel ride swift-safe in the night, ride without rest

if you have to far southward away where I’ll find you
ride swift, ride silent rest only beyond the border
safe from the Canadiens that stalk your breath
(Dumont, 50)
Dumont’s repetition of “ride” heightens the sense of urgency that

Madeleine Dumont feels as she wants her husband to ride swiftly
and silently from the Canadian troops. She poignantly offers “six
buckwheat cakes, wrapped warm till they reach you / as I would
send my arms if I could in the chilled morning” (Dumont, 50).
The buckwheat cakes show not only how the Métis were starving
and suffering after Batoche but also Madeleine Dumont’s pro-
found love for her Gabriel. She aches to be with her husband, but
she can only send her love in her buckwheat cakes.
The Pemmican Eaters ends as it began: with two poems about
Riel. Riel looms large not only in Métis history but also the his-
tory of what is currently Canada. Like “Otipemsiwak,” Dumont
captures Riel’s mysticism but also his grounding in Métis ways
of knowing. Dumont calls Riel “Our Prince,” whose life Canada
will regret taking, because he was “our prophet, the one among
us gifted / our seer (Dumont 2015, 50). In contrast to the more
remote and heady Riel, she refers to Gabriel Dumont as “Our
Gabriel,” a more down-to-earth and shrewd military leader. But
Riel is ahead of his time:
If only your fine mind could have leapt in another time

along this colony’s narrow path
It’s not just that the path is narrow
184 June Scudeler
but it’s also borrowed from another people

another place.
(Dumont, 60)
Attempting to conform to Eurowestern ideas of nationhood and

governance was doomed to fail because that path was too limited
for Métis conceptions of self-determination. Dumont condemns
Riel’s hanging, wondering if he felt “trouble, tremble, or terror” as
he walked to the gallows “with the priest / that betrayed you at
Batoche / anointing your last rites” (Dumont, 60). Dumont
doesn’t use “who” to refer to the priest but dismissively uses “that”
to show that the priests, the Catholic Church, and the Canadian
government are inhuman and treacherous.
Although they can be considered kin, Gabriel Dumont and Riel
have different ideas of resurgence. Métis Elder Maria Campbell
shows the differences between the two men:
Louis him
he was differen.
Differen from Gabe an all dah udders
I guess you can say he was a spirit man.
He gave hisself to dah peoples
and he do dat since he was a small boy.
Hees Daddy you know
he was dat kine of man too.
He put dah peoples before hees family even.
Deres’ not many mans you know
dere born like dat.
Yeah dat Louis

he give us another kine of membering.
But not Gabe.
Hoo
he was a wile tough man him.
He was dah kine of man he can make you believe
can do anything on dis eart
long as you was tough enough to stay on your feet.
(Campbell 2010, 94)
Campbell calls Riel a spirit man, rather than the dominant soci-
ety’s labelling him “mad” because he saw visions.
“Louis’ Last Vision,” which ends The Pemmican Eaters, flickers
between the past and the present as Riel foresees Métis resur-
gence. It echoes the spirituality and “envisioning / what was inside
the dimness” (Dumont 2015, 8) in “Otipemsiwak,” the first poem
in the collection. “Louis’ Last Vision” begins with the blunt lines:
“‘Father, I see a gallows on top of that hill,’ said Louis / ‘And I am
swinging from it’” (Dumont, 62). But Riel’s vision also contains
dreams of resurgence. Dumont asks him if he also saw
the limbs of young aspen swaying at

Batoche,
the infinity symbol flying beside the cross
St. Antoine de Padua with its bullet holes
(Dumont, 62)
Dumont mixes the past with the present, the Métis infinity flag
beside the graves at Batoche, the bullet holes that are still visible
in the church, and the young aspen trees that symbolize regrowth.
She wonders if Riel saw the L’Assomption sash “whip in the air”
from the corner of his eye (Dumont, 62). Hauntingly, Dumont
tells the story of Gabriel Dumont searching for Riel after the
defeat at Batoche, wondering if the light is like “Gabriel scouting
at dusk? Did you hear him call?” (Dumont, 62). In Gabriel
Dumont’s memoirs, which were transcribed as he was unable to
read or write in alphabetic forms, he recalls searching for Riel for
four days: “Once he called for him in a bluff, thinking that he
might be there. Actually, he was there with the women and Nicolas
Fayant. The latter recognized Gabriel’s voice; but Riel feared it
was a trap set by the English and they did not answer” (Dumont
2015, 101). It is hard not to feel regret for what could have been if
Riel had answered his friend’s call.
Dumont emphasizes that writing The Pemmican Eaters challenged
her to “convey a Métis perspective,” which “deepened my sense of
identity as a Métis” (Dumont 2015, 86). The Pemmican Eaters both
retells the past and envisages a future situated in Métis values like
186 June Scudeler
wâhkhtôwin. Dumont’s poetry is full of righteous anger, showing

the beauty and strength of Métis people. When Dumont writes
as Madeleine and Gabriel Dumont, Louis Riel, and buffalo, she
uses an affective kinship to help the reader become their relations.
Dumont gives immediacy to the events of 1885: we’re still here and
calling ourselves Métis.
Acknowledgments
Maarsii to Marilyn Dumont for her inspiring poetry and to Jenni-

fer Adese and Chris Andersen for including me in this important
book.
Notes
1 Piikani archaeologist Eldon Yellowhorn (Yellowhorn and McMillan

2004, 131) refers to Horse Days as the time between the Dog Days and
the reserve system.
2 The Buffalo stone is now at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton,
where Indigenous Peoples still go to pay their respects.
References
Anderson, Grant. 2006. “The Buffalo Hunt.” In Metis Legacy II: Michif Cul-
ture, Heritage and Folkways, edited by Lawrence J. Barkwell and Grant
Anderson, 208–12. Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute.
Andrews, Jennifer. 2004. “‘Among the Word Animals’: A Conversation
with Marilyn Dumont.” Studies in Canadian Literature 29(1): 146–60.
Barkwell, Lawrence J. 2011. Veterans and Families of the 1885 Northwest Resis-
tance. Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute.
Campbell, Maria. 2010. Stories of the Road Allowance People. Saskatoon:
Gabriel Dumont Institute.
Cariou, Warren. 2014. “Edgeworks: Indigenous Poetics as Re-placement.”
In Indigenous Poetics in Canada, edited by Neal McLeod, 31–38. Waterloo,
ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Dahl, Gregg. 2013. “A Half-Breed’s Perspective on Being Métis.” In Metis in
Canada: History, Identity, Law and Politics, edited by Christopher Adams,
Gregg Dahl, and Ian Peach, 93–139. Edmonton: University of Alberta
Press.
De Ramirez, Susan Berry Brill. 2003. “The Power and Presence of Native
Oral Storytelling Traditions in the Poetry of Marilou Awiakta, Kimberly
Blaeser and Marilyn Dumont.” In Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contem-
porary American Indian Poetry, edited by Dean Rader and Janice Gould,
82–102. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Dumont, Marilyn. 2001. “On the Surface.” First Voices, First Words, special
issue of Prairie Fire 22(3): 192–93.
–. 2015. The Pemmican Eaters. Toronto: ECW.
Gould, Janice, and Dean Rader. 2003. “Introduction: Generations and
Emanations.” In Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American
Indian Poetry, edited by Dean Rader and Janice Gould, 3–20. Tucson:
University of Arizona Press.
Highway, Tomson. 2015. A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance: Imagining Mul-
tilingualism. Henry Kreisel Lecture Series. Edmonton: University of
Alberta Press/Canadian Literature Centre.
Hubbard, Tasha. 2015. “Hearts on the Ground: Buffalo Genocide in the
19th Century.” In Kent Monkman: The Rise and Fall of Civilization, edited
by Sarah Chate, Kent Monkman, Sarah Milroy, and George R. Gardiner
Museum of Ceramic Art, 19–29. Toronto: Gardiner Museum.
LaDuke, Winona. 2002. The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential
Writings. Stillwater, MN: Voyageur Press.
Préfontaine, Darren R. 2011. Gabriel Dumont: Li Chef Michif in Images and in
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and His Lost World. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.
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Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre.
8
Mary and the Métis: Religion as a Site
for New Insight in Métis Studies
Paul L. Gareau
In the closing chapter of Defining the Métis (2017), historian Tim-

othy Foran describes a dramatic scene from the pulpit of Oblate
missionary Jean-Marie Pénard at Île-à-la-Crosse in northern Sas-
katchewan in 1899. Pénard was at his wits’ end over the apparent
state of moral decline of the Métis in his mission. As spiritual leader
of the community, he observed with mounting disdain the Métis
cavorting, dancing, drinking, and engaging in loud and obstinate
behaviour. This was particularly difficult because Île-à-la-Crosse
had been deemed by the Catholic authorities of the day as the
bridgehead of civilization, and the pious and devoted Métis were
seen as the wellspring of Christianization in the godless northern
wilderness. The Métis were defined by their Catholic devotions
to “dominical obligation, dutiful reception of the sacraments,
burial in consecrated ground, and veneration of the Sacred Heart”
(Foran, 113). Spurred on by their continued disobedience and way-
ward activities, Pénard delivered a brutal sermon to his Métis con-
gregants on the dangers of moral depravity. Pénard spoke of “the
punishment of Sodom,” describing the destruction of that city by
the wrath of God. Satisfied at first with his delivery of a sobering
message, Pénard observed with disparagement some congregants
looking back at him defiantly. For him, this was the rock-bottom
of a once beloved mission site and represented the unravelling of
his efforts. Foran relates how Pénard could see clearly the geneal-
ogy of the community’s degradation but was thoroughly confused
by the Métis’ conflicting behaviour. They had “proved to him that
188
Mary and the Métis 189
their faith had sunk to the same level as their morality; that is to
say that there is very little left. And yet, their external devotions
seem to indicate that they still have faith. It defies understand-
ing” (Foran, 112). Pénard was confounded by how the Métis could
remain religiously pious while openly defying his moral authority.
This episode, though localized in the nineteenth-century North-
west, is paradigmatic of how the Métis have been defined with
ambivalence regarding their religious identity. The Oblate per-
spective describes a beloved race of devoutly religious Catholics
fallen from grace because of their rebellious nature, drawn to the
spirituality and lifestyle of their “Indian” ways. Asserting the ide-
ology of settler colonialism, in which Catholic or Christian prose-
lytization stood as the driving force of civilization, this ambivalent
attitude reflects the racist paradigm of Métis mixedness, in which
morality is measured by the level of one’s performed whiteness.
This perspective, therefore, sees the Métis as both good and bad
Catholics. Why, then, did the Métis perpetuate an ambivalent atti-
tude that embraced Catholic popular devotions while rejecting
the moral authority of a recalcitrant, colonial Church?
In the scholarship on the Métis experience of religion, the Métis
have been portrayed as ambivalent about their Catholic identities,
or alternatively, as perpetuating colonial structures of oppression.
The problem is theoretical: as scholars, we have difficulty extricat-
ing the hegemonic power of the Catholic hierarchy when defin-
ing religious identity as a colonial construct (i.e., Catholicism
is a form of enfranchising Indigenous Peoples). From there, we
cannot conceptualize the Métis as good Catholics, or inversely,
Catholics as good Métis. In the spirit of this volume on new direc-
tions in the burgeoning field of Métis studies, this chapter seeks to
explain how an uncritical understanding of religion as a category
for describing social behaviour, experience, and identity leads to a
misrepresentation of Métis experience and worldview. By solicit-
ing insight from religious studies to help redefine the category of
religion, I outline a theoretical framework to examine the flexibil-
ity of Catholic popular devotion, specifically to the Virgin Mary,
and offer a more precise reflection on Métis religion. It is not a
190 Paul L. Gareau
Christian apology but serves to outline our continued depen-

dence on racist interpretations of the Métis as mixed in describ-
ing the Métis experience of religion. The Métis are striving for
Métis sociopolitical and religious ways of being. Therefore, this
chapter reveals how the Métis are doing religion in ways that are
decidedly not ambivalent but rather reflect the sovereignty and
self-determination of Métis religion.
Oblate Conundrum: The Legacy of Missionary

Perspectives in Métis Studies
Within the scholarship and literature, one overarching theme

regarding Métis identity is ambivalence (see Macdougall 2012;
Van Kirk 2001). Ambivalence in this context represents a lack
of or confusion over sociocultural belonging, moral orientation,
and self-regard. The idea perpetuated is one of racial mixedness;
the Métis are perpetually stuck between cultures and categories
(Andersen 2010, 2014). The ethos of contemporary Métis studies
is to soundly disrupt this dominant, underlying racist attitude.
The Métis are not defined by the composition of their race but
by their engagement with different relations and a shared history
(Gaudry 2016; Macdougall 2010; St-Onge and Podruchny 2012).
In Métis studies, the question then shifts from trying to under-
stand the Métis from a racialized logic of mixedness to how the
Métis define, organize, and promote themselves as a people. In
conjunction with the discipline of Indigenous studies, Métis stud-
ies serves the claims and experiences of Indigenous sovereignty
and the self-determination of Métis people (Teves, Smith, and
Raheja 2015). But as the field of Métis studies grows, religion as a
category of inquiry remains unquestioned and largely reflective of
the racialization model.
Regarding the Métis today, there is an implicit acknowledg-
ment of the importance of religion or spirituality in shaping Métis
culture. Important Métis writers have written on this topic in gen-
eral terms (see Campbell 1973; Lavallée 1997; Welsh and Weekes
1994). And Herb Belcourt (2006) and Marilyn Dumont (2015)
emphasize Catholic pilgrimage (specifically, to Lac Ste. Anne) as

a key element of their sense of Métis identity. But overall, there is
a lack of conversation on the connection between Catholicism and
the Métis. This is because, as we will see, a conventional under-
standing of religion dominates the research. This view asserts rei-
fied categories of European religion and Indigenous spirituality,
which are projected onto the Métis and valued above the Metis’
own religious perspectives. This uncritical idea of religion lives on
in our scholarship and conceptualizations of the Métis, underscor-
ing a penchant to see them as caught between two worlds.
A large part of this problematic attitude toward the Métis and
religion is rooted in the legacy of moral ambivalence present in the
historical record of Christian missionaries “discovering” the Métis
in the nineteenth-century Northwest. Though there were differ-
ent Protestant missionary activities and Métis engagements with
Protestantism (Brown 2001; Code 2008; Pannekoek 1991; Widder
1999), the major historical sources for examining the religious char-
acter of the Métis – and the focus of this chapter – are the Catholic
missionary archives of the Jesuits and Oblates of Mary Immacu-
late. The Oblates, in particular, left behind a tremendous legacy of
historical writings on their missionary program in the Northwest
dating back to the 1840s. This material has become one of the foun-
dations from which contemporary scholars have sought insight
into the period and character of the Métis. We must recognize that
the overarching goal of the Oblates was to civilize the Indigenous
People of the Northwest. Therefore, it is problematic to extrapolate
the experiences and worldview of the Métis from a corpus of writ-
ings driven by the civilizational project of settler colonialism. As
we will see below, this colonial attitude fed the Oblates’ ambivalent
regard of the Métis in terms of religion. By integrating this mate-
rial into scholarship on the Métis, the tone was set for interpreting
Métis religion in terms of either its complicity with or its opposi-
tion to Catholicism, as presented by the Oblates.
There is much written on the colonial penetration of Oblates
into the western interior. Histories such as those by Raymond Huel
(1996) and Robert Choquette (1995) play off of one another when
192 Paul L. Gareau
it comes to the history and purpose of the Oblate mission to the

Northwest. Huel takes a more heroic tone regarding the Oblate
presence among Indigenous People, while Choquette outlines the
ethnonationalist confrontations between Catholics and Protes-
tants and the assault of settler colonialism on Indigenous Peoples.
Certainly, the primary reason for the Oblate presence in the North-
west was to proselytize to Indigenous Peoples in order to imbue
the landscape with the religious morality and authority of Catholi-
cism and the Catholic Church. Though tremendous efforts were
made by the Oblates to learn, codify, and communicate with their
Catholic neophytes in Indigenous languages (Foran 2017; Huel
1996, 210–11), Nicole St-Onge (2004, 20) clarifies the Oblates’
underlying ideology: “Oblate missionaries, imbued with a western
European racist ideology, perpetuated a process of racialisation
by emphasizing further distinctions along religious and linguistic
lines and interpreting them in racial terms.” This ethnocentrism is
the lens through which the Oblates perceived the moral character
of the Métis, judging them as either good or bad Catholics.
The overall narrative in Oblate sources of their encounter with
the Métis follows the rise and fall from grace of the Métis due
to their intransigent behaviour and deficient moral capacity. Dat-
ing back to the arrival of secular priests in the 1840s, Oblates
were impressed with the Métis regarding their receptivity to and
engagement with Catholic devotion and religious authority (see
Morice 1929). Driven by their own ethnocentric worldview, the
Oblates saw the Métis as inherently more virtuous than First
Nations peoples, who had little to no contact with or limited inter-
est in Christianity. The Métis are reported to have been proactive
in their Christianization, guiding Oblate missionaries to Métis
wintering sites (some of which became important Métis pilgrim-
age sites), inviting them on seasonal buffalo hunts, and expressing
a desire for Catholic sacramental dispensation such as Eucharist,
baptism, marriage, and sepulchre (see André 1871; Lacombe 1900).
The Oblates also saw the Métis as intermediaries with some First
Nations groups (Duval 2008, 69). Overall, the Métis were viewed
by the Oblates as highly valuable instruments in establishing and
sustaining the presence of Catholicism in the moral landscape of

the Northwest. But, as the missions developed, the Oblates’ per-
ception of the Métis moral character started to deteriorate.
Largely driven by a racist ideology, the Oblates held the view
that the Métis were inherently better than First Nations by virtue
of their whiteness. And by this same logic, the Métis’ swift decline
was due to the draw of the “bad blood” of their First Nations
ancestry. This view is indicative of the Oblates’ perception of how
the Métis had fallen out of favour with the religious authorities.
St-Onge and Foran speak of how, in the eyes of the Oblates, the
Métis failed at the civilizational project by succumbing to the call
of their “Indian” blood, negating the “white” way. With the rising
tide of Métis nationalism and an ethos of resistance to coercion,
by the end of the nineteenth century the Oblates felt threatened
by the Métis rejection of their moral authority and that of the
Catholic Church. The Métis were seen as fickle friends who were
swayed by nascent liberal nationalist movements or the draw of
their “Indian” blood (Foran 2017, 115–18). They were made out
to be recalcitrant antiauthoritarians who rejected their Catholic
identity. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the
Oblates turned their attention to the tide of European Christian
settlers who would engage in developing the moral geography of a
sedentary, heteronormative, and androcentric agriculturalist soci-
ety centred on the moral authority of the Catholic Church (see
Lestanc 1898; Taché 1869; Thérien 1885). And, subsequently, the
Métis were lost to the pages of the missionary record and the joint
story of the civilizational project that would become the settler-
colonial narrative of Canada as a nation-state. Within the context
of this history, the Métis had literally fallen from grace.
Spiritual but Not Religious: Contemporary Scholarship

on the Métis and Religion
The Oblate record remains important for understanding the his-

tory of the Métis and religion. We return to this source often. But
as evidenced in the primary records and histories of the Oblate
194 Paul L. Gareau
encounter with the Métis, a bias toward the supremacy of Euro-

pean civilization in the form of Catholicism became a lens that has
informed but also distorted our contemporary understanding of
Métis history. The narrative is that the Métis tried to engage in the
civilizational project but ultimately failed because of their incapac-
ity to perform or engage in whiteness (see Giraud 1986a, 1986b).
This historical perspective has left a taint on our understanding
and interpretation of Catholicism among the Métis. The legacy of
Oblate ambivalence has led us to understand the Métis moral char-
acter as a good Catholic or bad Catholic dichotomy. And scholars
of the Métis have, in one way or another, either adhered to this
dichotomy or downplayed the influence of Catholicism in defence
of a Métis religious identity based in syncretism. But this misrep-
resentation of the Métis experience of religion is not just because
of the influence of Oblate perspectives on current scholarship but
also, and more importantly, because of a continued application of
racialized logics to our understanding of the category of religion
that has led to the inflexible categories of “European religion”
or “Indigenous spirituality.” Though some good scholarship has
emerged from this setting, we need to challenge and disrupt this
discourse by unpacking religion as a sociocultural category. Only
then can we start to understand the relationship between Catholic
authority and Métis religious identity.
As mentioned above, religion is an important topic in the cor-
pus of scholarship on the Métis. It is an element that cannot be
ignored when speaking about the sociopolitical, economic, and
relational characteristics of the Métis. However, there has been
little scholarship that engages with the topic of religion directly,
even though, in contrast, there is an industry dedicated to the topic
of Indigenous spirituality or religion focusing on Christianity (see
Charleston and Robinson 2015; Smith 2008; Vilaça and Wright
2013). What is often emphasized in examining the Métis experi-
ence of religion is either the impact of authority and coercion by
institutional religion or the influence of Indigenous spirituality on
Métis syncretic culture. The different approaches depend on how
the author reads and negotiates the legacy of moral ambivalence,
tied to an idea of racial mixedness, in understanding the Métis’

moral or religious character. In regard to this topic, two major
themes emerge in the literature: 1) Métis social and political deal-
ings with the hegemonic power of the Church, and 2) Métis reli-
gious syncretism of Catholicism and Indigenous spirituality. The
former theme can be found in a plethora of articles and writings
that touch on the role and impact of the Catholic institution on
the Métis. This literature seeks to underscore the hegemonic role
of the Church working against Métis interests and action toward
self-determination (e.g., Anuik 2009; Douaud 1983; Duval 2008;
Gareau and Lalonde 2004). This perspective tends to focus on
how Métis resistance to colonial forces included pushing back
against the Catholic Church and its ecclesiastical authority (see
Payment 2009, 93–122, for a clear example of the Métis experi-
ence of religious authority in Batoche).
In contrast, there is little material on the Métis experience of
religion that focuses on syncretism and spirituality. As Lawrence
Barkwell (1999, 13) points out: “Métis spiritualism is an important
but neglected area of study.” Elements of this religious syncretism
have been discussed by scholars writing microhistories of vari-
ous Métis communities (Payment 2009; St-Onge 2004; Overvold
1976; Zeilig and Zeilig 1987). There has also been a focus on Métis
traditional knowledge and healing that dovetails with what Bark-
well calls spiritualism (Anuik 2009; Edge and McCallum 2006;
Iseke 2010). Chantal Fiola (2015), building on the premise that
Indigenous spirituality acted as a counterpoint to the colonial-
ism and moral exclusivism of the institutional Catholic Church,
focuses her work specifically on outlining an Anishinaabe world-
view as part of Métis spirituality. Métis Elder Elmer Ghostkeeper
(2007) summarizes important themes of complex gift giving
and reciprocity with one’s relations in the ethos of a Nehiyawak
(Cree)-Métis syncretic spirituality. Nathalie Kermoal (2006, 2016)
speaks of the sociospiritual nature of Métis women’s traditional
knowledge and political presence in the Métis body politic, both
historically and today. And Darren Préfontaine, Todd Paquin, and
Patrick Young (2003) have produced a descriptive, educational
196 Paul L. Gareau
document that outlines the Indigenous spiritual practices that

have informed a Métis religious worldview. These practices revolve
around kinship relations, good works, and traditional knowledge,
which provide a necessary explanation of the spiritualism or spiri-
tuality of the Métis. Though these writings help to describe the
Métis experience of religion as it relates to Métis culture, they fall
short of explaining how the Métis utilize the religious structures
of Catholicism to their advantage and as more than simply a coun-
terpoint to Indigenous spirituality.
In her seminal book on the Métis of nineteenth-century Île-à-
la-Crosse, One of the Family (2010), Brenda Macdougall presents
an interpretation of the social construction of Métis religious
identity linked to the Catholic Church, based on the Nehiyaw
sociopolitical, economic, and philosophical concept of wahkoot-
owin. Wahkootowin is an ethos of relatedness that “influenced the
behaviours, actions, and decision-making processes that shaped
all community economic and political interactions” (Macdou-
gall, 8). Macdougall argues that this ethos of relatedness stood
at the centre of the Métis worldview in the Northwest. Above and
beyond influencing the social and political lives of the Métis in
their negotiations with the world around them, it also became
the framework through which Métis engaged in the practice of
Catholicism. Macdougall observes: “Catholicism as a religion that
also privileged family – natural and spiritual – and Homeness was
wholly compatible with the worldview of the Metis, and, as such,
was easily incorporated into the region’s prevailing socio-religious
structures” (Macdougall, 245). Overturning the conventional
understanding of religious syncretism, Macdougall suggests that
wahkootowin was the basis on which Catholicism was appropri-
ated by the Métis and transformed into a worldview of relatedness
that impacted economics, social relations, and kinship structures.
In operationalizing Catholic elements in service of the Métis
religious worldview, Macdougall explains, “the acculturation of
individuals, institutions, and ideas via wahkootowin connected
people through intermarriage, religious conversion, acceptance of
a godparent’s role, and engagement in the socio-cultural life of
the community” (Macdougall, 245). According to this view, the

Catholic Church was not a driving force for Métis moral action
but rather added form to the philosophical drive inherent in Métis
ways of relating.
This cogent explanation of how the Métis use the institutional
structures of the Catholic Church as part of their religious activity
is a major leap toward acknowledging and understanding Métis
agency with regard to the question of religion. In her doctoral
thesis “Au nom du bon dieu et du buffalo: Metis Lived Catholi-
cism on the Northern Plains,” Émilie Pigeon (2017) adds to the
acknowledgment of Métis self-determination with regard to
Catholicism. She applies theories of lived Catholicism (i.e., lived
religion) to the socioreligious culture of nineteenth-century Métis
buffalo hunters of the forty-ninth parallel, the transborder area
between the United States and Canada. Through intensive archi-
val research, Pigeon outlines Métis buffalo-hunting culture and
identity through lived Catholicism. She makes three salient points
about the impact of Métis lived Catholicism: 1) the bridging aspects
of religious devotion and the Catholic sacramental structure led to
identity formation among the Métis; 2) resistance to colonialism
by way of a strong Catholic faith helped to overcome the trau-
mas of settler violence toward the land and Indigenous People;
and 3) lived Catholicism shaped the Métis body politic and col-
lective memory by relaying stories of who the Métis are and who
they were (Pigeon, 7). Through the analysis of lived Catholicism,
Pigeon, like Macdougall, de-emphasizes the prescriptions of insti-
tutional religion and places religious engagement within a Métis
cultural setting, conditioned by mobility. She writes: “Implanta-
tion of Catholicism among the Metis peoples was more than a
tool in the colonial assimilationist project. It became medicine for
some, religion for others, and left its mark in the lived practices
and rituals enacted by buffalo hunters and their descendants into
the twentieth century” (Pigeon, 8). Pigeon speaks of the power of
Métis lived Catholicism in ways that are unprecedented in Métis
studies, centring the forces of identity, economy, politics, and kin-
ship around Métis understandings of religion. Pigeon goes far in
198 Paul L. Gareau
answering the question dominating this chapter – Why did Métis

peoples adopt Catholicism? (Pigeon, 18) – by placing the answer
in the hands of the Métis themselves. This work is a tremendous
resource in furthering our understanding of Métis engagement
with religion.
With Pigeon outlining the centrality of lived Catholicism to
Métis buffalo hunters in the south and Macdougall affirming wah-
kootowin as the central ethos of the Métis in the north, the analyti-
cal gaze shifts away from the conventional, Eurocentric narrative
of the Métis as neophytes, pawns, rebels, or failures with respect
to the Catholic Church and the civilizational project. Instead, they
focus on how the Métis employed Catholicism to support and
reflect their sociopolitical and religious worldview. Both Pigeon’s
and Macdougall’s analyses offer a degree of freedom from the
problem of ambivalence sourced from the Oblates’ account of
Métis religion and view the Métis as social agents negotiating
the various forces and influences around them. But in order to
fully understand Métis religion vis-à-vis Catholicism, we need a
more deliberate discussion of what “institutional religion” actu-
ally means and how the Métis engaged with it. In establishing
a theoretical framework, we need to unpack the category of reli-
gion, consider the importance of lived experience, and question
the rigidity or flexibility of Catholicism.
Rethinking the Category of Religion: Religious Studies

as a Resource
As we have seen, outlining and understanding the Métis experi-

ence of religion is a complex endeavour. A major challenge is that
our definition of religion remains bound to dualistic and racialized
ways of thinking. These logics must be challenged through a criti-
cal examination of how religion is socially constructed, looking at
the impact both of religion on people and of people on religion.
In other words, we need a deeper understanding of the category
of religion to fully understand Métis religious engagement. Reli-
gious studies offers theoretical and methodological tools for
thinking more broadly and critically about religion as a category.

Following Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith’s notion of “theoreti-
cal promiscuity” for the benefit of Indigenous studies (Simpson
and Smith 2014), an exposition of some current theoretical ideas
in religious studies can greatly benefit the field of Métis studies.
Religious studies is a multidisciplinary academic field focusing on
the social impact of religion on society. Outside of religious stud-
ies, as demonstrated above, religion is often defined by the charac-
teristics and purview of institutions, an approach that ignores or
negates individual experience (Bernauer 2017; Packard 2011). In
contrast to the perceived rigidity of religion as a category (i.e., reli-
gious organization, specialized personnel, sacred literature, theol-
ogy, cosmology, etc.), spirituality appears to offer a more flexible
category that validates religious experience. As Deepak Chopra
succinctly stated on Twitter: “Religion is belief in someone else’s
experience. Spirituality is having your own experience” (Chopra
2013). Religion, however, is not as inflexible as it would appear
based on this dichotomy of religion and spirituality.
Without denying the validity of spirituality as a concept, it is
important to realize that the canon of religious studies was, in
fact, attempting to explain religious experience within the con-
fines of religious structures. Émile Durkheim’s (2012, 45) view
of religion was that religious institutions literally house and give
shape to religious experience (i.e., collective effervescence) for
the benefit of social cohesion and group identity. Clifford Geertz
(1973, 90), shifting away from this functionalist interpretation of
institutions, sought a definition of religion that considered both
people’s ethos (i.e., how we engage in the world) and worldview
(i.e., how we see the world). He believed that humanity was in
constant search for meaning and that religion offered a complex
and multidimensional canopy on which meaning could be derived
and constructed through experience. Geertz sought a universal
means (i.e., grand theory) by which people could understand the
phenomenon of the religious.
Talal Asad’s seminal book Genealogies of Religion (1993) interro-
gated the objectivity of Geertz’s phenomenology by problematizing
200 Paul L. Gareau
the effectiveness of grand theories in the social sciences’ methods

and epistemological insight. Asad (1993, 29) points to ethnocen-
trism and objectification in the search for a universal definition of
religion: “My argument is that there cannot be a universal defi-
nition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and
relationships are historically specific, but because that definition
is itself the historical product of discursive processes.” Asad stated
that any essentialist definition of religion is bound to particular
sociopolitical discourses, which are historically and culturally
conditioned and embedded in relationships of power. Thus, he
aimed to deconstruct the universality of symbolic anthropology
(i.e., Geertz and his lineage) and proposed a critical examination
of how religion is understood within discursive fields.
Meredith McGuire’s (2008) approach resonated with Asad’s on
the topic of interrogating the objectivity of the study of religion.
Building on previous work by David Hall (1997) and Robert Orsi
(1996, 2005), McGuire observed that the disciplinary fields in the
study of religion carry embedded assumptions and prejudices that
continually reinstate the status quo. McGuire questioned how reli-
gion as a category is defined in the Western context, historically
downplaying experience for the sake of systematizing religion.
She writes in Lived Religion (2008, 200): “When we remember that
all religious traditions are social – and often seriously contested –
constructions, then we realize how misleading it is to represent
any religious tradition as unitary, unchanging, pure, or authen-
tic.” McGuire then notes that dichotomous thinking and the pro-
jection of cultural uniformity have led to conventional thinking
that continually reinforces the status quo and ignores real pro-
cesses and activities occurring in the realms of religious thought,
engagement, and expression. Her own view is that religion is
sourced in the individual at the level of personal interpretation,
affinity, and identification in conjunction with personal experi-
ences, religious structures and symbols, and the surrounding cul-
ture. She also notes that “although lived religion pertains to the
individual, it is not merely subjective. Rather, people construct
their religious worlds together, often sharing vivid experiences of
that intersubjective reality” (McGuire, 12). The complex defini-

tion underpinning her theory of lived religion, incorporating as it
does both the social and the personal, portrays religion as a lived
phenomenon, in continual flux, always reflecting both the wider
culture and the experiences of the people in question.
The work of Asad and McGuire can help condition the con-
ventional view of the Métis experience of religion, deepening our
understanding of how and why the Métis operated within the con-
text of the institutional Catholic Church at the end of the nine-
teenth century. They present us with a broader definition of religion
that considers not only the formative impact of institutions but
also the significance of lived experience in forming religious iden-
tity. Overall, this framework provides an epistemological means of
looking past the apparent rigidity of institutionalized religion to
see its inherent flexibility at the level of lived religion. Applying
this theoretical framework to the study of the Métis as religious
practitioners and their relationship with the Catholic Church at
the end of the nineteenth century allows us to be sensitive to the
Métis religious experience and affirm their agency. But before we
can apply this theoretical framework, we need to understand that
the Catholic Church is not an inflexible category on its own. It has
inconsistencies that allow for institutional flexibility.
Mary, Mother of the Church: Ultramontanism

versus Marian Devotion
The Catholic Church is without question an inherently conserva-

tive religious institution built on a long history of empire and of
hegemonic political power and moral authority. Facing a crisis
of influence following the Protestant Reformation and the three-
pronged juggernaut of modernization (i.e., the Scientific Revo-
lution, the Enlightenment, and the rise of the nation-state), the
Catholic Church of the early nineteenth century found itself los-
ing social and political ground, becoming both physically and
ideologically isolated. By this time, the Church had assumed an
attitude reflecting a “standard of faith and practice that defined
202 Paul L. Gareau
the Roman Catholic position as opposed to its opponents” (Hill

2007, 207). This attitude gave rise to the ultramontanist move-
ment, which dominated the Catholic Church between 1850 and
1950. Pope Pius IX (1846–78) was its architect; he “saw a strong
papacy as the only salvation of the Church in an age of godless,
anti-Christian, and anticlerical liberalism” (Bokenkotter 2004,
317). The movement asserted the spiritual authority of an increas-
ingly transcendental Church under siege and losing temporal
authority. As Jacinthe Duval (2008, 68) explains, this conser-
vative restructuring and extreme elitist attitude were based on
a perceived need for a heavy hand in the moral guidance of all
humanity. The ultramontanist idea of the Church as the absolute
authority and purveyor of God’s transcendent action would define
the Catholic Church for the next hundred years, influencing Cath-
olic orthodoxy, Catholic engagement in the world, and Catholic
identity. It became the facade on which we projected the idea of an
entrenched and inflexible institutional Catholic Church.
As the Catholic Church asserted greater transcendental author-
ity, it became increasingly distanced from the laity. But in becom-
ing a moral compass for all Catholics, ultramontanism fostered
a dynamic culture of religious, popular devotion to the Virgin
Mary (Marian devotion), the cult of the saints, and an intensi-
fied sacramental devotion (Bokenkotter 2004, 327). This interces-
sional devotionalism became emblematic of what it meant to be
Catholic in the modern world, and it still resonates in the Church
today. For the institutional Catholic Church, the Virgin Mary was
promoted as the central and distinguishing symbol of Catholi-
cism, personifying the Catholic Church itself (Hamington 1995;
Pelikan 1996; Rubin 2009). She is arguably the most identifiable
and important, yet complex and often contradictory, symbol of
Catholicism.
The Church hierarchy, however, held an ambivalent attitude
toward Mary. First and foremost, the Catholic hierarchy saw her as
the embodiment of the Church, as the first true Christian believer,
as a tenacious and humble symbol of obedience to God’s will,
and as the perfect woman – both mother and virgin (Hamington
1995). But the Church authority has never and will never go so
far as to allow Mary an equal role in Christian salvation to that
of Jesus (Rubin 2009; Warner 2013); some of the reasons cited
largely reflect Mary’s noncanonical role in the Christian salvation
economy (Dodd 2012, 4–5). For the Catholic hierarchy, Mary was
a sociopolitical, symbolic figure that could be used to help deploy
varying levels of institutional exclusivity or inclusivity. The laity,
however, did not uphold this perspective of a mutable Mary. They
largely saw Mary as a powerful symbol of intercession between
the penitent and the godhead, as a voice of condemnation for
the sinful state of the world, and, at times, as important as Jesus
with regard to Christian redemption (Hamington 1995; Miravalle
2006; Tavard 1996; Warner 2013).
The historical struggle for control over Mary, therefore, has
always involved the Catholic Church de-emphasizing her power
in response to a preponderant Marian devotional culture among
the laity (Gareau 2020). Although the institution seems obstinate,
the Catholic hierarchy has also promoted Mary as a dynamic and
crucial figure in the salvation of humanity through Jesus. In other
words, Mary is part of a doctrinal structure that extends her the
full weight and power of a transcendental Church that claims
absolute authority over the will of God. And yet the Church
remains reticent to fully expound Mary’s soteriological role in the
Catholic salvation economy. This disparity of meaning between
the institutional Church and the laity hints at the dynamic and
fluid nature of Catholic popular devotion. Though Mary is central
to the ultramontanist definition of Catholicism, she is not a reified
character who stands in either perfect consonance with or opposi-
tion to the moral authority of the institutional Church. Popular
devotion is not controlled by the Church or by the laity: it is an
independent socioreligious phenomenon largely fed by lived reli-
gious experience.
Robert Orsi endorses a more nuanced view. In Between Heaven
and Earth (2005), he engages with the intersections between social
construction and personal interpretation – between imposed and
negotiated meaning – in the lived experiences of religious people.
204 Paul L. Gareau
On a theoretical level, Orsi argues that lived experiences cannot

be easily abstracted and compartmentalized into epistemologi-
cally normative categories. On a concrete level, he points out that
the Virgin Mary and popular devotion are not controlled by the
Catholic institution or by the laity but are conditioned by the rela-
tionship between deity and devotee. He writes:
The Virgin Mary exists in relationships … [and] cannot be

found solely in psychological analyses of any single believer’s
(or even community’s) experience of her because Mary and her
devout alike find their being in culture … She is a cultural fig-
ure in that she enters the intricacies of a culture, becomes part
of its webs and meanings, limitations, structures, and possibil-
ities. She contributes to making and sustaining culture, and re-
inventing it, at the same time that she herself is made and
sustained by culture, in dynamic exchanges with her devout.
(Orsi, 60–61)
Orsi explains that Mary, in people’s lived experiences, is not an

ideal social construction set on “making meaning,” beset by the pre-
rogatives of a moral authority. She is, rather, a driving force for the
negotiation of religious meaning between the divine and the
devotee, conditioned by the variety and plethora of lived, religious
experiences. Mary, then, is not a means through which the Catholic
institution defines Catholic identity but rather a means for believers
to understand and express their own personal relationship to the
divine. Orsi explains that not one single individual has control over
Mary but that she is autonomous, oriented toward an ongoing rela-
tionship with Catholic devotees, helping to shape meaning in reli-
gious experience and, thus, informing religious identity.
Mary and the Métis: Redefining a Theory of Métis Religion
As demonstrated earlier, scholarship on the religious expression

and worldview of the Métis has relied too much on the norma-
tive dictates of the Catholic institution. Indeed, when we look at
the ultramontanist movement’s focus on the reification and con-

solidation of the Church’s sociopolitical and religious authority,
we are tempted to define Catholicism solely in the Church’s own
terms. But this does not help us to understand Catholicism among
the Métis, who may or may not have subscribed to the Church’s
authority or racial or moral vision. In light of this insight and little
original research on the Métis experience of Catholicism, we can
turn to the field of religious studies to gain a nuanced conception
of religion and a theoretical model that can help lead us toward a
clearer understanding of Métis religion.
As previously discussed, Asad rejected any universalist defi-
nition of religion as inherently ethnocentric, shifting our atten-
tion to the discursive construction of religion via experience. His
approach reflects an understanding that knowledge(s) are condi-
tioned by relationships and that religious experiences play a major
role in the construction of sociopolitical worldviews. This critical
perspective suggests that we must avoid reducing our discussion
of Métis religion to the hegemony of Catholic institutional control
over the Catholic laity. We can therefore move away from the view
that the Métis have been shaped primarily by a coercive, institu-
tional discourse and toward a view of the Métis as shaping the
contours of their own religious and cultural lives and identities,
their ethos and worldview.
McGuire’s theory of lived religion complements Asad’s insights,
supporting a view of religion not as a monolithic historical tradi-
tion based on established institutions or denominations but as
something created and accidental, merged, blended, and socially
wrought by religious people in religious communities with a
variety of diverse experiences. As illustrated in Pigeon’s research
(2017), this theory emphasizes the actions and interpretations of
religious people that transcend categories and suggests that nor-
mativity must be questioned to avoid perpetuating uncritical per-
spectives and misconceptions in the study of religion. McGuire’s
theoretical and methodological insights suggest that, when we
consider the Métis experience of religion, we should not focus
solely on religion as a hegemonic and coercive force in people’s
206 Paul L. Gareau
lives but also as something that is performed in parallel with the

meanings laid out by institutions. The lived experience of Métis
religion is as important as its codification by socioreligious and
cultural institutions. Furthermore, this theory also makes clear
that Métis religion is not solely the product of subjective inter-
pretation but is co-constituted in a world of shared experiences,
values, needs, and relations.
Finally, Orsi’s discussion of the power, malleability, and auton-
omy of Catholic popular devotion helps to shed light more directly
on the Métis lived experience of religion. As previously outlined,
while the institutional Church is ambivalent about Mary as a
symbol, the laity see her as the driving force of intercession and
religious salvation. This lends a tremendous amount of power to
Mary within popular devotion and gives pause to the institutional
Church. Orsi observes that, against the Catholic institutional pur-
view, Mary is not controlled by anyone but rather exists in relation-
ships that reflect cultural definitions and differentiations in which
negotiated meaning is nuanced by lived experience. For the Métis,
the relationship with Mary and the corpus of Catholic popular
devotion offer freedom from the machinations and prerogatives
of the institutional Church as well as access to the religious (i.e.,
sacred, ontological, cosmological, or magical) power of an institu-
tional religiosity. In other words, this relationship with Mary helps
raise religious devotions above the web of discursive power inher-
ent in religious structures of moral authority such as the Catholic
Church. Theoretically, this allows the Métis to develop their own
religious worldview and conviction, which can weather the brunt
of institutional power and coercion.
These insights – Asad’s deconstruction of universalist definitions
of religion, McGuire’s emphasis on the importance of lived reli-
gious experience, and Orsi’s discussion of the flexibility of Mary
and Catholic popular devotion – provide a conceptual framework
for reconsidering the role of Catholicism in the long-standing Métis
experience of religion, one that takes seriously the agency and self-
determination of the Métis. When we look back at the example of
Oblate missionary Pénard, dumfounded over the behaviour of his
Métis congregation, we can now see how their relationship with

Mary and the religious actions of popular devotion allowed for a
robust and resilient religious framework that spoke to their own
needs, ethos, and worldview. Our examination of the flexibility
of Marian and popular devotion in Catholicism suggests that the
Métis were, in their own way, accessing the power of a transcen-
dent authoritative institution. They were not bound by these per-
spectives but were forming a Métis ethic and worldview. They were
decidedly not ambivalent before the power of a moral authority
but assertive in their Catholic identity as a form of Métis religion.
In the face of the Oblates’ conundrum of seeing the Métis as
both good and bad Catholics, I lay out a theoretical groundwork
for looking at Catholicism in a way that speaks to Métis experi-
ences and worldview and does not depend on the moral and racial-
ized dictates of Catholic institutional authority. Unpacking the
category of religion through the insights of religious studies helps
reveal how readily available resources within the ultramontanist
Catholic Church, through Mary and popular devotion, allowed
the Métis to remain seated in their pews in defiance of the voice
of moral exclusivity and the colonial project. The purpose of this
chapter is not to explicate the Métis experience of religion as a
mosaic of Indigenous spiritual expressions or to assert Christian-
ity as something elemental to Métis identity. It outlines the means,
structures, and possibilities of Métis religion that centres Métis
knowledge, lived experiences, and institutional engagement. From
here, we can continue to re-examine Métis history and begin to
do original research on the contemporaneous Métis experience of
religion, research that will have the power to further Métis sover-
eignty and peoplehood and explicate and validate Métis religion.
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9
Building the Field of Métis Studies:
Toward Transformative and
Empowering Métis Scholarship
Adam Gaudry
Métis studies is a scholarly field concerned with both the his-

tory of and issues facing the Métis people. This chapter proposes
some ways forward for Métis-specific scholarship by exploring the
current state of the field of Métis studies for undergraduates and
graduate students while also analyzing institutional deficits that
may limit the transformational impact of Métis studies scholar-
ship. While the field has entered an era of unprecedented growth
with a critical mass of young scholars and a sizable group of senior
scholars, it is still unevenly developed and in many places lacks the
kind of infrastructure that can induct Métis studies students into
a clearly delineated and self-conscious community of scholars. To
undertake such an analysis, and to advocate for the development
of a transformative scholarship, I argue for the need to solidify the
presence of Métis voices in the field. To do so, I propose a number
of institutional developments to allow a highly decentred group of
scholars to generate a self-conscious field of Métis studies that col-
lectively nurtures the development of Métis-focused scholarship.
Undergraduate Education: The Métis Studies Double Duty
In its contemporary manifestation, Métis studies is most strongly

connected to the discipline of Indigenous studies, a discipline
intended to tell Indigenous stories and the space where Métis
experiences are both taught and researched most regularly. Métis
studies finds its logical home within Indigenous studies, and a
213
214 Adam Gaudry
significant number of Métis studies scholars are housed in Indig-

enous studies academic units, but this situation is not without its
challenges. Within an Indigenous studies context, Métis studies
has to take on a kind of double duty, examining both Métis issues
and the unique legal-political status of Métis people in Canada.
The Métis have the particular challenge of being definitively non-
Indian, which is disconnected from the legal and policy realities
of the Indian Act while still being recognized as Aboriginal in the
Canadian legal order. Métis studies, then, faces the challenging
task of making sense of this peculiar Métis legal and policy his-
tory, one that is anything but clear.
Like other Indigenous nation–specific fields of study (Anishi-
naabe studies, Iroquois studies, Mi’kmaq studies, etc.), Métis
studies is firmly committed to exploring the specific issues of its
people and to contributing to their self-determining capacities
through relevant and detailed analysis of the people’s definitive
historical and contemporary experiences (Barkwell, Dorion, and
Préfontaine 2001). However, whereas most Indigenous Peoples
defined as “Indians” by Canada can draw on a common curricu-
lum of Indigenous studies scholarship that concerns specifically
Indian issues (issues such as the Indian Act, the reserve system,
and the struggles against them), Métis studies requires a different
analysis of the unique political and legal context of the Métis peo-
ple, who are, according to Canadian law, not Indians. The Métis
faced a different type of colonial management strategy, one that
comprised a different set of policies such as scrip and laissez-faire
provincial social supports, almost all of which existed outside the
Indian Act regime. While the Indian Act and its attendant history
is in many ways shared by almost all other Indigenous Peoples
subjected to Canadian governance (Inuit are another obvious
exception here), the progressive externalization from Indianness
that the Métis experienced since the 1870s has meant that the
robust scholarly literature on the Indian Act is not always useful
in making sense of the issues that the Métis face. Furthermore,
the patriation of Canada’s Constitution in 1982, and the inclusion
of the Métis in section 35 as an Aboriginal people distinct from
Building the Field of Métis Studies 215
Indians and Inuit, has only amplified the legal distinctiveness of

the Métis in comparison to other Indigenous Peoples.
While many scholars are aware of this distinction, textbooks
and university curriculums often confine Métis issues to a single
week or lecture, and many Indigenous-focused programs lack a
Métis specialist, leaving Métis issues undertheorized in university
classrooms. The result is that many Métis undergraduate students
feel more conversant in Indian Act policy than their own people’s
struggle against colonial intrusion.
Métis studies, then, must attend to two concerns associated
with this double duty. It must explain historical and contempo-
rary Métis experiences as well as situating them in a unique politi-
cal and legal context that is, in a scholarly sense, comparatively
underdeveloped. Métis studies scholarship therefore concerns a
number of issues different from other Indigenous–nation specific
fields, as it must develop its own people-specific history that is
legally and politically distinct from most of the other Indigenous
nations. It is in this context that many Métis studies scholars
must teach undergraduates and have a particular responsibility to
ensure that they are presented with accurate and compelling nar-
ratives that examine Métis experiences in navigating this imposed
legal and policy context.
This double duty is made challenging by the relatively under-
developed institutional infrastructure of Métis studies scholarship
in the Canadian academy. There are several Métis research insti-
tutes connected to the three Prairie-based Métis organizations – the
Louis Riel Institute in Manitoba, the Gabriel Dumont Institute
in Saskatchewan, and the Rupertsland Institute in Alberta – and
they are mandated to pursue the intellectual development of
Métis knowledge and address real-world issues faced by the Métis.
These institutes have developed curriculums for elementary and
secondary schools in an effort to address this double duty. The
development of postsecondary curricular resources, however, is
something that scholars could assist with, and they could in effect
support other Indigenous studies scholars in inserting additional
Métis content into their courses. Métis studies scholars, buoyed
216 Adam Gaudry
by Métis research institutes, can support the elaboration of Métis

knowledge in postsecondary education by engaging with a range
of scholars.
A significant knowledge gap on Métis experience and the Métis
legal context exists in the teaching of Indigenous issues gener-
ally, so much so that often they are not taught at all or relegated
to a single lecture. Part of the problem is the lack of accessible
resources and knowledge, as well as an earnest desire not to pres-
ent misinformation to students. However, not teaching these sub-
jects only perpetuates an undesirable, cyclical situation in which
few people feel comfortable teaching about Métis issues because
few people have learned about Métis issues. There is an obliga-
tion, then, to start building the kinds of relationships and sharing
the kinds of knowledge that facilitate teaching and learning about
issues of concern to Métis communities. Working collaboratively,
Métis studies scholars can support the development of a sustain-
able base of critical Métis studies scholars, securely supported by
postsecondary institutions, who can develop the physical spaces
to research and teach Métis issues as Métis issues.
Supporting Graduate Students in Becoming

Métis Studies Scholars
Like most Métis studies scholars, I am largely self-taught. The

number of Métis studies scholars available to supervise graduate
students is relatively small in number and widely dispersed across
many institutions. Many universities lack the institutional infra-
structure to connect senior Métis studies scholars with interested
graduate students, and my experience is a fairly common one for
Métis students. For the self-taught Métis studies graduate student,
there is a surprising amount of scholarship to wade through from
three traditions, which poses a challenge for those aspiring to
expertise in Métis studies.
The field of Métis studies has been around for quite some time,
even if it hasn’t always been self-consciously identified as such.
It finds its origins in three major intellectual movements: 1) in
twentieth-century historical studies examining the political devel-

opment of the Northwest, particularly the so-called Riel Rebel-
lions (for examples, see Giraud 1986; Howard 1974; Innis 1930;
A. Morton 1939; W.L. Morton 1957; Stanley 1936; Pannekoek,
2001); 2) in fur trade history and the gender-based interventions
of historians beginning in the 1970s and 1980s (see Brown 1980,
1983; Foster 1976; Gorham 1988; Peterson 1978, 1982; Peterson and
Brown 1985; Van Kirk 1973); and 3) in the many Métis scholarly
works, writings, and memoirs that challenge dominant narra-
tives on Métis people (see Adams 1989; Campbell 1973; de Tré-
maudan 1982; Barkwell, Dorion, and Préfontaine 2001; St-Onge,
Podruchny, and Macdougall 2012; Adams, Dahl, and Peach 2013;
Lischke and McNab 2007; O’Toole 2010). While these three broad
trends may be obvious for many trained in the field, they can
appear as a jumble to many new to it.
Presenting a particular problem is the sheer number of works
focused on the Métis. In an attempt to address this concern, this
chapter’s references are intended to work as a starting point for a
comprehensive reading list and can be used in conjunction with
the brief historiography of Métis studies presented here. In terms
of quantity, Métis studies is perhaps the most established Indig-
enous nation–specific field in the Canadian context. But the prob-
lem is that sources vary greatly and are presented in anything but
a systematic manner. Books, studies, articles, and edited collec-
tions are plentiful, overwhelming in their quantity.
The most challenging part for the self-taught scholar is immers-
ing oneself in a Métis studies canon, which, for much of the field’s
history, was not of Métis making. Producing intensely problem-
atic and often racist narratives, many seminal works – Alexander
Ross’s Red River Settlement (1972 [1856]), Alexander Begg’s History
of the North-West (1894), George Stanley’s The Birth of Western Canada
(1936) and Louis Riel (1963), and Marcel Giraud’s two-volume The
Métis of the Canadian West (1986) – rely on dichotomous narratives
of “civilization” versus “savagery” in which the Métis are repre-
sented as decidedly the latter. The foundational civilization nar-
rative, which Stanley called the frontier thesis, presents the Métis
218 Adam Gaudry
“rebellions” as being caused by “the clash between primitive and

civilized peoples” made inevitable by the “Canadian intrusion and
the imposition of an alien civilization” (Stanley 1936, vii). Using
this language, early scholars of the Métis saw them as an object
of study and analyzed their actions – particularly the work of the
1869–70 and 1885 provisional governments – to explain Canada’s
early development, including how Riel’s execution blew open the
French-English schism that would define Canadian politics for the
next century.
However, within this early Métis studies scholarship, the Métis
were also developing their own historical narratives based on their
own experiences. From 1885, the Métis authored many books,
memoirs, and manuscripts. Extensive and detailed descriptions
and analyses of Métis life before this Canadian “intrusion” can
be found in Riel’s “Last Memoir” (1985 [1885]), Louis Goulet’s
Vanishing Spaces (1976), Norbert Welsh’s Last Buffalo Hunter (1994
[1939]), Auguste Vermette’s Au temps de la prairie (2006), Peter
Erasmus’s Buffalo Days and Nights (1999 [1920]), and Gabriel
Dumont’s Gabriel Dumont Speaks (2009). Given that these works
are mostly memoirs, they are often treated as descriptive primary
sources, disregarding much of the self-conscious theoretical analy-
sis of Métis life contained within them. Through these sources,
and others like them, understandings of Métis history, law, poli-
tics, and culture, from those who lived it, are both available and
well-developed; they contain significant Métis-centred analyses as
well as self-conscious engagements with the dominant narratives
of their day, which were almost certainly anti-Riel in nature, if not
outright anti-Métis. They should be considered theoretical works
in and of themselves, grounded as they are in a Métis philosophi-
cal tradition articulated self-consciously by their authors.
However, for most of the field’s history, Métis intellectuals
made up the minority of scholars, if not numerically then in terms
of their societal influence. It is only recently that the number of
Métis scholars contributing to these debates has reached critical
mass. Having achieved this state, it is not surprising that there are
now seismic shifts in how Métis issues and history are discussed in
both academic and popular writing, by both Métis and non-Métis.

Most influential new works employ rigorous community-engaged
perspectives, many more are authored by Métis scholars them-
selves. The result is that most new works now attempt to under-
stand Métis actions as being motivated by an attempt to survive
and thrive in a changing economic and political world (see, for
example, Andersen 2014; Chartrand 2007; Macdougall 2010).
In historical studies of Métis people, the field is now rooted
in analyzing how Métis people understood their world and how
they acted according to those understandings. Whether articulat-
ing how the Métis understood and navigated the forty-ninth par-
allel in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Hogue 2015) or
how the Métis ordered their social world using understandings
of gender and family (Macdougall 2010), there is a decided trend
toward Métis-centric study, which gives Métis experience defini-
tive explanatory power. In contemporary studies of Métis peo-
ple, the centring of Métis experience and the allocation of Métis
explanatory power to Métis people are also common and visible in
explorations of how the Métis understand contemporary spiritual-
ity (Fiola 2015) and contemporary Métis identity (Andersen 2014).
Sifting through these varying perspectives and making sense of
their relationships to one another is not easy, particularly if you
are doing it on your own and for the first time. For many Métis
studies graduate students, this is the reality they face, but these
difficulties could be avoided with mentorship from established
Métis studies specialists. With supportive and nurturing mentor-
ship, we can work to produce more positive experiences for stu-
dents working in our field.
Transformative Métis Scholarship
Increasingly, Métis studies has adopted a Métis-centric approach.

In other words, an approach in which historical and contempo-
rary Métis voices are given the authoritative power to narrate and
explain their own experiences. This Métis-centrism is perhaps the
definitive quality of current Métis studies and is a vital part of
220 Adam Gaudry
the field’s future. In returning the power to tell Métis stories to

Métis people, the field also looks to support powerful transfor-
mations in Métis communities. In doing Métis-centred scholar-
ship, then, Métis studies scholars should aim to be transformative
and empowering, assisting the Métis in reclaiming our collective
voice and our political independence. It should be noted here that
non-Métis scholars have a long history of working alongside Métis
communities, something that if done properly can produce benefi-
cial and transformative scholarship.
Continuing the Field’s Turn Toward

Métis-Centred Research
As this brief overview of the development of the field of Métis

studies demonstrates, in recent years the field has witnessed an
intellectual shift, one that embraces Métis-centred approaches
geared toward telling Métis stories and generating the real-world
empowerment of Métis communities. This shift can be consoli-
dated in academic terms, resulting in a self-aware and conversant
field of Métis studies. Such a field will produce transformative
scholarship that both destabilizes colonial tropes about Métis
people and replaces them with more accurate and empowering
narratives of Métis survivance and resurgence. While such trans-
formative scholarship has been underway for quite some time, I
propose a series of best practices that will allow us, as Métis stud-
ies scholars, to better equip our academic units, our institutions,
and our students to undertake empowering and transformative
Métis research.
In terms of best practices, I identify two goals. First, a successful
field of Métis studies must continue the turn toward Métis-centred
scholarship and increase the involvement of Métis communities
in the field. Second, Métis studies scholars should explore how
they can increase the capacities of their academic units to recruit,
train, and graduate Métis studies scholars through collaborative
extra-university approaches and within their own institutions.
To explore these best practices, I unpack each of these goals and
suggest how the field of Métis studies can strengthen its research
production and engage a growing number of Métis studies schol-
ars as Métis studies scholars.
While university ethics protocols are fostering a culture of
engagement among university-affiliated researchers, it is impor-
tant that Métis studies scholars remain committed to the ethical
research approaches developed in Indigenous studies. Métis stud-
ies must also elaborate on existing field-specific research protocols
for working in Métis communities. Métis studies benefits from
the well-developed literature in Indigenous studies on research
methods and the ethical responsibilities of researchers. Much of
Métis studies’ methodological approach to research is consistent
with this literature. For example, the well-known work of Linda
Tuhiwai Smith (1999), which details the ethical commitment of
researchers to decolonization, is largely applicable to Métis stud-
ies research. More locally, the “Tri-Council Policy Statement on
Research Involving the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples
of Canada” (CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC, 2014) also serves as
a vital guideline for ethical and community-engaged research. As
I’ve argued elsewhere, Indigenous studies research methods that
advocate ethical, effective, and engaged research practices tend
to embody three broad principles: “i) research is grounded in,
respects, and ultimately seeks to validate Indigenous worldviews;
ii) research output is geared toward use by Indigenous Peoples and
in Indigenous communities; and iii) research processes and final
products are ultimately responsible to Indigenous communities,
meaning that Indigenous communities are the final judges of the
validity and effectiveness of research” (Gaudry 2011, 117). Activist-
oriented research also involves a fourth principle: “Research is
action oriented and works as a motivating factor for practical
and direct action among Indigenous peoples and in Indigenous
communities” (Gaudry, 117). But Métis studies research, owing
to its double duty as a nation-specific research field and a field
that challenges the unique political-legal standing of the Métis in
the Canadian context, also faces a unique set of challenges. The
development of a Métis studies research protocol is therefore the
222 Adam Gaudry
best strategy for effectively guiding transformative Métis studies

research that is responsible to Métis communities.
The basic framework for a Métis-specific research protocol
has already been developed by the Métis Centre at the National
Aboriginal Health Organization. The Métis Centre’s (2011)
research report, “Principles of Ethical Métis Research,” provides
Métis-specific guidelines for undertaking research in Métis com-
munities and among Métis people. Developed by a think tank of
experienced Métis researchers, the report identifies six research
principles to convert the best practices of Indigenous studies
research for a Métis-specific context. The document centres Métis-
specific research on building reciprocal relationships with subject
Métis communities in three ways: “Engaging the community by
going among the people and becoming known, earning accep-
tance through this process, and then getting community involve-
ment once the relationship is established” (Metis Centre, 2).
Another principle requires researchers to focus on ethical research
outcomes of benefit to a community, and yet another asks them to
respect existing community protocols for knowledge acquisition
and dissemination (Metis Centre, 2–4).
The most important principle in this report, however, stresses
the need for researchers to understand the unique Métis context
before conducting research. It suggests involving individuals who
are generally acknowledged as Métis experts – for instance, Métis
researchers, Elders, and historians, all of whom possess “insight
into Métis methodologies and context, and can assist research-
ers in advancing these methodologies” (Metis Centre 2011, 4).
Such engagement is, of course, made simpler by a solidified Métis
studies field and intellectual community experienced in conduct-
ing ethical research among Métis people and responsible to and
respectful of Métis interests. The report implies a need for a self-
aware body of scholars able to train future Métis studies research-
ers to conduct ethical research in Métis communities and among
Métis people. It concludes by pointing out the need for four
things: more capacity building, ongoing dialogue on the evolving
principles of ethical Métis research, a centralized identification
of Métis experts, and the consolidation of Métis-specific research

into an accessible database available to researchers. It suggests a
need for a more self-aware field engaged in a national conversation
about Métis research and Métis issues (Metis Centre, 5) – in other
words, a self-conscious field of Métis studies engaged in transfor-
mative scholarship.
Since Métis studies performs a double duty in articulating a
people-specific history and culture and the unique political-legal
situation of Métis in Canada, Métis experts in the academic or
scholarly sense must have knowledge of both. Métis studies
researchers must be cognizant of the specific context in which
they operate. The Métis Centre’s “Principles of Ethical Métis
Research,” when read in the context of a well-developed literature
on ethical Indigenous studies research methodologies, points to
the genesis of a Métis-specific research protocol. The development
of Métis-specific research protocols that prioritize the collective
interests of Métis communities, and the specificity of the Métis
context, is an important component for a well-developed field of
Métis studies, and the elaboration and practice of these principles
are essential to the future success of the field.
Institutional Development to Support

Métis Studies Scholarship
While there is a long history of Métis studies scholarship in terms

of output, in my view the field suffers from a lack of institutional
capacity, which ultimately hinders its growth. While Métis stud-
ies scholars have built significant research networks that span
the continent, most universities lack the institutional infrastruc-
ture necessary to produce a community of Métis studies scholars.
Because Métis studies is performing double duty, an Indigenous
studies education on its own is often not sufficient to build the
required expertise to do Métis-specific research, yet the need for
this particular type of training is rarely on the institutional radar
at Canadian universities. Therefore, building the infrastructure
necessary to reinforce the Métis-centred turn of Métis studies falls
224 Adam Gaudry
to Métis studies scholars ourselves. This chapter, then, is a call for

increased institutional development for Métis studies at our home
institutions and in partnership with other Métis studies scholars
and research units. As a field, Métis studies should work toward
the development of field-specific infrastructure that augments
Métis interests and supports undergraduate and graduate Métis
studies students and scholars.
A significant challenge is the uneven development of Métis
scholarship at different universities, along with widely dispersed
Métis studies scholars. To overcome this decentralization, I sug-
gest that we work on building two types of Métis studies infra-
structure: local institutional infrastructure, where Métis studies
research is well established, and interinstitutional infrastructure,
which would allow for the training of Métis studies scholars from
multiple universities at once, particularly targeting universities
that lack a Métis studies scholarly tradition.
Within those universities that do possess a Métis studies
scholarly tradition, Métis studies scholars find themselves in an
advantageous position, as they can build off of existing scholarly
networks. In these spaces, Métis studies would benefit from the
institutional development of Métis-specific research hubs, along-
side the networking of existing projects to further consolidate
Métis studies–related knowledge production. Given that Métis
studies research involves a specialization that is unique and exten-
sive, Métis studies students would likely benefit from the creation
of Métis-specific spaces such as research centres and labs. By hav-
ing clear destinations for students to enter the field, Métis studies
scholars will be able to better identify, recruit, and train the next
generation of scholars. These students will also benefit from more
direct guidance over their research and learning, which will mini-
mize the many pitfalls associated with self-directed teaching.
The University of Ottawa’s Métis Research Lab exemplifies
local institutional infrastructure development. The lab uses a
social history and genealogical approach to study how Métis fami-
lies “evolved and developed relationships” while leading highly
mobile lives. The project is led by two well-established Métis
studies scholars, Brenda Macdougall and Nicole St-Onge, and is

assisted by graduate students in the field. This research unit has
been instrumental in producing cutting-edge research as well
as hosting Métis research conferences that link established schol-
ars with junior scholars and graduate students. By adopting a lab
model, the unit also focuses on mentorship: students’ work on
the project and their work on their dissertations are intertwined.
Since labs provide students with extensive oversight in terms of
skills development, research progress, and publishing, this model
may be valuable in overcoming the current lack of institutional
capacity for Métis studies in many institutions that nonetheless
have Métis studies scholars as faculty. Those of us in these for-
tunate circumstances should commit ourselves to developing the
infrastructure necessary to bring new scholars to the field, whether
that means the creation of Métis studies labs or securing funding
for Métis research that supports Métis students. Both would be
most effective if scholars take on a mentorship role and students
actively seek out Métis studies scholars for support and guidance.
While not all universities have the institutional infrastructure
to establish Métis studies units on campus, the field itself must
work to build extra-institutional capacity to support Métis studies
students outside of our own institutions. Significant steps have
already been taken in this regard with the establishment and exten-
sion of the Métis Studies Workshop, which began as a luncheon
and discussion about Métis research at the Native American and
Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) in Saskatoon in 2013
and evolved into a broader intellectual conversation at subsequent
annual meetings and several standalone meetings and research
collaborations. These workshops were made possible through the
generous support of faculty members and our home units, but
they were also designed to engage scholars and students from far
afield, leading to the production of interesting new research. It
was at one of these meetings, in Washington, DC, that a series of
presentations were sharpened and honed into this collection.
The workshop also served an important social role in the field:
allowing Métis studies scholars and students who work in disparate
226 Adam Gaudry
locales to gather annually and discuss the direction of our field.

Because we are still a relatively small group, these gatherings gave
students access to senior scholars in the field. Thus, workshops are
an important component of the extra-institutional infrastructure
development vital to the growth and prosperity of the field.
What we particularly need are graduate-level courses in Métis
studies, courses that introduce students to the field and prepare
them for producing original Métis studies research. While estab-
lishing these courses may be easier at some universities than oth-
ers, the development of a Métis studies summer seminar, open to
students from across the continent, could support students who
don’t have access to this kind of seminar at their home institutions.
The seminar could be held annually at rotating locations, provid-
ing graduate students with a for-credit introductory Métis studies
seminar transferable to their home institution. A two-week inten-
sive course could provide an overview of Métis studies by analyz-
ing both foundational works and the most up-to-date literature.
It could train students and provide them with many of the tools
required to continue their education, regardless of whether they
are under the direct supervision of Métis studies experts. Such
an atmosphere would also allow for the development of a Métis
studies community, in which extra-institutional relationships pro-
vide new scholars with the skills and support they need to develop
community-engaged and transformative Métis studies research. A
key component of such a course would be exposure to multiple
perspectives and multiple established scholars. If a seminar like
this were established, it would greatly improve our ability to sup-
port emerging Métis studies students, who would otherwise face
the daunting task of organizing their own study of Métis history
without the support of those who have come before.
We are at a tipping point in Métis studies scholarship, but as Leah

Dorion and Darren Préfontaine (2001, 30) remind us: “The future
of Métis studies will depend on how the diverging interpretations
of the discipline will reconcile themselves. If the dominant trend of
scholarship continues … Métis Studies will remain a splintered
discipline. If community-based studies and culturally sensitive

writing gains a larger following then the discipline will expand.”
This is an astute observation. The ability of Métis scholars to assert
Métis perspectives has been the key to the reemergence of Métis
studies as a field that empowers Métis knowledge, as opposed
to one that reinscribes a sense of colonial inferiority onto Métis
communities. As Métis reclaim possession of our own history and
political philosophy, very different stories will be told, and dif-
ferent political understandings will emerge. By working together
to build new opportunities for collaboration and cooperation, we
can support one another and support Métis communities. This
collective undertaking has been built on the hard work of others,
and in many ways it is the responsibility of this emerging genera-
tion of Métis studies scholars to do the heavy lifting required to
build the field of Métis studies.
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Contributors
Jennifer Adese (otipemisiwak/Métis) is an associate professor in

the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mis-
sissauga. She is (with Robert Alexander Innes) co-editor of Indig-
enous Celebrity: Indigenous Entanglements with Fame (forthcoming,
University of Manitoba Press), and is the recipient of a SSHRC
Insight Development Grant titled “‘No one else can speak for us’:
Métis Women's Political Organizing, 1970s–Present.” Her work
has appeared in Studies in American Indian Literature (SAIL), Ameri-
can Indian Quarterly (AIQ), Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education
& Society (DIES), MediaTropes, TOPIA, PUBLIC - ART, CULTURE,
IDEAS, along with a number of edited collections.
Chris Andersen (Métis) is the dean of the Faculty of Native Studies

at the University of Alberta. He is the author of the award-winning
“Métis”: Race, Recognition, and the Struggle for Indigenous Peoplehood,
and, with Maggie Walter, co-author of Indigenous Statistics: A Quan-
titative Indigenous Methodology. With Jean O’Brien, he co-edited
Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies.
Paul Gareau is Métis from Bellevue near Batoche, Saskatchewan

and is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at
the University of Alberta. His research, publications, and teach-
ing explore the Métis experiences of religion, the legacy of colo-
nial discourses on Indigenous and ethno-cultural minorities, and
the multiplicity of experience in rural spaces. Grounded in Métis
Studies and Indigenous Studies as well as Religious Studies,
230
Contributors 231
Gareau’s work centres on theory and methodology around rela-

tionality, gender, Indigenous epistemologies, land and place, and
sovereignty/peoplehood.
Robert L.A. Hancock is Cree-Metis from Treaty 8 on his mother’s

side, from the Monkman family, and English Canadian on his
father’s, although he was born and raised and is grateful to be
living and working in Lekwungen territory. He is the Associate
Director Academic in the Office of Indigenous Academic and
Community Engagement at the University of Victoria, where he
is also an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology.
Robert Alexander Innes is a member of Cowessess First Nation and

is department head and an associate professor in the Department
of Indigenous Studies at the University of Saskatchewan.
June Scudeler (Métis) is an assistant professor in the Department

of Indigenous Studies, cross-appointed with the Department of
Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser Uni-
versity. Her research examines the intersections between queer
Indigenous studies, Indigenous literature, film, and art, includ-
ing Indigenous futurisms and horror. She has published articles
in Native American and Indigenous Studies, American Indian Culture
and Research Journal, Canadian Literature, and Studies in Canadian
Literature. Her chapters are included in Queer Indigenous Studies:
Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics and Literature (University of
Arizona Press), Performing Indigeneity (Playwrights Canada Press),
and The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies.
Jesse Thistle is a Métis-Cree author and assistant professor at York

University in Toronto. He's a PhD candidate in the Department
of History, a Pierre Eliiott Trudeau and Vanier scholar, and gov-
ernor general medalist. Jesse is the author of “Definition of Indig-
enous Homelessness in Canada,” published through the Canadian
Observatory on Homelessness. His award-winning memoir, From
the Ashes, is a number-one national bestseller, CBC Canada Reads
finalist, and an Indigo, Chatelaine, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Wal-
rus, and Capitol Hill Best Book of 2019. He was chosen for Kobo's
232 Contributors
2020 Emerging Canadian Non-fiction award, as well was selected

as the Indigenous Voices Non-fiction Writer of the year for 2020.
Daniel Voth is an associate professor in the Department of Political

Science at the University of Calgary and the director of the Inter-
national Indigenous Studies Program. He is Métis from the Métis
Nation of the Red River Valley. Raised in Winnipeg’s inner city,
Daniel earned his PhD from UBC in 2015. His research agenda
focuses on the political relationships between Indigenous peoples,
particularly in southern Manitoba, and he studies how settler-
imposed power structures and land dispossession undermine
important gendered orientations to governance. His research has
been published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, the Uni-
versity of Toronto Law Journal, twice in Native American and Indig-
enous Studies, Canadian Journal of Urban Research, and several book
chapters.
Index
Aboriginal peoples, 82, 117, 130, Arnault, Brenda, 127–28

140n1, 141n10, 214 Asad, Talal, 199–201, 205–6
activism, activists, 89, 115, 117; Assiniboia, 121, 172
political, 116–18, 126, 128, 136, 139 Assiniboine (people), 10, 13, 94–97,
Adams, Christopher, 7 100–3, 107, 109–11
Adese, Jennifer, 46, 110 Association of Métis and Non-Status
agency, 59, 61, 110, 119–20, 197, Indians of Saskatchewan, 129
201, 206 authority, 85, 192, 194; moral, 189,
Alberta, 10, 128, 130–32, 134, 136–37, 193, 201, 203–4, 206–7
141n12, 164, 178, 215 autonomy, 25, 98, 101, 110, 206
Alfred, Taiaiake, 25
alliances, 10, 46, 50, 52–53, 56 bands, 10, 20, 94, 96–102, 105–6,
Anaya, S. James, 36n5 110; multicultural, 13, 94, 98, 100
ancestors, 32, 40–42, 56–58, 60, Bannatyne, Annie, 125
63, 94, 108, 123 Barkwell, Lawrence J., 33–34,
Andersen, Chris, 43–46, 49, 50, 51, 125, 195
53, 54, 59, 62, 86, 88, 93–94, 119, Barron, Laurie, 157–59
167–68n5 Barrone, Bud, 157
Anderson, Benedict, 26 Batoche, 101, 108–9, 122, 126, 170,
Anishinaabe, 21, 171, 176, 195, 214 175, 179–80, 182–85, 195
anthropology, 7, 42, 47, 200 Begg, Alexander, 122, 217
Arcand, Bella, 153 Belcourt, Herb, 190
Arcand, Bernadette, 153 Big River (AB), 160, 164
Arcand, Damas, 153 bison, 148, 175–76. See also buffalo
Arcand, George, 153 Blanke, Cecile, 129
Arcand, Larry, 152 Blondeau, Maurice, 152
Arcand, Lottie, 148, 152 Boucher, Salomon, 173
Arcand, St. Pierre, 147–48, 150, boundaries, 15, 26, 52, 56, 92, 171
152–53, 166 Bourgeault, Ron, 124
233
234 Index
Boyer, Rose, 131 Charlottetown Accord, 135, 141n11.

Brewer, John, 147 See also constitution,
Britain, 75, 77, 129–30 constitutional
British Columbia, 7, 10, 130–31, Chartrand, Paul, 33
136, 161 Chavis, Ben, 18–21, 23, 25, 26, 28,
Brown, Jennifer, 5–6, 7, 47 29, 30–31, 34, 48–49, 60
Bruce, John 121 Chopra, Deepak, 199
buffalo, 86, 95, 124, 171–72, Choquette, Robert, 191–92
175–79, 181–82, 186, 197; hunt, Christianity, 192, 194, 207
hunters, 80, 95, 96, 99, 105, Christianization, 188, 192
123–24, 179–81, 192, 197–98. Clark, Joe, 132
See also bison Clark-Jones, Bertha, 128–29, 131, 139
Buffalo stone (Manitou Stone), Clark’s Crossing (SK), 173
178–79, 186n2 coercion, 63, 79, 193–94, 206
Butler (lieutenant), 178 colonial, colonialism, 4, 23, 25,
28–29, 31–34, 42, 45, 48, 57, 62,
Cairns, Alan, 69, 82–84, 89 138, 195, 197; powers, 9, 22, 30–31,
Callihoo, Victoria Belcourt, 124 45, 191, 214; settler, 11, 22, 189,
Cameron, David R., 73 191–93
Camp, Greg, 95 colonization, 13–14, 116, 118–19, 122,
Campbell, Maria, 151–52, 164–66, 125–26, 139, 170–71. See also
184–85 decolonization
Canada First (settler group), 121 conflict, 95–97, 103, 109–10, 135;
capitalism, 107, 120, 124 armed, 108; racial, 71; sectarian, 74
Cardinal, Harold, 60–61 constitution, constitutional, 121;
Cardinal, Michel. See Okanase (chief) Canadian, 33, 67, 86, 116, 129–35,
Cariou, Warren, 171 140n1, 214; law, 9; processes, 118.
Carrière, Jeannine, 40 See also Charlottetown Accord
Carter, Sarah, 98, 111n2 Constitution Act, 108, 110, 117, 130
caste system, 157–59 constitutionalism, 84–85
Catholic, 77–78, 104, 189, 192, 194, control, 51, 75, 134, 203–4
202–3, 205–7. See also identity, Cornell, Stephen, 71
Catholic Corntassel, Jeff, 31, 36n2, 48–49,
Catholic Church, 78, 184, 192–93, 50, 59–60
195–98, 201–3, 206; hierarchy, Coté, Gabriel, 98
189, 202–3 Cowessess (chief) (Marcel,
Catholicism, 105, 189, 191–98, Desjarlais), 98, 100
202–3, 205–7 Cowessess First Nation, 103–4
ceremony, 26, 60–61, 123, 176, 179; Cree, 10, 34, 54, 67, 96–97, 101–2,
cycles, 20, 51, 59 105, 111n2, 171, 181, 195; Elders, 146,
Champagne, Duane, 25 149; language, 41, 177; peoplehood,
Index 235
60, 64n2; Plains, 13, 94–98, 100–3, Dumont, Gabriel, 171–73, 175–86, 218
107, 109–11, 178; society, 60 Dumont, Madeleine, 171, 182–83, 186
Cross Lake First Nation, 67 Dumont, Marilyn, 14, 170–86, 190
cultural: development, 106–7, 110; Durham, Lord (John George
differences, 92, 94, 99, 103, 107, Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham),
109; expressions, 106, 110; 68, 70–75, 77, 79, 80, 83–84, 87,
integrity, 50, 102; practices, 60, 89, 89–90n2
94, 105, 107, 109. See also identity, Durkheim, Émile, 199
cultural; mixing, cultural; Duval, Jacinthe, 202
protocols, cultural; unity, cultural
culture, 32, 53, 67, 80, 82, 93, 102, economics: economies, 6, 10, 21,
126, 190, 201, 204, 218, 221, 223; 33, 81, 93, 99, 104, 123, 127, 137,
Canadian, 81, 83; European, 93, 157–59, 197
105; First Nations, 105–7; Métis, education, 74, 78, 137, 226
93, 106–7, 110, 176, 196; political, epistemologies, 34, 170
68, 79–81 equality, 24, 134–35, 177
customs, 29, 72, 74, 78 equines, 147, 151, 153, 166. See also
Cypress Hills (AB-SK), 100, horses
102–3 Erasmus, Peter, 218
erasure, 10, 13, 21, 32, 44, 88, 96,
Dahl, Gregg, 7–8 118, 171
Daniels, Harry, 6 Europeans, 71, 76, 80–81, 99
Daniels v Canada, 3, 108, 11n4
Debden (SK), 146, 153–54, Fagan, Kristina, 25
156–57, 162 “Falcon’s Song,” 33
decolonization, 40, 57–58, 62, family: extended, 152; healthy, 43;
116, 221 kinship-based, 123; large, 97, 161;
Dennis (colonel), 102–3 networks, 99, 106; nuclear, 151;
Desjarlais, Cecil, 103 privileged, 196; sustaining, 179;
Desjarlais, Marcel. See Cowessess traditional, 138. See also Métis,
(chief) (Marcel, Desjarlais) family
Devine, Heather, 57, 98 farmers: farming, 72, 105, 147, 151,
Dewar, Greg, 67, 87 153, 159, 166
Dickieson, M.G., 101 Fayant, Nicolas, 185
diplomacy, 27, 31, 33, 41, 45, Fiola, Chantal, 195
50, 151 First Nations, 13, 15, 67–68, 92–95,
displacement, 116, 126 97, 99–103, 105–10, 130–31, 141n10,
dispossession, 13, 22, 49, 122, 126 192–93, 221; peoples, 67, 92–94,
Dobbin, Murray, 159 105, 107–8, 110, 192; relations with
Dorion, Leah, 226 Métis, 13, 94, 99
Duck Lake (SK), 149, 152, 166 Flanagan, Tom, 6
236 Index
Fleury, Rose, 127 Grand Coteau, Battle of, 34

Foran, Timothy, 188–89, 193 Grant, Cuthbert, 34, 173
Fort Garry (MB), 121 Gray, Lottie, 152
Fort McLeod (AB), 100 Great Depression, 41, 159
Fort Qu’Appelle (SK), 100 Gros Ventre (people), 103
Foster, John, 5, 105–6 Gus, Joyce, 131, 135
fragment theory, 69, 79–80, 87
frameworks, 84, 222; analytical, Haida (people), 85–86;
28–29, 35; conceptual, 49, 61, 206; mythology, 85
theoretical, 14, 61, 189, 198, 201 Half-Breed: Commission, 124;
Freedman, Russell, 176 people, 121–22, 160; women,
French (people), 71–75, 77–81, 83, 124–25
89–90n2, 120 Hall, David, 200
Friedel, Marge, 131–34, 139 Hall, Stuart, 23
fur trade: traders, 5, 93, 95, 100, Hardisty (AB), 178
105–7, 120, 123–24 Hartmann, Douglas, 71
HBC (Hudson’s Bay Company),
Gabriel Dumont Institute, 127, 215 10, 120, 172
Gaudry, Adam, 58, 59, 82, 84, Henderson, Jarett, 89–90n2
86–87 Henry, Jérôme, 173
Gaudry, John, 153–54 Henry, Pierre, 173
Gaudry, Robert, 154 Hickerson, Harold, 96
Gaudry, Wilfred, 154 Highway, Tomson, 177
Geertz, Clifford, 199–200 Hinton (AB), 161–62, 164
Gellner, Ernest, 26 historians, 3, 5, 29, 42, 92, 95, 120,
Genaille, Sheila, 132, 135–36, 139, 158, 217, 222
141n11 history: oral, 14, 51, 56, 146–47,
gender, 42, 48, 127, 219; equality, 157, 163, 166; political, 13–14, 116,
35, 133, 135–36, 141n14 118–19, 138; sacred, 20, 47, 60;
Ghostkeeper, Elmer, 46, 195 shared, 43, 71, 190
Ginzburg, Carlo, 147, 163–64 Hobsbawm, Eric, 26
Giokas, John, 33 Hogue, Michel, 101
Giraud, Marcel, 5, 76, 217 Holm, Tom, 18–21, 23, 25, 26, 28,
Gould, Janice, 171 29, 30–31, 34, 48–49, 60
Goulet, Elzéar, 125 homelands, 40, 47, 49, 51, 58–59,
Goulet, Laurette, 125, 140n3 115, 122–23, 149. See also Métis,
Goulet, Louis, 218 homelands
governance, 50, 121, 126, 184; horses, 95, 147–51, 153–54, 166,
structure, 136, 139, 176 177–78, 180. See also equines
government: Canadian, 108, 115, Hubbard, Tasha, 176, 178
120–22, 125, 132, 141n10, 175, 184; Hudson’s Bay Company. See HBC
federal, 126, 132, 135, 137 (Hudson’s Bay Company)
Index 237
Huel, Raymond, 191–92 Inuit, 15, 130, 141n10, 214–15, 221

Hulme, Barb, 40 Iron Alliance. See Neyihaw Pwat
Isbister, Alec, 157, 160
identity, 6–7, 21, 23, 32, 40, 42, 44,
48–49, 55, 70, 88, 96, 99, 119, 186, Jefferson, Margaret, 127
189, 197, 205; Canadian, 69, 83; Jobin, Shalene, 50, 60–61, 64n2
Catholic, 14, 189, 193, 202, 204, Joseph (chief), 103
207; collective, 46–47, 50, 53; Justice, Daniel Heath, 25–26,
cultural, 56, 85; group, 19, 199. 53–54, 63, 119
See also Métis, identity
ideology, 81, 189, 192; racist, Kamooses (chief), 100
192–93 Kermoal, Nathalie, 195
Iggers, Georg, 158, 160 kin: kinship, 40, 42, 49, 52–54,
Île-à-la-Crosse (SK), 188 56–57, 63, 96, 101–2, 109, 146, 153,
Indian Act, 104, 108, 128, 131, 171, 176–77, 184, 197; practices, 63,
214–15 94, 99
Indians, 52–53, 79–81, 100, 102–5, knowledge, 14, 20, 42, 45, 61–62,
108–9, 130, 158, 178, 181, 214–15; 125, 127, 146, 163, 172, 205, 216, 223;
status, 104, 128 traditional, 137, 195–96. See also
indigeneity, 15, 20, 24, 26, 36n2, Métis, knowledge
88, 102, 105–6 Kolopenuk, Jessica, 95, 98
Indigenous: collectives, 27, 35–36n1;
collectivities, 9, 20, 27–28, 31, Lac Ste. Anne (AB), 122, 124, 131, 191
35–36n1, 36n4; communities, 34, LaDuke, Winona, 176
45, 53, 63, 127, 221; groups, 22, Laliberte, Ron, 164–65
44, 51, 57, 95, 97; issues, 21, 67, Lambton, John George. See
216; nationalism, 21, 82; Durham, Lord (John George
nationhood, 19, 22–26, 28, 54, 83, Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham)
118–19; Nations, 15, 25, 73, 119, language, 6, 10, 20–21, 26, 48,
124, 130, 214–15, 217; peoplehood, 59–60, 51, 64n1, 64n2, 67, 73–74,
13, 15, 20–22, 26–27, 30, 33, 36n2, 78, 80, 87, 96, 106, 123, 146–47,
36n3, 36n4, 36n5, 118–19; politics, 170, 178, 218
116, 172; sociality, 15, 19, 25, 29; Lavallie, Annie, 127
sovereignty, 20, 190; spirituality, law, 7, 42, 71, 77, 218; ancient, 72;
191, 194–96; territories, 20, 32, 94. constitutional, 9; international, 9
See also women, Indigenous leaders: leadership, 5, 10, 89, 93,
infrastructure, 213, 223–25; 100, 118, 121–22, 127, 129–30, 188
institutional, 215, 216, 223–25 Lebret (SK), 152
Innes, Robert, 30 Ledoux, Marianne, 166
intermarriage, 28, 74, 76, 81–84, Lək̓ ʷəŋən (people), 40–41
94, 97–99, 102–3, 121, 196. See also Lerat, Harold, 103
marriage, interracial; mixing Lerat, Pierre, 103
238 Index
Les Femmes Michif Otipemisiwak– Medynski, Louise, 131

Women of the Métis Nation Membertou First Nation, 137
(LFMO-WMN), 136–37 memory, 48, 62, 109, 147, 154, 157,
Lewis and Clark, 96 160, 162, 166; collective, 49, 197
LFMO-WMN. See Les Femmes Métis: communities, 3–7, 11, 32,
Michif Otipemisiwak–Women of 43–44, 93, 103, 122, 124, 126, 195,
the Métis Nation (LFMO-WMN) 216, 220–23, 227; cultures, 93,
Lischke, Ute, 6 106–7, 110, 176, 196; ethnogenesis,
Little Bone. See Okanase (Chief) 110, 119; family, 7, 41, 56, 104, 111n2,
Little Pine (chief), 100 153, 161, 224; history, 57–58, 92–93,
logics, racialized, 69, 79, 190, 194 110, 115, 138, 170, 183, 194, 207, 218,
Lorne, Marquis of, 100 226; homelands, 40, 95, 171;
Louis Riel Institute, 215 identity, 3–4, 6–8, 11–12, 32, 42, 58,
Lower Canada, 71, 73–75, 89–90n2 110, 190–91, 207, 219; knowledge,
Lucky Man (chief), 100 215–16, 227; life, 120, 123–24,
Lyons, Scott, 26 146–47, 153–54, 163, 166, 172, 218;
nationalism, 13, 115, 117, 193;
Macdonald, John A., 172, 174–75 nationhood, 13, 116, 119, 123, 172;
Macdougall, Brenda, 7, 53, 55–57, people, 92–94, 110; peoplehood,
92, 93, 96, 106–7, 196–98, 225 3–4, 8, 11–15, 32–33, 44, 46, 89,
Mair, Charles, 124–25 139; politics, 12, 33, 116, 126; Red
Manitoba, 10, 121, 130–31, 136, 172, 215 River, 32, 124–25; religion, 14,
Manitoba Act, 33, 122 189–91, 198, 204–7; sociality, 11, 15,
Manitoba Métis Federation, 3, 10 19, 21; society, 55, 96, 138, 157, 166;
Manitou Stone. See Buffalo stone sovereignty, 172, 175, 207; ways, 14,
(Manitou Stone) 149, 152, 171, 175, 183, 197; young,
Manuel, George, 141n9 154, 161. See also individual terms
marginalization, 8, 30, 116–17, Métis Centre, 222–23
125–26, 139 Métis National Council (MNC),
marriage, 6, 78, 100, 104, 106, 192; 10, 115, 119, 130–41; Women’s
interracial, 78, 84. See also Secretariat (MWS), 133, 136, 141n11
intermarriage; mixing Métis National Council of Women
Mary, Blessed Virgin, 14, 189, 201–4, (MNCW), 132–33, 135–36, 141n11,
206–7; devotion to, 201–2 141n12, 141n14
Mattes (SK), 146, 148 Métis Research Lab (University of
McGuire, Meredith, 200–1, 205–6 Ottawa), 224
McIvor, Sharon, 132 Métis women, 13–14, 98–99, 107,
McKee, Sandra Lynn, 172 115–18, 122–41, 182, 195; activism,
McNab, David T., 6 116, 133, 137–38; equality of, 134,
McPherson, Rosemarie, 136–37 136; organizations, 132, 141n11,
McRae, Kenneth, 69, 80–82, 87, 89 141n12. See also women
Index 239
Michif (language and people), 104, Indigenous, nationalism; Métis,

123, 136, 146, 147, 148, 150–59, 162, nationalism
166, 177 nationhood, 27; contemporary, 31,
Middleton (general), 179, 181 44; critique of, 22; discussion of,
Miller, J.R., 92, 108 23, 25; settler, 25; tribal, 119.
Miller, Susan A., 118 See also Indigenous, nationhood;
Milloy, John, 95 Métis, nationhood
Mistawasis (chief), 100 nation-states, 15, 22–24, 29, 34, 50,
mixedness, 4, 7, 9, 62, 85–86, 88, 193, 201; colonial, 31, 45, 94
92–93, 190, 195 Native Women’s Association of
mixing, 72, 77, 79, 81–82, 87, 89, Canada (NWAC), 128, 131–32
99; cultural, 85, 86, 85–86; racial, Nehiyaw Pwat (Iron Alliance), 10, 33
4, 13, 68–70, 72, 74–84, 86–89; Nez Perce (people), 103
politics of, 69, 88–89. See also Niitsitapi (people), 95
intermarriage; marriage, niwahkomakanak, 12
interracial NMWC. See National Métis
MNC. See Métis National Council Women of Canada (NMWC)
(MNC) Northern Plains, 5, 7–10, 12, 30, 33,
MNCW. See Métis National 94, 100–2, 107, 197
Council of Women (MNCW) Northwest Company, 32, 120
Moka, Katherine, 131 North-West Rebellion, 5
Morrissette, Alcide Joseph Northwest Resistance, 5, 8, 14
Alphonse, 146–67, 167n1 NWAC. See Native Women’s
Morrissette, Blanche, 146, 157 Association of Canada (NWAC)
Morrissette, Josephine, 162
Morrisette, Louise, 148, 167 Oblates (Oblats de Marie
Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, 173 Immaculée), 189, 191–94, 198, 207
Ojibwa (Ojibwe), 96–97, 99,
narratives, 3, 24, 44, 88, 118, 215, 102, 111n2
217–18, 220; colonial, 44; Ojibwe. See Ojibwa (Ojibwe)
dominant, 109, 217–18; racist, 217 Okanase (chief), 98
Nath, Nisha, 70 Omeniho, Melanie, 133–34, 137–39
National Aboriginal Health One Arrow (chief), 108–9
Organization, 222 One Arrow First Nation, 108
National Aboriginal Women’s Ontario, 10, 117, 120, 122, 136, 159
Summits, 117, 137 Orsi, Robert, 200, 203–4, 206
National Métis Women of Canada O’Soup, Louis, 98, 100–1, 103
(NMWC), 132
nationalism, nationalist, 9, 12, 13, Paquin, Todd, 195
26, 28, 30, 35–36n1, 36n2, 44, 48, Park Valley (SK), 148, 151–54,
51, 82, 116, 119, 138. See also 158, 165
240 Index
Parr, Joy, 158–59, 163 protocols, 56, 60, 64n2, 221–22;

Peach, Ian, 7 cultural, 94, 110
Pearson, Diane, 18–21, 23, 25, 26,
28, 29, 30–31, 34, 48–49, 60 Quebec, 8, 78–80, 110, 122
Peers, Laura, 95–96, 98 Quebec Act, 77
Peguis (chief), 97, 98, 95, 97–98
Pelletier, Rose Agathe, 104 race: English, 73, 75, 78, 89–90n2;
Pelletier, Samson, 104 inferior, 72, 75; politics of,
pemmican, 124, 172, 179 68–70, 75
Pénard, Jean-Marie, 188–89, 206 racialization, 4, 6–7, 15, 32, 70,
peoplehood: historical, 34–35, 89–90n2, 93, 192; racialized
35–36n1, 36nn2–5, 45; idea of, discourse, 4, 8, 32, 68, 88; 190
28, 44, 47; matrix, 12, 18–21, 25–27, racism, 32, 76, 92, 109, 115, 124–26,
33–36; model, 12, 47, 49–53, 56, 189–90
59, 61; projects, 50–51, 62. RCAP. See Royal Commission on
See also Cree, peoplehood; Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP)
Indigenous, peoplehood; Métis, Red River, 6, 8, 32–33, 41, 80,
peoplehood 95–96, 98, 106, 115, 120–22,
Peterson, Jacqueline, 5–6, 7, 47 124–26, 148, 172
Petit, Claude, 152 Red River Expeditionary Force
Pigeon, Émilie, 197–98, 205 (RREF), 122, 125, 140n3
Podruchny, Carolyn, 7, 58–59, Reid, Bill, 85
100, 107 relationality, 20–21, 27, 30, 34, 45
political, politics, 3, 7, 13, 33, 70, relations, social, 9, 19, 21, 35,
77, 82, 88, 115–16, 118, 127–28, 197, 35–36n1, 44, 59, 196
218; Canadian, 68, 70, 82, 218; religion, 14, 74, 189–91, 193–201,
community, 45, 68, 79, 82, 88–89; 205–7; category of, 14, 189, 194,
national, 115, 138–39; theory and 198, 207; definition of, 198–99, 201;
practice of, 13, 68; thought, European, 191, 194; institutional,
58, 68, 86, 89 194, 197–98, 201; lived, 197, 200–1;
Poundmaker (chief), 97 Métis experience of, 189–90,
power, 21, 29, 31, 48, 69, 78, 83, 85, 194–96, 198, 201, 205, 207.
197, 200, 203, 206–7, 220; See also Indigenous, spirituality;
hegemonic, 189, 195, 201, 205; spirituality; worldviews, religious
political, 4, 8, 89, 201 Richer-Morrissette, Yvonne, 146, 158
Powley decision, 3, 7 Riel, Louis, 5, 101, 121–22, 171–75,
prairie, 4, 115, 119, 146–47, 154, 183–86, 217–18
158, 163–64, 171, 176, 178, Riel Rebellions, 5, 217
180–82, 215, 218 Robinson, Eric, 67–68, 87, 89
Préfontaine, Darren, 195, 226 Rodnick, David, 97
Prince Albert (SK), 131, 156, 161, 164 Ross, Alexander, 217
Index 241
Rosthern (SK), 147 sovereignty, 14, 19–21, 28, 42, 48,

Royal Commission on Aboriginal 172, 190. See also Indigenous,
Peoples (RCAP), 6, 131–34, 138, sovereignty; Métis, sovereignty
141n10, 141n11, 141n12 spirituality, 170, 185, 189–90, 195–96,
RREF. See Red River 199, 219. See also Indigenous,
Expeditionary Force (RREF) spirituality; religion
Rupertsland, 67, 121 Sprague, Doug, 6
Rupertsland Institute, 215 St. Albert (AB), 122
Stanley, George, 217–18
Salesa, Damon Ieremia, 72 state: Canadian, 5, 7, 10, 32–34, 41,
Saskatchewan, 10, 14, 127–33, 136, 46, 49–50, 58, 74, 80, 82, 88, 116,
141n11, 146–47, 150–54, 157, 159, 127; settler, 13, 31, 35, 68, 76,
166, 178, 215; northern, 149, 151, 78–79, 84, 88
153, 157, 159, 188 statehood, 22–23, 30, 48
Saskatoon, 127–28, 146, 156, 225 Stonechild, Blair, 108
Saskatoon Métis Society, 127–28 St-Onge, Nicole, 7, 58–59, 96,
Saskatoon Native Women’s 98–100, 107, 192, 193, 225
Association, 128, 140n5 St. Paul des Saulteaux (MB), 98
Saul, John Ralston, 69, 86–89
Saulteaux (people), 10, 13, 34, Tanner, John, 96–97
94–103, 107, 109–11 territories, 9–10, 20, 26, 41, 49, 58,
Scott, Thomas, 121–22, 125 64n2, 73, 85, 89, 102. See also
Selkirk, Lord (Thomas Douglas, Indigenous, territories
5th Earl of Selkirk), 172 Thomas, Robert K., 12, 19, 43,
Selkirk (MB), 67, 120 47–49, 51–54, 60
settlers, 33, 67–68, 74, 79, 81, 83, Thompson, Debra, 70–71, 80
88, 153, 159, 165, 175, 181; Tocqueville, Alexis de, 76
Canadian, 12, 69, 82, 89–90n2. Todd, Zoe, 46, 56
See also colonial, colonialism; Tolley, Erin, 70
nationhood, settler; state, settler Tourond’s Coulée, Battle of, 173,
Sharrock, Susan, 101 179, 181
Shore, Fred, 121 traditions, 5, 9, 25, 63, 76,
Siegfried, André, 68, 76–80, 84, 89 79–80, 86, 119, 171, 200, 205, 216,
Simpson, Audra, 26, 199 224; disciplinary, 11, 15; political,
Simpson, Leanne, 171 13, 63
Sinclair, Joyce, 131 trauma, 162–64, 166, 197
Smith, Andrea, 26, 199 treaties, 21, 28, 30–31, 41, 77, 84,
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 221 100–3, 108, 111n2, 121, 124, 130
society, Canadian, 70, 116, 118, 126, tribes, 20, 25, 28, 53, 97, 101, 178
141n10. See also Cree, society; Troupe, Cheryl, 127
Métis, society Tully, James, 69, 84–86, 89
242 Index
Underhill, Frank, 76–77, 79 Weinstein, John, 13, 115–18, 119,

United States, 4, 7, 10, 24, 29, 76, 138–39
80, 182, 197 Welsh, Christine, 40
unity, 24, 68–69, 87; Canadian, 77, Welsh, Norbert, 218
83–84, 87; cultural, 23; political, Western Canada, 5, 10, 146–47,
77, 89 164–66, 217
Whitefish Lake (SK), 149, 166
Van Kirk, Sylvia, 5 Wiegers, Mary, 132–34, 139, 141n11
Vermette, Joseph, 173 Wildcat, Matthew, 54
Vermette, Marie-Rose, 173 Willow Bunch (SK), 122, 153
Villeneuve, Isidore, 173 WMN. See Women of the Métis
violence, 4, 24, 75–76, 88, 95, Nation (WMN)
121–22, 125–26, 137, 163; sexual, Wolseley Expedition. See Red River
75, 140n3 Expeditionary Force (RREF)
Virgin Mary. See Mary, Blessed women, 52, 88, 106, 117, 124–25,
Virgin 127–39, 141nn11–12, 141n14, 155,
185; Indigenous, 118, 128–29, 137;
wahkohtowin. See wahkootawin women’s organizations, 126–28,
wâhkôhtowin. See wahkootawin 130–31, 136–37. See also Half-
wahkootawin (wahkohtowin, Breed, women; Métis women
wâhkôhtowin, wahkootowin), 12, Women of the Métis Nation
40, 42–43, 50, 53–63, 64n2, 153, (WMN), 132–33, 135–37, 141n12
171 196, 198 worldviews, 14, 54–55, 106, 123,
wahkootowin. See wahkootawin 189, 191–92, 196, 199, 204–5, 207;
Waiser, Bill, 108 religious, 196, 198, 206;
war, 95–97, 102–3, 158, 178. See also sociopolitical, 205
conflict, armed
Webber, Jeremy, 29 Young, Patrick, 195

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A People and a Nation

A People and a Nation

EDITED BY JENNIFER ADESE

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

May you continue to carry the stories of our Nation

Introduction: A New Era of Métis Studies

1 | Peoplehood and the Nation Form: Core Concepts

2 | The Power of Peoplehood: Reimagining Metis

3 | The Race Question in Canada and the Politics of

4 | Challenging a Racist Fiction: A Closer Look at

5 | Restoring the Balance: Métis Women and

6 | Alcide Morrissette: Oral Histories of a Métis Man on

7 | “We’re Still Here and Métis”: Rewriting the 1885

8 | Mary and the Métis: Religion as a Site for New Insight

9 | Building the Field of Métis Studies: Toward

At the 2015 annual gathering of the Native American and Indig-

We have greatly appreciated reading your thoughtful and engag-

At one time, research on Métis issues was confined mostly to the

prairie homeland). On the other side, are more racialized argu-

Métis Studies: A Portrait of a Field and Its Genealogy

The field of Métis studies evolved out of earlier scholarship on

the historical presence of the Métis people of the Northern Plains.

Métis identity in Canada. With several exceptions, however, the

The Métis People, in the Singular

In the spirit of previous edited volumes, we see the scope of this

edited collections, this volume supports the idea of a single Métis

of what is now western Canada and the northern United States

by engaging in various nation-to-nation policy relationships with

introduce a deeper complexity to the contours of the conception of

In Chapter 1, Chris Andersen challenges Holm et al.’s (2003)

suggests that analyzing racial mixing as a strategic political tool

confronts colonization’s gendered fracturing of the Métis Nation

by unnecessarily dismissing the analytical utility of nationhood,

Part 1: The Peoplehood Matrix

The peoplehood matrix draws on the insights of Cherokee scholar

a core concept in Indigenous studies in that, to a greater degree

particular the juridical diminishment of “Indian treaties,” which

of terms such as “race” and “nationhood.” More to the point, they

Part 2: Indigenous Nationhood – Imagining

Holm and colleagues’ critique of nationhood, though brief, hinges

states. Additionally, Holm and colleagues (2003, 17) raise a second

tensions, fissures, and internal differences. Among the most pow-

numerous rhetorical forms through which nationalist discourses

(2005), Scott Lyons (2010), Audra Simpson (2000), and Andrea

1987). Likewise, other authors have used “people” as an overarch-

Part 3: Peoplehood – Turning the Lens Outward

How might we situate the peoplehood matrix to retool it in a man-

collective consciousness (race, ethnicity, and so on), nationhood

modification, or profound cultural change. The second is that

kinship groups, or even families – to produce internal norms. In

Does this mean, then, contrary to Holm and colleagues’ claims,

Part 4: Métis Studies, Writ Political

As noted in the Introduction to this volume, until about a decade

tools of the North West Company in 1816 and later as primitive

Indigenous peoplehood in favour of emphasizing the heartbreak-

However, examples of these diplomatic politics need not cen-

with other Indigenous Peoples, particularly the Dakota.7 Barkwell

Peoplehood and the Nation: Analytical Allies

Introduction: A New Era of Métis Studies

1 | Peoplehood and the Nation Form: Core Concepts

2 | The Power of Peoplehood: Reimagining Metis

3 | The Race Question in Canada and the Politics of

4 | Challenging a Racist Fiction: A Closer Look at

5 | Restoring the Balance: Métis Women and

6 | Alcide Morrissette: Oral Histories of a Métis Man on

7 | “We’re Still Here and Métis”: Rewriting the 1885

8 | Mary and the Métis: Religion as a Site for New Insight

9 | Building the Field of Métis Studies: Toward