A Question of Nationhood: The Origins of the Métis Peoples

The Métis as a nation and people developed or emerged through particular and

peculiar circumstances. Indeed, it is a complicated task to pin down the origins of the

Métis people.

The problem of describing the origins of the Métis Nation can begin with the question of

who the Métis are and who they are not. Part of the problem is that the Métis as a people

emerged from several different factors. Let’s begin by taking a look at these factors.

One of the first factors to consider when setting out to describe the origins of the

Métis people is the question of their direct lineage. In truth even at this level there are

several sub-factors that should be explored somewhat before we continue. The classical

image of the Métis as described by J. E. Foster (1978) of, “…the French-speaking,

Roman Catholic, non-Indian native, buffalo hunters of the Red River Settlement… who

constituted Louis Riel’s following” is indeed of some merit. However as Foster goes on

to ask, “what of the English-speaking, Protestant, non-Indian native, buffalo hunters of

Portage La Prairie, Prince Albert and Fort Victoria east of Fort Edmonton? He then

continues to list several other people groups in the general region at the time, “the French

and Saulteaux speaking, Roman Catholic, voyageur-farmers in Red River and their

neighbours, the English-speaking, Protestant, farmer-tripmen and occasional merchants,

among others.”

Clearly, the classical image as an overarching description of the Métis, while valid in

some aspects, is nonetheless grossly inadequate overall.

So then what can be said to describe the Métis? There are in fact several elements

shared by all Métis people, regardless of any other differences observed.

This essay will look at several factors that establish what the Métis Nation is, its origins, and some characteristics that define it.

To begin with, one common link all Métis people share is their origins as a people

of mixed heritage. The very name Métis, which means mixed in French, is used to

describe “offspring of Indian and white parentage (Peterson and Brown 2007: 5).” While

it is true that there was a time when this term was used specifically in its classical

function as portrayed above, the term has come to be more widely embracing. Today, as

evidenced by the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in 2003 of the case of R. v.

Powley, it is generally accepted that a Métis is anyone who identifies as Métis, is

accepted as such by the community, and has an ancestral connection (Frideres and

Gadacz 2005: 44). All Métis people share the heritage that they are the progeny of

European and Indian relationships. The path that this fact took which eventually led to

the birth of a Métis Nation is what we will look at now.

After a careful examination of the existing literature on the subject, it becomes

clear that there are at least six factors that led to the creation of a Métis Nation.

From the departure point of their mixed parentage in laying the groundwork for

the Métis peoples’ common heritage, the next factor this essay will discuss is the

isolation that their geographic location offered them. Much of what will be discussed in

this paper was not unique to those of what was then called the New Northwest – present-

day Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta (Dickason 2007: 30.) Much of what the Métis

in the New Northwest experienced was also experienced by the mixed-bloods (Métis) of

the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence region, known at that time as the Old Northwest. The main

difference that led to a sense of nationhood in the latter was the geographic isolation they

experienced. This isolation allowed them time their counterparts to the East did not

experience; time to continue in their ways and further forming and concreting those little

idiosyncrasies that eventually came to be understood as a separateness worth standing up

and fighting for. So it was that when the land surveyors finally did start to appear in the

New Northwest, along with the telegraph and railroad companies, the Métis people pulled

together and stood as a distinct Nation.

Hand in hand with this isolation factor is the concept of the buffalo hunt. The Métis

of the New Northwest lived on the land in such a way that it belonged to everyone and to

no one at the same time. The way of life for the Métis was one of nomadic freedom. As

Irene Spry describes in her essay, The Tragedy of the Loss of the Commons in Western

Canada, “western Canada went from common property, …with wandering bands of

Indians and groups of Métis hunters, to open access resources, and finally to private

property (Getty and Lussier 2000: 203).” The Métis were free to live off the land, to hunt

the buffalo and other game as they pleased, and to set their own course in life. With the

selling of the land by the Hudson Bay Company and the resulting incursion of European

settlers, the Métis rose up, “declaring themselves (rather than the Hudson’s Bay

Company [HBC]) the rightful owners of the heartland of North America, that part of the

greater Northwest where the woodland prairies dissolve into plains (Peterson 2007:37.)

The buffalo hunt was also significant to the formation of a Métis Nation in the

sense that it gave the Métis people something they were uniquely gifted at and needed

for. The voyageur canoe-brigades were the consumers of great quantities of pemmican –

a food staple made with buffalo meat, and so it was that the Métis men in the New

Northwest formed large hunting parties and with military organization operated hunting

trips on the plains, while the women stayed back processing the meat into pemmican

(Berger 1981: 28.) It was also from these gender organizations of labour that expressions

of a fledgling Métis culture developed.

Related to the buffalo hunts is the fur trade which fostered in the Métis a migrant

lifestyle. As emphasized by Louis Hartz, “migrants are neither a social nor a cultural

mirror of their parent community. The circumstances of migration act as a highly

selective device which causes the new community to diverge from its origins… The

communities derived from the various migration processes reflected aspects of the parent

cultures but were not a microcosm of them (Foster 2007: 79.)

This served as another ingredient for the Métis coming to consider themselves to be a

unique nation with similarities shared between both parent nations, but enough

distinctions to make them their own.

Another factor that contributed to the Métis Nation is the role women played in

their social matrix. Métis women brought much to their culture. Transmitted from their

mothers, they learned and contributed to the life of their peoples by, “preparing furs,

netting snowshoes, foraging, securing small game, etc (Brown 1983: 41).”

As an example of the level of respect the Métis held women in, we read a statement by

Louis Riel to the court during his 1885 trial, on his homeland as mother: “The North-

West is also my mother, its is my mother country… and I am sure that my mother

country will not kill me … because a mother is always a mother, and even if I have my

faults if she can see I am true she will be full of love for me (Brown 1983: 44).”

Compared to the established paradigm of women in European culture at the time, it is

beyond doubt that the Métis perception and the function of women in their social

networks could contribute to their sense of uniqueness and consequently a sense of

nationhood.

It has been proposed that the appearance of the British, first in the acquisition of

Acadia with the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 (Dickason 2007: 30), and

following with the filling of positions of prominence or authority in the trading

companies, led to a further entrenched view of uniqueness and nationhood among the

Métis people. In the work culture of the time, it was understood that those Métis working

as trappers or buffalo/pemmican suppliers to the HBC or its primary competitor the North

West Company (NWC) would be aiming to eventually secure a higher and thus more

comfortable position with the trading companies - such as a clerk or a supervisor of some

kind. With the filling of these positions by the British it gradually became clear to the

Métis, especially the classical French Métis, that they would never be in a position to

realize this goal. They therefore instead turned their attention to focusing on being

freemen, independent suppliers in the chain of commerce with the various companies in

their business. And the Métis did develop a reputation of being very good and proficient

at what they had set out to do – supplying the various buffalo products and fur trade

(Foster 2007: 80, 81.) This reputation, along with a general sense that they were distinct

from the other communities added to a sense of having something to hold on to when the

land surveyors started encroaching on their territory in the New Northwest.

Another point worthy of mention as being a factor of Métis Nationhood is their

unique status of originating as a result of the fur trade. In the words of John E. Foster

(2007), “The métis were unique among native people in the sense that as distinct entities

they did not antedate the fur trade. They alone could look to the fur trade for their origins

and not simply for significant formative influences.” This is a good example of the

realities which establish the distinctness of the Métis people from their Indian parentage

and could go on to contribute to their sense of nationhood.

This paper has examined a number of factors that combined to contribute to the

creation of a Métis nation. We explored the origins of the Métis as the progeny of

European and Amerindian parentage, along with the current understanding of who a

Métis is in the eyes of the Canadian courts; we looked at the role of isolation in the New

Northwest in granting the burgeoning Métis a time to come of age; the Buffalo hunt in its

action as a glue for the new peoples, giving them a sense of specialization, purpose,

function, and something to fight to protect and maintain; the fur trade in forming a unique

aspect of heritage as well as a migrant experience, further setting them apart from either

parent nation; the function of women in métis society, serving to form nationhood to both

the people as a whole and the women in particular; and the increasing control and

dominance of the British in the established systems of authority, both governmental

industrial, and how this contributed to a firm sense of purpose and unique direction in the

Métis people.

The Métis people are a unique miscegenation with an observable heritage and

collection of past experiences singularly their own and identified as such by others.

As Jennifer Brown put it in Strangers in Blood, “ Western Canada, as we know it

today, was indeed born of conflict, conflict not between métis and mixed-blood, but

between a wandering, free life and settlement; a conflict between agriculturalists,

especially the flood of newcomers in search of landed property and wealth, and the old

way of life that both métis and mixed-bloods had had in common with their Indian

cousins, a way of life based on adjustment to the natural environment and the shared use

of the fee gifts of nature. That way of life was doomed with the coming of surveyors,

fences, police, organized government, settlers and private rights of property in real estate

and natural resources (Spry 2007: 113).”

In closing, it can be said that it is the understandings and perceptions of a group

of people that result from shared experiences, along with the resulting behaviours unique

to that people which distinguishes them from others ( Foster 2007: 82). In the broadest

sense this definition can certainly be applied to the people who came together and formed

what has become the Métis Nation.

References

Berger, T. R. (1981). Louis Riel and the New Nation. In Fragile Freedoms, pp. 26-27, 267-268. Clarke, Irwin & Company Ltd.

Brown, J. S. H. (1983). Woman as Centre and Symbol in the Emergence of Metis Communities. Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 3 (1): 39-46

Dickason, O. P. (2007). From One Nation in the Northeast to New Nation in the Northwest: A look at the emergence of the métis. In Jacqueline Peterson & Jennifer S. H. Brown (Eds.), The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Foster, J. E. (2007). Some questions and perspectives on the problem of métis roots. In Jacqueline Peterson & Jennifer S. H. Brown (Eds.), The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Foster, J. E. (1978). The Métis: The People and the Term. Prairie Forum, 3 (1): 79-90.

Frideres, J., & Gadacz, R. (2005). Aboriginal Peoples in Canada. Toronto: Pearson

Peterson, Jacquiline (2007). Many roads to Red River: Métis genesis in the Great Lakes region, 1680 – 1815. In Jacqueline Peterson & Jennifer S. H. Brown (Eds.), The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Peterson, J., & Brown, J. (2007). The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Spry, Irene M. (2007). The métis and mixed-bloods of Rupert’s Land. In Jacqueline Peterson & Jennifer S. H. Brown (Eds.), The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Spry, Irene M. (2000). The Tragedy of the Loss of the Commons in Western Canada. In A.L. Getty.& Antoine S. Lussier (Eds.), As Long as the Sun Shines and Water Flows: A Reader in Canadian Native Studies. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press