Our Metis History
Posted by Kai in Great Lakes, Great Plains, History
This document has been altered slightly but all the credit still goes to Kai,
so if my additions are incorrect it is my fault.
History of the Métis Homeland
The Métis are a group of people who are descended from primarily French-Canadian, Scottish, English, German or other European nations, fur traders who married mostly Cree, Ojibwa and Iroquois women, who then formed their own society with a separate ethnic and racial identity from their parent European and First Nation societies. Intermarriage began pretty much as soon as Europeans and Native people met, but the first “distinct” Métis identities and societies began to appear in the Great Lakes area (modern Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin, and northern Illinois and Ohio) in the 1600's before spreading south and west, in the 1700s.
As white settlers began to enter those areas where the Metis had settled, a lot of Métis either moved or were forced west. South of the Great Lakes Métis, French-Canadian, and British people continued to monopolize trade despite being in what was technically US territory. Then, with the war of 1812, many migrated, or fled north and west. Thus in the area near Lake Winnipeg another society sprang up known as the Red River colony, a mixture of Great Lakes Métis and the Métis of from the fur trade in that area. At this time there was a division between Métis born of French-Canadian ancestors and those of Anglophone ancestry. In 1816 after the Battle of Frog Plains (also known as the Battle of Seven Oaks) in which the Métis fighting for the North West Company defeated the Hudson Bay Company, made a decisive victory against the HBC monopoly of the fur trade, and a sense of a common Métis identity developed in the area, uniting the Metis causing that battle to be frequently referred to as the birth of the Métis nation.
Métis people began to spread west for largely two reasons. The first was their involvement in the fur trade like their French-Canadian predecessors taking them as far away as the modern Northwest Territories and British Columbia, as well as through the prairie provinces. Increasingly, however, Métis people settled the the prairies (both in what is now Canada and the US), where they hunted buffalo in the summer months.
By and large, the Métis of today are still found in these same areas which includes all of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, and parts of Ontario, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, North Dakota, Montana, and Minnesota. A concept of a Métis homeland is somewhat complicated. It tends to refer to places that Métis people have historically lived, both in the United States and Canada, however, Métis people are also found outside of of these lands in present day times, and in addition, numerous other non-Métis people also have their homelands within what is considered the Métis homeland in Canada. (namely First Nations communities, which are often located side-by-side with Métis ones, and very frequently there is significant blurring between the two).
Other areas that should probably be considered part of the Western Métis homelands are northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. The main reason that these areas are not commonly considered part of the Métis homeland is that they fall into two categories that are often invisible in Métis history: 1 is that of the Great Lakes Métis who largely did not participate in the two Métis resistances of the 19th century, and 2nd, that of United States Métis who were legally denied recognition and also lack the federal recognition of Canadian Métis. Ontario Métis and Wisconsin and Michigan Métis, are from the same cultural group but are divided by the border. The Métis in North Dakota and Montana, and the Red River Metis are of the same cultural group, but most have also lost connections (with some exceptions) due to the U.S./Canadian border. Those living close to the border however have been have been existing as Metis across the modern US-Canadian border for centuries, both in the Great Lakes region and the prairies.
In Canada, the border in the east was largely solidified to the Métis by the 1860s. On the prairies however the Métis people continued to hunt buffalo and lived mostly ignorant of the border through the 1860s and 70s. In the 70s and 80s, the border was being more strictly enforced by US and Canadian officials, but Métis people continued to move across it regularly. After the North West Resistance of 1885, disparate bands of Métis people spread out from the Red River area, including a large number who went south to the United States, hoping to escape the stigma of being “halfbreed,” who were hated on both sides of the border.
Developments in Métis Government
Some of the first forms of centralized Métis government came along with the annual buffalo hunts in the prairies. An enormous amount of Métis people came together in the spring and fall to hunt buffalo for both subsistence use and for pemmican. In order to make sure that the hunt ran smoothly, a complex system of organization was developed. A 'captain of the hunt' was elected by the community, along with a council. This group organized how the hunt would proceed creating a system of written and unwritten rules (sometimes known as the Laws of the Prairie, or the Laws of the Hunt). This system was probably in place by the mid1700s, and was firmly established by the early 1800s. It drew Métis from the Red River settlement, the plains, and the Great Lakes areas such as Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin, and the hunt itself took place in an area that is now southern Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba as well as North Dakota, Montana, and western Minnesota.
Previously, the overwhelming majority of people living in the Red River area and further west were Métis people of both Francophone and Anglophone heritage. By the 1860s, however the British and Canadian governments became concerned with the possibility US expansionism reaching land that was owned by the Hudson Bay Company. In 1868 Rupert’s Land, a vast area of land owned by HBC was transferred to Canada, and Canadian officials announced that they would be taking control of the Red River area as well in 1869. The Métis community viewed this as a threat to their way of life, fearing that both anti-Francophone and anti-Indigenous prejudice that existed would cause the Canadian officials to remove them and or their ability to govern themselves.
After the Métis conflicts/wars with the Hudson Bay Company in the earlier in the 1800s, numerous Métis had come to be part of a council known as the Council of Assiniboia, which was an unelected body of representatives from the traders as well as the Francophone and Anglophone Métis communities to govern and maintain peace in the area. The Council was still active when Canada announced its intention to enter the Red River area. Knowing how the government felt about them the council organized Métis people to defend their sovereignty over the area that had been their homeland for well over 150 years. Louis Riel proposed the creation of a provisional government and was eventually elected its president. The new provisional government, through some militia action was able to negotiate with the Canadian government to admit Manitoba to the Confederation as a Province with promises for the protection of the Metis peoples political rights, land ownership, and cultural aspects such as language and religion. However, when the Canadian government sent in military forces the newly created provisional government was squashed and ceased to exist. Riel fled across the border to the United States.
Following Canada's creation of Manitoba, its new government was immediately dominated by Anglo representatives, and although Louis Riel was elected three times to represent Manitoba in Quebec, due to his exile, he was never able to take office. As a result, many Métis moved west to modern Saskatchewan and Alberta, where they were told they could continue to live in their own societies. A number of councils similar to the former provisional government sprang up, with the most powerful being in St. Laurent, but the North West Mounted Police continually intervened in Métis affairs due to Canadian fears of a repeat of the resistance of 1869, and the Metis councils lost the right to govern themselves other than small domestic issues. The Métis were betrayed by the Canadian government again and forced to deal with a territorial government that included no Métis representatives, the exact thing they’d been trying to avoid by migrating.
For much of the 1870s and 1880s the Métis, tired of the abuses, tried to negotiate with the government to gain representation of their views, or be left alone, but failed. By the 1880s, Métis people had formed unofficial groups in their communities aiming to rectify the situation, and Louis Riel was called back from the United States, where he had been living in Métis communities in Montana. Riel and other leaders such as Gabriel Dumont led what was to become the North West Resistance of 1885, which ended in the hanging of Riel. In the aftermath, the Canadian and territorial governments turned strongly against the Métis, who were considered nothing more than French half-breeds. Suppression of what happened by government officials led to widespread silence about the 1885 resistance, and, in many cases, as in the United States, Métis families attempted to pass themselves off as French-Canadian to avoid the stigma of being Metis.
On the Canadian side of the border, after many decades, the Metis began to reassemble in local associations aimed at improving their economic situation beginning in the 1930s. In the early part of the 20th century, the Métis people were often known as the Road Allowance People, due to the enormous number of Métis people who had been widely discriminated against, dispossessed of their lands, denied employment, and denied schools for their children, they were often living on the public lands that bordered roads. Though by now many Métis communities were largely self-governed on a local basis they were still subject to persecution by Canadian officials, and many crimes against the Metis went unpunished. As the Courts began to change, in the 1960s, there was another wave of political organization by Métis communities sparking the creation of Métis provincial organizations. Despite local involvement, Métis people received little recognition or political rights until 1982, when they were named one of Canada’s three Aboriginal people. The following year, the Métis National Council was created to bring together Métis organizations in each province and to represent the Métis Nation on a National and even International level.
History South of the border showed many Métis had moved south and/or west into Montana alongside Cree people who were often kin in search of buffalo; many more came south to Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota after the resistance of 1885. They lived in autonomous communities but in the late 1870s were increasingly persecuted by the US military, who suspected them of providing arms to the Lakota. Pressed by difficult living conditions and lack of food due to the United States government and the military tactics, the Métis and Cree in the Montana area drew closer together and began to request the assistance of nearby reservations, with whom they often shared family. In 1882, a group of Ojibwa, called Chippewa by the United States, and Métis signed treaties creating the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. In the last decades of the 19th century, approximately 1,200 Métis families moved onto the reservation along with approximately 200 Chippewa. Others became part of the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation created in 1916.
No real equivalent to the revival of Métis identity and political associations that happened in Canada has occurred in the United States in the 20th or 21st centuries due mainly to the Metis people being legislated out of existence. The Métis people in the United States were divided politically between those who claimed their Native ancestry and enrolled on reservations, and were (and still are) treated as Indians by the federal government, and those who refused to give up their identity and were not associate with a reservation, who the government refused to recognize and considered them to be white.
The Great Lakes Métis on both sides of the border continued to live in their communities even after many migrated northwest in the early 1800s. Although initially strongly integrated with the fur trade companies, after they moved west Métis communities became more autonomous, and tended to be more connected to the First Nations around them (mostly Ojibwa, Odawa, and Potawatomi, and in Wisconsin and Minnesota there were also significant connections with the Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Dakota, and other nations). With an influx of white settlers in the 1840s and 50s, the US and British governments began to make treaties with local First Nations groups. The Métis also requested land, or at least payment for land taken. And in many of these treaties, occurring on both sides of the border, and were, in nearly all cases, the Metis were supported by their relatives among the First Nations peoples. Both governments, on the other hand, fought to keep Métis out of the treaty negotiations. Several treaties gave Métis payments as “Indian half breeds” and a few promised them land (such as the half-breed tracts in the United States); but regardless of these promises, most Métis eventually lost the land to settlers in court disputes, just as Métis in the prairies lost their scrip lands.
There is very little existing written history of Great Lakes Métis communities after the 1850s. In both Canada and the US, some Métis eventually enrolled in local Indian reserves/reservations, while others lived in their own communities, frequently on the outskirts of either predominantly white towns or the Indian reserves. In the United States, Métis communities in the Great Lakes continued to live with at least something of a separate communities from other Indian and white people until at least the 1940s-1950's, but there has been no real movement of Métis people in recent times around that identity. They could not claim to be Metis or they would have no legal rights or standings if they did not claim to be “Americans.” If they tried to claim their Native heritage then they were stripped of their Metis identity and placed on reservations. Since 1982 Métis in Ontario, and other provenances, have a political organization under the Métis National Counsel, and one of the most influential Métis related court cases in Canada was brought about by an Ontario Métis family (the Powley ruling).
The Border between us.
And so we reach, more or less, the present day. The Métis nation continues to exist on both sides of the border. In Canada, the number of people identifying as Métis openly has increased and Métis political power is likewise increasing throughout Western Canada. There the Métis are recognized as indigenous people distinct from First Nations and Inuit people. They do not have a designated land base in the form of a reserve or reservation, and until very recently had essentially the same legal status as non-indigenous Canadians, unlike many First Nations people. Since 2003 there has been more discussion of Métis legal rights, including the Powley ruling which indicated that Métis people do have certain rights non-Aboriginal people do not. One can be recognized by the Métis National Council, receiving Métis status and a card, but it does not carry significant legal benefits akin to having Indian status.
In the United States, even the "word" Métis is practically unknown outside the Turtle Mountain Reservation. Other historical Métis communities who are part of the Turtle Mountain Band are considered to be Indians under United States law, and the Reservation itself is run by tribal government like other First Nations in the US. As for other Métis in the area whose families did not join up with a First Nations Reservation, they remain without a centralized organization they can call their own.
I do not have research or evidence beyond the anecdotal as to how much interaction has occurred between Métis people north and south of the border. In my experience, it is very, very common for Métis families to have relatively recent ancestors from both sides of the border, and it’s not unusual for people to cross it to visit relatives or for special occasions such as Metis Fest, and Back to Batoche. Because Métis people as a distinct group remain mostly unknown in the US, most Métis-centered political efforts are strongly based in Canada. Most Métis people are aware, however, of the historical cross-border nature of the Métis people/nation. It’s difficult to tell if there will be any sort of movement to join forces with Métis across the borders. One of the most unifying factors, however, has been the revitalization of the Michif language, which remains particularly strong in North Dakota. As a result, in the past few decades there has been an increase in communication between US and Canadian Métis who are trying to keep their language alive.
There are many other indigenous groups in North America that cross international borders created by colonizer nations. These include the Kanienkeha (Mohawk), Mikmaq, Blackfoot, Ojibwe, Cree, Yoeme (Yaqui), Kumeyaay, Tohono O’odham, Potawatomi, and others. Across the US and Canadian border, certain agreements have been worked out so that indigenous citizens may cross the border with more ease than non-indigenous people–for instance, the Jay Treaty has allowed Canadian-born people with Indian status to come to the United States. Crossing the US-Mexican border has been much more difficult, due to the American concern about illegal immigration from that area.
In some ways the situation of the Métis more closely resembles indigenous nations that cross the southern border than the northern one. The ability to negotiate easier border crossing between Canada and the US is facilitated by the fact that the United States and Canada have relatively similar organizations of reserves and reservations, and tribal enrollment and status for First Nations people. In Mexico, however, there is less official record-keeping of indigenous people, which makes the United States less inclined to grant concessions to people who claim to be indigence and want to cross the border. The Métis in Canada are in a similar situation, having been mostly unregistered in government records and thus not as easy for the governments to keep track of. That situation is changing, though, with the creation of a Métis registry in Canada. Likewise, some indigenous nations on the southern border are finding ways to ease travel across the border with enhanced tribal ID cards and other methods.
This is not to say that IDs and government registries are necessarily good things. They come with heavy baggage of colonial control and are highly controversial. Still, it will be interesting to see as Métis people reconnect across the border, spurred on by interest in Michif and other Métis cultural aspects, if the Métis nation will once again take control of its cross-border homeland, both north and south. A common thought among Elders is they feel that someday, before they die they hope they will be able to go home without government intervention from either side.
Perhaps someday the Metis/Michif in the U.S. Can put aside their differences and join together in their quest to be recognized, or at least come together.
Posted by Kai in Great Lakes, Great Plains, History
This document has been altered slightly but all the credit still goes to Kai,
so if my additions are incorrect it is my fault.
History of the Métis Homeland
The Métis are a group of people who are descended from primarily French-Canadian, Scottish, English, German or other European nations, fur traders who married mostly Cree, Ojibwa and Iroquois women, who then formed their own society with a separate ethnic and racial identity from their parent European and First Nation societies. Intermarriage began pretty much as soon as Europeans and Native people met, but the first “distinct” Métis identities and societies began to appear in the Great Lakes area (modern Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin, and northern Illinois and Ohio) in the 1600's before spreading south and west, in the 1700s.
As white settlers began to enter those areas where the Metis had settled, a lot of Métis either moved or were forced west. South of the Great Lakes Métis, French-Canadian, and British people continued to monopolize trade despite being in what was technically US territory. Then, with the war of 1812, many migrated, or fled north and west. Thus in the area near Lake Winnipeg another society sprang up known as the Red River colony, a mixture of Great Lakes Métis and the Métis of from the fur trade in that area. At this time there was a division between Métis born of French-Canadian ancestors and those of Anglophone ancestry. In 1816 after the Battle of Frog Plains (also known as the Battle of Seven Oaks) in which the Métis fighting for the North West Company defeated the Hudson Bay Company, made a decisive victory against the HBC monopoly of the fur trade, and a sense of a common Métis identity developed in the area, uniting the Metis causing that battle to be frequently referred to as the birth of the Métis nation.
Métis people began to spread west for largely two reasons. The first was their involvement in the fur trade like their French-Canadian predecessors taking them as far away as the modern Northwest Territories and British Columbia, as well as through the prairie provinces. Increasingly, however, Métis people settled the the prairies (both in what is now Canada and the US), where they hunted buffalo in the summer months.
By and large, the Métis of today are still found in these same areas which includes all of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, and parts of Ontario, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, North Dakota, Montana, and Minnesota. A concept of a Métis homeland is somewhat complicated. It tends to refer to places that Métis people have historically lived, both in the United States and Canada, however, Métis people are also found outside of of these lands in present day times, and in addition, numerous other non-Métis people also have their homelands within what is considered the Métis homeland in Canada. (namely First Nations communities, which are often located side-by-side with Métis ones, and very frequently there is significant blurring between the two).
Other areas that should probably be considered part of the Western Métis homelands are northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. The main reason that these areas are not commonly considered part of the Métis homeland is that they fall into two categories that are often invisible in Métis history: 1 is that of the Great Lakes Métis who largely did not participate in the two Métis resistances of the 19th century, and 2nd, that of United States Métis who were legally denied recognition and also lack the federal recognition of Canadian Métis. Ontario Métis and Wisconsin and Michigan Métis, are from the same cultural group but are divided by the border. The Métis in North Dakota and Montana, and the Red River Metis are of the same cultural group, but most have also lost connections (with some exceptions) due to the U.S./Canadian border. Those living close to the border however have been have been existing as Metis across the modern US-Canadian border for centuries, both in the Great Lakes region and the prairies.
In Canada, the border in the east was largely solidified to the Métis by the 1860s. On the prairies however the Métis people continued to hunt buffalo and lived mostly ignorant of the border through the 1860s and 70s. In the 70s and 80s, the border was being more strictly enforced by US and Canadian officials, but Métis people continued to move across it regularly. After the North West Resistance of 1885, disparate bands of Métis people spread out from the Red River area, including a large number who went south to the United States, hoping to escape the stigma of being “halfbreed,” who were hated on both sides of the border.
Developments in Métis Government
Some of the first forms of centralized Métis government came along with the annual buffalo hunts in the prairies. An enormous amount of Métis people came together in the spring and fall to hunt buffalo for both subsistence use and for pemmican. In order to make sure that the hunt ran smoothly, a complex system of organization was developed. A 'captain of the hunt' was elected by the community, along with a council. This group organized how the hunt would proceed creating a system of written and unwritten rules (sometimes known as the Laws of the Prairie, or the Laws of the Hunt). This system was probably in place by the mid1700s, and was firmly established by the early 1800s. It drew Métis from the Red River settlement, the plains, and the Great Lakes areas such as Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin, and the hunt itself took place in an area that is now southern Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba as well as North Dakota, Montana, and western Minnesota.
Previously, the overwhelming majority of people living in the Red River area and further west were Métis people of both Francophone and Anglophone heritage. By the 1860s, however the British and Canadian governments became concerned with the possibility US expansionism reaching land that was owned by the Hudson Bay Company. In 1868 Rupert’s Land, a vast area of land owned by HBC was transferred to Canada, and Canadian officials announced that they would be taking control of the Red River area as well in 1869. The Métis community viewed this as a threat to their way of life, fearing that both anti-Francophone and anti-Indigenous prejudice that existed would cause the Canadian officials to remove them and or their ability to govern themselves.
After the Métis conflicts/wars with the Hudson Bay Company in the earlier in the 1800s, numerous Métis had come to be part of a council known as the Council of Assiniboia, which was an unelected body of representatives from the traders as well as the Francophone and Anglophone Métis communities to govern and maintain peace in the area. The Council was still active when Canada announced its intention to enter the Red River area. Knowing how the government felt about them the council organized Métis people to defend their sovereignty over the area that had been their homeland for well over 150 years. Louis Riel proposed the creation of a provisional government and was eventually elected its president. The new provisional government, through some militia action was able to negotiate with the Canadian government to admit Manitoba to the Confederation as a Province with promises for the protection of the Metis peoples political rights, land ownership, and cultural aspects such as language and religion. However, when the Canadian government sent in military forces the newly created provisional government was squashed and ceased to exist. Riel fled across the border to the United States.
Following Canada's creation of Manitoba, its new government was immediately dominated by Anglo representatives, and although Louis Riel was elected three times to represent Manitoba in Quebec, due to his exile, he was never able to take office. As a result, many Métis moved west to modern Saskatchewan and Alberta, where they were told they could continue to live in their own societies. A number of councils similar to the former provisional government sprang up, with the most powerful being in St. Laurent, but the North West Mounted Police continually intervened in Métis affairs due to Canadian fears of a repeat of the resistance of 1869, and the Metis councils lost the right to govern themselves other than small domestic issues. The Métis were betrayed by the Canadian government again and forced to deal with a territorial government that included no Métis representatives, the exact thing they’d been trying to avoid by migrating.
For much of the 1870s and 1880s the Métis, tired of the abuses, tried to negotiate with the government to gain representation of their views, or be left alone, but failed. By the 1880s, Métis people had formed unofficial groups in their communities aiming to rectify the situation, and Louis Riel was called back from the United States, where he had been living in Métis communities in Montana. Riel and other leaders such as Gabriel Dumont led what was to become the North West Resistance of 1885, which ended in the hanging of Riel. In the aftermath, the Canadian and territorial governments turned strongly against the Métis, who were considered nothing more than French half-breeds. Suppression of what happened by government officials led to widespread silence about the 1885 resistance, and, in many cases, as in the United States, Métis families attempted to pass themselves off as French-Canadian to avoid the stigma of being Metis.
On the Canadian side of the border, after many decades, the Metis began to reassemble in local associations aimed at improving their economic situation beginning in the 1930s. In the early part of the 20th century, the Métis people were often known as the Road Allowance People, due to the enormous number of Métis people who had been widely discriminated against, dispossessed of their lands, denied employment, and denied schools for their children, they were often living on the public lands that bordered roads. Though by now many Métis communities were largely self-governed on a local basis they were still subject to persecution by Canadian officials, and many crimes against the Metis went unpunished. As the Courts began to change, in the 1960s, there was another wave of political organization by Métis communities sparking the creation of Métis provincial organizations. Despite local involvement, Métis people received little recognition or political rights until 1982, when they were named one of Canada’s three Aboriginal people. The following year, the Métis National Council was created to bring together Métis organizations in each province and to represent the Métis Nation on a National and even International level.
History South of the border showed many Métis had moved south and/or west into Montana alongside Cree people who were often kin in search of buffalo; many more came south to Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota after the resistance of 1885. They lived in autonomous communities but in the late 1870s were increasingly persecuted by the US military, who suspected them of providing arms to the Lakota. Pressed by difficult living conditions and lack of food due to the United States government and the military tactics, the Métis and Cree in the Montana area drew closer together and began to request the assistance of nearby reservations, with whom they often shared family. In 1882, a group of Ojibwa, called Chippewa by the United States, and Métis signed treaties creating the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. In the last decades of the 19th century, approximately 1,200 Métis families moved onto the reservation along with approximately 200 Chippewa. Others became part of the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation created in 1916.
No real equivalent to the revival of Métis identity and political associations that happened in Canada has occurred in the United States in the 20th or 21st centuries due mainly to the Metis people being legislated out of existence. The Métis people in the United States were divided politically between those who claimed their Native ancestry and enrolled on reservations, and were (and still are) treated as Indians by the federal government, and those who refused to give up their identity and were not associate with a reservation, who the government refused to recognize and considered them to be white.
The Great Lakes Métis on both sides of the border continued to live in their communities even after many migrated northwest in the early 1800s. Although initially strongly integrated with the fur trade companies, after they moved west Métis communities became more autonomous, and tended to be more connected to the First Nations around them (mostly Ojibwa, Odawa, and Potawatomi, and in Wisconsin and Minnesota there were also significant connections with the Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Dakota, and other nations). With an influx of white settlers in the 1840s and 50s, the US and British governments began to make treaties with local First Nations groups. The Métis also requested land, or at least payment for land taken. And in many of these treaties, occurring on both sides of the border, and were, in nearly all cases, the Metis were supported by their relatives among the First Nations peoples. Both governments, on the other hand, fought to keep Métis out of the treaty negotiations. Several treaties gave Métis payments as “Indian half breeds” and a few promised them land (such as the half-breed tracts in the United States); but regardless of these promises, most Métis eventually lost the land to settlers in court disputes, just as Métis in the prairies lost their scrip lands.
There is very little existing written history of Great Lakes Métis communities after the 1850s. In both Canada and the US, some Métis eventually enrolled in local Indian reserves/reservations, while others lived in their own communities, frequently on the outskirts of either predominantly white towns or the Indian reserves. In the United States, Métis communities in the Great Lakes continued to live with at least something of a separate communities from other Indian and white people until at least the 1940s-1950's, but there has been no real movement of Métis people in recent times around that identity. They could not claim to be Metis or they would have no legal rights or standings if they did not claim to be “Americans.” If they tried to claim their Native heritage then they were stripped of their Metis identity and placed on reservations. Since 1982 Métis in Ontario, and other provenances, have a political organization under the Métis National Counsel, and one of the most influential Métis related court cases in Canada was brought about by an Ontario Métis family (the Powley ruling).
The Border between us.
And so we reach, more or less, the present day. The Métis nation continues to exist on both sides of the border. In Canada, the number of people identifying as Métis openly has increased and Métis political power is likewise increasing throughout Western Canada. There the Métis are recognized as indigenous people distinct from First Nations and Inuit people. They do not have a designated land base in the form of a reserve or reservation, and until very recently had essentially the same legal status as non-indigenous Canadians, unlike many First Nations people. Since 2003 there has been more discussion of Métis legal rights, including the Powley ruling which indicated that Métis people do have certain rights non-Aboriginal people do not. One can be recognized by the Métis National Council, receiving Métis status and a card, but it does not carry significant legal benefits akin to having Indian status.
In the United States, even the "word" Métis is practically unknown outside the Turtle Mountain Reservation. Other historical Métis communities who are part of the Turtle Mountain Band are considered to be Indians under United States law, and the Reservation itself is run by tribal government like other First Nations in the US. As for other Métis in the area whose families did not join up with a First Nations Reservation, they remain without a centralized organization they can call their own.
I do not have research or evidence beyond the anecdotal as to how much interaction has occurred between Métis people north and south of the border. In my experience, it is very, very common for Métis families to have relatively recent ancestors from both sides of the border, and it’s not unusual for people to cross it to visit relatives or for special occasions such as Metis Fest, and Back to Batoche. Because Métis people as a distinct group remain mostly unknown in the US, most Métis-centered political efforts are strongly based in Canada. Most Métis people are aware, however, of the historical cross-border nature of the Métis people/nation. It’s difficult to tell if there will be any sort of movement to join forces with Métis across the borders. One of the most unifying factors, however, has been the revitalization of the Michif language, which remains particularly strong in North Dakota. As a result, in the past few decades there has been an increase in communication between US and Canadian Métis who are trying to keep their language alive.
There are many other indigenous groups in North America that cross international borders created by colonizer nations. These include the Kanienkeha (Mohawk), Mikmaq, Blackfoot, Ojibwe, Cree, Yoeme (Yaqui), Kumeyaay, Tohono O’odham, Potawatomi, and others. Across the US and Canadian border, certain agreements have been worked out so that indigenous citizens may cross the border with more ease than non-indigenous people–for instance, the Jay Treaty has allowed Canadian-born people with Indian status to come to the United States. Crossing the US-Mexican border has been much more difficult, due to the American concern about illegal immigration from that area.
In some ways the situation of the Métis more closely resembles indigenous nations that cross the southern border than the northern one. The ability to negotiate easier border crossing between Canada and the US is facilitated by the fact that the United States and Canada have relatively similar organizations of reserves and reservations, and tribal enrollment and status for First Nations people. In Mexico, however, there is less official record-keeping of indigenous people, which makes the United States less inclined to grant concessions to people who claim to be indigence and want to cross the border. The Métis in Canada are in a similar situation, having been mostly unregistered in government records and thus not as easy for the governments to keep track of. That situation is changing, though, with the creation of a Métis registry in Canada. Likewise, some indigenous nations on the southern border are finding ways to ease travel across the border with enhanced tribal ID cards and other methods.
This is not to say that IDs and government registries are necessarily good things. They come with heavy baggage of colonial control and are highly controversial. Still, it will be interesting to see as Métis people reconnect across the border, spurred on by interest in Michif and other Métis cultural aspects, if the Métis nation will once again take control of its cross-border homeland, both north and south. A common thought among Elders is they feel that someday, before they die they hope they will be able to go home without government intervention from either side.
Perhaps someday the Metis/Michif in the U.S. Can put aside their differences and join together in their quest to be recognized, or at least come together.
