Defining Metis

Defining Métis examines categories used in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Catholic missionaries to describe Indigenous people in what is now northwestern Saskatchewan. It argues that the construction and evolution of these categories reflected missionaries’changing interests and agendas. Defining Métis sheds light on the earliest phases of Catholic missionary work among Indigenous peoples in western and northern Canada. It examines various interrelated aspects of this work, including the beginnings of residential schooling, transportation and communications, and relations between the Church, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the federal government. While focusing on the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and their central mission at Île-à-la-Crosse, this study illuminates broad processes that informed Catholic missionary perceptions and impelled their evolution over a fifty-three-year period. In particular, this study illuminates processes that shaped Oblate conceptions of sauvage and métis. It does this through a qualitative analysis of documents that were produced within the Oblates’ institutional apparatus—official correspondence, mission journals, registers, and published reports. Foran challenges the orthodox notion that Oblate commentators simply discovered and described a singular, empirically existing, and readily identifiable Métis population. Rather, he contends that Oblates played an important role in the conceptual production of les métis.

Ask any Canadian what "Métis" means, and they will likely say "mixed race." Canadians consider Métis mixed in ways that other Indigenous people are not, and the census and courts have premised their recognition of Métis status on this race-based understanding. Andersen argues that Canada got it wrong. From its roots deep in the colonial past, the idea of Métis as mixed has slowly pervaded the Canadian consciousness until it settled in the realm of common sense. In the process, "Métis" has become a racial category rather than the identity of an Indigenous people with a shared sense of history and culture.

Born of encounters between Indigenous women and Euro-American men in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Plains Metis people occupied contentious geographic and cultural spaces. Living in a disputed area of the northern Plains inhabited by various Indigenous nations and claimed by both the United States and Great Britain, the Metis emerged as a people with distinctive styles of speech, dress, and religious practice, and occupational identities forged in the intense rivalries of the fur and provisions trade. Michel Hogue explores how, as fur trade societies waned and as state officials looked to establish clear lines separating the United States from Canada and Indians from non-Indians, these communities of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry were profoundly affected by the efforts of nation-states to divide and absorb the North American West. Grounded in extensive research in U.S. and Canadian archives, Hogue's account recenters historical discussions that have typically been confined within national boundaries and illuminates how Plains Indigenous peoples like the Metis were at the center of both the unexpected accommodations and the hidden history of violence that made the "world's longest undefended border."

These twelve essays constitute a groundbreaking volume of new work prepared by leading scholars in the fields of history, anthropology, constitutional law, political science, and sociology, who identify the many facets of what it means to be Métis in Canada today. After the Powley decision in 2003, Métis peoples were no longer conceptually limited to the historical boundaries of the fur trade in Canada. Key ideas explored in this collection include identity, rights, and issues of governance, politics, and economics. The book will be of great interest to scholars in political science and Indigenous studies, the legal community, public administrators, government policy advisors, and people seeking to better understand the Métis past and present. Contributors: Christopher Adams, Gloria Jane Bell, Glen Campbell, Gregg Dahl, Janique Dubois, Tom Flanagan, Liam J. Haggarty, Laura-Lee Kearns, Darren O'Toole, Jeremy Patzer, Ian Peach, Siomonn P. Pulla, Kelly L. Saunders.

In recent years there has been growing interest in identifying the social and cultural attributes that define the Metis as a distinct people. In this groundbreaking study, Brenda Macdougall employs the concept of wahkootowin � the Cree term for a worldview that privileges family and values interconnectedness � to trace the emergence of a Metis community in northern Saskatchewan. Wahkootowin describes how relationships worked and helps to explain how the Metis negotiated with local economic and religious institutions while nurturing a society that emphasized family obligation and responsibility. This innovative exploration of the birth of Metis identity offers a model for future research and discussion.

Why don’t more Métis people go to traditional ceremonies? How does going to ceremonies impact Métis identity? In Rekindling the Sacred Fire, Chantal Fiola investigates the relationship between Red River Métis ancestry, Anishinaabe spirituality, and identity, bringing into focus the ongoing historical impacts of colonization upon Métis relationships with spirituality on the Canadian prairies. Using a methodology rooted in an Indigenous world view, Fiola interviews eighteen people with Métis ancestry, or an historic familial connection to the Red River Métis, who participate in Anishinaabe ceremonies, sharing stories about family history, self-identification, and their relationships with Aboriginal and Eurocanadian cultures and spiritualities.

They know who they are. Of predominantly Chippewa, Cree, French, and Scottish descent, the Métis people have flourished as a distinct ethnic group in Canada and the northwestern United States for nearly two hundred years. Yet their Métis identity is often ignored or misunderstood in the United States. Unlike their counterparts in Canada, the U.S. Métis have never received federal recognition. In fact, their very identity has been questioned. In this rich examination of a Métis community—the first book-length work to focus on the Montana Métis—Martha Harroun Foster combines social, political, and economic analysis to show how its people have adapted to changing conditions while retaining a strong sense of their own unique culture and traditions. Despite overwhelming obstacles, the Métis have used the bonds of kinship and common history to strengthen and build their community. As Foster carefully traces the lineage of Métis families from the Spring Creek area, she shows how the people retained their sense of communal identity. She traces the common threads linking diverse Métis communities throughout Montana and lends insight into the nature of Métis identity in general. And in raising basic questions about the nature of ethnicity, this pathbreaking work speaks to the difficulties of ethnic identification encountered by all peoples of mixed descent.

Over the course of the last twenty years, Native American and Indigenous American literary studies has experienced a dramatic shift from a critical focus on identity and authenticity to the intellectual, cultural, political, historical, and tribal nation contexts from which these Indigenous literatures emerge. The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature reflects on these changes and provides a complete overview of the current state of the field. The Handbook's forty-three essays, organized into four sections, cover oral traditions, poetry, drama, non-fiction, fiction, and other forms of Indigenous American writing from the seventeenth through the twenty-first century. Part I attends to literary histories across a range of communities, providing, for example, analyses of Inuit, Chicana/o, Anishinaabe, and Métis literary practices. Part II draws on earlier disciplinary and historical contexts to focus on specific genres, as authors discuss Indigenous non-fiction, emergent trans-Indigenous autobiography, Mexicanoh and Spanish poetry, Native drama in the U.S. and Canada, and even a new Indigenous children's literature canon. The third section delves into contemporary modes of critical inquiry to expound on politics of place, comparative Indigenism, trans-Indigenism, Native rhetoric, and the power of Indigenous writing to communities of readers. A final section thoroughly explores the geographical breadth and expanded definition of Indigenous American through detailed accounts of literature from Indian Territory, the Red Atlantic, the far North, Yucatán, Amerika Samoa, and Francophone Quebec. Together, the volume is the most comprehensive and expansive critical handbook of Indigenous American literatures published to date. It is the first to fully take into account the last twenty years of recovery and scholarship, and the first to most significantly address the diverse range of texts, secondary archives, writing traditions, literary histories, geographic and political contexts, and critical discourses in the field.

The Authentic Dissertation is a road map for students who want to make their dissertation more than a series of hoop-jumping machinations that cause them to lose the vitality and meaningfulness of their research. Students and tutors are presented with practical guidance for the kind of alternative dissertations that many educators believe are needed to move Doctoral and Master’s level work beyond the limitations that currently stifle authentic contributions for a better world. Drawing on his Cherokee/Creek ancestry and the Raramuri shamans of Mexico the author explores how research can regain its humanist core and find its true place in the natural order once more. Four Arrows provides a degree of "credibility" that will help graduate students legitimize their ideas in the eyes of more conservative university committees. This inspiring book will also help academics who sincerely want to see these alternative forms but are concerned about the rigor of "alternative" dissertation research and presentation. The featured dissertation stories tap into more diverse perspectives, more authentic experience and reflection, and more creative abilities. They are, in essence, spiritual undertakings that Honour the centrality of the researcher’s voice, experience, creativity and authority Focus more on important questions than on research methodologies per se Reveal virtues (generosity, patience, courage, respect, humility, fortitude, etc.) Regard the people’s version of reality The goal of this book is not to replace the historical values of academic research in the western tradition, but to challenge some of these values and offer alternative ideas that stem from different, sometimes opposing values.