Certainly, Canadian Parliament is still arguing about whether Louis Riel is a traitor or a Father of Confederation. As I said in the opening, there are a number of assumptions about Canadian history that I want to "unread" with you. These are the everyday, common sense concepts that the average Canadian has about Canadian history when they get out of the school system. I'm willing to bet that each of you unconsciously makes one or more of these assumptions, as I certainly did until a few years ago.

1) That the Confederation was the fulfillment of a National Dream.

2) That the initial contact between Aboriginal and Western Europeans was a meeting of primitive and civilized peoples, respectively.

3) That significant North American history begins with Columbus.

4) That North America was "empty" and the human beings here all immigrated from somewhere else. These are the cliches of the common sense history upon which most Canadians build their sense of Canada's past.

It is pretty obvious that history, as a subject, deals with time and, by definition with time past. But the effect of the amount of time you are dealing with is not often considered in spite of the tremendous effect that element has on the consciousness of the people who are teaching, learning, and even living a particular history.

First let me unread the third assumption I listed earlier that significant North American History begins with Columbus, or Champlain, or Cartier, or even Confederation. The history of Canada is always taught in the context of the "discovery" and "development" of the so-called "new" world. This might be a natural assumption for immigrants who left a 'motherland" or fatherland" in the "old" world.

But from an Aboriginal perspective, it is only the immigrant that is "new", not the world the immigrant was travelling toward. If we look, from an Aboriginal perspective, at the range or span of years which make up Aboriginal history on this continent, we can begin to see they are literally eons apart. The earliest, estimate for human life in North America which has turned up in my research so far is 500,000 years. I realize that most archeologists would challenge that, but bear with me for a bit. If we think of that time period as the "Aboriginal day" or the 24-hour period of North American human history ,"official" Canadian history can be seen in a very different light.

I'm ready to be corrected by any real mathematicians in the group, but on a scale of 500,000 years equals one day, that would mean that Columbus --on our Aboriginal clock-- stumbled onto North America about one minute and fourty-four seconds ago and that Canada itself, in terms of Confederation, is about 35 seconds old

If we take a timeframe based on the oldest human remains found in North America so far, (now some archeologists will start nodding their heads) about 70,000 years Canada was founded some time after I started to talk to you here today. The point is that standard Canadian history is hardly more than a burp in the Aboriginal history of this continent.

Aboriginal peoples in North America would reverse every one of these "common sense" assumptions based on the following elements:

1) Origin histories which establish them as originating in North America and occasionaly migrating elsewhere.

2) A mythology that considers colonial or modern North America as a recent and perhaps even passing phase in North American history.

3) The experience that frontier Europeans (including modern national and international corporations) were and are diseased and crazed barbarians intent on ravaging the lands and peoples they come in contact with.

4) That Confederation was a vicious scheme designed to deprive the first "true Canadians" --the Metis-- of their birthright of self-determination and nationhood.

I"m prepared to answer questions on any of these counter assumptions, but first I want to deal with the concept of Metis as peoples. In my experience in the Consitutional reform process dealing with Aboriginal and Treaty rights over the last five years, I have come to the rather uncomfortable conclusion that negotiations between groups, and particularly between cultures is too often a matter of trying to get people who are using the same words to mean different things, to agree on using different words to mean the same thing.

This is also notoriously true for history, oral or written. With that in mind, I want to go over theø terminology we are using right now, so we can at least establish a clear baisis for understanding. Let's start with the term "Metis." Every book or article you pick up related to Metis will tell you that the word Metis means "mixed" -- which is true enough, as far as it goes. The books will also tell you that it was applied to people born of mixed Indian and White, usually French, blood. That is also true as far as it goes --but it does not go far enough to give you any real understanding of even the basic genetic background of Metis peoples.

Most Metis people today are not so much the direct result of Indian and White intermixing any more than English Canadians today are the direct result of intermixing of Saxons and Romans. Most Metis today are the direct result of Metis intermarrying with Metis, or Metis with Whites, or Metis with Indians, or with Inuit, or with Blacks, or with Orientals, or what have you. Most Metis today are born of one of more parents who are Metis.

In my own family for example, the last pureblooded Indian I know about was sometime in the mid 1700's. The first white woman in my immediate family was my own mother. There were no Whites or Indians involved in between --halfbreeds were marrying halfbreeds-- Metis maryying Metis. And, as we heard from Claude yesterday, there is evidence for pre-Columbian Metis.

In my research over the last decade or so, I have come across dozens of terms that were applied by various people in different areas and circumstances to mixed blood peoples. There are terms like Halfbreed, Halfcaste, Native, Mixed Blood, Voyaguer, Coureurs de Bois, Home Guard, and Forest Rangers, Country-born, Ecossais, Acadians, Mountain Men, Rupertslander Chicot, Pork Eaters and Bois Brule and --believe it or not-- Canadian. In talking with people here yesterday, I picked up three more --Jocot, Maladdouit, and Bemdenviik.

Perhaps our Cree brothers have the most accurate description of Metis. They called us the -- and my apologies to those who know how this really should be pronounced --"Oo Tipe a Yim Isowak" --the people that own themselves, or that nobody owns. This phrase strikes to the heart of Metis culture. Connnected to, but free from, the limitations of tribal life; connected to, but free from, the dominance of White settlement, the Metis were a new people in a changing world, apparently free to unfold their lives to the limits of their own abilities.

In everyday circumstances I would define Metis as a person of Aboriginal ancestry who identifies him or herself as a Metis. But I am not going to confine myself to even that definition today because I expect to be able to show you that the term, Metis, as it used today, would, and should, cover many more groups of people than the term has, in fact been applied to in Canadian history. I am going apply the term Metis to any people of mixed Aboriginal ancestry who can be recognized, historically, as a community distinct both from Indians and from Whites in the more conventional uses of those terms. This ignores the fact of overlapping between all three sets of communities, but I think we can use it as a general frame of reference and I'll do my best to keep it as clear as possible.