Back at Red River, the beginning of the western chapter of the rise of Metis Nations begins, not as you might expect, with the Riel's, but with a scots halfbreed named Cuthbert Grant, immediately after the War of 1812. In the traditonal colonial pattern, the Earl of Selkirk had manipulated a large grant of land from the Hudson's Bay Company in Red River in 1811. Following an equally traditional format, his
colonial governor unilaterally legislated hunting and trade restrictions on the local population to support the struggling colony.

The resistance of the population, who considered themselves the masters if not the owners of the area was predicatable and in 1816 Governor Semple and twenty of his officers and men fell under the guns of a breed of men variously called Halfbreeds, Bois Brule, or Metis led by Cuthbert Grant. I don't know why historians avoid this particular sequence in Canadian history except for the Battle of Seven Oaks but I suspect it may be because Grant is not French, it is the first time the strugggle is clearly between White and Metis, and the Metis won both the war and the peace hands down. It simply doesn't fit into the pattern Candian historians are looking for.

The Battle of Seven Oaks, from a Metis perspective, was a clear demonstration that the indigenous, mixed blood populations of the west were prepared to fight for their rights. The Metis and Halfbreeds of Red River has succeeded in establishing a social, political and military prescence in their homeland, but their brothers in other parts of the country were not fairing as well.

Halfbreeed Resistances. 

Most of you will be suprised to know there was kind of Metis uprising in what is now Ontario in 1849, which takes us briefly back to the Upper Great Lakes and the Metis of the Sault. Reports of boulders of solid copper in the Upper Great Lakes had triggered a rash of speculative prospecting and mining on unsurrendered Indian lands. Indian and Halfbreed complaints and petitions around the issue were repeatedly ignored and a few mines began extraction.

Determined to assert their rights and with some expectation of exploiting the resource themselves, the local Natives organized a token resistance. With cannon stolen from a Hudson"s Bay Company post, the expedition "captured" the Quebec Mining Company's mine at Mica Bay in a bloodless coup. Shocked into action and disconcerted by the realization the "culprits" could not be convicted, as the courtshad no jurisdiction on unsurrendered land, authorities hastily began negotiations for a treaty in the area.

Back in Red River, in an unconnected event the same year, the Metis had once more taken up arms. Angered by increasingly severe restrictions on fur trading, several hundred armed Metis surrounded a courthouse where three of them had been charged with smuggling furs. Although the court which included Cuthbert Grant as one of the three judges registered a conviction, no sentences were ordered and the jubliant Metis knew they had successfully challenged the Hudson's Bay monopoly in the West. The apparently coopted Cuthbert Grant was replaced by the leader of the group that had surrounded the courthouse --Louis Riel Sr.

Although troops were hastily dispatched to both areas, no shots were fired. But it was obvious to all sides that the mixed bloods were a factor that had to be dealt with. The effect, if not the intent, of subsequent policy was to drive a legislated wedge between so-called fullblooded Indians and so-called Halfbreeds. The fact that this was, in biological terms often impossible, only briefly daunted legislators of the time. The trick was to define Indians in terms of Indian relationship to Indian lands. The rest, as history was to prove, would take care of itself.

The fact that mixed bloods had been successfully relegated to a legislative noman's land became obvious when mining magnate W.B. Robinson began negotiating the treaties of Lakes Huron and Superior. After forcing a split between the Mica Bay faction, who were holding out for local development of mining resources, Robinson refused to negotiate with the Halfbreeds. When the Chiefs pressed the Halfbreed claim, Robinson deftly countered by leaving the inclusion of Halfbreeds up to the Chiefs.The truth, at last, was obvious. Halfbreeds in the Sault had been denied an earlier claim to their lands on the basis that the Proclamation of 1763 had declared the area as Indian land and that the lands had to be formally surrendered before title could be transferred. Now that the formal surrender was accomplished, they were denied their claims on the basis that they were not Indians --a fact the Americans across the river had recognized and made allowances for in their treaties. Most Candians who finish high school have a nodding acquaintance with the Riel resistances of 1870 and 1885. I think it is clear to everyone that this situation is certainly another eight for eight match to our pattern.

Those of you who really have been paying attention will recall that we have already identified several groups who are genetically identical to Canadian groups. There are the Acadians or Cajuns who were expelled to Louisiana country, but I really haven't been able to research their political history after they got there. There are the Metis on the American side of the Sault who are obviously of the same gene pool as the Canadians, but who as far as I know were mostly accomodated in the American treaty process. Others, like the Langlades who left for greener pastures and later found themselves the founding families of towns and even states south of the imaginary border.

In the west there is the situation in the now American area of Pembina which was the first Red River Metis centre. Most of the French families there were moved northward to Whitehorse Plains in the early 1820's under the leadership of Cuthbert Grant. And then there were those who lived their lives and developed their communities along the natural north/south trade routes from the arctic circle to the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, outside the puritan dominated states, and almost anywhere west and south of the eastern seaboard French and English halfbreeds lived very similarly to their Canadian counterparts.

But it is also true that there were many differences. The whole concept of metissage revolted the more puritan American colonialists, which made it much more likely haflbreeds would be more readily accepted as French particularly when the French and Americans were trying to gangup on the British. Given the much higher incidence of violent interaction between Americans and Indians and rate of settler expansion, it was also much less likely that haflbreed families would consciously or unconsciously develop significant communities before they were dominated by mushrooming settlement. Particularly in the mountinous areas of the U.S., it was much more likely that individuals often dubbed mountain men or buckskinners would spend their entire lives as isolated as possible from the contamination of frontier towns.