First let me warn you that the title and the abstract you might have in your kits relating to this presentation is now defunct. On the way in from the train station yesterday I realized I had not asked anyone who the audience for this presentation was going to be. I then learned it was likely that at least half of the participants at this conference were likely to be officials of various Ministries of Natural Resources (MNR). Up to that point I had assumed the audience would be university students and academics and I had designed my presentation to test out a few ideas I have been developing.

I really do think I would be more helpful to MNR people and to Métis people for that matter if I refocused my presentation to concentrate on the issues of Metis identity and definition and the relationship of those processes to the on-the-ground issues of exercising Aboriginal rights. So I suggest you forget about the stolen Canadian identity stuff and be assured I will try to provide you some food for thought that will be useful to you in the application of government policy to the exercise of Métis rights.

I also want to make it very clear that I am speaking here today from a personal and individual point of view. I am not representing or speaking on behalf of any organization, or group or specific community. I say that, partly because that is a relatively rare experience for me and partly to ensure that none of the organizations I have worked with over the years get blamed for any of the things I am about to say.

By way of introducing my presentation to you, I think it only fair that you be very much aware of some of the baggage I bring with me to this conference.

I identify myself today, and have for the last 20 years or so as a Métis person. I did not do that for the first 30 years of my life for the very simple reason that I did not know that such an identity existed. Apart from knowing that I had "Indian ancestry", and that my great-great grandfather was some kind of "halfbreed explorer" I knew nothing of my indigenous heritage. My education made me vaguely aware that some kind of kook named Riel got himself hung for standing in the way of John A's plans for confederation. But that ís about as far as it went.

What is relevant to our purpose here this weekend is that the issues we are discussing are not academic, or political, or even legal issues for me. They are personal issues. They are what my life is about. I do not and will not pretend to be objective about Métis identity and Métis rights. On the other hand I also recognize the limitations of blatant subjectivity and I will try to minimize those limitations by being as factual as I possibly can about the issues we are dealing with.

The second set of circumstances you should be aware of as a background to this presentation is my professional experience as an analyst, researcher, writer and consultant to Aboriginal organizations and a few government departments over the last 20 years. I had the good, and sometimes frustrating, fortune of being an active front line participant in the early days of off-reserve land claims research in Ontario, a full-time national player during the entire decade of constitutional reform on Aboriginal matters, and a part-time and somewhat reluctant minor member of the Métis policy team of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.

These experiences, apart from seriously testing my sanity, exposed me to a continuous flow of processes and documentation related to Aboriginal peoples, Aboriginal issues, Aboriginal and Treaty Rights, and the relationship of those issues to the non-Aboriginal populations and many of their governments. The significance of this experience, as far as my personal perspective goes, is that, while it tends to ground me in the practical and the possible, it has also exposed me to a flood of historical and current documentation and to a range of consultation processes between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in Canada that very few others have crammed into a single lifetime.

I hope that experience and that perspective will be useful to increasing our understanding Métis identity and Métis rights. At the end of my presentation I would appreciate it if you just ask yourself this question, what if what this guy says is actually true? You might even find that experience entertaining, even if you later decide I am just nuts.

I should also make it clear that my personal use of the term "Métis" is in its broadest and most inclusive application. Although my personal ancestry in the Gladman line of my family is listed in the Red River genealogy, the Moore side of the family are James Bay Halfbreeds. I cannot and will not exclude one in favour of the other. From my point of view we are, indeed, all Métis within the meaning of Section 35 of the Constitution Act regardless of what other names may have been used to label us historcially.

I decided to participate here today because, now that I am pushing 60, I think itís time to share some of what I have learned working in the Aboriginal movement over the last 25 years. And what I have learned will be unsettling to some of you -- at least I hope it will. To some it will be intriguing, and to others I suspect it will seem to be outright nonsense. So be it. My responsibility is to share what I have learned..

I want to be clear about the underlying question this presentation addresses, which is:

Who are the Métis referred to in Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982? -  and why does it matter.

Although the term "Métis" is used in the Constitution to identify one of the Aboriginal peoples of Canada, the term itself is not defined. That gives rise to several other questions we must answer:

Can/Should/Must/How will/ Métis be defined?

and

Why are the first two questions being asked, at all?

The last question is the simplest to answer. The first two questions are being asked because there appears to be differences of opinion in both the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal community and among governments as to how those questions might be answered. There are many political, legal, economic, cultural, and social repercussions which are dependent on the answers to those questions.

The first question is more difficult to answer because the answer relies on the response to still more questions. It is necessary to have some idea of why any given person wants to call him/herself Métis. It is also necessary to know why anyone else should care if a given person calls him/herself Métis, or not.

Having said all that, I now want to forewarn you that I have a number themes or topics I want to get into with you today, all of which orbit around the central issues of Métis identity and definition.

 

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 Fundamental  Question

Letís begin with this fundamental question.

1. Is or should Aboriginal ancestry, in and of itself, play a significant role in personal/social/political identity in Canada?

I begin with this question because, it seems to me, anything else that can be said about the role and function of Aboriginal peoples in this country --especially the Métis-- depends on how it is answered.

If the answer is no -- and that is certainly the answer the Fathers of Confederation and subsequent Canadian federal and provincial government policy up to 1969 have given -- then we can stop our conference right here. It seems to me there is nothing more to be said. In that case, Aboriginal peoples can be relegated back to their pre-sixties role as a colourful anomaly which is sadly but inevitably fading into some kind of Darwinian sunset.

If the answer today is yes, it does have a significance, then we are faced with a very real problem because our entire dominant social and political reality in Canada is based on a conscious or unconscious negative response. It has become increasingly common in recent years to admit that Canadian attitudes toward Aboriginal people were genocidal, ethnocidal, or least assimilative -- depending on who you are talking to. Aboriginal people were supposed to have had the good grace to disappear long before now. The simple statistical fact that the Aboriginal population of Canada is multiplying faster than the general population creates a very real management problem for those whose job it is to keep the Canadian boat afloat.

Oddly enough, I have had a great deal of difficulty in getting people to respond to this basic question. Aboriginal organizations avoid the question for fear a positive answer would flood them with indigenous wannabees, and a negative answer would deplete their existing constituencies. Government agencies don't want to bother with it because it detracts from their concentration on political agendas which focus on government policy designed to minimize the political significance of Aboriginal peoples by focusing on them as "special interest" groups or economically deprived or depraved minorities. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples ignored the question in favour of a pragmatic political emphasis on the relationship between existing Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal "Nations." Academia doesnít want to appear to be seriously considering a question with such obvious racial and politically incorrect genetic overtones. Individual response to the question varies from complete indifference to honest confusion over why the question is even being asked.

Before I move to the specific issues of Métis identity and definition I want to explain how I came to focus so specifically on this particular question of the significance of Aboriginal ancestry.

During the First Ministers Conferences on Aboriginal matters (FMCs) between 1982 and 1987, I was a senior official and analyst for the Native Council of Canada (NCC), one of the four participating national Aboriginal organizations. During the course of the literally thousands of hours of discussion between government and Aboriginal delegations over a period of ten years, I became painfully aware of a virtual chasm of misunderstanding between these two sets of Canadians.

Quite apart from the many differences in perspective that might be expected in any negotiations between seventeen delegations, there was a fundamental difference in orientation between two sets of delegates that was so ubiquitous it could easily be overlooked. In fact it took me several years to recognize it simply because I  wasn't looking for it.

On the government side of the table sat a group of people who considered themselves to be immigrants or descendants of immigrants to Canada, and often proudly said so in their presentations. By definition, an immigrant is a person who has left his or her homeland or "native" land to live in a different or "foreign" land. Think about that. By definition that person or an ancestor of that person has decided that living in his or her homeland was less important than whatever advantages might be gained by living in a foreign land. In the case of displacement or forced immigration, that person often has a kind of emotional scar or experiences the stigma of exile.

In any case, living as an indigenous person in one's own homeland has become, at most, a secondary factor in their lives and, quite naturally, is no longer an integral part of their sense of personal or national identity. Consciously or unconsciously, it was from this frame reference that many of the non-Aboriginal FMC delegations were both speaking and listening. For lack of a better phrase, I will describe this orientation as an "immigrant" or "settler" mentality. This terminology is not meant to be derogatory or imply superiority. It is simply an attempt to describe or characterize an identifiable point of view.

On the other side of the table sat a group of people who considered themselves to be Aboriginal people or, at the very least, the descendants of Aboriginal people in Canada, and often proudly said so in their presentations. The central and single most important factor in their personal identity and sense of nationhood was the fact that they were a "Native" people living in their own homeland. Consciously or unconsciously, it was from this frame of reference that all Aboriginal delegations were both speaking and listening. I will describe that frame of reference as an indigenous orientation or an "indigenous mentality." Again, this terminology is descriptive of a point of view, and is not intended to be either derogatory or imply superiority.

The point I want to leave you with is that there is a distinct and profoundly different indigenous perspective which is very much alive in Canada and that perspective is in virtual --and perhaps even polar -- opposition to the more conventional, majority immigrant or settler point of view that has dominated social policy and political agendas in Canada at least since confederation.

The difference that was most evident in the attitudes of the respective delegations was their attitude towards land. Government delegations thought of land in terms of possession, economic value, and political control of the exploitation of renewable and non-renewable resources. Aboriginal delegations spoke of the land in terms of identity, relationship, and continuity. From a government perspective the lands of Canada were economic resources to be exploited or protected. From an Aboriginal perspective those same lands were an extension of, and a foundation for the individual, the family, the community, and the nation. Government delegates thought of the land as belonging to them. Aboriginal delegates thought of themselves as belonging to the land.

The importance of that situation to the issues we are dealing with here today is related to how that polarity impacts on the issues of Métis identity, the definition of Métis, and the exercise of Métis rights.

I guess we can now move on to the guts of this presentation in which I am going try to inter-relate a daunting variety of factors and situations. We must deal with terminology of course and, more importantly from my point of view, the context in which various terminologies have been applied to Métis peoples. We must deal with the historical social and political contexts in which Métis communities came into being. And all of that must be applied to the process of human identity building with which Métis peoples are currently involved and how that process impacts on the exercise of Métis rights.
 
 

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