Metis Identity - A Source of Rights?
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Metis Identity - A Source of Rights? |
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Since, paradoxically, terminology, itself, is not particularly helpful in resolving the issues of Métis identity and definition, a more useful frame of reference for our discussion is needed. As a result of my research over the last 20 years, and as a way of organizing the information I was collecting on various mixed blood or halfbreed communities, I developed lists of characteristics or identifiers these populations had in common.
From a socio-economic point of view, for example, there are several basic characteristics which can be identified as common to all of the mixed blood groups to which this variety of terminology applied. Those characteristics are:
1. Mixed parentage of Indian and non-Indian sources.
2. Indigenous lifestyle based on local resources
3. Kinship networks related to both Indian and non-Indian
as primary basis for political and economic life.
4. Distinguished by outsiders (both Indian and non-Indian)
as distinct from both Indian and non-Indian society.
5. Self-identified (although the specific terminology
varied) as distinct from both Indian and non-Indian society.
These identifiers serve as guideposts to help identify commonalities, in terms of identity and definition, between different mixed-blood communities at various places and in different times in Canadian history.
Another set of identifiers relates historical and political characteristics. In the 1977-80 land claims research projects designed to identify and document the potential claims of MÈtis and non-status Indians in Canada, useful data had to be extracted from literally thousands of pages of primary and secondary source materials. In the course of that exercise, researchers became aware of a pattern of events that seem to embroil virtually every mixed blood community the project examined. The elements of that pattern are presented here as historical and political guideposts to help us make the connection, in terms of identity and definition, between mixed-blood communities at various places and different times in Canadian history.
1. The existence of one or more mixed-blood communities.
2. The community exists in advance of and is economically and politically independent of major white settlement.
3. An outside group attempts a take-over of the area.
4. A negotiation process is begun, usually by the half-breed group, to establish recognition of possession, or shared jurisdiction of land with the outside group.
5. The negotiation process fails.
6. One or more armed encounters ensues.
7. The leadership of the half-breed community is recognized.
8. Legal and political techniques are imposed which dispossess the half-breed community.
As a rule-of-thumb, I propose that any community, whether historic or current, which experiences a majority of the listed circumstances and proposes to identify itself as a MÈtis community, should seriously be considered as a candidate for that identification.
It is a given, in the context of modern sociology, that the culture into which an individual is born strongly affects how that individual experiences him or herself. When a given culture is in some form of major transition, the impact on the identity of members of that culture is often profound. These factors have played and still play a major role in the development of MÈtis identity.
In the context of discussion with the Constitutional Review Commission of the NCC in 1991, a description was offered to explain the variety of situations in which Aboriginal people can find themselves.
1. There are Aboriginal people who live in a ìtraditionalî land-based culture in \both a physical and spiritual sense.
2. There are other Aboriginal people who are, for most purposes, completely assimilated into Euro-Canadian life.
3. There are still other Aboriginal people who are in transition between those two ìstatesî of being.
4. Some of these people live their lives in a bi-cultural mode or in a state of dual identity.
This paradigm is particularly useful when comes to understanding shifts of identity and definition among Métis peoples.
There are Métis individuals and communities who reflect each of these modes. In rural, remote and Northern Canada there are Métis who live a hunting/gathering subsistence kind of lifestyle which virtually matches the historic descriptions of 18th Century Métis lifestyle. These individuals and communities could be described as ìtraditionalî Métis. At the other end of the scale there are completely urbanized populations of Métis who are struggling to reclaim their heritage. In between is a population who are experiencing a fluid, changing, and often bicultural identity process between Indian, Métis and non-Aboriginal cultures.
The amount of influence culture may have on an individual has little to do with the "amount" of Aboriginal ancestry in an individual. There can be no doubt however, that the mores of any given culture (including rituals like census taking and licensing) have an enormous effect on whether or not an individual will self-identify as a Métis -- as opposed to identifying as an Indian, or a non-Aboriginal. Culture can have an absolutely determinative impact on the acceptance or rejection of any given individual as being part of a particular Métis community.
Over two decades of research on Aboriginal issues, it became evident that some areas of Canada have very few ìindigenousî Métis, compared to others. Specifically, the coastal areas of Canada, British Columbia, and the Maritimes, had a very low percentage of self-identifying Métis peoples, compared to Ontario or the prairie provinces. It is rare to meet an Iroquois or Haida mixed blood individual who identified as a Métis.
One possible explanation springs from the fact that in those societies where the women determine the membership criteria of the community, rules that would exclude their own children are rare, regardless of who the fathers of the children might be. In these cases there would be no motivation to identify as Métis, simply because the children would be raised with the identity of their mothers.
In societies where Aboriginal fathers make the rules, or where the patrilineal bias of the Indian Act was applied, there is a tendency to be more protective of their own children, even if the mothers were white, and membership or participation in the community was more likely to be denied to the children of white fathers. Those same children would often be rejected by white communities as well. As a result, over a number of generations, a population of mixed blood progeny were virtually forced to create their own communities, in order to be relatively free of both white and Indian prejudice.
Certainly, there were many other factors at play. The further back you look in the history of Aboriginal-White contact, the more likely mixed blood children would be raised in the Indian community. After 1876, the increasingly restrictive clauses of the Indian Act included the children of white women who were married to registered Indians as band members, but excluded the children of Indian women who were married to white men, or to MÈtis or even to full-blooded Indians who were not registered.
Another major factor in both the development (or lack of development) of Métis identity, and in how Métis populations were treated, was the effect of the temporal and/or physical location of a given half-breed population. As we shall see, the mixed-blood populations in Acadia and New France were embroiled in a different set of historical circumstances, than were those of Sault Ste. Marie, or Red River. All of those communities fit most of the socio-economic and historical and political identifiers listed above, but only one of them is commonly identified in Canadian history today as a Métis community. The policies of British Crown toward mixed bloods differed from those of the colonial authorities and differed again among the Federal and Provincial governments after confederation. The creation of international, colonial, national, and provincial, and borders, also played a major role in how mixed-blood communities were identified and dealt with in both colonial and modern-day Canada.
Having established these rough identifiers, we can now examine some specific historic and current mixed blood communities and populations to see if and/or how they match up.
By Any Other Name - Historic and Current Mixed Blood Populations.
One final element must be noted before the history of pre-and post Red River Métis communities can be presented. The history of contact between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians is not, as most would presume, a closed book. In fact, the history of that contact is virtually continuous to the present day.
History notes that Aboriginal people in eastern Canada met their first whiteman in the 1600ís. According to one Inuk northern broadcaster, there are Inuit in the north today who have never actually seen a whiteman. For those people the history of contact is just beginning. The point to be made is that the history of contact --and the creation of Métis populations-- is an unfolding and ongoing process from east to west and from north to south in Canada. The history of the dispossession of the Acadians in 1755 later happened to the mixed bloods of Sault Ste. Marie in 1850 and still later to the MÈtis of Red River in 1870, and is now happening to the Métis of the Territories or of Labrador.
There are many differences in circumstance and specific events, and the terminology used, but the interactions and end results are startlingly similar. And we all know what the end result is -- the displacement of a mixed blood population so that a settler population can take over their assets and eventually subsume their very identity -- at least in name.
As was indicated earlier, the actual term "Métis" may not have been used by populations like the Acadians, but the pattern of their heredity and history are nearly identical, and in some cases physically related, to later populations who did use the term. I am proposing that they were Métis in fact, if not in name, and that the descendants of those communities can legitimately identify today as Métis within the meaning of Section 35(2) of the Constitution Act.
In any case, a number of identifiers have been established which can be used to locate Métis communities. A number of factors have been listed which can be used to determine how a given community was perceived by others and by itself. At this point, some of the history which served as the backdrop referred to earlier, against which identity as, and identification of, MÈtis took place, can be presented.
Almost four centuries passed between the proverbial 1492 and the established dominance of European settlement in North America in the late 1800's. It is in the later part of this 400-year period that Métis developed their cultures and indigenous relationship to the land. As contact occurred on a continental basis in the 15-1600's with increasing frequency, and since the resulting Halfbreeds married with Whites Indians and other MÈtis, the mixed blood populations mushroomed into the 1700's.
Canadians are only now becoming aware that the first attempts to colonize what is now Canada was based on an attempt to deliberately create a ìnew raceî in the so-called ìnew world.î That attempt backfired. In fact a "new" indigenous population was being created in the zone of interaction between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal societies. The process by which these population developed is one of a "founding metissage.î
In eastern areas in the 1750's only the keenest eyes could discern the mixed blood from the Indian and by 1800 in Ontario, many could not be distinguished from whites. Still others, in Sault Ste. Marie areas and in Red River, formed communities totally independent, culturally, of White and Indian alike, and often generations before White settlement was established. As often as not, they were perceived as Indians by Whites, and as Whites by Indians, and as Natives or MÈtis by their own peers.
As European "discoverers" and explorers
landed on the east coast, worked their way down the St. Lawrence, and slowly
spread southward and westward, the metissage phenomenon became a kind of
inevitable side-effect-- from the colonial point of view. From the point
of view of the groups themselves a new life in a new world was emerging
and they were the core of its development.
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