| My surprise was not so much that Amer- icans were
asking these questions as it was that these Americans had so little awareness
of the deep roots Métis had and have in what is called the United
States today. While I was working as assistant director of research
for the the Ontario Metis and Non-Status Indian Association between 1978
and 1981 I had a staff of 12 researchers who were dumping mount- ains of
papers and documents on my desk which they had fished out of various archival
sources in Ontario.
To my own surprise a significant amount of this
data had both direct and indirect reference to Métis in the United
States. Since my job at the time was to extract data of importance
to the potential claims of Ontario Métis and Non-Status Indians,
I set most of this U.S. data aside as being relatively insignificant to
my immediate purposes.
There were three major (and many other) pieces of
work that shed light on Ameri- can Métis that crossed my desk at
the time. The first was Joseph Howardís ìStrange Empire,
Louis Riel and the Métis People.î Still one of the best
works on Riel, Howard, an American writer, pointed out that Sault Ste,
Marie (on both sides of the current border) and Pembina (in North Dakota)
were the first major Metis settle- ments before Red River and long before
they were divided by the Canada/U.S. Border.
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I was also surprised
to learn that Riel himself was an American citizen at the time he was hung.
The second was a photocopy of an old work by another
American writer, Louise Seymour Houghton, entitled ìOur Debt to
the Redman, The French Indians in the Development of the United States.î
Published in 1918, this book describes literally dozens of Métis
(her word) families who were the founders of dozens of major cities in
the U.S. Ohio Valley.
The third, and perhaps most important work, was
that edited by Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S. Brown -- The New Peoples,
Being and Becoming Métis In North America. A collection of
writings and presentations published in 1977 from a conference at the Newberry
Library in Chicago, this book provides hard data and statistics on American
Métis that simply cannot be successfully challenged.
In more recent times two more excellent books have
been published by Americans on American Métis. ìThe
Many Hands of My Relations, French and Indians on the Lower Missouri,î
by Tanis C. Thorne explores the historical Métis phenomenon in present
day South Dakota, Missouri, Ilinois, Omaha, and Louisiana. The second
book, ìChildren of the Fur Trade, Forgotten Métis of the
Pacific Northwest, by John C. Jackson explores the same phenomenon in Oregon
and the Pacific Coast of the U.S. Northwest. |
