It is assumed that the word Metis was used for some time, before Louis Riel, to describe people of mixed Indian and White descent. The word itself comes from the French, meaning, simply, "mixed"; or, in Spanish, it was "Mestizo". However, the first use of the word in public print comes from the pen of Louis Riel himself, from an article that was published in the Globe and Mail not long after his death. People of mixed heritage had existed from at least the mid-sixteen hundreds or nine months from the time the first white man set foot in North America.
The Algonquin tribes, especially Ojibway, called them "wissakodewinmi" meaning burnt-sticks and later Frenchified into "Bois Brule" by the French colonists. The English called the Metis "half-breed" but this was generally a misnomer as there were few Metis who were actually of pure White and pure Indian ancestry in half and half portions. In some early official accounts and reports, the Metis were referred to as "natives" to distinguish them from Indians. The racial awareness of the Metis themselves is more significant than the French or English characteristics of their European forefathers. The definition is not restricted to the physical area of Red River, either, but is developed as a living process in today's society.
The Canadian government over the years has developed a wide range of terms to describe and categorize the native peoples' populations and their descendants. Most often these terms were arrived at arbitrarily and were used to restrict the native peoples. With the introduction of the Indian Act in 1867, an act of parliament ". . . which allowed a group of bureaucrats to administer the affairs of Indians and have full control over Indians", Indians were designated as "official Indians", that is, treaty Indians or registered Indians. These were the Indians who had a band number and were on the band lists in Ottawa. Treaty Indians were registered Indians who resided in areas where treaties were entered into with the government as Opposed to those Indians who were registered in Ottawa but lived in areas where no treaty had been signed, i.e., the Northwest Territories and the Yukon.
Another group-labelling involved the non-status and enfranchised Indians. Non-status Indians were those who had lost their registered status by marriage, i.e., where an Indian woman would marry a non-registered Indian, a Metis or a white man, or the off-spring of a marriage between two non-registered Indians. Conversely, a white woman who married a registered Indian man would become a full fledged Indian woman with all the rights and privileges under the Indian Act. An enfranchised Indian was a registered Indian who, under the Indian Act, had voluntarily decided to become a white man by relinquishing his registered status in return for his share of the principal of the band funds held in trust for him by the federal government, usually a few hundred dollars. Half-breed Indians were the children of western-European and Indian parents; they could be either registered as Indians or simply as half-breeds if their fathers were white and their mothers Indian. The irony is that white women, with no native blood whatsoever, could be registered Indians and Indian people could be declared white even though they had no white parentage. The distinction between non-status Indians and Metis has always been confused, even for native people. A very recent movement in native organizations indicates a strong desire to eliminate the term non-status altogether. It remains to be seen if this movement will evolve a more equal relationship between groups presently identified as Metis and those identified as non-status. In the past it seems to have been more a question of politics at any given point in time whether or not the Metis would accept non-status Indians as equal.
The first half-breeds in the West were eastern Metis who spearheaded the movement into the Red River country. This movement took place 100 years before the white man settled and 200 years before the first white women arrived. The original Metis, having very little contact with whites, took Indian wives and by the 1 800's were able to intermarry among themselves and establish their own culture, exclusive of Indian or white.
For many years the Metis remained a distinct ethnic group identified specifically with western Canada. Although many Metis have, and do, live in the Northwestern United States, Metis have not been recognized even as an ethnic reality in American consciousness. In Canada, however, half-breed and many non-status Indians have moved toward the only recognized non-status group ... the Metis. This has provided an idendity solution for many natives who had lived for years in a limbo world outside the special status reserved for registered Indians. This represents an expanded concept of the Metis
people Û with an historical continuity borrowed from the original Metis in the West, but based on the reality of native consciousness in North America.
The term Metis then becomes as much a concept as a concrete fact and will be used in a variety of ways. The application of the term will depend on its context to clarify its meaning. Basically, Metis can be considered to be people who identify themselves as such.
In much of the early writing concerning the Metis, the people were treated simply as a colorful deviation and the human experience involved is all but lost. This oversight has filtered down to the present scholarship on the origins of the Metis. That the Metis existence is a result of human relationships and not political machinations is largely ignored by most writers. The birth of the Metis came about as a result of a "participation mystique", a desire of people wanting to get together. It had no intentional political function even though the result created political and cultural changes that played a major role in the history of Canada. Although all white historians on the subject agree with the latter idea, none have recognized the fact that the Metis today represent a new North American personality.
The best of both worlds was open to the first generation of half-breeds and they had an entre into what little frontier white culture that existed as well as direct connection to the Indian culture through the mother's line. The early Metis were both bilingual and bi-cultural and for the most part, because of sufficient isolation, were not pressured to identify with either culture. There were ready-made roles for the men as interpreters, guides, canoemen, trappers and, for those so inclined and educated, clerks or traders at the outposts. The Metis women were sought by both white and Metis alike as extremely desirable and prized mates.
The most quoted assumption with the early Metis is that the conflict between the Northwest Company and the Hudson's Bay Company created the first sense of identity among the Metis. Although this assumption will be challenged more fully later on, it should be pointed out here that the Metis were being identified as a group as early as 1670. It is safe to assume that the Metis identified themselves as a distinct group sometime before that. In fact, identity formation could be expected shortly after the first marriage between two half-breed partners, about nine
months after. For the following generation that identity would be a social reality, especially in the larger communities. Such a community was a concrete reality at Pembina in 1780.
An important fact that is all too often over-looked by even the most eminent western-Canadian historians was the emergence of the "Bois Brule" in the West as a third readily recognized lifestyle. In the East, the half-breed tended to go "native" or pass for white. It was only in the West that the "Bois Brule" offered a third choice to the two cultures around him. This came about because the "Bois Brule", as master of his world with a far superior technology in relation to his environment, became a much envied and admired role model which developed into a third social alternative.
Official recognition of the Metis as a distinct people grew in direct proportion to the economic value of their holdings to outsiders. The first recognition came as a result of their role as cultural and economic go-between for the Northwestern and Hudson's Bay companies. Although they were not actually identified as anything but half-breeds or natives until Riel, still they definitely were seen as a race apart. Early description of the Metis varied with the personal bias of the writers and ranged from glorification to disrespect.
In 1936, George Francis Gilman Stanley published his history of the Canadian west and became the one historian responsible, more than any other, for the popularity of the frontier thesis. The first assumption contained in this thesis is so logical from a European point of view that only a Metis or an Indian could begin to doubt it . . . but its rationality is precisely its weakness.
The thesis states that "both the Manitoba insurrection and the Saskatchewan rebellion were the manifestation in western Canada of the problem of the frontier, namely, the clash between primitive and civilized peoples" . . . In a slightly more chauvinistic vein he also states, "The rebellion of 1885 was the last effort of the primitive peoples in Canada to withstand the inexorable advance of white civilization". He reaches this conclusion having "studied both sides of the controversies, and endeavored to eliminate . . . all partisan or personal bias". What he eliminated in terms of bias he more than makes up for in unconscious racist attitude.
The Metis as pawn in a chess game where all the pieces are white is similar to the notion of the frontier thesis and functions
as an assumption underpinning the main theme of the frontier thesis. Quoting the Selkirk Transcript, Hudson's Bay Archives and other "unbiased sources", modern historians, including some Metis, assume that the Metis in the Red River were manipulated by the Northwest Company officials into opposing Selkirk's settlement. Even Metis writers lend credence to this distortion.
The second insidious assumption credits buffalo hunting techniques as the most significant factor in Metis life in general, and the Metis nationalism in particular. Even those few writers who discount the Metis as pawn, fall into this trap. All accounts of early Metis life contain some, often lengthy, descriptions of the buffalo hunt. The significance of the buffalo hunt in early Metis life diminishes somewhat when we find that not more than one-third of the Metis assembled for the fall hunt. This can only mean that two-thirds of the Metis were engaged in other activities. To say that the buffalo hunt was the main architect in building a sense of nationhood is absurd in the light of this understanding.
Another assumption, one that was particularly favoured by the Ontario Orangemen, was the papal conspiracy. This idea claimed that the Metis were organized and driven by the Roman Catholic Church to establish a Franco-Catholic empire in the new world. Although Riel did have a concept of a new world pope, this was 100 years after the "nation" concept was fully developed in Metis communities.
The argument against the frontier theory is quite simple and perhaps its very simplicity has served to be the major factor in its being overlooked by historians. The fact is that the Metis developed their sense of nationhood not because of white civilization or the Northwest Company or even Louis Riel. Rather, it was a natural expression of their own reality in the context of their own social development. Ironically, if read between the lines carefully enough, even those historians who have written supporting the frontier idea supply the necessary information to support the native perspective.
There is a basic bias that exists in all experience and history is particularly vulnerableÛbecause it is recorded to support the economic and social system it arises from. These same biases inevitably create radical prejudice. In the words of Carl Jung, the psychologist, the Metis "were a question mark addressed to
the world" and because they were prevented from communicating their answer, they have been dependent on the world's answer. It is important here to grasp the character of the western-European bias and how it functions. The white historians did not deliberately conspire to distort history. They were victims of their own cultural bias, which may best be explained as a way of orienting oneself to reality and also a way of excluding unwanted aspects of it.
To more fully understand this phenomenon of cultural bias one has to look at the European perception of history. Most white historians have assumed that possessiveness is a primary motivator, the territorial imperative, if you will. Land, to the white man, was to be possessed. Competition for personal gain was a life style and ego-self was the centre of all rationality. White reliance on the concept of dominance and conflict to gain status, limited only by law and then only if caught, gives rise to the notion that history is a series of social/political conflicts with winners and losers. Here we have a case where historians were only able to see reality in terms of "civilization" or, in other words, in their own limited perception of institutionalized history.
The Metis inherited from their Indian forebears a view of the universe that was opposite to that of the western-European of the 17th, 18th, and l9th centuries. The white man saw himself as fulfilling his divine destiny by exercising his "will" upon theuniverse and changing the imperfections of nature into the perfect order of rational man. The Indian saw the universe as perfection personified and sought to simply change his individual imperfections to better fit the natural order. That the Metis were aware of both views, White and Indian, had the effect of uniting both concepts. This resulted in the Metis development of "response-ability". This ability to respond was an essential survival characteristic for a people who saw land as a living reality to be shared. This view was more natural in a world that was constantly changing. It was more in keeping with the natural functions of life than the white habit of attempting to control nature.
The Metis had developed a way of life that was co-operative, rather than competitive. Co-operation as a life style meant that the "self" had to be seen as a link in the network of life. This was quite different from the European idea of "self" as a link in a chain of logical events. The Metis gained status among his peers by his ability to compromise his conflicts within the group for the greater good of the community. In other words, dissolution of conflictÛnot dominance in conflictÛwas the goal. The Metis,
rather than being limited in their pursuit of freedom by institutionalized "law", were actually liberated through their natural sense of ecological awareness. This awareness served to influence the Metis view of history as an evolutionary process, a living process, one that saw reality in terms of relationship (inevitable or otherwise) and response to environment.
The basic characteristics of the Metis life style were so alien to the European ideas that the whites coming into the area of the Red River, like Hind and Dawson, literally did not see the civilization around them. This cultural "blindness", although not intentional, nevertheless was often unconsciously exploited in favour of the viewer. The history of the Metis as recorded by white historians is filled with these"blind spots" and has served to create what might be termed the invisible Metis or, as the Metis have called themselves, "The Forgotten People".
The Webster's definition of civilization is an ideal state of human culture characterized by complete absence of barbarism and non-rational behaviour, optimum utilization of physical, cultural, spiritual and human resources and perfect adjustment of the individual within that social framework. By that definition, the Metis had existed as a civilization more than a century before the first white settlement in the West. A basic idea of this book is that the Metis were indeed civilized and that that civilization was undermined, both consciously and otherwise, by Europeans and Canadians. This was justified under a local version of manifest destiny in pre-confederation days, which expressed itself in a desire for a "KINGDOM OF CANADA". This is the challenge to white-biased history, that there was a civilization of Metis people that has not been destroyed, but rather exists today, not only among the Metis but in the mind of every Canadian whose ancestors were in North America when Riel first said, "We are Metis". To outline the development of that phenomenon is the function of the next two chapters.
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