Every Canadian knows one thing about
the Métis, that they are descended from the union of French fur traders and
Indigenous women. That bare little fact usually snoozes in the Canadian mind
for a lifetime, perhaps alongside a hazy image of Louis Riel and the factoid of
his hanging. But the Métis story deserves a fuller fleshing out, not only
because the details are interesting and, in this era of reconciliation, highly
relevant, but also because something remarkable, something uncommon, lies at
the heart of the Métis story. In the space of only two centuries, a new people
was born, a new nation, a unified society with its own language, economy and
culture. Between the early 1600s and 1800s the Métis developed from
non-existence to a golden age.
For many years no one quite
understood what was happening. Children who were born to French fur traders and
Indigenous women were regarded simply as French or Indigenous, depending on
where they lived. Those who were sent away to be raised in French settlements
were accepted there as fully French, with no special meaning attaching to their
parentage. Those who stayed with their parents in Indigenous communities were
accepted as fully Indigenous. The idea of Métis did not exist.
However, as the fur trading system
expanded further and further into the Great Lakes region, the great distances
became problematic for the fur companies. A single season was no longer
adequate to ship trade goods from headquarters in Quebec City, Montreal and
Trois-Rivières to the French and First Nations trappers. As a result, the
companies set up depots to store supplies over the winter and staffed them with
fur traders and their Indigenous wives and families. Those families living in
small, secluded depots, separated from both French and First Nations
communities, quietly, unwittingly, laid the foundations of the future Métis
nation. A new culture began to take shape, unique to the depots, primarily a
blend of French and Indigenous cultures but with the addition of distinctive new
practices. Interestingly, the depot people still did not see themselves as
having their own identity.
When the French trading system
reached beyond the Great Lakes in the late 1700s, into what was then known as
Rupert’s Land, the isolation ended and the Métis nation was born. In the open
lands of the west the depot people gathered and realized their commonality.
Rupert’s Land was English, under the governance of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
The Métis stood out distinctly because of their language, their Catholicism,
virtually every part of their culture. Their self-awakening had begun.
By about 1820 they began a period of
rapid self-development and growing self-confidence, an era they later came to
regard as their golden age. Recognizing the vast demand for pemmican to supply
the hundreds of canoe brigades fanning out across the enormous distances of
western and northern Canada, the Métis seized the opportunity and created a
powerful new economy based on the buffalo hunt. The effort of organizing hunts
on a massive scale inspired them to develop organizational skills to a high
level and to institute rules and practices that were later transferred
successfully to the military and political spheres. After a hunt, the meat was
processed into pemmican, which the Métis sold, insisting always on cash. By
refusing to accept the traditional HBC scrip, they freed themselves from the
HBC monopoly and were able to buy their trade goods more cheaply south of the
border. In an effort to protect their monopoly, the HBC issued laws and
regulations, but it had no effect on the Métis, who continued to operate as
they liked, whether as trappers, farmers or hunters. Their best years, these
years of prosperity and self-assertion, lasted until the process of
Confederation began.
The rest of Métis history is much
less upbeat. As Confederation approached, English newcomers from Ontario
arrived, greedy for land and power, hostile to the Métis, openly racist, and
ready to use fraud and violence to achieve their ends. They were largely
supported by John A. Macdonald and the central Canadian government. In less
than a generation the Métis lost their economic base and were driven off their
lands around the forks of the Red River into the outer fringes of the west.
They were hardly alone in suffering and being dispossessed during the expansion
of Canada. All Indigenous people suffered. As the “taming” of the West
continued, many of the smaller, marginalized groups, those without a clear
national identity, such as “non-status Indians,” were eventually absorbed into
the Métis nation.
The largest of these other groups
were the descendants of HBC employees, some of whom had, like French fur
traders, married Indigenous women. However, their experience was very different
from the French. Because the HBC system focused everything on the fort —
trappers came to the fort rather than the company going out to the trappers —
Indigenous women had to live in the fort with their husbands, and children were
raised in the fort, where they were given a British upbringing. But the HBC
officials brought deep-seated racist attitudes from Britain, and although the
children lived in British settlements and were raised in British ways, they
were never accepted in society, always cruelly stigmatized as “half-breeds”.
Instead of recognizing their potential and recruiting them to be valuable
employees, the HBC exploited them only as cheap labour. As their numbers grew,
they moved out of the forts and took up farming in the areas surrounding the
forts, rejected, yet always thinking of themselves as British. Thus they were
never able to develop an independent sense of identity. Eventually, however,
their position as permanent exiles became untenable, and they too merged into
the Métis nation.
The final chapters of Fred Shore’s Threads
in the Sash spell out the details of the promises made to the Métis, the
promises broken, the treaties ignored, the abuses perpetrated, the theft of
land and rights, all aimed at crushing a proud and enterprising people. It also
presents the current legal and moral case against the Canadian government and
the grounds the Métis have for seeking compensation. Starting in the late
1960s, a century after their dispossession at the Red River, the Métis have
re-awakened as a people, regrouped, reorganized, and determined a way forward
that they hope will lead to a restoration of some of their former independence.
As the largest of Canada’s Indigenous groups, numbering almost half a million,
one-third of all the Indigenous people of Canada, the Métis must arrive at a
satisfactory settlement with the rest of Canada, if Canada’s ambitious
reconciliation process is to have any chance of success.
