They Were Canoemen & Fur-traders
This genealogical study connects my Metis ethnic ancestry through the SOULIERE and LAROCQUE surnames.
The following historical description has been extracted from the Canadian Encyclopedia
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Métis is one of several historically
variable terms (michif, bois brûlé, chicot, halfbreed, country-born, mixed
blood) used in Canada and some parts of the northern US to describe people of
mixed North American Indian-European descent.
Definition
It is important to define specific
meanings for the term as used in this discussion, while cautioning that writers
past and present have not achieved consensus on the matter. Written with a
small m, métis is an old French word meaning “mixed,” and it is used here in a
general sense for people of dual Indian-White ancestry. Capitalized, Métis is
often used but not universally accepted as a generic term for all persons of
this biracial descent. It may variously refer to a distinctive socio cultural
heritage, a means of ethnic self-identification, and sometimes a political and
legal category, more or less narrowly defined. (For example, Alberta's Métis
Betterment Act of 1938 defined Métis as persons “of mixed white and Indian
blood having not less than one-quarter Indian blood, “not including those
people already defined under Canada's Indian Act as treaty or non-treaty
Aboriginal people.)
This complexity arises from the fact that
biological race mixture [Fr, métissage] by itself does not determine a person's
social, ethnic or political identity. Many North American Whites have some
Aboriginal ancestry, and rates of European genetic admixture among status-Aboriginal
people in eastern and central Canada range in some instances from 20% to over
40%. Biologically, métissage has gone on since earliest European contact, but
overtime and in different areas people of that ancestry have grown up and lived
out their lives in a vast variety of circumstances, leading them and their
descendants to be categorized and to classify themselves by many different
criteria.
Métis
in Atlantic Canada
On Canada's Atlantic seaboard families
and communities of mixed descent were identifiable in the 1600s, although not
classified according to race. Early and often casual unions between European
fishermen and Aboriginal women from Acadia to Labrador produced uncounted
progeny who matured as Aboriginal people among their maternal relatives. Those
among the Maliseet were known as “Malouidit” because so many of their fathers
came from St Malo on the Brittany coast of France. In Acadia, many French took
Aboriginal wives, and some communities became largely mixed. The capitaines des
sauvages who served the French governors as interpreters, intermediaries and
distributors of annual presents to the Aboriginal people were commonly of mixed
parentage.
Some such offspring were born of formal
church marriages, as Acadian families such as the Denys and d'Entremonts forged
both kinship and trading ties with the Micmac. During the 17th century, French
officials supported such marriages in hopes of better converting the Aboriginal
population and building up the population of New France. “Our young men will
marry your daughters and we shall be one people,” Samuel de Champlain
reportedly told his Aboriginal allies, and subsequent administrators continued
to encourage those mixed unions which were church-sanctified.
Problems arose, however. Both the Aboriginal
people and the French traders who sojourned among them had a distressing
tolerance for unions unblessed by Christian rite, and many Frenchmen took up
“savage” ways themselves. As New France began its second century, policy
shifted against intermarriage - reflecting, too, the increased availability of
White wives within the colony, both Filles du Roi and Aboriginal-born. The
ideal of “one people” (French, incorporating Aboriginal) faded. Countless
families, both French and Aboriginal, had become genetically mixed, but
Aboriginal communities, as such, were not assimilated. Nor did biological
métissage in eastern Canada yield a biracial population that persisted as
socioculturally or politically distinct. Indeed, despite their numbers, people
of mixed descent are difficult to identify in early records of New France; they
either remained among their mothers' kin as Aboriginal people or were baptized
with French names, and in almost all instances went on record solely as French.
The official discouraging of mixed unions
in New France was probably one among many factors that fostered the growth of
the first distinguishably Métis communities around and beyond the Great Lakes
from the 1690s on. Many men who evidently preferred the freedom and
opportunities of life in the country to the regulation of church and state in
the home colony found livelihoods at the trading and military posts that were
carrying French influence into the interior of the continent. Their Aboriginal
families, whom they might or might not legitimize in the missionaries' terms,
had formed nuclei of settlement at several dozen localities by the time of the
Conquest (1759-60). Numerous American and Canadian towns and cities (eg,
Detroit and Michilimackinac in Michigan; Sault Ste Marie in Ontario; Chicago
and Peoria in Illinois; Milwaukee, Green Bay and Prairie du Chien in Wisconsin)
had their origins in these informal biracial communities. The sizes of these
populations are sporadically reported. As of 1700 the Jesuit missionary
Étiennede Carheil was deploring the lewdness and apostasy of the hundred or
more Voyageurs and Coureurs de Bois residing with Aboriginal women around
Michilimackinac.
Carheil and other outsider-critics to the
contrary, these communities achieved a moral and social order of their own.
French Catholicism remained a part of their heritage, even if attenuated by
isolation. Aboriginal constraints also set moral limits. Unions with Aboriginal
women involved commitments to and reciprocities with Aboriginal kin and
neighbours, and earned their own descriptive term, marriage à la façon du pays,
“according to the custom of the country.” Fathers often lived out their lives
with these families, whether formally employed at the forts or subsisting as
gens libres, freemen who supplied the posts or served intermittently as guides,
interpreters or voyageurs. Game, fish, wild rice and maple sugar furnished
sustenance, supplemented by the small-scale slash-and-burn or “burnt-stump”
agriculture that may have caused Great Lakes Métis tobe labelled bois brûlés or
chicots.
The
Western Métis
While these communities were growing
during the late 1700s, a biracial population of a rather different character
was becoming noticeable to the north and west of the Great Lakes watershed.
Rupert’s Land, the region draining into Hudson Bay, was granted by Charles II
of England in 1670 for the exclusive trade of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC).
After the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 granted Hudson Bay to the British, HBC
posts there became permanent residential enclaves among the predominantly Cree
Aboriginal people, who, as “Homeguard” traders and provisioners, were basic to
the company's survival and success.
As around the Great Lakes, White women
were absent; and Aboriginal people eager to consolidate trade and friendship
offered wives to the English and Scottish traders in “the custom of the
country.” HBC employees, however, violated strict company rules if they
accepted. The HBC directors in London, strongly aware of the costs and problems
of maintaining posts so remote from their home base in so northerly an
environment, sought rigid controls on the numbers of post dependants. The need
to maintain security at the forts and to minimize expenses and sources of
friction with the Aboriginal people reinforced company concerns about
maintaining servants' celibacy and chastity and, in turn, reinforced the
employees' efforts to keep transgressions off the record. By the 1740s,
however, when officer James Isham reported that traders' Aboriginal offspring
around the posts had become “pretty numerous,” the HBC London Committee had to
acknowledge the limits of its control. By 1810 the company had given some
attention to both the responsibilities and the rewards of educating and
training these progeny into “a colony of very useful hands.”
These early Hudson's Bay offspring did
not become classed as a separate ethnic/racial entity in these years. Even if
the company could not suppress country marriages, it could and did suppress the
growth of dependent post communities and free traders by removing from the bay
all British servants who retired or were dismissed and by encouraging
Aboriginal people to disperse to their hunting grounds each winter. A very few
HBC officers' Aboriginal sons gained permission to travel to Britain; most
offspring were assimilated among the Cree Homeguard, and a few became company
servants, sometimes classed by 1800 as “Natives of Hudson's Bay” or even as
“English.”
The HBC data to 1810 show that biological
mixing in itself was insufficient to occasion Métis “ethnogenesis” - the rise
to recognition and self-consciousness of a new racial-political-cultural group.
These HBC offspring lacked the distinct community and economic base upon which
to build a separate identity. Through much of the 18th century, company rules
gave their trader-fathers good reason to be circumspect about their existence.
HBC word usage also muted their distinctiveness. It was in New France, and in
British Canada after 1763, that Métis, bois-brûlé, and later, half breed, came
into use; HBC men lacked such terms until they picked them up from the
Canadians in the early 1800s. If language is any guide to thought, perhaps HBC
writers also lacked (although they later learned) the increasingly judgemental
racial/blood consciousness shown by some of their Canadian fur trade
counterparts by the early 19th century.
Events of the late1700s and early 1800s
brought great changes for both British and Canadian fur-trade offspring. Around
the Great Lakes, Britain's conquest in 1760 of New France may have heightened a
Métis sense of separateness as the new regime intruded. The leadership of the
Montréal fur trade became British - in fact, mainly Highland Scottish, as the
North West Company (NWC) gained strength in the 1780s. Francophones whose
experience and skills continued to be basic to the trade were relegated to
lower ranks. In 1794 Jay’s Treaty fixed the United States-Canadian boundary
around the Great Lakes. In following decades, US White settlers and governments
displaced and disorganized numerous Métis communities around the lower lakes,
leading many to migrate northwest towards Minnesota and Rupert's Land.
It was in the Red River Region of
Manitoba that the Métis became conspicuous in Canadian history. By 1810 they
had established roles as buffalo hunters and provisioners to the NWC. As NWC
supply lines lengthened to Athabasca and beyond, the Red River heartland was
central to the Montréal traders. Accordingly, when in 1811 Thomas Douglas,
fifth earl of Selkirk, reached an agreement with the HBC to found the colony of
Assiniboia with a band of Scottish settlers, the Nor'Westers and their
Aboriginal-born employees and associates saw it as a direct threat to their
trade, livelihood and territorial interests.
Events of the next decade are well known:
the Pemmican War, the Seven Oaks killing of Governor Robert Semple and several
colonists in 1816, the often violent conflicts between the HBC and NWC, and the
final merger in 1821. Less recognized is the fact that each company's Red River
Colony involvement was intensified in part by the presence of its own
Aboriginal-born constituency. The growing numbers of “Hudson's Bay natives”
were a factor in the HBC decision to support the colony. Servants with
“country” wives and families lobbied for the founding of a community where they
could retire and have lands, livelihoods, schools, churches and other
amenities. The HBC itself hoped to reduce costs by relocating dependent post
populations in a place where they could become self-supporting under the
company's governance.
The Nor'Westers and their Métis
associates had a more complex relationship. The NWC claimed less control over
its Métis and freemen, many of whose biracial connections long predated its
arrival in the Northwest. In the conflict, this fact served the NWC well, for
no matter what support it actually gave to Cuthbert Grant Jr, and his Métis
cohorts, it could and did argue that these men were defending an identity and
interest of their own. Nor'Wester William McGillivray admitted in a letter of
14 March 1818 that Grant and the others were linked to the NWC by occupation
and kinship. “Yet,” he emphasized, “they one and all look upon themselves as
members of an independent tribe of natives, entitled to a property in the soil,
to a flag of their own, and to protection from the British government.”
Further, it was well proved “that the half-breeds under the denominations of
bois-brûlés and metifs [an alternate form of Métis] have formed a separate and
distinct tribe of Indians for a considerable time back.”
From 1821 to 1870 Red River's
overwhelmingly mixed-descent population continued to reflect its dual origins:
Montréal, the Great Lakes and Prairies, and the NWC; and Britain, the Orkney
Islands (a major HBC recruiting ground) and Rupert's Land. The extent to which
these subgroups were allied is debated. Some argue for their solidarity on the
basis of their numerous intermarriages, business ties, and shared involvements
in the buffalo hunt, the HBC transport brigades, and Louis Riel’s provisional
government of 1869-70. A contrary view emphasizes the split between the Roman
Catholic Francophones and the Protestant Anglophone “country-born,” as they
were sometimes known. The debate reflects in part the complexity of the
evidence and the fact that many individuals, such as members of the Alexander
Ross family, suffered ambivalence about their Aboriginal heritage and about
Métis political activism.
Whatever their internal ties and
tensions, the rapidly growing population of “half breeds” in the Northwest was,
by the 1830s, increasingly seen as a racial aggregate as racial interpretations
of human behaviour gained ground. As such, they were often stereotyped and
disparaged, as by HBC Governor George Simpsonin his characterizations of the
company's “half breed” clerks and postmasters from the mid-1820sto 1832.
Simpson showed biases that were common
among other Europeans (clergy and colonists) arriving in Red River and the
fur-trade country and among numerous scientific and popular writers of the
period; attributes of race or “blood” were linked with cultural and behavioural
traits to produce deterministic judgements that science later proved untenable.
Such views, applied to biracial groups, covered a wide range; such hybrids were
everything from “faulty stock” or a “spurious breed” to “the natural link
between civilization and barbarism,” as Alexis de Tocqueville put it in the
1830s. Daniel Wilson, writing of the Red River half breeds in 1876, moved
beyond such interpretations. Racial traits, he suggested, did not set limits to
adaptivity or potentials. Besides demonstrating “a remarkable aptitude for
self-government” in their organization of the buffalo hunt, the Métis also
showed “capacity for all the higher duties of a settled, industrious
community.”
The
Red River Provisional Government
Events from the mid-1800s onwards offered
few outlets for the qualities that Wilson perceived. The 1840s and 1850s saw Métis
challenges to the HBC trade and administrative monopoly in Red River: the trial
and freeing of trader Pierre-Guillaume Sayer in 1849, and the anti-HBC lobbying
efforts in London by Alexander Isbister. Other events soon overshadowed the HBC
question: the intensifying eastern interest in developing the West (heightened
by Henry Y. Hind’s glowing report of its agricultural potential), Confederation
and the 1870 transfer of Rupert's Land to the Canadian government. The
consequent efforts of government surveyors to map Red River without regard for
local residents' holdings touched off Louis Riel's move to establish a
provisional government in November of1869. The Canadian bargaining with Riel
led to passage of the Manitoba Act, securing the admittance of a small portion
of the present province to Canada with provincial status and, most important
for the Métis, stating that 1 400 000 acres (566 580 ha)would be allotted for
“the children of the half breeds.”
The promised land base was lost in the
next decade, however. The settlers and troops who arrived in the new province
from 1870 on were hostile to the Métis, many of whom were “beaten and outraged
by a small but noisy section” of the newcomers, according to a report by the
new governor, Adams Archibald. Métis landholders were harassed, while new laws
and amendments to the Manitoba Act undermined Métis power to fend off
speculators and new settlers. Of the approximately 10 000 persons of mixed
descent in Manitoba in 1870, two-thirds or more are estimated to have departed
in the next several years. While some went north and some south to the US, most
headed west to the Catholic mission settlements around Fort Edmonton (Lac Ste
Anne, St Albert and Lac La Biche) and to the South Saskatchewan River, where
they founded or joined St Laurent, Batoche and Duck Lake.
The
Northwest Rebellion
As they grew, several of the latter
communities sought to secure clear land titles from the Canadian government.
Lieutenant-Governor Alexander Morris thought in 1880 that the claimants' case
was clear: “They will, of course, be recognized as possessors of the soil and
confirmed by the Government in their holdings.” He urged that Métis still
depending on the buffalo hunt have land assigned to them as that resource
failed. The government ignored Métis concerns while at the same time
negotiating the major Aboriginal treaties and pre-empting land for RAILWAYS. In
deep frustration, the Saskatchewan Métis took up arms under Riel and Gabriel
Dumont in the North-West Rebellion of 1885.
Métis defeat at Batoche and the execution
of Riel set off a second dispersal, particularly to Alberta, and a renewed
weakening of their political influence and cohesiveness. Sir John A. Macdonald
in 1885 viewed them as without distinct standing: “If they are Indians, they go
with the tribe; if they are half-breeds they are whites.” Where Métis
individuals did receive land allowances (or money equivalents), they usually
were granted them in paper scrip - transferable certificates which unscrupulous
speculators often pressured them to sell cheaply on the spot (see Treaties).
The “scrip hunters” who followed the Treaty No 8 Half-Breed Commission in 1900
as it made its awards to Métis in the Dene settlements bought up many $240
scrip certificates for cash amounts of $70 to $130.
From 1885into the mid-1900s poverty,
demoralization and the opprobrium commonly attached to being “half breed” led
many people of Aboriginal descent to deny or suppress that part of their
heritage if they could. In 1896 Father Albert Lacombe, concerned for Métis
interests, founded St-Paul-des-Métis northeast of Edmonton on land furnished by
the government. For financial and other reasons, the colony failed as a formal
entity by 1908, and settlers from Québec began to dominate the area.
The
Métis Settlements
Some other developments after 1900 were
more positive, however. In 1909 the Union nationale métisse St-Joseph de
Manitoba, founded by former associates of Riel and others, began to retrieve
from Métis documents and memories their own history of the events of 1869-70
and 1885, resulting in A. H. de Tremaudan's History of the Métis Nation in
Western Canada (1936). The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of new leaders -
notably James Patrick (Jim) Brady and Malcolm Norris - who, as prairie
socialist activists built a new political and organizational base to defend
their people's interests. Many Métis and ex-treaty Aboriginal people had been
squatters on crown lands in north-central Alberta. Threatened by a federal plan
to place these lands under provincial jurisdiction, Joseph Dion and others
organized petitions and delegations to the Alberta government to seek land
title for the squatters.
After Brady and Norris joined the
movement in 1932, the first of several provincial organizations was founded -
the Métis Association of Alberta, open to all persons of Aboriginal ancestry.
Its efforts led to the appointment of the Ewing Commission to “make enquiry
into the condition of the Half-breed population of Alberta” 1934-36. Despite
reverses, the association eventually secured land for Métis settlements and
passage of the Métis Betterment Act in 1938. In the same year the Saskatchewan
Métis Society (later the Association of Métis and Non-Status Indians of
Saskatchewan) was founded.
Political
Activity
Since the mid-1960s, Métis political
activity has intensified with the founding of numerous other organizations, eg,
the Manitoba Métis Federation, the Ontario Métis and Non-Status Indian
Association, and the Louis Riel Métis Association of BC. Confronting such
issues as the federal government's White Paper of 1969 and the Constitution of
1982, Métis have repeatedly faced questions about whether to pursue their
concerns jointly with status or nonstatus Aboriginal people or through their
own channels. From 1970 to 1983 the Native Council of Canada (NCC, now the
Congress of Aboriginal Peoples) represented Métis interests on the national
level. For the 1983 First Ministers’ Conference, however, the two NCC seats
were both allocated to nonstatus Aboriginal delegates; and the Métis National
Council was formed to secure distinct Métis representation there and elsewhere.
In Manitoba the Métis have initiated legal action to pursue claims to lands
promised to them under the Manitoba Act. Nationally, the Royal Commission of
Aboriginal Peoples, established in 1991, gathered numerous reports on recent
Métis history and on the issues facing Métis history and on the issues facing
Métis peoples in the 1990s. According to the 2006 census, there are 409 065
Métis in Canada
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