From: "Elizabeth B. Pollard" <beaver.cs.washington.edu!gnosys!asnuah.asn.net!UAHEBP01>
Subject: Re: Life and what it means to be of Metis status.
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1992 17:12:00 GMT

Original-Sender: "Elizabeth B. Pollard" <asnuah.asn.net!UAHEBP01>

Subj:  Life and what it means to be of Metis status

Original-Sender: geezer@skyview.bison.mb.ca (Geezer)

< My question is: What does it mean to be Metis? My friend threw me a
< curve when he said, "Metis people don't know which way to go!" Is
< this true?

Metis is French for "mixed," like the Spanish *mestizo*. There is a
suggestion of the origin of the Metis in an article by W. A. Sloan,
"The Native Response to the Extension of the European Traders into
the Athabasca and Mackenzie Basin, 1770-1814," *Canadian Historical
Review*, vol. 60, No. 3 (1979): 281-299. After discussing how the
Cree and Chipewyan (a Dene group) acquired the bulk of the trade in
furs in the 1770s through the 1790s, Sloan notes (pp. 291-292) that
Alexander Mackenzie reported that the Chipewyan expected to be
treated to a drink of rum when they had completed a transaction with
the French Canadian traders of the North West Company. Only those
Chipewyan who had frequent contact with the Cree were inclined to
barter for liquor on any other occasion. This meant that the French
traders could not ply the Chipewyan with liquor to persuade them to
trade their furs or dried meat and fish.

The Indians were not paid in cash, but by a revolving credit system.
Hard bargaining infuriated the French traders of the North West
Company. The brigade commanders seized the wives and daughters of
those men who could not pay their debts and sold them to their men
for 500 to 2,000 livres each. They were often not satisfied with
taking a woman, but also took the Indian's tent and gun. Any Chipewyan
who resisted was severely beaten. This treatment apparently worked
well to persuade the Chipewyan to keep the French traders with furs
and provisions until the Hudson's Bay Company took over the fur trade
on the upper Mackenzie River in 1816. The Chipewyan received rela-
tively moderate treatment from the its agents.

It has been some time since I looked at Richard Slobodin's *Metis of
the Mackenzie District*, Ottawa: Canadian Research Centre for Anthro-
pology, University of St. Paul. What I remember is that the children
of Indian mothers and French Canadian fathers were an embarrassment to
the Indian groups and became outcasts. Neither did they have access to
full membership in Euro-Canadian society. They organized in longhouse
communities and matrilineal clans (genealogical descent traced only
from the original mothers and through their female descendants). This
residential pattern and kinship system do not exist among the Dene
and Cree, and the latter may have been adopted to avoid recognizing
relationship to the French Canadian slavemasters. The British traders
of the Hudson's Bay Company employed Iroquois warriors to extend
their influence in western Canada, and these Iroquois made it as far
west as the Blood and Piegan divisions of the Blackfeet in southern
Alberta. The Metis may have gotten the idea of longhouse villages
and matrilineal clans from them.

It appears that there are Metis in Alberta and Manitoba, which
suggests that the French traders may have seized Cree women as well,
or that the descendants of the Chipewyan slave women are well
dispersed. I have found a reference to Joe Sawchuck's *The Metis of
Manitoba: Reformulation of an Ethnic Identity. (Canadian Experience
Series). Richmond Hill, ONT: Irwin Publishing Inc., 1978. I understand
that Sawchuck is a Metis. Although I have not seen this book, the title
suggests that the Metis in Manitoba, at least, are not satisfied with
an ambiguous identity.

Grosvenor Pollard
via Elizabeth B. Pollard

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Elizabeth Pollard                        Bitnet: uahebp01@uahvax1
Systems Librarian                        Internet: uahebp01@asnuah.asn.net
University of Alabama in Huntsville     Compuserve: 72457,1560
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