num_pages: 240
description: Defining Mtis examines categories used in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Catholic missionaries to describe Indigenous people in what is now northwestern Saskatchewan. It argues that the construction and evolution of these categories reflected missionarieschanging interests and agendas. Defining Mtis sheds light on the earliest phases of Catholic missionary work among Indigenous peoples in western and northern Canada. It examines various interrelated aspects of this work including the beginnings of residential schooling transportation and communications and relations between the Church the Hudsons Bay Company and the federal government. While focusing on the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and their central mission at le--la-Crosse this study illuminates broad processes that informed Catholic missionary perceptions and impelled their evolution over a fifty-three-year period. In particular this study illuminates processes that shaped Oblate conceptions of sauvage and mtis. It does this through a qualitative analysis of documents that were produced within the Oblates institutional apparatus  official correspondence mission journals registers and published reports. Foran challenges the orthodox notion that Oblate commentators simply discovered and described a singular empirically existing and readily identifiable Mtis population. Rather he contends that Oblates played an important role in the conceptual production of les mtis.
language: English
title: Defining Métis: Catholic Missionaries and the Idea of Civilization in Northwestern Saskatchewan, 1845-1898
publisher: University of Manitoba Press