Prelude to Red River: A Social Portrait of the Great Lakes Metis

Archives of Connection

“…In particular, building on early work by the Cambridge Project of Demographic History, many social historians and ethnohistorians have used family reconstitution as a key research method (Laslett 1966;Greven 1972;Peterson 1978;Kirk 1983;Sleeper-Smith 2001). However, while family reconstitution has involved heroic labors performed in previously ignored sources, historians have often limited their analyses to discrete families, more or less.…”

Les Bois-Brûlés et le Canada français : une histoire de famille éclatée

“…Bien que Brown se soit avant tout concentrée sur les réalités métisses propres à la CBH, elle dresse toute de même de très pertinents parallèles avec la Compagnie du Nord-Ouest et sa main-d'oeuvre canadienne-française dont les enfants d'ascendance mixte seront parmi les premiers à dé-velopper une identité collective clairement distincte 55 . Pour sa part, Jacqueline Peterson 56 a défriché l'essentiel du terrain pour ceux qui, à sa suite, s'intéresseront à la naissance des identités métisses dans la région des Grands Lacs. L'une comme l'autre aura contribué à focaliser le regard des chercheurs à l'extérieur de la région de la Rivière-Rouge.…”

Documenting Historic Métis in Ontario

“…2 Although a large body of literature exists on the Métis Nation in the western provinces, there are no published case studies of historic Métis communities in the province of Ontario. A review of the literature reveals agreement among historians that a mixed European/aboriginal population grew out of the fur trade around the Great Lakes, and that descendants of this population formed the recognizable ethnic and political group of Métis that developed at Red River (Brown 1987;Foster 1995;Giraud 1986Giraud [1945; Gorham 1987;Morrison 1996;Peterson 1978Peterson , 1981Peterson , 1985Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1996). However, beyond such references to the Great Lakes mixed population, detailed published accounts of the formation and ethnogenesis of Métis communities in Ontario are lacking.…”

“…We focus particularly on the early origins of Métis in Ontario during the fur trade period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 3 This focus is influenced by two factors: First, historians and Métis researchers agree that any ethnogenesis that occurred was intimately tied to the fur trade (Burley et al 1992;Dorion and Préfontaine 1999;Giraud 1986Giraud [1945; Gorham 1987;Peterson 1978Peterson , 1985; second, it is these fur trade origins that are referred to by the Powley defense and judgments as the source of the ''historic Métis community'' at Sault Sainte Marie (Powley 1998a: 20;2001: para. 16-19;2003: 18-19).…”