Still hiding in plain sight?: Historiography and Métis archival memory

Abstract

This paper examines how the practices of professional and non‐professional historians helped to create a particular vision of the Métis past. It suggests that the archives that scholars have generally relied upon to craft their histories have overdetermined the form and content of Métis histories and have created a truncated view of Métis history that ends abruptly in the late 19th century. While this failure to address 20th‐century Métis history is rooted, in part, in the history of dispossession and economic marginalization and Métis experiences with Canadian colonialism, it also emerges from the tendency within the historical profession to overlook Métis historical labor and the histories produced outside the academy. The resulting void in the scholarly literature regarding the daily lives and the networks of social relations that have sustained Métis communities in the 20th century have severed Métis history from the intellectual and cultural life of present‐day Métis communities.

“The Forgotten People:” Analyzing the Invisible, Intersectional Discrimination Against Metis Women

“…Some scholars have examined the invisibility of Metis history. For example, Michel Hogue analyzes how historians often overlook Metis historical labor and the impact they made on the development of Canadian society, which undermine the perceived importance of the Metis past (Hogue, 2020). However, Hogue does not address Historically, the term Metis was only used to refer to people with mixed Indian and French ancestry.…”