From "One Nation" in the Northeast to "New Nation" in the Northwest: A Look at the Emergence of the Metis

The mixing of the races, as the cliche would have it, began in North America as soon as Europeans and Amerindians met; it was another manifestation of a universal phenomenon that was re-experienced under the particular conditions of the New World. But the universality of the event in its biological sense was not matched by a corresponding generality in its social and political aspects. In this regard, racial intermixing was as individual as the societies experiencing it. In the New World, such powers as Portugal and Spain accepted it as an inevitable consequence of colonization and sought to deal with it by integration and assimilation. France also sought to assimilate Amerindians, but added her own dimension by trying to use racial intermixing as an instrument of empire. In so doing, she unwittingly helped to prepare the way for a phenomenon which she not only did not want, but would have disapproved of thoroughly: that is, the development, among the Metis of the Canadian Northwest, of the sense of a separate identity, the spirit of the "New Nation." Although in Canada today, the Metis are identified with the West, specifically with the three prairie provinces (Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta), it is doubtful that there was any more mixing of the races, in a biological sense, in those regions than in the East or on the West Coast. In fact, the reverse may well be true, at least as far as the East is concerned; Jacques Rousseau, eminent Quebec biologist, claimed in 1970 that 40% of French-Canadians could find at least one Amerindian in their family trees. What did not occur on either coast or in the St. Lawrence Valley was the emergence of a clearly defined sense of separate identity, of a "New Nation." In comparing the Metis of the Northwest with those of the Northwest (principally Red River, but also Hudson Bay and the Great Lakes), the question immediately presents itself: why did a "New Nation" arise in the latter region but not in the former? And why do we never hear of the Metis on the West Coast? For that matter, why do we practically never hear of Metis in the Northeast?