(Re)mapping Métis Relationships in Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild

(Re)mapping Métis Relationships in Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild Erin Akerman (bio) and Kristina Bidwell (bio) Cherie dimaline’s 2019 novel, Empire of Wild, is a fictionalized depiction of her own Métis community and intervenes in debates about their relationship to the Métis Homeland. Since this community is often misunderstood within academic and political discourses, we begin with a brief summary of its history. Empire of Wild’s village of Arcand is based on Lafontaine, Ontario, the current geographic centre of a Métis community that was relocated several times to various locations on Lake Huron by the British and American administrations around the turn of the nineteenth century.1 At the time of these relocations, the heritage of the community was largely Anishnaabe2 and French (Travers 219), although their ancestors also included Indigenous people from Red River as well as other First Nations people and settlers of various nationalities and ethnicities who had, over time, cohered into a distinct community linked by a web of kinship connections and family solidarities as well as shared lands and End Page 29 historical experiences (see “The List of the Drummond Island Voyageurs” in Osborne). They spoke mainly Anishnaabemowin and French and often made a living in the fur trade and as guides and voyageurs on the Great Lakes (Travers 224, 230, 232).3 The community was moved from Mackinaw Island (currently called Mackinac Island) in what is now Michigan to St Joseph Island, Upper Canada, in 1796 after the American Revolution and the signing of the 1794 Jay Treaty (Osborne 123). At the commencement of the War of 1812, the Métis helped to recapture Mackinaw Island, after which many of them returned to their former home (“Fort Mackinac”). They were again forced to cede the island to the United States in the wake of the 1814 Treaty of Ghent (“Fort Mackinac”). Since the fort on St Joseph Island had been destroyed during the war, the Métis were moved to Drummond Island in Upper Canada (“Fort Mackinac”). In the 1820s, the British and American governments redrew the border between Upper Canada and the United States so that Drummond Island then fell within American territory. Consequently, in 1828, the Drummond Island Métis were once again relocated, this time far across Lake Huron to Penetanguishene on Georgian Bay, “receiving lots small parcels of land as compensation for their losses” (Travers 226). Despite this coerced migration, the community demonstrated continuity and self-determination by reproducing their social relations in their new home. After they were allocated small parcels of land across Penetanguishene Bay, largely in what is now called Lafontaine (226), community members sought to re-root themselves by choosing lots near one another (A. F. Hunter cited in Travers 226), “marrying within their own community” (Travers 233), advocating for themselves as an Indigenous community to the colonial government (Marchand, From 61), and continuing to occupy “much the same location as the allocations of the first lots” when the 1901 census was conducted about seventy years later (Travers 226). This community is now called the Georgian Bay Métis Community and is represented by the Métis Nation of Ontario (mno) and the Métis National Council (mnc).4 End Page 30 The Georgian Bay Métis Community’s identification as “Métis,” however, has recently become contentious. As part of a movement to define the Métis Homeland as centred on the historic Red River community, the Manitoba Métis Federation (mmf) now claims that the Georgian Bay Métis Community and other mno communities are not Métis, despite their citizens’ inclusion within the mnc for decades. mmf President David Chartrand has starkly said about these communities, “They don’t have no connection to us” (Monkman).5 This exclusion of mno communities has been opposed by the Métis Nations of Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, and, as a result, the mmf withdrew from the mnc in 2021. Dimaline seems to acknowledge these debates about Métis identity in Empire of Wild when her narrator initially describes the Indigenous community who relocated to Lafontaine/Arcand as made up of “halfbreeds … and...