Metis and the Medicine Line

Prior to 2000 historians used the term borderlands to refer to the US-Mexico border area. Since then, however, that has changed dramatically, as this study illustrates. Many borderlands historians have turned their attention north to the US-Canada boundary region. At the same time, the research focus expanded and now incorporates both transnational and comparative studies in what has become a growing and fascinating new approach to North American history. Within this field, particularly in Canadian history, the Metis peoples have attracted at least some attention for generations dating back to Marcel Giraud’s massive 1945 study. In the United States, until recently, many historians accepted the nineteenth-century pioneers’ views that the mixed-race people living in frontier communities represented a degraded and dying culture.With the new approaches to border and ethnic issues, the focus has shifted, and Metis communities and individuals now receive increasing study. Michel Hogue’s new analysis examines how Metis experiences along the forty-ninth parallel both shaped the nature of border issues and had a direct impact on the development and destruction of their mixed-race communities as they moved back and forth across the developing international border. He places their experiences clearly in a scene of “multiple-layered and conflicting claims” (5) over the land and its resources. In both countries the Metis, along with their First Nations and American Indian neighbors, faced efforts by the governments to end their claims to independence and the land.The struggle for control pitted Indigenous people on both sides of the border against national pretensions to control the region. It also placed two competing systems, the hunting-trading economy of the Metis and the settlement-based agricultural-commercial economy of the expanding settlements, on a collision course. Hogue presents these social-economic clashes as parts of both Canadian and US efforts to dominate the West and, in particular, their shared border. To do that effectively, he demonstrates convincingly how both governments enacted and implemented policies based on racial ideas that depicted the Indigenous peoples as lazy, backward, and inefficient in terms of using the land and resources. Working from that base, the invading governments could justify pushing both Native people and Metis onto ever-smaller land areas and so used the border to hinder or end seasonal migratory activities that brought people from one country to the other. Both governments used ideas about race, location, and custom in planning and rationalizing their actions.The narrative traces the central issues of creating a Metis borderland, of how economics and group sovereignty operated, of the impact of treaties and ideas about race, and of how Metis resistance, particularly in Canada, affected these developments. Hogue contrasts the experiences of Metis families on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana with those dealing with the North-West Half-Breed Scrip Commissions in Canada. The border complicated and weakened Indigenous peoples’ claims in both countries, and the author’s analysis of Antoine Ouellette’s efforts to get his Scrip claims accepted in Ottawa when he crossed the border from Montana shows clearly how boundary issues, identity, and citizenship all complicated the situation.Hogue’s study combines thorough scholarship, an awareness of recent issues in borderlands studies, and a persuasive discussion of comparative Western ethnic topics in the two nations. It blends the issues effectively and adds a fine account to the growing contributions on transnational scholarship. It will be interesting to see where his work goes from here

Archaeology · Ethnic group · Ethnology · Frontier · Genealogy · Geography · Independence (probability theory) · Indigenous · Metis · Miller · Political science · Archaeology and Natural History · Canadian Identity and History · Ecology · History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Law

• Settler geology

  Open Access•J J Schmidt•Political Geography•2020

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