Metis Communities Research Articles

Journeying through Resilience and Transition: Exploring Substance Abuse, Mental Health, and Well-being in Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed

This research paper intensely analyses Maria’s challenges as depicted in Maria Campbell’s autobiographical Novel Halfbreed. It examines her metamorphosis from childhood to adulthood and the self-empowerment that resulted from her hardships. The article also looks at how Indigenous women have historically been marginalized and highlights Campbell’s story as an example of a young Native woman’s tenacity in Metis society. It also investigates the historical marginalization of Indigenous women and emphasizes Campbell’s narrative as a testament to the resilience of a young Native woman within the Metis community. It centers on Maria Campbell’s masterful portrayal of her journey from vulnerability to empowerment in Halfbreed. It provides insights into Campbell’s obstacles in life and how resilience enables her to respond to them with fortitude and flexibility. It discusses how mental health influences one’s thoughts, emotions, and capacity to cope with stress, highlighting its significance in fostering resilience and maintaining a sense of purpose and self-worth. The article delves into the societal implications of mental health struggles, particularly examining issues such as Xenophobia and sexism and their impact on interpersonal relationships. The article connects the protagonist’s narrative with larger societal concerns, revealing the complex relationship between mental health and systemic obstacles. It also emphasizes Campbell’s mission to highlight these issues and the need for societal transformation. It also provides valuable insights into the complex nature of mental well-being and its significant impact on both individuals and communities.

'Yvonne Boyer and Larry Chartrand; foreword by Tony Belcourt, Bead by Bead: Constitutional Rights and Metis Community'

'Yvonne Boyer and Larry Chartrand; foreword by Tony Belcourt, Bead by Bead: Constitutional Rights and Metis Community'

Fugitive Emissions of Volatile Organic Compounds from a Tailings Pond in the Oil Sands Region of Alberta.

Tailings ponds in the oil sands (OS) region in Alberta, Canada, have been associated with fugitive emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and other pollutants to the atmosphere. However, the contribution of tailings ponds to the total fugitive emissions of VOCs from OS operations remains uncertain. To address this knowledge gap, a field study was conducted in the summer of 2017 at Suncor's Pond 2/3 to estimate emissions of a suite of pollutants including 68 VOCs using a combination of micrometeorological methods and measurements from a flux tower. The results indicate that in 2017, Pond 2/3 was an emission source of 3322 ± 727 tons of VOCs including alkanes, aromatics, and oxygenated and sulfur-containing organics. While the total VOC emissions were approximately a factor of 2 higher than those reported by Suncor, the individual VOC species emissions varied by up to a factor of 12. A chemical mass balance (CMB) receptor model was used to estimate the contribution of the tailings pond to VOC pollution events in a nearby First Nations and Metis community in Fort McKay. CMB results indicate that Suncor Pond 2/3 contributed up to 57% to the total mass of VOCs measured at Fort McKay, reinforcing the importance of accurate VOC emission estimation methods for tailings ponds.

First Nations and Metis peoples\u2019 access and equity challenges with early childhood oral health: a qualitative study

BackgroundInequities in early childhood oral health are evident amongst Indigenous peoples and communities in Manitoba, Canada. Early childhood caries (ECC) is decay in primary dentition in children under 6 years of age. A severe form of the disease occurs at a higher rate in Indigenous populations compared to the general population. ECC has been strongly associated with social determinants of health.MethodsFocus groups and sharing circles were conducted with four First Nations and Metis communities in urban and rural communities in Manitoba. There were eight groups in total of purposively sampled participants (n = 59). A grounded theory approach guided thematic analysis of audio recorded and transcribed data.ResultsIndigenous participants experienced challenges similar to those found in the general population, such as encouraging and motivating parents and caregivers to establish regular oral hygiene routines for their children. However other challenges reported, disproportionately affect Indigenous communities. These include poor access to dental care, specifically no dental offices within 1 h driving radius and not having transportation to get there. Not having evidence-based oral health information to support good oral hygiene practices, preventing parents from making the best choices of oral hygiene products and oral health behaviours for their children. Poverty and food insecurity resulting in poor nutritional choices and leading to ECC. For example, feeding children sugary foods and beverages because those are more readily avialble than healthy options. Confusing or difficult encounters with dental professionals, highlighted as a factor that can erode trust, reduce compliance and impact continued attendance at dental offices.ConclusionClosing existing early childhood oral health gaps for First Nations and Metis peoples and communities requires equity-oriented healthcare approaches to address specific problems and challenges faced by these populations. Family, community and systemic level interventions that directly implement community recommendations are needed.

Healthy Smile, Happy Child: partnering with Manitoba First Nations and Metis communities for better early childhood oral health

Indigenous populations in Canada are disproportionately affected by early childhood caries. The Healthy Smile, Happy Child initiative utilizes a community development approach to encourage community uptake of evidence-based early childhood oral health promotion strategies. Sharing circles and focus groups elicited First Nations and Metis (Indigenous peoples of mixed Indigenous-European, primarily French, ancestry) views on the challenges of keeping children caries-free. We share participants’ experiences and viewpoints on implementation research strategies, principles and protocols that are sensitive to Indigenous community-based contexts.

Water as wahkohtowin in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves

Water as wahkohtowin in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves Christina Turner (bio) Water is vital to works of Indigenous literature. This is true not only because water is a central site of colonial appropriation, subject to theft and pollution by states and corporations in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere, but because water is also the substance of connection, facilitating kinship between human beings and their other-than-human relations.1 Water’s connective capacities are especially prominent in Metis author Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 book The Marrow Thieves.2 In that text, the devastation of the world’s waterways robs most of humanity, save Indigenous peoples, of the ability to dream, triggering the reopening of residential schools. Dimaline’s characters—including her protagonist, French—spend the novel travelling north, seeking fresh water as they flee so-called school “Recruiters.” But water in this text also facilitates relationships: just as rivers link disparate places and just as freshwater lakes sustain a variety of lifeforms, waterways in Dimaline’s novel enable connections between human kin, between living beings, and between seemingly disconnected ideas. This element’s inherently connective quality means that, in Dimaline’s text, water informs the human imagination and therefore undergirds the ability to dream. Only when French understands this relationship can he help his human family defeat the Recruiters. Thus, in The Marrow Thieves, water is both the site of colonial conflict and the key to anticolonial Indigenous resurgence. In this article, I argue that water in The Marrow Thieves is best understood under the rubric of wahkohtowin, the Metis and Cree concept variably translated as “kinship,” “family,” or “relation.” This argument builds on Patrizia Zanella’s observation in a recent SAIL article that the novel’s “expansive kinship networks” and its protagonist’s “understanding of family” both resonate with the [End Page 98] concept of wahkohtowin (185). My understanding of this concept is primarily informed by scholarship in Metis studies. Within that field, wahkohtowin has been mobilized to describe the emergence of Metis collective identity: wahkohtowin frames Metis historian Brenda MacDougall’s study of the Metis community at Sakitawak in what is now northern Saskatchewan (3), and Metis scholar Adam Gaudry uses this term to describe buffalo hunt governance amongst the nascent Metis nation in the early nineteenth-century plains (78). Some of these same scholars look beyond interhuman relations to consider how wahkohtowin informs human relations with the land and its denizens. Gaudry, for example, argues that for nineteenth-century Metis, wahkohtowin encompassed “a familial connection to the environment and the sacred world . . . a sense of kinship to the land” (89). Like Gaudry, Metis anthropologist Zoë Todd focuses on wahkohtowin in the other-than-human world. But where Gaudry focuses on land, Todd looks to the waterways of the Lake Winnipeg watershed and the beings who inhabit those waterways, using wahkohtowin to articulate protocols for human–fish relations in this territory (2016, 48–49). Taken together, these analyses reveal that wahkohtowin is central to Metis collectivity writ large because wahkohtowin describes kinship between Metis people, where “people” denotes not only humans but bodies of water and the beings who subsist on or in those bodies of water. These insights suggest wahkohtowin is an apt framework for analyzing the role of water in a work of Metis literature, as I do here. Such a study is timely because, while Metis critics including Deanna Reder and Jennifer Adese have examined wahkohtowin in works of Metis literature,3 these analyses focus exclusively on interhuman relations, whereas my exploration of The Marrow Thieves will attend carefully to French’s relations with bodies of water and the other-than-human beings who rely on them. My decision to use wahkohtowin to analyze Dimaline’s novel comes from a desire to heed the call made by Adese, in a 2016 SAIL essay, to change how critics analyze works of Metis literatures. Drawing on her own biography, Adese describes “‘Métisness” as a “placeholder for a broad, meaningful, and very deep set of kinship ties, shared family and social (hi)stories, and shared geographic relations” (57), relations she also sees in Metis writing, including Herb Belcourt’s memoir Walking in the Woods...

Ségrégation, Métis et identification ethnique à travers le jumelage du recensement de 1851 et les actes d'état civil

This methodological note presents a new spatial segregation index based on neighbourhood. It makes use of nominal data from the 1851 census to estimate the degree of concentration in a mixed-ancestry population (Indigenous and non- Indigenous). The tool was developped for a study concerning the identification of a historical Metis community in the present-day Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean region in Quebec. The index sheds light on the spatial and residential behaviours of the population, and, in so doing, constitutes an indirect but precious tool for examining possible factors of identity otherwise not well documented elsewhere. Although developed in a specific context, this methodological tool has a broad range of applications.

Indigenous community members' views on silver diamine fluoride to manage early childhood caries.

Early childhood caries (ECC) continues to be the leading reason for pediatric dental surgery in Canada and is particularly prevalent among Indigenous children. Silver diamine fluoride (SDF) offers an alternative method to manage non-restoratively caries. It is important to determine Indigenous communities' views on and receptivity toward SDF. To understand Indigenous community members' views on pediatric dental surgery to treat ECC under general anesthesia (GA) and receptivity to SDF as an alternative to restorative surgery. Focus groups and sharing circles congruent with an Indigenous ways of gathering information were conducted. Three interviewers engaged eight groups of First Nation and Metis communities in three rural Indigenous communities and ne metropolitan urban setting in Manitoba, Canada. Overall, 59 individuals participated. Open coding was guided by grounded theory and further analysis using Nvivo 12 software™. Participants mean age was 35.6 years, 88 percent (52 individuals) had a least one child, and 32 percent (19 individuals) were employed. Eight themes emerged, including respondents' fear of dental surgery under GA, fear of pain after dental surgery, parents' need for more information before accepting SDF treatment, and concern about the black staining of treated lesions. Indigenous parents' acceptance of SDF as a treatment option is contingent on having more information and assurance that treatment under GA can be avoided. Understanding Indigenous parents' views may ensure better acceptance of SDF as a minimally invasive treatment option to manage ECC. A cautious and informative approach to SDF implementation in Indigenous communities is recommended.

Fort St. Joseph Revealed: The Historical Archaeology of a Fur Trading Post by Michael S. Nassaney

Book Reviews 183 of Metis identity merely to “place” would allow. Yet, according to Mackinnon, both women sought to subsume their Metisness in the public sphere, a manner of self-preservation that, she writes, continues today among the Metis. Just as the Fur Trade in the Great Lakes relied heavily on French, Metis, and Indian “kinship networks” to succeed, the same is true of the Metis communities described in this monograph. Mackinnon examines the importance played by the resilient trading families that Delorme Smith and Hardisty Lougheed belonged to. It was these families who provided the skills to perform well the duties necessary for a pioneer in isolated settings, but also skills of “leadership, diplomacy, and social convening.” (126) Those skills, Mackinnon asserts, were learned through both the European and Indigenous ancestries of these Metis women. Mackinnon’s study of the lives of two important Metis women from the late and post-Fur Trade era is also a study of the nature of Metis identity. According to Mackinnon, at times their identities relied on “cultural, adaptive, and situational survival strategies” (348) to cope with their unique Indigenous heritage, but in their public lives they were remembered mostly as Euro-North American women rather than as Metis matriarchs. This volume is a lengthy and in-depth study, well-sourced and footnoted with reliable and respected scholarly support. It benefits from numerous historic photographs of the subjects. While it is not directly related to Michigan history, the experiences of the subjects of this work bear a great deal of similarity to Michigan’s own fur-trade, Metis women such as Magdelaine LaFramboise and Agatha de LaVigne. Mackinnon’s approach that Metis culture predated Red River culture will resonate with many Great Lakes descendants of early French fur traders and their Indigenous wives. James LaForest Editor, Voyageur Heritage Press (Voyageurheritage.com) Independent Researcher Michael S. Nassaney, ed. Fort St. Joseph Revealed: The Historical Archaeology of a Fur Trading Post. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. Pp. 292. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth: $90.00. When most folks think about ongoing archaeological studies dealing with historical fortifications or towns, Plymouth Plantation, Colonial 184 The Michigan Historical Review Williamsburg/Jamestown, and Fort Michilimackinac usually come to mind. Those sites, studied since the 1950s or before, have hitherto represented the best of major, long-term professional archaeological studies of the historic colonial and frontier eras in America. Now, added to that list of uniquely important historic archaeological sites, is Michael Nassaney’s Fort St. Joseph, a predominately French eighteenth-century fur trading outpost in Southwestern Michigan. There are many aspects that make Nassaney’s study both unique and scientifically important, and three in particular stand out: the manner in which Fort St. Joseph was discovered; the cooperation and unification between an academic entity (Western Michigan University) and the city of Niles; and the awesome interplay among the populations involved that make this scientific project the success it has been and will continue to be. For more than a century, theories existed as to the location of Fort St. Joseph. Fortunately, local collectors shared finds gleaned from years of walking riverbanks, but, alas, due to the construction of a dam on the St. Joseph River, river levels heightened the depth of ground water, leading many persons—lay and professional—to conclude the site no longer existed! That is, until Nassaney, a professor of anthropology at WMU, installed a well point dewatering system to lower the ground water table, and, as they say, the rest is history. Rarely has there ever been a scientific archaeological endeavor—save perhaps Stuart Streuver’s former Koster project in Illinois—that involved and, indeed, depended on the cooperation of academics, their students, and the local citizenry to obtain the kind and type of dynamic success Nassaney and his colleagues have been able to achieve. It is truly a lesson for other academics as well as city officials and laypersons. Building on a successful mix of professionals and laypersons alike, tourism, historical interpretation, and successful academic careers have been launched—and perhaps even more importantly, the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project has contributed greatly to a better, fuller understanding of European/Native American...

Metis Pioneers: Marie Rose Delorme Smith and Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed by Doris Jeanne Mackinnon

Reviewed by: Metis Pioneers: Marie Rose Delorme Smith and Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed by Doris Jeanne Mackinnon Annabel G. LaBrecque Metis Pioneers: Marie Rose Delorme Smith and Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed. By Doris Jeanne Mackinnon. University of Alberta Press, 2018. ix + 584 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00, paper. In Metis Pioneers, Doris Jeanne Mackinnon details the role two particular Metis women played in western Canada's transitional period from the fur trade economy to sedentary agriculture and industrial capitalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marie Rose Delorme Smith and Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed were both born in 1861 to Metis and Euro-American parents who occupied influential positions in the fur trade. Mackinnon argues that Smith and Lougheed adapted the skills and kinship connections rooted in the fur trade to navigate the transition to new economies. While both women publicly fashioned themselves as Euro-American "pioneers," Mackinnon argues, Smith and Lougheed retained essential components of their experiences and identities as Metis women in order to adapt to new western societies. Underlying Smith and Lougheed's biographies is the Red River Rebellion, which Mackinnon weaves into the text without much contextualization. While Mackinnon discusses how both Metis and settler men in Smith and Lougheed's extensive kinship networks participated in the rebellion, the author does not fully explain the political and economic stakes of these events for the broader Metis community to which Smith and Lougheed were connected. Another pitfall is Mackinnon's contradictory claims about the "social capital" (xxvii) Smith and Lougheed "continued to contribute" (xxvii) to their marriages and, more broadly, post– fur trade societies. Though Mackinnon claims that this social capital was rooted in their Metis identities and connections, her sources indicate an opposite reality: that their socioeconomic authority, at least in the eyes of their (predominantly male) contemporaries, was tied primarily to the influence Smith and Lougheed's fathers enjoyed in the fur trade. To the author's credit, Mackinnon demonstrates throughout that the "social value" (338) of the labor expended by Indigenous and Metis women in fur trade economies has been inadequately documented by contemporary historical actors and historians alike, due largely to the "unidentifiable monetary value" (338) of this labor. Mackinnon makes clear that her purpose in telling the personal histories of these two Metis women is done so not in the service of either Canadian settler nor British imperial history. Rather, Metis Pioneers commemorates the two Metis women whose methods of survival in increasingly settler colonial spaces both reflected and shaped the much longer history of dynamic Metis identities and means of endurance. Metis Pioneers is an analytically sophisticated biography that succeeds in balancing local and family [End Page 325] histories with broader historical processes that both shaped and were shaped by dynamic ideas about Metis and Indigenous identities. Readers interested in Metis women's history as well as the social history of the late Canadian fur trade will find this text as engaging as it is informative. Annabel G. LaBrecque Department of History University of California, Berkeley Copyright © 2021 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Truth, respect and recognition: addressing barriers to Indigenous maternity care.

[See related article at [www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.181002][2]][2] KEY POINTS For those of us living and working in First Nations, Inuit and Metis communities, the finding of the linked research by Wall-Wieler and colleagues,[1][2] that mothers with a history of child apprehension are

Understanding indigenous strategic pragmatism: Métis engagement with extractive industry developments in the Canadian North

Although an understanding of the empowerment of indigenous communities facing extractive industrial developments is growing, most academic research still favours conventional conceptualizations of local indigenous communities as subject to circumstance and which are pushed even further to the fringes of their lands by external forces threatening to extinguish their traditional ways of life. However, this conventional understanding of industrial-indigenous relations falls short on explaining recent developments in the indigenous Metis communities of northern Alberta. Several of these indigenous communities have mobilized a variety of resources to increase their leverage and expand their rights in the midst of oil sand development. Rather than being subject to circumstance, we argue that indigenous communities often seize the moment through strategic and pragmatic engagement with their ever-changing environments. By analyzing the current mobilization of resources among three indigenous Métis communities in the regional municipality of Wood Buffalo, Alberta, we developed an empirically grounded framework for understanding indigenous strategic pragmatism and the output, outcomes and impact of indigenous engagement with extractive industry developments.

ALWAYS COMING HOME: METIS LEGAL UNDERSTANDINGS OF COMMUNITY AND TERRITORY

Metis ideas of territory are complex, varied and often not well understood. Metis perspectives on intersections of territory and community are likewise not appreciated by Canadian courts. This is evident in the difficulties of Metis rights claimants in British Columbia, where misconceptions about Metis history and traditional use areas have resulted in courts questioning the existence of historic Metis communities in the province. The leading case on Metis rights in Canada, R v Powley, requires claimants to prove there is a historic Metis community in an area where claimed rights are exercised. In BC, courts following Powley in three cases – R v Howse, R v Nunn and R v Willison – have held there are no historic Metis communities in the Kootenays, the south Okanagan, or the Kamloops/Shuswap area. Although these regions comprise only a portion of lands within provincial boundaries, the BC government takes the position there are no Metis communities in the province capable of meeting the Powley test, and thus asserts there can be no Metis Aboriginal rights holders in BC.
 To challenge this position, and in order to illustrate the multiplicity and richness of Metis legal understandings of territory and community, the author braids family history, narrative, legal analysis and the perspectives of 23 Metis people from the southern BC interior who were involved in or affected by the Howse, Nunn and Willison cases. The author suggests that expansive and nuanced Metis understandings of communities and territories cannot be encompassed by the Powley/Willison definition of a Metis community as “... a group of Métis with a distinctive collective identity, living together in the same geographic area and sharing a common way of life”. While the court’s definition posits history, territory and community as separable, Metis views suggest these concepts are interlinked and mutually constitutive.

Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People by Michel Hogue

Reviewed by: Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People by Michel Hogue Elliot Worsfold Michel Hogue. Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People. Regina: University of Regina Press, 2015. 328 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95 sc. Michel Hogue successfully applies the framework of borderlands history to the experiences of the Plains Metis in his monograph Metis and the Medicine Line. Hogue's study examines the communities of mobile Plains Metis along the emerging American-Canadian border from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries. The book is largely dived into two parts. The first part of the book, chapters one through four, establishes the Plains Metis clearly as a borderland people. Metis communities existed on both sides of the Canadian-American border and the Plains Metis used this fact to their advantage during the mid and late 19th century. For example, the Plains Metis skillfully crossed the border to illegally sell liquor and weapons to Indigenous peoples in Montana and subsequently moved across the border into Canadian territory where they could escape the legal persecution. While Metis traders used the border to their economic advantage, other Metis actually helped Canadian and American officials solidify the border. Hogue describes how the Plains Metis helped government surveyors establish the border by acting as interpreters, offered their geographic knowledge of the area, and kept the surveyors supplied and housed. By providing these services, the Plains Metis "shaped the way that federal actors saw the borderlands" (94). In this sense, Hogue shows how the Plains Metis both exploited and created the Canadian-American border during its formative years. The second part of the book, chapters four and five, chronicle how a militarized border and strict legal definitions of nationality and race started to complicate the borderland lifestyles of the Plains Metis in the late 1870s and beyond. Specifically, ideas of citizenship and race along the border started to pose barriers to Metis land [End Page 128] ownership and politics. Plains Metis in the United States found themselves increasingly labeled as "foreigners" or "British" by a hostile American government and thus found it difficult to voice their political concerns, as they were not truly considered American citizens. Yet these same communities of Metis found it difficult to obtain land scrip in Canada because of their occasional American residency. Race equally complicated the ability of Plains Metis people to secure greater rights. Both American and Canadian government officials enacted "laws and practices [that] increasingly slotted the Plains Metis into the binary categories of white or Indian" that served to erode their land claims (229). While the more recent literature on Metis scholarship may initially take issue with Hogue's emphasis on the Metis's "mixed" racial ancestry, he is careful to note that these were the views of white policymakers at the time, and not his own. In fact, Hogue provides several examples of instances where Metis challenged American and Canadian lawmakers based on their Indigenous heritage and their rights as a distinct people. For instance, he describes the advocacy work of Alfred Larocque, who alongside seventy-four other Metis families petitioned for scrip in Canada on the basis of their "Indian blood and their birth in and occupation of lands within the North-West" (199). Hogue's emphasis on Metis activism guarantees that readers never lose sight of the fact that government agents placed racialized and national labels on the Metis, despite advocating for their own sense of nationhood. Hogue's discussion of borderlands and race ensures Metis and the Medicine Line will be useful for readers of Canadian Ethnic Studies even if they do not specifically study the Metis. In particular, scholars of the American and Canadian West will appreciate Hogue's ability to challenge national narratives in favour of showing many voices and people who inhabited this region. Hogue writes that "As a framework, the idea of the borderlands allows us to reimagine the northern Plains as a place of multiple, layered, and conflicted claims to territory" (5). Indeed, Hogue demonstrates that Americans, Canadians, Plains Metis, Assiniboine, and several other Indigenous nations all competed to assert their claims to this space. By...

TOWARD A SHIFT IN EXPECTATIONS AND VALUES: WHAT WE’VE LEARNED FROM COLLABORATIVE ACTION RESEARCH IN NORTHERN INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES

In this paper we propose that collaborative action research values, goals and practices have much in common with guiding principles for conducting research with educators and community members in First Nation, Inuit and Metis communities, as outlined in the Task Force on Aboriginal Languages and Cultures on Aboriginal Languages and Cultures’ (2005) document. We draw on experiences in the Northern Oral Language and Writing through Play Partnership project to make our case, and conclude by identifying needed shifts in expectations and values within the broader academic community for conducting educational research in Indigenous communities.

Łeghágots'enetę (learning together): the importance of indigenous perspectives in the identification of biological variation

Using multiple knowledge sources to interpret patterns of biodiversity can generate the comprehensive species characterizations that are required for effective conservation strategies. Caribou (Rangifer tarandus) display substantial intraspecific variation across their distribution and in the Sahtu Region of the Northwest Territories, Canada, three caribou types, each with a different conservation status, co-occur. Caribou are essential to the economies, culture, and livelihoods of northern indigenous peoples. Indigenous communities across the north are insisting that caribou research be community-driven and collaborative. In response to questions that arose through dialogue with five Sahtu Dene and Metis communities, we jointly developed a research approach to understand caribou differentiation and population structure. Our goal was to examine caribou variation through analysis of population genetics and an exploration of the relationships Dene and Metis people establish with animals within bioculturally diverse systems. To cultivate a research environment that supported legha gots'enete “learning together” we collaborated with Ɂehdzo Got'i ne (Renewable Resources Councils), elders, and an advisory group. Dene knowledge and categorization systems include a comprehensive understanding of the origin, behaviors, dynamic interactions, and spatial structure of caribou. Dene people classify to dzi “boreal woodland caribou” based on unique behaviors, habitat preferences, and morphology that differ from ɂekwe “barren-ground” or shuhta ɂepe “mountain” caribou. Similarly, genetic analysis of material (microsatellites and mitochondrial DNA) from caribou fecal pellets, collected in collaboration with community members during the winter, provided additional evidence for population differentiation that corresponded to the caribou types recognized by Dene people and produced insights into the evolutionary histories that contribute to the various forms. We developed culturally respectful and relevant descriptions of caribou variation through partnerships that respect the lives and experiences of people that depend on the land. By prioritizing mutual learning, researchers can broaden their understanding of biodiversity and establish a common language for collaboration.

Communicating Risk to Aboriginal Peoples: First Nations and Metis Responses to H1N1 Risk Messages

Developing appropriate risk messages during challenging situations like public health outbreaks is complicated. The focus of this paper is on how First Nations and Metis people in Manitoba, Canada, responded to the public health management of pandemic H1N1, using a focus group methodology (n = 23 focus groups). Focus group conversations explored participant reactions to messaging regarding the identification of H1N1 virus risk groups, the H1N1 vaccine and how priority groups to receive the vaccine were established. To better contextualize the intentions of public health professionals, key informant interviews (n = 20) were conducted with different health decision makers (e.g., public health officials, people responsible for communications, representatives from some First Nations and Metis self-governing organizations). While risk communication practice has improved, ‘one size’ messaging campaigns do not work effectively, particularly when communicating about who is most ‘at-risk’. Public health agencies need to pay more attention to the specific socio-economic, historical and cultural contexts of First Nations and Metis citizens when planning for, communicating and managing responses associated with pandemic outbreaks to better tailor both the messages and delivery. More attention is needed to directly engage First Nations and Metis communities in the development and dissemination of risk messaging.

Don’t Tell Us Who We Are (Not): Reflections on Métis Identity

After having messed up Indian and Inuit identity for over 140 years, the federal government passed Bill C-3 in 2010 (with Royal Assent in 2011), yet another inadequate amendment to address gender inequity in the membership provisions of the Indian Act. Now, the federal government proposes to study and regulate Metis identity. This aim of regulating Metis identity was conveyed through suggestions that, among other things, federal agencies examine different Metis organizations for consistency of membership criteria. Despite the backpedaling of some bureaucrats and politicians when the media and the Metis National Council (MNC) asked questions, it is reasonable to read this as a government wish to standardize what it means to be Metis, and to define Metis for the purposes of policies, rights claims, and other identity claims. Having unilaterally enforced a limited vision of what it means to be “Indian,” arguably a category created by the colonial imagination, these sorcerers’ apprentices now feel compelled to expand their expertise to the Metis. Recognition by the state, or “status,” always has been a tool of the colonial government intended to identify a discrete community for policy attention—the ultimate objective of which was assimilation—and to limit the financial liability of the colonial state. Clarifying or standardizing Metis “status” is not driven by the needs or interests of Metis communities, nor is it apparently framed by international law about self-determination and Indigenous human rights. One danger of an authentication formula, designed for the purpose of colonial legal and administrative clarity, is that it would subject Metis, in all our diversity, to an external legitimation process. And, as history has shown, only some will be legitimated. Further, such a process indicates

The free people--Li gens libres: a history of the Metis community of Batoche, Saskatchewan

The free people--Li gens libres: a history of the Metis community of Batoche, Saskatchewan

Moving From Model to Application: Cultural Keystone Species and Reclamation in Fort McKay, Alberta

Abstract Located within the boreal forest of northern Alberta, the Cree, Dene and Metis community of Fort McKay lies at the center of a large-scale oil sands (bitumen) extraction area. For people who view human and environmental health as inextricably linked, the effects of developmental activities, including subsequent restoration or reclamation processes, are experienced on both social and ecological levels. Consequently, for reclamation efforts to be meaningful to local people, they must take into consideration more than ecological functionality and address the linked social factors. This paper assesses the use and value of the Cultural Keystone Species (CKS) model in the community of Fort McKay, Alberta as a mechanism to address social, ecological and spiritual values in regional land reclamation. As salient species with a defining influence on culture, CKS offer a culturally meaningful tether for communities with landscapes in transition. As part of the Fort McKay Traditional Environmental Knowledge ...