Guest Blog: Heirs of an Ambivalent Empire by Scott Berthelette

Heirs of an Ambivalent Empire by Scott Berthelette explores how French-Indigenous interactions in the Hudson Bay watershed area led to the rise of the Métis Nation. The recently-published book follows French-Canadian (Canadien) fur traders across the Northwest as they navigated relationships between sovereign Indigenous nations and the French government. Over time, the Canadien’s ties with the French colonial state became increasingly uncertain as imperial authority weakened, leading to an outcome that few could have foreseen – the emergence of a new Indigenous culture, language, people, and nation.

In his Guest Blog below, Berthelette discusses the material mixing and hybridization of French-Indigenous culture by examining written accounts by Hudson Bay Company fur traders.

Métissage, sartorial expressions, and the prehistory of the Métis Nation in the Hudson Bay Watershed

Students of Western Canadian history are familiar with the Battle of Seven Oaks (what the Red River Métis call the “Victory at Frog Plain”) where about 60 mounted and armed Métis were confronted by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) territorial governor Robert Semple and 28 men, who they soundly defeated. A series of controversial decrees from the Selkirk Settlement that forbade the export of pemmican and the hunting of buffalo from horseback had provoked the Métis into action. These decrees were meant to ensure that there were enough food supplies for the Red River Colony, but they infringed on Métis food sovereignty and their economic livelihood. Buffalo herds sustained Métis communities – food, clothing, and material for shelter – and the sale of pemmican was the backbone of their economy. Métis from all over the northwest rallied together to pushback against the pemmican proclamation and rode into battle flying their own national flag. The Victory at Frog Plain secured Métis food sovereignty and economic well-being against the unfair decrees of the HBC and the Red River Colony. As Métis lawyer and historian Jean Teillet writes, “The Victory at Frog Plain established the Bois-Brûlés as a collective of warriors and resisters against any who would interfere with their rights.”[1] Traditional Métis historiography has sometimes framed events like the Battle of Seven Oaks in 1816 as a fundamental moment that defined the contours of Métis culture, community, and nationhood in the Northwest.

Many Canadians are familiar with C.W. Jefferys watercolour “The Fight at Seven Oaks, 1816,” which depicts the opening salvos of the Battle of Frog Plain. Library and Archives Canada/1972-26-779.

However, by the time the Métis cavalrymen clashed with Governor Semple’s men at Frog Plain in 1816 they were already a well-defined group of people, a veritable nation, with a long history, culture, set of values, language, and even national flag. How then did the Métis Nation come together in the first place? What were the eighteenth-century origins of the Métis people? These are the kinds of questions my new book, Heirs of an Ambivalent Empire: French-Indigenous Relations and the Rise of the Métis in the Hudson Bay Watershed, investigates. The book is, in essence, a history of the forebearers of the Métis. To write this history, I went back to the era of New France and to the Indigenous-French relations that occurred in the Hudson Bay watershed much earlier in the eighteenth century. The French imperial projects in the Hudson Bay watershed – namely the quest for the Mer de l’Ouest – set in motion a series of cultural processes whose ultimate outcome was unintended: the birth of a new people. The prolonged history of Indigenous-French trade, diplomacy, and cultural exchange in the Northwest would see the emergence of a Métis culture, language, people, and nation. Therefore, I began to envision an alternative trajectory for Métis peoplehood in the Northwest, one that recognizes that the preceding relationships between Indigenous women and French men in the eighteenth century as a salient part of the Métis story. These Indigenous-French marriages gave rise to what some historians have dubbed the “Plains Métis,” who practiced a syncretic form of Catholicism, spoke Michif (mainly a combination of Cree and French), called themselves the “Bois-Brûlés” and declared themselves “la nouvelle nation.” Because Métis ethnogenesis revolved around female-centred family networks, the Bois-Brûlés would emerge as a new Indigenous people, whose community and kinship structures were firmly rooted in the local landscape and worldview of Indigenous women. The Métis asserted their sovereignty and group identity and situated themselves within an extensive alliance of other Indigenous peoples – their relatives the Ininiwak (Cree), Nêhiyaw (Plains Cree), Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), and Nakoda (Assiniboine).

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French explorers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers searched in vain for the Mer de l’Ouest, a vast inland sea supposedly located in the middle latitudes of North America meant to provide a passageway to the Pacific Ocean. One such explorer was Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye, an officer from the Compagnies Franches de la Marine, who searched for the Mer de l’Ouest in the 1730s and 1740s. La Vérendrye was an explorer and key figure in the French colonial history of western North America, and his reputation as an explorer is remembered in Northern Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Minnesota, and North Dakota, a fact which has often precluded other aspects of Indigenous-French relations in those regions. When La Vérendrye set out from Montreal to search for the Mer de l’Ouest he brought with him hundreds of fur traders, soldiers, and voyageurs to the Hudson Bay watershed. To tell the story of the origins of the Métis nation then, I would have to examine the lives of these ordinary or everyday Frenchmen and French-Canadians – the voyageurs, soldiers, fur traders – as well as the Indigenous peoples they interacted with. Importantly, these Indigenous-French interactions and relations prefigured the rise of the Métis people.

The French search for the chimerical Mer de l’Ouest brought hundreds of French-Canadians to the Hudson Bay watershed, who eventually formed close (sometimes familial) relationships with the region’s Indigenous inhabitants. BnF, département Cartes et plans, Philippe Buache and Guillaume Delisle, “Essai d’une carte que Mr. Guillaume Delisle… avoit joint à son mémoire présenté à la cour en 1717 sur la mer de l’Ouest,” 1752.

The Hudson Bay watershed was a truly unique contact zone in comparison to other regions of North America – like the Great Lakes, Illinois Country, and Louisiana – because over the long term the cultural brokers’ descendants became a part of a ‘new’ Indigenous people. There were many ingredients, but a principal factor is what I refer to as métissage (hybridity). By using the term métissage I refer to not just an ethnic mixing but also cultural mixing and hybridization. In the Hudson Bay watershed, French-Indigenous cultural métissage was centred on many processes, including material culture and sartorial expression, religion and spiritual ceremonies, and language acquisition. So, in other words, during this French period under colonial officers like La Vérendrye, the important groundwork was being laid for an eventual Métis culture and nation to come into being. A lot of what we know about French-Indigenous métissage in the Hudson Bay watershed comes from the writings of HBC fur traders who moved inland from the Bay starting in the 1750s. For today’s blog post, I will be focusing specifically on what I call sartorial métissage as seen through the eyes of HBC traders.

HBC post journals and travelogues (like this one) provide much (and sometimes the only) information on the activities of French-Canadians and their Indigenous relatives in the Hudson Bay watershed during this pivotal period. HBCA, B.198/a/10, Severn post journal, William Tomison, ‘Observations of a Journey Inland to the Great Lake Performed by William Tomison Steward at Severn House Mr. Andrew Graham Master From June 16th, 1767 to June 30th, 1768.’

When William Tomison, an HBC servant, first met a French-Canadian trader named François Jérôme dit Latour on Lake Winnipeg he was travelling with his Cree wife, their children, ten French-Canadian voyageurs, and fourteen Crees relatives, all in six large canoes. Tomison remarked that Jérôme was wearing a loose-hanging ruffled shirt, a capote (a long coat with a hood), and a long pair of trousers without stockings or shoes.[2] Like his Cree partners, Jérôme was dressed for practicality and travel. Tomison was not the only HBC trader who remarked on the dress of French-Canadian traders who were acclimatising to the Indigenous societies and environments of the Hudson Bay watershed. A few years earlier, Anthony Henday, an HBC labourer and net-maker, remarked on how the French-Canadian traders of the Saskatchewan River valley dressed expressing his surprise at how one French trader was “dressed very genteel yesterday, but to day he is dressed like the natives excepting his white ruffled shirt, silk handkerchief tied round his head and laced hat.”^[3] In another instances, Henday observed that the French-Canadians “wore nothing but thin drawers, and striped cotton shirts ruffled at hand and breast.”^[4] As historians Timothy J. Shannon and Sophie White have demonstrated, sartorial expressions of “cultural cross-dressing” fundamentally mediated encounters between Europeans and First Nations.^[5] In other words, dress and clothing could serve as symbolic cross-cultural expressions that helped Natives and newcomers find common cultural meanings.

Sometimes, “cultural cross-dressers” were not always necessarily seeking mutual understanding; sometimes, they were simply looking for expedient adaptations to the local environment of the Northwest. French-Canadian voyageurs, for example, dressed primarily for the constraints of long-distance canoe, adapting their clothing to the requirements of strenuous paddling and portaging. During the summer, most French-Canadians went about wearing only an oversized linen shirt that fell to the knees and a brayet (breechcloth) in order to alleviate the intense heat. One observer wrote that French-Canadians, when paddling and portaging canoes, “are generally barefooted and barelegged, wearing only their shirts.”[6] Another remarked that, “when the French are travelling about in this country, they are generally dressed like the natives; they wear then no trousers.”[7] Inversely, Indigenous peoples often traded their animal skins for woollen or linen garments and fabrics, which not only dried much faster than furs but could also be dyed with a variety of coloured pigments. One eighteenth-century observer noted that “a great number of the natives … had already begun to dress like the French: the same kind of jacket and vest, while on journeys they wore the same red cap or hat.”[8] According to fur trade historian Susan Sleeper-Smith, ready-made clothing, bolt cloth, blankets, and the items to transform cloth into clothing – scissors, thread, pins, and needles – became the most desirable trade items, constituting 60 per cent of merchandise exchanged in the fur trade.[9] Ultimately, these sartorial expressions helped to create somewhat of a cross-cultural “middle ground” between the French-Canadians and Indigenous peoples of the Hudson Bay watershed.

Métissage – whether through sartorial expressions, religious syncretism, or linguistic proficiency – seems to have kept French-Canadians in a preferential position for diplomacy and trade in Indigenous political and commercial networks. Anthony Henday summed it up when he declared that all of the Crees he encountered while in the interior were “strongly attached to the french Interest.”^[10] The end results of these longue durée processes of métissage were familiar cultural patterns of the nineteenth century Métis Nation – a deep religiosity and reverence for Roman Catholicism intermixed with Indigenous spiritual beliefs; a cultural dress consisting of the ceinture fléchée, capote, leggings, moccasins, and floral beaded designs that reflected both French-Canadians and First Nations groups; a distinct composite language in the form of Michif based primarily on Cree, French, and Anishinaabemowin. During the 1730s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, Indigenous peoples and French-Canadians asserted separate markers of cultural identity, particularly through expressions of sartorial, spiritual, and linguistic hybridity in the Northwest, which sowed the seeds that would bear fruit for the Métis people in the coming generation.

see caption below

Take for example Peter Rindisbacher’s 1825 watercolour “A Half-caste with his Wife and Child” depicting the cultural melding that had taken place between Indigenous peoples and French-Canadians in the Northwest compared to a photograph of Charles and Joseph Riel, brothers of Louis Riel, circa 1871, which depicts the Métis traditional dress. The ceinture fléchée (“Sayncheur Flayshii”), a symbol of Métis national identity, is depicted in both images being worn the traditional way, around the waist and tied in the middle, with the fringes hanging down.

According to conventional Métis historiography, the Métis people emerged as a salient political force in the early nineteenth century following the Battle of Seven Oaks. A century-long investigation of Indigenous-French interaction in the Hudson Bay watershed demonstrates, however, that the earliest emergence of significant patterns of métissage in the Hudson Bay watershed can be traced back to at least the eighteenth century. Indigenous women and French-Canadian fur traders and voyageurs, who would never have thought of themselves as Métis, nevertheless played important roles as progenitors of the Métis people. A dynamic Métis world was emerging from the vestiges of New France’s imperial projects in the Hudson Bay watershed. They were the heirs of what had been an ambivalent and failed French empire in the Northwest. Female-centred Indigenous kin networks constituted the centripetal force that incorporated outsider males into a distinct regional and cultural world view rooted in family obligations, responsibility, and relatedness. The union of these Indigenous women and French-Canadians gave rise to what Métis historian Brenda Macdougall has dubbed the “proto-generation,” children who took their fathers’ last names but resided in the homelands of their mothers’ families, eventually intermarrying with each other and developing a sense of peoplehood and claiming a homeland.[11] Their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren married each other to form new and distinct communities and kin networks, slowly moved onto the northern Great Plains, and gradually developed a unique sense of themselves as totally separate from other European or Indigenous communities in the Hudson Bay watershed. They were multilingual, great horsemen, expert buffalo hunters, acted as important cultural brokers between European and Indigenous societies, and dominated the trade in buffalo hides and pemmican. The Métis had come into their own and formed a homeland in the Northwest.

Scott Berthelette is Red River Métis, a member of the Manitoba Métis Federation, and assistant professor in the Department of History at Queen’s University.

[1] Jean Teillet, The North-West Is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel’s People, the Metis Nation (Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2019), 68.

[2] HBCA, B.198/a/10, Severn post journal, William Tomison, ‘Observations of a Journey Inland to the Great Lake Performed by William Tomison Steward at Severn House Mr. Andrew Graham Master From June 16^th, 1767 to June 30^th, 1768.’

[3] Barbara Belyea, Anthony Henday, A Year Inland: The Journal of a Hudson’s Bay Company Winterer (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000), 189.

[4] Belyea, A Year Inland, 189.

[5] Timothy J. Shannon, “Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick, William Johnson, and the Indian Fashion,” William and Mary Quarterly Third Series, 53 (1996): 13-42; Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 1-20.

[6] Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, “The Memoir of Lamothe Cadillac,” in The Western Country in the 17th Century: The Memoirs of Lamothe Cadillac and Pierre Liette, ed., Milo Milton Quaife (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1947), 16.

[7] Pehr Kalm, The America of 1750: Peter Kalm’s travels in North America, Volume 2 ed. Adolph B. Benson (New York, Dover Publications, 1964), 473-475, 534-535.

[8] Kalm, The America of 1750, 560.

[9] Sleeper-Smith, Indigenous Prosperity, 163-174.

^[10] Belyea, A Year Inland, 63.

[11] Brenda Macdougall, One of the Family: Métis Culture in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Saskatchewan (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 17-20.