Who Are the Métis Nation?

Most people in Canada have heard the word “Métis.” They might think of Louis Riel standing on a gallows, or picture a red river cart pulled across a prairie they saw in a school textbook. If you ask, “Who are the Métis Nation?”, the answer you often hear is some version of, “They are people who are part Native and part European.”

That answer sounds straightforward. It also misses the point.

It treats the Métis as a racial category, not as a people. It turns a complex history of nation‑building into a kind of blood‑quantum math. And it opens the door for anyone who discovers a distant Indigenous ancestor in a genealogy website to claim “Métis” as a personal identity.

If we want to understand who the Métis Nation are, we have to shift the question from “What is in their blood?” to “What people emerged here, in this place, and what story have they lived together?” The Métis Nation is not “any mixed person.” It is a people with its own story, rooted in a particular homeland, with its own laws, language, leaders, and relationships.

A people, not just a mix

In Canadian law, the Métis are recognized as one of the three Aboriginal peoples in section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, alongside First Nations and Inuit. That sentence often gets repeated as a formality, but it reflects something real. The Métis are not a side note. They are a constitutionally recognized Indigenous people.

Their beginnings are tied to the fur‑trade era in what was then called the North West. In the late 1700s and 1800s, First Nations women and European traders and voyageurs formed families in and around Hudson’s Bay Company and North West Company posts. Many of these families did not simply fold back into First Nations communities, and they did not become generic “settlers” either.

Over generations, they clustered in particular places. They married among each other. They developed their own ways of hunting, trading, and governing collective life. They built networks of related families that stretched along river systems and across the Plains. Children grew up not only knowing they had mixed ancestry, but knowing that they belonged to a distinct “we,” with its own leaders, stories, and obligations.

This is the difference between “mixed” as an individual characteristic and “a people” as a collective reality. A person can be mixed without belonging to the Métis Nation. The Métis Nation exists because a set of communities lived, organized, and struggled together long enough to become a people.

Homeland where the Métis Nation comes from

Another way to answer “who” is to ask “where from.” Peoples are shaped by land. Métis memory is no exception.

When we talk about the Métis Nation, we are not talking about every place in Canada where there are families with both Indigenous and non‑Indigenous ancestors. We are talking about a people whose roots are in a specific homeland in west‑central North America.

This homeland follows the fur‑trade routes and the great river systems of the interior. It includes:

• What is now Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta

• Parts of present‑day Ontario, British Columbia, and the Northwest Territories

• The northern Plains in the United States, including places like North Dakota and Montana

One of the best known centres is the Red River Settlement around present‑day Winnipeg. Red River has often been called the cradle of the Métis Nation, because of the density of Métis families there and the political role the community played in the 1800s. But it was not the only place. Métis river‑lot settlements grew along the Saskatchewan and Assiniboine rivers. Road allowance communities sprung up on the edges of towns and survey lines. Wintering camps and buffalo‑hunting bases dotted the Plains.

People often call this region the Métis Nation Homeland. It is defined less by survey maps and more by lived use. It is where Métis communities hunted, trapped, traded, held councils, buried their dead, and raised children who knew themselves as part of a Métis “us.”

This grounding in place matters. It means that “Métis Nation” is not a label that can be stretched to cover any mixed‑ancestry community anywhere. It points to a particular historical people, in a particular part of the world.

What makes the Métis Nation distinct

If you look at the story from a distance, several threads show up again and again. Together they make Métis distinctiveness easier to see.

1. Shared history and political life

The Métis did not remain on the margins of someone else’s politics. They formed their own.

In the 1800s, Métis communities organized large buffalo hunts, which required complex rules and collective decision‑making. Hunt captains were chosen. Responsibilities were divided. Sanctions were enforced when people broke agreed‑upon rules. This was not random chaos on the Plains. It was governance.

When their lands and trading routes were threatened, the Métis also acted together. They protested Hudson’s Bay Company control over trade. They challenged new settlers and surveyors. They negotiated and, when they saw no other option, they took up arms.

Two of the best known examples are the Red River Resistance of 1869 to 1870 and the North West Resistance of 1885. In both cases, Métis leaders and communities asserted their right to shape the future of their homeland, not simply to have decisions made for them from Ottawa or London. They created provisional governments, wrote lists of rights, and insisted on being treated as a political partner.

You do not do these things as a racial category. You do them as a people.

2. Culture, language, and everyday life

Like any people, the Métis developed daily practices that mark out their own way of being in the world.

Music and dance are visible examples. Fiddle tunes and Métis jigging are recognized across the Prairies. These forms carry influences from both Indigenous and European traditions, but over time have become something that is simply Métis.

Language is another marker. In many regions, Métis families speak Michif, a language that intertwines elements of Cree, French and sometimes other tongues. There is variation from community to community, but the point stands. Métis people did not just speak “broken French” or “some Cree.” They created and maintained their own language.

Dress, spiritual practices, ways of travelling and building, ways of handling conflict and making decisions, all show similar patterns. Pieces come from different sources, but over time they are woven into a Métis fabric.

3. Symbols and self‑understanding

Peoplehood lives in how people talk about themselves.

Métis communities developed and carried their own flags. They told stories about their own leaders, hunters, traders, and families. They honoured particular battles and turning points that mattered to them.

Crucially, they spoke about themselves as a nation. Not just as “mixed” individuals scattered through someone else’s country, but as a collective with its own interests and responsibilities.

Today, national and provincial Métis governments describe the Métis Nation as the Indigenous people descended from these historic Métis communities in the Homeland, who continue to see themselves and act as a distinct nation. That continuity of self‑understanding is part of what holds the people together.

Who is not included in “Métis Nation”?

All of this brings us to a harder edge in the conversation.

Because “Métis” is sometimes used casually to mean “mixed,” there is a growing tendency in some circles to treat “Métis” as a kind of open category for anyone who feels they fall between worlds, or for anyone who finds a single Indigenous ancestor in the distant past. This can feel inclusive on the surface. It is also deeply confusing.

From the perspective of Métis governments and most historians, the following holds:

• Having some Indigenous ancestry, by itself, does not make someone part of the Métis Nation.

• Métis nationhood is about belonging to the people who formed in the Métis Homeland, having roots in historic Métis communities, and being recognized as part of that collective through community and institutional processes, not just through personal declaration.

  
  

This does not deny the reality of other mixed‑ancestry families and communities elsewhere in Canada. It does not say their histories are unimportant. It says they are not automatically Métis Nation.

Being careful here is not gatekeeping for its own sake. It is a way of respecting that “Métis Nation” names a particular Indigenous people, with their own boundaries, responsibilities, and political relationships. Stretching the term to cover anyone who feels it fits them personally erases that specificity and, ironically, repeats some of the same colonial habits that treated Indigenous nations as flexible administrative labels.

Why this matters

You could ask, “Does any of this really matter, as long as people mean well?” It does.

When we see the Métis Nation as a people with a homeland, history, and political life, we can begin to see their role in shaping the Prairies and Canada. They appear as traders and intermediaries who linked Indigenous and settler economies. As buffalo hunters and community builders who lived deeply on the land. As nation‑builders who negotiated Manitoba’s entry into Confederation. As rights‑holders whose struggles continue in courts and politics today.

When we instead see them as “mixed,” we flatten that entire story into a question about ancestry. We make it harder to talk honestly about land, law, broken promises, and what it would take to repair relationships. We also risk drowning Métis voices out in a wider sea of people claiming the label for reasons that have little to do with the historic Métis Nation.

Getting this right is not about memorizing a definition. It is about learning to see a people clearly.

In the next article in this series, we will move closer to the land itself, and explore what Métis people mean when they speak of their Homeland and of the North West as a kind of mother country.