New Peoples, Renewed Debates

New Peoples, Renewed Debates Michel Hogue Adams, Christopher, Gregg Dahl, and Ian Peach (eds.)– Métis in Canada: History, Identity, Law & Politics. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2013. Pp. 530. Andersen, Chris– "Métis": Race, Recognition, and the Struggle for Indigenous Peoplehood. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014. Pp. 267. After years of frustrations in the courts and the hard-fought struggles by Métis political leaders to secure recognition of Métis Aboriginal rights, it would seem as though the Métis are on a winning streak of late. Although their full implications remain to be seen, the Supreme Court's 2013 decision that the federal Crown failed to implement the land grant provisions set out in the Manitoba Act and the 2014 Federal Court of Appeal ruling that the Métis fall under federal jurisdiction as defined by s. 91(24) of the British North America Act, promise to alter Métis jurisprudence. The two rulings emerged after a decade's worth of cases (especially in the area of harvesting rights) that followed the Supreme Court's landmark 2003 Powley decision. The effects of these decisions, and of the expansion in litigation more generally, are being felt in Métis scholarship. Two recent books illustrate how this swiftly changing legal landscape have injected a new urgency to recurring debates within Métis historiography, even as they chart new directions for the field. In "Métis": Race, Recognition, and the Struggle for Indigenous Peoplehood, Chris Andersen argues that this changing legal landscape and the public recognition of Métis rights is actually a miscrecognition that is based in a faulty understanding of the Métis as a hybrid offshoot of "Indian" and "white" races, rather than as an autonomous Indigenous people. The racialization of the Métis as such, and the "tethering of the term to racial understandings of mixedness," he argues, is the outgrowth of Canadian colonial policies and the administrative categories used to classify Indigenous peoples and to diminish Métis claims to indigeneity (200). According to Andersen, the conflation of "Métis" and "mixed" in the legal and popular imaginations is rooted in the racial logics that define Métis-ness solely in relation to blood and on their presumed connections to other Indigenous peoples. The implication is that what makes the Métis "Métis" is, above all, the question of their not-quite whiteness, not-quite Indianness. This is hardly accidental. The racialization of the Métis as such is inextricably bound up in the broader settler colonial projects of land-taking and the use of race as a tool to facilitate the transfer of lands and to legislate Indigenous peoples out of existence. Andersen builds his case, first, by tracing how the notion of Métis hybridity has helped sustain a racialized understanding of who is or what it means to be [End Page 289] Métis. By way of illustration, Andersen uses the shifting currents in Great Lakes ethnohistory to show how, in recent years, ethnohistorians have used the moniker to identify the people in communities in the Great Lakes and beyond. Such practices have erased the analytical distinctions between "Métis" and "métis" communities that had been common in earlier studies, and that reserved the use of capital M "Métis" for communities (like that at Red River) that evinced a contemporary self-consciousness as Métis, along with the various markers of their distinctiveness as a new people: distinctive language, dress, cosmology, artistic traditions, political organizations, and a sense of their own history. Andersen criticizes those who suggest that other communities became "Métis" by virtue of their mixed ancestry, their separation from First Nations and white communities, and, in some cases, by their self-identification as "Métis" in the more recent past. By conflating non-tribal Indigenous settlements with the social and political dynamics at Red River, he argues that these observers diminish Métis legitimacy by reducing "Métisness" to the "mere condition of mixedness" (50). Andersen then proceeds to show how these ideas have also exerted tremendous power over juridical views of Métis rights and the statistical understandings of "M...

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