Defining Métis: Catholic Missionaries and the Idea of Civilization in Northwestern Saskatchewan, 1845–1898 by Timothy P. Foran (review)

In this post Daniels v. Queen era, the concept of defining Métis continues to be important and yet tenuous. According to some estimates the number of people across Canada now self-identifying as Métis has expanded dramatically since the Supreme Court handed down its 2016 decision.

The freedom to determine whether one can rightfully identify as Métis is, unfortunately, not yet entirely in the hands of the Métis people themselves. It is into this discussion that Timothy Foran's book finds its place among the ever-increasing publications on the Métis people.

Foran's argument is that Roman Catholic missionaries assumed a critical role in conceptualizing a Métis population, a conceptualization that was subsequently adopted by the Canadian state. He supports his argument with a close study of Roman Catholic mission records of those who served the community of Île-à-la-Crosse. He argues that historians have largely accepted this record-keeping as "standardized, objective, and impersonal" (3), without acknowledging the humanity and perspectives of individual missionaries.

Because the Oblate missionaries to Île-à-la-Crosse conceived of the Métis as exhibiting "markers of a Lower Canadian paternal heritage—namely communication in a dialect of French and membership in the institutional Catholic Church" (9), the Oblates did not recognize a distinct Métis people in this region until the latter nineteenth century. Yet historians such as Brenda Macdougall argue that Métis ethnogenesis is evident in the region by the early nineteenth century.

It takes some time for Foran to articulate his primary argument. The first chapter provides a chronological history of the Roman Catholic missionary expansion from Red River into Île-à-la-Crosse (1846–66) to its eventual situation as a remote and ramshackle outpost (1867–98). The decline in the mission's status is seen as resulting from a series of crises that included fires, an overhaul of the Hudson's Bay Company (hbc) transport system, and a subsequent influx of Euro-Canadian settlers.

The second chapter focuses on Oblate perceptions of the hbc, without which mission work in the northern region would have been much hampered. Not only were the Oblates at Île-à-la-Crosse dependent on the hbc for supplies, but their evangelical activity was reliant, at least until the influx of free traders, on the long-established provisioning and trading cycles of the hbc. The subsequent decline of the hbc monopoly altered operations and trade routes, eventually engendering mistrust between the Oblates and the hbc at Île-à-la-Crosse.

In the third chapter, the author begins to examine the civilizing project of the Oblates and the Grey Nuns at Île-à-la-Crosse. Although the author notes that some researchers suggest that the Oblates were more concerned with missionary work than assimilation, he argues that the Oblates advocated total immersion in the residential school model as a way to civilize Indigenous people, a position later adopted by the Canadian government.

Primarily through a discussion of the struggle to survive as a boarding school, the narrative in this chapter is that, rather than nurture and perhaps define a Métis identity, the Oblate mission at Île-à-la-Crosse was more intent on inculcating a French identity in those they viewed as "sauvages" and "half-breeds." As a way to solicit funding, the Oblates presented the Métis as the transitional people who could be relied upon by missionaries to be a civilizing influence.

The fourth and final chapter devotes much attention to the dedication of the Oblates to learning the Indigenous languages that would facilitate proselytizing. As conditions in the district changed with the arrival of more free traders, the Cree and Chipeweyan speakers visited with less frequency, and a Métis class of people, more stationary to the mission area and more devoted to the Roman Catholic faith, emerged in the eyes of the...