Delia Hagen Page 1 9/6/2008

Nations, Migration, and Métis Subsistence Possibilities, 1860-1940 Delia Hagen, University of California at Berkeley

The following paper examines the ways imperial occupation transformed Métis peoples’

options for using their ancestral homeland in the northern Great Plains of North America. The

Métis are a racially- and ethnically-mixed indigenous nation that grew out of the sustained

intercultural contact of the fur trade. From the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth

century, indigenous societies in the American and Canadian Great Plains found themselves

inundated by a stream of non-Indian agricultural immigrants. The immigrant farmers who

flowed into the region were part of a larger process of the Canadian and American empires’

invasion of Métis’ traditional territory. The Métis had long relied on a highly mobile trapping

and trading lifestyle in order to take advantage of seasonal resources and opportunities in a vast

region stretching from the Great Lakes into the Rocky Mountains on both sides of what would

become the U. S.-Canadian border. After the US.-Canadian border bisected their homeland in

the 1870s, they continued to move through an expansive territory in order to survive. My

previous research reconstructs historical Métis migration patterns and demonstrates the

endurance of a Métis community that did not conform to spatial and social boundaries dictated

by the U.S. and Canadian empires. This paper builds on that research by exploring the multiple

and complicated ways imperial occupation transformed the possibilities for moving through and

using the Métis’ ancestral homeland.

Imperial occupation transformed the possibilities for using the Métis homeland in two

important ways. Most obviously, settler colonization and the expansion of market capitalism re-

worked the physical landscape and decimated native flora and fauna populations upon which

Métis groups had long depended. At the same time, new governmental forms engulfed their

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territory. Métis people found themselves subject to a variety of local, state, provincial, and

federal regulations that forbade their use of many of the resources that contributed to their

survival. Although Métis people often violated the rules of their colonizers, they increasingly

put themselves at risk in order to do so: their commonplace survival activities became

criminalized by colonial codes.

While some published literature has dealt with the environmental changes that

accompanied settler colonialism in North America, less has taken into account the enormous

regulatory burden that colonialism imposed on indigenous populations. In part, this

historiographical gap is the result of the fact that most studies of indigenous populations focus on

a single place. But highly mobile populations like the Métis had to contend with myriad changes

over a vast region comprising many jurisdictions. Only by following their transnational

migrations and the obstacles they encountered as they moved can we understand the full impact

of imperial occupation on indigenous survival strategies.

In the North American Great Plains, legal limitations that prohibited or impeded many

activities that could contribute to Métis survival stemmed, in large part, from how colonizing

societies defined and categorized Métis people. On both sides of the border, colonial authorities

often refused to grant Métis people membership in any of the spatial, racial, or tribal categories

into which they divided their populations. Membership in all of the categories from which the

Métis were excluded conveyed de jure and de facto rights to a variety of resources. In many

cases, exclusion from these rights-bearing categories endured well into the twentieth century,

undermining Métis people’s material well-being and impeding their efforts to maintain a stable

subsistence.

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This paper examines how this process played out in the part of Métis territory claimed by

the United States. South of the international boundary that crossed the Métis homeland,

government authorities and the non-Indian populace used several aspects of Métis history and

society to define Métis people as Canadian, non-Indian, and non-white. They focused especially

on the mobile, interracial, and intertribal aspects of Métis society in order to discursively

displace the Métis, that is, to define them as foreign. This discursive displacement underwrote a

simultaneous refusal to recognize Métis rights to American-claimed space and the resources

therein. These processes left many Métis in a legal and social limbo, in which they could claim

neither the rights of (white) American citizens, nor the rights of (federally recognized) American

Indians, nor the rights of immigrants to America. The first part of this essay will explore the

ways in which non-Indian Americans excluded Métis from these categories. The second part

will analyze the material consequences of these exclusions.

Before proceeding, an explanation of my use of language is in order. The people who are

the focus of this essay were a mixed group. Historians and others have emphasized especially

the Chippewa, Cree, French and Scottish ancestries of Métis people, but Métis groups and

individuals boasted innumerable combinations of Native American and European lineages.

Métis ethnogenesis coincided with increasing non-Indian immigration and concomitant

displacement of indigenous groups in the central and western portions of the North American

continent, and these phenomena together created a cosmopolitan society on the Great Plains by

the mid-nineteenth century. Métis people moved often and far, and groups broke apart, re-

formed, and mixed with other groups at different times in their lifecycles and at different

locations throughout the border region. In doing so they connected communities across what

became the North American West.

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To emphasize these connections, I have elected to use the word Métis when referring to

the people in this essay. I do not mean to imply that all of these people were, individually,

Métis. Nor do I mean to challenge other identities these people may have claimed, or that their

descendents may now claim. As used here, the word Métis is intended to suggest not only

individuals of mixed ancestry but also a mixed and morphous group composed of people of a

variety of backgrounds. As groups changed they took on different characters, and sometimes

they were heavily Cree, other times heavily Chippewa, other times more Métis. But they were

rarely, if ever, exclusively any one of these during the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries. While each group contained a particular mixture of people at any given moment, and

every individual in any group might claim a different ancestry, all of these groups had mixture in

common.1 Métis is therefore the best term I’ve encountered because it is the most inclusive.2

Other terms implicitly assert a tribal, racial or spatial discreteness that fails to capture the

cosmopolitan nature and shared history of nineteenth century Great Plains groups. Terms like

American Métis and Montana Métis also appear in this essay. These are meant to imply a most

expansive definition of these geographical communities, as the communities’ kinship lines,

members, and associates spread out across the border region and beyond. For instance, Montana

Métis, as used here, means Métis people with ties to the groups that spent time in Montana.

Montana and North Dakota constituted the heart of the Métis homeland in the United States.

My choice of language is, in part, an attempt to call attention to serious and persistent

deficiencies in our understanding of the history of Métis populations and the processes in which

they were involved. Much of the history of Métis people in the United States has been

misinterpreted, or missed entirely, by American historians who treat as discrete populations who

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were inextricably intertwined. Scholars’ treatment of these populations as discrete is part and

parcel of a uncritical use of primary sources. Although many sources explicitly assert both the

entangled, inseparable nature of the ancestries within Métis groups, and the confusion of

observers about individual and group identities, historians continue to repeat and adopt the labels

in the sources, such as “Canadian,” “Cree” or “Chippewa,” as though they are accurate. By

writing about intertwined populations as though they are discrete, scholars are guilty of seeing

like a state: they replicate the inaccurate and destructive social simplifications employed by

states as tools of colonialism.3 By ignoring or minimizing the ongoing connections between

different populations, historians obscure one of the important ways in which indigenous

populations resisted the order imposed upon them by colonial regimes. By refusing to recognize

and respect the racial, spatial, and tribal complexity of Métis people, scholars perpetuate the

colonial epistemes that underlay the persecution of the Métis explored in this paper.

Both the American and Canadian empires attempted to dismember the Métis community

according to maps they imposed on the lands they invaded, for the spatial racial, and tribal

complexity of Métis society violated and threatened the simplified social orders the colonial

regimes tried to create. In the United States, government officials and other contemporaries

defined the Métis in such a way as to deny them recognized membership in any of the

communities and population categories understood to have legitimate claims in and to U.S.

claimed territory. This entailed constructing the Métis as neither American, nor Indian, nor

white. The allegation that all Métis people were unambiguously Canadian seemed to be the most

pervasive and persistent of these de-legitimizing discourses. This essay will examine this

characterization of the Métis before moving to an analysis of the efforts to define them with

3 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

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regard to race and tribe. From there, the paper will explore the material consequences of each of

these discursive acts.

Making the Métis Canadian

American government agencies, and the non-Indian settlers they served, ascribed

Canadian status to Montana Métis people for a variety of reasons. Americans relied especially

on their ideas about Métis nativity, cultural attributes, historic events, and mobility to argue that

Métis should be considered Canadian. Large-scale American immigration into Métis peoples’

Great Plains homeland began in earnest in the 1860s. Thereafter, the Métis found themselves

regarded, and persecuted, “as foreigners in the territory [they] had always called, ‘home.’”4

Real and alleged place of birth figured prominently into discursive constructions of the

Métis as Canadians. The American government legislated birthright citizenship in 1868. A few

years later, in the early 1870s, surveyors plotted the U. S.-Canadian border across the Great

Plains and Rocky Mountains. The line they marked bisected the Métis homeland. This fact

allowed the United States to argue that many U.S. Métis were Canadian, not American. As

noted above, Métis people had been highly mobile for generations, and continued to be so even

after the United States and Canadian empires marked their common border and implemented

their respective sedentarization schemes. Many, if not most, American Métis families included

members who had been born on both sides of the international border.5 When it suited their

needs, colonial agents and settlers viewed birthplace as the single determinant factor in ascribing

Métis nationality. Although chance often determined where the Métis women were the moments

they bore their children, colonial authorities used the locations of those moments as a basis for

4 Ron Rivard and Catherine Littlejohn. History of the Métis of Willow Bunch [Saskatchewan]. 2003, p. 196. 5 Delia Hagen, “‘The Territory We Had Always Called Home’: Nations, Migration, and the Northern Plains Métis, 1880-1930,” unpublished paper presented at Writing New Histories of Indigineity and Imperialism: A Workshop, University of Manitoba, Winnepeg, Manitoba, May 21-23, 2008.

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denying Métis rights to reside on American-claimed soil. Authorities adhered to this birthplace

standard when it suited their purposes, and often violated it when it didn’t. Observers and

administrators frequently labeled as “Canadian” Métis people who had been born in the United

States to what they termed “Canadian parents” or “Canadian families.”6

The nature of nativity documentation abetted this discursive displacement of the

American Métis. Colonial agents privileged written records, but, in the case of the Métis, the

existent documentary record was minute and unreliable. Moreover, because the majority of the

fur trade posts that grew into Métis economic and community centers were located north of the

international boundary, written sources were predominantly Canadian in provenance and

therefore might undermine rather than undergird claims to recognition as Americans. Births

occurred often went unrecorded until parents returned to Canadian administrative centers.

Some colonial authorities recognized the absurdity of applying nativity criteria to the

Métis community. In an 1893 report to the Secretary of the Interior, the Commissioner of Indian

Affairs protested the futility of distinguishing between “Canadian” and “American” Métis in a

census at North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain Reservation, one of the two primary Métis-associated

Indian reservations in the American Great Plains. As he explained, during much of the 1800s,

while the Turtle Mountain people moved throughout the region

without any reference to an [un-surveyed and unmarked] international boundary line, their nearest church was at St. Boniface, and the nearest important trading post was at Winnipeg. Their children were in most cases baptized at St. Boniface, and nothing suggested at the time the importance of distinguishing between American nativity and British allegiance. Indeed, through the Hudson Bay Company, Great Britain had

6 See, for example, Lefort, Tilda R. application file, Box 190, Turtle Mountain, RG 75, NARA Kansas City; Langie, Mrs. Lewis application file, Box 190, Turtle Mountain, RG 75, NARA Kansas City; C. H. Asbury, Superintendent, to Addiea Brooks, Superintendent, Florence Crittendon Home, Feb. 1, 1932, Social Relations, 1932 file, Box 73, Turtle Mountain, RG 75, NARA Kansas City; James Hyde, Superintendent, Turtle Mountain Agency, to CIA, July 26, 1928, Enrollment of Citizenship, Degree of Blood, 1918-27 file, Box 58, Turtle Mountain, RG 75, NARA Kansas City.

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pushed her claims far south of the present boundary line. . . . In view of these facts it must seem superogatory to draw attention to the extreme difficulty of preparing at Turtle Mountain a census of only genuinely American Indians—Indians to whom British affiliations may not by some record or other means be ascribed, as, for example, the baptismal record at St. Boniface.7

Perhaps even more importantly, where it crossed the Great Plains (the heart of Métis

territory), the international boundary was “based on an astronomical concept instead of ‘natural

features’” like rivers, canyons, or mountains.8 Thus, prior to the international boundary survey,

“there was no telling where the precise line lay.” As iconic western author Wallace Stegner put

it, “wolfers and traders did not carry astronomical instruments.”9 Even colonizing governments

couldn’t pinpoint the limits of the territory they claimed: when surveyors reached the Red River

in September of 1872, they discovered that the Canadian custom house stood south of the

boundary line.10

The absence of an observable border was part of the reason many Métis couldn’t even

identify, much less document, where they were born. Even after the survey crews completed

their work in 1874, the line could be identified only by piles of rocks or earth placed three miles

apart. The region’s famed winds, as well as its irreverent inhabitants, soon diminished many of

these. Nativity documentation remained elusive for decades. After the OIA had ostensibly been

keeping records and producing reports on the region’s indigenous inhabitants for about 50 years, 7 CIA D. M. Browning to SOI, July 6, 1893, reprinted in S. Doc. 444, 95. Emphasis added. The OIA and congressional emphasis on Turtle Mountain nativity should be considered in the context of the open and voluminous immigration that characterized the era. Indeed, even in this larger context the Northern Plain’s white population was uniquely foreign: some 43 % of North Dakota’s 1890 population was born outside of the United States, a higher proportion than any other state in the nation at the time. See Frederick Luebke, ed., Ethnicity on the Great Plains (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), XI. The commissioner’s efforts to introduce into the census proceedings some responsiveness to the complexity of historical conditions proved fruitless. When he called attention to the misguided nature of the assignment, he was ignored and the census commission replaced. 8 Sheila MacManus, The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 9 Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier, New York: Viking Press, 1962. p. 85. 10 Stegner, Wolf Willow, p. 88.

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many individuals still remained uncertain about the details of their birth. When asked in 1929

where they were born, Métis respondents offered such vague answers as “right around here, my

father told me,” or “my father told me in this country some place, but I don’t know where. It

was on the line some place.”11 As the Superintendent of the Turtle Mountain Agency put it in

1942, “Many of the enrolled as well as the non-enrolled people here are not even able to tell

whether they were born on the north or the south side of the Canadian line.”12

American authorities also seized on the ancestries and associated cultural attributes of

U.S. Métis in their efforts to categorize, and treat, Métis as Canadian subjects. As noted above,

Métis communities had been profoundly interracial and intertribal for generations. This ongoing

syncretism was the essence, and the origin, of Métis groups. People who wanted to displace the

U.S. Métis linked elements of both their European and Native American ancestries to Canada.

They emphasized especially the French and Cree aspects of Métis communities, both of which

they construed as synonymous with Canadian.

Cree constituted one of the main Native American components of Métis society. Indeed,

Michif, the Métis language, draws predominantly on Cree verbs and French nouns, though as

spoken in different times and places it also incorporates words from Chippewa, English, Gaelic,

Assiniboine, and possibly other languages.13 Many Métis people did not consider themselves

Cree, and Métis groups and individuals boasted a dizzying array of backgrounds that defied any

single ethnic label. But Métis communities contained many Cree people and their kin, and many

Métis lived in so-called Cree communities: the two groups bled into one another across time and 11 Vague answers like these were much more common than any concrete responses as to birthplace. See Committee on Indian Affairs, Survey of Conditions of the Indians in the United States, Part 23, 12509, 12511, 12533. 12 F. W. Boyd, Superintendent, Turtle Mountain Agency, to CIA, Feb. 26, 1941, enclosing a “list of Canadian Indians on the reservation,” Indian Reorganization Enrollment, 1936-1940, Box 58, Turtle Mountain, RG 75, National Archives Central Plains Region. 13 Pauline Laverdure, Ida Allard, and John Crawford (ed.), The Michif Dictionary: Turtle Mountain Chippewa Cree (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Pemmican Publications, 1983), vii-ix. Michif is distinct from any of its parent languages and was spoken in many Métis communities throughout the Canadian and American Great Plains.

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space. Observers equated Métis with Cree. So, too, did they equate Cree with Canadian.

Although Cree people lived in and used areas south of the 49th parallel before, during, and after

widespread agricultural settlement of the region by non-Indians, “the charge was ever present—

[the Cree] are Canadian Indians with no claim to protection from the United States

government.”14 When they called “the Cree” a Canadian, not an American, tribe,

contemporaries ignored or denied the fact that Cree territory included parts of the northern

United States.

Observers’ focus on the French aspects of Métis society served to characterize the Métis

as Canadian in a similar way. At the time it colonized the Great Plains homeland of the Métis,

the United States was officially and emphatically Anglophone. Many francophone and/or

French descent people made American territory their home after the retreat of the French

Empire, but those who sought to displace the Métis conveniently disregarded this fact. They also

disregarded the many other European ancestries and influences apparent in Métis communities:

equating Métis with French rendered them foreign. As an ethnic description in the northern

Great Plains, “French Canadian” had no American counterpart. “French” or “French half-breed”

meant Canadian. As Charles Gordon, Justice of the Peace for Wolf Point, Montana, succinctly

put it in 1931 when he described the “non-reservation” Indians in his area, “many of the families

talk French. It is white mens opinion that these are ‘Canadian Breed French’.”15

14 Verne Dusenberry. The Montana Cree: A Study in Religious Persistence. Stockholm: University of Stockholm/Almquist & Wiksell, 1962. Reprint, with a foreword by Lynne Dusenberry Crow, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998, 28. Even historians who seem to be somewhat attuned to the geographic complexities of the region’s history treat the Cree as Canadian, despite the fact that the works they author make clear that Canadian/American distinctions are the product of settler, not Cree, geographies. 15 Charles Gordon, Secretary, Commercial Club of Wolf Point, to Superintendent McCullough, Fort Peck Agency, Poplar, Montana, July 14, 1931, Tribal Relations, 1948 file, Box 58, Turtle Mountain, RG 75, NARA Kansas City; Superintendent, Turtle Mountain Agency, to CIA, April 27, 1923, Mixed-bloods, 1923 file, Box 150, Turtle Mountain, RG 75, NARA Kansas City.

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Other aspects of Métis history also undergirded the suggestion that the Unites States

Métis belonged in Canada. Foremost among these were the armed conflicts between Métis

groups and the Canadian armies, known commonly as the Red River and Riel rebellions, which

occurred in 1869/1870 and in 1885. These famous conflicts placed the Métis at the center of

Canadian politics and, in observers’ eyes, linked them irretrievably to Canada.

Métis response to the rebellions also highlighted the association of the Métis with

Canada. Persecution by Canadian authorities and settlers led Métis participants and civilians

alike to retreat south of the international boundary. This movement relied on and reflected long-

standing, well-established spatial and social networks, but the fame of the rebellions

overshadowed the more mundane historic context of the refugees’ flight. The earlier, ongoing

movements were thus effectively erased in the eyes of American colonizers, and the mobile

Métis were re-cast as refugees in the territory they’d occupied for generations. The many

migrations in the decades after the rebellions followed patterns established decades before, but

they, too were re-cast. Instead of being modern manifestations of long-established, purposeful

migratory practices in order to use different locales within a historic territory, they were

interpreted as the aimless wanderings of refugees in a foreign and unfamiliar land.16

16 Martha Foster, We Know Who We Are: Métis Identity in a Montana Community (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), p. 177; Gerhard Ens, “The Reformulation of the Turtle Mountain Métis Community, 1879-1905,” in Fiske, ed, New Faces of the Fur Trade, 1998, and “The Border, the Buffalo, and the Métis of Montana,” in The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests: Essays on Regional History of the Forty-Ninth Parallel, Sterling Evans, ed., Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2006; Hans Peterson, “Imasees and His Band: Canadian Refugees After the North-West Rebellion,” The Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology, Vol. VIII, No. 1 (1978); Verne Dusenberry, “The Rocky Boy Indians, Montana’s Displaced Persons.” Montana Magazine of History, 4 (Winter 1954): p. 3, 11-12; Verne Dusenberry, The Montana Cree: A Study in Religious Persistence. Stockholm: University of Stockholm/Almquist & Wiksell, 1962. Reprint, with a foreword by Lynne Dusenberry Crow, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998, p. 33-34, 43; Thomas Wessel, A History of the Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation. Bozeman: Thomas Wessel, 1975, p. 26-42; Larry Burt, “In a Crooked Piece of Time: The Dilemma of the Montana Cree and the Métis,” Journal of American Culture 9 (1), 1986: p. 48, 50; Larry Burt, “Nowhere Left to Go: Montana’s Crees, Métis, and Chippewa and the Creation of the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation,” Great Plains Quarterly 7 (summer, 1987); Luke Ryan. Freedom, Fear, and the American Periphery: The Chippewa and Cree in Montana, 1885-1923. Unpublished master’s thesis. Missoula: University of Montana, 1998; Celeste River. A

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Refusing to Enroll Métis in Federally Recognized American Indian Tribes

The aftermath of the second Métis rebellion coincided with increasing efforts in the

United States (and elsewhere) to formalize and police racial categories. The end of

reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow laws in the American South, the influx of southern

European immigrants, and the ascendance of scientific racism, among countless other

phenomena, played into and bespoke a shifting racialism in America. In the Great Plains, as in

other regions, colonizers tried to police both the social and spatial boundaries of the racial

categories they constructed. The mobile, mixed Métis proved especially vexing to these efforts.

Their inseparability from the region’s largest non-white population, Indians, aggravated colonial

authorities to no end. American officials used the racial and tribal classification commissions

fostered by the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887 to try to separate the Métis from other Indians and

from Indian reservations.

The proceedings of the 1892 McCumber Commission at North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain

reservation exemplified this effort to create distinct and separate Indian and non-Indian groups.

As in the efforts to equate Métis people with Canada, the attempts to purge Métis people from

the Indian communities of which they were a part used the mobility and mixed ancestry of the

Métis as grounds for exclusion. At Turtle Mountain, the McCumber commission refused to

enroll over 45 percent of community members. The rhetorical tools with which it carved the

Turtle Mountain community were by then well-honed through repeated use. The commissioners

employed every trope of racial, cultural, and national citizenship at their disposal when they

dismissed some applicants as Canadian (either Indian or white); some as all or predominantly

white (either by “blood” or, especially in the case of female applicants who had married “white”

Mountain in His Memory, Frank Bird Linderman: His Role in Acquiring the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation for the Montana Chippewa and Cree. Master’s Thesis, University of Montana, 1990.

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men, by social status/life choice/action); some as American Indian but belonging, in the

commissioners’ opinion, to other bands or tribes; and some as Indians of proper tribal or band

affiliation but lacking proper spatial affiliation (ie. inarguably bound to a 9 million acre tract

delineated in a treaty negotiated by the same commission). This geographic dismissal proved a

particularly flexible purgatory tool: individuals could be, and were, declared ineligible for

enrollment due to having been born outside the tract, or for isolated or repeated short- or long-

term absences from the tract later in life, regardless of the reasons for such absences.17

Withholding Whiteness from the American Métis

Enrollment purges like the one performed by the McCumber Commission at Turtle

Mountain in 1892 defined many American Métis, in the eyes of the federal government and its

administrators, as non-Indian. At the same time, governmental authorities often considered

many Métis people non-white, denying them the possibility of citizenship regardless of

birthplace. In the myriad documents discussing the Métis people purged from the Turtle

Mountain rolls, BIA officials usually referred to them as Indians, and most statistical reports

through the 1930s formally counted many Métis under a separate “non-enrolled Indian”

category. In the eyes of these officials, the Métis were Indians, either American and therefore

ineligible for birthright citizenship, or Canadian, and therefore ineligible for formal immigration

and naturalization.18 Many non-Indian people in the private sector shared this belief,

withholding social whiteness from the Métis in a wide range of situations and interactions.

17 Delia Hagen, “The Process and Consequences of Creating the Turtle Mountain Tribal Roll of 1892,” unpublished paper completed for Prof. Jon Gjerde’s Immigration and Ethnicity research seminar, Spring 2003, University of California Berkeley. 18 Not until the Nationality Act of 1940 were “Indians from Canada and elsewhere” permitted to become naturalized citizens of the United States. F. W. Boyd, Superintendent, Turtle Mountain Agency, to CIA, Feb. 26, 1941, enclosing a “list of Canadian Indians on the reservation,” Indian Reorganization Enrollment, 1936-1940, Box 58, Turtle Mountain, RG 75, National Archives Central Plains Region.

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In combination, these overlapping processes left many U.S. Métis in a legal and social

limbo, in which they could claim neither the rights of (white) American citizens, nor the rights of

(federally recognized) American Indians nor the rights of immigrants to America. The balance

of this essay will focus on the material implications of Métis exclusion from these social and

legal categories. It will first look at the most basic of material implications—the right to occupy

a place—before moving to the ways exclusion from rights-bearing categories impeded Métis

access to resources and opportunities that were crucial to survival.

No Safe Place: The Spatial Consequences of Being Considered Canadian, non-

Indian, and Non-white

All of the categories from which Métis found themselves excluded, American, Indian,

and white, carried with them de jure and de facto rights. Foremost among them was the simple

right to occupy the places that the American and Canadian empires assigned to each of these

three groups. By refusing to ascribe Métis people a stable and secure national, tribal, or racial

status, colonial authorities ultimately helped perpetuate the very mobility and intermixture that

they sought to minimize. Lacking recognized occupancy rights to any single place, the Métis

had to make due by moving between many. In 1895, when members of the Montana Métis

community traveled east with “Montana’s Wildest West Show,” promoters billed them as “the

only people in the United States without a country.”19

Categorized as Canadians, many Métis found themselves persecuted for the ostensible

crime of being south of the international boundary. The punishments they endured ranged in

severity. At the more benign end of the spectrum stood social snubbing and harassment at the

19 Raymond Gray (for the Federal Writers Project). The Cree Indians, unpublished manuscript available at University of Montana and Montana State University libraries, 1942, p. 32.

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hands of neighbors. American government agents, on the other hand, subjected them to life-

threatening physical violence and mass deportation.

U.S. government persecution of American Métis on the grounds of their alleged

Canadianness began with the advent of a federal presence in the region in the 19th century, and

endured into at least the mid-twentieth century. The most spectacular episodes of persecution

centered around the basic right to occupy American-claimed space. American authorities at

times responded ferociously to the alleged national trespass by Métis people. Late in the fall of

1867, for instance, five years before the international boundary survey, United States marshals

descended on a Métis camp on the Milk River in Montana, ostensibly “having heard that

Canadian traders were transacting business” there. Ben Kline, a Métis resident of the camp,

recalled that the marshals “went among them [and ] confiscated their complete stock of goods,

valued at not less than $15,000.” The marshals then set fire to the Métis cabins, and ordered two

traders in the camp to leave United States’ territory. Their actions left the Métis facing the

coming winter with neither supplies nor shelter. The marshals also seized the ammunition with

which the Métis hunted animals that could provide them food, furs to trade, and hides from

which to fashion shelter and clothing. Few Métis could have felt safe during this period, as U.S.

Army officials issued repeated calls “to break up” what it called “trading parties from the British

possessions and execute summary justice on the principals engaged.” 20 Five years later, the

zealous pursuit of this goal led the American military to attack a Métis camp located in Canadian

20 Father Van Den Broeck, “Sketch of Ben Kline’s Life,” unpublished manuscript dated Nov. 14, 1925. Small Collection 942, Ben Kline Reminiscence, Montana Historical Society; Oscar Mueller, notes from interview with Ben Kline, Dec. 2, 1931, Small Collection 942, Ben Kline Reminiscence, Montana Historical Society; C.A.R. Dimon, Colonel First U.S. Volunteer Infantry, Fort Rice, Dakota Territory, to Lieut. Col. Edward P. Ten Broeck, Janaury 24, 1865, Small Collection 927, U.S. War Department, Department of the Platte, Montana Historical Society

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territory. This international incident spawned an investigation by the Canadian government, and

complaints to Washington by the British minister, after its victims sought legal redress.21

Sporadic attacks on Montana Métis gave way to more systematic efforts in the 1880s.

Although several previous efforts to deport dispersed Métis groups had failed to oust them from

Montana, newspapers around the state increasingly called for their expulsion. In this they were

joined by many indivuals, like Butte-area rancher and attorney Thomas O. Miles, himself an

immigrant from New Brunswick, Canada. In 1892, Miles undertook a vigorous campaign for the

“permanent removal” to Canada of “Cree Indian . . . pests,” writing to newspapers and state

officials, and meeting personally with the U.S. Attorney for the District of Montana and with

Montana’s U.S. Senator T.C. Power.22 The demands of Miles and others among the recently

arrived non-Indian population met with apparent success four years later, when Congress

appropriated $5,000 to “deport from the State of Montana and deliver at the international

boundary line to the Canadian authorities, all refugee Cree Indians in said State.”23 The

Canadian government collaborated in rounding up and deporting so-called Cree people from

Montana in the months that followed. Despite the coaction of both nations, however, the would-

be deportees thwarted the efforts of colonial authorities by varied and creative means. Many

Montana Métis evaded capture by fleeing to Idaho and North Dakota. Others used their intimate

knowledge of Montana topography and hid from their would-be captors in the state’s mountain

valleys. Some Métis tried unsuccessfully to avoid deportation through legal channels, filing

papers to acquire U.S. citizenship and retaining an attorney to press their case. At least two 21British Minister at Washington, D.C., file 1283 (1872), Papers Respecting Outrages On British Subjects At White River Settlement and Half-Breed Settlement at Frenchman’s River, vol. 228, reel T-12177, RG 15, Library and Archives Canada. 22 Biographical Note, Small Collection 475, Thomas O. Miles papers, 1892-1908, Montana Historical Society; Small Collection 475, Thomas O. Miles papers, 1892-1908; Raymond Gray (for the Federal Writers Project). The Cree Indians, unpublished manuscript available at University of Montana and Montana State University libraries, 1942, p. 16-17 and 147-155. 23 United States Congress, Senate Report No. 821, 54th Cong., 1st Sess.; Gray, p. 34.

17

people, a man named Raining Bow and a woman whose name was left unrecorded, killed

themselves in order to avoid being returned to Canada against their wills. When, in the summer

of 1896, the U.S. Army did succeed in delivering five groups of “Cree” totaling 523 people to

the northern border, many contemporaries reported that they “were back in Montana even before

the troops” who had deported them.24

The 1896 deportation events proved to be the most high-profile of the many instances of

the U.S. government persecuting the Montana Métis on the basis of supposed Canadian status.

They were not the last. Local, state, and federal entities continued to pressure Métis people into

removing to Canada through the mid-20th century. For at least fifty years after the 1896

deportation debacle, other, less widespread and well-orchestrated, deportation efforts plagued the

Métis. Writing in 1942, Métis attorney Raymond Gray claimed that his people “dread[ed] the

menace of deportation more than any evil that can befall the victims of exploitation.” This

menace lurked even as Gray wrote: in February of that year, “Cree Indians” George Red Thunder

and Charles Kennedy had been deported from Montana to Canada.25

Less violent, but more ubiquitous and unrelenting, were the everyday forms of

discrimination practiced against the Métis by non-Indian Montanans who wished they would go

“home.” These recent immigrants to Métis territory apparently failed to see the irony of their

24 ARDIA 1896, p. 23, 342-343; Gray, p. 47; Choteau Acantha, October 5, 1905, reprinted on http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mtteton/Métisridgeproposal.html. The legend of the return of the Cree contradicts Canadian government reports about the distribution of the deportees on reserves in that country. Although itself inaccurate, the legend reflects several historical realities, including the ability of many Métis people to evade capture and deportation, and their reappearance in familiar locales once the threat thereof subsided. It also reflects the fact that many deportees did return to the United States. Although they did not, as legend holds, beat the troops back to Montana, a few escaped en route to Canadian reserves and “a good many” returned to the U.S. within a year. In subsequent years Canadian Indian agents reported a steady flow of deportees southward. Although Indian Department reports don’t provide total numbers, something of the scale and rapidity of this return migration is suggested by the numbers available for the Hobbema Reserve. Of the 150 Montana deportees originally settled there in 1896, only 47 remained two years later. These numbers are all the more striking given that, the year before, Hobbema was singled out in the ARDIA as the reserve that had enjoyed the most success in getting deportees to remain. ARDIA 1897, p. 20-21; ARDIA 1898, p. 232, 461; ARDIA 1899; ARDIA 1900 p. 228. 25 Gray, 22.

18

position. Their antipathy for the Métis persisted through the mid-twentieth century: when Métis

attorney Raymond Gray wrote a WPA-commissioned history of the Métis/Chippewa/Cree in

Montana in 1942, he concluded that “for half a century an incessant attack on the presence of the

Cree Indians in Montana, has been, and still is being, carried out by prominent citizens,

newspapers and organizations. The Cree Indians have never ceased to be the brunt of attack.”26

Allegations of Canadian origin and racial mixture made anti-Métis behavior more widely

accepted than actions perpetrated under a more general anti-Indian rubric. The rights of Indian

groups considered undeniably Indian and American had firmer foundations, and although non-

Indian people might bemoan, despise and assault “American” Indians and their rights, the press

was less likely to openly applaud such actions. In contrast, persecution of Métis people found

sanction and encouragement in the state newspapers, which, with a few notable exceptions,

formed a veritable chorus of scorn well into the twentieth century. Papers in cities with a large

Métis presence published especially persistent and vicious attacks. The Anaconda Standard

vituperated against the “Dirty Crees” in its area, denouncing them as “Canadian beggars.” The

Helena Daily Independent worried about the impact the Métis had on other residents of the

region: in 1904, when the Forest Service paid about 50 destitute “Cree” people some 40 cents a

bushel for pine cones, which contained seeds for tree nurseries, the paper complained that the

group “robbed [squirrels] with impunity and it is likely that many a squirrel family will go

hungry this winter.”27

Métis rights to particular places were also undermined by the aforementioned refusal of

the United States to grant them formal Indian status via listing on the rolls of federally

recognized tribes. By categorizing many Métis as Canadian, the U.S. could deny their right to

26 Gray, p. 130. 27 Helena Daily Independent, January 28, 1904, reprinted in Dusenberry, “The Rocky Boy Indians,” 9.

19

occupy American claimed space in general. By refusing to list them on the rolls of tribes to

which they were related, the U.S. could deny their right to live on American Indian reservations

in particular. Much of American and Canadian Indian policy during this period focused on

separating “Indian” communities from “non-Indian” communities. The circular logic of these

policies operated as though there were some clear line between “races” that could be transposed

onto a map and then transfigured into a border, which in turn would maintain separation between

ostensibly distinct races. The fact that racial and spatial realities were not, and had never been,

that simple seldom prompted policymakers to question their goals. Reservations were for

enrolled Indians, not for their unenrolled spouses, siblings, parents, offspring, and other assorted

kin, companions, and community members. Off-reservation places were likewise forbidden to

Indians, who were generally supposed to stay within the bounds of the reservation on which they

were enrolled.

As with the efforts to deport Métis people from the U.S., the attempts to keep Indians on

the reservations where they were enrolled, and to keep un-enrolled people off reservations,

enjoyed some level of international collaboration but little success. In 1889, the Canadian and

American governments explored developing a joint, international Indian pass system, but

ultimately both governments instituted separate, similar pass systems whereby enrolled Indians

were required to obtain passes to leave their reserves or reservations. Likewise, reservation

agents on both sides of the border sought to limit visitors to Indians or whites with formal,

usually written, permission to be there.28

28 Hana Samek, The Blackfoot Confederacy, 154-156. These policies changed for many reservations in the United States after they were opened to homesteading. This development varied by reservation: some reservations were opened to homesteading as early as the 1890s, others were never opened to non-Indian land ownership and settlement.

20

These attempts to create distinct populations and enforce a corresponding physical

separation perpetually plagued members of the Métis community. Their mixed ancestry and

history of mobility combined with the racial and tribal categorization policies of the nations that

colonized their homeland meant that many different reservations and reserves included Métis

people on their rolls. For the same reasons, many Métis people were on no federally recognized

tribal roll, either in Canada or the United States.29 Spouses, children, parents, or siblings, to say

nothing of more distant relations, often found themselves in a position in which some members

of the family were not allowed on the reservations where other members were enrolled. Such

situations abounded across time and space. Stories like that of the Métis Magee family were

typical: after moving around for many years, Emma Minesinger Magee and her new husband

tried to settle on western Montana’s Flathead Reservation in 1896. This attempt proved fruitless

for, as Emma recalled in her memoir, ““Flathead blood gave me the right to live on the Reserve.

Not so, my husband.” As a result, the Magees soon resumed the nomadic existence that took

them back and forth the international border in the Rocky Mountain region.30

In their efforts to make a living and keep their families together, Métis people fought on

multiple fronts the restrictions that forbade their residence on reservations. As discussed above,

individuals repeatedly sought to secure residence rights by applying for formal enrollment on

reservations they considered home. Groups of Métis people also sought formal permission to

reside on the reservations of their relatives. Montana Métis formally petitioned for residence

rights on the Flathead Reservation in 1887, 1890, 1902, and 1904, on the Blackfeet Reservation

29 Delia Hagen, “‘The Territory We Had Always Called Home’: Nations, Migration, and the Northern Plains Métis, 1880-1930,” unpublished paper presented at Writing New Histories of Indigineity and Imperialism: A Workshop, University of Manitoba, Winnepeg, Manitoba, May 21-23, 2008. 30 James Hyde, Superintendent, Turtle Mountain Agency, to James Ryder, Superintendent, Hayward Indian School, Enrollment of Citizenship, Degree of Blood, 1918-1927 file, Box 58, Turtle Mountain, RG 75, NARA Kansas City; Emma Minesinger Magee, “Montana Memories,” K. Ross Toole Archives, University of Montana.

21

around 1910 and on the Crow Reservation around 1913. Métis people also hoped to secure a

stable land base by pursuing the creation of new Indian reservations. Most of these efforts

enjoyed only minimal success, at best. The requests for homes on the Flathead Reservation and

Crow reservations were all denied. The Blackfeet effort ended in failure when the lands granted

there proved uninhabitable. And, after years of denying such requests, when the U.S.

government finally created a reservation for Montana’s “landless Indians” in 1916 it rejected

many applicants for enrollment and residence thereon.31

The failure of these formal attempts led most Métis to rely on a far more dependable

method for gaining access to reservation lands: illegal residence. Despite the many laws that

forbade their presence and the intermittent attempts to expel them, Métis people remained on and

returned to lands ostensibly limited to enrolled Indians. They continually violated the

regulations colonial authorities hoped to inflict on the region, and maintained an enduring

presence on most reservations throughout their historical homeland. As they had in the face of

attempts to keep them in Canada, the Métis refused to comply with colonial maps. They asserted

their rights by persisting in forbidden places like the Crow Reservation, where “two or three

times they have been gathered by the Agency authorities and put off, . . . each time they have

returned.”32

Although American authorities controlled Indian lands more obviously and intensively

than other spaces, the attempts to create, and then physically separate, distinct races also

complicated Métis claims to places outside of the BIA’s jurisdiction. As mentioned above, even

31 Delia Hagen, “‘The Territory We Had Always Called Home’: Nations, Migration, and the Northern Plains Métis, 1880-1930,” unpublished paper presented at Writing New Histories of Indigineity and Imperialism: A Workshop, University of Manitoba, Winnepeg, Manitoba, May 21-23, 2008. 32 Ibid.; Crow Supt to CIA 5/7/1912 MHS RS 266 Box 14 fldr 2. Although space limits preclude it, similar histories could be recounted for the Fort Belknap and Fort Peck Reservations in Montana, both of which housed Métis populations who weren’t enrolled at those locations over a long period.

22

while Métis were denied enrollment in federally recognized tribes, government officials as well

as many non-Indians in the general public often considered Métis people to be Indian. This fact

undermined Métis efforts to make homes outside of reservation boundaries. Being Indian in the

eyes of the government authorities, and therefore presumably ineligible for citizenship, led to

denial of homesteading applications. This foreclosed one of the most promising options for

families to secure lands on which to settle and survive. Métis peoples attempts to find a place to

live in urban areas often met with failure as well. Police and other officials in cities like Devil’s

Lake, North Dakota, sometimes “ordered them to leave,” even in the dead of winter. So intent

were urban officials on ridding their jurisdictions of Indians that they occasionally went so far as

to pay for transportation to distant reservations where the Métis had no residence rights.33

“No help no place:” Resources and Opportunities Withheld from the American Métis34

Clearly, exclusion from the national, racial, and tribal categories that the United States

used to organize the populations of the places it invaded made it difficult for Montana Métis to

find a place, literally, in what had been their homeland. The fact that rights to resources attended

each of these categories compounded the Métis’ dilemma. Under United States’ rule, enrolled

members of federally recognized Indian tribes retained rights to use the natural resources on, as

well as merely to occupy, certain lands. They also could access, for better or worse, a variety of

services and opportunities intended exclusively for their use. The same was true for white

Americans. When the Métis were excluded from both of these demographic categories, they lost

not only the lands but the rights that attended them.

33 Superintendent, Turtle Mountain Agency, to Peter Timboe, Chief of Police, Devils Lake, North Dakota, Dec. 22, 1922. Law and Order file, Box 157, Turtle Mountain, RG 75, NARA Kansas City. 34 The quote is taken from a complaint made by Patrick Lizotte to H. D. McCullough, Superintendent, Fort Peck Agency, Jan. 5, 1932, Drouth Relief, 1931-32 file, Box 113, Turtle Mountain, RG 75, NARA Kansas City.

23

Space constraints preclude a detailed analysis of the many resources from which the

Métis found themselves cut off. The remainder of this paper will therefore offer a general

overview of the range of limitations the Métis endured. It will first explore the consequences of

the United States’ refusal to formally recognize, and enroll, Métis people as American Indians.

It will then examine the implications of being considered Indian by the non-Indian population

and by the same government authorities that refused to place them on tribal rolls.

When U.S. officials refused to place Métis people on federally-sanctioned American

Indian tribal rolls, or purged them therefrom, they also denied Métis people legal access to a

variety of natural resources critical to their survival. As discussed above, the most basic of these

resources was land itself, a place to rightfully exist. Beyond that, Métis people who lacked

official Indian status also lost rights to use the products of the land. Enrolled Indians often

retained de jure rights to the resources on their reservations as well as some hunting, fishing,

trapping, and harvesting rights to lands they ceded during treaty negotiations.35 In many of the

places they lived, government regulations barred unenrolled Métis from cutting firewood for

winter warmth, or felling larger timbers for building. Laws also forbade the unenrolled from

hunting and trapping for hides, furs, and meat, or digging and harvesting plants like snakeroot

that had formerly contributed to their survival. Because almost all of the products of these flora

and fauna resources could be sold as well as consumed by the Métis, the regulations barring

Métis access undermined not only their subsistence but their ability to participate in the market

economy as well. They thus impeded Métis access to the cash and bartered goods that had long

been important parts of their livelihood.

35 Even for enrolled Indians, these rights often existed more in law than in fact, as a variety of government policies, private party actions, and changes in the physical world often interfered with their ability to exercise their rights to resources.

24

Métis people who could not become enrolled members of American Indian tribes lost

access to other material benefits in addition to those provided by natural resources. Enrolled

Indians sometimes received a variety of goods aimed at contributing to their survival. The most

well-known of these were rations of food and clothing. But in different times and places,

material assistance included such varied items as housing or materials for construction thereof;

household implements like cook and heat stoves; coal with which to fend off the Northern Plains

winter’s icy reach; seed for planting cash and food crops; farm animals to be raised for sale or

consumption; and farm implements and draught animals with which to work their lands.

Other services available to enrolled Indians, many of which had material outcomes, also

eluded unenrolled Métis. Although Indian people often detested the BIA and Christian mission

schools designed to eradicate their native cultures, these schools could provide a Western

education that might help students survive in the colonial society that surrounded them. Perhaps

more prone to embrace it that other Indians due to the European elements of their community,

Métis often expressed a desire to attend Indian schools. Documents suggest that material

incentives contributed to this desire: as Sister Genevieve of Turtle Mountain’s St. Mary’s

Industrial Boarding School succinctly put it, “the people here, being very poor, send their

children to be clothed and fed.”36 U.S. Indian agents, however, tried to limit BIA schools to

children of families on tribal rolls.37

Métis people also had difficulty accessing Indian medical services. BIA and Mission

hospitals tried to exclude unenrolled patients, and doctors at other facilities learned that they

could expect BIA payment only for services rendered to people on official government rolls.

Other opportunities with more obvious material implications, like BIA employment and use of

36 ARCIA (1890), 29. 37 Superintendent, Turtle Mountain Agency, to CIA, April 27, 1923, Mixed-bloods, 1923 file, Box 150, Turtle Mountain, RG 75, NARA Kansas City.

25

tribal flour and timber mills, also remained off-limits to many Métis. The scarcity of jobs and

infrastructure in the rural Northern Plains exacerbated the impact of these prohibitions.

Even enrolled Métis experienced difficulty accessing the resources that were ostensibly

available to them. Religious and secular officials who managed the Indian infrastructure

routinely expressed a preference for providing the services under their control to tribal members

they considered properly American, or more Indian, or more tribally pure. School openings,

hospital beds, employment opportunities, and other resources were often allocated under a

system of national, racial, and tribal triage, which privileged the applicant deemed most worthy

by authorities. The tribally and racially mixed Métis, besmirched by the taint of Canadian

association, suffered accordingly.

Métis people found few opportunities on non-Indian lands to offset those denied to them

on the basis of their tribally unenrolled status. As mentioned above, although the American

government refused to enroll many Métis people in federally recognized tribes, government

authorities and the general public still considered most Métis to be Indian. Being Indian, of

course, meant that Métis suffered profound, pervasive, and often violent discrimination at the

hands of many sectors of society. These phenomena have been well documented elsewhere in

studies of Native American history. But their unenrolled status left the Métis particularly

vulnerable, for they lacked even the guise of federal protection or Indian-specific rights that

might moderate the impacts of anti-Indian racism.

Being Indian in the eyes of non-Indian society inflicted serious material consequences on

the Métis community. The general public, and U.S. law, understood Indians to be wards of the

federal government. Assistance to Indians was therefore deemed to be the responsibility of the

nation, not the state, county, or city. On this basis, public officials consistently denied a wide

26

array of services to Métis people. Schools administrators barred or dismissed Métis pupils.

Public hospitals and clinics refused them medical care and referred them to the same Indian

Health Service facilities that sent them to non-Indian facilities. Local and state organizations

dedicated to helping the poor withheld food, clothing, and other assistance from Métis families.

It is no wonder, then, why Patrick Lizotte, a Montana Métis, wrote in desperation to the

Fort Peck Indian Reservation in 1932. He implored the reservation Superintendent for aid, for

the Great Depression had deepened still further the Métis community’s crisis: as the need for aid

spread to other sectors of society, public and private agencies formalized their policies with

regard to the Métis and became even more adamant in their insistence that the Métis were

somebody else’s responsibility. The result, as Lizotte put it, was that they could get “no help no

place.” The colonizing society’s ideas about the spatially-, racially-, and tribally-mixed Métis

had fostered a regime that radically altered Métis people’s ability to gain the barest subsistence.