Overview

Defining Métis examineds categories used in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Catholic missionaries to describe Indigenous people in what is now northwestern Saskatchewan. It argues that the construction and evolution of these categories reflected missionaries' changing interests and agendas. Defining Métis sheds light on the earliest phases of Catholic missionary work among Indigenous peoples in western and northern Canada. It examines various interrelated aspects of this work, including the beginings of residential schooling, transportation and communications and relations between the Church, the Hudson's Bay Company and the federal government. While focusing on the the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and their central mission at Ile-à-la-Crosse, this study illuminates broad processes that informed Catholic missionary perceptions and impelled their evolution over a fifty-three-year period. In particular, this study illuminates processes that shaped Oblate conceptions of sauvage and métis. It does this through a qualitative analysis of documents that were produced within the Oblates' institutional apparatus—offical correspondence, mission journals, registers, and published reports. Foran challenges the orthodox notion that Oblate commentators simply discovered and described a singular, empirically exisiting, and readily identifiable Métis population. Rather, he contends that Oblates played an important role in the conceptual production ofles métis.

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9780887557743

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Reviews

This is a landmark study in the field of missionary-indigenous relationships. Foran's meticulously researched monograph presents a different interpretation of the role of the Oblates in the formulation of a Metis identity. Subsequent examinations of the missionary encounter will find it difficult to avoid his insightful analysis and conclusions .- Raymond Huel, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of Lethbridge.

This is a landmark study in the field of missionary-indigenous relationships. Foran's meticulously researched monograph presents a different interpretation of the role of the Oblates in the formulation of a Metis identity. Subsequent examinations of the missionary encounter will find it difficult to avoid his insightful analysis and conclusions .- Raymond Huel, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of Lethbridge.

Author Information

Timothy P. Foran is the Curator of British North America at the Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec.

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