On Metis Identity
by Billy Brady
December 2001/January 2002
I’m going to use a recent set of events to illustrate how important it continues to be that shaping my identity IS MY AFFAIR.
In decrying the “sellers of medicine”, an Anishnabe man who frequents a Métis discussion group – claiming he isn’t, nor ever will be, a Métis –uses his position as a Native academic to illustrate how sure he is of his own self and how sure he is about who is and isn’t “white” and “wannabe”.
In my work with people of mixture, the best poster I have seen is of two boys who are both Métis and who look “type-able” as one “Indian” and one “white”. The French word “Métis” simply means “mixed”. The title to the poster is “Métis: The Invisible People”.
For those original Métis to have taken a term that once may have been ascribed negatively and turned it into a positive term – perhaps 130 to 200 years ago; to have blended their position as the suppliers of pemmican to the fur trading forts along all the waterways of the Hudson Bay, Saint Lawrence and Missouri and Mississippi and even the Columbia river drainage; to have been the settler, hunter, creators of the plains provinces’ (Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba) first civil governments and subsequent targets of the Canadian federal government’s campaign to eliminate local civil control of their own affairs in the crushing of the Metis Resistance ending in the hanging of Louis Riel, is to cite a people who – born of the interplay of the fur trades’ demands – began the technique of taking oppression and turning it into their own strength.
These are the roots of the people self-identifying as “Métis”.
What is missing, in my opinion, when we use the term “métis” in the United States is often the sense of identity of the word. The view of those who claim to be able to identify what the American Metis scene is all about by virtue of what they know of struggles inside Canada where “Métis” is among the three peoples listed by the 1982 national Canadian Constitution as having aboriginal rights often does not include what it is like to live where there was no word. The word, itself, is precisely what I needed to understand that my identity was something I could wear and proclaim with positive and accurate meaning when I, an American by birth, realized there was a word that described the mixed-blooded Indian and European peoples in Canada.
In 1973, I wrote about the first indigenous professor to take a seat in hallowed academia in Canada and the book he had written about being a half-breed from Saskatchewan and the life of being lumped in with Indians as inferior peoples in the schemes of Canada’s racism. I wrote to help myself and others “like me”who were American breeds with no way to identify ourselves in anything but negative terms.
I said, in the pages of bibliographies and statistics sheets that I handed out at lunch groups and support groups within larger workshops, that the term “Métis” was originally from Canada but “might well serve as a model for all mixed Americans”.
The North American Métis formed the initial forts and enterprises that became important American and Canadian cities and have old roots in every one of the river towns that, to this day, stand as vital links of trade to the commercial backbone of nearly an entire continent. They are the same people who were given short shrift in dealings that the governments of the United States and Canada devised to make manifest their claims to the lands that were part of the sovereign territories of tribes, large and small.
They are among the ones treated with the same labeling that made them turn a term that must have been used as we use the term “mongrel” into an identity that has become a point of honor for who they are and for who brought them into existence.
To continue to fall in the unwelcome position of being labeled by how we look – a blind spot the aforementioned web-author is working from- is to misunderstand what it took for a once inclusive people to become pawns in this no-win system of oppressing those who cannot escape their looks but who know their heritages have given them a strength as living contradictions to the ideas of supremacy and “purity”.
The somewhat fitful starts at organizing those of these heritages in the U.S. sees many, many ideas that are way ahead of their useful time. And some that are plain wishful thinking as to how we got to using the term “métis”.
Some claim there is no need to compete for government monies with registered Indians – or, conversely, to claim that autonomy and self-control can be attained by making known the existence of the métis to such international bodies as the United Nations – and begin setting up actual Nations within North America. This is grandiosity to the extreme. This is strategy far ahead of the reality we are facing as we wake the sleeping giant of our own body politic.
It also flies in the face of logical power sharing. It is stating the objectives before there is a force of aware participants who will make the alliances and arrangements with governments and groups in a system that has bent human beings along a “looks” defined system for centuries. In such systems where lighter-being-better racism spares no one, we are all suspected condoners of scrabbling for the scraps governmentally made available.
The choice of intermarrying for the gamut of reasons people have done so was within the context of an extremely brutal, white supremacist system of so-called “values”.
It is only since the passage of civil rights laws and the enforcement of them along with the realization that it is criminal to perpetrate crimes against people based on their race or other inescapable realities (what we are calling “hate crimes”), that it has become unsavory to attack minority members of the social community.
To this extent, we owe a tremendous debt to the willingness of those who campaigned in the teeth of hatred against African descended peoples during years of struggle to see that such fairness and equal administration of law has become the ethics and values of those who consider their society “democratic” and “free”. We have trod the road of defeating supremacist mentalities in everything from Abolition to crushing the Third Reich and preventing ethnic cleansing.
We have, by these, and generations of far subtler resistance, created the actuality of Constitutional guarantees being applied and guaranteed.
So now, the issues that I began with by citing how one bona fide Indian with registration number; describable lands falling under his tribe’s jurisdiction, and a history of people who retain their values and their language – seems when he turns and attacks those among us who have the audacity to claim Native heritage whilst living with the misfortune of looking other than Indian.
Maybe it is easier to discount and smear people for “selling medicine” than to take the role of realizing that the very juggernaught that brought about the destruction of languages and freedom to travel, to live unmolested by murder, torture, government edicts that stole children away and placed them in the keep of dubious religious “Christian” schools, and disease is what some of the very decryer’s ancestors chose to avoid when they intermarried.
The creation of peoples who were all targets of similar oppression and enslavement when the unions of African and Indian descendants intermarried is almost never considered when targeting the extended families that include those who are now not readily identifiable as “Indian”. That’s a reflection of the intactness of labeling people the way the slavemasters did. One drop black and you’re “black”.
To lambaste those who charge for the work some of them do in trying to enlist the development of the inner struggles to maintain a spiritual balance is the heat and heart of the hate those people receive. The ultimate slam seems to be to label anyone like this as “wannabe”.
A theme the man I cited states in his website decrying the cyber identities of these people (a paradox in itself!) is that all so many of them seem to gravitate to the spiritual model of what they find in the “medicine wheel”. It could be that this model actually does serve as a bud on the growing idea that a model exists for us all to be included.
The role of the teacher of this ancient tool in the formation of the modern American Metis movement cannot be underestimated. But, more about this person in subsequent chapters..
I did my own research about who was and who wasn’t Indian very early on. In 1952, I was polling my housing project in the poor part of San Diego as to who was of Indian heritage.
I could easily see those who were Hopi and Navajo but I knew we were mixed with Indian and I wanted to know who else was because we didn’t look classically “Indian”.
In a 55 acre housing tract of scattered former Navy duplexes; perhaps 250 people; over 90% of those I asked said they, too, were “part-Indian”. For all that our racist system cared they were probably considered “white”. I knew better. I know better.
They hailed from Oklahoma, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Georgia, Arizona, New Jersey and many other places. I knew them to be “just like us”: part-Indian.
I was actually surprised to realize, later on, that there were people who were just Danish-American, just German-American.
I had the fortune of having my oldest sister move to Canada in 1966. In 1967 I hitchhiked there from Southern California and my natural wariness of how U.S. society was acting in Vietnam and in implementing actual civil rights caused me to seriously compare what this “look alike” society contained.
Were the offers to allow war-resisters sanctuary some cynical ploy that would reverse itself with time?
Were the legal representations of political parties, outlawed in the U.S., some temporary scheme that would see eventual wholesale incarceration?
I became aware of there being a sort of trust in the manners of many “white” male Canadians that had no treachery or unease in how they came across. This was actually my biggest emotional shock.
Why were they able to come across this way when, so often, the approach of these similar looking men in the United States was something to be wary of?
That answer took many, many more years to realize. I have my explanation of this (which I will also detail later on). For starters, however, I understood that a particular fear eluded these Canadian men.
That is and was a fear of being discovered as mixed heritage when they’d been the recipients of white, male privilege for unknown numbers of generations.
In Canada I saw people who were really just Irish-Canadian; just Ukrainian-Canadian; just Scottish-Canadian; just Welsh-Canadian and many others who “didn’t look like” or exactly like “white” people in the United States. “Why was this?” I asked.
It was because we here in the USA are so terrifically mixed – and yet nearly unaware and demonstrably disinterested in this being realized.
I instantly saw that most of the “white” types of men who posed for newspaper and magazine clothing ads in the U.S. were of mixed heritage.
I realized that we were living in such a massive social cover-up that to identify where the keys could be made to unlock this hidden truth was both a huge relief and calling to be lived and taught.
This was fourteen years before I took the trip (in 1981) that confirmed, for our own family’s edification, that we were of African heritage as well.
It was eleven years before the founding of the National American Métis Association.
That would come about in 1978 when those same sheets I had been using in groups of mixed-heritage people in co-counseling, were shared with the writer of the book that imparted the existence of the tool of the true Medicine Wheel’s teachings; Seven Arrows, (published in 1972) by Hyemeyohsts Storm.
It was as he read the little paragraph about what I saw this term “métis” having for those of American mixed-heritage that the modern “Métis movement” was born in the USA.
Paradoxically, the term “métis” spread like wildfire through the “Indian community”, where the very same people who latched onto it’s usage; i.e., “Tuscarora-Metis”, were simultaneously attacking Storm for “not even being Indian”.
I have taken steps to inform some of the most vociferous of his detractors as to where his role in the modern spread of the term originated. You see, his fame for the beauty and power of Seven Arrows was that when he and we adopted this concept of “métis” being a real term for us to use to define our mixed-heritage-ness, it was an irresistible idea.
Now we are reaching a cross-roads. In Canada it is an actual issue as to what defines “Métis”. It may become a governmental definition with the disingenuous assistance of some of the Métis leadership there.
Yet, no amount of haggling about what defines a “Métis” can stuff this good idea back into some political bottle that governments can wield to control the fact of our human existence.
We are mixed.
We are proud of this.
We know we are on the wave of what humanity is going through.
We know that to “get over it”; it, being the past of genocidal separations, legal structures defining “miscegenation”, maintenance of the very terms and attitudes which were used to run very efficient systems of enslavement, esclavitud, apartheid, segregation and class – we are going to be the bearers of how to own our intelligence and employ it in intelligent behavior as we redefine our existence.
For now, we can agree that Metis means being mixed and descended from aboriginal peoples.
We will eventually take the time to examine how very mixed every part of the human family has become. We will see that our success as a species has everything to do with intermixing.
We may become tolerant that the widest possible definition of being human – is being “métis”.
We may have time to realize that reconnecting with whatever our aboriginal heritages are – is a way to relearn values that place us in awe of how a planet created us and we can honor our very existences.
I heard said just recently that women will finally win justice over the long haul by making extant the mixing of every one of the peoples that men have tried to keep separate.
Here’s to that ideal!
Here’s to the truth!
Do you have comments for Billy Brady about this article? Write to him at: nama_bb@yahoo.com
Billy Brady serves as the National American Metis Association’s Executive Director and has been involved with community development and community healing for thirty years. He was one of the first people to suggest using the word “metis” to describe all the Mixed-Blood peoples of the USA. Billy has been a successful businessman and has worked closely with many of the leading Metis writers and thinkers of our time. Billy’s focus in his work with NAMA is in creating ways for us to learn HOW to be Metis in our modern world.
Copyright © 2001 Billy Brady. All rights reserved.