Defining Métis: Catholic Missionaries and the Idea of Civilization in Northwestern Saskatchewan, 1845-1898

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Description

“Defining Métis” examines categories used within the latter half of the nineteenth century by Catholic missionaries to explain 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 at the earliest phases of Catholic missionary work among Indigenous peoples in western and northern Canada. It examines more than a few interrelated aspects of this work, including the beginnings of residential schooling, transportation and communications, and relations between the Church, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the government.

While specializing in the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and their central mission at Île-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 throughout the Oblates’ institutional apparatus – official correspondence, mission journals, registers, and published reports.

Foran challenges the orthodox notion that Oblate commentators simply came upon and described a singular, empirically existing, and readily identifiable Métis population. Relatively, he contends that Oblates played the most important role within the conceptual production of les métis.

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