Mixed Race Studies

Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People by Michel Hogue (review)

Labour / Le Travail
Issue 77, Spring 2016
pages 297-299
DOI: 10.1353/llt.2016.0039

Sterling Evans, Louise Welsh Chair in Southern Plains and Borderlands History
University of Oklahoma

Michel Hogue, Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People (Regina: University of Regina Press 2015)

It is not an exaggeration to assert that Michel Hogue’s Metis and the Medicine Line is now one of the best studies written about the western Canadian – US borderlands. It is thoroughly researched from a variety of different archival sources from both sides of the 49th parallel, it is very well organized and written, and will be a standard for North American borderlands history for many years to come. Likewise it is a fine addition to the already robust scholarship on Metis history (and note, it was Hogue’s choice to use the word “Metis” without an accent on the “e”). Thus, this combination of themes works to do exactly as the book’s subtitle suggests, relating the history of how creating a border divided a people.

To do so, Hogue argues that the goal of Metis and the Medicine Line is to reveal “how the process of nation-building and race-making were intertwined and how … the Metis shaped both.” (8) “The experiences of these borderland Metis communities,” he continues, “therefore offer a fresh perspective on the political, economic, and environmental transformations that re-worked the Northern Plains across the nineteenth century.” (9) And finally, he states how the book “offers a (partial) corrective to those who would focus solely on race by drawing attention to the historical circumstances that gave rise to the Metis emergence as an autonomous people … and to the resilience and persistence of such notions.” (19) Those are noble objectives, but it is fair to assess how well they are achieved in this study. Along the way, Hogue gives special attention to how the Metis developed “mobile communities” (7) in the borderlands, how they negotiated “racialized markers of belonging,” and how they created a “hybrid borderland world” (10) and “an interethnic landscape.” (20) And more than theoretical labels here, these kinds of terms help to define Hogue’s message of Metis resilience and agency and set up the book’s themes well in the Introduction.

At that point Metis and the Medicine Line is divided into five chapters, all with cleverly developed action noun signposts as main title markers. The first chapter, “Emergence: Creating a Metis Borderland” discusses the importance of the Metis bison economy and trade and how the Metis used that for border marking. Chapter 2, “Exchange: Trade, Sovereignty, and the Forty-Ninth Parallel,” explores the Metis role in the “growing salience of the 49th parallel” (55) and how they came to negotiate it for their benefit. Chapter 2, “Exchange: Trade, Sovereignty, and the 49th Parallel,” explores the Metis role in the “growing salience of the 49th parallel” (55) and how they came to negotiate it for their benefit. Chapter 3, “Belonging: Land, Treaties, and the Boundaries of Race,” gets into the more difficult business of trying to explain the complexity of Metis racial identity (and especially with the concept of “racial marking”) and continues to address the bison economy (especially as that came to change with the different degrees of bison decline on opposite sides of the US-Canadian border. In what I consider to be one of the book’s greatest strengths, Hogue provides excellent analyses of the Metis role in Plains geopolitics – not only in their dealings with the US and Canadian governments, but also with other Indigenous groups throughout the Northern Plains. The fourth chapter, “Resistance: Dismantling Plains Borderlands Settlements, 1879-1885,” gets into some comparative discussion of US and Canadian policies on Native peoples, offers more on border diplomacy, and reiterates the role of Louis Riel in all of this history. Likewise, for the Metis on the Canadian side of the line, it provides excellent analysis on “symbols of economic re-orientation.” (172) And finally, Chapter 5, “Exile: Scrip and Enrollment Commissions and the Shifting of Boundaries and Belongings,” is a bit more complicated and perhaps unnecessarily too detailed (the only place in the book I thought so) on the history of the scrip use by Metis peoples in Canada. This chapter seems like more of a stand-alone…

Read or purchase the review here.

Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People

University of North Carolina Press
April 2015
Approx. 352 pages
6.125 x 9.25
17 halftones, 3 maps, notes, bibl., index
Paper: ISBN 978-1-4696-2105-0

Michel Hogue, Assistant Professor of History
Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canadas

Born of encounters between Indigenous women and Euro-American men in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Plains Metis people occupied contentious geographic and cultural spaces. Living in a disputed area of the northern Plains inhabited by various Indigenous nations and claimed by both the United States and Great Britain, the Metis emerged as a people with distinctive styles of speech, dress, and religious practice, and occupational identities forged in the intense rivalries of the fur and provisions trade. Michel Hogue explores how, as fur trade societies waned and as state officials looked to establish clear lines separating the United States from Canada and Indians from non-Indians, these communities of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry were profoundly affected by the efforts of nation-states to divide and absorb the North American West.

Grounded in extensive research in U.S. and Canadian archives, Hogue’s account recenters historical discussions that have typically been confined within national boundaries and illuminates how Plains Indigenous peoples like the Metis were at the center of both the unexpected accommodations and the hidden history of violence that made the “world’s longest undefended border.”

Between Race and Nation: The Plains Metis and the Canada-United States Border

University of Wisconsin, Madison
May 2009
419 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3384469
ISBN: 9781109476347

Michel Hogue, Assistant Professor of History
Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation examines how the Plains Métis both experienced and shaped their incorporation into two nation-states: the U.S. and Canada. It explores how, as the northern Plains were pulled into the economic, political, and social orbits of distinct metropolitan centers, the social category of race emerged as a key measure of the boundaries of citizenship within new nation-states. The study encompasses a critical time period when ideas about race and the differences it marked were in flux. Set in a place that straddled national borders, where national territorial claims were weak, and where national borders marked different legal regimes, it explores the question of how and why mixed racial groups in North America formed or failed to form. This study asks, What effect did the new political boundaries and racial hierarchies emerging within these new states have on the potential for the creation of the Métis as a distinct people?

The study shows that, as this borderland world became more closely tied to national economies and polities through the nineteenth century, the socio-legal categories of nationality and race became key faultlines that circumscribed Métis claims to belonging in both countries. Incorporative projects, whether commercial or national, initially allowed Plains Métis communities to flourish. But, as settler-based societies supplanted fur trade societies, social relations changed dramatically. Even in Canada, where distinct legal and conceptual categories existed for people of mixed Indigenous and white ancestry and where fur trade interactions had given rise to separate Métis communities in other parts of the country, recurring questions about nationality and race undercut Plains Métis attempts to secure a more permanent place in the borderlands. The precise meanings of the categories of race and nation—or who could be included within them—remained the subject of intense negotiation among officials, the Métis, and their Indigenous neighbors. Ultimately, the absence of appropriate legal frameworks for the recognition of mixed-race groups and state willingness to guarantee the corporate rights of those groups created significant barriers for the continuation of separate, identifiable Plains Métis borderland communities.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Note on Terminology
• INTRODUCTION: Remapping Plains Metis History from the Borderlands
• CHAPTER ONE: Creating a Metis Borderland, 1800-1840
• CHAPTER TWO: Fur Trade, Free Trade, and the Franchise: The Politics and Economics of Metis Borderland Settlements, 1840-1870
• CHAPTER THREE: Crossing Boundaries: The Plains Metis in Montana, 1869-1878
• CHAPTER FOUR: White, Indian, Metis: Race and Incorporation on the Canadian Prairies, 1869-1879
• CHAPTER FIVE: Dismantling Plains Metis Borderland Settlements, 1879-1885
• CHAPTER SIX: Scrip & Enrollment Commissions and the Shifting Boundaries of Belonging, 1885-1920
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

List of Figures

1. “Heart of a Continent”
2. Northern Plains in the 1860s
3. Metis Wintering Sites, 1840s-1870s
4. Metis Migrations
5. Northern Plains in the 1870s
6. Reduction of Montana Indian Reservations, 1885-95

Purchase the dissertation here.