Métis heritage always comes down to community

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/09/2023 (987 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last week we loaded our three young boys into the family van to go get their first-ever photo ID: a Manitoba Métis Federation Citizenship card.

We rolled into the MMF head offices at 150 Henry St., long-form birth certificates and about 50 pages of registration documents in hand.

Even though my husband and I have our cards, our children needed proof of community endorsement, in the form of signatures from MMF representatives of local government, and to demonstrate links to our genealogy.

Because several generations of our families have their cards, and have opened their genealogies to new applicants, this is the shorter version of the citizenship process. People applying for the first time have a few more hoops to jump through.

My own ancestry is Scottish Métis. The family river lot was near Narol, a few miles north of Winnnipeg on the east side of the Red River. It is where my ancestors farmed until the signing of the Manitoba Act of 1870, which established the province but needed the Métis land for non-Indigenous settlers.

The solution was a promise of a quarter section of land for each Métis child as compensation for moving off of the lot.

This seemed a fair endeavour (in the eyes of the federal government, anyway) but there were problems.

The biggest was the government didn’t have enough land to make good on this promise. There were additional barriers involving taxation, travel, land suitability and outright forgery of documents that further robbed Métis children of their inheritance.

Through this process and the issuing of these promissory documents, called scrip, my own ancestors became scattered; some near Teulon, some near Beausejour, some never able to claim the land promised to them.

It’s these historical scrip documents, and proving our genealogical connection to the names on those documents, that confirm we are members of the Métis Nation.

Ironically and poetically, Métis identity, in the eyes of the federal government, is defined by what was taken from us.

So when a public figure like Kevin Klein asserts he is Métis, but cannot speak to connection or knowledge of who we are as a people, it’s hurtful and confusing.

Klein, a provincial Tory cabinet minister, claims membership to the Painted Feather Métis, a for-profit organization operating from a single family home in Ontario. Where are his ancestral lands? Where are the records of ancestors reaching through time to reclaim him? Where is the support of the Métis Nation?

There are, of course, many Red River Métis folks who have become unmoored from community and history. But the records are meticulously kept, and the community is here, waiting to reconnect and welcome lost cousins. There’s no shortage of Métis people he may have asked for guidance and community.

Klein has repeatedly defended his identity claim by stating that it’s a “personal journey,” but the journey of reclaiming Métis identity is done in community.

And if it’s personal, then why make a public claim without the knowledge to speak to what this identity means? Surely he anticipated questions. It’s more than a bit disheartening to have the ignorance of an MLA laid so bare with so little recompense.

Shouldn’t every member of the provincial government in the homeland of the Métis know who the Métis are, especially if they’re claiming to be us?

With his admission of ignorance, this MLA has exposed his own lack of education about Indigenous people in this province.

The generational wealth stolen from Métis children is why my kids have Manitoba Métis citizenship cards now.

This is their birthright and the work of generations of family and community to ensure the inheritance denied to generations of Métis children is not lost forever; to reclaim and restake our claims to our homeland, and to reconnect with family and community; to weave together whatever tattered threads we may bring, to re-tie our community to one another across time and distance, to attach shreds of story between one another and to rediscover a shared land, history and language that was nearly extinguished.

If Klein is part of that shared history, he has to do more than put a stamp on an envelope and await a card from Ontario.

My children are Métis. They receive certain benefits from the Red River Métis government in an attempt to recover the inheritance stripped from them by the Manitoba Act, somewhat thanks to a 2016 Supreme Court decision ruling the implementation of the act unconstitutional.

This inheritance, the right to property and access to the wealth of one’s parents, was taken from my family and my husband’s family. The line and linkage of intergenerational wealth was severed and seized by an act of government.

It is incumbent upon any present-day government official to, at the very least, understand his own constituents and the history of the province which we, the public, have entrusted him to govern.

rebecca.chambers@freepress.mb.ca