Heirs of an Ambivalent Empire by Scott Berthelette

Author:Scott Berthelette
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2022-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

6

From Métissage to Métis

Canadiens and Natives in the Hudson Bay

Watershed after the Conquest of Canada, 1760–1782

The French ministers, bureaucrats, and imperial planners who had sought to fulfill imperial projects in the Hudson watershed could hardly have foreseen that the French presence in the West would, despite the vicissitudes faced by France’s North American empire, have a much more enduring and salient legacy. Failed imperial aspirations – whether in the fur trade, Indigenous alliances, or the “discovery” of the Western Sea – ultimately resulted in the creation of a new Indigenous culture, language, people, and nation: the Métis. While French colonial thinkers and dreamers like Guillaume Delisle, Jean Bobé, Governor Vaudreuil, and La Vérendrye had spent decades chasing a rêve fou in the form of the non-existent Western Sea, they had unknowingly engendered crucial processes that contributed to the beginnings of political self-determination and collective identity that eventually led to the emergence of the Métis people. Indeed, under the very noses of Troupes de la Marine officers, Jesuit missionaries, and colonial officials, a dynamic cultural exchange had taken place at the Western Posts, which saw the entrenchment of métissage alongside the emergence of group identity, ultimately leading to the ethnogenesis of the Métis people. French imperial expansion into the Hudson Bay watershed had contributed to a complex environment characterized by Native-newcomer exchange and in which the Canadiens tended to thrive. By the 1750s and ’60s, a dynamic French-Indigenous social world born of cultural hybridity was no longer dependent on the foil of French Empire for its existence. The French colonial structures of the ancien régime had collapsed in the Hudson Bay watershed following the British conquest of Canada, but a new world was beginning to rise from the ashes.

In the 1750s, Troupes de la Marine officers, unable to wrest control of the fur trade away from the HBC or to locate the fabled Western Sea, withdrew ignominiously to defend Canada in the Seven Years’ War (1754–63).1 Rejecting the call to arms, many former voyageurs, soldiers, and coureurs de bois remained in the Hudson Bay watershed among their Indigenous fur trade families. Consequently, when British pedlars from Montreal, such as Alexander Henry the elder, James Finlay, Peter Pond, and Thomas and Joseph Frobisher, arrived in the Northwest in 1767, they encountered well-established, cohesive, and dynamic French-Indigenous communities. Between 1754 and 1775, the HBCmade fifty-six wintering trips inland with the goal of attracting Native customers to come and trade at their bayside posts, only to be confronted by long-time resident Canadien traders. The journals kept by many of these inland travellers, among them William Tomison, William Pink, Matthew Cocking, Samuel Hearne, Philip Turnor, Peter Fidler, and David Thompson, recorded a culturally hybrid French-Indigenous world in the Hudson Bay watershed.

The first half of this chapter examines HBC and NWC sources to challenge the previous scholarly interpretation that the French presence in the Hudson Bay watershed vanished during the Seven Years’ War. By taking an in-depth look at the cases of two individuals – François

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