Interlude 1

What’s a Métis?
What is a Métis?

Well first of all Sir John A. MacDonald wanted to kill the Métis off. For him, we were to be treated as whites. He used those words. People in Ottawa, they didn’t know who the Métis people were, people in Ontario thought we’d long gone with the buffalo. So the federal government and Indian Affairs wanted to erase the memory and the knowledge of the Métis people, because the Ontario government figured these Indians were supposed to die off. The numbers are supposed to go down, they’re not supposed to go up