Riel descendent touches several hot-button issues
Indigenous concerns missing from federal election campaign, Jean Teillet tells Jennifer Ackerman.
REGINA October marks the 175th anniversary of Louis Riel’s birth and 150 years since Riel and the Metis people began the Red River Resistance. As Saskatchewan celebrates the Month of the Metis, Riel’s great-grandniece Jean Teillet, an Indigenous rights lawyer, author and lecturer, visited Regina’s Government House on Thursday to talk about her new book and weigh in on a few hot-button issues like the federal election and Metis identity. Here is some of what she shared:
HER NEW BOOK
Published last month, The North-west Is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel’s People, the Métis Nation is a 200-year history of the Metis people. A bit of a quirk of Canadian history, Teillet said everybody knows about Riel but nothing about his people, and she’d like to change that.
“He’s like a comet. He just sort of flamed out into the sky and everybody’s been so mesmerized by him and still is, that he still continues to be the focal point,” she said.
A proud Riel descendant, Teillet said there are other key figures in Metis history who are also worth remembering — like the Metis nation’s first great leader Cuthbert Grant, and of course Gabriel Dumont, both from Saskatchewan. “He’s not the beginning, he’s not the end,” she said of Riel. “The Metis nation is still here and it was here a long time before he came along.”
FEDERAL ELECTION
Less than a week away from the federal election, Teillet said there’s been a “complete absence” of Indigenous issues during the campaign.
“You have to make it an agenda item: ‘This is what we promised to do. We are going to keep working with Indigenous peoples,’ ” said Teillet, who’s been involved in treaty negotiations for more than 20 years. “First Nations, Inuit, and Metis — we need to find a way to incorporate them into this country with land.”
In a country rich with land, she said not working with Indigenous people on the issue of land rights is “selfish” and “arrogant.” With Indigenous populations on the rise, she said by ignoring land — and other Indigenous issues — Canada is on the path to creating its own disaster.
RACE SHIFTERS
Teillet spoke of a disturbing trend in Eastern Canada where people have begun to claim Metis heritage based on genealogies and DNA tests. “They are people who are either doing their genealogies, which is a great hobby these days, and they go back to (the) 1600s and they find an everso-great Indian grandmama and then they jump up and down and say I’m Metis!” she said.
But the Metis nation has strict registration rules, one of which mandates a person must be a descendent of the Metis nation, which wasn’t established until the 1790s. Teillet calls these people “race shifters,” a term coined by an American academic.
More than just a little trend, she said it’s a “huge thing” in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Quebec. Many making claims of Metis status start out as people who are against First Nation and Inuit land claims, according to Teillet.