Books
For the Metis, the forty-ninth parallel was first a blessing, then a curse.
Q&A: Michel Hogue on the Metis and the forty-ninth parallel. Reviews: Character traits. Facets of creation. Dissenting opinions. More books: Master swindler, “enemy aliens,” our game, her own eyes.
Author Michel Hogue’s Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People has received high marks for its exploration of the border between Western Canada and the United States and its impact on the Metis. Grounded in extensive research in U.S. and Canadian archives, Hogue’s account illuminates how the Metis and other indigenous peoples were at the centre of the sometimes violent history of the forty-ninth parallel. Hogue, who grew up in Manitoba’s Red River Valley, is an assistant professor in the department of history at Carleton University in Ottawa. Canada’s History senior editor Nelle Oosterom recently spoke with Hogue.
What story are you telling in this book? This book has two storylines: The first is the emergence of the plains Metis communities in the nineteenth century, and the second is the creation and enforcement of the Canada-U.S. border along the forty-ninth parallel. The book traces how those Metis communities in places like the Red River Valley and the northeastern plains emerged at the contested edges of the fur trade empires and the edges of the border with the United States. It’s about how they used those boundaries to create a vibrant society and economy that took advantage initially of the divisions that the border marked.
The arc of the story suggests in some way how that was very successful as a strategy for many decades.
But with the collapse of the buffalo — the heart of their mobile economy — and with the growth of the power of the American and Canadian governments, much of the basis of those borderland Metis communities was swept away in the nineteenth century. The book tries to look at what happened to these mobile Metis communities.
How did the Metis define the borders of their own territory?
The borders were defined in part by kinship. They dedicated themselves to mobile buffalo hunting, and that meant going through territories that were inhabited by others. The Metis were able to do so in part because they were related to the Cree, the Assiniboine, the Saulteaux, the Anishinaabe. They moved through those territories in concert with members of those groups.
How did the Metis help to make the Canada-U.S. border?
The most obvious way was in the mundane tasks of helping to survey the border. The work of the boundary commission in the 1870s was really conducted with the labour and expertise of Metis men and women who worked as guides, interpreters, hunters, and who supplied the intelligence and shelter that the commission needed as it worked its way west.
The cart trails they used had long been blazed by Metis traders and hunt-