Mixed messages: The Metis in Canadian literature, 1816--2007

The study of contemporary Metis texts is a burgeoning field in Canada today, reflecting the rate at which Metis authors in particular are coming onto the literary scene and using Metis representations to reflect their experiences and worldviews. That development in critical attention is beginning to counterbalance the weight that used to be given to Riel studies, which for decades dominated discussions of Metis history or representations of Metis in Canadian literature. The purpose of this study is to do a broad overview that encompasses not only Riel and the nineteenth-century Metis but also representations of Metis characters other than Riel in Canadian literature by authors of all backgrounds.;In the last two chapters I study texts by Metis authors, who began to gain discursive control over their self-representations in the 1970s. These authors claim a very different Metis identity from that of the nineteenth century, an identity that is now female-oriented and indigenized. More problematically, as I contend in Chapter Five, the history of metissage is being reinterpreted in contemporary Metis literature as imbricated in physical and cultural genocide against First Nations peoples.;The methodology used is a comparative historical and thematic examination of representations of the Metis and metissage (the process of racial and cultural mixing) in Canadian texts from the past two centuries in French and English. The nineteenth-century Metis texts that I study in Chapter One reflect a male-oriented Metis national identity that is largely influenced by the Metis' European (French and Catholic) heritage but that necessarily encompasses a definition based on dual racio-cultural heritage. That definition is maintained by non-Metis authors whose representations of the Metis dominate in Canadian literature after 1885. In Chapters Two and Three, I examine texts by non-Metis authors who convey different types of sympathy or hostility toward metissage and the Metis depending on their own ethnic backgrounds and ideologies. In addition, I discuss a broad shift in ideologies over time as the idea of what it means to be Canadian moves from "white" normativity in the early twentieth century to multiculturalism in the mid-twentieth century.