| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

We Know Who We Are: Métis Identity in a Montana Community. By Martha Harroun Foster. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006. xii, 306 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8061-3705- 3.)
Martha Harroun Foster's study of Montana's multiracial Métis reveals that groups in the United States have long struggled for recognition of their aboriginal heritage. We Know Who We Are joins a growing body of literature that seeks to unravel the complexities of ethnic identity in plural societies, a highly emotional and controversial issue. Foster is particularly intrigued with how a group of people with Indian and European ancestry, which lacks formal organization and governmental sanction, and sterotypical Indian cultural traits, still sees itself as a distinct people.	1
In a well-written, theoretically complex introduction, the author outlines the factors that affected the development and maintenance of Métis identity, an ethnicity that has been fluid, situational, inclusive, and adaptive. Borrowing from Fredrik Barth's groundbreaking 1969 study of ethnic boundaries, Foster finds that a complex mixture of economic activities, government policies, ascription by outsiders, and self-ascription enhanced Métis community persistence ("Introduction," in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, ed. Fredrik Barth, pp. 9–38). According to the author, however, the group's flexible kinship organization proved most central to the Montana band's survival since its genesis in the eighteenth-century Red River of the North region of the Canadian–United States borderlands.	. . .

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