| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Martha Harroun Foster. We Know Who We Are: Métis Identity in a Montana Community. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 306. $29.95.

No people more confounded nineteenth-century Anglo-American efforts to imagine their westward expansion as a triumphant march across an untamed wilderness than the Métis, those populations of multiple origins and mixed racial ancestry. Their presence uncomfortably reminded Americans of the prior French and British occupations of the supposedly untrammeled wilderness. With their commitment to elements of their European cultural heritage, in particular the market economy of the fur trade, and their devotion to Christianity (albeit Catholicism), the Métis could clearly claim connection with the earlier empires and, in their physical embodiment of racial intermingling, suggest an alternative to the emerging Anglo-American myth of a frontier line that divided the civilized from the savage. Across the Midwest and Western Plains, the Métis were an unsettling reminder to incoming Anglo-Americans that historical realities were far more complicated than they wanted to admit. The Anglo-American response to this vexing historical reality was also repeated in each new territory to which they laid claim. Time and again they sought to erase the Métis as a distinct group, denying them an independent political or even ethnic existence. Whereas Canadians, in the words of Jennifer S. H. Brown and Jacqueline Peterson in The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America (1985), gradually came to view the Métis as self-identifying "new peoples," Anglo-Americans did not. In contrast, they constructed the Métis either as mixed-blooded Indians or old French settlers: that is, as either "Indian" or "white."

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