Mobility, Material Culture, and Metis Identity: A comparison of 19th century wintering camps in the Canadian West

Summary

Relationships between artifact assemblages and cultural identities are complex and difficult to disentangle. The Canadian west during the 1800s provides an interesting historical and archaeological case study that has potential to shed light on the dynamics of settlement, material culture, and the mobile nature of Métis peoples. Based originally in the Red River Settlement, some of the Métis began to expand west after 1845, forming interconnected wintering communities to participate in winter bison hunting. These wintering communities were almost entirely inhabited by Métis families, so the assemblages from wintering sites present a test case to examine the day to day material culture of the Métis hunting brigades during the mid- to late-1800s. In this paper, I examine patterns from previous and new excavations of Métis wintering sites in Alberta and Saskatchewan to explore how Metis communities balanced the mobility of buffalo hunting with the need for a protected home base during the difficult prairie winters. I compare assemblages across sites and make inferences about the complex nature of Métis identities during the nineteenth century, including the relationship between mobility, family, and the economics of buffalo hunting.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

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