Categorizations of Identity in Settler Colonial Contexts: Unpacking Métis as Mixed in the Archaeological Record

Summary

The Métis Nation of Canada has often been categorized as a mixed, hybrid ethnic group, based largely on racialized understandings of the early encounters between Indigenous women and European men. Métis scholars have begun to critique the racial basis for "Métis-as-mixed" and shift toward ways of identifying based on personhood and nationhood. In this paper, I discuss how settler colonial categories of hybridity have influenced past archaeological research on the Métis in Canada and explore the possibilities of archaeological analysis of Métis sites based on a Métis ontology that centers kinship, mobility, and nationhood. Using examples from my research, I present a way of understanding the rise of a new people through the archaeological record that does not rely on logics of mixedness, but rather considers the spatial and material patterns as representative of an emergent Métis worldview.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018   •
• Seeing Ethnicity?: Parsing Hybridity, Creolization and Ethnogenesis in The Archaeological Record

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 437