Family, Land, and Food: A New Approach to Métis Ethnic Identity in Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

I draw from heart-centered practices to explore the relation between foodways and identity among the Métis, a post-contact Indigenous nation from northwestern North America. Moving away from hybridity-centered understandings of identity that have guided archaeological research on the Métis until recently, I present a new approach that situates foodways as a tool used to shed light on the processes involved in the construction and expression of Métis ethnic identity. Centering materials recovered from and the practices associated with late 19th-century Métis overwintering sites, this framework highlights the intimate connections between the land, kinship, and food as core components of that identity. It also places Métis women at the center of a broad system of care that articulates Métis ethnic identity on a day-to-day basis. These ideas have important implications for the interpretation of a range of artifacts and ecofacts recovered at overwintering sites, and for Métis archaeology more broadly.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow