The Heartbeat of the Métis: Mobility, Material Culture, and Kinscapes

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.

The homeland of the Métis Nation of Canada is a vast landscape, making it challenging to trace our material history across many colonially imposed borders. Métis ancestors moved across this landscape along trails and river systems, creating a web of interconnected places tied together through kin relations with human and other-than-human relatives. These veins of connection were key to our emergence as a distinct people and Nation. In this paper, I explore the vascular kinscapes of the first and second generation of Métis ancestors in western Canada by mapping family connections to place throughout the homeland. I argue that Métis mobility is akin to a heartbeat, where families would ebb and flow to certain places at certain times, leaving behind material traces that help map our history and challenge traditional understanding of mobility in archaeology.

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