Half-breed is a term, now considered offensive, used to describe anyone who is of mixed race, although in the United States, it usually refers to people who are half Native American and half European/white. [1]
Half-breed is a term, now considered offensive, used to describe anyone who is of mixed race, although in the United States, it usually refers to people who are half Native American and half European/white. [1]
In the 19th century, the United States government set aside lands in the western states for people of American Indian and European or European American ancestry known as the Half-Breed Tract. The Nemaha Half-Breed Reservation was established by the Treaty of Prairie du Chien of 1830. [2] In Article 4 of the 1823 Treaty of Fond du Lac, land was granted to the "half-breeds" of Chippewa descent on the islands and shore of St. Mary's River near Sault Ste. Marie. [3]
Unusually for its time, under the 1850 Donation Land Claim Act, "half-breed Indians" were eligible for land grants in the Oregon Territory, as were married white women.
During the Pemmican War trials that began in 1818 in Montreal regarding the destruction of the Selkirk Settlement on the Red River the terms Half-Breeds, Bois-Brulés , Brulés, and Métifs were defined as "Persons descended from Indian women by white men, and in these trials applied chiefly to those employed by the North-West Company". [4]
The Canadian government used the term half-breed in the late 19th and early 20th century for people who were of mixed Aboriginal and European ancestry. [5] The North-West Half-Breed Commission established by the Canadian government after the North-West Rebellion also used the term to refer to the Métis residents of the North-West Territories. In 1885, children born in the North-West of Métis parents or "pure Indian and white parents" were defined as half-breeds by the commission and were eligible for "Half-breed" Scrip. [6] [7] [8]
In Alberta the Métis formed the "Halfbreed Association of Northern Alberta" in 1932. [9]
The North-West Rebellion, also known as the North-West Resistance, was an armed resistance movement by the Métis under Louis Riel and an associated uprising by Cree and Assiniboine of the District of Saskatchewan, North-West Territories, against the Canadian government. Many Métis felt that Canada was not protecting their rights, their land, and their survival as a distinct people. Fighting broke out in late March, and the conflict ended in June. About 91 people were killed in the fighting that occurred that spring before the conflict ended with the capture of Batoche in May 1885.
The Red River Colony, also known as Assiniboia, was a colonization project set up in 1811 by Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk, on 300,000 square kilometres (120,000 sq mi) of land in British North America. This land was granted to Douglas by the Hudson's Bay Company in the Selkirk Concession. It included portions of Rupert's Land, or the watershed of Hudson Bay, bounded on the north by the line of 52° N latitude roughly from the Assiniboine River east to Lake Winnipegosis. It then formed a line of 52° 30′ N latitude from Lake Winnipegosis to Lake Winnipeg, and by the Winnipeg River, Lake of the Woods and Rainy River.
In January 1814, Governor Miles MacDonell, appointed by Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk issued to the inhabitants of the Red River area a proclamation which became known as the Pemmican Proclamation. The proclamation was issued in attempt to stop the Métis people from exporting pemmican out of the Red River district. Cuthbert Grant, leader of the Métis, disregarded MacDonell's proclamation and continued the exportation of pemmican to the North West Company. The proclamation overall, became one of many areas of conflict between the Métis and the Red River settlers. Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk had sought interest in the Red River District, with the help of the Hudson's Bay Company as early as 1807. However, it was not until 1810 that the Hudson's Bay Company asked Lord Selkirk for his plans on settling in the interior of Canada.
Institutional racism, also known as systemic racism, is a form of institutional discrimination based on race or ethnic group and can include policies and practices that exist throughout a whole society or organization that result in and support a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others. It manifests as discrimination in areas such as criminal justice, employment, housing, healthcare, education and political representation.
The Manitoba Act, 1870 is an act of the Parliament of Canada, and part of the Constitution of Canada, that provided for the admission of Manitoba as the fifth province of Canada.
A scrip is any substitute for legal tender. It is often a form of credit. Scrips have been created and used for a variety of reasons, including exploitative payment of employees under truck systems; or for use in local commerce at times when regular currency was unavailable, for example in remote coal towns, military bases, ships on long voyages, or occupied countries in wartime. Besides company scrip, other forms of scrip include land scrip, vouchers, token coins such as subway tokens, IOUs, arcade tokens and tickets, and points on some credit cards.
Robert Semple was an American-born fur trader and merchant who served as governor of the territories controlled by the Hudson's Bay Company in the Canadas from 1815 until his death in 1816.
The Métis are an Indigenous people whose historical homelands include Canada's three Prairie Provinces. They have a shared history and culture, deriving from specific mixed European and Indigenous ancestry, which became distinct through ethnogenesis by the mid-18th century, during the early years of the North American fur trade.
The Métis flag was first used by Métis resistance fighters in Rupert's Land before the 1816 Battle of Seven Oaks. According to only one contemporary account, the flag was "said to be" a gift from the North West Company in 1815, but no other surviving accounts confirm this. Both the red and blue versions of the flag have been used to represent the political and military force of the Métis since that time. The Métis flag predates the Flag of Canada by at least 150 years, and is the oldest patriotic flag that is indigenous to Canada.
A 19th century community of the Métis people of Canada, the Anglo-Métis, more commonly known as Countryborn, were children of fur traders; they typically had Scots, or English fathers and Indigenous mothers, often Cree, Anishinaabekwe, Nakoda, amongst others. They were also known as "English halfbreeds." Some Anglo-Metis still identify by this name. Their first languages were generally those of their mothers: Cree, Saulteaux, Assiniboine, etc. and English. Some of their fathers spoke Gaelic or Scots, leading to the development of the creole language known as "Bungee". Some scholars have started spelling Métis as "Metis" to acknowledge the presence and contributions of the Anglo-Métis and the complex history of the Métis people overall.
The Métis Nation of Alberta (MNA) is a registered not-for-profit society in Alberta, Canada, that acts as a representative voice on behalf of Métis people within the province.
Alberta's Métis people are descendants of mixed First Nations/Indigenous peoples and White/European families. The Métis are considered an aboriginal group under Canada's Constitution Act, 1982. They are separate and distinct from First Nations, though they live in the same regions and have cultural similarities, and have different legal rights.
Bois-Brûlés are Métis. The name is most frequently associated with the French-speaking Métis of the Red River Colony in the Red River valley of Canada and the United States.
Half-Breed may refer to:
The Pembina and Red Lake bands of Chippewa ceded to the United States the Red River Valley of the north in two treaties. Both were named for the treaty site, "Old Crossing" and the year, Treaty of Old Crossing (1863) and the Treaty of Old Crossing (1864). In Minnesota, the ceded territory included all land west of a line running generally southwest from the Lake of the Woods to Thief Lake, about 30 miles (48 km) west of Red Lake, and then angling southeast to the headwaters of the Wild Rice River near the divide separating the watersheds of the Red River of the North and the Mississippi River. In North Dakota, the ceded territory was all of the Red River Valley north of the Sheyenne River. In size, the area was roughly 127 miles (204 km) east-west and 188 miles (303 km) north-south, making it nearly 11,000,000 acres (45,000 km2) of prairie and forest.
The Nemaha Half-Breed Reservation was established by the Fourth Treaty of Prairie du Chien of 1830, which set aside a tract of land for the mixed-ancestry descendants of French-Canadian trappers and women of the Oto, Iowa, and Omaha, as well as the Yankton and Santee Sioux tribes.
The Iron Confederacy or Iron Confederation was a political and military alliance of Plains Indians of what is now Western Canada and the northern United States. This confederacy included various individual bands that formed political, hunting and military alliances in defense against common enemies. The ethnic groups that made up the Confederacy were the branches of the Cree that moved onto the Great Plains around 1740, the Saulteaux, the Nakoda or Stoney people also called Pwat or Assiniboine, and the Métis and Haudenosaunee. The Confederacy rose to predominance on the northern Plains during the height of the North American fur trade when they operated as middlemen controlling the flow of European goods, particularly guns and ammunition, to other Indigenous nations, and the flow of furs to the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) and North West Company (NWC) trading posts. Its peoples later also played a major part in the bison (buffalo) hunt, and the pemmican trade. The decline of the fur trade and the collapse of the bison herds sapped the power of the Confederacy after the 1860s, and it could no longer act as a barrier to U.S. and Canadian expansion.
William Pearce (1848–1930), was a surveyor, statistician, planner, and administrator in western Canada. He served in the federal government from 1874 to 1904 as federal surveyor and administrator, as federal advisor for western development and as Western consultant for the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. As Inspector of Dominion Lands Agencies, he oversaw the "development and allocation of all land, forests, mineral and water resources" from "Winnipeg to the eastern foothills of the Rockies"—representing 400,000 square miles of land, earning his nickname—"Czar of the West". He was known for his work on the Bow River watershed irrigation systems that transformed lands in southern Alberta into fertile land.
The Métis Nation of Ontario (MNO) is the government of Métis citizens and communities within Ontario that is recognized by the Canadian government. It is the democratic representative of the Métis communities represented by the MNO, with the responsibility of providing responsible and accountable self-government for its citizens and Métis communities in Ontario.