Who Are the Métis?

The Métis are a distinct Indigenous people and nation with our own history, culture, languages, kinship networks, traditions and collective identity.

The Métis Nation began to emerge in the historic Northwest during the fur-trade era of the late eighteenth century. European fur traders, particularly French and Scottish men, formed families with Indigenous women from Nations including the Cree, Saulteaux, Anishinaabe, Dene and others. Their children did not simply remain a collection of people with mixed ancestry.

Over generations, families married into one another, travelled and worked together, established communities, developed extensive kinship networks and created a shared culture and political consciousness. From those communities emerged a new Indigenous people: the Métis.

Métis people developed their own traditions, music, dance, clothing, foodways, artistic practices, systems of governance and languages, including Michif. Distinct Métis communities developed along the rivers, lakes, trails and fur-trade routes of the Northwest. The historic Métis Nation Homeland eventually stretched across a vast part of west-central North America, including areas that are now Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories and the northern United States.

This distinction is important. Métis does not simply mean a person who has both Indigenous and European ancestry. The Métis emerged collectively as a distinct Indigenous people with communities, culture, identity and nationhood of their own.

Before There Was a British Columbia

British Columbia did not exist when Métis people first crossed the Rocky Mountains.

The Colony of British Columbia would not be proclaimed until 1858. Decades before that happened, Métis voyageurs, traders, interpreters, freighters and families were already travelling, working and living west of the Rockies.

At that time, today’s provincial borders did not exist. European trading companies referred to large portions of the interior as New Caledonia and to areas farther south as the Columbia District.

For the Indigenous Nations who had lived here since time immemorial, however, these were already homelands connected by sophisticated systems of travel, trade, kinship and diplomacy. The newcomers entered landscapes that were neither empty nor unexplored.

Métis history in what is now British Columbia developed within this much older Indigenous world.

It is therefore important to understand the early Métis presence here in context: Métis people arrived as participants in the expanding fur trade, itself part of European colonial expansion, while relying heavily upon the knowledge, territories, economies and relationships of the First Nations whose homelands they entered.

Métis West of the Rockies

Some of the earliest documented Métis history in what is now British Columbia appears at the very beginning of the inland fur trade west of the Rocky Mountains.

Métis Nation British Columbia identifies the Alexander Mackenzie expedition of the 1790s as one of the earliest recorded instances of possible Métis presence in the region. The subsequent Rocky Mountain Fort, established near the Peace River to help support the fur trade, relied in part on provisions such as pemmican, and MNBC’s historical research describes Métis participation as integral to its establishment.

By the opening years of the nineteenth century, the evidence becomes clearer. Métis Nation British Columbia identifies Jean Baptiste Boucher as the first recorded Métis person known to have settled in what is now British Columbia. Born in 1779 to a French-Canadian father and Cree mother, Boucher was already an experienced fur trader when he travelled west with North West Company trader Simon Fraser. MNBC records him as remaining west of the mountains and becoming associated with Fort St. James.

Parks Canada independently confirms that when the first voyageur canoes arrived at Fort St. James in 1806, Métis people were among their crews. Generations of Métis families subsequently travelled to, lived at and worked around the post. This means documented Métis presence in British Columbia predates the creation of the Colony of British Columbia by more than half a century.

New Caledonia and the Northern Interior

In 1806, Simon Fraser, John Stuart, Jean-Baptiste Boucher and their crew established the trading post that became Fort St. James on Stuart Lake. Fort St. James grew into the administrative centre of the New Caledonia fur-trade district. From there, a chain of trading posts and travel routes expanded through the northern and central interior.

Names that remain familiar on today’s map began appearing within that network:

• Fort St. James
• Fort Fraser
• Fort McLeod
• Fort George, where Prince George stands today
• Fort Alexandria
• Fort St. John

These were not isolated buildings scattered randomly across the wilderness. They were connected by rivers, lakes, trails, canoe routes and eventually packhorse brigade routes.

Métis Nation British Columbia’s mapping of historic fur-trade routes shows these northern posts connected southward through an extensive transportation network reaching Kamloops, the Fraser River, the Lower Mainland and the Pacific Coast.

The People Between the Forts

When we look at an old map, it is easy to focus on the forts. But much of the Métis story happened between them. A trading post could accomplish very little if nobody could move several tonnes of cargo hundreds of kilometres through mountains, rapids, lakes and forests. Métis voyageurs and freighters became renowned for precisely this kind of work.

They paddled canoes and bateaux, handled freight, travelled overland with pack animals, repaired equipment, hunted, supplied food, interpreted languages and carried messages between communities separated by enormous distances. The fur trade required people who could move between worlds as well as between places. Many Métis people spoke several languages and had family and cultural connections spanning Indigenous and European communities. Those relationships could be important in trade, transportation and diplomacy.

As families travelled between posts, Métis kinship networks also stretched across great distances. The history of Métis people in British Columbia is therefore not found only in settlements. It is written into the routes themselves.

Following the Forts South

As the inland trade expanded, the network connected northern New Caledonia with the southern interior. Fort Alexandria became an important point on the Fraser River. Farther south, Fort Kamloops connected routes through the interior. From there, brigades travelled toward the lower Fraser through routes eventually connecting with Fort Hope and Fort Yale. Cargo did not travel in one vehicle from beginning to end. Depending upon the terrain, goods might spend part of their journey in a canoe, another part aboard a bateau, and another portion strapped to packhorses travelling through the mountains.

The movement of freight through British Columbia was a relay system on a continental scale. The forts were its transfer points. The rivers and trails were its roads. Métis and First Nations people provided much of the knowledge and labour that made movement through this enormous landscape possible.

Fort Langley and the Fraser Valley

In 1827, the Hudson’s Bay Company established Fort Langley on the lower Fraser River. That date matters for the Fraser Valley Métis Association. Fort Langley was operating more than thirty years before the Colony of British Columbia existed. The fort was established within the unceded territories of the Kwantlen, Katzie, Matsqui and Semiahmoo First Nations, in a landscape where Indigenous peoples already maintained extensive communities and trade networks.

The Hudson’s Bay Company chose the Fraser because it hoped the river could connect its interior trading system with the Pacific. Fort Langley became increasingly important as that network developed. European trade goods and supplies travelled inland through the post, while furs and other resources from the interior moved outward toward coastal and international markets. 

Métis people were part of that world.

Parks Canada now explicitly recognizes that Métis people held significant roles throughout the fur trade at Fort Langley, working as labourers, freighters, craftspeople and, at times, clerks. Métis people also helped facilitate relationships among First Nations, traders and settlers. Parks Canada describes the Métis contribution to the fur trade in what would later become British Columbia as vital. Fort Langley therefore provides a particularly tangible connection between the Fraser Valley and the much larger Métis fur-trade world.

A River Before a Highway

Today we often experience the Fraser River as something we cross. Historically, it was something people travelled. For thousands of years before the arrival of the fur companies, the Fraser and its tributaries were transportation, food and cultural corridors for the Indigenous Nations of the region. The fur trade added another layer of movement to those ancient waterways.

Fort Hope became an important transfer point between the difficult overland routes of the interior and river transportation on the Fraser. Downriver lay Fort Langley. For people travelling through the fur-trade network, the river connected the mountains and interior of the continent with the Pacific. This is one reason the Fraser Valley has an important place in the Métis story of British Columbia. The valley was not at the distant edge of that network. It became one of its major corridors.

Why Are So Many Places Called “Fort”?

For somebody arriving in Canada from another country, the word fort can be misleading. It may suggest a military castle or defensive installation. Many of the places carrying the name Fort in western Canada began instead as fur-trade posts. They were working places. There might be warehouses filled with trade goods and furs, workshops, blacksmiths, boats, livestock, food stores, living quarters and trading spaces.

Around and through them moved First Nations traders, European company employees, Métis workers and families, voyageurs, interpreters, craftspeople and travellers. They became points in a transportation and commercial network. That is why names beginning with Fort appear again and again when following early Métis history across British Columbia.

• Fort St. John
• Fort St. James
• Fort Fraser
• Fort George
• Fort Alexandria
• Fort Kamloops
• Fort Hope
• Fort Yale
• Fort Langley
• Fort Victoria
• Fort Nanaimo

Not every one of these places was a historic Métis community, and their individual histories are different. What connects many of them is the fur-trade system through which Métis people travelled, worked and formed relationships across what would eventually become British Columbia.

Long Before the Province

By the time the Colony of British Columbia was created in 1858, this network had already existed for decades. Métis people had already crossed the mountains. They had already travelled the rivers of what would later be named British Columbia. They had already worked at its trading posts. Métis families had already lived at Fort St. James for generations. 

Fort Langley had already been operating on the Fraser River for more than thirty years. The provincial border that now separates British Columbia from Alberta did not define their world. Neither did the border eventually established between Canada and the United States.

The Métis fur-trade world was organized around rivers, watersheds, trading districts, family networks and transportation routes that crossed the boundaries we recognize today.

Then Came the Colony

In 1846, Britain and the United States established the international boundary at the 49th parallel across much of the Pacific Northwest. That decision reshaped the Hudson’s Bay Company’s transportation system. Fort Langley became increasingly important as a British-controlled connection between the inland posts and the Pacific Ocean.

Then, in 1858, gold on the Fraser River brought an enormous influx of newcomers. Approximately 30,000 miners surged into the region during the Fraser River Gold Rush. Britain, concerned about maintaining control over the territory, formally created the Colony of British Columbia.

On November 19, 1858, the proclamation establishing the new colony was made at Fort Langley. The irony is worth noticing.

The place where British Columbia was formally proclaimed had already been part of a much older Indigenous landscape and, for three decades, part of a fur-trade world in which Métis people were working and travelling.

The colony was new.

The Métis presence was not.

Métis History Is Also a History of Movement

This history helps explain why Métis identity cannot always be understood by looking for one ancestral village on a modern map. Métis families moved. They followed the fur trade.

They travelled between river systems, trading districts and communities. A family might have connections to Red River, Saskatchewan, Athabasca, the Peace River country, New Caledonia, the Columbia District or the Pacific Coast across different generations.

Those journeys produced extraordinarily wide kinship networks.

They also help explain why someone living in British Columbia today may discover ancestral names connected to places thousands of kilometres apart. The map changed around Métis families. Their relationships often came first.

The Old Routes Are Still Around Us

Much of that historic world can be difficult to see today. The canoes have largely disappeared from the transportation corridors. The brigade trails have been replaced or crossed by highways. Some trading posts disappeared entirely. Others became towns and cities. But the geography remains.

• The Fraser still flows past Fort Langley.
• Hope still sits at the entrance to the Fraser Canyon.
• Kamloops remains a meeting place of major transportation routes.
• Prince George still occupies the region once served by Fort George.
• Fort St. James and Fort St. John still carry their histories in their names.

Across British Columbia, familiar places sit upon landscapes that once formed part of a vast network of rivers, trails, trading posts and human relationships. For Métis people today, learning that history can change the way we look at the map. We begin to see not simply isolated forts, but connections. Not simply trade routes, but journeys.

Not simply names in historical records, but families. And not simply a culture belonging to the past, but a people whose history in this land began long before British Columbia had a name.

A Living Métis Community

The Métis story did not end with the fur trade. 

Today, Métis people live throughout British Columbia and continue to strengthen language, music, dance, harvesting, beadwork, storytelling, kinship, governance and community life. For some families, that cultural continuity was carried strongly from one generation to another. For others, generations of displacement, discrimination and pressure to assimilate interrupted those connections. That is why cultural revival matters.

• Learning an ancestor’s name matters.
• Learning why their family moved matters.
• Learning a Michif word matters.
• Learning to bead, dance, harvest, cook, play fiddle or sit together in community matters.

But Métis culture cannot live only in genealogy. It survives when people practise it. It grows when people share it. And it becomes stronger when another generation has the opportunity to belong to it.

Here in the Fraser Valley, FVMA is one small part of that much larger story: connecting Métis people to one another, creating opportunities to learn and participate, and helping ensure that Métis culture remains something living in the present and carried confidently into the future.