In 1942, at the age of 94, Métis matriarch Elizabeth Longlade (née Dusome) shared stories from her remarkable life, which were captured in a Toronto Star  article. Although brief, the article recounts Elizabeth’s reflections, revealing her family’s experiences spanning both generations and geography. The article was published at the height of the Second World War. For Elizabeth, these seemingly faraway global events were deeply personal, as several of her grandchildren were a

In the autumn of 1850, government-appointed Treaty Commissioner William B. Robinson, made a promise on behalf of the Crown that the lands on which the Sault Ste. Marie Métis Community resided on along the St. Mary’s River would be respected and protected. These Métis lands were organized into narrow family river lots; a pattern recognizable throughout the Métis Nation Homeland, and shared by other Métis communities including Batoche, the Red River, and St. Albert. These Métis

Elizabeth Dusome was born in 1847 at Highland Point, “across the bay” from Penetanguishene into the large and deeply connected Métis family that had moved from the Red River to Georgian Bay in the Upper Great Lakes in the years before her birth.   As a “pioneer resident” of the region who grew up at a time when Penetanguishene was a “cedar swamp with a scattering of Indian wigwams and fishing shanties”, only a generation after much of the community had been relocated there fr

The Métis Nolin family, originally from the Upper Great Lakes, have left a legacy across the Métis Homeland. This includes the Nolin sisters, Marguerite and Angelique. Marguerite and Angelique Nolin were the children of trader Jean Baptiste Nolin and his Métis wife, Marie Angelique Couvret. Raised on Michilimackinac, the birthplace of many Métis families in the region, the Nolins moved to Sault Ste. Marie in the late 1780s and quickly set down roots along the St. Mary’s River

Michilimackinac, or Mackinac Island, was “an eighteenth century nexus for the Great Lakes fur trade” where many Métis families like the Langlades, Cadottes, and Nolins emerged as leading families within the emerging Métis political consciousness in the Upper Great Lakes. Within that often male-dominated business world, Métis matriarch Madeline Laframboise was renowned for her entrepreneurial prowess and success. Laframboise was “a tall and commanding figure, and most dignifie

George Harvey was born on December 16, 1856 at Michipicoten on Lake Superior to a Métis mother, Jane Flett, and Scottish Hudson Bay Company employee, Alexander Harvey.  The next year, the Harvey family moved north to Moose Factory on James Bay, where the young George spent many of his formative years deeply engrained within the region’s bustling fur trade economy and growing Métis community.  In 1870, when George was just 13 years old, he was sent to Stromness in Scotland’s O