Historically, the Métis at Sault Ste. Marie had a diversified economy grounded in their community’s River Lots, as well as in the lands and waters of their surrounding traditional territory. Métis families at Sault Ste. Marie engaged in a wide range of land- and water-based occupations, which included fishing, trapping, and maple sugaring, in addition to other income-earning endeavours. In 1891, Stipendiary Magistrate E.B. Borron highlighted this diversity by noting that, “ha

Many Métis communities across the Métis Nation Homeland had a distinctive way of building and designing their homes. Métis in the Upper Great Lakes, for example, including Sault Ste. Marie and Georgian Bay, generally lived in detached wooden houses built from cedar bark and logs. A home of the prominent Métis Cadotte family, for instance, located on Mackinaw Island, was described as, “Made of logs covered in cedar bark.” It is thought the materials used in these hou

Ever since their relocation from Drummond Island, Penetanguishene has been the well-documented as the home to Métis in the Upper Great Lakes. Historical records from as early as the mid-1800s show that many visitors to the area recognized the Métis community at Penetanguishene as distinct from both their First Nations and non-Indigenous neighbours. In 1849, for example, Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle wrote that Penetanguishene was, “the nearest point of Western Canada”

In letters, journals, and reports from the 1820s through the 1850s, missionaries, government officials, and Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) personnel frequently identified Métis people and families in the vicinity of Mattawa-area fur trade posts on the Ottawa River. Métis people in the Mattawa region were often documented and referred to by various names such as ‘bois brulees’ and ‘halfbreeds’. For example, in the journal of his 1821 tour of Canada, Lord Dalhousie, the new Governo