Weekly Crossword: Mar 10 - Mar 14, 2025
- Ontario Métis Facts
- Mar 15
- 7 min read
Updated: May 21
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“Mine by merit”: Remembering Lewis Solomon
March 9, 2025 marked the 125th anniversary of Lewis Solomon’s passing, in his 80th year.
Lewis Solomon—known to many as Louie—was born into the Métis community at Drummond Island, in 1821, to government interpreter William Solomon and his Métis wife Marguerite (nee Johnston) of Mackinaw. Lewis and his family were among the Métis families living on Drummond Island to relocate to Penetanguishene in the spring of 1829, following the British surrender of the island to the United States after the War of 1812 and imposition of the international border.
Although Lewis grew up in an environment dominated by French and Indigenous languages, where most did not hear English until after their relocation to Penetanguishene, he pursued “a tolerably fair education” as a young adult that afforded him a “command of English [that] is somewhat above the average”.
In Penetanguishene, Lewis’ strong language skills, entrepreneurial spirit, and deep community connections would enable him to build a prosperous “jack-of-all-trades” career, in professions as diverse as guiding, interpreting, and captaining ships through the waters of Georgian Bay, of which he was deeply familiar. This eventful life enabled Lewis to amass decades of vibrant stories of his Métis community.
Lewis shared many of his life’s stories with journalist A.C. Osborne shortly before he died in 1900. This included stories of his family’s displacement from Drummond Island, his Métis community’s enduring spirit and identity in Penetanguishene, and his many career achievements such as captaining the Duchess of Kalloola on its maiden voyage to the ‘Sault’.
Lewis also recounted numerous stories of guiding and of his Métis community’s generous hospitality to visitors, treasure hunters, and dignitaries alike, through which Lewis served as one of his Métis community’s first ambassadors. Among them was the story of Lewis Solomon’s harrowing rescue of Lord Morpeth, that almost cost Solomon his life:
“While camped near the Hudson's Bay post at French River Lord Morpeth went in bathing and got beyond his depth and came near drowning. I happened to pass near, and reached him just as he was sinking for the last time, and got him to a safe place, but I was so nearly exhausted myself that I could not get him on shore. Mr. Jarvis came to his lordship's assistance and helped him on to the rock. Lord Morpeth expressed his gratitude to me and thanked me kindly, saying he would remember me. I thought I would get some office or title, but I never heard anything further about if Mr. Jarvis afterwards got to be colonel, and I suspect he got the reward that should have been mine by merit.”
Despite never receiving the recognition or reward he was promised, Lewis Solomon’s belief in earning only what was “mine by merit” highlights the deeply rooted values, principles, and hardworking spirit that enabled Lewis and the Georgian Bay Métis Community to endure and prosper for generations since.
Click here to view the original story and sources.
Burning Out Métis Families at Agawa Bay
Following the loss of the Sault Ste. Marie Métis Community’s traditional River Lots, in the early decades of the 20th century, a group of Métis families re-established themselves at Agawa Bay.
Around 1903, Dave Bussineau and his wife Mary started to build a home at Agawa Bay. Soon after, Arthur Davieaux and his wife Viola also moved to the Bay, followed by the Roussain family around 1920. Louis Miron and his family also lived on an island nearby.
For more than 60 years, these four families lived a beautiful life at Agawa Bay. They hunted, fished, gardened, harvested maple sugar, cut wood, and guided tourists. Many of their relatives came and went with the seasons.
As with many small Métis villages across west central North America, however, the Métis families at Agawa Bay would once again be forced from their homes.
The first sign of change came in the early 1960s, when the Ontario government no longer allowed the Métis children of the Agawa Bay village to do their education by correspondence.
Then, in 1967, government officials arrived at Agawa Bay in float planes and told the families they had to leave. According to the officials, the Métis villagers were “squatters” who had no right to live there. The newly created Lake Superior Provincial Park, they said, was intended “for the enjoyment of all, not the few.”
Records show that between 1959 and 1968, the Ontario government relentlessly acquired all of the property in the park, including from the Métis “squatters” that included, “Dave and H Bussineau, W Roussain, M. Roussain, Edna Roussain, A. Davieaux.”
The final act in this forced eviction occurred in 1968 when government employees burned the Métis homes to the ground. One Crown employee later recalled that they, “torched a lot of the buildings that had to go…nobody considered anything here of historical significance.”
The Sault Ste. Marie Métis Community continues to remember and advocate those Agawa Bay families today.
Click here to view the original story and sources.
The Collective Métis Memory
Although the Métis Homeland covers an expansive geography throughout west central North America, it is often said that the Métis world is a very small one. News of any kind is known to travel fast throughout the Métis Nation’s deeply connected family and community networks.
While these expansive generations-old Métis kinship networks have been used to organize across distances, maintain a unified voice, and collectively advocate throughout history—giving rise to coordinated Métis Nation actions from the Upper Great Lakes westward—they have also had more personal implications.
As Christy Ann Simons noted of the Sault Ste. Marie Métis Community, for example, in her 1951 memoirs about growing up as a settler on St. Joseph Island in the late 1800s:
“We found out that if one was nice to one half breed family all the half-breed families – like the Indians were nice to you, and vice versa, be unkind to one family and all had no use for you.”
Grudges, like reputations, are not easily shaken in such tightly woven communities. As Christy Ann Simons also later recounted, a slight against one Métis family could ripple outward, taking on a life of its own:
“Two white men entered the [Métis] Solomon home. It happened to be Christmas Day. The women of the household greeted the visitors with a kiss. One man accepted, the other refused. The women were hurt by the refusal… Other white people who were told of the occurrence told this white man he should not have refused and perhaps made enemies.”
In a world where kinship ties are everything, to offend one household might mean estranging an entire network of relatives, friends, and allies. At the same time, a kind word or a helping hand could be just as enduring, solidifying bonds that can stretch across time and geography.
Throughout the deeply connected Métis Nation, where relationships form the backbone of survival and solidarity, one’s actions—good or bad—are rarely forgotten.
Click here to view the original story and sources.
The Métis Village of Frenchtown
For generations, family River Lots along the St. Mary’s River were at the heart of the Sault Ste. Marie Métis Community’s diversified economy and way of life, that extended throughout the lands and waters of their surrounding traditional territory.
The River Lots, however, were not the only historical Métis enclave in the ‘Sault’. Immediately west of the River Lots, situated around what are now Gore and John Streets in Sault Ste. Marie’s downtown, laid the small Métis village of Frenchtown.
Many of the Métis families that resided in Frenchtown had remained employed in the fur trade by the Hudson’s Bay Company into the 1850s, after the Robinson-Huron Treaty’s signing. They eventually settled on HBC-owned holdings around the Company post, maintaining possession of their lots until about 1900.
Frenchtown’s Métis families included the Belleaus, Brassards, Boyers, McKays, Nolins, and Riels. Hyacinthe Davieaux was a particularly leading figure among them.
In 1901, however, the HBC sold its properties. Like their Métis River Lot relatives fifty years before and their Métis descendants at Agawa Bay sixty years later, the Métis of Frenchtown were largely forced off their lands and made to disperse. In this instance, to make way for Sault Ste. Marie’s budding steel industry—eventually leading to the renaming of the area to “Steelton”.
Despite the numerous attempts to erase the Métis from Sault Ste. Marie, the Sault Ste. Marie Métis Community continues to remember and tell its stories. Today, visitors can learn more about Sault Ste. Marie’s Métis history—including the Métis River Lots, Agawa Bay, and Frenchtown—at the Sault Ste. Marie Métis Heritage Centre, located in the historic Frenchtown neighbourhood, or through the community’s Métis Tours partnership.
Click here to view the original story and sources.
Desecration of the Sault’s Métis Cemeteries
Following their exclusion from the 1850 Robinson-Huron Treaty, many of the Sault Ste. Marie Métis Community’s families found themselves without government-recognized title and were forced to relocate from their traditional homes.
As a result, by 1861, Sault Ste. Marie was swamped by Ontario settlers of British origin and Protestant religions—contrasting significantly with Alexander Vidal’s 1846 pre-treaty survey, which enumerated a population almost entirely of Roman Catholic Métis. Many of these settlers were British and Protestant who carried anti-Métis sentiments and took actions to ignore and forget the Sault Ste. Marie Métis Community’s long and distinct history.
In 1901, for example, when the Hudson’s Bay Company sold their land holdings in Sault Ste. Marie, the original Métis cemetery associated with the Company post was built over to make way for other developments.
A second Métis cemetery was dug up and relocated in the early 1900s, then dug up and relocated again in the 1960s. Both times, the Métis community members who laid there were pushed further and further from town—and from their traditional homes.
Of the hundreds of Métis people buried in that cemetery, less than a dozen gravestones survived the desecrations.
The relocations of the Métis cemeteries have left an enduring impact on the Sault Ste. Marie Métis Community. Even today, many local Métis citizens still reflect on their community’s dark history of displacement and say that the settlers, “didn’t even want dead halfbreeds around here.”
