Historic Crown Recognition of Métis in Georgian Bay

Georgian Bay’s eastern shore and islands have been home to a distinct and identifiable Métis community since the late 1820s, following many Upper Great Lakes Métis families relocating from Drummond Island to the point of Lake Huron in 1828. Their presence is not only well documented and remembered locally, but also formally recognized by Crown representatives and governments for generations.

In 1847, for example, a Crown Indian Agent for southern Ontario, reporting to the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, drew careful distinctions between different groups under his supervision, writing:

“Among the Indians under my superintendence I am not aware of the existence of any regular half-breeds, that is to say, of our persons combining French or English habits with those of the Indians. That there may be a mixture of the races I have no doubt…”

Here the Agent made an important distinction: people of mixed First Nations and European ancestry were not necessarily Métis, or “Half-Breeds”. Instead, the Agent clearly recognized the Métis as a distinct people, separate from First Nations and Europeans, with their own culture, way of life, and communities.

While the Agent found no such distinct Métis community in southern Ontario, he was clear that they did exist further north in the Upper Great Lakes:

“…on Lake Huron and other places where I have had the opportunity of meeting the ‘Bois brulé’ and full bred Indian, a marked difference is to be seen between the two.”

The agent’s careful and intentional use of “Bois brulé”—a name commonly attributed to Métis from the Upper Great Lakes to Red River—to distinguish Métis from neighbouring First Nations underscored the Crown’s historical recognition of the Métis in the Upper Great Lakes, including Georgian Bay, as distinct and independent from both First Nations and settler populations. Acknowledgement of the Métis as a distinct community within the Upper Great Lakes has continued to the present day, including the Government of Ontario’s formal recognition that the Georgian Bay Métis Community is a historic rights-bearing Métis community in 2017.

See Our Sources

• Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, 1847

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