Throughout history, Métis communities’ distinctive political identities have often emerged as a response to external threats to their collective Métis rights and way of life.
Now-famous Métis political actions include the Battle of Seven Oaks and North-West Resistance. Each event served to solidify a distinctive Métis identity and collective consciousness in present-day Manitoba and Saskatchewan, respectively.
In present-day Ontario, the 1905 negotiations for Treaty 9 in the western James Bay region acted as a similar catalyst—further solidifying the Abitibi Inland Métis Community’s already-distinctive collective Métis identity.
For generations, the Abitibi Inland Métis Community had developed a unique identity and way of life alongside its European and First Nations neighbours, with deep extended family and kinship connections westward throughout the Métis Nation Homeland.
The Abitibi Inland Métis Community’s growing collective consciousness was demonstrated in its 1893 petition to the Government of Ontario, to “consider compensation for the extinction of the half-breed title to the soil” as had been granted to their Métis relatives farther west.
The Abitibi Inland Métis Community’s calls for rights recognition continued into the 1900’s, when commissioners arrived in the region to negotiate Treaty 9.
While government treaty-making policy prohibited negotiators from dealing collectively with the Abitibi Inland Métis Community, many individual community members were also, “refused treaty by the Commissioners on the ground that they were not living the Indian mode of life.”
In other words, the Abitibi Inland Métis Community was, at that time, living a distinct Métis way of life apart from its First Nations neighbours that disqualified it from treaty inclusion.
As concluded in a 2005 Praxis report to the Department of Justice Canada, these exclusionary and coercive government positions during Treaty 9’s negotiations served to further crystalize the Abitibi Inland Métis Communities already-distinct Métis identity:
“The distinctly mixed-ancestry way of life at Moose Factory was, by act of the treaty, politicized in a way unprecedented in their two-hundred year history at the fort. This event, it can be argued, generated something more than a fur trade post community...”