“no legal reason” to Exclude Moose Factory’s Métis
- Ontario Métis Facts
- Jul 4
- 2 min read
While Treaty 9 was being negotiated in 1905, Métis in Moose Factory organized and petitioned the government for “that scrip has been granted to the Halfbreeds of the North West Territory” as a lasting settlement for their inherent land-related rights and interests as a distinct Indigenous people in what is now northern Ontario—a collective assertion known today as the 1905 Moose Factory Métis Petition.
Many Métis from Moose Factory had Métis family members and other relatives who had moved further west in the preceding years, including to the Red River region, and had received Métis scrip. The 1905 Moose Factory Métis Petition was, in part, an acknowledgement that the Métis community in Moose Factory knew how Canada was treating their Métis relatives in other regions. It was also an effort to seek equal treatment with their Métis relatives on the prairies.
However, Canada largely refused to apply the Dominion Lands Act east of Manitoba—including in the James Bay region—ultimately excluding Métis in Moose Factory from receiving Métis scrip despite their petitioning efforts. As was acknowledged nearly a century later in the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP): “in practice… the government of Canada made little effort to apply the Dominion Lands Act east of Manitoba”.
RCAP further acknowledged and affirmed the Abitibi Inland Métis Community’s long-held belief that Canada’s exclusion of Métis in Moose Factory and other historic Métis communities east of Manitoba from receiving Métis scrip was an arbitrary act of discriminatory policy implementation, concluding that there was, “no legal reason why the government limited the distribution of Métis scrip to what are now the three prairie provinces”.
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