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Writer's pictureOntario Métis Facts

Sayer Family Pt. 4: Métis Rights Champions


By the time Pierre Guillaume Sayer retired from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1832, his family had grown and settled in Grantown (later renamed St. Francois-Xavier), a Métis farming settlement established by Métis leader Cuthbert Grant.

 

Life in the Métis community revolved around buffalo hunting and pemmican production. Twice a year, Métis in Grantown would go buffalo hunting and the community became one of the HBC’s largest pemmican suppliers.

 

In Grantown, Pierre Guillaume and his wife, Josette, raised their four children within the growing Métis community. Pierre Guillaume continued his fur trade career, like his brothers and their father before them, who had begun the family tradition in the Upper Great Lakes.

 

This included engaging in independent trading. As Pierre Guillaume would find out, however, the Hudson’s Bay Company was fully opposed to Métis free trade.

 

In 1849, Pierre became the center of a legal battle for Métis rights. He and three other traders were charged with illegal trading—a violation of the HBC’s trade monopoly.

 

However, Pierre Guillaume and his fellow Métis believed in their right to trade freely. The Métis community rallied around them. Led by Louis Riel Sr., hundreds of Métis gathered to protest the charges.

 

Although Pierre Guillaume was found guilty, no punishment was imposed. The charges against the others were dropped.

 

This case became an important moment in the fight for Métis rights. It effectively broke the Hudson’s Bay Company monopoly and likely inspired similar actions by other members of the Sayer family across the Métis Homeland, from the Upper Great Lakes westward.

 

A year after Pierre Guillaume’s trial, for example, his nephew Toussaint Michel signed a petition to protect the Métis River Lots in Sault Ste. Marie. Pierre Guillaume’s brother Henry also followed his example by ignoring HBC policy at the Company’s Mississagi post—just east of Sault Ste. Marie—first by moving the post’s operations to his own building across the river and then becoming a fully independent trader who successfully competed with the HBC for years.

 

The Sayer family’s collective actions from the Upper Great Lakes westward not only helped to solidify a shared sense of Métis Nationhood across west central North America, but also laid a foundation for the ongoing defense of Métis rights that continues to today.


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