Métis communities throughout the Métis Homeland have vibrant and diverse ways of life grounded in the lands and waters that surround them. Each Métis community has developed unique food-based traditions that have sustained their families and livelihoods over generations.
Small-scale farming and food growing, in particular, have taken on a varied and polarizing place both within and between Métis communities. For some, food growing has long been an important staple. For others, it was looked down upon with disdain.
Like many Métis communities throughout the Homeland, for example, the Métis community at Sault Ste. Marie based its way of life around its Métis River Lots for generations. Each was customarily held by a specific Métis family, on which they would build their home and often undertake small-scale farming activities that would supplement other seasonal mainstays like fishing and maple sugaring.
This seasonal pattern of small-scale food growing reflected traditions shared by many other Métis communities for generations. For example, since the days of the fur trade, Métis “women of the fort”, in many regions of the Métis Homeland, were known to garden throughout the summer, while also taking on other seasonal food-related duties such as snaring, fishing, and berry picking.
Not all Métis communities, however, shared this same affinity for food growing.
Métis families at Penetanguishene, in particular, such as the Trudeau (Lepage), Dusome-Clermont, Brissette-L’Hirondelle, and Solomon families grew a proud subsistence and commercial fishing tradition, that has long formed the heart of their Métis community’s place-based way of life. Within it, some community members shunned farming altogether.
One now-famous story immortalized in Le Loup de Lafontaine, originally published in French, recounts Métis fisherman Francois Labatte’s disdain for the farming way of life, saying:
“He lived mainly from fishing. Water was his domain. He did not hide his disdain for the cultivation of the land. In his eyes, [farmers] were only an inferior class of people, slaves of the soil… who wade all day in mud and manure.”