English Canada uneasy with Metis, mestizos, half-breeds

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Three of the four European peoples who colonized the New World have produced a mixed-race group of people with the earlier pre-Columbian Indians. The Spanish and Portuguese produced mestizos, the French, the Metis, but the fourth colonizers, the English, did not mingle with Indigenous peoples in such a way as to create a significant number of mixed-race offspring. It is an exception. There is a joke among mestizos and Metis that asks, When did we get here? About nine months after Europeans landed. This is considered an historically correct statement.

Looking back almost 400 years to the early decades of the 17th century, when the first English villages were established on the East Coast, there is no discussion in the history books of a halfway-Metis or half-breed people being created. The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay set up what were called "Praying towns," for Indians. Indians were herded into these predecessors of reservations that were near the Puritan villages, but no new half-breed people resulted from this proximity. From the New England states south to the Carolinas, in all the English Thirteen Colonies over a vast and diverse area, there is surprising homogeneity across the board on this point.

About 150 years later, by 1760, the word half-breed entered the English language, a mixed-race people were finally named. It was a reluctant word as it has now passed out of use by the media because it is seen to have negative connotations. Was this a case of ethnic cleansing perhaps? A word and a people were shunned and half-breeds have quietly vanished.

The majority of the population of Ontario is English-speaking, the provincial government is taking the Metis Nation of Ontario to court questioning their existence. This makes logical if cruel sense because the democratic majority of Ontarians who speak English no longer culturally acknowledge half-breeds as they are understood not to exist any more. Now Metis are next on the list. People are people, and if English-speaking people do not have a halfway people, then French-speaking people cannot either.

This Metis court challenge would likely not be initiated in the West, Quebec, or by the federal government. Metis and halfbreeds were instrumental in the creation of the province of Manitoba and its entering Confederation in 1871 and integral to the history of the Prairie Provinces, but not Ontario. The Ontario public however, in a 400-year-old eastern tradition, does not know a halfway people, so the government must represent this view. Even if the people are wrong or misinformed, history, language, and culture lead government policy in a democracy.