The Metis: people of mixed indigenous and European or African blood in the Americas

While the term metis generally refers to people along the US/Canadian border who are of mixed parentage--indigenous and European or African lineage--the term Mestizo refers to Indios and Spanish along the south borders of the North and South America, and Creole refers to indigenous, French and African bloodlines in Louisiana and along the Gulf of Mexico. But in truth, all of these people of mixed indigenous and European/African/Asian heritage are spread throughout North America.

I first became aware of metis as a girl when I read James Fennimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. The fact that Indian scouts spoke several European and native American languages provided a doorway into that time, an doorway that led to further research. Louise Erdrich's novels, as well as Linda Hogan's, brought the reality of mixed bloodlines people to life for me and many readers in the past several decades.

Later, after I had started a river organization on the Susquehanna River, my friend Treebeard/David Chamberlain (link to his book on the Lenape on Amazon) explained that his people, a band of the Lenape or Delaware avoided being moved to a reservation in Oklahoma by becoming assimilated. At the same time, the Big Horn Band on the Chemung River kept their stories alive even while living as white men.

The matrilineal Montour family on the Susquehanna trace their ancestry to Queens Esther and Catherine Montour, quintessential metis of Mohawk, French, Dutch and Lenape stock. After two decades of research on this family, who I have incorporated into the contact story at the heart of Burning Silk, I conclude that the metis were the continent's first and best attempt so far at engineering a people suited to live in harmony on this continent.

Let me quote at length from my conclusions about the metis: "She (Catherine Duladier, the maitresse de la soie at the heart of the novel) had not anticipated the impact their neighbors' way of life would have on her family. None of the Duladiers had met an indigenous American before coming to this continent. To find a new race of people--the metis--sprung up here over the past two hundred years astonished them. The magnitude of this fact seemed like something they might have heard about before arriving.

Their neighbors, the Montour family, on whom they had come to depend for knowledge of this new land and its particulars, lived in homes with windows like theirs, of log and plaster and fieldstone, clothed themselves in a stunning mélange of Louis Quatorze, Regency and…Bedouine, chic beyond any European woman's dreams (if she had the eyes to see it, and the Duladier women did,) as louche a chic as they had ever imagined. No doubt certain traveling Parisians found this rangy frontier style shocking enough to take home and adapt to their own Bohemian lifestyles. And the British? Little wonder that Marguerite's grandmother was said to run a salon on the distant Susquehanna that no European taking a tour of the Americas would miss."

Intermarrying with French trappeurs and Dutch traders, the Montour women and their bands living on the Susquehanna and on Seneca Lake, one of the Finger Lakes in the St. Lawrence watershed, occupied land coveted by a new breed of English settlers coming up from the south. It served these settlers to style the Montours and their people as "savages" to justify taking their lands by force. General Washington sent Generals Clinton and Sullivan to cut down their mature orchards, burn their homes, and destroy their crops on the eve of harvest.

Treebeard's forebearers passed down the memory of standing above the broad alluvial valley on Queen Esther's Glen, at the confluence of the Chemung and Susquehanna Rivers called Carantouan, watching the blue serpent, the long line of uniformed soldiers, destroy their homes and crops. Queen Esther's people fled before the soldiers to the site of today's Watkins Glen where they joined Queen Catherine's band, canoeing north along Seneca Lake until their were able to cross over to Canada and the sanctuary of their indigenous family.

In the imagined contact between French Huguenot silkmakers and Marguerite Montour, the granddaughter of Queen Esther, Burning Silk positions this legendary metis family as emblematic of the native American way-of-life…which they were. Discriminated against in the years after the American Revolution, Burning Silk tells the story that this branch of the Montours had returned to their original home on the Delaware River to sink their roots into their indigenous way of life. Imagine the Duladier's surprise to find these native women spoke French fluently!

Sally Roesch Wagner in her Sisters in Spirit, documents how the Iroquois clanmothers contributed directly to the Women's Declaration of Rights at Seneca Falls. In Burning Silk, the impact of the matrilineal way of life of the Montour women had a profound effect on the French Huguenot women, who were not able to own land or to vote.

In a matrilineal society, women elect the chiefs and un-elect them if they are not doing a good job. All property, clan, name, heirlooms pass to an individual through their maternal line see matrilineality essay.

Today, in Iroquois society, elder women are accorded the highest respect. The Iroquois, along with other indigenous American tribes, have lived this matrilineal way of life since time before memory. It remains for the metis to continue to strike the balance within their own persons and families that the Reinhabitory Institute predicts is the challenge all of us face on the North American continent today: the challenge of becoming native, of learning how to live in harmony within our home watersheds, with each other and with other species.

More information on The Metises