Defining Métis: Catholic Missionaries and the Idea of Civilization in Northwestern Saskatchewan 1845–1898

Defining Métis examines categories used by Catholic missionaries to describe Indigenous people in present-day northwestern Saskatchewan in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It argues that the construction and evolution of these categories reflected missionaries’ changing interests and agendas. Timothy P. Foran challenges the orthodox notion that Oblate commentators simply discovered and described a singular, empirically existing, and readily identifiable Métis population. Rather, he contends that Oblates played an important role in the conceptual production of les métis.