From nation to population: the racialisation of 'Metis' in the Canadian census

Between 1996 and 2001 the 'Metis population' of Canada skyrocketed from 204,000 to 292,000, an astonishing and demographically improbable increase of 43 per cent. Most puzzling about this 'increase' is not so much the unpersuasive explanations offered by statisticians and others but, more fundamentally, the underlying assumption that such a thing as a 'Metis population' exists at all. In contrast, I argue that such an idea constitutes an artifact of Canada's racial/colonial episteme in which 'the Metis'-formerly an indigenous nation invaded and displaced in the Canadian nation-state's westward expansion - have been reduced in public and administrative discourse to include all - 1, indigenous individual who identifies as Metis: reduced, in other words, to (part of) a race. The paper argues further that the authority of the Canadian census as a privileged forum of contemporary meaning-making in Canadian society is such that the lack of explicit Census categories to distinguish Metis Nation allegiance further naturalises a racialised construction of Metis at the expense of an indigenously national one.