The "forgotten people" was the widespread perception that best fit the Metis in Canada at the turn of the 1970s. This was a pivotal time when young Western Metis scholars started a long process of historical revision challenging the image of the Metis as half-savage rebels and direct threats to the modern country's development that Canadian historiography had conveyed up to then. Following the Northwest uprising of 1885, the military intervention of Canada and the hanging of their political leader, the Metis had been, to a large extent and for most of the 20th century, pushed to the spatial and social margins of Canada's society. In the current context of national reconciliation and renewing relationships between the State and Aboriginal peoples, such a reinstatement of the Metis is timely. But it comes with side effects. In the shadow of the Western Metis stand an increasing number of communities claiming Metis identity and their own history, in places well outside the Prairies, the land usually associated to Metis identity in Canada. Those claims raise challenges with regards to Metis definition as an Aboriginal people: on the one hand, communities of recent affirmation suffer from a lack of both political visibility (of recognition) and historical visibility (scarcity of evidence); on the other hand, their claims deeply call into question historical and geographical representations that shape the identification processes of indigenousness. This paper offers a new geohistorical perspective on Eastern Metis issues, one that is more sensitive to the effects of scale and indirect evidence in the production of geographic knowledge. I shall capitalize on a twenty-year experience in fundamental research on Metis issues, and on a more applied research that results from my involvement as an expert witness in a court case in Quebec.
