Charlotte Hunter

Seven Generations is Not a Test

· Charlotte Hunter

There is a sentence that follows Ontario Métis people around the internet — usually in the replies, usually in the comments, usually signed by someone who has never met one of us:

“You’re not really Métis. Having a Cree ancestor seven generations ago doesn’t make you Métis.”

It comes from two directions, and I want to name both, because they sound different but they’re making the same error.

From one side, a First Nations person will say: you’re a lost First Nations person. You just haven’t found your way back to the community your nearest ancestor came from. Go find it. You belong there, not here.

From the other side, a Métis person — usually self-styling as “Red River” Métis — will say: you’re not really Métis. You may have the blood, but you never developed the culture. Only our Métis — the ones who came out of Red River, the ones carrying the real thing — are Métis. You’re a pale copy.

Both are wrong. And both, despite sounding like opposites, are doing the same thing: they are measuring a Métis person with a ruler that was never made for Métis people.

Let me show you the ruler, and then let me show you the actual definition. When you see the definition, the catchphrase falls apart on its own.

The ruler they’re using is the Indian Act’s

Start with where the “seven generations” instinct comes from, because it doesn’t come from Métis law. It comes from the Indian Act.

Under the Indian Act, a person’s status is determined by blood — by a quantum, by a count — and by registration to a specific band. You trace your line back to an “Indian,” someone registered, past or present, to a First Nation, and that line is what makes or breaks your status. Generation by generation, you can lose it.

That is a registration logic. It is a colonial logic. And it is the only ruler most people have ever been handed, because that is the only one the state has ever offered.

First Nations were forced into this system. Their registration, their benefits, their very legal identity under the Crown, are structured by it. So when a First Nations person looks at an Ontario Métis and reaches for “but your blood is Cree, go back to your band,” they are reaching for the only tool they’ve been given. I understand that. I don’t blame them for it. I just want to be clear about what they’re doing: they are holding the Indian Act’s ruler up to a people the Indian Act does not govern, and declaring the ruler correct.

That is not a legal argument. That is a category error. And a category error, aimed at an entire people, is what erasure actually looks like.

Métis citizenship was never defined by distance from a First Nations ancestor. The ancestor who grounds Métis citizenship is the nearest Métis ancestor, from a Métis community. That is not a quibble. That is the entire point — and it is the point every “you’re really just a lost Indian” argument walks straight through.

There are two definitions, and they agree

Here is the thing the gatekeepers never seem to have read: there are two definitions of Métis citizenship in play in Canada. One was made by Métis. One was made by the Supreme Court of Canada. And they do not contradict each other. They land on the same place.

The Indigenous-made definition. In 2002, the Métis National Council General Assembly adopted a National Definition:

“Métis” means a person who self-identifies as Métis, is distinct from other Aboriginal peoples, is of historic Métis Nation Ancestry and who is accepted by the Métis Nation.

Read it slowly, because every phrase is doing work:

  • Self-identifies as Métis. The starting point is the person, not the blood count.
  • Distinct from other Aboriginal peoples. The definition itself says that being Métis means not being a First Nations person. This is the clause the “you’re really a lost First Nations person” argument ignores, because if you take it seriously, their whole premise collapses. A Métis person is, by definition, distinct from the First Nations communities they’re being told to “go find.”
  • Of historic Métis Nation Ancestry. Not “a First Nations ancestor, diluted.” Métis ancestry. The lineage that matters is the Métis one.
  • Accepted by the Métis Nation. More precisely, by the Métis government and registry that operates in the province where you live. The MNC is explicit that it does not itself issue citizenship; the provincial Métis governments and their registries do. That is self-determination. A Métis person’s citizenship is determined by Métis governments, under Métis law — not by a First Nation, not by Manitoba, not by a stranger in a comment section.

Nowhere in that definition is there a generation count. Nowhere is there “distance to a First Nations ancestor.” The ruler doesn’t appear in the text.

The colonial definition. If you don’t take Indigenous law seriously and you want the highest court in the country to tell you who is Métis, the Supreme Court did, in R. v. Powley, 2003 SCC 43. For the purpose of claiming rights under section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, the Court looked to three broad factors as “indicia of Métis identity”: self-identification, ancestral connection, and community acceptance (para. 30).

The first and the third sit close to the Indigenous definition, so I won’t dwell on them. The second is where the fight is, so let me quote the Court exactly (para. 32):

“We would not require a minimum ‘blood quantum’, but we would require some proof that the claimant’s ancestors belonged to the historic Métis community by birth, adoption, or other means.”

Read that again. The Supreme Court of Canada explicitly refused a blood-quantum test. And the connection it requires is not to a First Nation — it is to a historic Métis community.

So: Indigenous self-determination and the Court’s constitutional analysis arrive at the same conclusion. Métis identity is grounded in connection to a Métis community and in Métis ancestry. It is not grounded in how many generations separate you from a First Nations ancestor. Anyone who tells you it is is telling you, in a roundabout way, that the Indian Act applies to Métis. It does not.

Take the catchphrase apart

Now let’s go back to the sentence and break it into pieces, because it sounds like one argument but it’s three, and all three fail.

“You’re not really Métis. Having a Cree ancestor seven generations ago doesn’t make you Métis.”

Piece one: it assumes the Cree line is the line that counts. It isn’t. For Métis citizenship, the line that counts is the Métis line — the nearest Métis ancestor from a Métis community. Yes, there is a Cree great-great-grandmother in the web. She is real. She is the First Nations side of the ethnogenesis that made Métis people. But a person’s identity is not decided by which thread of the loom you choose to count. The Métis thread is the one that grounds citizenship, and it is there.

Piece two: it smuggles a generation count in as a threshold. “Seven generations” is doing all the work in that sentence. Where does that number come from? Not from the MNC definition. Not from Powley. Powley is unambiguous that there is no minimum blood quantum. The number has no source in Métis law or in the Constitution’s application to Métis. It is a number borrowed from the Indian Act system and applied to a people the Indian Act doesn’t govern. Pull it out, and the sentence has nothing left in it.

Piece three: it assumes Métis-ness is a quantity that decays with distance. It isn’t. It’s a quality of connection to a community. A person whose nearest Métis ancestor came from a historic Ontario Métis community is Métis by exactly the same definition as a person whose nearest Métis ancestor came from Red River. The region of origin changes which community a person belongs to. It does not change whether the person is Métis.

That last point is the whole game — and it’s the one the “Red River” gatekeepers most need to understand.

“You lack the culture” — and why that charge misfires

This is the argument the self-styled “Red River” Métis make, and it’s the most interesting one, because it borrows a real legal criterion and points it the wrong way.

Powley did say that Métis are a distinctive people. The Court held that the term “Métis” in section 35 of the Constitution of Canada does not cover everyone of mixed heritage; it refers to “distinctive peoples who, in addition to their mixed ancestry, developed their own customs, way of life, and recognizable group identity separate from their Indian or Inuit and European forebears” (para. 10). And it defined a Métis community as “a group of Métis with a distinctive collective identity, living together in the same geographic area and sharing a common way of life” (para. 12).

So “distinctive culture” is real. Good. Now read what it actually says.

The distinctiveness that Powley requires is that Métis are distinct from their forebears — distinct from the First Nations and the Europeans they came from. It is the criterion that proves Métis are their own people. It is not a criterion that says only one region’s Métis developed a culture, or that Red River is the reference standard every other group must clear to count. The Court said this explicitly when it refused to require that Métis rights “find their origin in the pre-contact practices of the Métis’ aboriginal ancestors,” because doing so “would deny to Métis their full status as distinctive rights-bearing peoples” (para. 38). The distinctiveness runs within each Métis people, across regions.

And here is the part the gatekeepers won’t say out loud: Powley was decided on an Ontario Métis community. Not Red River. Sault Ste. Marie. The Supreme Court affirmed that the Métis of Sault Ste. Marie — an Ontario, Upper Great Lakes community — were a historic Métis community with a distinctive identity, noting that even in the 1840s “Indians and Whites recognized them as being a separate people” (Ray Report, quoted at para. 22). The Court further held that this community did not vanish when the 1850 Robinson treaties came through; it went “underground,” “invisible,” but it continued (paras. 24–28).

So the case the Red River gatekeepers keep citing to deny Ontario Métis is the very case that vindicated an Ontario Métis community. The test was born here, in Ontario. It is not a Red River test. It never was.

And the evidence of a distinctive Ontario Métis culture isn’t a theory — it’s documented. The Métis Nation of Ontario, working with the Government of Ontario, has produced summary reports identifying the historic Métis communities of Ontario:

  • Rainy River / Lake of the Woods / Treaty 3
  • Northern Lake Superior
  • Abitibi Inland
  • Sault Ste. Marie and Environs
  • Killarney and Environs
  • Georgian Bay and Environs
  • Mattawa / Ottawa River and Environs

These are not Red River. They are not “lost First Nations.” They are historic Métis communities, identified through professional, historical research, with the shared customs, traditions, and collective identity that Powley says a Métis community must have. If “distinctive culture” is the bar, Ontario Métis clear it. The research is public. It’s not a secret. It’s a matter of reading it.

And the “distinctive culture” is not a modern invention being bolted onto an old blood line. It’s in the primary record, from the 1790s forward: the Red River jigs and fiddle music at Moose Factory and Timiskaming (a 1913 wedding described as having “half-breeds bridesmaids and maids of honour; groomsmen togged in buckskin and moccasins; music of accordeons and fiddles”); the fiddle player Jimmy Swain on the 1905 Treaty 9 expedition, “entertain[ing] both whites and Indians by playing Red River jigs”; the Métis wooden houses and gardens at Temiskaming, distinct from the tents, noted by the Crown’s own surveyors in 1900; the 1859 New Year’s Day fight at Moose Factory in which the Métis came out as a single cohort — “we were about ten Breeds in that fight,” one of them recalled — fighting against the Norwegian servants, not against the First Nations. The culture was there. It was documented. It was not imported from Red River. It grew here, the way Powley says Métis culture is supposed to grow.

And here is the fact that should end the “you’re a lost First Nations person” argument at its source, because it is the First Nations’ own records that make the distinction. On the Timiskaming Reserve in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Métis families lived on and near the Anishinaabe reserve, and both sides treated them as separate. The Indian Agent Adam Burwash, reporting to Ottawa in 1902, wrote that “the majority of this band are Scotch half-breeds; the remainder belong to the Algonquin tribe.” In 1906 and 1909, Algonquin band members — including Angus Wabie — petitioned the Department of Indian Affairs over the sale of reserve land, and in doing so drew the line in their own words: “All the North Temiscaming Indians want to Hold His Land but Those that voted to sell, there are all Halfbreed White.” The Anishinaabe did not read the Métis as “long-lost First Nations who haven’t found their way home.” The Anishinaabe, their government, their agents, and their own band records read them as a separate people. If the distinction is that real to the people the gatekeepers are reaching for, then “you’re really one of us, go find your band” isn’t a claim about identity. It’s a claim that’s been overruled by the very records it’s meant to rest on.

And there is one more thing, and I want it in plain print because it is the single most important fact in this whole piece: in 2017, the Government of Ontario formally recognized the Abitibi Inland Historic Métis Community — my community — as a rights-bearing Métis community “in accordance with the criteria outlined by the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Powley. Read that again. The state of Ontario looked at the Abitibi Inland Métis, ran us through the exact test the “Red River” gatekeepers keep quoting, and came back and said yes. The recognition names the territory by name: the inter-connected historic Métis populations at the inland posts between New Post and Timiskaming — “Frederick House, Abitibi House, Kenogamissi, Flying Post, Mattagami and Matachewan — as well as the historic Métis population at the Moose Factory Post and environs.” The Abitibi Inland. That’s my regional community — the community my family has been part of through. The state recognized my community, under your case, as Métis. And I’m not some displaced person I have to go find — I’m in my community, in the Timiskaming district, in Kenogami. If anyone on the internet still thinks I need to go find a band, the Government of Ontario would like a word with them.

What I’m not blaming, and what I am

Let me be precise about who I’m pointing at, because precision matters and I don’t want to flatten two different things.

I am not blaming First Nations for the way the Indian Act shaped how identity is counted in this country. That was imposed on them. Reaching for it is a rational move given the only tools available. The education gap is on all of us — it’s that nobody sat the gatekeepers down and read them the MNC definition or Powley para. 32. I’ll do my part of that. This piece is my part.

What I am pointing at is the error, and the people who keep repeating it with full access to the correction. The “you’re a lost First Nations person” line, and the “you’re not real Métis, you’re not from Red River” line, are both available to their speakers in a form they can actually defend. They choose the form that erases, because the form that corrects — read the definition — would end the argument and cost them nothing but the habit.

And I’m not going to let this stay anonymous, because the anonymity is part of how it works. This isn’t a pile of nameless comments from bored strangers. It is being lobbed by First Nations Chiefs and by university Professors — people with titles, platforms, and the standing to do real damage. A Chief telling my people that the only way to be Indigenous in this country is the way the Indian Act was built to work is not making a genealogical point. He is telling his people, and telling mine, that the Métis are a claim to be litigated, not a people to be counted. A Professor doing the same from a lectern is lending it the one thing it doesn’t have on its own: authority. The people doing this have read the sources I’m reading. I have no reason to think any of them is genuinely unable to get hold of Powley para. 32 or the MNC National Definition. The choice is deliberate, and the deliberate choice to deny a people is not a mistake I can forgive by calling it “a category error.” It’s a choice.

And it’s not being aimed at me, or at some adult who can answer back. A lot of it is being aimed at our kids. Young Métis, already carrying the weight of being told their culture is a half-step, being told their name is a slur in a comment section, being told they don’t really count — and now having a Chief or a Professor tell them, in public, that the whole thing is a misunderstanding they need to correct by going to find a band. That is not education. That is not kinship. That is the specific, deliberate, ongoing harm of telling a vulnerable child that the people who raised them were wrong about who they are. If you want to know why I’m writing this with anger and not with a smile, that’s why. I’m writing it for the ones who haven’t had years to build the armour I’ve had.

And I’ll say the blunt thing, because it’s true and because it’s the reason this matters beyond any single person’s pride: the erasure of Métis people by other Indigenous people is still erasure, and it still serves colonialism. Division is the oldest tool in the Crown’s kit. Make Indigenous people police each other’s boundaries — make a First Nations person deny an Ontario Métis, make one Métis person deny another — and nobody is left to stand together against what we actually share a history of. Every time someone tells an Ontario Métis “you’re not really one of us,” they are doing the Crown’s boundary-work for free, in a country that has spent a century and a half trying to make us uncountable. We should not mistake that for kinship.

The regional point everyone keeps missing

There’s a point about how Indigenous communities work that gets lost, and it’s worth making plainly because it’s where both gatekeepers quietly agree with the Indian Act.

Métis communities are regional. My community is the Abitibi Inland — the colonial name for the area is Abitibi-Temiskaming. My family has been from the Abitibi Inland through every line I can trace. My First Nations roots are from Moosonee, as well as Eastmain and Nipissing. But my Métis roots are from Fort Temiskaming — that’s the post where the Louttit and the Kijekijik lines became one family, my family line. I grew up hunting and fishing at Lake Abitibi. I live in the District of Timiskaming (the colonial misspelling), and I’m represented at the MNO by the Temiskaming Métis Community Council.

And here’s the part that exposes the whole “go find your band” instinct. The reason that line sounds so natural to people is that the Indian Act made First Nations communities small — it carved regional peoples into postage-stamp reserves, a divide-and-conquer system that almost worked. First Nations were regional in scope and authority too, before the Act chopped them into band-by-band fragments. So when someone reaches for “find your band,” they are reaching for a band — a colonial unit — and assuming that unit is what Indigenous community is supposed to look like.

The Métis were never chopped that way. We never lost our regional community borders. The *Indian Act’*s ruler — band, reserve, fragment — was never made to fit us, and it never fit. That’s why “go find your band” doesn’t work on me. I’m in my community. Regional, continuous, intact. I didn’t have to go find it. I never left.

What actually makes me Métis

Let me answer the question they keep pretending to ask. Not the legal one — you have that. The other one. The one under the insult. What is it about you that makes you Métis? What are you actually holding on to?

The place. I live in Kenogami, a small rual village in the District of Timiskaming — a place I call home, not the place that grounds my citizenship. The grounding is my regional community: the Abitibi Inland. That’s a place on a map, not a metaphor — the inland region between New Post and Timiskaming that makes up the Abitibi Inland Historic Métis Community, the community the 2017 recognition names by name. Kenogami is where I live; the Abitibi Inland is where I’m from, and I’m still in it.

My line in that report is the Louttit-Kijekijikokwe line. That’s my people’s name. When I read through it — the posts, the weddings and the baptisms, the boat steerers and the fiddlers and the petitions for scrip — I’m not reading a stranger’s history. I’m reading my own.

Now here’s the correction to the “seven generations” insult, and I want you to watch it, because it unravels on their own terms. They say a Cree ancestor “seven generations back” doesn’t make me Métis. Fine. But my nearest pure-blood First Nations ancestor is only six generations back, if that matters to you.

And here’s the part the count can’t touch at all: every generation since that ancestor has been Métis. Not one. Not two. Every one. The line that runs forward from that First Nations great-great-great-great-grandmother is a line of Métis people — born at the posts, raised in the trade, married into the Métis families of Abitibi Inland, petitioning for scrip in 1893 and 1905, building houses at Moose Factory, fishing the whitefish twice a year, etc. My family moved to the Kipawa area for a generation, attended a church-run day school, mingled with the Nipissing and Temagami people, and then moved back up to the area we still live today. We were a mobile people, which is also part of the historic record. The Métis-ness isn’t a thin coat over a First Nations base. The Métis-ness is the line, from the point it split into its own people to the present day. You can’t reach it by counting backward through a First Nation. You reach it by following the line forward — and following it forward lands in the same place I’m standing in now.

I testified to the MNC Expert Panel in March 2024. My name is in the record of that roundtable, sitting with elders and community members of Abitibi Inland, speaking to the panel about our history and our place in the Métis Nation. That’s not a symbolic gesture. That’s a Métis community, represented by its own people, showing up to the Métis National Council’s own expert panel and saying this is who we are. I was in the room. The panel heard us. The report carries what we said, and the report is public.

So. What makes me Métis? Not a drop. Not a count. A place — the Abitibi Inland, my regional community, where we’ve always been. A line — Louttit-Kijekijikokwe, and the families woven through it, from the post at Fort Temiskaming. A culture I inherited that is still alive in the people around me. An acceptance — by my community, by the MNO, by the Métis Nation, and, on the legal side, by the Government of Ontario in 2017. Four things. And not one of them is “how many generations since a First Nation.”

The catchphrase wants to make me an absence — a person short of something, a person with a missing piece. But I’m not short of anything. I’m full. I’m the full line, the full community, the full culture, the full acceptance. I’m the Chair of the Métis Nation of Ontario’s Two-Spirit Council. The only thing missing is in the people who keep asking — because the answer to what they’re asking is sitting right in front of them, and they’d rather it weren’t there.

I am not lost

I’m Métis. I’m from the Abitibi Inland — my regional community . The thread that grounds it is my nearest Métis ancestor, from a Métis community. That ancestor is not a mystery I need to solve by counting back seven generations toward a band. That ancestor is a Métis person, from a Métis community, in a place, in a line — and I am the continuation of it.

I am not a lost First Nations person looking for my way home. I was never, definitionally, a member of the band the gatekeepers are pointing me toward — and Powley and the MNC both say I’m not supposed to be. I am Métis. The Métis are one of the three original peoples of Canada, written into the Constitution and into our own self-determined law. Our historic communities in Ontario are identified, researched, and on the record. And I’m not lost, not displaced, not in search — my community is regional, it’s intact, and I’m standing in it.

So here is what I ask of everyone reading this, in both directions:

If you’re a First Nations person who has been told that the only way to be Indigenous is the way the Indian Act was made to work — there is another way, and it’s not in opposition to yours. It just isn’t yours to adjudicate. You don’t have to hold the ruler for Métis people. You don’t have to hold it for anyone but your own community.

If you’re a Métis person telling another Métis person they’re not real enough, that their community doesn’t count because it isn’t yours — you are not defending the Métis. You are narrowing us. You are doing the one thing that helps nobody but the people who have profited from our division since 1867. The distinctiveness Powley protects is what makes us a people to ourselves. It is not a membership card stamped in one province.

The correction is short, and I’ll give it one more time so it sticks:

Métis citizenship is not a count of generations back toward a First Nation. It is a connection to a Métis community — self-identified, ancestral, and accepted. Get that, and “seven generations” stops being a test, because it was never one. It was just a ruler in the wrong hand.

Sources

  • Métis National Council, “Citizenship” (National Definition adopted by the MNC General Assembly, 2002). metisnation.ca/about/citizenship
  • R. v. Powley, 2003 SCC 43, [2003] 2 S.C.R. 207 — esp. paras. 10, 12, 22, 24–28, 30–34, 38. decisions.scc-csc.ca (item 2076)
  • Métis Nation of Ontario, “Historic Métis Communities in Ontario” (summary reports prepared collaboratively with the Government of Ontario). metisnation.org/registry/citizenship/historic-metis-communities-in-ontario
  • Written Submissions of the Abitibi Inland Métis Community to the Métis National Council Expert Panel (2024), prepared by the Métis Nation of Ontario with the Government of Ontario — including the 2017 Government of Ontario recognition of the Abitibi Inland Historic Métis Community as a rights-bearing Métis community under R. v. Powley.
  • Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples: Perspectives and Realities, vol. 4, at pp. 199–202, 241, 243 (quoted in Powley at para. 10).