Still hiding in plain sight?: Historiography and Métis archival memory

This paper examines how the practices of professional and non‐professional historians helped to create a particular vision of the Métis past. It suggests that the archives that scholars have generally relied upon to craft their histories have overdetermined the form and content of Métis histories and have created a truncated view of Métis history that ends abruptly in the late 19th century. While this failure to address 20th‐century Métis history is rooted, in part, in the history of dispossession and economic marginalization and Métis experiences with Canadian colonialism, it also emerges from the tendency within the historical profession to overlook Métis historical labor and the histories produced outside the academy. The resulting void in the scholarly literature regarding the daily lives and the networks of social relations that have sustained Métis communities in the 20th century have severed Métis history from the intellectual and cultural life of present‐day Métis communities.