After Batoche the Métis entered their bitter years of hiding, le grand silence. They were scattered and their leaders were silenced. The buffalo were gone, and as the steamships, roads and railroads pushed west and north, the niche the Métis had filled as freighters came to an end. They began to live in large tent-camps on the fringes of the new Prairie towns, and they scared the living daylights out of the settlers. They were harassed by the Mounties, and while many tried to pick up work on farms or other labouring jobs, their reputation simply didn’t recommend them as farm labourers.
The Métis in Red River had wanted to settle on reserves in 1870. Not all, but some still requested reserves into the 1880s. But when they asked for reserves, they were denied. Governments would grant Métis reserves only out of charity. It wasn’t until the 1890s, at the urging of the priests, that the first Métis reserve (other than the Treaty #3 half-breed reserve) was finally established. Redemption was the plan. Indeed, the application to set up the reserve was entitled “A Philanthropic Plan to Redeem the Half-Breeds of Manitoba and the North-West Territories.”1
Father Lacombe asked for land for the “amelioration of the metis” before they became a “source of danger for the settlers of the North-West.” According to Lacombe, there were between seven and eight thousand French Métis in Manitoba and the North-West, of which about two-thirds were living “miserable and poor” in settlements, and the other third were scattered all over the country leading a “miserable life, camping near the new towns and settlements of the white people, where they are exposed to all kinds of demoralization.”2 He wanted a French Catholic enclave in what was becoming a sea of Protestants. At the time he proposed it, the Métis were virtually the only French Catholics available to create his enclave.
The Métis knew the place Lacombe chose for the reserve as St. Paul’s Place. In 1896, Father Lacombe renamed it St. Paul des Métis. It became a gathering place for meetings, and when Gabriel Dumont visited in 1906, Métis came from miles around to listen to one of their great heroes. St. Paul des Métis was remarkably successful, with substantial homes and valuable improvements. Joe Dion, a non-treaty Cree, was impressed with life at St. Paul des Métis, saying that he had seen it at its best, with good homes, nice farms, and beautiful horses and carriages. Everybody had plenty to eat and good clothes to wear.3
But by 1908 the Church decided that St. Paul des Métis was no longer worthy of its efforts. The priests wanted a better and bigger class of French Catholics at St. Paul des Métis, which would not happen unless the colony was no longer a Métis-only reserve. So the priests proposed to the government that the reserve be disbanded. They kept their own portion of the townships and were reimbursed for the investments they had made ($68,000). The Métis were expendable. The withdrawal of the reservation was approved on August 13, 1908.
The Métis were outraged. They held a mass protest meeting and sent a petition to Ottawa signed by one hundred Métis. Having seen the deafening silence with which the government responded to previous Métis petitions, the reader will not be shocked to hear that only more silence greeted this latest one. On May 10, 1909, the St. Paul des Métis reserve was officially declared open to homesteaders.
It turned out that the Church had already been making deals with speculators who were using intimidation tactics to force the Métis off the lands. The Church defended its actions by claiming that the experiment had not “been of such a degree as to encourage them in continuance of effort in that direction.”4 This was despite the fact that the priests were making money off the Métis reserve. In 1902 Father Lacombe and Father Therien went on a fundraising tour of Quebec and the eastern United States and raised $21,000 by appealing to their benefactors to fund St. Paul des Métis. None of that money went to the Métis reserve. Instead it disappeared into the coffers of the diocese of St. Albert. When the crops failed in 1903, none of the money was made available.
An Edmonton syndicate handled the takeover. The syndicate included a former agent of the Catholic Church, a Dominion land agent and a local trader, all ably assisted by a law firm in Edmonton and by Father Therien, the priest who was in charge of St. Paul des Métis. The syndicate encouraged speculators who induced the Métis to sell out. But the Métis had nothing to sell. They didn’t own their lands. Under the scheme set up by Father Lacombe, the Métis were occupiers, not owners. Father Therien wrote, “It must be supposed that Providence wanted the disappearance of our school and the ruin of our colony in order to establish in this region many French-Canadian parishes . . . From the beginning we had to battle against two obstacles: the Métis and the English-speaking settlers.”5 He called it “providence,” but it was likely no coincidence that the newly constructed nearby railway increased the value of the lands. The oblates would have made a tidy profit in selling to their new French-Canadian settlers.
Two men, Laurent Garneau and James Brady Sr., exposed the priests, the syndicate and its scheme. They raised enough of a stink that a royal commission was established to investigate. Technically, the lands were restored to the Métis. But it was too late. The clergy had initiated this attack on a working Métis settlement. That move let loose a vicious round of racial abuse, an echo of the reign of terror in Manitoba. Many of the Métis fled farther north where there were fewer antagonists. The only ones able to withstand the onslaught were the wealthier Métis who could purchase their lands.
Once again hundreds of Métis were forced off their lands. As more and more Métis were displaced, the places they could go were getting fewer and fewer. Now there was real law in the North-West, not just the distant law that had governed in absentia for the previous century. There were rules, policemen and judges. Specifically, there were new rules about vagrancy. The Métis now had new names applied to them: they were “squatters” if they built a home and tried to stay on the land in one place, and they were “vagrants” if they lived in camps or kept moving. Either way they were illegal.
All of Western society revolves around having an address. One must have a residence to obtain a driver’s licence, or to get welfare or social assistance. Even access to education and medical care requires an address. Many Métis continued to live in tents and in family groupings. Tents were not considered an address. The Métis were seen as diseased and dangerous vagrants. Some tried to stay in the south, but the refuge for many became the northern parts of the provinces.
The Métis Nation always had two branches. The southern branch was the Plains buffalo hunters and those who lived a more agrarian life and settled in the parishes in Red River, on the South Saskatchewan River and in other locations in the North-West. The northern branch was the woodland Métis who lived along the old voyageur highway. These Métis lived by hunting and fishing, trapping and freighting. The aftermath of the North-West Resistance, the end of the buffalo, the end of freighting and the violent hatred pushed many from the southern branch to join their relatives in the north.