Governing a Homeland

With this publication, the study of Métis governance is finally being elevated out of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and moved into the twenty-first. The authors, Kelly Saunders and Janique Dubois, provide an account that is sorely needed. Building upon Murray Dobbin’s The One-and-a-Half Men, from 1981, and John Weinstein’s Quiet Revolution West, from 2007, they continue in the tradition of important books about Métis politics by non-Métis. (Neither Saunders nor Dubois is Métis — and, to be clear, many fantastic Métis scholars are working on related issues.) Drawing on years of engagement with Métis provincial governments, Saunders and Dubois tap into the contemporary vibrancy that they’ve seen at local, regional, provincial, and federal levels to show how Métis political action has never stopped. Indeed, they demonstrate that a commitment to nationhood through political organization is at the core of being Métis.

This book is also unlike many...