Review of Homeland to Hinterland: The Changing Worlds of the Red River Metis in the Nineteenth Century By Gerhard J. Ens.

• Main Author: Sprague, D.N.
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln 1998
• Subjects: Other International and Area Studies; Canada; Metis
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/2020; https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/greatplainsquarterly/article/3019/viewcontent/BR_Sprague.pdf

Studies of the Red River Settlement, the Metis people, and their buffalo hunt are so numerous that historians in the wider fields of Aboriginal or western Canadian studies have become increasingly impatient with this phenomenon of "Red River myopia." The question a reader must ask of this book is what new perspective Gerhard Ens brings to the existing material. According to Ens, Homeland to Hinterland situates the local experience in a "broader process of economic change." Authors of previous works, he claims, were political historians writing about "the rise of a 'new nation' without adequately explaining the social and economic origins," or fur trade historians who "seldom examine the Red River Metis past the mid-nineteenth century." Ens proposes to show how a Metis identity developed within "the economic and social niche they carved out for themselves within the fur trade," looking with particular care at the interval between 1840 and 1880. The author asserts again and again that this identity rose and fell with the "cottage industry" connected with exploitation of the buffalo as an item of peltry traded with Americans. In his estimate, buffalo robes were the mainstay of the Metis economy after 1840. These skins of the beasts-"hair left on and the hide tanned"-had to be "harvested in winter" to obtain the best product. Since the resource was increasingly remote from Red River, more and more Metis had to relocate to the prime buffalo wintering sites, their ties to Red River becoming ever more tenuous. Increasingly, "the Metis homeland" turned into little more than a waypoint in the marketing of robes manufactured in Saskatchewan for sale in St. Paul, Minnesota. As soon as Canadian newcomers began to pour into Red River as a province of Canada in 1870, the Metis robe traders thought even more seriously of cutting all ties to the old homeland. Long absences became permanent migrations. The point Ens asserts repeatedly is that the Metis dispersal "was the result largely of their involvement in the buffalo robe ...