Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development awards uOttawa professors $161,000 to continue studying Métis nation’s complex socio-economic structures

uOttawa professors Nicole St-Onge and Brenda Macdougall, from the departments of History and Geography respectively.

Thanks to the support of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, uOttawa professors Brenda Macdougall and Nicole St-Onge, from the departments of Geography and History respectively, will continue their research titled Tracking the Métis Intergenerationally and Geographically: New Methods and Approaches for Understanding the Nation.

“This project began a year ago and aims to better understand how the Métis developed complex kinship structures predicated on reciprocal support for one another through intermarriage, religious god-parenting obligations and group labour–all reinforcing a greater sense of family and community within a mobile, bison-hunting economy they dominated,” says Macdougall, the chair of Métis Research at uOttawa.

“How these highly mobile communities maintained themselves socially and economically through time and how they interacted with their environment and especially the bison herds will be analyzed in this research project, which utilizes ethnographic research, genealogical methods, (…) social networking analysis and GIS mapping,” adds St-Onge.

To learn more, please contact the co-investigators, Brenda Macdougall, chair, Métis Research, Department of Geography, and Nicole St-Onge, Department of History.