Wintering, the Outsider Adult Male and the Ethnogenesis of the Western Plains Metis

From Foster's chapter, Page 179:

"Over the past half century the historical assessment of the nineteenth-century Plains Métis experience has altered (winterers) on the western Plains in the 1840s was, for Marvel Giraud, evidence that "primitivism" had won out over "civilization" in the lives of many of the Plains Métis. More recently, for Gerard Ens, the same evidence suggests a highly effective entrepreneurial response to an industrial market opportunity. With the emergency of this scholarly reassessment historians have exhibited heightened interest in the fate of the Métis with the onset of settlement in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Métis “primitivism” is no longer an acceptable explanation for the marginalization of the Métis in this period. This same historical reassessment has heightened interest as well in the questions of what were, a century earlier, the circumstances and processes which gave rise to the Métis. As scholars have come to appreciate mixed Euro-Canadian and Indian ancestry as simply biological fact, shared among many individuals who may choose to identify culturally as Indian, Metis of Euro-Canadian, their interest has sharpened in terms of the circumstances and processes which constitute Métis ethnogenesis. No longer are mixed ancestry and the social circumstances which gave rise to it sufficient explanation for the origins of the Métis on the western Plains." (179).

A digital edition of From Rupert's Land to Canada is accessible on Open Library