This website is a resource for people who are concerned with or want to find out more about the rise of the so-called “Eastern Metis” in the eastern provinces (Ontario, Québec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia) and in New England (Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine). The Métis Nation is a western-based Indigenous people whose culture grew out of kinship relations with the Plains Cree, Saulteaux, Assiniboine, and Dene. The so-called “Eastern Metis” are instead an example of what is referred to as race-shifting or self-indigenization, a process that, in the case of this research project, involves white French-descendants inventing and claiming an “Indigenous” identity, often in opposition to actual Indigenous peoples.

Please note that we use the term “Eastern Métis” to refer to a social movement that involves individual and organizational claims to being “Eastern Métis,” “Québec Métis,” “Acadian-Métis,” “Mi’kmaq-Métis,” “Algonquin-Métis,” and increasingly, false claims to being Algonquin, Mi’kmaq, Abenaki, Huron-Wendat, and other First Nation peoples whose territories are located in this region.

The website includes a “storymap” that features a GIS map of some of the organizations and court cases surveyed through our project. The story map hasn’t been updated since 2020 though the main website is updated regularly. As of January 2024, we have included about 100 organizations that are involved in the “Eastern Métis” movement and about 120 court cases that have involved legal claims to being “Métis” in various Canadian courts. The individuals and organizations involved in these cases have all lost in court.

We included a handy “What’s New” link at the top of the home page to provide visitors with an overview of any new material added to the website. We invite you to get in touch should you have any information you’d like to share. We’ll continue to provide reliable information to our visitors, who’ve visited the site nearly 200,000 times since we first launched in summer 2019.

Darryl Leroux’s book, Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity, which includes an analysis of some of this material, was published in September 2019.