Montana Conversations: “The Métis in Montana History” with Nicholas Vrooman

The Northern Rockies Heritage Center hosts this program “with Nicholas Vrooman, who discusses a disfranchised society of indigenous North Americans known as Metis (and in Montana as “landless Indians”). This presentation is about those aboriginal peoples who live along the Canada and United States border between Lake of the Woods (MN) and the Rocky Mountains (MT) who were left out of the reconfiguration of the North American West. During the last third of the 19th century, as these new nation-states exerted effective control over the northern Great Plains and those Aboriginal societies within that geography, they made critically disastrous decisions concerning “who was who, who was whose, who was in, and who was out.” Those choices gave form to the relationships between the First Peoples of the borderlands and the federal governments of the U.S. and Canada today. Some First Peoples, such as Montana's Little Shell Tribe, were left out of the settling.
The presentation is free and open to the public.