2010.11.10
Days Remaining: 200

1. After my post yesterday I started doing some poking around about the metis in Canada, and got to thinking about something I had thought before: it's a damned shame that we don't learn about Canadian and Mexican history growing up in the US. Why don't we know, for instance, that Louis Riel, the "Father of Manitoba" (the Canadian province) was convicted of treason and executed for leading an armed uprising (they even have a name for it: The North-West Rebellion) against the Canadian Confederation? He also heard voices and thought that God was calling him to found a "new" Catholic Church, one based in Montreal, focused upon the needs of the Metis populations of Canada. This guy was one of Canada's founding fathers. And I thought Ben Franklin was interesting.

2. Anyway, the metis are really interesting, and are a good illustration of one of my favorite analytical terms/ideas: ethnogenesis (literally, in Greek, "the generation of a people"). Basically, this is the term to describe the myriad ways that groups identifying themselves in ethnic (as opposed to national, religious, class-based, etc.) terms come into existence. This is neat because the entire underlying claim of an ethnic identity is predicated upon shared descent from a common ancestor or group of ancestors: identity is tied in with genetics. The problem, when one looks at this in history, however, is that many "ethnic" groups seem to appear rather suddenly on the stage of history without actual evidence of large migrations into an area (although migration legends are often developed as a way of explaining the presence of an ethnic group in a specific location). Even worse is that many ethnic groups, when examined closely, contain a surprisingly complicated series of apparently contradictory data that makes the idea of singularity problematic.

3. One of my favorite examples of this is that Attila the Hun, leader of the Huns (usually thought of as an ethnic group arising in central Asia) had a name, "Attila" that is actually Germanic (technically Ostrogothic) and means "little father" ("atta" was father, and "-ila" was the diminutive, usually used affectionately). So why did a Hun from central Asia have a German name? Well, because the "Huns" weren't actually a single people, probably, and as a polyglot and poly-sourced group, incorporated "Germans" (actually Ostrogoths) into their confederation. Attila was probably either partly Ostrogothic, had a (probably Turkic) name translated into Ostrogothic, or became famous first among Ostrogoths, who then had the privilege of providing his public name. In fact the "Huns" empire collapsed relatively quickly after Attila's death, and somehow this did not leave lots of stateless Huns decamped all over Europe. Instead, a lot of folks who were otherwise Germans, Celts, Greeks, etc. suddenly stopped being Hunnish and went back to whatever was going on locally. The lack of political cohesion stopped the process by which all of those disparate people were beginning to reimagine themselves as one people, the Huns.

4. Successful versions of the process underlay the emergence of the modern nationalities of Europe (most "English" people are descendants of pre-Celtic Britons or of Celts, not invading Anglo-Saxons or Normans, most "French" are descendants of Gauls and Romans, not the Franks, and so on). In those cases the leaders of invading groups were able to provide incentives to the conquered folks to move away from their previous identities and reimagine themselves as part of the invading group. This happened in Egypt, where the majority of the population are descendants of ancient Egyptians (they've done genetic testing to demonstrate this) but think of themselves on some level as being Arabs.

5. In North America, on the other hand, ethnogenesis is most readily attested for groups emerging from demographic collapse. So the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek (Mvskoke), Seminole and others are all historically recent groups that coalesced out of the remnant populations of earlier groups. At the time of European (specifically Spanish) contact, there were lots of distinct groups in the southeastern parts of the continent, but epidemics destroyed their social structures and cohesion. What happened afterward is that the descendants of those who survived slowly began to form new groups with different social structures (loose confederations instead of highly organized chiefdoms, for instance, and villages instead of centralized towns) and in the process began to think of themselves as parts of new groups (the "tribes" of American history). We see this most clearly in the case of "tribes" whose members didn't all speak the same language (most famously the Creek Confederacy, where there were at least four major languages present in various Creek villages). Where's the ethnogenesis? Well, despite these internal differences, Creek folks organized themselves and identified themselves as being Creek (technically, Muskokee), albeit perhaps "Creek from Town X" as opposed to "Creek from Town Z"). They developed a whole range of common rituals and practices, including stories about their "single" origin (this also happened among the Cherokee and Choctaw), usually an emergence narrative, where Creek ancestors came into this world from another through a hole in the ground (which was the sky of the previous world). That story would suggest a single, unified origin and common descent therefrom.

6. That's ethnogenesis: the process by which disparate groups of people come to imagine themselves as part of a group united by common descent. We see traces of this in the development of ancient Israelites, Greeks, Romans, the Japanese, Arabs, etc. But we're so used to thinking in ethnic terms that it's hard to remember that ethnic identity is constantly being reimagined or renegotiated, as opposed to a natural "fact." The metis in Canada are a good example of this: there was no single origin point for them, the metis populations developed over time from an ongoing process of intermarriage between (usually French) European settlers and Native American women. As the children of these marriages grew in number, despite having a range of Native ancestries - Chippewa, Ojibway, Potawatomie, Cree, etc. and a range of European ancestries (very broadly French and English, but recognizing real differences within each of those two groups) to think of themselves as a single people. Nowadays Metis is a distinct ethnic designation in Canada, with at least one major Metis language (Michif - French nouns and Cree verbs; apparently it's very hard to learn) and a strong internal sense of shared identity. We all know that they were a very heterogeneous group to begin with, but somehow it's become normalized to think of metis as a self-evident ethnic identity, where any given metis is assumed to be more like any other metis than like a non-metis person.

7. So, that's today's thinking on a topic of no importance to the vast majority of anybody. But this is what I have been thinking about since mentioning the metis yesterday.