Métis -- History, Métis, Métis -- Government relations, Canadian Northwest -- History, Canadian Northwest -- Race relations, Canada -- Canadian Northwest 

"Marcel Giraud's study of the social history of the Métis of western Canada portrays the birth of the Métis as a distinct group, defines the roles they played in the history of the fur trade era in the North West, and examines the decline of the Métis in the late 1800s. Giraud uses his own personal observations of the economic and social position of the Métis in the 1930s to conclude his study. Originally published in Paris in 1945 as Le Métis canadien, Giraud's research is still the most thorough ethnographic and historic study of these people who considered themselves a "nation" apart from both whites and Indians. Painstakingly translated by George Woodcock, The Métis in Western Canada is the first English edition of this famous work.

Volume I of this edition begins with Giraud's examination of the physical environment of the Canadian prairies and the history of the penetration of the white race along northerly and southerly trade routes. Although the Métis originated with the appearance of the whites in the West, Giraud points out that it was only at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the years of decisive conflict between the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company, that the Métis emerged for the first time as a truly individual entity. The opportunity that events gave them to play a historic role and the claim they laid to constituting an independent nation endowed with a tradition and a glorious past allowed the collective personality of the Métis to develop vigorously in the Canadian West."--Book jacket.