Métis communities have long been known for their generosity in peoples’ times of need, even when facing immense hardships themselves.
Despite the Treaty commissioner’s promise to protect the Sault Ste. Marie Métis Community’s rights, for example, Métis families were displaced from their lands on the St. Mary’s River following their exclusion from the 1850 Robinson-Huron Treaty. Many were forced to relocate over the next decades as Canada and Ontario opened the region to settlers from eastern Canada, profoundly disrupting the Métis community’s traditional way of life.
One of those settlers was Christy Ann Simons, who arrived with her family from Sarnia in 1878 to take up a free Ontario government land grant on St. Joseph Island, just south of Sault Ste. Marie. In her memoirs, recorded in 1951, Simons recounted an example of the Métis’ profound generosity, even to the settlers who benefited from the Métis’ ongoing displacement from their lands:
“Mother was fortunate in getting across free with some half-breed in his boat… Mother was nice to the half-breeds the same as she had always been to the Indians on the reservation near our old home, and they seemed to appreciate it. They asked her to go across in their boat when they were going and would not take pay.”
The Métis boatmen’s generosity speaks both to Métis values and the challenges and discrimination that Métis communities faced as settlers spread north and settled on Métis lands:
“Mother asked why they would take her across free, and refused to take others across when they asked. The answer was ‘You treat us like we were people, they treat us as if they were better than us, and we were nothing.’”