Hi Nighthawk...
In reference to your comments below...
There were no French from France women traipsing around in the bush hunting caribou or even pigeons with small children and infants in tow, they wouldn't have survived or known how to survive.
Anyone who had ancestors living in the Maritimes prior to 1763 is a descendant of Indigenous peoples and is Indigenous themselves.
It seems these "facts" are the basis for a lot of your other beliefs.
However, I have done more research since when I first started this thread, and i don't think these are facts at all.
From all the evidence i have seen , the large majority of Acadian settlers who left descentents in the Acadian community were French men with French wives ...
IMO , the information in the links below is basically correct.
http://www.acadian-home.org/acadian-origins.htmlOn the level of racial origins, there is a source which provides a considerable amount of information. This is a series of fifty eight despositions of the heads of Acadian families that were taken down on Belle-Isle-en-mer between Feb 15 and March 12, 1767
(continues with very detailed oral testimonies about Acadian family origins, that were given in 1767 ...)
According to these testimonies, the large majority of the first Acadian settlers had French wives. This conclusion is supported by many old records and recent mtDNA findings.
In the link below is the mtDNA results for many of the women who have long been rumoured to have been Native. In the 33 distant female ancestors investigated through mtDNa, only 6 turned out to be of Native descent.
http://www.acadian-home.org/origins-mtdna.htmlAs these investigations seem to be focusing on women who were not proven to be French in other records , I think thes mtDNA tests probably found more matrilineal lines that went to a native ancestor , than would be found in the average Acadian with many ancestors who were well documented as originating in France.
The link below has long lists of patrilineal and matrilineal DNA results for people of French Canadian / Acadian descent.
The website seems a bit difficult to access at the moment, but I went over it a few months back, and it shows a long list of results of mtDNA and Y DNA tests done on people who's French ancestors were the first non native residents of Quebec or Acadia.
Almost all the patrilineal lines of people tested were French and only one in 20 of the matrilineal lines of the people tested had origins on this continent.
http://www.frenchdna.org/ENG-results.htmPeople with distant Native ancestry probably get DNA tests more frequently than people who know their matrilineal line is proven to be French - so if we assume this one in 20 is an avaerage within the french canadin population that is probably higher than the real average, but this would probaly reflect the average French Canadain being about 1/40 or 2% indigenous descent ....
While the family biographies of the first settlers in Quebec below doesn't cite sources, I did go over some of the details a while ago and found most of the claims to be reasonably accurate .
http://www.geocities.com/weallcamefromsomewhere/quebec_realfirst.htmlThere was a lot of men who came from France without wives, however, for the most part, if these men found wives amoungst the indigenous peoples it would appear that is where their children remained.
And there is probably a reason for this...
In the 1600's , the majority of Acadian / French Canadian families with 2 French parents had large families on average of about 8 children.
When the woman is known to have been Native, it seems French men rarely managed to father more than one child with their Native partner, before she died. Perhaps in the early years of the first French settlements, the Native women and possibly their children were very vulnerable to the diseases carried by the French.
If these childrens mothers did not survive, it seems likely they would have usually been raised by the mothers relatives and grown up as members of a Native community.
Metis (with an acute accent on the "e" which I can't do on this keyboard) is from a french word meaning "half" shorthand for "half-breed".
So why would that also apply to someone who is very slightly mixed from way way back ?
Unless there is strong support from the federally recognized First Nations in the area, I don't think a population that is 98% French on average should have a right to declare themselves "Metis" - as meaning an indigenous person with rights to the resources which belong to indigenous peoples .
No one cares about "percentages" and didn't for hundreds of years,
I guess because realistically , except in a couple isolated French settlements , there wasn't much in the way of percentages to care about...
Why would anyone care if someone wants to self-identify as being a bi-racial or tri-racial descendant anyway?
I agrees if people put a disporportionate emphasis on some aspect of their families background, or have fanciful ideas about one of their ancestors, and they don't make this part of the public dialog, it doesn't really matter to the public. I guess it might be annoying if you had to spend time listening to a bunch of thouroghly disproven ideas .... But it isn't really a problem that would affect much besides peoples immediate friends and family. But this does become a problem when people begin publishing fictious historical or genealogical information , or they publish unlikely specualtion about some families native ancestry, and this is stated as a fact - and it isn't a fact at all....
It becomes even more of a problem when people encourage people with extremely small and distant amounts of Native descent to claim their "soverinty" and identity as Native people. It seems even more disrespectful when this alleged Native ancestry is nothing but speculation or is completely fictious.
To use this word " Metis" with all it's implied political meanings and property rights and apply this to people who are almost entirely non native ( or maybe not native even at all ) seems dishonest , exploitive and disrespectful....
IMO , when distant descendents make these claims to be Metis it probably serves to trivialize and confuse public perception of the REAL soverienty and REAL rights of REAL indigenous peoples and their governing bodies. I think this does create problems.
