Heirs of an Ambivalent Empire: French-Indigenous Relations and the Rise of the Métis in the Hudson Bay Watershed

How early French-Indigenous relations in the Northwest led to the rise of a new people, the Métis.

Heirs of an Ambivalent Empire explores the lives of ordinary Canadiens who used kinship ties to navigate the space between sovereign Indigenous homelands and the French colonial government in the Hudson Bay watershed from the early 1660s to the 1780s – leading to the emergence of a new Indigenous culture, language, people, and nation: the Métis.