In his 1965 book, “Metis of the Mackenzie District,” author Richard Slobodin stated, “There is also a tradition, related by several people of Beaulieu and Mandeville ancestry, that at some indefinite period in the early nineteenth century these Metis name-groups each constituted a ‘tribe.’”

Early iterations of Quebec, Ontario and Red River Métis had migrated to the North since the late 1700s. They were vastly mobile, and by one account in the book, “They lived in the bush, like the Indians: only they kept going more, and they kept trading—they were a tribe.”

This report demonstrates that these Métis kinship networks weren’t just individuals recruited as North West Company or Hudson’s Bay Company “work gangs,” or simply dismissed as “interlopers” irrelevant to the history, as many on social media and even some First Nations groups have attempted to say.

As collectivities, they were established to this region before British Columbia existed, self-determining on land and water. They played a central role in the development of British Columbia, the entire Pacific Northwest, and travelled Canada-wide circuit trading and hunting into regions that now encompass Alberta and Northern British Columbia. They functioned as independent “tribes.”

As one descendant of the Beaulieus and Mandevilles stated to Slobodin, “These Beaulieus and Mandevilles — there may have been other bunches, but I don’t know — they each had a sort of headquarters. The Beaulieus were on the Salt River [close to Fort Smith] and the Mandevilles on the south shore of the Lake [Great Slave] near Buffalo River... Then they would pack up, the whole bunch, men, women, and children, and go on down the Mackenzie and turn up, maybe up the Liard, trading, hunting, on a great big circuit, on into northern B.C. Then over the Athabasca and back down to the Slave... No, no, they couldn't do it in one season. They’d be gone for three, four, five years.”