The Métis people are a distinct aboriginal group with a right to hunt and pursue their historical practices, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled.
The landmark ruling Friday morning - issued "by the court" as a whole - vaulted the Métis from their historically lowly station in Canadian constitutional limbo to a new ranking as an aboriginal people on a par with the Indians and Inuit.
"A Métis community is a group of Métis with a distinctive collective identity, living together in the same geographical area and sharing a common way of life," the court said.
"The purpose of section 35 (of the Constitution Act) is to protect practices that were historically important features of these distinctive communities and that persist in the present day as integral elements of their Métis culture."
The importance of the case was never in doubt. Métis rights had been recognized in the 1982 Constitution Act. The question that remained was: Recognized for what?
It was a long journey from the Louis Riel debacle to the Supreme Court of Canada, but the Métis people placed their hopes in the courts to end their rootless existence. Each level of court ultimately came through in spades.
They cast aside government arguments that granting aboriginal status would allow anyone with a faint trace of aboriginal blood to insist on hunting and fishing out of season or pursuing a land claim.
The court gave short shrift to government fears that the ranks of self-described Métis should mushroom overnight, the entire group piggybacking on rights created for Canada's indigenous people.
"The difficulty of identifying members of the Métis community should not be exaggerated so as to defeat constitutional rights," the court said.
Indeed, the ruling opens the door to a full range of rights for the Métis - a population estimated at anywhere from 60,000 to a half-million people. In the 2001 census, Statistics Canada said Friday, 292,310 people identified themselves Métis.
The Métis looked to success in the Supreme Court as ushering in a new era of rights and self-worth that would give them a legal springboard to greater ownership of natural resources.
It is possible to have an orderly system for determining who is a Métis and for managing scarce natural resources to ensure they are not unduly depleted, the Supreme Court said.
"To support a site-specific aboriginal rights claim, an identifiable Métis community with some degree of continuity and stability must be established through evidence of shared customs, traditions, and collective identity, as well as demographic evidence," it said.
"Self-identification, ancestral connection, and community acceptance are factors which define Métis identity for the purpose of claiming Métis rights under s. 35.
"Absent formal identification, courts will have to ascertain Métis identity on a case-by-case basis taking into account the value of community self-definition, the need for the process of identification to be objectively verifiable and the purpose of the constitutional guarantee."
The court rejected arguments that Métis rights must trace back to practices they were engaged in before first contact with European arrivals in Canada.
"This view, in effect, would deny to Métis their full status as distinctive rights-bearing peoples whose own integral practices are entitled to constitutional protection under s. 35(1)," the Court said.
It said that Ontario's refusal to recognize a Métis right to hunt for food in the case before in - involving moose-hunters Steve and Roddy Powley - infringed the Métis aboriginal right.
Provincial justifications involving conservation of natural resources were not strong enough to justify the infringement, the judges reasoned.
"Even if the moose population in that part of Ontario were under threat, the Métis would still be entitled to a priority allocation to satisfy their subsistence needs," they said.
Led by Ontario and Manitoba, several provinces and powerful hunting groups believe that Métis hunting rights would play havoc with resource management.
Ontario maintained the Powleys cannot claim aboriginal rights because Métis in their region did not develop into a community until the early to mid-1800s. They said that the Métis obviously did not predate the earliest contact between aboriginals and Europeans, therefore it made no sense to consider them aboriginal.
The federal government argued that a Métis should at least prove a strong connection between his present-day community and practices and those of his ancestors at the time Europeans came into contact with indigenous people.
The Supreme Court actually heard two cases on the issue, one originating in Ontario and the other from Manitoba. The Powley case was seen as the more significant.
Steve Powley, 55, and his 29-year-old son, Roddy were two men of humble means who said they rely on hunting to sustain their families.
On Oct. 22, 1993, conservation officers confiscated their guns, along with a moose they had shot, on the basis that the men lacked valid hunting licences. The legal challenge that ensued has consumed a decade, and made the case a rallying point for a people who believe they have been abused and marginalized. After a trial judge ruled in their favour, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled in 2001 that the Métis are full-fledged aboriginal people with constitutional rights that compare to those of Indians.
"The trial judge's findings of a historic Métis community and of a contemporary Métis community in and around Sault Ste. Marie are supported by the record and must be upheld," the Supreme Court said yesterday.
"The historical record fully supports the trial judge's finding that the period just prior to 1850 is the appropriate date for finding effective European control in the Sault Ste. Marie area. The evidence also supports his finding that hunting for food was integral to the Métis way of life at Sault Ste. Marie in the period just prior to 1850. This practice has been continuous to the present."
"It's fantastic," Steve Powley said in an interview after the ruling was released. "We got everything we asked for."
Métis lawyer Jean Teillet argued that the Métis are strict in assessing who qualifies - and that had successive governments not ignored the Métis and virtually willed them out of existence, Métis genealogical records would be just as complete as those of Indian bands.
Ms. Teillet said a Métis is someone who identifies him or herself as one, who can trace aboriginal blood from one parent, and who is accepted by the Métis community as a member.
The other case pitted Manitoba Métis leader Ernie Blais against the province over the question of whether the Métis right to hunt had been extinguished by treaty. In contrast to the Powleys, Mr. Blais has lost his fight each step of the way.
Different Métis groups disagree over what makes a person a Métis. Some of the more restrictive definitions effectively exclude hundreds of thousands of people who regard themselves as Métis.
Other interpretations simply state that if a person has mixed blood, considers himself to be a Métis, and if he has been accepted as such by the Métis community, then he is.
Their struggles with the governments of Canada reach back to the days of Riel, a campaigner for Métis and Western rights who led both the Red River Rebellion in 1869 and the 1885 Northwest Rebellion. Riel was captured and eventually hanged for treason.
On the high side, some estimates of current Métis strength reach a million. Statistics Canada sets it about 210,000, based on a 1996 survey that asked people to identify their racial antecedents.
"Throughout the Métis Nation, common communal indicators with respect to language, song, dance, dress, art, national symbols, community structures and way of life have been identified," the Métis National Council and Métis Nation of Ontario argued in the Supreme Court.