Practicing urban Métis heritage sovereignty in Edinburgh,Scotland in (and beyond) the National Museum of Scotland

Abstract

This article examines the often-overlooked urban presence of the Métis people, one of three Indigenous groups recognized in Canada’s 1982 Constitution Act, outside the geographical boundaries of Canada and/or the Métis homeland. Focusing instead on the UK, the article centers the dynamic interplay between Métis representation within the National Museum of Scotland (NMS) and their historical and contemporary urban presences in Edinburgh. In doing so, we highlight the limitations of the museum’s narrative by juxtaposing it with the broader, more dynamic context of Métis heritage in Edinburgh beyond the museum, focusing on the power of Metis kinscapes for shaping Metis mobility to 19th century Edinburgh. As such, the article argues for the recognition of Métis urban heritage outside of the conventional geographical boundaries of the Metis nation. We conclude by proposing the potential of digital heritage tours to offer a mobile, interactive approach that contrasts with the static displays of the museum, enabling deeper connections to the Métis’ historical and contemporary urban presences in Edinburgh.

Introduction

The Royal Scottish Museum and the Museum of Scotland, which together comprise the National Museum of Scotland (NMS), sit stolidly connected on Chambers Street in Old Town Edinburgh, directly north of the University of Edinburgh. The George IV Bridge and Greyfriars Kirkyard lie immediately to the west of its sunken entrance and the bustle of South Bridge Street lies just steps to its east. Attracting more than 3 million in-person visitors a year (and 2.5 M more online visitors: National Museums Scotland, 2023), NMS is a keystone generator of Edinburgh’s (and Scotland’s) “authorized heritage discourse” (c.f. Smith, 2006), carefully scripted exhibitions of which may be viewed in the various galleries leading away from its Venetian Renaissance-inspired grand central hall.

Spread across several rooms, one gallery in particular — “World Cultures” — offers museum visitors a rich and globally expansive display of cultural belongings, some of which are from Indigenous Nations whose territories lay today within what is today considered Canada’s imagined borders. These include (among others): Inuit, Dënesųłı̨né, Tłı̨chǫ, and Gwich’in communities in the North; Haida, Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), Coast Salish (Musqueam), and Tlingit/Tsimshian communities from the West Coast and adjacent inland territories; Kainai (Blackfoot) communities from the Northern Plains; and Mi’kmaq communities from the East Coast. More than 130 objects, most with accompanying explanations, have been carefully curated to offer a compelling snapshot of these nations’ cultures, politics, and perhaps surprisingly to many, (parts of) their modernity.

Visitors knowledgeable about North American Northern Plains history in particular, however, might find the World Cultures gallery puzzling and even confounding for its complete exclusion of Métis history, culture, and modernity. The Métis people who, along with First Nations and Inuit peoples, are recognized in Canada’s Constitution, are a post-contact Indigenous people who became a major economic and political force by the middle of the 19th century in the Northern Plains of what is now Western Canada. ¹ More relevantly here, perhaps more than any other Indigenous people “in Canada,” the Métis people possessed long standing historical presences in, and relationships with, Scotland. Despite the distinctive character of these relationships, they appear only parenthetically in the museum’s “heritage imaginary” (c.f. Taylor, 2004), relegated to a footnote in its “Industry and Empire” gallery (part of which details Scotland’s role in subarctic fur trade in northern North America).

Contrast the diminished depiction of Métis heritage in the National Museum of Scotland with the vibrant heritage potential discernable (if one knows [where] to look) in Edinburgh’s historical and contemporary urban landscapes beyond the glass of its iron-framed front doors. Edinburgh, it turns out, is a city teeming with centuries of Indigenous travelers and visitors, and the patina of their experiences—including those whose descendants would become Métis, some of whom would go on to play prominent roles in the rise of the Métis nation—endures. Indeed, Edinburgh beyond the NMS offers all visitors—Indigenous and otherwise—a denser, more agentic, and more temporally expansive set of possibilities to engage with Métis heritage.

We delve into this stark disparity in further detail below but we offer a brief example here to provide a sense of the juxtaposition between Métis presence in Edinburgh the museum and in Edinburgh the city. Turning left out of the museum onto George IV Bridge and up towards the University, we might cross paths—metaphorically, at least—with the young Alexander Kennedy Isbister. The ex-employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company arrived in the mid-1840s at the age of 22, having first spent a couple of years at King’s College, now the University of Aberdeen. We could follow him northeast towards Richmond Street where Isbister is working as a dispensing assistant at the Royal Dispensary. Or perhaps he is heading towards the offices of W.R. Chambers to drop off his latest contribution to Chambers Edinburgh Journal (Cooper, 1988: 29, 32). If we add in the movements of family and friends—his uncle John Frederick Kennedy (see Newhouse et al, 2005: 298) or his friend Alex Rowand (Cooper, 1988: 29), for instance—Isbister’s Edinburgh begins to take on real volume. A thread of connection at the outer edges of the Métis kinsphere, this is another story untold in the museum, then, but one to which we will return below.

In the National Museum of Scotland, the Métis are “over there,” their ancestors relegated to a hazy—and geographically obscure(d)—past that has since been superseded by British modernity; but outside the museum lies a quintessentially urban space that offers stories drawing on the past, present, and future of the Métis—like Isbister (and like many other Métis visitors)—to reflect a vibrant and insistent Indigenous presence in the Edinburgh of then, and today. These presences recall the long history of Indigenous, and specifically Métis, mobilities to, and presences in, Edinburgh as a history of modern agents imbricated in the ebb and flow of Empire. While substantial attention has been paid to Indigenous transatlantic travel in recent years (see Dodds Pennock, 2023; Flint 2009; Morgan, 2017; Thrush, 2016; Vaughan, 2006, among others ² ), very little of it has centered the transatlantic nexus of Métis travelers; with few exceptions, both the Métis and actual Scottish sites remain peripheral to this conversation. ³ If, as Thrush, calling on Daniel Richter’s (2001)Facing East from Indian Country, urges, we are to understand these transatlantic endeavors by Indigenous travelers as agentic, generative, and indicative of a differently envisaged spatiality, then few, surely, could lay claim to Edinburgh as an outer edge of Indigenous territory more credibly than the Métis (Thrush, 2016). Finally, precious little of the research in this area to date has been conducted by Indigenous researchers, as our mini reading list above makes evident. That this article is co-authored by a Métis scholar is only one element of the gap this addresses, though; fundamentally, this “tour” of Edinburgh maps out not only the historical presence in this Scottish city of individuals who either were or would become Métis, or whose activities were vital to the formation of Métis national identity, but also the affective potential for contemporary Métis orienting themselves in this imperial hub through stories of habitation both transient and longer-term that offer connection to (perhaps unexpected) places.

Imagine wandering through the artifact-laden halls of the National Museum of Scotland or ambling down the cobblestoned streets of Old Town, Edinburgh. Neither perambulation seems an obvious place to embark on an investigation of urban Métis experiences. What possible value arises from focusing outside of “the Métis homeland” (Brandson, 2018) (whether Edinburgh or elsewhere) for stories about Métis heritage? We argue that at least three factors make this a more compelling choice than it may at first appear. First, though these have not tended to include Métis experiences, a small but suggestive literature has traced Indigenous motivations and experiences of travel to the United Kingdom over the past five centuries (e.g., Morgan, 2017; Thrush, 2016; Vaughan, 2006; but also see Millions, 2018). These experiences were overwhelmingly urban.

Second, perhaps more than any other Indigenous people whose territories Canada imagines as its own, Métis historical social, economic, and political networks connected them ⁴ to Britain, and Scotland in particular. Finally, the near-complete omission of Métis from narratives of Indigenous mobility beyond Canada and the United States has fostered an “under-imagining” of the extensive social geographies through which the Métis have traveled, explored and navigated, some of them urban. Following from this, this narrower geographical aperture likewise constricts the kinds of heritage stories that get told about the Métis people and perhaps just as importantly, the kinds of stories that Métis are likely to tell about themselves.

This article offers an analytical “corrective” to two of what we regard as three substantive gaps in the adjacent (and sometimes overlapping) fields of Métis studies and urban Indigenous scholarship. We aim to do so by focusing on urban Métis experiences more temporally and geographically expansive ⁵ than the times and places upon which the fields have been focused. We undertake this argument through four parts and a conclusion. In part one, we briefly explore the place of urban Métis experiences in the fields of Métis studies and urban Indigenous scholarship. Part two then outlines the complex relationship between capital cities, national museums and imperialism to underscore what makes the under-representation of the Métis nation in Scotland’s hegemonic heritage “crown jewel” —the National Museum of Scotland—particularly problematic. Here, we discuss what it means to understand Edinburgh as a central “node” in Britain’s global imperial networks, and the important consequences that has for determining how, from a heritage perspective, it is possible for people to be “in two imaginative places at once” (in this case, both in and beyond the National Museum of Scotland’s heritage imaginary).

Following this, part three details the historical power of imperial networks to prevail upon Indigenous (im)mobility in ways that mainly benefited colonial powers. As was the case with other Indigenous peoples of the time, however, Métis had their own reasons for travelling within these networks that are irreducible to mere effects of colonial dictates or desires. Toward this end, we detail in particular the importance of Métis kinscapes (Macdougall, 2021; Macdougall and St-Onge, 2013; St-Onge and Macdougall, 2021) for properly contextualizing historical Métis mobility decisions and behaviors between Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) territories ⁶ (and, following the Rupertsland Transfer in 1870, Canada) and Great Britain over the course of the 19th century.

Part four then briefly lays out the curation of Métis heritage in the National Museum of Scotland, underscoring its relative invisibility and attendant relegation to a bit player in the broader machinations of Scottish imperialism. This section of the article then proceeds with a “thicker description” (i.e., Geertz, 1973) of the travel and circulation of “early-Métis” families and individuals to and from HBC territories and then Canada (mostly) throughout the 19th century. We do this with two goals in mind. Firstly, in sketching out the scope and scale of Métis presences in the city—as travelers and actors within and through Empire—we illuminate the degree to which the museum holds Métis peoples in a distant, orientalizing gaze, ignoring their modernity and diminishing their active agency in (sometimes adjacent to and in at least one instance, active opposition to) the fur trade. Secondly, we draw attention to the narrative possibilities, the “liveness,” inherent in the act of tracing the active presence of Métis kin in historical Edinburgh’s built environment.

Finally, the article concludes with a conceptual discussion of the potential utility of an “urban Métis heritage tour” as a more kinetic and responsive “counter-heritage” modality (i.e., Byrne, 2014; Robertson, 2012) for considering Métis heritage in Edinburgh. The heritage tour is intentionally placed in direct contrast with the National Museum of Scotland’s positioning of the Métis. In doing so, we seek to offer an example of what Métis heritage sovereignty ⁷ might look like in (mobile) practice beyond both the NMS’s physical layout and its heritage imaginary.

Urban Métis in the field of Métis/urban Indigenous studies

As the field of urban Indigenous scholarship in Canada approaches its half century mark and the field of Métis studies (arguably) a century, few of its scholars have explored the phenomena of urban Métis identities, experiences or dynamics (though see Burley, 2013; Kermoal 2022; Laliberte, 2013; Troupe, 2009 and especially Werner et al., 2018 for exceptions to this). ⁸ Two possible exceptions exist to this assertion. First, a sizeable scholarship exists on the inception and growth of the Métis community in the “Red River Settlement Zone” (see Vrooman, 2012: 19), encompassing territories in and near what is now modern-day Winnipeg, Manitoba (see Peterson and Brown, 1985, some of whose chapters touch in elements of this geographical region). However, none of this literature has taken much conceptual interest in theorizing the transition of Red River/Winnipeg from entrepôt/frontier settlement to city, before or following its formal incorporation as such in 1873.

Second, a smaller but still robust scholarship has discussed Métis culture and politics which, in the post 1960s period, became increasingly urban. Joe Sawchuk (2001) for example, an originator of the sub-field of Métis politics, argued more than two decades ago that the increase in Métis cultural festivals such as “Back to Batoche Days” (perhaps the most important annual Métis cultural event on the western Prairies; Métis Gathering, 2024) would become increasingly important “especially for the 65% of the Métis population who live in urban areas, cut off from their traditional communities” (Sawchuk, 2001: 88). But apart from Laliberte (2013), none of this scholarship has explored the distinctiveness of this geographical “turn”: that is, what made these political dynamics distinctively urban and for that matter, what forms of mobility shaped the expanding geographical sphere to include both rural and urban spaces?

More recently, increased recognition achieved by provincial Métis nations and the Métis National Council in various arenas of federal and provincial government intervention has led to a scholarly focus on urban Métis, especially in the context of Métis women’s health and well-being (see Jones et al., 2024, 2020; Monchalin et al., 2020a, 2020b; Monchalin et al., 2019; Wesche, 2013). This latter scholarship asserts essentially that Métis have a right to live in urban spaces that feel welcoming, that Métis lives are inextricably bound together with cities and that, as such, they are deserving of health services that recognize and meet their distinctive priorities and expectations.

Conversely, and particularly in the subfield of Métis historiography that tacitly positions Red River as a hub rather than a locale, Métis are often understood as a quintessentially mobile Indigenous people. Fur trade and border scholars, as well as ethnohistorians, have emphasized the expansive territories over which Métis historically travelled as part of their role in the subarctic fur trade and the growth of the buffalo hunting economy (i.e., Brown, 1980; Foster, 1973; Peterson, 1981; Ray, 1974; Van Kirk, 1980). Others have more specifically grounded collective 19th-century Métis consciousness in an ethic of mobility (see e.g., Hogue, 2015; Macdougall, 2021; Macdougall and St-Onge, 2013; Macdougall et al., 2014; St-Onge et al., 2014; Vrooman, 2012). In the introduction of their important intervention into Métis historiography, for example, Macdougall et al. (2014: 6) argued that along with geography and family, mobility constituted one of three key elements that “defined Métis culture and society across North America” (emphasis added).

While each field of scholarship differs in geographical focus, temporal scope, methodological positioning and even in Métis definitional lineations, they share in common three features, two of which we focus on in this article. First, with few exceptions, Métis/urban Indigenous studies have focused on humans, with nearly no attention paid to the power or animacy of objects to understanding the Métis people. Second, their scholars write in ways in which Métis get to be historical, or they get to be urban, but it is rarer that they get to simultaneously be both. Indeed, both literatures (rightly) narrate the gradual urbanization of Métis families as a result of Canadian governmental policies that destroyed traditional Métis economies, dispossessed them of their land (Adams, 1975; Campbell, 1973) and even stole their babies (see Stevenson, 2020).

Finally, this literature overwhelmingly restricts depictions of Métis geographical mobility—historical and contemporary—to within North American boundaries and for that matter, within the geographical boundaries of the so-called “Métis homeland” (which extended several 100 km into northern United States). In sum, the broader project from which this article stems attempts to unsettle the assumptions of time and space by re-embedding, in Britain, some of the “wrinkles” of the Métis narrative that iterations of both Canadian settler historiography and Métis nationalisms have tended to iron out; while simultaneously exploring the ways these stories are told in the Métis “elsewhere.” One such (important) place, we will argue, is in Edinburgh, Scotland.

National museums and capital cities, in imperial nodes and networks

A substantial body of literature has explored the privileged epistemic authority enjoyed by museums in conveying histories to the broader public (for classic discussions on this, see Anderson, 2006; Bennett, 1995; Hooper-Greenhill, 1992; Handler, 1988; Huyssen, 2003; MacDonald, 2013), and national museums in particular have come to play a dominant role in staging “pasts” in ways that reproduce the legitimacy of the nation-state in which they are located (see Anderson, 2006; Aronsson and Elgenius, 2015; Knell et al., 2011; Watson, 2020). Given Edinburgh’s position as an important “node” in British imperialism’s historical networks, this includes what Millions (2018: fn. 6) has called HBC territories, in and beyond “Rupert’s Land” to encompass large parts of the so-called Northwest (much of which Canada later claimed as part of its territory following its formal establishment as a country in 1867). Together, these possess important implications for the historical narrations that escape beyond the National Museum of Scotland’s beyond its doors, and likewise, Edinburgh beyond its municipal boundaries.

Britain’s centuries-long series of global imperialist projects both compelled and impelled nations around the world into dispossessory relationships. Much of this took place under the historical threat of physical violence (which often played out in fact) and it also took the form of extractive industries that generated valuable but deeply inequitable trade relationships. Indeed, the iconic stature and associated heritage “draw” of many (western) European capital cities have been profoundly shaped by centuries of such economic relationships that relied on extracting the wealth of non-European nations’ territorial resources, transporting it back to Europe, and utilizing the taxes levied to build public infrastructure. This includes some of the iconic architecture/built environments that European cities project to the world today.

It is in this sense that we can think of European cities as preeminent examples of what the sociologist Anthony Giddens has termed power containers. For Giddens, power containers are characterized by their ability to “generate … a concentration of allocative and authoritative resources. Class-divided societies, castles, manorial estates—but above all cities—are containers for the generation of power” (Giddens, 1985: 13). Maitland (2014) argues that capital cities manifest this power in a number of ways. First, as the capital of their nation state, they physically and symbolically represent the seat of rule for the country, and are where the national government sits (indeed, capital cities are often referred to as a shorthand for the nation (Kaplan and Hannum, 2023: 143)).

Second, capital cities often serve as the main headquarters for multinational corporations, which direct much of the nation-state’s economic force. Third, they often contain a disproportionate ratio of the nation-state’s social, cultural and educational institutions (Maitland 2014: 4). In this latter sense and in Maitland’s words, capital cities have become places of pilgrimage that attract hundreds of thousands—and in the case of various iconic western European capital cities, millions—of yearly visitors to their “allocative and authoritative” buildings, monuments, civic spaces, and even in some cases, physical layouts. Capital cities, as such, played an important role in the manifestation of imperial power historically and national power today.

For myriad reasons, cultural goods and belongings “acquired” overseas were often transported back to Europe and deposited in or near capital cities. In a heritage context at least, it seems that capital cities were not merely power containers, but power depositories. And as relevant state authorities began to build heritage institutions such as museums, they often populated them with these cultural belongings. NMS’s public webpage, for example, holds over “over 12 million objects,” historically collected as

as works of art, as material evidence of the past, as scientific discoveries, as curios and personal mementoes, as representations of other cultures, as specimens of natural resources for industrial exploitation, as well as trophies or loot taken during colonial military campaigns (National Museums Scotland, 2024).

For these and other historical reasons, heritage/tourism, particularly in western Europe, was—and remains—deeply imbricated in the gravitational pull of capital cities’ enduring power (see Campbell, 2003; Frew and White, 2011; Gordon, 2006; Gottmann, 1983; Hall, 2002; Kaplan and Hannum, 2023: 148–153), and national museums often comprise an important part of the heritage fields of capital cities. ⁹

As we explore further in part four, outside of perhaps the movie or television production industry, national museums possess a nearly unparalleled power to tell stories to a broad array of publics. This power allows them privileged interpretations of the “whats” and the “whens” of history but perhaps equally important for our discussion here, it allows them to profoundly shape the “wheres” of history. For example, we noted earlier that the National Museum of Scotland positions Métis in its Industry and Empire Gallery as being “over there” (in territories now claimed by Canada). We will show that despite centuries of Métis presence in Edinburgh, the NMS has marginalized them as (geographically and conceptually) distant and minor figures in an increasingly confident 19th-century Scottish nationalism. In doing so, their narration of Métis presences in Edinburgh effectively render the two incommensurable: one can historically be Métis, or be in Edinburgh, but not both. It thus constantly reproduces the heritage imaginary that Edinburgh is a place that Métis do not—cannot—belong to.

Capital cities and their national museums continue to endure as concentrated locales of their respective for(u)ms of authority, and their influence invariably extends far beyond their municipal confines. That is to say, they—and for our purposes here, Edinburgh in particular—serve as powerful nodes within broader flows and networks whose political and cultural power is often more global in scale. Though capital cities’ local power may have stemmed from their construction in historically strategic locations (often linked to important transportation routes), their broader reach resulted from their position within larger networks that shaped the circulation of people, goods, information, and meanings across wide political, cultural, and geographical expanses (see generally Sheller and Urry 2006, originators of the “new mobilities paradigm”).

Given the new mobilities scholarship’s fundamental insistence on the importance of foregrounding movement and mobility, their barriers and the relations of power that shaped their relationships, networks play a key role in what they have defined as the “relational turn.” To wit, “[t]heories and metaphors of the network and complexity provide powerful tools for considering the inter-relatedness and inter-dependencies of the mobilities of both people and things” (Adey et al., 2014: 3). Likewise, numerous post-colonial authors have utilized the concept of networks as a key analytical lens for understanding the circulation of communication, knowledge, and culture in the attempted exercise and maintenance of colonial power (e.g., see broadly Appadurai, 1996; Perry, 2015; Said, 1978; Stoler, 2002, 1995; Thomas, 1994).

As noted earlier, new mobilities scholars have recognized the inequitably power-laden and co-constituted relationship between mobilities and immobilities (Hannam et al., 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006). Sheller (2018: 33) has referred to this as the “unevenness” of mobility (meant to signal not only who can move and who cannot, but who gets to decide whether or not they move, and who does not). Investigating the imperial/colonial contexts of this unevenness—of mobilities and the presence or absence of relevant moorings—is, as we will see below, a key contextual element for understanding the (im)mobility of Indigenous travelers over the past five (or so) centuries. It is within networks that Indigenous nations/communities/families/individuals lived (and sought to live) meaningful lives in the face of colonial authorities who attempted to dismiss such agency except as it incidentally coincided with the rapacity of their own.

We began this article by pointing out that studying urban Métis heritage through the lens of Edinburgh hardly seems an obvious place to begin. To be blunt, what, if anything, can Edinburgh teach us about Métis heritage? As it turns out, Edinburgh played a key role in the global spread of the British empire and in Scottish imperial aims more specifically (see e.g., Devine, 2003; Devine and McCarthy, 2017; Fry, 2001; MacKenzie and Devine, 2011), much of which played a constitutive role in what was to become Canada. As such, it potentially offers a rich source of teachings, particularly in a heritage context, depending on how and where we are willing to imagine the mobilities of Métis presences.

For example, Scotland played a significant role in the extractive relationships that Britain and her mercantile interests fashioned with Indigenous nations and traders, part of the growth of the subarctic fur trade following the formal, late-17th-century establishment of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). The establishment of this formalized trading context allowed British traders to continue to build pre-existing (though nascent) trade relationships between themselves and Indigenous trappers/traders in what is now called Canada, particularly in regions whose river networks flowed into Hudson’s Bay (see Ray, 1974; Rich, 1958–1959 for a general overview of HBC’s role in the growth of the subarctic fur trade). As the HBC expanded, they recruited many of their initial employees from Britain, including the Orkney Islands just north of the Scottish mainland (see McCormack, 2011, 2013; Rigg, 2011).

In the centuries that followed, from their lowly beginnings as indentured servants, Scottish employees came to occupy many of the upper tiers of the fur trade company and fur trade society, particularly after the consolidation of the Hudson’s Bay Company (with its purchasing of its main rival fur trading rival, the North West Company) in 1821 (see Brown, 1980; Van Kirk, 1980). The growth of the fur trade and the role of British (and in particular, Scottish) fur traders and entrepreneurs in that emergence and expansion remained embedded in the broader economic landscape of Scotland’s (and Britain’s) growing imperial desires and objectives in HBC territories in (what eventually became) Canada (see Tough, 1992).

In the centuries that followed, Scottish influence in HBC territories came to exert a marked influence on the growth and unfolding of the Métis nation, particularly by the early 19th century. From the fur trade organization and hierarchy (including its racial inflections following the 1821 consolidation of the HBC and the North West Company—see Brown, 1980; Van Kirk, 1980); to the subsequent settlement patterns in HBC territories (particularly in Red River, with the establishment of the Red River Colony in 1812 by Scot Thomas Douglas, the 5th Earl of Selkirk and its subsequent populating following the “structural rationalization” of the fur trade); to the continued connections between Halfbreed and Scottish extended families over the broad span of the 19th century.

All of these contributed, to a greater or lesser extent, to the “style” of nationhood (i.e., Anderson, 2006: 6) that the Métis nation—including the circulation of its economy, ideas, material culture, and people—came to assume. And indeed, it is to the role of Métis cultural connections in shaping Métis mobility decisions that we turn to next, in part three. In particular, we position the central importance of kinscapes in making historical sense of Métis presences in Edinburgh. Because, from a Métis perspective, otherwise geographically and culturally distant intimacies of extended family relationships and obligations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous kin encouraged and produced circuits of distinctly Métis mobility, some of them European and in those cases, nearly all of them urban.

Networks fight back: The power of Métis kinscapes

The relationships between imperialism and Indigenous mobility are, a widely ranging scholarship tells us, complicated ones. Two separate (though not incompatible) literatures have taken up the relationships between networks and Indigenous agency in intriguing ways. Properly contextualized, they reveal Edinburgh as an especially interesting hub for thinking about historical and contemporary urban Métis mobility beyond conventional tendencies. And they likewise also shed additional light on what makes the National Museum of Scotland’s “heritage imaginary” as it pertains to the Métis people in its galleries so deeply confounding.

On the one hand, scholars have noted the extent to which the creation of specifically settler colonial locales (see Veracini (2010) for a “root” discussion of settler colonialism) were profoundly grounded in attempts to control the movements of Indigenous peoples. Usurping what Carpio et al. (2019) refer to as Indigenous peoples’ mobility sovereignty and the forms of relationality they practiced across time and space became a prerequisite for enabling settler colonialism and attendant forms of mobility among settlers (see Carter, 1990; Clarsen, 2009; Goeman, 2013; Simpson, 2017; Wolfe, 2006). On the other hand, scholars have equally noted the role of mobility in many pre-colonial Indigenous societies, highlighting the complicated motivations and enduring presence of a “mobility ethos” (De Costa, 2007), even in the teeth of the aforementioned colonial projects’ attempts to restrict or forcibly redirect it. These discussions have traversed a number of scholarly disciplines, including, of particular relevance here, History.

Authors associated with the “new British imperial history” have explored Indigenous peoples and their mobility, challenging earlier British imperial history narratives that often painted a picture of Indigenous peoples as either stationary or moving only according to colonial directives. Ballantyne and Burton (2009), Lester and Laidlaw (2015), Carey and Lydon (2015), and Standfield (2018) have, for example, noted the tendency in this earlier scholarship on mobility in the British imperial context to position Indigenous people as “local” in contradistinction to the globally mobile European. This discursive rendering had the effect of “flattening” Indigenous agency, Ballantyne and Burton (2009) argue, and in doing so, has failed to “recogni[ze] Indigenous people as subjects in their own right” (Standfield, 2018: 3).

Standfield (2018) argues that contextualizing Indigenous mobility as an extension of pre-colonial sociality “helps to challenge the assumption that Indigenous people were merely engaged in travel for European purposes or along European lines.” She asserts further that “[b]y understanding the context of pre-colonial Indigenous mobility, we can focus on Indigenous mobility in imperial and colonial contexts, seeing it as more than simply traveling or working with Europeans” (Standfield, 2018: 3). Lester (2014) likewise uses the concept of an assemblage to contemplate an agentic (though sometimes necessarily attenuated) relationship between Indigenous peoples and the desires and demands of British imperial agents. Rather than casting everyday Indigenous activities in the contexts of Indigenous cooptation, resistance or immobility, Lester suggests instead that “assemblage thinking” encourages us to muse about how, regardless of existing power differentials, all actors enmeshed in an apparatus are (differentially) constrained and enabled to action in ways more or less faithful to the dynamics of power within that apparatus.

For Lester, assemblage thinking yields two important insights about the substance and role of agency (Indigenous and imperial)—both of which are relevant here. First, agency/capacity are networked through a heterogeneous ensemble of relationships with “other individuals, organisms and objects. In one way, this assemblage approach to discourses, networks and places decenters both white and indigenous agency, since each is effected only relative to, and through, the other” (Lester, 2014: 54). As such, imperial capacity to act is always directed or mediated (and in some cases, is attenuated) by the constraints and affordances of the network or assemblage within which it exists (Standfield, 2018: 4). In short, Indigenous agency cannot be thought of as merely reactive to imperial impositions since, despite their relative positions of privilege or marginalizations, all agents within an assemblage are invested in it.

Second, assemblage thinking necessarily extends the geographical expanse of any analytical field under consideration. If all agency is shaped by the assemblage(s) that shape them and (thus) give them meaning, then networks, with their global circuits and flows, cannot be associated exclusively with imperial actors. Nor can Indigenous collectivities be understood as fundamentally “local” (Lester, 2014: 51). Assemblage thinking instead encourages us to think through the consequences of its ability to provide grounds for the continued animation of Indigenous (kinship) networks across broad expanses of social and physical space. In this analytical rendering, colonial locales—and, we more specifically assert here, metropoles— “become nodal points within indigenous kinship networks, less visibly replicating the circulatory networks of empire more often associated with colonizers at larger scales” (Lester, 2014: 52).

So: if Indigenous peoples were historically mobile—and remained so following the imposition of colonial assemblages—what were the social norms and relations that shaped their motivations and their actual practices? De Costa (2007) argues that for many Indigenous societies, mobility served several imperatives. These included ceremonial obligations, but also those pertaining to economic, social, and (other) cultural considerations. Likewise, Indigenous travelers often incorporated elements of modernity into their communal lives as they continued to assert their agency from within the fabric of colonial assemblages that ostensibly sought to attenuate or even eliminate it (see Altman and Hinkson, 2007; Deloria, 2004; Kearney and Bradley, 2015).

Of direct relevance to our argument about Métis people in historical Edinburgh, the concept of a kinscape is useful for thinking about the specific mobility ethos of Métis in a global imperial assemblage. We use the term “kinscape” in keeping with its early use by historian Sami Lakomäki (2014) to describe (in his empirical case) the complex senses of space and belonging that characterized attempts by the Shawnee—an Indigenous people—to continually build “a terrain of social and geographic space in which several overlapping networks of kinship radiated out from each community and connected it to dozens of others, both near and far, Shawnee and non-Shawnee” (Lakomäki, 2014: 160) in the midst of emerging imperial ambitions and impositions in what was to become the United States of America.

More specifically to the Métis context, Métis historian Brenda Macdougall, both singly and with collaborator Nicole St-Onge, has made fruitful use of the kinscape concept as a novel methodological approach for analyzing the complex social relations through which the Métis came to rely on and reanimate their complex society. Kinscapes represent “a series of interfamilial communities connecting people who shared and acted upon mutually supportive economic and political agendas, not just geographically but also intergenerationally” (Macdougall, 2021: 236; also see Macdougall and St. Onge, 2013, 2017). They thus refer to a complex set of ethical obligations and responsibilities pertaining to economic, social, cultural, and political dynamics mediated by extended family relations across time and space. Crucially, these both shaped and were shaped by their adherents’ continued economic and emotional investments in them.

Unlike the French trading system that involved traders moving inland and marrying into Indigenous families and communities, for English and Scottish traders, the HBC operated on a model of establishing trading posts on strategic points of the numerous waterways that comprised the transportation corridors of the vast geographical expanses of Rupert’s Land. These posts effectively set the stage for numerous so-called “country” marriages (“à la façon du pays”) between HBC employees and Indigenous women of the various bands and nations with whom they traded. Most of the formative discussions on the fur trade from the late 1970s onward (i.e., Brown, 1980; Foster, 1973; Peterson, 1981; Van Kirk, 1980) have noted the power of these intimate relationships in constituting the economic, cultural, and political constitution of the fur trade itself. Many of the upper-tier HBC employees and their families moved to and from Rupert’s Land (see Barclay, 2015): some stayed in the Red River Colony, some took up new lives in more easterly parts of Canada and some moved for a time to Europe.

In her extensive exploration of elite fur trading in British-Métis families’ extensive kinship ties between central Canada and the United Kingdom, historian Erin Millions argues that the mobility of upper-class Indigenous children in a fur trade society milieu challenged common understandings of the place and the role of Indigenous people within the broader conceptual span of Britain’s imperial ambitions (and indeed, its history). She notes that the “rise” of (what she terms) “British-Métis” fur trade families constitutes a specific historical and geographical moment that inaugurated “a period during which British-Métis families leveraged their numbers, socio-economic privilege, fur-trade kin networks, and British heritage to establish themselves as members of the colonial elite” (Millions, 2018: 4).

In their attempts to maintain this elite status, many of these extended families—at once highly socially and geographically mobile and highly multicultural—placed a premium on the value of education. And though Millions offers detail on how these educational experiences sometimes traversed imperial binary expectations such that they included both Indigenous and non-Indigenous education, “British-style education … [in particular] … was central to the cohesiveness and success of British-Métis fur-trade families, and the privilege afforded to these families allowed them to invest significantly in education for their children” (Millions, 2018: 5). In this normative context, these elite fur trade families endeavored to ensure that their children were educated in their homes, local public contexts and, of particular interest here, in more geographically extended locales such as Montreal, Edinburgh, and London. Elite HBC fur trade families’ concern with education was, Millions explains, a common concern with other elite families throughout the British Empire, part of their attempt to ensure the success of their children in imperial—and in particular, metropolitan—locales. These practices also increased the likelihood of reproducing their continued elite position within their fur trade society (Millions, 2018: 6).

To be clear, we are not attempting to argue that Métis mobility to Scotland was a fundamental part of the 19th-century lives of the vast majority of the Métis people. In the grand scheme of things, we are likely talking about hundreds rather than thousands of individuals. Nonetheless, mobility, rather than stasis, constituted a fundamental precondition for understanding the social worlds of the Métis people. We have chosen Edinburgh as an important exemplar of these kinscape nodes for the reasons laid out above, but it need not necessarily have been Edinburgh (e.g., we might have chosen 19th-century London; 19th-century Montreal; or, using a wider aperture and a different century, WWI northern France, Belgium or The Netherlands of the 20th century; or even 21st-century Rome, with the Papal Apology on 28 March–1 April 2022).

In our empirical case, some of the precursor families we emphasize “became Métis,” as events—often global in origin but local in their manifestations—were thrust upon them. And for some, that mobility included the UK and more specifically Scotland. This was as much the case historically as it is today, and as much for Indigenous peoples as for non-. Métis kinscapes encouraged the movement of Métis bodies, ideas, and objects to Scotland, and Edinburgh. Next, we juxtapose the manner in which the Scottish National Museum has narrated the inclusion of the Métis people, through our material culture, into their artifacts with the “storyworld” of Métis presences in the Edinburgh beyond its doors.

Métis heritage presences in Edinburgh, in (and beyond) NMS

As noted previously, the Métis people—including their ancestral belongings—are not to be found in any of the Indigenous galleries of the NMS. To recall, reference to them at all is only to be found in the Museum of Scotland, the 1998 building dedicated to Scottish history and culture. There, in a glass case on an interior wall, a number of ancestral Métis and Cree belongings illuminate a broader narrative of the “Scottish fur trade.” Signifiers of Indigenous otherness—moose-hide moccasins, a bear-claw necklace, a beautifully beaded “octopus” bag, for example—sit alongside more familiar European domestic clutter such as decorated platters, a silver chalice and bowl, a flintstock rifle.

On the rear wall of the case, a range of photographs, paintings, and prints echo this “marriage” of cultures narrative. Métis cultural belongings sit alongside a painting of “Pocahontas and her son” —the connotations of the title clear, in spite of the 300-year gap between the painting’s actual subject and the so-called “grandmother of America.” Above the pair and slightly to the right as you look at the case, a photograph of Sir George Simpson, Governor of Hudson’s Bay Company, takes the eye on an arc from the allegorical to the symbolic, in the form of a painted portrait of Dr. John Rae “in the dress of a Cree Indian.” Like the snowshoes that partially overlap his portrait—an Indigenous technology but in this case made, it transpires, by Rae himself—this Scotsman in Cree clothing hints at the ideal amalgamation of European enterprise and Indigenous technology, just as the country marriage combines European entrepreneurialism and spirit of adventure with Indigenous trade networks and knowledge of the country. Ironically—or perhaps inevitably, given the national narrative this display ultimately serves—as a result, “Pocahontas,” like the historic antecedent and like the Métis themselves, is entirely absorbed into a narrative of Scottish enterprise and adaptation, her “son” perhaps the future of this encounter. The Indigenous “past” gives way to the “modern” present through a process of adventure, encounter, and—again, ironically—indigenizing of the Scotsman, at the expense of a story of Indigenous agency, adaptivity, and continuance.

In sum, the dominating narrative of this Industry and Empire gallery presents a quintessentially Scottish story, but one that happens several thousand miles away, much of it in and around Quebec (and to our point, far outside of the national homeland of the Métis); the objects in the display cases ultimately index the intrepid nature of the Scottish national character and the successful meeting of cultures that resulted. The objects and their associated narratives tell us little of the Métis themselves. That is to say, the Métis story—as in the version of this story that does something other than interpellating Indigenous ancestors into a Scottish national narrative—is entirely absent from this space.

Contrast this narrativization with the vibrant world of “Indigenous Edinburgh” (i.e., Thrush, 2016) and its Métis heritage possibilities. By the early-19th century, a veritable stream of Indigenous visitors were coming from the territories currently claimed by Canada, including, as mentioned above, children of the fur trade. The very earliest of the Métis visitors to Edinburgh—as far as documented visitors are concerned—however, was one John Bunn, of York Factory, Manitoba. Following his ‘part-Indian’ mother’s death in around 1806, Bunn’s Scottish maternal grandfather and his English-born father sent him to school in Edinburgh, after which he attended medical school at Edinburgh University. Departing Edinburgh for a post in Moose Factory in 1819, he went on to establish a private practice in the Red River Settlement in 1824 and returned again to medical school in Edinburgh in 1831 to upgrade his skills (Lamirande and Barkwell, n.d.). In between his two stints at the University, fellow Métis student, James Sinclair, attended Edinburgh University to read Law. Son of Chief Factor William Sinclair and his Cree-Métis wife, Nahoway Norton, Sinclair would return to Red River for a career in trade and exploration (Barkwell, n.d.).

As noted previously, for many British-Métis fur trade elites, education was a priority and their children would often be sent to Britain in the course of it. While the school of choice, for boys at least, was the “Nest Academy” —a familiar term for the part of Jedburgh Academy housed in buildings known colloquially as the Wrain’s (or Wren’s) Nest—in Jedburgh 40 miles to the south-east, many will have passed through Edinburgh and in some cases, such as that of young Albert Hodgson in 1867, were sent to Edinburgh for periods of respite, convalescence, and leisure (see Millions, 2018; Morgan, 2017). Albert and his cousin Johnnie are also documented, in one of Albert’s own letters to his Uncle George Davis, taking a trip to Edinburgh to buy clothes and have their photographs taken (Millions, 2018: 16); this is unlikely to have been unique or even unusual.

The presence of these kin networks transcends the school-aged members of Métis families, too. In 1873, for instance, Lydia Christie, following a stint at finishing school in Quebec, could be found at a portrait photographer’s studio in the Edinburgh suburb of Portobello. The occasion for the photograph was her performance in a musical recital in Edinburgh; the recital and her refined appearance in the portrait itself reflect, for Millions, the “vision of a Victorian woman” and constitute “practices of respectability [which] were key to her status as a member of the fur-trade in Rupert’s Land” (Millions, 2018: 17).

Among this transient presence of Métis families and individuals in Scotland, so clearly part of a circulatory network, there were also of course those whose presence left longer term traces. Although he would ultimately live much longer—and die—in London, the aforementioned Alexander Kennedy Isbister entered what would be his 41-year expatriate life in Britain first via Aberdeen, and then Edinburgh. He was admitted to the universities of both cities, attending the University of Edinburgh first in 1845 and then again for a Master’s degree in the late 1850s (see Cooper, 1988). Although Isbister’s fame as an educator, advocate, and lawyer would all be established in London, his time in Edinburgh was not insignificant, and he can be traced in many parts of the city as we have noted.

With greater longevity—if for tragic reasons—the Ballenden family also has a traceable Edinburgh presence. John Ballenden and his Métis wife, Sarah McLeod Ballenden, left Canada under a cloud of controversy in 1853, following their children who they had sent to Scotland for school under the care of their widowed aunt. Several of the children died far from home; their mother died shortly after their arrival in Scotland and, in 1856, their father also passed away. A family memorial stone, erected by John in 1853, stands in New Calton Burial Ground in Edinburgh; while several of the Ballendens survived and had children of their own, none of the siblings of this branch of the Ballenden family would return to Canada (Millions, 2018: 20–21).

As Millions notes, the transatlantic journeys of fur-trade children “were only one part of the mobility that characterized the careers and life paths of British-Métis families, but they were also part of a tradition of Métis mobility in a larger sense” (Millions, 2018: 7). That mobility was circulatory: it was two-way. Certainly, visitors to NMS could be forgiven for understanding the story as told as one of a set of mobile, global Scottish agents—upper-class aristocrats, colonial administrators and officials, explorers and scientists, merchants and industrialists, landowners, and diplomatic envoys—traveling and imposing themselves on local, static, Indigenous populations. Our snapshot of Métis presence in Edinburgh tells a more textured tale. It is a tale of continuity of mobility on a transatlantic scale; of proud embrace of both Scottish/British and Métis cultural and national affinities; of Indigenous agency in those imperial networks often thought to be the exclusive preserve of the British middle and upper classes.

To sum up this section, then. Insofar as national museums serve as corporeal and digital locales for millions of visitors, heritage work undertaken at national museums is important, even crucial, nation-building labor. But as is the case with any revelatory exercise, illuminating one story obscures another, and the depiction of Métis in the National Museum of Scotland as little more than a cog in the wheel of 19th-century Scottish industry as good as erases the long history of agentic Métis presences in the city itself. Unlike the museum case’s story of the Scottish fur trade, tracing the presence of Métis individuals and families in Edinburgh—and the experiences of the legions of other Indigenous travelers as well as those of “people of color” —reveals a more deeply nuanced, relational mobility both ways across the Atlantic.

Conclusion: Heritage sovereignty as a verb—making visible Métis mobilities in Edinburgh

The pith of this article’s argument, articulated through four major parts and multiple literatures, is threefold: first, that until recently, the literatures best positioned to explore the growth and lived complexity of historical and contemporary urban Métis experiences (i.e., Métis studies and urban Indigenous studies) have not done so. Second, the limited consideration of Métis mobility beyond its usual geographical boundaries (i.e., Canada, the provincial Métis nations or even “the Métis homeland”) effectively neglects a crucial geographically broader aspect of the complex narrative of Métis nationhood. In short, it fails to recognize the enduring influence of (European) capital cities on the trajectories of its growth. Third, though heritage offers a compelling way of thinking about how and “when” Métis are located and publicly narrated in otherwise “non-Métis” urban spaces, the utility of these efforts is powerfully shaped by the contexts within which they are produced. In short, we are only able to see where we point our light.

Toward these ends, we have juxtaposed the National Museum of Scotland’s circumscribed representation of Métis heritage in its galleries with potential moments and sites of Métis heritage drawn from the vibrancy of Métis presences in the city of Edinburgh during the (same) heyday of “Scottish Industry and Empire” featured in the museum. The problem, of course, is that despite our juxtaposition of their disparate heritage imaginaries, few people—aside from interested academics or experienced community researchers—have access to the evidence of Métis heritage outside of what the NMS has presented in its gallery. Certainly, the conceptual possibility exists that in the future, NMS will undertake a redesign or a reinterpretation of their Métis holdings to produce more productively complicated, more vibrant narratives about Métis presences in Edinburgh. ¹⁰ What to do in the meantime, though?

By way of what might be regarded as a slightly unorthodox conclusion, we conclude by presenting a comparatively low barrier, more dynamic and more explicitly place-based modality for reckoning with Métis heritage in Edinburgh than that currently offered by the National Museum of Scotland. In contrast, we offer the methodology of self-guided heritage tours as relatively inexpensive alternatives to create and to engage with place-based histories. In our case, it holds the potential to reveal and reinvigorate the otherwise hidden histories of Métis travelers, visitors and/or residents in Edinburgh. NMS has created a narrative in which Métis are “over there” (i.e., in HBC territories)—here, we will demonstrate the utility of city heritage tours for attaching people (in this case, Métis people) to Edinburgh the place: Métis as “over here” (i.e., in Edinburgh), however unexpected that may otherwise appear (c.f. Deloria, 2004).

Self-guided heritage tours do more than offer a distinct and engaging way to uncover otherwise hidden histories, however. Specific to our argument here, we wish to emphasize their potential to provide stark contrasts to what are often the static and limited representation of museums. The NMS attracts millions of visitors annually (in person and online) and plays a crucial role in narrating Scotland’s heritage. This fact renders its minimized depiction of Métis history—constrained, additionally, by its traditional exhibition methods and limited funds for reimagining and developing new ones—all the more problematic. Insofar as the NMS has relegated the Métis to their temporal and geographical narrative periphery, Métis stories and contributions are merely folded into Scotland’s transoceanic national-historical narratives.

Conversely, physically mobile tours enable immersive and personal explorations of urban space, as well as the claiming of space—including historical sites—that are otherwise often invisibilized (see generally Springgay and Truman, 2018). As such and through the powerful amplifying power of augmented reality features walking tours hold the potential to allow participants to engage directly with the spaces and stories that in this case shaped previous (and future!) Métis experiences. By including geo-located “stops” with an overlay of relevant historical documentation that can be easily read through handheld devices (normally in the form of smartphones or tablets), such walking tours effectively allow Metis stories and narratives to be overlaid atop of more dominant stories and narratives that otherwise invisibilize them.

While self-guided digital heritage tours will likely never match the NMS in visitor numbers, they offer a dynamic approach to Métis heritage, allowing participants to engage with history in more personal and meaningful ways. As Farman (2014: 6) notes, “[s]torytelling with mobile media takes the stories of a place and attaches them to that place, offering an almost infinite number of stories that can be layered onto a single site.” A digital tour might layer multiple temporal and thematic stories onto key Edinburgh sites (i.e., Sneaky Pete’s, George Square, or New Calton Burial Ground, to name but a few) featuring geo-tagged locations with accessible multimedia content like oral narration, archival photos and letters. Tours can be (and often are) organized thematically, with users choosing one or several routes. Drawing on Farman’s layered storytelling and/or Springgay and Truman’s emphasis on embodied movement, such a tour would engage visitors intellectually, physically, and emotionally, animating the city with Métis presence past and present.

Moving through the streets of Edinburgh, building walking tours thus encourages visitors to encounter the vibrant and multifaceted story of a highly mobile Métis society whose presence spans multiple centuries. By making these histories digitally “visible” and easily accessible, heritage tours effectively foster a deeper appreciation of the Métis’ historical presences and their enduring legacy. In doing so, these tours challenge staid narratives like those presented within the museum’s exhibition. Ultimately, these tours bring to life a richer tapestry of Métis experiences in Edinburgh, ensuring their stories are seen, heard, and remembered in the places where they took place. Moreover, they can bring life to the ongoing mobility and dynamic presence of Métis people and Métis culture in Edinburgh, bringing that 19th-century story right up to the present day.

In that vein, heading towards the city rather than the university as we did in the introduction, we could cross over George IV Bridge and start walking down Candlemaker Row. Halfway down, we would turn right, onto Merchant Street, and walk to what seems a dead end. To our left, a dark, brooding alleyway—typical of Edinburgh—would lead us down to Cowgate and to the unprepossessing frontage of Sneaky Pete’s at No.73. If you visit in the day-time you will see only a black, shuttered frontage in the base of the late 18th-century building that abuts George IV Bridge, but by night the small grassroots music venue comes alive, hosting musicians from across the world. And, had you visited Sneaky Pete’s on the 7th of November 2022—not so long ago, as of the writing of this article—you could have experienced the confessional storytelling of Sister Ray, aka Ella Coyes, a young Métis singer-songwriter from Edmonton, Alberta (Tickets|Scotland, 2022). Coyes is just one in a long line of Métis to find themselves in the city. Their purpose for visiting has changed over time, of course. Family connections have loosened, diplomatic routes have altered, but Edinburgh remains a draw for Métis creatives, students, scholars, and more, and Edinburgh remains a surprisingly affecting node in wider Métis kinscapes.