Darryl Leroux takes on the claims of French descendants in Canada and the United States to being "Métis" in this work.

Given the nature of this work and the debate overall - I want to assert before continuing that I do not think there are separate, identifiable Indigenous Métis communities in the Province of Québec - thus, I do agree with Leroux that the two organizations he analyzed in his work are not legitimately Indigenous organizations. I agree wholeheartedly that Métis are not merely "mixed".

However, I found this work to be of poor academic quality overall. Leroux did not conduct any interviews himself, rather analyzed genealogy forums online, court transcripts, and interviews conducted by other researchers. The lack of primary source material thus is detrimental to the overall work. While the posts he chose to cite, and the interview clips he chose to quote are certainly interesting and speak to his thesis, I would expect better data collection practices from an academic.

Secondly, when discussing the historiography of French-Canadians which he asserts led to the phenomenon of people in Québec identifying as Métis, he cites historian Gilles Havard while dismissing current historiographic trends, however, Havard emphasizes in his own work the importance of French-Indigenous interactions in the creation of the French-Canadian people. Havard does, emphatically, also indicate that the Métis of the Northwest are in his view, the authentic Métis, but this is not how Leroux depicts Havard's writing. The other historians he cites are anglophones, with Havard seeming the only francophone he chose to mention directly in the text. Leroux could have done better work on understanding the intricacies of this historiography, cited more historians, etc. if he chose to include this section in his work at all (as indeed, Leroux is a trained sociologist, and not a historian).

Additionally, there is a confusing tendency in the work to frequently cite the low amount of ancestors in a given subject's heritage, often noting they are 1% or less of their total heritage, and yet simultaneously, Leroux cites authors who discuss how blood quantum is irrelevant. Indeed, there is an emphasis on kinship, and the importance of community ties in the works he cites - which would be the natural critique towards these organizations, though Leroux continues to return to the point of blood quantum in his critiques, creating a paradox in his work.

Overall, while Leroux is able to show from what he collected that there are definitely people in Québec who weaponize a "Métis" identity, and some of whom have roots in white supremacy movements; in addition to some genealogy debates wherein people attempt to create a more "interesting" ancestry for themselves, the data in and of itself does not speak to the whole movement, as it is far too narrow an analysis to conclude anything larger than the specific subjects he studied, nor does it explain the "why" of it all.

A material analysis to understand the tensions between the hunters in the region that led to anti-First Nations sentiment, and a psychological study on the causes of some genealogists to look for "interesting ancestry" (a larger phenomenon) would be extremely interesting, as these are the questions I was asking myself at the end of the work.

In the end, Leroux's work offers up an interesting question and subject, but the poor academic quality ensures that I would not recommend it to someone interested in the subject. Rather, I would point them to other works, including Chris Andersen's "Métis". ( )