In the summer of 1857, Alexandre-Antonin Taché, Bishop of Saint-Boniface (present-day Manitoba), reached an agreement with the Sisters of Charity of Montreal, known as the Grey Nuns, to staff new convent boarding schools planned for locales in present-day Saskatchewan. Taché’s initiative to expand the Catholic missionary project to include female missionaries was consistent with many such projects in Canada and the United States. The male leaders of the mission, in this case Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate from France and Quebec, felt strongly that the church's efforts to Christianize and “civilize” the Indigenous peoples should include French-Canadian nuns, because the female missionaries would model proper gender roles and attitudes for their young charges. The Oblates working in the region were particularly critical of the behavior of Native men and what the missionaries perceived as the troubling condition of the Native women and the men's mistreatment of their wives and children. The Grey Nuns would therefore educate and train young Indigenous girls in French Catholic prescriptions regarding female chastity and virtue, domesticity, cleanliness, social reproduction, and religious devotion.

It is the Catholic missionaries’ conception of “civilization” that is the main focus of Timothy Foran's short but instructive study. Defining Métis is an investigation of the French/ French-Canadian Catholic views and perspectives of indigeneity in northwestern Saskatchewan, one that analyzes the corpus of French-language sources created by the missionaries over the second half of the nineteenth century. The author makes clear that his aim is to “interrogate [the] missionaries’ epistemologies” (2) that shaped both the missionaries’ actions and the creation of the documents they left behind—documents that have played a central role in the academic scholarship on the Métis and other Indigenous groups beginning most notably with Marcel Giraud's Le Métis canadien: son role dans l'histoire de l'Ouest (1945). In probing the origins, motives, and worldviews of the Oblates and the Grey Nuns, the author presents a narrowly-focused work that operates on two levels, the intellectual and the experiential, both of which interacted in the missionizing work of the male and female religious. Although Foran is clear that he uses Euro-Canadian sources and focuses primarily on the perspectives of the French/French Canadians, the contribution of his study is to highlight the importance of understanding and analyzing the collections of French-language sources that have had such a significant impact on Métis scholarship.

Defining Métis includes a concise introduction, four longer chapters, a short conclusion, and an appendix with a series of maps showing the geographic evolution of the Catholic missionary network based at Île-à-la-Crosse. In the introduction Foran presents the idea of “missionary-made” categories of indigeneity and outlines his central argument that through their writings, the French/French Canadian Catholic Oblate missionaries in northwestern Saskatchewan contributed to shaping the ways in which non-Natives defined, classified, and ultimately governed the Indigenous inhabitants of the region. After 1870, the Catholic missionaries began to use the term “métis” (as opposed to the earlier term “sauvage”) to identify the Native peoples at Île-à-la-Crosse, and the new Dominion of Canada (formed in 1867) relied on this Catholic knowledge base in its state formation project. For the missionaries, the term sauvage connoted a remoteness from la civilisation, while those inhabitants who appeared more closely linked to la civilization chrétienne by religious observance and language (their knowledge and usage of French) were classified as métis. Thus, the categories of indigeneity created by the missionaries were predicated on notions of perceived progress to civilized behavior and culture that was both French and Catholic.

In the four chapters that follow, Foran examines the role of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste mission site at Île-à-la-Crosse in the evolving mission network (chapter 1), Oblate perceptions of the Hudson's Bay Company (chapter 2), the beginnings of the residential education system under the Oblates and the Grey Nuns (chapter 3), and finally, the Oblates and the categorization of indigeneity (chapter 4). He concludes with la civilization moderne and the missionaries’ view that the expansion of the Canadian state and the large-scale influx of Euro-Canadian settlers ultimately disrupted the French/French Canadian missionary project in Saskatchewan. The ambivalence of the Oblate missionaries toward Euro-Canadian society stemmed on one level from their idealized conception of the social order that should accompany la civilization chrétienne and on a second level from their Catholic ultramontane position vis-à-vis modernizing, industrializing, and democratizing Western states—especially societies that were moving toward a separation of church and state (secularization) and those in which the Catholic Church appeared increasingly under threat because it did not hold sway in the ways that it had prior to the Protestant Reformation and the age of republican revolutions. A central irony in the Oblates’ worldview was the missionaries’ belief that while Indigenous communities could and should choose to adopt aspects of French Catholic culture and religion, their openness to other aspects of Euro-Canadian society not under the purview of the missionaries was suspect, if not dangerous.

Defining Métis presents a complex, nuanced, and thoughtful portrait of the French/French-Canadian missionaries who labored in northwestern Saskatchewan in the second half of the nineteenth century. It ably outlines their worldview and the historical events and the historical contexts (global, national, regional) that shaped the corpus of documents they created and which had a lasting impact on the Canadian state and on academic scholarship. The focus on French-language sources is particularly noteworthy given the predominance of English-language sources and studies in North America. As the author recognizes, his study represents only one side of a much larger, multi-faceted, and multi-layered history. Here it is important to note that Defining Métis should be read alongside the growing literature on the Métis, including all manner of creative, material, oral, and written sources created by the Métis themselves.