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Introduction
Since the 19th century, items of Metis material culture-such as the sash, clothing decorated with floral beadwork, and the Red River cart-have become symbols for denoting Metis-ness, or métissage. These items of material culture have been used since the ethnogenesis of the Metis people and were influenced by various aspects of Indigenous as well as Euro-Canadian material cultures. While starting as useful artefacts in the 19th century, their meaning has shifted towards a primarily symbolic level over the course of time. Sashes, for example, originated in Quebec and were brought to western Canada by fur traders, who used them among others to keep the upper body and vital organs warm, to support the wearer's back, and as carrying straps. Today, they are worn primarily on special occasions and-in western Canada-as markers of métissage. Whereas other aspects of i9th-century Metis material culture, such as for example tepees used on buffalo hunts, have not been adopted as symbols for Metis people.
Thus, this article addresses the question why some aspects of Metis material culture, like sashes, beadwork, and the Red River Cart, have turned into symbols for the Metis while others, like housing, have not. I argue that the struggle for landownership between Metis and Euro-Canadian settlers was deeply intertwined with the emergence and development of Metis material culture. While there is an intensive debate among scholars about when the ethnogenesis of the Metis started, the Metis ethnogenesis became obvious to Euro-Canadians during thepemmican wars, the conflict between different fur trade companies, in the 1810s. In this context, the Battle of Seven Oaks near Fort Garry on the Red River is often described as a turning point of Metis history and the Red River Valley as their homeland.1 Although in Euro-Canadian interpretation, all of the land in the drainage basin of Hudson Bay belonged to the Hudson's Bay Company, Metis people were in a large majority until the 1870s, owned river lots on the banks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, dominated the economy, and "exercised more or less unconstrained political authority over most of their lands."2 Items of material culture served as a means to demonstrate these claims to landownership towards newly-arrived Euro-Canadian settlers.
In order to analyse how Metis people have used artefacts to...