The controversial rise of the eastern Metis: 'Where were these people all this time?'

Mary Lou Parker, 82, Grand Chief of the Eastern Woodland Metis Nation NS, is seen at home in Hebron, N.S. on Saturday, May 12, 2018. Some people with mixed Indigenous ancestry in Quebec and the Maritimes, identifying as Metis, are claiming aboriginal identity, and want to assert their treaty rights. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan)

HALIFAX -- It was 1948 when her father told her. He was laying on the chesterfield in the living room of their Yarmouth, N.S., home, his body ravaged by tuberculosis.

"He had consumption and he knew he only had a few months to live," recalls Mary Lou Parker. "He told me we had Indian blood in us, which made us Metis."

The 12-year-old felt proud of her Indigenous roots. But she was warned never to reveal her "half-breed" heritage, as it was then called, for fear of being shunned.

So she kept it secret until years later, in a quest to explore her identity and gain recognition, she formed the Eastern Woodland Metis Nation Nova Scotia, using a term -- Metis -- usually associated with Western Canada. Her group has grown exponentially, and now has 30,000 members.

Census data show the number of people who call themselves Metis soared nearly 150 per cent in Quebec and 125 per cent in Nova Scotia from 2006 to 2016, according to Statistics Canada. Dozens of new Metis organizations cropped up over the same period.

But the sudden proliferation of self-reported Metis in Eastern Canada has emerged as a profoundly divisive debate.

Many use identity cards that look much like Indian Status cards. Others have tried to claim Indigenous rights through the courts, fuelling a perception that the aboriginal newcomers are so-called rights grabbers.

"It's one thing to say 'I'm First Nation, this is part of my culture and I want to learn more about it,"' says Cheryl Maloney, a Mi'kmaw activist and Cape Breton University political science professor.

"But that's not what they're saying. They're trying to be viewed as Metis under the Constitution, and to have rights and benefits."

Critics reject outright that there is a distinct Metis identity in the Maritimes and Quebec. They say people of mixed blood in the region either integrated into Indigenous communities or assimilated with European newcomers, unlike the distinct Metis People of Louis Riel in Western Canada.

"When you're looking at the Maritimes and Quebec, the children of intermarriage were accepted by either party, in our case the Mi'kmaq or the Acadian," Mi'kmaw elder and historian Daniel Paul says.

"There was no such thing as a Metis community here in this region."

For those who consider themselves eastern Metis, the rejection of their identity is exclusionary and mean-spirited -- a continuation of their oppressed status.

They argue that a distinct mixed-heritage people existed in the region with a shared history and culture. But these mixed-race people were compelled to identify as white for fear of discrimination.

"We were forced to assimilate with white people, our identities stolen," says Parker, 82, the grand chief of the Eastern Woodland Metis. "Now we're reclaiming our native heritage."

Many Mi'kmaq people say Indigenous Peoples suffered enormously from efforts to assimilate them. This includes the Residential School system -- what one federal bureaucrat called the "final solution to the Indian Problem."

"Throughout history we resisted colonization and spoke out about the horrors against Indigenous Peoples," says Jarvis Googoo, a non-practising lawyer in Halifax and a Mi'kmaw from We'koqma'q First Nation.

"Where were these Metis people all this time?"

Yet hiding Indigenous heritage was a matter of survival, says Karole Dumont, chief of the Council of the First Metis People of Canada.

"If you could pass off as white you did," she says. "Our grandparents and great-grandparents did whatever they had to do to ensure that none of their kids ended up in residential schools."

The eastern Metis debate was thrust into the spotlight earlier this year when the East Coast Music Association pulled a Nova Scotia nominee from consideration for an Indigenous artist award.

At issue was the heritage of a Cape Breton guitarist who identifies as Acadian and Metis. His name was withdrawn from the Indigenous artist of the year category after questions surfaced about his background.

Dumont says revoking the nomination was "reckless and unfair."

"The Metis people are the only people who have to lay out their pedigree and prove their identity in Canada."

But Googoo says jobs, education and awards programs geared towards Indigenous Peoples are an important piece of reconciliation. He says having newly identified Metis flood those programs is a step backwards.

"It's worsening the problem because these organizations think they're doing their part for reconciliation."

Darryl Leroux, an associate professor at Saint Mary's University in Halifax and a critic of the rise of the eastern Metis, notes the spikes in self-identified Metis populations followed court decisions recognizing treaty rights.

While fewer than a thousand Nova Scotians identified as Metis in the 1996 census, that number more than tripled to 3,135 after the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed Mi'kmaq treaty rights in the 1999 Marshall decision, according to Statistics Canada.

The population swelled again after the 2003 Powley decision, when the Supreme Court affirmed Metis have an Aboriginal right to hunt for food.

By the 2006 census, self-identified Metis in Nova Scotia had once again more than doubled, reaching 23,315 by 2016. The increase mirrors a similar trend in New Brunswick and Quebec.

"It cannot be a coincidence that it shifts following court decisions," says Leroux, who cites evidence that some of the people now identifying as Metis were initially opposed to Indigenous treaty rights and even had ties to white supremacist groups.

Jean Teillet, lead counsel in the landmark Powley case and the great-grandniece of Louis Riel, successfully argued that a rights-bearing Metis community must prove more than a genealogical connection to an Indigenous ancestor.

"This is not just about individuals who have what I call an ever-so-great Indian grandmama," she says.

"Sometimes these people in Eastern Canada rest their entire claim on a 400-year-old connection to one First Nations woman," she says. "There is nothing more there."

Around 20 court cases have been launched by self-reported Metis in the region claiming Aboriginal rights. Each of them has failed, Teillet says.

"I think they're concocting a story out of thin air."