Maegan Ellis

Peter Fortna’s The Fort McKay Métis Nation: A Community History presents a compelling and community-centered account of one of northern Alberta’s long-standing yet often overlooked Métis communities. The book offers a significant contribution to both Indigenous history and the growing field of community-engaged scholarship. Beyond a regional study, Fortna’s work reflects how communities assert identity, maintain continuity, and navigate evolving relationships with the land, the state, and industry.
A defining strength of Fortna’s monograph is its rootedness in the community’s own voice and experience, grounded in respectful collaboration. Rather than writing about the Fort McKay Métis Nation (FMMN), he worked with them. Having the full support of the community, Fortna’s work was reviewed and partially funded by the FMMN itself. As Fortna highlights in his introduction, earlier iterations of this work drew on oral histories and interviews, family genealogies, land-use documents and reports, newspaper articles, and correspondence between community members and various organizational bodies to marshal historical evidence that Fort McKay’s Métis population holds section 35 rights under the Constitution. This research was initially undertaken to support Fort McKay’s legal claim to consultation rights and formed part of a larger submission that resulted in the Alberta government recognizing the FMMN’s “credible assertion” as rights-holders under section 35 in 2020. Fortna’s monograph expands on that work, turning evidence assembled for legal purposes into a deeper historical account of Métis identity, continuity, and community authority.
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