The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) has been called "la plaque tournante" (the turntable) of the French empire in North America. Until that point, France had been aggressive and expanding; afterward, she was on the defensive, determined to prevent further dismemberment of her North American empire. Nowhere was this change more evident than along the Atlantic coast, where French peninsular Acadia was transformed into English Nova Scotia, while Ile Royale (Cape Breton) and Ile St.-Jean (Prince Edward Island), as well as adjacent mainland areas, such as the Gaspé and the St. John River, remained in the hands of the French. These regions were mostly inhabited by the Micmac, an Algonkian-speaking hunting and gathering people, with their close relatives the Malecite (including the Passamaquoddy, who spoke a variety of the same language), and later some Abenaki, living along the St. John River. To the south were Abenaki. In contact with Europeans for more than two centuries, and allies of the French for half that time, these peoples were usually the ones indicated by the expression "French and Indians" of colonial war fame. The Treaty of Utrecht profoundly modified their position, particularly that of the Micmac in Nova Scotia (with whom this paper is principally concerned). As the rival colonial powers squared off against each other in preparation for what would become the final round of imperial hostilities in the Northeast, Micmac and Malecite found that their position to play off one against the other had been greatly strengthened.

The mixing of the races, as the cliche would have it, began in North America as soon as Europeans and Amerindians met; it was another manifestation of a universal phenomenon that was re-experienced under the particular conditions of the New World. But the universality of the event in its biological sense was not matched by a corresponding generality in its social and political aspects. In this regard, racial intermixing was as individual as the societies experiencing it. In the New World, such powers as Portugal and Spain accepted it as an inevitable consequence of colonization and sought to deal with it by integration and assimilation. France also sought to assimilate Amerindians, but added her own dimension by trying to use racial intermixing as an instrument of empire. In so doing, she unwittingly helped to prepare the way for a phenomenon which she not only did not want, but would have disapproved of thoroughly: that is, the development, among the Metis of the Canadian Northwest, of the sense of a separate identity, the spirit of the "New Nation." Although in Canada today, the Metis are identified with the West, specifically with the three prairie provinces (Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta), it is doubtful that there was any more mixing of the races, in a biological sense, in those regions than in the East or on the West Coast. In fact, the reverse may well be true, at least as far as the East is concerned; Jacques Rousseau, eminent Quebec biologist, claimed in 1970 that 40% of French-Canadians could find at least one Amerindian in their family trees. What did not occur on either coast or in the St. Lawrence Valley was the emergence of a clearly defined sense of separate identity, of a "New Nation." In comparing the Metis of the Northwest with those of the Northwest (principally Red River, but also Hudson Bay and the Great Lakes), the question immediately presents itself: why did a "New Nation" arise in the latter region but not in the former? And why do we never hear of the Metis on the West Coast? For that matter, why do we practically never hear of Metis in the Northeast?