When a nation dies and never ascends from the ashes of its own destruction, one circumstance must always be present. That nation forgot where it came from. It lost sight of its roots. The struggle for identity and the fervid quest for nationhood disappeared into the mists of time. The nation gave up on the quest. Outsiders came in, and this nation denied its heritage. Vision and hope faded; customs became suppressed through assimilation and doubt. Those people, who's forefathers and mothers would hold nothing to be impossible in their vision of a nation, joined in the hopelessness and despair. They forgot where they came from. They lost sight of their heritage. And when men forget what is at the heart of their nation, they lose their identity and their past, and become one with a people foreign to them and their ways, and disappear.
Yet I can see in the Métis of today the faces of the great Riel and Dumont, and the faces of those who struggled at Batoche, and I realize that our nation yet lives. I have seen the faces of the Métis people from the prairies to the lakes. They are the faces of a nation still strong, a reflection of the past, yet with the strength of the present. We can go back to the Red River and to the fur trading routes of the north, and we can see the same faces of the men, women and children who live today, who, like their ancestors, share in the making of the Métis nation. Our forefathers passed on a legacy of backbreaking toil and the turmoil of revolution. Their faces gazed from the backs of the Red River carts, from crude huts on the traplines, from the trenches at Duck Lake. They saw change, and they saw years of despair; until now, when the Métis nation is again to take it's rightful place in this country.
I see their faces throughout the whole story of the Métis people. We have been given our heritage, this land that we honour, through the dreams and visions and struggles of our forefathers and mothers. The cost has been high, but the price that they paid has been worthy of them. To forge our nation took men and women who were willing to become a new people. And they did that. And it is up to us to tell our children and they, their children, to the seventh generation, that we remember our identity, and from this identity we will shape our nation.
The Métis nation must not be forgotten and allowed to die. We owe it to those who passed this way before us, who gave us our grand heritage, who carved our nation with their hands and their hearts, that we will carry on with the struggle, and that we will write the history of a new nation, strong in our belief in the Creator, a love of our land, and a faith in our people.
John Roberts, adapted from Carl Sandburg
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