About the Community

The McMurray Métis is a contemporary and historic Métis community that can trace its cultural and genealogical origin to northeastern Alberta since before Effective European Control (Clark et al. 2015). McMurray Métis are organized through the self-governing Métis Local 1935, founded in 1987 under the umbrella of the Métis Nation of Alberta Association. Since at least the 1850s, community members have developed a distinctive Métis lifestyle in Fort McMurray and its surroundings. This includes participation in colonial economies, as well as continuously maintaining traditional land-use practices, including fur trapping, harvesting of food and medicine plants, hunting, and falling timber.

Fort McMurray itself has been strongly shaped by the Métis community; however, rapid industrialization and migration have transformed both the land and culture of northeastern Alberta in recent decades. As McMurray Métis continue to adapt to ecological and cultural changes, it is important to retain traditional ways of life in their territory.

The trapline is an essential component of the McMurray Métis culture, representing a community and family place where Métis Aboriginal rights can be exercised. Prior to the 1970s, when fur prices were higher and oil development more limited, trapping was a staple economic activity for community members. In contemporary times, the overall economic importance of trapping has diminished, but it remains an important source of income for many McMurray Métis people. Beyond this, the cultural significance of the trapline is as critical as ever before. It is an essential space for transmission of intergenerational knowledge, socialization of youth, identity formation, and the continuation of family and community bonds. The trapline remains a hub for McMurray Métis harvesting practices and connection to the land.

One factor contributing to the cultural importance of traplines is their ancestral nature, as it is common for trapping privileges to be passed down in a family from generation to generation within the McMurray Métis community. Many contemporary traplines regulated by the Government of Alberta, Registered Fur Management Areas (RFMAs), can be traced back to Métis traplines that existed before Effective European Control, and have been continuously trapped by McMurray Métis families since that time.

In some cases, Alberta’s Registered Fur Management System represents a threat to this historical continuity. Traplines can be lost or coerced from Métis control, part of a broader trend of Aboriginal land dispossession typical of settler colonialism.