The colonialism of Canada’s Métis health population dynamics: caught between bad data and no data at all

In the last two decades, Canada’s brand of colonial recognition politics has fueled several social and cultural changes that have, in turn, produced startling growths in the “Métis population” in Canada. Demographers and policy makers alike have expressed dubiousness about the extent to which “non-demographic factors” (that is, factors other than fertility and mortality) are fueling this growth, a dubiousness expressed in the growing use of “ethnic mobility” to explain population growth. In this article I explore the historical contexts within which the idea of a single Métis population took hold as a statistical technology, the kinds of social and cultural juxtaposition that making use of a single population masks, and the impact single population estimates have on the ability of Métis nation policy actors to fashion evidence-based policy relevant to the concerns of the Métis nation. While the dynamics and the data perused in this article are specific to Canada, they possess broader resonances with other nation-states grappling with their colonial histories and longstanding Indigenous peoples as these dynamics relate to official data dynamics.