This is the definitive history of the Fort McKay Métis Nation. It traces the evolution of the community from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, paying special attention to genealogy, land-use, land-tenure, and responses to mass oil sands development.

The Fort McKay Métis Nation carefully considers the community’s unique historical context, drawing on a broad range of sources including archival research, oral histories, grey literature, and community literature. It examines the complex interrelations between the Fort McKay Metis Nation and their neighbors, the Fort McKay First Nation, and their ways they have connected with each other.

Completed in partnership with the community, The Fort McKay Métis Nation provides perspectives which have never before been shared. It is an important, unique history of a community in the heart of the oil sands.

Peter Fortna is a historian based out of Cochrane, Alberta. He has worked with a number of Indigenous communities in western Canada in a variety of capacities authoring reports for regulatory hearings and legal proceedings. He assisted in the authorship of Remembering Our Relations: Dënesųłıné Oral Histories of Wood Buffalo National Park

Chapter 1. Early History of the Fort McKay Métis Nation: Origins to 1899