The New Peoples is the first major work to explore in a North American context the dimensions and meanings of a process fundamental to the European invasion and colonization of the western hemisphere: the intermingling of European and Native American peoples. This book is not about racial mixture, however, but rather about ethnogenesis -- about how new peoples, new ethnicities, and new nationalities come into being.

The contributors to this volume (with the exception of the late Verne Dusenberry) were participants at the first international Conference on the Metis in North America, hosted by the Newberry Library in Chicago. The purpose of that conference, and the collection that has grown out of it, has been to examine from a regionally comparative and multi-disciplinary vantage point several questions that lie at the heart of metis studies: What are the origins of the metis people? What economic, political, and/or cultural forces prompted the metis to coalesce as a self-conscious ethnic or national group? Why have some individuals and populations of mixed Indian and white ancestry identified themselves as white or Indian rather than as metis? What are the cultural expressions of metis identity? What does it mean to be metis today?