including the Cree. Descendants of English or Scottish and Natives were in some cases historically called "half-breeds" or "country born". They sometimes adopted a more agrarian culture of subsistence farming and tended to be reared in Protestant denominations. While the definitions and usage of the terms "Métis", "Metis" and "metis" (lowercase) have at times been controversial and contentious, there are legal definitions. Capital 'M' Métis refers to a particular sociocultural heritage and an ethnic identification. It is more than a racial classification and refers specifically to the Métis Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States. Numerous spellings of Métis have been used interchangeably, including métif, michif; currently the most agreed-upon spelling is Métis; however, some prefer to use Metis as inclusive of persons of both English and French descent. The spelling métis with a lowercase m functions as an adjective. The definition of the word has at times been disputed, as some people have attempted to use lower-case métis in the archaic sense of having a single, distant Indigenous ancestor or being in some other way "mixed". However, the majority of Indigenous groups and legal scholars define Métis as the people who live on the Métis homeland. "Most curators and scholars argue that the development of the Métis nation occurred at the Red River Settlement and that Métis families dispersed from there to other regions." Canadian Geographic's Indigenous Peoples Altas of Canada identifies Métis people as one of three Canadian Indigenous peoples in the following terms:Within non-Indigenous society, there are two competing ideas of what being Métis means. The first, when spelled with a lowercase "m" (métis), means individuals or people having mixed-race parents and ancestries, e.g., North American Indigenous and European/Euro-Canadian/Euro-American. It is a racial categorization. This is the oldest meaning of métis and is based on the French verb métisser [sic], to mix races or ethnicities. The related noun for the act of race-mixing is métissage. The second meaning of being Métis, and the one that is embraced by the Métis Nation, relates to a self-defining people with a distinct history in a specific region (Western Canada's prairies) with some spillover into British Columbia, Ontario, North Dakota, Montana and Northwest Territories. In this case, the term Métis is spelled with an uppercase "M" and often, but does not always, contain an accent aigu (é). The Métis of Canada and the Métis of the United States adopted parts