representatives. Ontario Métis Aboriginal Association The Woodland Métis are not affiliated with the Métis Nation of Ontario (MNO) and MNO President Tony Belcourt said in 2005 that he did not know who OMAA members are, but that they are not Métis. In a Supreme Court of Canada appeal (Document C28533, page 17), the federal government states that "membership in OMAA and/or MNO does not establish membership in the specific local aboriginal community for the purposes of establishing a s. 35 [Indigenous and treaty] right. Neither OMAA nor the MNO constitute the sort of discrete, historic and site-specific community contemplated by Van der Peet capable of holding a constitutionally protected aboriginal right". (See: Other groups and individuals) Distribution According to the 2016 Canada Census, a total of 587,545 individuals self-identified as Métis. However, it is doubtful that all such individuals would meet the objective tests laid out in the Supreme Court decisions Powley and Daniels and therefore qualify as "Métis" for the purposes of Canadian law. Data from this section is from the 2016 Canadian Census by Statistics Canada. Métis people in the United States Métis people in the United States are a specific culture and community, who descend from unions between Native American and early European colonist parents – usually Indigenous women who married French, and later Scottish or English, men, who worked as fur trappers and traders during the 17th to 19th centuries in the fur trade era. The women were usually Algonquian, Ojibwe and Cree. They developed as an ethnic and cultural group from the descendants of these unions. In the French colonies, people of mixed Indigenous and French ancestry were referred to by those who spoke French as métis, meaning "mixture." Being bilingual, these people were able to trade European goods, such as muskets, for the furs and hides at a trading post. These Métis were found throughout the Great Lakes area and to the west, in the Rocky Mountains. While the word in this usage originally had no ethnic designation (and was not capitalized in English), it grew to describe a specific ethnicity by the early 19th century. This use (of simply meaning "mixed") excludes mixed-race people born of unions in other settings or more recently than about 1870. Fewer Métis live in the U.S. than in Canada. During the early colonial era, people moved easily back and forth through Canada and the British colonies. While