The Métis ( ; ) are Indigenous peoples whose historical homelands includes Canada's three Prairie Provinces, as well as parts of British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, Northwest Ontario and the Northern United States. They have a shared history and culture, deriving from specific mixed European (primarily French) and Indigenous ancestry, which became distinct through ethnogenesis by the mid-18th century, during the early years of the North American fur trade. In Canada, the Métis, with a population of 624,220 as of 2021, are one of three major groups of Indigenous peoples that were legally recognized in the Constitution Act of 1982, the other two groups being the First Nations and Inuit. Smaller communities who self-identify as Métis exist in Canada and the United States, such as the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Montana. The United States recognizes the Little Shell Tribe as an Ojibwe Native American tribe. Alberta is the only Canadian province with a recognized Métis Nation land base: the eight Métis Nation Settlements, with a population of approximately 5,000 people on . Background Etymology The word métis itself is originally French for "person of mixed parentage" and derives from the Latin word mixtus, "of mixed" race. Semantic definitions Starting in the 17th century, the French word métis was initially used as a noun by those in the North American fur trade, and by settlers in general, to refer to people of mixed European and North American Indigenous parentage in New France (which at that time extended from southern Quebec through the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River, thence southward to Mississippi and Alabama). At the time, it applied generally to French-speaking people who were of partial Indigenous and partial ethnic French descent. It also came to be used for people of mixed European and Indigenous backgrounds in other French colonies, generally the children of unions between Frenchmen and women from the colonized areas, including Guadeloupe in the Caribbean; Senegal in West Africa; Algeria in North Africa; and the former French Indochina in Southeast Asia. The first documented "métis" child was a girl born about 1628 near Lake Nipissing, given the first name Marguerite, who was the illegitimate daughter of a Nipissing Indian woman and Jean Nicollet de Belleborne (born about 1598, likely in Cherbourg, France). As French Canadians followed the North American fur trade to the west, some of the settlers made unions with different Indigenous women,