“Our heritage, our identity”

Do organizations, and the people who belong to them, need symbols to project a shared sense of belonging to those outside their group? If so, who selects such symbols and how? And, is some sense of group consciousness necessary in order for organizations to persist? These questions are especially germane to new organizations or groups whose members have a part indigenous or aboriginal ancestry but who have lost much of their aboriginal culture through assimilation. This paper begins and ends with these concerns. In between, I discuss the case study which led me to raise these questions: the recent formation of the Labrador Metis Association (LMA).

Labrador is the mainland portion of Canada's tenth and most recent province, Newfoundland and Labrador. The Labrador Metis Association was formed in 1985. Given that the LMA is a relatively new organization, my aim is largely descriptive, providing background to the organization and some idea of the challenges I believe it now faces. I conclude with some examples of how other organizations whose members are largely assimilated have solved the kinds of problems facing Labrador Metis: those of group consciousness and of finding appropriate symbols to communicate group‐ness.

Notes

This paper draws on archival and field research in Labrador stretching back to 1971. An earlier version of the paper was presented on 19 May 1995 as a seminar (entitled “Recent Developments in Labrador Ethnopolitics") for social anthropologists at Tromsø University. I thank them and my wife, Karen Olsson, for comments on the paper.