The Métis flag was already old when Canada was invented. A white infinity symbol on a blue (or red) field, it was recorded on the northern plains in 1815, half a century before Confederation and 150 years before the Maple Leaf. It belongs to the Métis, the post-contact Indigenous nation born of the fur trade, descendants of French and Scottish traders and Cree, Ojibwe, and other First Nations women, who by the early nineteenth century had their own language, economy, and sense of themselves as a new people. The figure eight on the flag makes the claim compactly: two peoples joined into one that does not end.
A flag from the fur war
The flag's first appearances sit inside a corporate war. By the 1810s the Montreal-based North West Company and the London-chartered Hudson's Bay Company were fighting for the fur trade of Rupert's Land, and the Métis of the Red River and Qu'Appelle country, many of them NWC employees and provisioners, were being squeezed by the new Selkirk Settlement and HBC attempts to ban the export of pemmican, the buffalo-meat staple the Métis economy ran on.
In 1815 an HBC trader named James Sutherland recorded seeing a red flag bearing a horizontal figure eight at Fort John in the Qu'Appelle valley, flown by Métis under Cuthbert Grant. It is the earliest documented sighting. The next year the flag went into battle. On 19 June 1816, at Seven Oaks near present-day Winnipeg, Grant's mounted Métis met HBC governor Robert Semple and about two dozen men; in a fight lasting minutes, Semple and twenty of his party were killed against one Métis death. Seven Oaks was a violent episode in a commercial feud, and it was also the moment a Métis national identity announced itself under its own flag. A song composed immediately afterward by Pierre Falcon, "La Chanson de la Grenouillère," is often called the first Métis national anthem.
One contemporary account describes the flag as "said to be" a gift from the North West Company, a story repeated for two centuries. Jean Teillet, the Métis lawyer and historian (and great-grandniece of Louis Riel), calls it an urban myth in her history "The North-West Is Our Mother": company records document other gifts to the Métis in detail and never mention a flag, and she concludes the Métis made it themselves from trade cloth. The distinction matters. A flag issued by a fur company is livery; a flag a people sewed for itself is a declaration.
Reading the figure eight
Nobody wrote down what the infinity symbol meant in 1815, so its meanings have accumulated. The standard modern reading is double: the sideways eight is two circles joined, the coming together of European and First Nations peoples into a new nation, and it is the mathematical sign for the unending, the faith that Métis culture will exist forever.
Other suggested sources are less official and just as plausible. The figure eight is the floor pattern of Métis jigging and of the Red River cart wheels crossing; some trace it to a gesture in Plains Indigenous sign language; some see a pair of conjoined worlds. The color split has its own contested folklore. Tradition assigns blue to Métis associated with the North West Company (whose rival, the HBC, used a red ensign) and red to HBC-affiliated Métis; other accounts link blue to francophone and red to anglophone communities, or red to the hunt and blue to war. Teillet and others suspect the simplest answer: flags got made from the wool broadcloth that was actually in the trade stores, and blue and red were what there was.
The design itself is as minimal as heraldry gets, one white curve on a solid field, which is part of why a two-century-old flag looks contemporary on a hoodie.
After Seven Oaks: a flag in and out of history
The infinity flag did not fly at the two most famous moments of Métis resistance. Louis Riel's provisional government at Red River in 1869-70 used a flag of fleur-de-lis and shamrock, and at Batoche in 1885 the Métis fought under religious banners rather than the infinity flag. After the defeat of 1885 and the dispersal and dispossession that followed, Métis political life went quiet for decades, and the old flag with it.
Its return came with the Métis political revival of the twentieth century, through prairie organizations of the 1930s and the Métis National Council, formed in 1983 to represent the Métis Nation as Canada's constitution was being patriated; section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 names the Métis as one of Canada's three Aboriginal peoples. The blue infinity flag became the MNC's official flag, and in 2013 the council registered an official mark to protect it as the symbol of the Métis Nation. The red version kept its own life, particularly in Alberta, where the Métis Nation of Alberta (now the Otipemisiwak Métis Government) has flown it.
The flag today
The infinity flag is now the everyday emblem of a nation of several hundred thousand people across the Métis homeland: Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and parts of Ontario, British Columbia, and the Northwest Territories. It flies at the annual Back to Batoche gathering on the site of the 1885 battle, in beadwork and sashes at festivals, and on an increasing number of official flagpoles. Every 16 November, Louis Riel Day, the anniversary of Riel's hanging for treason in 1885, city halls and provincial legislatures across western Canada raise it; Manitoba, which Riel brought into Confederation, marks a separate Louis Riel Day holiday in February.
Two hundred and ten years after a trader jotted down a strange figure-eight flag in the Qu'Appelle valley, the Métis flag has outlasted both fur companies, the colony they fought over, and most of the flags that have flown above it.
References
[1] Wikipedia, "Métis flag." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis_flag
[2] Jean Teillet, The North-West Is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel's People, the Métis Nation (HarperCollins, 2019).
[3] Indigenous Corporate Training Inc., "The Métis Flag." https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/the-metis-flag
[4] Métis Nation of Alberta / Rupertsland Institute, "Métis Flag" culture resources. https://albertametis.com/app/uploads/2021/05/RLI-Culture-Cards-Fronts-2020.pdf
[5] Flags of the World (FOTW), "Métis Nation (Canada and U.S.)." https://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/xa-metis.html
[6] Constitution Act, 1982, section 35 (recognition of the Métis as an Aboriginal people of Canada).