An unrequited love?

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Metis noted as not being attracted to white people

An interesting observation of the Metis people can be found in Alfred O. Legge’s “Sunny Manitoba”—an 1893 overview of the newly established province. 

Legge notes that the rapid settlement of Manitoba before, and subsequent to the establishment of the province within Canada, had much to do with the development and influence of the Metis people. Legge wrote:  “The effect of drawing north and west many of the half-breed pioneers of civilization, who formerly fished in its rivers, and hunted the buffalo and the moose on its wide prairies. They are sometimes called Metis, from the Spanish word mestizo, indicating Indian-mixed blood. Generally of French and Indian parentage ; the mixture of Scotch blood is sometimes indicated by familiar names”.
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In describing how the Metis came to be, Legge didn’t mince words:  “The French betrayed no such repugnance to intercourse [sex] with the native Indians—or even to marriage with the Indian women—as the average Briton has done. They seem especially to have cultivated the friendship of the Crees, whose women were superior to those of other tribes, alike in mental and moral qualities. Not a few of these however—or, in Canadian phrase, "quite a few"—have married their daughters to gentlemen in good business and even official positions”. 

However, Legge noted that despite being created by white men marrying (or procreating with) Indian women, Metis people did not generally return the attraction:  “But whilst the Indian blood of the Metis is so diluted as frequently to leave little trace, either in complexion, speech or character, intercourse with the whites is comparatively rare. The law of reversion to type, with which Mr. Darwin has familiarized us, is naturally operative here, producing an approximation towards the Indian type of their progenitors. The affiliation of races is thus checked, and in a few generations the half-breeds of Manitoba and the North-West are likely to become wholly merged in the native races, to the great advantage of the latter. The semi-nomadic life of the past has already ceased to characterize them. Industrious, intelligent, and many of them fairly well educated, a very large majority live upon their Reserves, untrampelled by tribal rights which deprive the Indian of all security in his property.”

adapted from "Sunny Manitoba: Its people and industries" by Alfred O. Legge (1896)