Did French Settlers Really Mix with Native Americans? The DNA Says Less Than the Family Stories

Hero image: AI generated illustration of colonial Montreal around 1700, with the first Notre-Dame church and its crowded churchyard, French colonists on the riverbank and Indigenous traders near their canoes. Buildings and clothing are approximations, and some details, such as the patterned blankets, follow other traditions rather than the plain striped wool trade cloth of the period. It is not a reconstruction of the real cemetery and does not portray any real person.

In many French Canadian families, sooner or later, someone mentions the grandmother. She was Algonquin, or Huron, or Mi'kmaq. Nobody quite remembers her name, but everybody remembers the story. In Louisiana the ancestor is sometimes Choctaw or Houma; in New England, among the descendants of Quebec mill workers, the story often comes with a high cheekbone pointed out at a family wedding.

The idea has deep roots. New France is often remembered as the colony that allied with Indigenous nations rather than simply pushing them aside. French traders lived in Indigenous villages, learned their languages and sometimes married into their families. From there it is a short step to a popular belief: that the French Canadian people itself was born mixed.

In October 2026, a team led by biological anthropologist Diane Martin-Moya published in PNAS a genome-wide ancient DNA study of colonists from the St Lawrence valley. Their sample came from the old Notre-Dame parish cemetery, in the heart of what is now Old Montreal. The title says a lot: "Ancient DNA challenges to admixture narratives."

We read the study, put its result in context with modern Quebec genetics, and ran our own Global25 test on French Canadian, Acadian and Cajun averages. The short answer is that the genomes agree with each other remarkably well. The longer answer is more interesting, because it explains why a family story can be true and still invisible to every DNA test you will ever take.

The cemetery under Old Montreal

Montreal began in 1642 as Ville-Marie, a small missionary settlement on an island in the St Lawrence. The parish cemetery next to the old Notre-Dame church received Catholic burials from 1683 until 1796. Then the city grew over it. The construction of an aqueduct, fortification walls and later urban development cut through the graves.

The site was excavated over several years, which Martin-Moya describes as rare for Quebec archaeology. Her team sequenced DNA from 45 individuals and compared them with a reference panel of ancient and modern genomes: about 900 from Europe, 751 from West Africa and 673 from Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The choice of panels was deliberate. Three groups lived in colonial Montreal: French settlers, Indigenous people, and enslaved or free people of African descent.

The result was unambiguous. In Martin-Moya's words, "all 45 individuals we analyzed had French European ancestry." None showed any sign of recent Indigenous or African admixture. According to the Canadian Press report, there was one exception to the French ancestry, and even that one was European: a person of apparently Italian origin.

The kinship analysis produced a second, quieter finding. Several genetic lineages ran across multiple generations, but relatives were not buried together. Members of a single family turned up in different parts of the cemetery and in different burial phases. Unions between close relatives were rare. And the graves overlapped and cut into each other, which the authors link to rapid population growth in the young colony.

When skulls and genes disagree

This study did not appear out of nowhere. Earlier research on the same collections had come to very different conclusions. Some specialists saw only European remains. Others identified Indigenous, African or mixed individuals from the shape of their bones.

Martin-Moya herself, with Isabelle Ribot, published one of those skeletal studies in 2024. They measured the temporal bone, the part of the skull around the ear, in 214 individuals from colonial cemeteries of the St Lawrence valley dated between 1683 and 1878. Among the individuals the statistics could classify, 82% looked European, 7% Indigenous, 6% intermediate between African and Indigenous, and 5% African. The first Catholic cemetery of Notre-Dame in Montreal was one of the sites in that study.

The DNA from Notre-Dame does not confirm that picture. None of the 45 genomes carries the Indigenous or African ancestry that bone shape had suggested might be present in this burial population. It is to the authors' credit that they published a result that does not confirm part of their own earlier interpretation. It is also a useful lesson for anyone who has been told that a cheekbone, a shovel-shaped incisor or a skull measurement proves Native ancestry. Morphology varies a lot within every population. Genomes are a much sharper tool.

Who was not in the cemetery

The obvious objection is that 45 people are a tiny fraction of the thousands buried at Notre-Dame. The authors raise it themselves, and they go further: the cemetery was not a random sample of colonial Montreal, and they explain why.

• The rich are missing. Clergy and wealthy residents were buried inside the church. Their remains were more often exhumed and moved, for example when hygiene problems arose. The skeletons left outside, and later disturbed by construction, most likely belonged to ordinary and poorer colonists.
• Indigenous people mostly had their own burial places. Archival records show that some Indigenous people were buried in Montreal's Catholic cemeteries from the seventeenth century. But land dispossession and the relocation of missions separated Indigenous communities from the colonial town, and their dead were most likely buried within those communities.
• Enslaved people were buried elsewhere. Enslaved Indigenous and African people were often buried on their enslavers' property or in cemeteries for the poor.

So the absence of admixture in this cemetery is partly a statement about who was buried where. The authors read it as a sign of something real: that Indigenous and African-descended people were pushed to the margins of colonial urban Montreal, a picture that sits uneasily next to the popular image of a colony built on intermarriage.

What the parish registers already knew

Historians of New France will not be shocked. Mixed marriages did happen, and some of them are famous among genealogists. On 16 April 1657, at Trois-Rivieres, the French settler Pierre Couc dit Lafleur married Marie Miteouamigoukoue, an Algonquin woman. Their children appear in the censuses of the 1660s and 1680s, and their descendants spread from Quebec to the Great Lakes and New England.

The colonial authorities even encouraged such marriages for a time, as part of a policy that aimed to turn Indigenous allies into French Catholic subjects. But in the parish registers of the St Lawrence valley, French and Indigenous marriages remained rare. Most unions between French men and Indigenous women happened far from Quebec and Montreal, in the fur trade country of the Great Lakes and the West. Many of their descendants did not become French Canadians of the valley at all. They became the Metis.

That is the key to the paradox. A family can descend from a real, documented Indigenous ancestor born in the 1600s, and the ancestry that reaches them today is still extremely small. Because almost every French Canadian descends from the same pool of about 8,500 founders, a handful of mixed marriages in the first generations ends up in the family trees of a very large number of people, but at a tiny dose in each of them. The numbers are striking. In the genealogies studied by Claudia Moreau, Damian Labuda and colleagues, only 39 of 8,424 founders were documented as Native American. Yet an earlier study by Helene Vezina and colleagues estimated that between 53 and 78% of Quebecers have at least one Native American ancestor somewhere in their family tree.

What modern Quebec genomes say

The modern data point in the same direction. In February 2026, Peyton McClelland, Guillaume Lettre and colleagues published in Nature Communications a genetic reference for the CARTaGENE cohort, which includes genotype data for more than 29,000 Quebecers. Among 500 randomly selected participants with four Canadian-born grandparents, the average ancestry from the Americas was about 0.4%. No one carried more than 5%.

The authors add an important caveat: CARTaGENE recruited in cities and excluded people living on reserves, so people with substantial Indigenous ancestry are likely undersampled. The figure describes the French Canadian majority, not every family in Quebec. Earlier genetic and genealogical studies, summarised by Luke Anderson-Trocme and colleagues in their large 2023 study of Quebec genes and genealogies, likewise put average Indigenous ancestry in Quebec-born French Canadians below 1%, and noted that folk histories of large Indigenous ancestry are not supported by the data.

Not the same everywhere

A provincial average hides real differences between regions, and this is where the modern data become more interesting. In 2013, Moreau and colleagues genotyped 205 people from ten regional and ethnocultural groups of Quebec, all with deep genealogies, and estimated their Native American ancestry with several methods.

The highest averages are found in the east. Francophone Gaspesians come out at 2.50% with HAPMIX and 2.81% with ADMIXTURE, and the North Shore at 2.05% and 2.42%. That is roughly twice the level of Montreal (1.09%), Quebec City (0.96%) or Abitibi (0.84%). The spread between individuals is also widest in Gaspesie: a standard deviation of 2.57 points around a mean of 2.50% means that some people there carry several times the average. The dating of the admixture, about 11 to 14 generations ago, points to unions in the colonial period itself, which fits a history of contact on the Gaspe coast and the North Shore, where French, Acadian, Mi'kmaq and Innu communities lived close to each other.

Two caveats keep this in proportion. First, we found no published regional average above 5%; the highest group means are between 2 and 3%, and each group counts only about twenty people. Second, the estimates depend strongly on the method. For the same 205 people, genealogy alone gives 0.35%, HAPMIX 1.3% and ADMIXTURE 2.1%, while CARTaGENE, with a different method and a much larger urban sample, finds about 0.4%. All of these numbers say the same thing in different ways: Native ancestry in French Canadians is real, small, unevenly spread, and higher in the east.

Our Global25 test

We wanted to know two things. First, can public Global25 coordinates reproduce this low level? Second, and more important, how low can Global25 actually go before the signal drowns in noise?

The setup

We modelled each target as a mixture of European sources, an Indigenous American source and a West African source (Yoruba), using non-negative least squares with a sum to one constraint. We used two European source sets. Model A is simple: an average of 64 French people and an English average. Model B splits France into six regional averages: three from regions that sent many settlers to New France (Normandy through Seine-Maritime, the Atlantic west through Vendee as a proxy for Poitou, and Paris) and three that frame the rest of the country (Nord, Rennes in Brittany, and Haute-Garonne in the south), plus the English average.

For the Indigenous source we tested three very different proxies: modern Chipewyan from northern Canada, a Wendat (Huron) individual from the Teston Road site in Ontario dated to about 500 years ago, and a Mi'kmaq individual from Atholville, New Brunswick, dated to about 400 years ago. If the answer depended on the choice of proxy, we would see it.

One point about the data needs to be stated clearly. The Moriopoulos 2026 collection contains two kinds of French Canadian averages: small groups of real samples (three Quebecois, three Acadians, two Cajuns) and much larger groups that are flagged as simulated. We report both, but we treat the real samples as the primary result and the simulated averages only as a cross-check.

The results

The table gives the Indigenous American percentage for each group. Each column is one model: source set A or B, combined with one of the three Indigenous proxies. Gold rows are control groups that should carry no Native ancestry.

The real Quebecois average comes out at 0.42 to 0.51% Indigenous American, whatever the model or the proxy. That is almost exactly the CARTaGENE figure. The Acadian average gives 0.51 to 0.77%, and the Cajun average, from only two people, 0.89 to 1.20%. The simulated averages give zero across the board.

Read quickly, this looks like a beautiful confirmation. It is not, and the reason is in the gold rows of the table.

The noise floor

We ran the same models on 60 regional French, Breton, Belgian and Swiss Romand averages that were not used as sources. None of these groups should carry any Indigenous American ancestry. Yet the models found some in many of them. Two people from Charente-Maritime come out at 0.42 to 0.87%. Among groups of five or more people, the worst false positive was 0.63% in model A and 0.55% in model B. For single individuals it reached 1.39% and 1.57%.

In other words, the 0.4 to 0.5% we found for real Quebecers sits inside the range that Global25 produces for people from France with no Native ancestry at all. Our models agree with CARTaGENE, but on their own they cannot distinguish 0.4% from zero. The same is true for the Acadian figure, and the two-person Cajun average is too small a sample to say more.

The spike-in test

To find the real floor, we took ten French and Swiss Romand groups that were not used as sources and mixed known amounts of Chipewyan ancestry into their coordinates, from 0.25% to 5%, then ran the models again.

On average, the models recover the added amount almost perfectly. The problem is the spread. At 1% added, some groups come back at 0.10% (model A) or 0.53% (model B), well inside the noise zone. Only from 2% does every group come back above the noise ceiling, with a minimum of 1.11% in model A and 1.54% in model B. For averages built from a handful of people, about 2% is therefore the honest detection floor of this method. Below that, Global25 can tell you that Native ancestry is small, but not whether it is there.

The positive controls

A test that always says zero is useless, so we ran the same models on groups that do carry Indigenous ancestry.

Here the signal is impossible to miss. The Metis-mixed group from Newfoundland and Labrador comes out at 9 to 10%, Mi'kmaq and Onondaga individuals with European admixture at about 30%, Mohawk at about 40%, and the simulated Canadian Metis average at 48 to 51%. The three Indigenous proxies give results within a few points of each other. Global25 sees Native ancestry well when there is a meaningful amount of it. It simply cannot resolve the fraction of a percent that the average French Canadian carries.

Where small Native ancestry hides: the ANE trap

There is a second reason why people with a little Native ancestry often never see it in their results, and it has to do with deep ancestry. Native Americans descend in part from a Siberian population related to the 24,000-year-old boy from Mal'ta near Lake Baikal, known as MA-1, the reference genome for Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) ancestry. Raghavan and colleagues estimated that 14 to 38% of Native American ancestry traces back to this population. Europeans carry ANE-related ancestry too, mostly through the steppe herders of the Bronze Age. So in a model built from deep components (western hunter-gatherers, Anatolian farmers, steppe herders and ANE), a small Native signal can easily be absorbed by the components that share part of its history.

We tested this directly. We took the same ten French and Swiss Romand groups, added known amounts of Chipewyan ancestry, and modelled them with Loschbour (western hunter-gatherer), Neolithic Anatolia (farmer), Samara Yamnaya (steppe) and MA-1 (ANE), first without and then with a Native American source. We compared this with our modern-source model B.

The result is clear. In the deep ancestry model, 1 or 2% of Native ancestry is almost invisible even when a Native source is available: only 0.08 and 0.36 points are recovered as Native, and the rest shows up as a little extra steppe. Without a Native source, small doses go into steppe, and larger doses go into ANE, which then grows faster than the amount added because the model trades steppe for ANE. Only the modern-source model, with an explicit Native reference and close European sources, recovers the right amount on average.

So yes: some people do carry a little Native ancestry and never see it labelled as such. Depending on the calculator, it appears as a bit more steppe, as ANE, or as East Asian. The reverse is also true, and just as important: a small ANE or East Asian component in a French Canadian result is not proof of a Native ancestor, because Europeans carry ANE-related ancestry of their own. Only a model with a proper Native American reference, tested against a noise floor, can tell the two apart, and even then only above roughly 2%.

A correction to our own earlier article

In our article on Franco-Americans, Acadians and Cajuns, we reported 0.49% Indigenous ancestry for a Quebec average and 1.34% for a Cajun average, using a single ancient Canadian individual as the source. In the light of the floor test above, those figures should be read as consistent with the published estimates, not as a detected signal. They sit within the noise of the method.

Why the grandmother can be real and still invisible

The last chart is simple arithmetic, but it explains more than any model.

You inherit, on average, half of your genome from each parent, a quarter from each grandparent, and so on. An Indigenous ancestor born around 1820 would leave a person born around 1990 with about 1.6% of their DNA, just under what Global25 can reliably see. An ancestor born around 1660, in the generation of Pierre Couc and Marie Miteouamigoukoue, would leave about 0.02%. Because DNA is passed on in large chunks, most descendants that far down receive no segment at all from that ancestor, even though she is really in their family tree.

This is why genealogists and geneticists are both right. A French Canadian can descend, through a documented chain of baptisms and marriages, from an Algonquin woman of the seventeenth century, and still carry no measurable trace of her. Conversely, an ethnicity estimate that shows 2 or 3% "Native American" in a French Canadian should be treated with suspicion. It can easily be a statistical artefact, an East Asian or Siberian-like component that a calculator assigns when it has no good Indigenous reference.

The Metis: both histories in one people

If there is one people for whom French and Native is not a family legend but the whole story, it is the Metis. From the eighteenth century, in the fur trade of the Great Lakes, French traders married Indigenous women and raised families tied to their mothers' kin. In the Red River country in the 1810s and 1820s, the children of North West Company and Hudson's Bay Company men, many of them French Canadian or Scottish, and of Cree or Saulteaux (Ojibwe) mothers developed a shared identity, built around the buffalo hunt and the provisioning trade. They clashed with the Selkirk settlers at Seven Oaks in 1816. They spoke Michif, a language that combines French nouns with Cree or Saulteaux verbs.

Under Louis Riel they resisted twice: in 1869 and 1870 at Red River, which led to the Manitoba Act and the creation of Manitoba, and in 1885 in Saskatchewan, which ended with defeat at Batoche and Riel's execution. Since 1982, section 35 of the Constitution has recognised the Metis as one of the three Aboriginal peoples of Canada, with First Nations and Inuit.

Our Global25 data reflect that double origin. The Canadian Metis average in the Moriopoulos collection, a simulated group of six, comes out at 48 to 51% Indigenous American in all six models. The other half is European, and here we have to be honest about the method: the French and English sources are only 0.038 apart, so the model cannot reliably say how much of that half is French and how much is British. Depending on the source set, it moves between mostly English and a mix of Normandy and English. Historically, both are expected. The deep ancestry trap applies here too: without a Native source, the same Metis average is read as 79% ANE, with a very poor fit.

The Metis also show why DNA is the wrong tool for identity. In R v Powley (2003), the Supreme Court of Canada set out who can claim Metis rights: self-identification that is not recent, an ancestral connection to a historic Metis community, and acceptance by that community today. No minimum blood quantum is required. A Metis person whose genome is mostly European is still Metis. A French Canadian with one documented Indigenous ancestor from the 1600s is not Metis for that reason alone.

This is why the question has become politically sensitive in Quebec and the Maritimes. Between 2006 and 2016, the number of people who identified as Metis in the census rose by 149% in Quebec and 124% in Nova Scotia, compared with less than 60% across Canada, and nearly thirty new Metis organisations appeared in the two provinces. Many of their members trace their claim to one or a few Indigenous ancestors in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and some describe their families as having been hidden in plain sight among French settlers. The Metis Nation and Mi'kmaw leaders oppose these claims, and critics such as the scholar Darryl Leroux describe the trend as settler self-indigenisation. Genetics cannot settle this debate, but it adds one fact: an Indigenous ancestor twelve generations back is a real genealogical link, and in most descendants it leaves no trace in the genome.

What this does and does not mean

The authors are careful, and so should we be. The study does not show that French settlers and Indigenous people never had children together. It shows that in one cemetery of colonial Montreal, among 45 mostly ordinary colonists, no recent Indigenous or African ancestry was found. That result fits the modern genetic data and most of the genealogical record. It does not apply automatically to the fur trade country, to Acadia, to Louisiana, to regions such as Gaspesie and the North Shore where modern genomes show more Native ancestry, to the Metis, or to every family.

It also does not mean that relations between the French and Indigenous nations were only hostile. They included alliances, trade, war and family ties. As Martin-Moya put it, "What our results suggest is that when such ancestry exists, it needs to be put in context." Raquel Fleskes of Dartmouth College, who was not involved in the study, said it "provides a perspective on population relationships during the colonial period."

Finally, the authors make a point that goes beyond genetics. Indigenous belonging, they argue, rests on kinship, community and connection to land, not on a percentage in a test. Unsupported claims of distant Indigenous ancestry can harm Indigenous nations by weakening their rights, resources and standing. A DNA result can tell you something about your ancestors. It cannot, on its own, tell you who your people are.

Methods note

Global25 scaled coordinates. File merge priority, first occurrence wins: Davidski Global25 population averages, Davidski modern population averages, Moriopoulos 2026 All Averages (No Sims), dated ancient samples. Simulated averages (Quebecois n=157, Acadian n=36, Cajun n=8, Canadian Metis n=6) were taken from the Moriopoulos 2026 All Averages (With Sims) file and are labelled as simulated throughout. Scale compatibility was checked on shared entries (Chipewyan and French Paris identical across files; French Nord 0.003 apart). Model A sources: French average (n=64), English, Indigenous proxy, Yoruba; condition numbers 27.9 to 28.5. Model B sources: Normandy Seine-Maritime, Vendee, Paris, Nord, Rennes, Haute-Garonne, English, Indigenous proxy, Yoruba; condition numbers 155.0 to 157.5, driven by the closely related French regional sources (pairwise separations 0.009 to 0.044; Vendee and Haute-Garonne are the closest pair). Pole separations: French and English 0.038; French and Chipewyan 0.578; French and Yoruba 0.770; Chipewyan and Wendat 0.096; Chipewyan and Mi'kmaq 0.073; Wendat and Mi'kmaq 0.062. The Indigenous component is well separated from the European sources, so the collinearity in model B affects the regional French split, not the Indigenous estimate; the regional French percentages are not interpreted in this article. NNLS with a sum to one constraint applied as a weighted extra equation, weight 1000, followed by normalisation. Negative controls: 60 French, Breton, Belgian and Swiss Romand averages not used as sources; maximum false Indigenous percentage 0.63% (model A) and 0.55% (model B) for groups of five or more, 1.39% and 1.57% for single samples. Spike-in: 0, 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, 3 and 5% Chipewyan added to ten non-source groups (Normandy Manche and Calvados, Pas-de-Calais, Moselle, Finistere, Morbihan, Cotes-d'Armor, Puy-de-Dome, Bearn, Swiss Romand); minimum recovery at 2% was 1.11% (A) and 1.54% (B). Deep ancestry models: Luxembourg Loschbour, Turkey Neolithic, Samara Yamnaya and Russia MA-1, with optional Han (Henan) and Chipewyan sources; condition numbers 5.5 (four sources), 6.2 (with Han), 7.6 (with Chipewyan) and 10.1 (all six). Separations: MA-1 and Chipewyan 0.406, MA-1 and Yamnaya 0.179, Han and Chipewyan 0.401. Spike-in of 1, 2, 5 and 10% Chipewyan into the same ten non-source groups; reported values are mean changes relative to each unspiked group. Regional Quebec figures are taken from Moreau et al. (2013) and are not recomputed. The Montreal individuals themselves are not yet available as Global25 coordinates, so their results are taken from the PNAS study and not recomputed here.

Global25 coordinates used in this article

The sources, the French Canadian, Acadian and Cajun averages, the positive controls (the Canadian Metis average is simulated), and the deep ancestry sources used in the ANE test. They can be pasted directly into the Vahaduo tool.

French_n64,0.127251,0.142063,0.048036,0.019804,0.040455,0.005726,0.002875,0.003443,0.010964,0.017922,-0.003532,0.006966,-0.014030,-0.009219,0.011250,0.003576,-0.001526,-0.000238,0.001123,0.000848,0.002782,0.001824,-0.001304,0.005936,-0.001349
English,0.131855,0.137043,0.061788,0.044013,0.039230,0.016748,0.004985,0.005745,0.005264,0.005678,-0.004769,0.005616,-0.012589,-0.010351,0.020615,0.003552,-0.010369,0.004094,0.003685,0.002962,0.005937,0.003404,-0.003269,0.013794,0.000031
French_Oil_Normandy_Seine-Maritime_n16,0.129758,0.136398,0.055672,0.037892,0.039988,0.015705,0.002732,0.004875,0.006557,0.006265,-0.004598,0.004290,-0.009505,-0.007242,0.016320,0.006654,-0.005109,0.002011,0.001108,0.002251,0.004679,0.003300,-0.000216,0.012291,-0.002073
French_Oil_Pays_de_la_Loire_Vendee_n6,0.125205,0.146575,0.048523,0.017227,0.043187,0.002928,-0.000039,0.003808,0.011931,0.023022,-0.007524,0.007143,-0.015758,-0.010964,0.010722,0.000309,-0.007019,0.002893,0.001467,0.000042,0.001997,0.004719,-0.001356,0.004278,-0.003193
French_Oil_Ile-de-France_Paris_n11,0.127171,0.141436,0.050431,0.023990,0.040903,0.009305,0.002799,0.005454,0.011602,0.018174,-0.007706,0.006812,-0.012907,-0.010384,0.013770,0.006063,-0.001826,0.004664,0.002708,-0.000978,0.002201,0.003575,-0.001233,0.011141,-0.001905
French_Oil_Hauts-de-France_Nord_n39,0.127686,0.140482,0.051201,0.025004,0.038382,0.009082,0.001579,0.004343,0.008270,0.012495,-0.003893,0.004377,-0.011165,-0.008879,0.012403,0.001353,-0.006021,0.002511,0.003278,0.000600,0.001606,0.001462,-0.001135,0.008135,-0.000384
Breton_Ille-et-Vilaine_Rennes_n32,0.131252,0.138302,0.057346,0.037377,0.038815,0.014877,0.002446,0.004413,0.008258,0.009829,-0.004933,0.005821,-0.013737,-0.013500,0.018543,0.004823,-0.005863,0.001401,-0.000381,0.001821,0.004695,0.001395,-0.000705,0.011176,0.000086
French_Occitan_Occitanie_Haute-Garonne_n37,0.127020,0.144864,0.048914,0.017459,0.043542,0.003573,0.000400,0.003861,0.014952,0.023725,-0.003261,0.006659,-0.015019,-0.009477,0.010597,0.002587,-0.003570,0.002342,0.001291,-0.000081,0.003575,0.002420,-0.002555,0.001752,0.000482
Chipewyan,0.054635,-0.321923,0.107857,0.068799,-0.102942,-0.016455,-0.181898,-0.214491,-0.011249,-0.025422,0.010393,-0.005920,0.007805,-0.000895,-0.012418,-0.001790,-0.000652,0.002597,0.009993,0.009942,0.004243,-0.009398,0.001171,0.004940,0.006227
Canada_Teston_Road_500BP_Wendat_n1,0.052359,-0.308721,0.108988,0.094639,-0.095710,-0.006693,-0.235481,-0.275065,-0.024543,-0.021686,0.003410,0.000000,0.003717,0.009083,-0.003936,0.008618,-0.007953,0.001267,-0.006536,-0.010130,-0.003619,0.007543,0.006039,0.004940,-0.001437
Canada_Atholville_400BP_Mikmaq_n1,0.052359,-0.319892,0.120679,0.091409,-0.101250,0.004183,-0.208689,-0.249682,-0.002250,-0.026789,-0.000974,-0.002548,-0.003717,0.018441,-0.000407,0.021612,0.008996,0.012289,0.002640,-0.009880,-0.006364,-0.010140,-0.009244,0.005422,0.009819
Yoruba,-0.630062,0.062501,0.022113,0.016708,0.000503,0.012474,-0.044417,0.047767,-0.048881,0.032769,0.004621,0.000790,0.023056,0.000951,0.012523,-0.009607,0.007076,0.000449,0.006022,-0.002990,0.001554,0.002316,-0.001759,-0.000471,-0.000425
French-Canadian_Quebec_Quebecois_n3,0.127103,0.140143,0.049780,0.020780,0.039700,0.009947,-0.000078,0.002077,0.013908,0.016280,-0.005954,0.001648,-0.011199,-0.005138,0.013572,-0.005834,-0.014820,0.001562,0.002556,-0.005711,-0.002371,0.002638,-0.005793,0.003655,0.003512
French-Canadian_Maritimes_Acadian_n3,0.127482,0.137773,0.049528,0.024440,0.042162,0.005113,0.001567,0.003385,0.010567,0.021200,-0.004764,0.003647,-0.014717,-0.012616,0.014703,0.008486,0.004520,0.001901,0.001844,0.002334,0.000333,0.004740,-0.002178,0.007913,0.002754
French-American_Louisiana_Cajun_n2,0.129190,0.134050,0.049026,0.024064,0.039392,0.010598,0.002585,0.002654,0.009510,0.013485,0.000081,0.000899,-0.018434,-0.013143,0.007397,0.008287,0.004042,0.001394,0.005908,0.009505,0.001622,0.000309,-0.000185,0.010785,-0.000060
Canadian_Metis-Mixed_Newfoundland_and_Labrador_n15,0.124295,0.091195,0.060792,0.034819,0.023348,0.009613,-0.013803,-0.014615,0.005945,0.006463,-0.003908,0.005635,-0.012299,-0.009303,0.015255,-0.000557,-0.007449,0.002297,0.003737,0.001601,0.002654,-0.001525,-0.000715,0.010371,0.003249
Mohawk_European-Mixed_n5,0.101580,-0.032465,0.079143,0.058737,-0.014002,0.004946,-0.088165,-0.105415,-0.001948,-0.005489,-0.003452,0.001412,-0.005239,-0.000187,0.007451,0.003161,-0.002698,0.001041,0.002543,0.002386,0.002656,0.002956,-0.000326,0.008029,0.000668
Canadian_Metis_n6,0.099104,-0.084779,0.088194,0.065943,-0.028726,0.002317,-0.100950,-0.119364,-0.002248,-0.010370,0.001698,-0.001396,0.000356,0.001899,0.001901,0.003086,-0.001232,0.001870,0.004696,0.002076,0.002985,-0.001205,0.000282,0.005481,0.001196
Luxembourg_Loschbour.DG,0.130897,0.109677,0.203645,0.198000,0.162492,0.059125,0.015041,0.038075,0.100217,0.016219,-0.015427,-0.017235,0.019921,-0.001239,0.061346,0.070670,0.002608,0.007348,-0.008925,0.065406,0.117543,0.010387,-0.049422,-0.173639,0.019519
Turkey_N,0.117902,0.180087,0.003426,-0.101059,0.051240,-0.047969,-0.003799,-0.006846,0.036167,0.080678,0.008261,0.011309,-0.024164,0.000579,-0.042712,-0.010370,0.022556,0.001388,0.013649,-0.010448,-0.014261,0.005693,-0.004904,-0.003750,-0.004436
Russia_Samara_EBA_Yamnaya,0.125838,0.089254,0.042908,0.115456,-0.027868,0.044685,0.004491,-0.002949,-0.054858,-0.072996,0.001858,0.000350,-0.001652,-0.023610,0.037263,0.015734,0.000000,-0.001478,-0.001704,0.012506,-0.003120,0.001374,0.011229,0.018436,-0.004524
Russia_MA1_HG.SG,0.079676,-0.023357,0.037335,0.186695,-0.070475,0.046575,-0.047472,-0.054921,-0.020452,-0.069250,0.028743,-0.010041,0.015907,-0.044865,0.017372,0.023071,-0.007302,0.002280,-0.003520,-0.000250,-0.028699,0.003710,0.011832,-0.006989,-0.002155
Han_Henan,0.025496,-0.444193,0.008825,-0.064342,0.050533,0.020415,0.006721,0.003369,-0.013621,0.003791,-0.076355,-0.011420,0.012131,-0.008367,-0.005022,0.000000,0.002556,-0.001166,-0.001483,-0.004377,0.010906,0.007370,0.008529,-0.001687,-0.001868

References

1. Ancient DNA Martin-Moya D, Grenier JC, Lanigan LT, Pelletier J, Irving Pease EK, Racimo F, Bherer C, Schroeder H, Hussin J, Milot E, Ribot I (2026). Ancient DNA challenges to admixture narratives: Insights from Notre-Dame Cemetery (1683 to 1796) in Colonial Montreal, Canada. PNAS 123(42): e2523026123. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2523026123
2. Bioarchaeology Martin-Moya D, Ribot I (2024). Beyond the dominant narratives: Identifying Indigenous and African individuals in Quebec St-Lawrence Valley colonial cemeteries by three-dimensional morphometrical analysis of the temporal bone. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 55. sciencedirect.com
3. Population genetics McClelland P, Femerling G, et al., Lettre G (2026). A multi-ancestry genetic reference for the Quebec population. Nature Communications 17: 1319. nature.com/articles/s41467-026-68820-7
4. Population genetics Anderson-Trocme L, Nelson D, Zabad S, et al., Vezina H, Kelleher J, Gravel S (2023). On the genes, genealogies, and geographies of Quebec. Science. Preprint: biorxiv.org; summary: mcgill.ca
5. News Live Science (2026). DNA from centuries-old skeletons buried in Montreal reveals no genetic mixing between Indigenous people and French colonists. livescience.com
6. News Radley D (2026). DNA from Montreal's colonial cemetery shows French ancestry only, with no recent Indigenous mixing. Archaeology News Online Magazine. archaeologymag.com
7. News La Presse Canadienne (2026). Le metissage etait possiblement peu repandu a Montreal aux 17e et 18e siecles. noovo.info
8. Genealogy Pierre Couc dit Lafleur and Marie Miteouamigoukoue, marriage at Trois-Rivieres, 1657. apointinhistory.net
9. Population genetics Moreau C, Lefebvre JF, Jomphe M, Bherer C, Ruiz-Linares A, Vezina H, Roy-Gagnon MH, Labuda D (2013). Native American admixture in the Quebec founder population. PLoS ONE 8(6): e65507. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0065507
10. Genealogy Vezina H, Jomphe M, Lavoie E, Moreau C, Labuda D (2012). L'apport des donnees genetiques a la mesure genealogique des origines amerindiennes des Canadiens francais. Cahiers quebecois de demographie 41: 87 to 105. doi.org/10.7202/1012981ar
11. Ancient DNA Raghavan M, Skoglund P, Graf KE, et al., Willerslev E (2014). Upper Palaeolithic Siberian genome reveals dual ancestry of Native Americans. Nature 505: 87 to 91. doi.org/10.1038/nature12736
12. History The Canadian Encyclopedia. Metis. thecanadianencyclopedia.ca
13. Law R v Powley, 2003 SCC 43, Supreme Court of Canada, 19 September 2003. summary
14. Analysis Leroux D (2017). Becoming Indigenous: The rise of Eastern Metis in Canada. The Conversation. theconversation.com
15. Data Global25 PCA coordinates by Davidski, and the Moriopoulos 2026 collection of Global25 coordinates.