During the recent Holyrood elections, one group of people with a curious interest in the result was 4000 miles away in Manitoba, Canada. But it wasn't just their Scottish ancestry that made them sympathetic to the cause of those seeking independence - it was their own bitter struggle for equality.

This unusual community of people, almost unknown outside of North America, can trace part of their ancestry back to the pioneering Scottish fur traders who went to Canada in the eighteenth century and formed relationships with women from the local Indian tribes. The children they sired became know as the Metis - strong-minded, proud people whose name is derived from the Latin meaning "mixed".

Today, they are seeking greater recognition of their legal and human rights to redress a 150-year fight against the racial hatred and deprivation that still exists. It's a struggle that many Scots - the people with whom the Metis still closely identify - will have great sympathy for.

The amazing story of Metis history has never been told before outside of Canada, but it will soon be revealed in a BBC documentary called Highland Empire, produced and written by Scottish film-maker Douglas Eadie, for Pelicula Films.

Eadie, who spent six weeks in Canada last year to film the documentary, says when he started out, he had planned to concentrate mostly on the swashbuckling exploits of the Scottish traders, but the more he dug around, the more the fascinating tale of the Metis people began to emerge.

"I had vaguely heard about these people before I started, but when I got to Manitoba, I found there were so many of these direct descendents of the Scottish traders there, and I wanted to include the Metis in the film because they had such a direct link to the past," says Eadie.

The documentary covers the history of the fur-trading industry in Canada when droves of Highlanders, many of them wealthy chiefs of the old clan system, fled from Scotland after their Culloden defeat and created the North West Company, which struggled for supremacy with the English-run Hudson's Bay Company. The men were entrepreneurial, and the women they chose as partners for these frontier ventures were the natives of the central and north-west region, the Cree, Ojibwa and Salteaux people, who lived in hunting communities. The children they sired were the Metis, of whom more than 400,000 now exist in Canada.

And they are still fiercely proud of their Scottish heritage which has survived in their fiddle music, the soft bannocks that they make and their own blue and white flag, based on the Saltire but with a looped infinity symbol instead of a cross.

The Metis flourished in the late 1700s and lived in close communities - mostly in present-day Manitoba, which is still their heartland. Yet from 1870, their fortunes changed after a popular uprising was quelled by the government, which started years of displacement. The discrimination has persisted and Metis leaders are now lobbying for more rights, and fighting a land claim for 1.4 million acres of Manitoba, including the capital, Winnipeg, that was promised to the Metis in the 1880s. The case has been battled out in the courts since 1985, and is due to be resolved this summer.

Leah La Plante, a Metis and vice-president of the Southwest Region Manitoba Metis Federation, works tirelessly to improve life for her people. She told The Herald from her home in Brandon, Manitoba, that her combative spirit was probably inherited from her ancestor, Cuthbert Grant, the son of a Scottish settler who married a Cree Indian. Grant was sent to Edinburgh for an education, brought back to be a Metis freedom fighter in the early 1880s and is now a national hero in the style of William Wallace.

"The story of the Metis people is horrendous and it never seems to get better. Since 1870 we've been treated like dogs. Before that, we were flourishing but then the government decided our land was better used by white people, so they kicked us out, and we've been kicked around for generations since," says La Plante.

She says that some of the worst atrocities against the Metis have happened more recently. "In the 1940s, there was a Metis community called St Madeleine's with 50 families, schools, a church and shops. The government of Manitoba (all white) decided they wanted the land for farming, and wanted to buy them out. The Metis refused. Not long after, the community were all away working on a farm to earn money and when they came back, they found their all their homes on fire, and all their animals had been shot. They never got any compensation."

La Plante also believes that the social problems the Metis face now are brought on by decades of forced unemployment, and in some ways they are worse off than other Indian (First Nation) groups that signed treaties with Canadian governments in the past and secured reservations and financial aid.

"We've had none of that help and if you have white people telling you all the time you're useless, you start to believe them so it doesn't make for good social skills," she adds.

La Plante says she has experienced racism most of her life, but is now comfortable with who she is. "I did my research and I couldn't be prouder. But a lot of my people are not at that stage yet."

She says the older generations tended to deny their Indian heritage to get on. "My grandmother used to describe herself as an old half-breed'. Her generation were told to keep their mouths shut and not talk about who they are.

"It wasn't until I started researching our family tree that I found out most of my ancestors were Metis, and I also discovered that Cuthbert Grant was an ancestor. I was on cloud nine about that. Even my grandmother hadn't known it."

Not everyone feels as comfortable talking about their Metis connections as La Plante. Alexandra Paul, 50, a journalist at Winnipeg Free Press, says she is proud of her Scottish and Metis ancestry. One of her ancestors was a Scottish-born aristocrat whose wife was part Indian.

"I kept my family history a secret until recently. But I spoke to one of our family matriarchs about it and we agreed it's time to start talking about the Metis link. It's something to cherish," she says.

Paul, like La Plante, believes there is still a long way to go before the Metis have all the rights they deserve. "Native groups here are still fighting for their rights. Scotland got a lot of its back over the years, and the native groups here respect the Scottish struggle because it reminds them of their own. There's a lot in common in the histories of the two peoples," says Paul.

Highland Empire is on Sunday, 9pm, BBC2.


Birth of a nation

The Metis "nation" was created out of the tumultuous, pioneering years of fur trading in the 1770s, when Highland Scots went to Canada to stake a claim in this lucrative enterprise. At that time it was dominated by the English-run Hudson's Bay Company, the former French fur traders having mostly fled after the British seized control in eastern Canada. The HBC, which also employed Scots (mainly from Orkney), worked from landing forts on Hudson's Bay, where they owned a huge swathe of land given to them by Royal Charter in 1670. Indian traders delivered the highly prized mink, beaver and bear furs here ready to be shipped off to European markets. The Highland Scots were more maverick and ruthless and set up their own North West Company, based in Montreal, to travel directly to the fur-producing regions. To navigate the vast river system, they sought the help of natives as guides and boat builders. It was this close bond that led to the relationships with native women, giving rise to the Metis people, who later formed their own hunting and farming communities in present-day Manitoba and Ontario. Both companies thrived, but by the early 1880s there were skirmishes, especially after the HBC brought out more Scottish settlers whose colonies encroached on vital NWC trade routes. New settlers clashed with Metis communities. The Metis had several uprisings against them and, in 1870, tried to form their own provisional government, which was rejected. But the Metis nevertheless proclaimed themselves a "new nation" with its own culture, language (Michif) and flag, and their struggle for greater recognition continues to this day.