The Laughing People: A Tribute to My Innu Friends 9780228009269

Table of contents :
Cover
THE LAUGHING PEOPLE
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
A Word from the Chief of the Essipit
Acknowledgments
Note on the Innu
Prologue: In My Red Book
1 The Laugh of a Good Man
2 Cod Country
3 Floating Islands
4 Élisabeth’s Bread
5 The Animated World
6 The Time of Fur
7 Essipit, “The River of Shells”
8 A Sad Chapter for Children of the State
Epilogue: They Will Be Here Tomorrow
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

THE L A U GHI N G PEO P L E

THE LAUGHING PEOPLE A Tribute to My Innu Friends s e rg e b o u ch a rd with Marie-Christine Lévesque Translated by Craig Lund

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 Originally published in French as Le people rieur. Hommage à mes amis innus © Lux Éditeur, Montreal, 2017 www.luxediteur.com isbn 978-0-2280-0812-5 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-0926-9 (epdf) isbn 978-0-2280-0927-6 (epub) Legal deposit third quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: The laughing people : a tribute to my Innu friends / Serge Bouchard with Marie-Christine Lévesque ; translated by Craig Lund. Other titles: Peuple rieur. English Names: Bouchard, Serge, author. | Lévesque, Marie-Christine, author. | Lund, Craig, translator. Description: Translation of: Le peuple rieur. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210203471 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210203536 | isbn 9780228008125 (hardcover) | isbn 9780228009269 (pdf) | isbn 9780228009276 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: Innus de Ekuanitshit. | csh: Innu—Innus de Ekuanitshit. | csh: Innu—Innus de Ekuanitshit—History. | csh: Innu—Innus de Ekuanitshit—Social conditions. | csh: Innu—Innus de Ekuanitshit— Social life and customs. Classification: lcc e99.i55 b6813 2021 | ddc 305.897/320714178—dc23

When I was little, I didn’t want to be a fireman, I wanted to be an Indian. Failing to do so, I loved them instead, so much. All Indians, the Innu in particular. To Georges, Desneiges, and Michel; to Reggie, Jean-Charles, Joséphine, Rita, and many others, this book, with all my affection.

PROLOGUE

Contents

A Word from the Chief of the Essipit | ix Acknowledgments | xi Note on the Innu | xiii Prologue: In My Red Book | xv

1 The Laugh of a Good Man | 3 2 Cod Country | 12 3 Floating Islands | 29 4 Élisabeth’s Bread | 67 5 The Animated World | 90 6 The Time of Fur | 116 7 Essipit, “The River of Shells” | 133 8 A Sad Chapter for Children of the State | 163 Epilogue: They Will Be Here Tomorrow | 181

Notes | 191 Bibliography | 199 Index | 209

PROLOGUE

A Word from the Chief of the Essipit

This book on the Innu Nation and the community of Essipit is the realization of a dream we have nurtured for several years. Indeed, already more than a decade ago, with the collaboration of historians, Elders, anthropologists, and ethnologists, we collected writings, pictures, and recordings. But never did we believe that this project would have piqued the interest of an author with a reputation as great as Serge Bouchard’s. Yet, this is not surprising, since Serge Bouchard is an unconditional friend of the Innu: he lived among us, in all our communities, from Pekuakami (Lac SaintJean) to Pakut-shipu. He made friends, lived moments of pure wonder, distress, great joy, and also profound sadness. This book is a testament to that. There is nothing academic in this work. No scholarly analysis or grand theories. Only facts, images, and stories: many images, many stories that, like in Innu-aimun, the Innu language, are evoked, described, told, and sometimes whispered around a fire. With, in the background, the peaceful grin of the Innu people watching life pass just as a river flows, sometimes peacefully, without eddies or rapids, and sometimes violent like a torrent: memories of miraculous hunts and catches, dialogues with animals, and

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A Word from the Chief of the Essipit

exchanges with several spirits of the forest; also, memories of fracture, splits, and removal of children forced to go to boarding school. In a way, this book is a gift that Serge Bouchard and the Essipit community are giving to the Innu people. Like a mirror, it gives back to those who behold in it an image of great depth, like a lake whose shores disappear into the horizon. As far back as memories go, the Innu were there, are still there, and will continue to be there until memories cease. And for them to remain, their fire must be maintained. So, thanks to Serge Bouchard and his co-author Marie-Christine Lévesque, to the late Pierre Frenette, to members of the Innu Nation, and to all those who contributed, from near or far, for making this dream a reality. Tshinashkumitinau kassinu uikaneshmaut. martin dufour Chief, Essipit Innu First Nation Band Council

PROLOGUE

Acknowledgments

During this long writing journey, many put their shoulders to the wheel. We thank them from the bottom of our hearts: Eve Delmas of Lux Editions for the quality of her support and her fine psychology, Sylvie Vincent for the critical, very critical rereading of the manuscript, and Robert Laliberté, one of the last of the Mohicans in the patient and sharp art of revision. Their extreme rigour has greatly improved the book. We certainly thank the Council of the Essipit Innu First Nation and salute its Chief, Martin Dufour, for having financially supported the writing of the book. A special tip-of-the-hat to the former executive director of the Council, Réginald Moreau, whose trust and enthusiasm brought life to this project, as well as to Marc Chaloult and Suzie Gagnon, who have supported this project from the beginning. Finally, let us acknowledge the research work of Florence Parcoret.

PROLOGUE

Note on the Innu

Related to the larger Algonquian family, the Innu have been present on the Quebec-Labrador peninsula for several millennia. These former nomads were the first Indigenous Peoples to establish commercial and cultural ties with European explorers and missionaries. Today, they form a Nation of about eighteen thousand people grouped into eleven communities: nine in the boreal part of Quebec – Mashteuiatsh (Pointe-Bleue), Essipit (Les Escoumins), Pessamit (Betsiamites), Uashat mak Mani-utenam (SeptÎles and Maliotenam), Ekuanitshit (Mingan), Nutashkuan (Natashquan), Unaman-shipu (La Romaine), Pakut-shipu (Saint-Augustin), Matimekush (Schefferville); and two in Newfoundland and Labrador, Sheshatshiu (Northwest River) and Natuashish (Davis Inlet). Their language, Innuaimun, and their culture, Innu-aitun, are still alive and well.

PROLOGUE

In My Red Book

Adolescent at the time of my classical studies, in my room on the desk where I did homework, I had a red hardcover volume that I was so proud of – like a medieval monk beholding a rare manuscript. It was The Indians of Canada by Diamond Jenness. I consulted it incessantly, to relearn each and every day some rare and precious knowledge I was afraid of forgetting. I would find out much later what Innu writer An Antane Kapesh meant when she asserted that she was proud to be a “savagesse”: a term considered by some to be cursed, yet she translated it literally as the joy of living on savage lands. Much in the same way I naively believed “Indian” was among the most beautiful word in the world. I thought it nice to be an Indian. Yet history got the better of me; it got the better of us all. These “savages” and “Indians,” they disappeared, cast out with other dirty, decried words. So, we changed the words, thinking it would change the world, that by no longer saying this word or that, the problem would be resolved. We all know that someone who is visually disabled is not entirely blind, just as a person with reduced mobility is not wholly disabled; it would appear that someone who is Native is much less Indian.

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Prologue

In the book you are about to read, we frequently used these words, “savages” and “Indians”; they do not carry with them the charge that they have taken on today. Generally, when it comes to Indians, we use terms indifferently, like “Indigenous,” “First Occupants,” or “First Nations members,” to avoid the weight of repetition. Anyway, no matter the name, this book takes the side of the Innu. I know today that anthropologist Diamond Jenness shared racist views with a Canadian state that embraced the theory of Indians being intellectually inferior, but at least in his book, he attempted to list the original Nations of this country. He had prepared, I assume, small plaques for some future museum dedicated to the memory of extinct peoples. Regarding terminology, however, I think that we were where we should be today, calling these Nations by their actual name. In this context, the term “Native” has resolved nothing. It was used only to mask a reality: use this word and you will be absolved from having to clearly state that you are talking about the Innu, Eeyou, Anishinaabe, Atikamekw, or Huron-Wendat. Learning to name the Nations one by one is a good exercise; it is what I did when I was a young kid, buried in my red book. Therefore, I would like to tell all young journalists and commentators today that – paraphrasing the title of one of my books1 – Innus are not the spouses of Inuits.

This book tells the tale of the long journey of a very small Nation; it recounts both their joie de vivre as well as their crosses borne. It attempts to describe this Nation that is as friendly as it is mysterious (as can be found in the opening lines to Champlain’s travel diary) and that has lived and survived for over two thousand years in this part of America, also known as Nitassinan: the Innu homeland. For America did not emerge in 1492. Whether creators of icons like it or not, America did not wait for Christopher Columbus to “discover” it. Beyond the colonial horizon, this country has a rich past, much older than Western civilization has currently estab-

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lished. Even in pre-Columbian times, America already had its own myths, ruins, and antiquity. There was nothing less new than the “New World.” This brings us to every misunderstanding in history: the beginning. For example, it would appear that two nations, and only two, founded Canada. One snatched up its title while the other dreamed of confiscating it. This fabrication led to a tremendous aberration: a kerfuffle between the two interested parties ended up tossing out of the ring any who were neither one nor the other, which is, in other words, all the others involved. This history excluded Indigenous Peoples and kept in the shadows mestizos, the Chinese, Blacks, pioneer women, and the legions of everyday individuals who make up the country. Indigenous Peoples did not participate in the march toward civilization; they were not involved in progress, regardless if it were moral or not. They were given a place somewhere in prehistory, precluded from having any great national purpose. Dominant society made sure that they invented an Indian worthy of their expectancy, an imaginary being that embodied all its prejudices – even positive ones. This history wrote poems and books, painted pictures, and shot movies. But those to first inhabit America dwell in the blind spot of our retrovision, supporting actors from a past that was largely distorted. Throughout the chapters, you are going to accompany the young anthropologist that I was in the early 1970s when I first arrived at Ekuanitshit (Mingan). You will soon discover that these short stories on my first stays there serve as a pretext to tell greater tales. Stories about a resilient, nomadic hunter-gatherer people that has persevered for centuries; a perfectly established world that has encountered brutal historical change, confronted explorers, illness, greedy invaders, disparaging ideologies, and policies of annihilation; a society whose foundation was undermined and destroyed between 1850 and 1950 as the government orchestrated the sedentarization of adults and the forced education of children. Misunderstood, ignored, maligned, declared dead and gone, yet the Innu were always there, laughing, at the confluence of their many renaissances. Today, they are about twenty

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Prologue

thousand strong, hoping that their culture gets the recognition it deserves, struggling to find their place on this giant planetary marble. It is the community of Essipit that, in the name of all Innu, insisted on presenting in its own way the richness of this culture. A few years ago, its Council – more specifically the Chief, Martin Dufour; the director general at the time, Réginald Moreau; and the director of communications, Marc Chaloult – took the initiative on the present work, asking me to be the author. That is why one chapter is dedicated to the history of this small community of the Côte-Nord, Essipit, or “river of shells.” This village has endured throughout the ages, through trials and tribulations, emerging today as a small, albeit strong, group, strong in a very “Indian” sense of community, a mixed and resolutely Innu society, loyal to its lands and proud of its past, full of hope for the future. This book is not an intellectual work and certainly is not a history textbook. It has neither the pretension nor the task. This is an ecumenical work, written by a man who loves the subject. Too much? Just to think that I have been criticized for it! Yet, for this respect, I dare say this passion, I will never apologize. The Innu identity fascinates me. Its resistance and intelligence have instilled in me a profound admiration. So, I bestow herein a gift, a way of saying that I am passing the torch. Take this book for what it is: a note left in someone’s pocket, on the desk of another, notes of gratitude, and certainly letters of love. Other authors (and better ones) have written remarkable studies, essays, and books on the Innu people. I am referring to none other than José Mailhot, Denys Delâge, Sylvie Vincent, Pierre Frenette, Jacques Frenette, Daniel Clément, Paul Charest, just to name a few, and last but certainly not least Rémi Savard, whose book Le rire précolombien dans le Québec d’aujourd’hui I used as inspiration for the title of the present text. Therefore, I am not the first to undertake this subject. My contribution is added to the others, but let’s just say that it resolutely targets a broad public: young Innu boys and girls, for those who will follow, as well as all the Québécois men and women, so that one day the understanding and recognition of the First

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Prologue

Nations of Quebec becomes fundamental. For me, this book written for the general public should be of national interest, and I would go so far as to say national urgency. As colleagues before me have tried to accomplish, I am looking to break down the wall of ignorance by repeating these stories over and over so they become part of our society’s cultural heritage. Now for a word on Marie. You may have guessed, I am talking about my loyal companion, Marie-Christine Lévesque, who wrote this book with me. She is all over it – research, writing, revisions, and the multitude of verifications this kind of project calls for. We wrote this book together; it couldn’t have been any other way. This four-hand writing is a delicate operation, but you have to trust that by dint of forging, we have become a couple of smiths: one hammers, the other illuminates. Or, as Marie wrote in the foreword of another work: “A hummingbird on the nose of a bear, that is what we are.” And such is life. Without my red book on the Indians of Canada, god only knows what path I may have taken that would have led me away from my subject. serge b ouchard

THE L A U GHI N G PEO P L E

CHAPTER 1

The Laugh of a Good Man I do not believe there is a nation under the sun that mocks and teases more than the Montagnais nation. Paul Le Jeune, Relations de jésuites, 1634

Michel’s canoe was heading toward a rocky point at the far side of a large, wild lake north of Mingan; the summer afternoon was splendid. We had been coasting along the banks for a couple of hours, and I was looking forward to disembarking, standing up, and stretching my legs. Seated on my heels at the front of the canoe, Indian style as they say, it had been a good while that I could no longer feel my legs, the blood flow having been almost slowed to a halt. I was beyond the tingling phase and had reached full numbness but complaining or changing my position was simply out of the question. The beauty of the landscape had captivated my mind; I was daydreaming and travelling through time. We were gliding across the calm water like a raft along the surface of an indefinable void. The spruces scrolled by one after another, one the same as the other, like the eq of an audio track, pointed tops, lows and highs, a dark green, almost black background, the landscape of time before temporality. I could hear Michel speaking Innu as if I were an Innu myself. I could barely make out the sound of the paddle as he plunged it into the water at a steady rhythm. I naively admired this motion, this dexterity, this

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The Laughing People

assurance: paddling, simply paddling. Each row was the movement of an extraordinary dancer, combining strength and elegance, economy and efficiency, swift repetition. Indeed, everything just flowed. Michel was one with the boat, and you could see the pleasure he took steering it, moving it forward, doing whatever he wanted with it. To me, he resembled a lord surveying his land, his water, his domain. A handsome man, he had a copper complexion, like those who have lived outdoors in the wind, under the sun, through bitter cold and scorching heat. On his face he wore an expression of genuine gentleness. He had the look of a nomad; he was sovereign in his canoe, like a Sioux on his horse. I liked this man the moment I saw him. It was a great honour for me to be welcomed into his home for my long stays in Mingan. A young anthropologist, I knew nothing; I was curious, passionate, and I wanted to see and experience it all. Living under Michel Mollen’s roof was a big deal for me. Michel Mollen, nomad of the great territory who had gone on big hunts, experienced winter famine, crossed Labrador and all of Nitassinan in the north! The villagers admired him; the younger ones looked up to him. My friend Georges Mestokosho, an Innu the same age as me, with whom I spent the biggest share of my time, was excited by my good fortune: “You’re going to be staying with the real deal. Michel is a great hunter. He is good at everything he does. He doesn’t talk much, at least not in French, but he is going to teach you a lot. All you have to do is observe him.” Georges was right, I would develop a deep, somewhat surreal, friendship with Michel Mollen. Throughout the years that I saw him regularly over long stretches, Michel never uttered one word to me in French. When he saw me back in the village after a stay in Montreal, his eyes would light up; he would don a very touching smile and say things to me in Innu without expecting an answer. I was occasionally able to understand him, but I was too shy to try to converse with him in his language. Nevertheless, he knew how much I liked and respected him.

5

The Laugh of a Good Man

The canoe slipped between two rocky spots, and Michel pulled up onto a small beach with fine sand. With his black hair in the wind, a cigarette between his lips, he signalled for me to get down from the canoe and pull it up onto the shore. Finally, I was going to get to stretch. Paralyzed, I … fell flat on my face in the sand. In total silence among the spruces, a big, huge laugh bellowed out. Even if, during my fall, I managed to tip the canoe on its side, almost sending him into the water, Michel expressed no concern for the raft nor for getting wet. He laughed; he laughed so much, like someone who has been holding something back for so long as if he had been waiting many moons for this liberating moment. His entire body shuddered; I could see his white teeth, his wrinkled cheekbones, his eyes tearing up – his outburst was pure joy. It was neither the first nor the last time my clumsiness would elicit hilarity among my Innu companions. “Look, the quintessential Innu!” I said to myself, the one who would give anything for a good laugh, the mocking Innu, the prankster. Michel surely knew that I had been suffering in the canoe for those two hours, he was just waiting for the moment for me to be totally sprawled out before busting up. His laugh was sympathetic; it was the laugh of a good man. He knew that he could let loose with me and trusted my candour. I am sure that if we had waxed philosophical, we would have agreed that he honoured me with his laugh, that he acknowledged me in a way, included me in his circle. Michel threw up the tent in a halfhour, without me even noticing really. Before I was able to use my legs, even after giving them a good massage, the spruce poles were already set and the canvas thrown. Inside, he had set up the small poêle de tôle, the Innu heater of choice, and there he was, preparing some tea. Things were falling into place and the camp was taking shape without any setbacks, surprises, or hesitation. Michel went through the movements with great mastery, executing a sort of antiquated choreography as if we were in times of old.

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The Laughing People

But then came the flies, a phenomenal army of blackflies, terrifying swarms of them. This mass of thirsty little vampires clouded the pristine summer sky. I was bitten to the point of feeling ill. I was bitten, yet Michel hardly was at all. Flies covered his hands, walked across his skin, on his face, around his neck; it was like they were hesitant to bite him. In any case, he paid them little heed, rarely making any sort of gesture to swat them away. In the evening, we went back out on the lake to fish. In no more than a quarter-hour, we had already caught about twenty nice-looking trout. Under any other circumstances, I would have savoured this blessed moment, but the blackflies spoiled all the fun. We made our way back to shore earlier than expected; Michel saw that I was about to lose it. He prepared the trout, made some more tea, and lit a smoke fire to keep the flies away. On top of the smoke emanating from the green branches, we both chain-smoked cigarettes to have a continuous halo of protection around our faces. I wrapped myself in a blanket, like some sickly being, utterly useless. Michel did every task wearing the same smile, while I observed and pondered. As the stars were lighting up one by one, Michel started telling me a story, as if I were a companion, his son maybe. He spoke gently. I could grasp some words and expressions; I knew he was talking about animals. He was confident, the order of the world had been respected. Although I remember wondering if I would make it through the night, I found the moment to be profoundly rich. In front of me was everything I could have asked for – in other words, the essentials. Water (nipi), tea (nipishapui), the canoe turned on its side, the famous ush, the magical raft that brought us everywhere, from rivers to lakes, creeks to portages, light and reassuring. There was trout, matameku, that was cooking on the fire and the dead wood of old black spruce that we could hear crackling, sheshkatikutaku. Above all, I heard the immemorial voice of the great Michel Mollen; nuitsheuakan, my friend.

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The Laugh of a Good Man

I was there in 1970, in Mingan – about twenty years before the reserve officially adopted its original name, Ekuanitshit. Right across the way, on the Île du Havre, a team of archaeologists had discovered, three years prior, the foundations of a building dating back to the time of Louis Jolliet, meaning the end of the seventeenth century. Louis Jolliet is known for having discovered the Mississippi, but who took on, at Frontenac’s request, a political mission at Hudson Bay, became a fur trader, then ran fisheries, explored, and mapped the coasts of Labrador – just a few little-known facts. In 1697, in joint ownership with his father-inlaw, he received lordship over the Mingan islands and islets from the authorities of New France where he established his base for hunting seals and catching cod. It was one of the buildings from that trading post, destroyed twice by the English and Admiral Phipps, that the archaeologists were unearthing in 1967. Mingan. Everything seems so peaceful on this beach. However, it is filled with the spirits of Elders, teeming with history. But what history are we talking about? America’s history, supposedly having started in 1492 with Christopher Columbus? We know that Indigenous Peoples existed long before the arrival of Europeans, that there were even tens of millions of them on the continent, from Cape Horn to Alaska, but what about the Innu? How far back does their presence go in the backwoods of Quebec? How many generations were there that honed their knowledge and dexterity, walking, canoeing, trapping in the woods, ensuring the continuity of the great family lines? Archaeology is a good friend. Like all sciences of memory, it gets us to the bottom of things. It establishes links, sequences, transformations; it outlines eras and times of existences past. Without archaeology, this past would fall into “prehistory,” the colonial way of saying there was no history. Since, for serious scholars, history starts with the written word. Archaeology rejects this as false, believing objects speak, bits and pieces testify, the territory, as a whole, is an open book. From the Laurentians

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The Laughing People

to Labrador, and throughout the Saint Lawrence valley, there are traces of early human activity. Just at the Côte-Nord, there are close to fifteen hundred known archaeological sites, the majority of which attest to Indigenous occupation. However, these digs have, by and large, taken place alongshore. We have little knowledge regarding travels inland; this immense space conceals mysteries to this day. As new sites open, hypotheses are verified and realities are built and revived. At the very least, we believe they walked the territory of Nitassinan – “our land” in contemporary Innu – around eight thousand years ago. In this part of the North American continent, the last big ice caps that had totally covered the Canadian Shield for nearly one hundred thousand years were withdrawing to the north. Little by little, vegetation spread along the north shore of the Saint Lawrence – little black spruce appeared, along with bog birch, willow, and the great tapetal layer of moss, this nutritious lichen that in all likelihood attracted the first caribou. In their pursuit, hunters and their families gradually occupied lands recently freed from the ice. Despite the harshness of the climate, by sheer courage and ingenuity, they made their way. They increased their travels, always at the foot of glaciers, heading north in search of lands rich with game. They accumulated traditions and trades, leaving precious clues to their culture, most notably arrowheads that were recognizable and easily attributable to their way of life. They most likely encountered the last of the giant beavers from the Pleistocene, as big as black bears and, who knows, maybe a woolly mammoth, having disappeared from Nitassinan during the period of deglaciation. Generally, archaeologists support the claim that around six to five thousand years ago, depending on the region, the Côte-Nord environment – as far as water levels, climate, and forest cover is concerned – was formed as we know it today.2 The fauna was already alive and well. Caribou abounded; the great solitary moose roamed freely; black bears gathered in numbers to fish for salmon in the tumultuous waterfalls

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The Laugh of a Good Man

and rivers; white partridge congregated in a single location and numbered in the tens of thousands; mammals from the north, whose furs were so precious – fox, lynx, wolf, weasel, mink, marten, hare, beaver, and possibly wolverine – had vast expanses in which to live, reproduce, and perpetuate the circle of life. Waterfowl, such as duck and goose, was not left out; they nested and flew the skies. The eider settled on the open winter waters. Rivers and lakes filled with fish dotted the forests of black spruce, birch, and jack pine. Everything grew, stirred, sprung, and proliferated. It was the renaissance of the boreal landscape, after the long eclipse of the great cold. Over time, new cultural universes emerged, ones that focused more on coastal riches, the seal, walrus, migrating birds, saltwater fish, and crustaceans. In the Innu tongue, like all Algonquian languages, the opposition between forest, nutshimit, and sea, uinipeku, is well distinguished. Furthermore, there are other noteworthy differences: the great Nitassinan, which covers all of the Innu boreal lands, from Mashteuiatsh in the south to Natuashish in the north, does not make up one contiguous country. On a level that is as much cultural as it is geographic, and eventually historic, Nitassinan is split up into three delineated zones. First is the south, namely Charlevoix, Lac Saint-Jean, Saguenay; then to the east, the Haute-Côte-Nord; and finally, the northeast – the Lower North Shore and Labrador – a quadrilateral formed by the villages of Uashat, Matimekush, Natuashish, and Pakut-shipu. The landscape varies from one region to the next: it goes from mixed woodland to boreal forest, from taiga to tundra. Likewise, each country had its own fate, its own specific history. Given the present circumstances, although it is impossible to establish that the ancient inhabitants of Nitassinan were Innu, the scientific community generally agrees that they made their way onto the scene about 2,400 years ago. Over generations, these Palaeolithic societies became what Europeans would call, depending on time and location, the

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The Laughing People

Montagnais, Kakouchaks, Chicoutimiens, Tadoussaciens, Bersiamites, Papinachois, Oumamioueks, Ouchestigoueks, Excomminquois, Little Eskimos, Naskapi, and many more. It would be years before people realized that it was one Nation with the same language, Innu-aimum – nevertheless with marked dialectal variations – and with one culture, Innu-aitum. Those who were named then, across all tribes, Montagnais or Montagnais-Naskapi would eventually, in the eighties, declare their proper name in their own language: Innu, a word that simply means, just like the names “Innuit” and “Eeyous,” “human beings.”

In the wee hours of the morning, waking up was brutal. Michel was startled when he saw me. He examined me in worried silence. My face was swollen like a boxer who had just gone fifteen rounds and received a proper beating. The blackflies had really done a number on me; I could barely open my eyes. We could not continue our trip in such conditions. In the morning fog, Michel got to work immediately, and less than a half-hour later camp was taken down. When we made it back home, he put me under the care of his wife, Adèle. Our early return got people talking. Friends stopped by to see me, to observe the “phenomenon” and to encourage me, with a little grin on their face. I can still hear Michel’s effusions in the kitchen, telling the story of our trip. He gently made fun of Kauishtut – the bearded man, my nickname in Mingan – everyone burst out in laughter, I was part of their circle. I could not have had a better guide through Innu culture. It is true, Michel Mollen was the quintessential Innu, not only because of how easygoing he was but also because he represented the archetypical nomad. He was made for walking across the taiga, sphagnum, encountering flies and adversity, he was custom built for the boreal landscape; anyway, much more so than for sedentary life in government bungalows. Before the creation of Indian reserves, in the age of big caribou

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The Laugh of a Good Man

hunts, Michel had lived in a tent. He had been a child of this freedom, of this hardship sometimes, of this nomadism that Jesuit missionaries despised so much, but which allowed the Innu, for thousands of years, to benefit from all Nitassinan’s riches, continental and coastal, and to subsist in the most arid of conditions.

CHAPTER 2

Cod Country From the early times that the Basque fished for whale and cod in the St. Lawrence Gulf, they befriended all the savages of this country Memoir of traders from Saint-Jean-de-Luz and Ciboure, 1710

The Ailes du Nord dc-3 landed on the runway in the village of LonguePointe-de-Mingan. It was 4 May 1970, ten o’clock in the morning. The splendid sun shone off the sea for the entire flight. In this country where the wind normally blows so strongly, it was a day of dead calm, so calm that the landing was soft as could be. There were still some patches of snow under the spruce bowers, but you could feel nice weather was around the corner. Carrying two big bags, I got off the plane and walked across the tarmac toward a group of pickup trucks close to a hangar. In a place this isolated, a plane on the runway is like a boat at the dock – it’s an event. In the time it took to get to them, the plane had already taken off in the deafening roar so characteristic of large propeller engines. It was quite a sight, this legendary machine. Actually, since we left Sept-Îles, I found everything to be beautiful – the boreal and coastal landscapes, the dark green of the forest, sometimes dense, sometimes leafless, the nuanced blues in the gulf waters, the long ribbons of sand. When I got to the pickups, I asked if someone could drive me to the Montagnais village of Mingan, ten kilometres to the east. One man nod-

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ded: the deal was done. We took off straight away, going at a good speed down a gravel road, kicking up an impressive cloud of yellow dust behind us. “What are you going to do on the reserve?” the driver asked. I hesitated with my answer. It was already difficult, in 1970, to simply state that you were an anthropologist, and I could not imagine explaining to him my research in ethnoscience and cognitive anthropology. I went for something simple: “I am coming to learn the Montagnais language.” He turned abruptly, eyed me up and down, then said categorically, “Nothing to learn! The Indians, they don’t speak a real language. They’re always muttering the same sounds!” I held back any comments. How could I explain to him, since he was so sure of his statement, that Innu-aimun was a language of Paleo-Asiatic origin belonging to the Algonquian linguistic family, and that to learn to speak a language so complex and distant from French, it would take as much effort as it would to learn Chinese or Japanese? In truth, my goal was to gather Innu knowledge in the field of zoology, and this field study would become my master’s thesis in anthropology. Would my driver have believed that I had been preparing this visit for years? Would he have understood my interest, my passion, and the respect that I felt toward this culture? My research hypothesis was simple: a traditional hunter-gatherer society communicates knowledge by example, but it is transmitted above all through Oral Tradition. Elders play the role of custodian and transmitter; in other words, each Elder is a walking library that preserves considerable knowledge. In Mingan, I was coming to meet living archives. Just what did these hunters know about animals and nature? Did they know the names of every species? How were they classified? In what way did they organize and structure the information accumulated over generations of observation and practice? This is what anthropology calls ethnoscience: the study of a people’s knowledge relative to the environment in which they evolve. In short, I was researching Innu

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views on the world concerning wildlife. And it is through language, as a reflection of a specific architecture of memory, imagination, and thought, that I was hoping to access it – this language that did not exist. I settled in the Mingan reserve for my first five-month stay. I was welcomed by the Chief, Philippe Pietasho, who made sure that I was comfortably set up with a family. In a few weeks’ time, I established contact with my future informants: eight Elders, men and women, who agreed to share their knowledge of animals. Gradually familiarizing myself with the community, I was struck by the cultural gap separating the Innu from their Franco-Canadian neighbours at Longue-Pointe and HavreSaint-Pierre. My disappointing exchange with the pickup driver took on a more surreal dimension. How could he, and probably many of his fellow citizens, have never realized that the Innu, with whom he co-existed, spoke such a beautiful language? How could you not be lured in by the music, grabbed by the vitality of this ancient language spoken by twelve thousand people that has survived the ages to reach the twentieth century? This was the first thing to disorient me: the inhabitants of the reserve used Innu-aimun for everything, all the time. Here it was French, and even English, that did not exist. An imaginary line separated the village from the rest of the world; here, we were in Algonquin land. In 1970, the memory of the territory remained very much alive in the minds of the Elders. Traditional culture showed through everywhere. Like old Mathieu Mestokosho said, “Never will my soul leave the woods.” The permanent establishment of the Mingan community was quite recent: the federal reserve had existed for less than ten years; the village had been in constant construction since 1962, at the rate of a few houses per year. Several tents could still be seen. No one owned a television or radio, or a car, for that matter. The nomadic spirit still inhabited the premises. To prepare for my work, I compiled an inventory of every animal species found in the Côte-Nord and Labrador, including marine life. On cards, I had glued pictures of every mammal, bird, fish, crustacean … Yep, those were the old days – we had not yet

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made it to the digital era. My approach had a mechanical, repetitive dimension to it, and I had to show everything, note everything by hand. To better find my way around, and to translate the words of my informants, I recruited as my assistant the young man I mentioned earlier, Georges Mestokosho, Mathieu’s son. First, we would sit down with one Elder at a time, and I would show him or her each card in a systematic effort to collect the name given to each species. This process was undertaken by eight Elders, which allowed me to establish an elementary lexicon of marine and land animals sourced from an original Innu bestiary. To my surprise, there were species mentioned that I had not inventoried, others were more important than I had expected or were placed into a category that was altogether new to Linnaean classification. Although the taxonomic structure was rather easy to determine, I had to highlight the more dynamic dimensions of Innu knowledge; centuries of nomadism had given them intimate and wholly spiritual wisdom of the territory. Colour, shape, behaviour, life environment, mythological role, symbolic weight, sacred resonance … the portrayal of each identified species opened perspectives to a fruitful discussion. Who was Katshituasku, this monstrous bear who ate the parent of Tshakapesh? Where did Papakassiku, the master of caribou live? How did Uishkatshan, the gray jay, come to the aid of the small starving mammals? Ethnoscience was fulfilling its promises: I had the privilege to travel through the imagination of a culture and access an original view of the world. I was pleasantly surprised to see just to what extent these lexical games and exercises interested the Elders. They appeared happy to impart the millenary knowledge they call their own and to be listened to respectfully, like experts in their field. There was no complacency from me: not only were the Innu keen observers of nature, but they also displayed a remarkable knowledge that encompassed the entire field of boreal biodiversity. The subarctic soil, which we claim to be austere and poor, was for the Innu a garden full of riches, land that was infinitely

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obliging. “You won’t stay long,” my driver said to me as he dropped me off in Mingan. Those words, that tone, and that crooked grin often came to mind. After five months of intense, passionate interviews and followups, I realized that I had only scratched the surface of a well of inexhaustible knowledge. I was going to come back that winter and spring for another five-month stay. Of course, I was not the only anthropologist to take an interest in the Innu. Enthnolinguist José Mailhot was doing the same work in the Matimekush community and we were able to compare results. We even published a part of our research together, which for me was a true accomplishment.1 It is worth noting that we were precursors; our work in ethnoscience and ethnozoology opened a pathway of sorts. Throughout my conversations with Georges Mestokosho, I learned that people from Mingan remembered several anthropologists from the beginning of the century, many of whom were American, who had come to study their culture and community. They painted a rather comical picture: one was afraid of water; another wore baggy pants. At the same time, they had great respect for these field researchers who lived as they did, who ate as they did. The most important among them was no doubt Frank G. Speck. He took a keen interest in the Indigenous Peoples of eastern America, notably the Beothuk, the Mi’kmaq, and Montagnais-Naskapi. His ethnographic research on family groups that were hunting the territory between 1920 and 1930, as well as his collection of photography, provided invaluable material to the anthropologists who came after him, like José Mailhot and me. Speck noted that the Innu from Mingan called themselves Akwandjiwilnuts, which he translated as the “people from the place where something washed up.” It is assumed that this “something” referred to whales, which were so plentiful in the gulf waters. Even at that time, he attested, when the Innu found whales washed up at the mouth of the river, they would harvest the blubber. Does this very old practice derive from Basque fishermen?

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In Mingan, I would often go for evening strolls at the beach. Seated on a piece of driftwood, I thought about the history of this place, these people, and I saw the timeline scroll before me, surprised that the Innu, in such a secluded spot, were able to encounter so many foreigners. I started to dream: did they meet the men of the north that we call Vikings – Norse, Northmen, Normans – who came to America around the year one thousand? It is believed these adventurers explored the coasts of Labrador, the Côte-Nord, the Acadian Coast, at the very least the island of Newfoundland, as is evident from the discovery of their temporary settlement. In fact, it was Norwegians who had gone from Norway to Iceland, and from there to Greenland. The pilgrimages of Erik the Red and the colony he established are well documented. Leif Erikson, his son, drove exploration further west. He discovered Helluland, the “land of flat stones,” a poorly defined arctic region believed to be Baffin Island. From there he headed south, and his ships touched down at Markland, “the land of Forest,” which has been located approximately in Labrador, black spruce country. It is also presumed that Leif and his men explored the Gulf of Saint Lawrence since it evoked a third country, Vinland, the “fertile land.” This is most likely the future French Acadia, today called New Brunswick, Cape Breton Island, and the coasts of Nova Scotia. So, it was about this time, around the year one thousand, that the first contact with overseas visitors took place; however, there is zero proof of this occurrence. All we have to go on are Scandinavian sagas, written two centuries after the fact. According to legend, the Norse held rather tempestuous, even violent, relationships with the Indigenous Peoples of America, whom they called Skraelings – a pejorative term – a bit like the Greeks calling anyone foreign to them “barbarians.” Who were these Skraelings? Most definitely Inuit, but possibly Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, Innu? The mystery remains. After the voyage of Leif Erikson, an Icelandic merchant named Thorfinn Karlsefni left Greenland with a hundred men and women, cattle, and ships loaded with materials, and built a settlement at New-

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The Laughing People

foundland. Was it at the northeast corner of the island, at Anse aux Meadows? The foundations of this village, including several buildings and even a forge, were found and dated, attesting that the discovery of America by the Norse dated back five centuries before Christopher Columbus. During their stay, Thorfinn and his wife Gutrid had a son, Snorri Karlsefni, whom history has called the first American-born European. However, the young descendant did not put down roots: by the age of three, due to hostilities with Indigenous Peoples, so it is said, these colonists from the north abandoned their settlement and returned to Greenland and Iceland. Despite a significant amount of fabrication inherent in Viking sagas, archaeological discoveries correspond at least to some degree with certain aspects of these narratives: a second site was uncovered in 2016 at Point Rosée, on the far southwest end of Newfoundland. Discovered there was a fireplace used as a forge, traces of wood charcoal, and, most noteworthy, iron residues transformed from peat, a process commonly used by Vikings. Carbon dating done by researchers would indicate that this spot was frequented between 800 and 1300, the exact time that drakkars were sailing the north Atlantic. There is no confirmation that the occupants were in fact Vikings, but it is a strong possibility. History continues to be written – all the more so now since archaeology has powerful technological tools at its disposal, like the satellite imaging that helped a team of American researchers uncover the Point Rosée site. These explorations and discoveries made by people from the north did not immediately reach the ears of other Europeans to the south, since these groups naturally did not encounter one another. Yet, some vague idea of far-off islands and lands of ice imbued the imagination of seafarers and cartographers from France, Spain, and England. Furthermore, if we take into consideration the geographical location of Nitassinan, the mobility of these Indigenous Nations, and their constant interrelations, it is not hard to conceive that Indigenous Peoples caught

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wind of these sagas through Oral Tradition. The ephemeral presence of the Norse most certainly influenced their way of seeing the world. At least, in some hidden corner of their mind, they kept the fleeting image of these strangers with pale skin, light-coloured hair and eyes, donning helmets, shields, spears, axes, and knives, a whole arsenal of metal – that precious metal. They would have to wait close to a half-millennium before encountering them again – or to see for the first time, and no doubts on this one – visitors from the briny deep. We know that starting in the sixteenth century, possibly before, Basque fishermen tracked whales to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. However, we should talk about explorers first; in other words, the obsession Europeans had with discovering a passage to Asia. As scientific as it was at the outset, this obsession quickly turned economic: spices, which had become an essential part of the diet, were extremely expensive. They needed to find a way to procure them at the source, with no intermediary, and what a bonus it would be if they were to find gold! With a copy of Ymago Mundi in hand – the work published in 1410 that compiled all the cosmographic knowledge of the world since the Ancients – following Aristotle, Seneca, and Pliny, Christopher Columbus began his journey with the certitude that the western coasts of Spain were separated from the eastern coasts of India only by a small ocean strait. The rest is history. Motivated by the presumed success of this undertaking financed by the Spanish Crown, King Henry VII of England authorized explorer Giovanni Caboto, or John Cabot, to set sail toward the unknown lands to the west. Aboard Matthew, a small, modestly equipped vessel, Cabot set his course, without knowing it, toward North America. It is not clear where he debarked exactly – in any case, he did not follow in the footsteps of Marco Polo and land in the kingdom of the great Khan, as he and the chroniclers of that time believed upon their return. According to letters written by London observers and the famous map by Juan de la Cosa (1500) who borrowed certain elements from the world map

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drawn by Cabot in his logbook, it is thought that he landed on the banks of Cape Breton Island or Newfoundland. Despite the many discrepancies, the official version, the Canadian version at least, states that he likely debarked at Bonavista, on the east of the island of Newfoundland. He encountered no inhabitants there but found various instruments used for hunting and fishing. A Beothuk camp, perhaps. His discovery of the Great Banks was the most consequential. At court, he recounted that the waters offshore these new lands were teeming with cod, so much cod their mass slowed the ship: they could have walked atop them! This revelation set off a rush of fishing vessels to Newfoundland – English, Normand, Breton, Basque, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch ships set sail. A few years later, in 1501, Portuguese explorer Gaspar Corte-Real, in charge of three caravels, sailed along the coasts of Labrador, Newfoundland, and then Nova Scotia, also looking for this famous passage to the Indies. After ten months of travel, two of the ships made it back to Lisbon carrying fifty-seven Indigenous men, women, and children. According to historian H.P. Biggar, these Indigenous People were “Nasquapee Indians who still inhabit[ed] Labrador.” It is worth noting that these “Nasquapee Indians” were essentially Innu, the famous Mushuau Innu of the tundra, who, in 2003, were moved from Davis Inlet to the new Natuashish reserve. Were there some Beothuk from Newfoundland among those brought to Lisbon? The hypothesis is plausible: being held captive, Corte-Real’s crew came across a sword with gold that seemed to be of Italian craftsmanship and two silver earrings, coming from the republic of Venice. These goods were attributed to Venetian explorer Giovanni Caboto, who in all likelihood debarked at Newfoundland. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese and the Spanish divvied up the New World, following a deal sealed in 1494 by the Treaty of Tordesillas. Up to that point, France was too involved in Italy’s wars to be interested in any grand explorations. However, from

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the beginning of his reign, King François I clearly expressed that he wanted his piece of the pie. Despite Spain’s dissatisfaction, he succeeded in limiting the scope of the treaty to lands already discovered. We know his reply: “I would very much like to see the clause in Adam’s will that denies me my share of the world!” Among the Breton and Normand sailors who had already been to northern America, some were already taking an interest in these new horizons, beyond fishing, and making reconnaissance trips to the area. In 1506, Captain Jehan Denys of Honfleur drew a map of Newfoundland and the surrounding area – though it has never been substantiated. In 1508, Captain Thomas Aubert of Dieppe sailed to Newfoundland and, according to some historians, made it to the mouth of the Saint Lawrence. He captured seven Indigenous persons who would be the talk of the town in Normandy, with their clothing made of animal skins, their bows, and their canoes. Were they Mi’kmaq? Innu? Always the same question but never an answer. Strange times those were. Between 1500 and 1600, several “Indians” were brought back to Europe from America, places like Brazil, the Caribbean, Newfoundland and Labrador. They were shown off, observed, and studied. Their existence brought the definition of man into question: were these Indigenous Peoples human? Did they have a soul? Had God forgotten about entire continents at the world’s creation? The philosopher Montaigne himself met some Indigenous Brazilians at an observance in the city of Rouen, in 1562, and his conversations with them led to him writing one of his Essais, entitled “Of cannibals.” Going against the prevailing ethnocentrism, Montaigne questioned the way Europeans view Indigenous Peoples. Weren’t the greatest atrocities committed on the side of conquerors? Really, who were the barbarians? This transgression, impressively audacious for the time, founded anthropological thought as we know it today. So, France got the idea to take part in these great discoveries. Word about Portuguese Magellan’s trip around the world, completed between 1519 and 1522, had reached the king’s ears. Better yet, the chronicler

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himself gave a copy of his manuscript to Louise de Savoie, mother of François I, a manuscript with the juicy title Navigation and discovery of Upper India and the Maluku Islands when clover are born. Enthused over the prospect of ships loaded with gold and spices and convinced that if a route to Asia south of the Spanish colonies existed, then there should be one to the north as well, the king of France gave Italian Verrazzano the mission to find it. In 1524, aboard La Dauphine, Verrazzano set sail toward Spain and, from the Madeira Islands, bee-lined across the Atlantic to North Carolina. From there, he went along the American coasts up to Cape Breton Island and Newfoundland. Although he did not return from his exploration with cargo holds full of nutmeg and cloves, Verrazzano reported with certitude that the New World was attached to neither Asia nor Africa, America was “a whole in and of itself.” A continent? All these explorers, and many others, officially took possession of the Newfound Lands – starting with the English, then the Portuguese, then the French; however, they were not the first ones there. Far from it. Even before John Cabot’s “discovery of Canada,” as we said, Breton and Normand fishermen regularly crossed the Atlantic. Furthermore, it was the activities of fishermen, much more than those of explorers, that supplied the geographic, maritime, and cultural knowledge of Europeans from that time. According to some stories, a century before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the West Indies, the Basque, who were already whaling in the Gran Baya – the name they gave to the northern part of the Saint Lawrence Gulf – also frequented the Great Banks of Newfoundland. A link exists between the two: a sunken Basque ship at the Canary Islands allowed Columbus to get his hands on maps and documents containing secret information on the promising lands to the west. True or not, what is of interest beyond travel and conquest is the type of relationship that may have been established between foreigners and Indigenous inhabitants, most notably the Innu. Few doc-

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uments attest to what archaeology confirms: explorers considered Indigenous Peoples to be mere curiosities, the fishermen, however, saw them as partners. It is hard to imagine, with this increasingly dense maritime traffic throughout the sixteenth century, that there was not frequent and prolonged contact. Some historians highlight the presence, around 1580, of more than four hundred ships and thousands of men in the vicinity of Terra de Bacaloas – “Cod Country” in Portuguese. Indeed, it was a manna: in these fantastically fish-filled shoals, there was enough “sea beef ” to feed Europe, even Africa, and especially Christian countries where, during the “days of abstinence,” about four months out of the year, eating meat was not permitted. Religion aside, a new passion had emerged among the affluent for fine fish. Did Montaigne (him again) not write in his Essais, “I am a great lover of fish, and consequently make my fasts feasts and my feasts fasts”? So much the better, since here the fishing was truly miraculous. Already in 1534, on his first visit to the gulf, Jacques Cartier spoke of “the best cod fishery there ever was.” Not all fishermen set foot on land. Those who fished for “green cod” stayed offshore. They would clean and salt the fish on board the ships and, when the cargo holds were full, they would return to European markets and sell their goods without having encountered a single inhabitant. However, those who fished for “dried” cod (since it was dried under the sun and in the blustering wind on flakes) would remain for a good while. Since they were coastal fishermen, they would build small rudimentary dwellings upon the shores of Newfoundland and the Strait of Belle Isle, where they were active from May to September. Those fishermen most certainly had the chance to meet people. Starting in the second half of the same century, French Basque also dominated the landscape. They were excellent cod fishers, but also seasoned whalers. In fact, they would go from one activity to the next depending on what resources were available, and if there was no cod or

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whale, they would hunt seal or walrus. Archaeologists recently discovered dozens of whaling stations between Red Bay, Labrador, and Île aux Basques just offshore from Trois-Pistoles. Typical sites had big stone ovens where the fat of marine mammals was rendered in copper pots. Very sought after across Europe, the oil produced was used mainly as fuel for lamps, as well as a lubricant or an excipient for making soap. Several traces of these stations have been found, especially in Mingan (on Île du Havre, Île Nue, at Longue-Pointe), Sept-Îles, Les Escoumins, Bon-Désir, Tadoussac, even in Chaleur Bay and the Maritimes. This is just evidence of contact between the Basque and Algonquin Nations, and we can only imagine the extent to which goods were traded, services rendered, and knowledge exchanged. Around 1675, on a mission among the Mi’kmaq of Gaspésie and Acadia, the Fransiscan priest Chrestien Le Clercq was surprised and taken aback when he discovered that the inhabitants of Miramichi wore crosses “on their flesh and over their clothes.” They had crosses everywhere; they would use them to decorate the walls of their houses and bows of their canoes. They had so many that the father gave them the name Porte-Croix (Cross Bearers). Yet those Mi’kmaqs had not been evangelized by any religious order whatsoever. Were these souvenirs left by Basque fishermen? Beyond material traces, language is also the surest indication of Basque presence during a good portion of the sixteenth century. In a letter to Father Lallemant, dating back to 1626, the following reference to Indigenous inhabitants was found: “They call the sun Jesus; and what we have gathered from this country is that it is the Basque who formerly lived here, who are the authors of this domination.” In an account given in Voyages en Acadie (1604–1607), writer and wayfarer Marc Lescarbot describes a “language” among the Mi’kmaq, “which has a lot of Basque mixed in with it.” Similar information can be found in an archive from 1710, signed by a fisherman from Saint-Jean-de-Luz, an excerpt of which is featured at the beginning of this chapter: “And being as their lan-

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guages were totally different, they formed a kind of lingua franca composed of Basque and the other various languages of these Savages, through which all was able to understand one another very well indeed.” The Basque-Algonquin pidgin in question was probably rather basic, but extremely useful for commercial exchanges. Although not much remains today, it is worth noting that the ethnonym “Montagnais” could well have come from the Basque word Montaneses; and the word orignal (moose) is most likely borrowed from the Basque word oreinak (the plural form of orein, meaning deer), used afterward by Champlain with the spelling orignac. We are rapidly getting to the crux of our subject: commerce between nations, since from that time, the century of Jacques Cartier (not Champlain, as you may have believed), the Indigenous Peoples became close enough to the Europeans to develop the first codes for exchanges. The Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, and Innu all took an interest in glass beads and the metal utensils that would make their life easier, and the foreigners had an infatuation for exotic wild animal furs; this is what sparked international commerce. Fishermen brought not only seafood products back to Europe, but also pelts. Of course, it was more of a side job in the beginning, yet this commerce, monopolized by the Basque, would gain structure and size during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Provision contracts for ships attest to this. For example, in a contract for the Marie de St-Vincent, dated 1585, it is written that aboard there was “clean and suitable merchandise for trafficking with the Savages in Canada.” According to ethnologist and historian Laurier Turgeon, who thoroughly researched the notarial archives in the city of Bordeaux for that period, “It (was) not uncommon either to see cod fishermen towing or having a pinnace (small craft) aboard that could be used to sail to the coasts in search of furs while fishing.”2 In 1591, the English seized a Basque ship coming from Canada, containing tons of cod and barrels of whale oil, but also a “Greate Store

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of Riche Furs as beavers martrenes otters and many other sortes.” There you have it; the beaver made its debut; it was the beginning of a world … It is pretty much taken for granted that there was an episode of cultural and biological mixing between the Basque and Algonquin of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. However, the necessary research efforts must be made to get to the bottom of and bring to light every aspect of these networks of friendships and alliances, the existence of which was always suspected and continues to be confirmed by ethnohistorians. In what ways did the Basque influence the Innu? Did they contribute to attracting groups of hunter-gatherers to the coasts or, at the very least, have them lengthen their stay? The writings of André Thevet, historiographer and cosmographer for the king of France, shed some light on the relations fostered between the two peoples at the mouth of the Saguenay. In Grand insulaire et pilotage, a work he wrote in 1586, he asserts that the Basque melt the “fats of whale” there and get help “in their fishery” from the Amerindians. He adds that they “traffic also with these barbarians several kinds of fair and fine furs.”3 It is easy to imagine that the Innu, as they always did with foreigners, would come to the aid of whalers who would stay late into fall, racked by the cold, snow, and ice. Perhaps they offered them food, remedies, advice, and comfort. But was there more? André Thevet spoke of “a pilot from Saint-Jean-de-Luz who went upriver to Île d’Orléans and from there, accompanied by an Amerindian, travelled another hundred leagues in search of a gold mine ‘that is rather close to the south sea’ (here we know they are talking about the Great Lakes and not the Pacific).”4 Moreover, in a document dating back to 1613, it makes mention of another Basque captain, thirty-five years earlier, “who had steered upriver past Lac Saint-Pierre to barter with Amerindians.”5 If these passages are to be read as true, the Innu would have familiarized themselves early on (well before Champlain) with European

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customs, fur trading, and the acquisition of precious objects. Indeed, what they preferred most were the red copper kettles. In 1586, the captain of the Marie de St-Vincent was carrying two hundred aboard, and the following year, another two hundred, with other glassware and haberdasheries. Of course, this would eventually resolve a very old problem, since boiling liquid in a container made of bark had its limits. Yet we know that objects from Europe, at the beginning of trading, had a different function altogether, one that was more aesthetic and symbolic. For example, the Indigenous Peoples would cut down the metal kettles to make rings, pendants, necklaces, and earrings. However, these kettles were most often found intact, without any signs of use, on burial grounds. Already in 1600, this bartered merchandise was circulating across the Algonquian Territory through trade networks between Indigenous Nations. Kettles and pearls, axes and fabrics were found from the farthest reaches of Abenaki country along the Atlantic coast all the way to the Algonquian and Iroquois realms of the Great Lakes. One thing is certain, for decades the Innu saw “novelties” and witnessed a parade of Europeans (Norman, Breton, French and Spanish Basque, Portuguese, English) with their various ships and funny hats. The sixteenth century was a time of reciprocal teachings; just as they would be examined under a magnifying glass for centuries to come, the Innu assiduously studied the Europeans, their equipment and tools, their mores, and customs. They most definitely must have mused as much over the making of sails as they did the absence of women (since the Innu lived and hunted as a family) and over the obsession that these foreigners had for fishing. Why were such massive quantities of cod caught, prepared, and brought back to Europe? Many questions went unanswered concerning the whites: the origin of their power, the breadth of their technical knowledge, the actual nature of firearms, and the true face of their god.

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At night, seated on a piece of driftwood, I thought about all those foreigners who came to Mingan; explorers, European fishermen, as well as those who would come after, French and then Canadian trading post clerks, Scots from Montreal’s North West Company, the English from the Hudson’s Bay Company, American sportsmen (those aristocrats of salmon fishing). I thought about Acadians, Madelinots, the people of Paspébiac, the fishing families who settled on the Côte-Nord in the middle of the nineteenth century. I thought about the American army that built a military base at Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan in 1942; that strategic spot used as a staging post for bombers and other warplanes going to fight in Europe. They would fly over Goose Bay, another traditional site for the Innu community, that of Sheshatshiu; then Gander on the island of Newfoundland; Angmagssalik in Greenland; Reykjavik in Iceland; the Faroe Islands before finally reaching Scotland and England. Operations were conducted against German submarines as well; there were about a dozen U-boats that stormed around the gulf and sunk several ships and resupply convoys. After five years of intense activity, the Americans left the premises as fast as they arrived, leaving behind a deepwater wharf close to the Mingan trading post and mission, a gravel road linking the wharf to their base in Longue-Pointe, an asphalt runway, hangars, and maybe … a few multiracial children. The Innu’s taste for American music, I imagined, probably came during the war, with their record players and lps from the 1950s, as well as Tommy Mestokosho’s cool rocker look, photographed in 1958 by an American anthropologist. Looking out to sea, I also imagined that those bombers, in order to cross the Atlantic step by step, had taken the exact same route that the Vikings did when they came to America a thousand years ago.

CHAPTER 3

Floating Islands Before the white man was first seen on this island, the Indian head-chief knew of his coming. He spoke to his people, saying, “Look out! Something is coming across the waters.” And he repeated, “Look out! Keep on watching! For it is on the waters, approaching.” Marius Barbeau, Huron and Wyandot Mythology, 1915

I had a modestly furnished room – a single bed, a chair, and a small wooden table for writing that I put under the window so I could get a better glimpse of the black spruce tips lining the backdrop of the Nordic sky. This very distinct string of spiky spires was a haunting horizon that could lead me to deep contemplation at any moment. I cherished this boreal hallmark, this landscape of resistance. Behind the house, at the edge of the woods, there were some unhappy dogs, enormous sled dogs fastened to trees. You had to be careful around them, keep your distance, and not get too close. They barked all day long and howled all night: “Let us go back to the open land, let us travel through the winters of old, and haul cargo across the powder!” The house smelled new; it had just been built by the federal government. Michel and Adèle moved in without any conviction. It is worth pointing out that they adapted rather poorly to this domestic environment, never truly mastering it. Nomads from birth, having always lived in a tent, this dwelling seemed like a foreign land to them: it was a cage to lock them in, a trap to keep them stationary, like their dogs, permanently tied to a few hundred square feet. Scholarly literature calls it

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sedentarization but if you read between the lines, it’s an unspeakable sadness. The people of Mingan were not the only ones to endure such upheaval: construction was taking place across the entire boreal region in Canada to settle “on reserves” the last nomads of the country, and most likely the last in North America. Indigenous Peoples did not ask for these houses, just as they didn’t ask for residential schools. How could they have considered this massive intervention into their lives from the federal government as an “opportunity”? It went against their will, all across the north – in Nutashkuan, Unaman-shipu, Matimekush, Sheshatshiu, but also in Cree country and the Mackenzie River delta; where the Dene reside; everywhere, from Labrador to the Northwest Territories – they had to give up their traditional outings throughout the backcountry. They were proud of their freedom, yet these travellers immemorial were suddenly numbers on a tribal list, even considered the “beneficiaries” of services. The peoples of caribou and big hunts saw their world crumble around them and in return, they were offered idleness and the indignity of a reserve. Tragic times they were. In Mingan and elsewhere, these new accommodations were built on sites of old mission camps and trading posts. Old and new overlapped, giving a Baroque, almost surreal look to the reserves. The row bungalows stuck out sorely among the white cloth tents and rough timber cabins from the Hudson’s Bay Company. Conical stacks of black spruce logs could be seen everywhere: firewood for the small portable tent ovens. Uncountable were the traditional canoes propped up on a mount next to houses, a painful reminder of outings, journeys, and hopes for good seasons. The criss-crossing of new roads was an insult to the network of old footpaths; just like that, all bearings were lost. In the houses, as I said earlier, there were no radios or televisions. However, Michel and Adèle had a record player – I can still picture it perfectly, with its bright pinks and blues; Roxatone paints were the

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thing. Adèle played country records, especially those of a young Renée Martel; she would always listen to the same ones over and over and she knew all the lyrics by heart. Nothing was more comical than listening to her sing those songs in French without understanding a single word! In the village, there were no cars, trucks, snowmobiles, not even an atv. The only thing rolling was the school bus driven by Abraham Bellefleur, also known as “little Abraham,” a proud driver who bused elementary students every morning and every afternoon back and forth between the reserve and Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan. I do remember, however, a new car – a new huge American car that never moved and, it would seem, was forever parked out front of Mishtapinam Mestokosho’s (called “big Abraham”) small house. He was a man of influence, very devout, who had the exceptional privilege to make a pilgrimage to Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, and luck struck twice – he was the winner of a raffle, the prize of which was that massive automobile. Delivered to Mingan by boat, he simply parked it out front of his house. He didn’t drive and had no intention to learn. The car sat there as a sort of monument, or a statue; it was a sign of his piety, of his dealings with Tshitshe-Manitu. Federal planners had to recognize that, for the Indigenous Peoples, integrating a sedentary lifestyle was a more difficult operation than first thought. It goes without saying that they were not consulted. These soulless, square houses were designed God-knows-where, built by strangers in the style of modern bungalows, without any consideration given to those who were going to live in them. While I was in Mingan, my colleague Rémi Savard was staying with the Innu of Pakut-shipu (Saint-Augustin) where he documented the painful transition from tents to houses. “Since individuals and their space are one,” he aptly wrote, “we risk cutting into the group’s raw flesh when upending their spatial arrangements in such a hasty and radical manner.”1 As he explained, the Innu were not inherently resistant to progress. Suffering

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cold and famine throughout their nomadic life had even produced a certain affinity for comfort, especially for the heating in the dwellings. But was this the right way forward? In their new home, Michel and Adèle only occupied one room, their bedroom, in which they spent the lion’s share of their time, like in a tent. They slept on cushions on the ground, and all their belongings were at an arm’s length. Even later, when they adopted a little girl, Mireille, they kept her close in a kind of hammock above their berth; they could rock her upon hearing the slightest cry. Adjoining this “all-purpose” room was the kitchen where they received relatives and curious guests and served tea – there was always tea, Salada tea, day and night in a big kettle on the stove. Except when I was staying there, the rest of the house (the small bedroom and sometimes the living room where I would lay out my notes, maps, and boxes) remained unoccupied. Rémi Savard compared the Innu way of living to that of Asians who ate and slept on the floor, putting up partitions when needed. “In a cultural sense, the Japanese have no reason to envy the inhabitants of Brossardville. Was it inevitable that improving the Indian habitat, having become necessary in the new context of sedentarism, meant using our architectural and urbanistic habits?”2 In their way, the Innu answered that question: on the reserves, especially during summer, several of them would go back to living in tents set up next to their houses. Adapting, not to say accepting, was done little by little; just as the construction of a new village took place in stages. When I arrived in 1970, the aqueduct had just been installed; running water was seen as a revolution, even though the system broke down frequently enough that it was difficult to trust. For days there was access to neither tap nor toilet. We had to go to the river to fetch water and to the woods to relieve ourselves. Every year, the forest was cut a bit further back, recklessly clearing spaces where construction was planned for the following year. The bulldozer tore up the first layer of soil and work was finished when the entire parcel of land looked like a giant square of sand. You

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could see where the future roads would be, and electricity was being installed in units and buildings. Yet, no one considered the architectural layout of the land, only the appearance of a planning concept. Beauty was not in the plans. The reserve would be dull, functional; cookiecutter units, one the same as the next, in the middle of the desert. The harshness of the situation was in contrast with the warmth of the people in the village. My hosts were attentive to my needs and would discreetly ward off any curious person who stopped by the house to spy. Since they only spoke Innu, our exchanges would often take funny turns. Anyway, it sped up the language learning process, and I quickly learned the most common expressions: I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I’m going out, I’ll be back, it’s raining. However, I progressed more slowly with the grammar; knowing the words is one thing, putting them together and making coherent sentences is another. I felt very alone at times. Living in a community where French and English were absent – except for Renée Martel songs – only intensified my feeling of estrangement. I was in Quebec, on the Côte-Nord, but this Innu immersion – the sound of the language, the habits, tastes, and smells – transported me to a different place in a different time. People got a kick out of my curiosities and repeated astonishments. I did not always get what was going on around me. I made blunders and stumbled around like a child. Yet, I was looked after by people who took great care of me and my wellbeing. No doubt pride was a factor: in a way, they were proud to put up the anthropologist of the season! Some fifty years later, I know now just how close of a relationship we had. When Michel, naturally shy, looked at me, I saw such fondness in his eyes, the best of intentions, and a peaceful glow and concern. His eyes said: “We have so much to tell each other.” We spent hours, on evenings when the weather was bad, seated around the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes. I put my notes in order and wrote while he drank tea and watched me. Sometimes he would tell me stories, in Innu of course. He taught me phrases and got a kick out of my mistakes and

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difficulties. In return, I think Michel knew how much he impressed me. This man had patience from another time; you could really sense that he did not belong to this new world that had overtaken his, despite him and everything else. He took electrician classes in the summer offered by the Department of Indian Affairs. The federal government wanted these hunters to learn “real” jobs. Michel applied himself to these apprenticeships, as was his nature. His curiosity and dexterity made it so he may have found some satisfaction in electricity, but I am not convinced. Never did he look happier, more energetic, and more gallant than when he would leave the village for days, with his rucksacks and a canoe on his back, heading into the woods to hunt. Adèle also did her part to make sure I did not feel too out of place. For example, every morning as soon as she woke, she would prepare breakfast for me: two eggs sunny side up and two slices of toast. It may be worth noting that no one in Mingan ate like that in the morning; Adèle had seen this type of meal eaten by whites during her stay at a sanatorium in Gaspé. Her intentions were good, except that in the North the only eggs available were tshiashku-uaua, or seagull eggs. I can’t tell you how impressive just one seagull egg can be; now imagine two of them. The yolk was as big as a grapefruit, and the egg covered the entire dinner plate. Even worse, Adèle would get up at five o’clock every morning. From the moment she cooked my eggs to the time I got up, a good two hours had passed. When I sat down to eat, I would have before me a very intimidating dish of gigantic, cold, stiff eggs. As a good ethnologist, I forced myself to finish the whole dish without comment. After a few weeks of this diet, I asked my friend Georges Mestokosho to put an end to my agony. We all had a good laugh. Adèle was happy to no longer feel compelled to make this strange concoction, and I was happy to be able to wake up each morning knowing that I would be eating innu-pakueshikan (a delicious bread, bannock) with fruit and delicious shikuteu (cloudberry) jam.

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During my first stay, 90 per cent of my diet was game meat. We ate fresh salmon (poached at night), Canada goose, duck, muskrat pie, beaver fricassee (a house favourite), hare stew, some caribou, seal, black bear, lake trout, and capelin, when in season. For the Innu, this food was sacred, as sacred as the hunting and fishing outings that allowed them to procure it. Eating was an occasion to talk about animals. Each animal had its own stories and its own share of troubles. For example, while eating caribou, which was rather infrequent, we discussed how the species had been depleted in the Mingan backcountry. Indeed, caribou were seen for the last time along the Havre-Saint-Pierre road in the winter of 1970. The Elders attributed this desertion to the foul mood of Papakassiku, the master of caribou, since the whites had offended him. Over the course of the last few years, the Ministère Québecois de la Chasse et de la Pêche wildlife service decided to reintroduce caribou into the Charlevoix woods: between 1966 and 1969, about forty of the Lac Magpie herd were captured on the Côte-Nord and transported to the Laurentides Wildlife Reserve. An extraordinary operation, yes, but absolutely sacrilegious in the eyes of the Elders. Caribou were not to be treated that way; it showed a lack of respect for atikuat and their master, Papakassiku, who had no choice but to let it be known that he had been offended. I must admit, I wasn’t much of a hunter. However, I would often “go to the ducks” with my Innu friends around the Mingan Archipelago. It was the best opportunity to get down to the brass tacks of my subject. We had to get up at the break of day (around 3 o’clock in the morning on summer days), set out in small canoes, hit the open water, and paddle to a rocky point where we waited for flocks of moyacs (eiders), Canada geese, snow geese, and that other species that were so abundant in the Côte-Nord. Whenever a flock would come to the waterfront, the guys would always let me shoot first. And every time, I missed my target, sparking a round of laughter. Even today I am not sure if I missed on

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purpose or if I was simply a lousy shot, but I was convinced that they invited me to hunt duck for one reason only: to mock Kauishtut. Laughter – it was always about getting in a good laugh. My wife’s arrival would give them the perfect occasion. Newly married at the end of summer, we had not seen each other for nearly four months. Ginette finally met up with me in Mingan for a short week. Her arrival aroused the curiosity of the entire reserve. In fact, she was completely disoriented, even distressed, by the Innu way of life. All she ate for the week was salmon and trout and was incapable of trying beaver or any other game meat. The first day, once we settled in, she went to the bathroom and discovered, to her amazement, two bloody seals in the bathtub. Keeping her composure, she asked me how I took a shower or a bath in these circumstances. It is true that the Mollens, like most of the houses on the reserve, used the bathtub to store seal, duck, or whatever game the men brought back from their hunts and the women would butcher. The bathroom was not a bathroom, but rather a room for preparing meat and hides. “You’re telling me you haven’t taken a shower in four months?!” Truth be told, I had taken one or two in the oblate missionary’s house; otherwise, I occasionally washed up in the sink, when there was running water. I must have smelled of pine smoke and God knows what else, but as I said earlier, having almost died from black fly bites, I avoided any soap or shampoo that would undoubtedly attract them. Ginette didn’t waste any time. She literally took me by the ear, brought me to the river, and on a nice sandy beach stripped me naked. It was a glorious day, and the late August sun was generous. Thinking we were away from prying eyes, she pushed me into the water and started washing me from head to toe, lathering me up with soap and scrubbing vigorously, punctuating each scrub pretending to be outraged: “This is impossible! Four months without washing!” We were completely at ease, in our own world, but soon enough laughter could be heard. Muffled laughter, tucked away in the trees, as if the spruce were whispering

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to one another. In fact, a bunch of the women from the village had followed us. Hidden in the woods, they watched the extremely comical scene: a woman from the village thoroughly cleaning her anthropologist husband as if she were dealing with an artifact! The week went by quickly. A bit like I had done during my first days in Mingan, but in fast motion, Ginette familiarized herself with realities that had surprised or repelled her at first. She questioned me on everything – food, the Innu language, Algonquian history, the context of this mission, and the trading post – and she asked me about my research. Just talking about hunting could supply hours and hours of conversation. To grasp the very particular and essential link connecting the Innu hunter and his prey, you had to pay close attention to the dialogue that had been woven over millennia between the human family and wildlife. We learned that animals were not strangers to the community, that a seal in the bathtub was a friend visiting, a generous friend bringing fat, health, life, and that this bear that was about to be butchered was affectionately called “grandma.” Three years later, in 1973, Mingan had completely changed. It was now the ski-doos that howled instead of the sled dogs, who had disappeared and whose memory had already faded from everyone’s mind. Old pickup trucks and a couple of clunkers had taken over the reserve’s symmetric roads, with underinsured drivers behind the wheel. The television signal was clear; through the small screen, a new world had suddenly appeared. The transformation was abrupt, like a river’s current during the thaw, forcing its way downstream. Yesterday became old news in no time, carried away on a giant wave. Three years earlier, unwittingly, I had seen the last images of a reality that was dying before my eyes: the entire village walking to the mission church for mass, all these people moving along slowly in small groups, old with old, and young with young. They were going to church or to the docks to see the Fort Mingan, a supply ship coasting the Côte-Nord during summer. It was a unique sight, and a precious one: these Elder men and women,

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bowlegged from having portaged, heaved, and transported so much, these great wayfarers shuffling along small sandy paths, moccasins on their feet. It sometimes happened that the Fort Mingan would dock at the village in the middle of the night. It could moor at three in the morning and leave an hour later. In the shadows, a procession of silhouettes hurried along. The Elder women sold to the tourists aboard (often European) some thick beaver skin mittens, moccasins, or a pair of replica snowshoes. The children circled their mothers’ skirts, the men chatted, a cigarette dangling from their lips. Inevitably, the tourists took pictures of the elderly Montagnaises, especially those with a more wrinkled face. They would take pictures of the children as well, cute children with laughing eyes. I could not help but think, looking at this scene, that the people of Mingan, like those of Nutashkuan, Unaman-shipu, and so many others along the coast, were repeating an old ritual: they have been going “to the boat” for over four hundred years.

The sea, boats, this is how a “New World” appeared in the eyes of the Innu. Oral Tradition retained certain echoes of this “happening,” since, more than arriving, the Europeans did indeed happen! All these white bodies and faces covered with hair … Were they gods? Animals? Where did they come from? What did they want? Anthropologist Sylvie Vincent collected a number of narratives on the matter, and she writes, “All nations from northeast America, be they Algonquian, Iroquoian, or Inuit, held in their memory the arrival of Europeans on their lands.”3 In fact, you have to distinguish between mythical narratives (atanukan), abundant and heavily studied in the Innu oral culture, from “historic” (tipatshimun) ones, which recount events that humans more surely witnessed. The latter are less known; many were recorded but were considered to be of lesser interest or unreliable. In any case, few were published.

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To our knowledge, the oldest narrative that exists, the only one that dates back to the time contact was first made, was put in writing in Relation des jésuites in 1633 by Paul Le Jeune: It is the words of a young Innu man from the region of Tadoussac, Pierre Pastedechouan, who for a time was the missionary’s language teacher. A fascinating character, by the way, very representative of the disruption Indigenous Peoples incurred in their contact with newcomers. The Recollects took him in when he was just a child and brought him to live in France for five years. He came back baptized and had mastered “the ways of the world” as well as Latin and French. Although he had forgotten much of his mother tongue, he was sent back to his tribe, against his will, to re-immerse himself in the culture and eventually to be used as an interpreter and translator. The English occupation (1629– 32) made his stay longer than expected. Having acquired no skills for forest life and even less for hunting, the other men constantly ridiculed him, and the women rejected him. When they arrived, it was the Jesuits’ turn to take an interest in the young man, even though he had “become barbaric like the rest,” Le Jeune lamented, “and continued in his barbarities.” The missionaries had him sent to Quebec to help Le Jeune write a Montagnais-French dictionary. He was given “a French habit” and loads of tobacco so he would stay focused on his masterpiece. Torn between two cultures, afraid of “rotting” if he stayed confined in a single place, Pierre Pastedechouan decided to go to Tadoussac and live among his nomadic brothers. However, tragedy awaited him there: illadapted, he got lost in the woods and starved to death. Pierre Pastedechouan reminisced about his Innu childhood and carried with him the memory of previous generations. During one exchange, he delivered this precious testimony to Le Jeune: His grandmother enjoyed telling of the Savages’ surprise upon seeing the first French ship land in this here country, they thought that it was a moving island, they did not know what to think of the

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huge sails that powered it, and they were even more surprised when they saw how many men were on deck. The women started preparing cabins for them, which is what they normally do when new guests arrive, and four Savage canoes ventured out to meet these ships, they invited the French to come to the cabins that were being prepared for them, but they could not understand each other. [The French] offered them a loaf of bread or biscuit; upon taking it back and inspecting it, finding that it had no taste, [the Savages] tossed it in the water: they were just as surprised as the ruler of Calicut aboard the first European boat that he saw close to his lands. It is difficult to date the event: did young Pastedechouan’s grandmother see the European ship with her own eyes or was it told to her? How many generations back do these memories go? Nevertheless, we can presume that this meeting took place at some point during the sixteenth century. The middle? Toward the end? This was a time when fishermen and whalers were coming to Tadoussac in droves. So, it was these ships, with their masts and massive sails that embodied the first surprise. The Montagnais, not knowing from which Nation these men of the open water came, called them Ouemichtigouchiou, which then became Mishtikushuat4 (the French wrote Mistigoches), “meaning a man who works with wood, or who uses a canoe or ship made of wood,” as opposed to them, who navigated in canoes made of bark. Other narratives, collected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from various Algonquian Nations in North America, follow the same thread. For the Cree, an Elder tells of the European ship that appeared to her people as “a gigantic person in the shape of a white spruce.”5 Another narrative, reconstructed from Delaware, Monsey, and Mahican versions, evokes “something remarkably big was swimming or floating on the horizon … some very long fish or animal” and concluded, much like the Caribbean Indians who took Columbus and his men for gods,

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that “it was an enormous canoe or house in which the Decider was found.” In another story from Acadia, Mi’kmaqs saw “a strange small island”: “[T]here were trees aboard and branches on the trees, in which, they thought, a few bears were scrambling.”6 Although the ships made quite the impression, the hairiness of the Europeans was just as striking. No story mentions the arrival of any specific explorer. The newcomers were attentive and gave themselves the privilege of writing “their” history. At least they included the Indigenous Peoples in this epic tale of the New World in which they played an integral part. Between the lines of written history, we must therefore imagine … Let us imagine, for example, on that fine day in June 1534, near BlancSablon, Montagnais families gathered for summer, as was their custom. There are cries of joy, an assembly. Some are holding their hand to their head like a visor, scanning the horizon, others are pointing to the open sea: there, two “moving islands” heading west. The kids run to the water, and the men grab their paddles and a few hides. From where do these Mishtikushuat come? Are they fishermen? What colour is their flag? The Montagnais are not afraid; they have seen many other boats like this, with their massive sails. This time, however, they would not have the pleasure of getting to see them up close. These ships flying the French flag, apparently not cod fishermen, stay in the open water. The captain of the expedition has better things to do than meet people; commissioned by the king of France, he is looking for a route to Asia and, if found, “large quantities of gold and other riches.” Truth be told, this Falkland Islander captain, a certain Jacques Cartier, was making his first trip to North America. In light of Verrazzano’s writings (who, you may remember, preceded him by ten years), Cartier sought to reach the kingdom of Cathay – the region of China made famous by Marco Polo. He noted in his diary: “I did not think I would encounter such an obstacle on the new land that I had discovered.” We are emphasizing: so this continent is an “obstacle!” The king financed the expedition not to discover a new France, but to find a way

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to cross or circumvent this obstacle. Behind it was this obsession to reach Asia, the promised land – and not this “land that God gave to Cain” – such was how Cartier, in his diary, described the Côte-Nord as he sailed along it with contempt! How far we are from Jacques Cartier, just how many Christians did our poet Louis Fréchette glorify: It is the new apostle by destiny guided To go, despite the Ocean’s whirl And bring the holy word to the other end of the world!7 When the two ships sailed back across the Côte-Nord in early August, again they did not stop. Their mission was complete. Although it was an absolute failure with regards to the stated objectives, Cartier was able to show up at court with some accomplishments: He mapped the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and although he unwittingly missed the river’s mouth twice (the famous waterway into the continent’s core), at the very least he took possession of a new land in the name of the king of France. Moreover, he “braved the treachery and cruelty of a rabble of barbarians” – to use the terms from our historian François-Xavier Garneau – and he brought back two Indigenous people, sons of Chief Donnacona, who would certainly know how to steer him in the right direction. Yet, along the shingle beach of Nutashkuan (we know this from the writings of Jacques Cartier), the Montagnais, who habitually go there to hunt for seal in the grant baye (the Strait of Belle Isle), lit fires to get the travellers’ attention. They counted on “going to the boat” to bring back some valuables. Seeing that the ships were not coming in, a dozen of them jumped in their canoes, like the Mi’kmaq did a month earlier at Chaleur Bay, like the Saint Lawrence Iroquoians did at Honguedo (Gaspé), and they simply invited themselves aboard. Cartier was surprised by this laxity: “[They] came bravely aboard, as if they were French.” However, in the only description that can be found in Cartier’s journal, they are depicted as “fierce and savage!” Otherwise, mere gen-

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eralities: “Their hair is tied back, like a handful of braided hay, with a kind of nail through it, or something else; and they thread bird feathers in it. They wear animal skins, both men and women; but the women are more covered and squeezed into said skins and wear a belt around the waist. They paint their tanned hides with distinct colors.” And this was the first “official” contact. With nothing to gain from these people and their sad land of “moss and little aborted woods,” Cartier had little to say about them. He was hardly more loquacious with regards to the Mi’kmaq that he met in Gaspésie, whom he attempted to scare by shooting “lances of fire” at them. If he took a keener interest in the Saint Lawrence Iroquois at Honguedo, it was because they came from the country’s interior: perhaps they knew how to skirt the continental barrier. It is worth noting that this short commentary, jotted down in his journal, was as good as could be expected from a foreigner intent on usurping their lands, planting a discreet thirty-foot cross decorated with fleur-de-lis and Vive le Roy de France (Long live the king of France) – a simple marker, he claimed – on top of kidnapping two of the Chief ’s sons: “They are the best thieves in all that they steal!” In sum, the Innu go unnoticed to Jacques Cartier, just like Jacques Cartier did not exist in Innu history. One boat among many. A half-century would go by before a true encounter would take place.

The year 1603 was momentous in America’s history, a turning point in Innu history. Yet, the year 1608 is more generally mentioned to mark the start of Franco-Amerindian relations. For centuries, the encounter at Pointe Saint-Mathieu, also called the “tabagie de 1603” has been considered anecdotal. Recently though, this event has been revisited and re-evaluated more accurately by historians and analysts, namely Denys Delâge, Mathieu D’Avignon, and the tandem Camil Girard and Jacques Kurtness, who see in this a “founding event.”8

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The colonial version of Champlain’s first trip to North America has something archetypical about it: the great explorer approaching the natives on the banks of an unknown land. When Captain François PontGravé and his passenger, Samuel de Champlain, introduced themselves at Pointe Saint-Mathieu in Baie-Sainte-Catherine (today called the Pointe-aux-Alouettes), a stone’s throw from Tadoussac, they made contact with groups of Indigenous Peoples already well seasoned in international relations. These peoples had seen strangers sail past for many a moon and sometimes land on their coasts, especially in the last twenty years, when fur fever hit European merchants. As early as the end of the sixteenth century, there were clashes in the Saint Lawrence, notably between Bretons and Normands, for a monopoly on trade. The famous “tabagie” – feast – was, therefore, not an encounter of the “third kind.” For generations, as fishermen from all horizons frequented the gulf waters, then the Saint Lawrence valley, it became increasingly clear that the Innu and other Algonquian Nations would have to consolidate their political and commercial alliances with these overseas visitors. Yet, among the lot of them, they chose to trade with the French. A choice that was set in stone on that very day, 27 May 1603, not with treaties or signatures, but according to the rituals of Indigenous diplomacy. For Champlain, it was his first journey to the region, and he did not have any official title. Invited as a simple observer, his mission was to “see the country & what the entrepreneurs do there.” As for François Pont-Gravé, who headed the expedition, he was a regular at the place. Earlier, he had sailed the river upstream, all the way to Trois-Rivières, establishing ties with and accumulating knowledge from the Innu, with whom he had traded fur. Aboard their ship, La Bonne Renommé, were two young Montagnais men who had been brought to France the year before, of their own free will, to familiarize themselves with the French language and culture. But take a closer look. On 27 May 1603, Pont-Gravé and Champlain, accompanied by the two young men, landed at Pointe Saint-Mathieu

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amidst a lively site surrounded by bark tents: there are thousands of men, women, and children. The newcomers were received in the hut of Montagnais Chief, Anadabijou. Inside, a hundred men were preparing a great feast; meats were cooking on several blazing fires: moose, bear, seal, beaver. One of the two repatriated Montagnais men took the floor. According to Champlain, the young man gave an extremely enthusiastic report on their stay on the other side of the Atlantic. He recounted the excellent treatment reserved for them at court and relayed the king’s intentions: he “wishes them well, & desires to populate their land, & make peace with their enemies [who are the Iroquois], or send forces to vanquish them.” Anadabijou was satisfied with what he has heard. He shared his pipe with his guests; they smoked and fraternized. Now it was his turn; he addressed the assembly, making it heard by his people and other Chiefs present “that they should be genuinely happy to have His Majesty as a great friend.” He added “that he would be delighted that His Majesty populate his land, & make war with his enemies; that there was no nation in the world that he wished more well than the French.” This friendship, he concluded, would be good and useful to them. The festivities lasted two weeks. The day after the first meeting at the pointe, Anadabijou called upon his people to break camp and head directly to Tadoussac, where “their good friends” were. There was a whole lot of bustling about: in the blink of an eye, camp was taken down, two hundred canoes were on the water, things were packed; furs, kids, Elders, and dogs were put aboard to travel less than a league, to the other side of the Saguenay, where everything was unpacked, the tents were set back up, and the fires rekindled. On this small end of the earth, the French got a glimpse into the magnitude of Indigenous Peoples. This was the reason for the festivities: their arrival coincided with the celebration of an important victory that united three different Nations: the “Montagnés, Estechemins & Algoumedquins.” These three Nations, all of which belong to the wider Algonquian family, formed

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an anti-Iroquois coalition that was later called the “Laurentian coalition.” Their warriors had come back from a raid in the Iroquois river valley (Richelieu) where, together, they beat their common enemy: you guessed it, the Iroquois. They killed one hundred of their enemies, and the scalps of the vanquished were exposed for all to see. The Montagnais (or Montagnés, Montagnez, Montagnets) are inhabitants of Tadoussac, and, therefore, the designated hosts of the meeting – the first map to make mention of the group was done by Lescarbot and dates back to 1609. Certainly, their name’s origin comes from the nature of the area: the immediate surroundings of Tadoussac are mountainous, like Charlevoix and the Saguenay fjord. But this ethnonym would later encompass all Innu parentage: groups spread along the Saguenay and around Lac Saint-Jean (called Tadoussaciens, Kakouchaks [or the Porcupine Nation], Chicoutimiens, and Piékouagamiens), as well as those groups who were scattered along the Côte-Nord and all the way up to the banks of Labrador (the Bersiamites, Papinachois, and Oumamioueks). It is not surprising that so many had gathered at Tadoussac. As soon as the ice melts, it is custom for these nomads to converge at various spots, like the seashore to fish together, to trade, to hold strategic meetings, to meet partners to marry, and if the Europeans show up, to “go to the boat.” In his journal, Champlain calls Anadabijou “the great sagamo of Canada’s savages”; it is true that the Montagnais Chief of Tadoussac was an impressive figure. However, this European-style hierarchy does not exist in Indigenous societies: there is no duly proclaimed Chief who holds power over the group; even less so over other groups. In fact, it is the accumulation of his qualities that allows him to ascend: generosity to his people, physical or spiritual strength, hunting skills, courage, and above all, eloquence. Father Le Jeune testifies, “There is no place on earth where rhetoric is more powerful than in Canada … it governs all peoples, since their Captain is elected solely for his tongue: and he is obeyed as much as he is long-winded, they have no laws but that of his word.”

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Indeed, a Chief does not compel anyone; he counsels, guides, persuades, and he does so as often and for as long as he holds the esteem of his people. Furthermore, there can be many Chiefs in one group: one for resolving specific conflicts, another for leading hunts. The term sagamo, according to Father Le Jeune, came from the Mi’kmaq of Acadia, and he specifies, “the true word is Oukhimau.” A word that has travelled across centuries and today is written utshimau in Innu-aimun. Let’s have a look at the two other peoples who were at Tadoussac. The Algoumequins, or Algonquins, are a Nation of Kitchesipirinis, meaning “people of the great river.” They held a strategic position on this important tributary of the Saint Lawrence that was named the Ottawa River, and from it they controlled all the fur commerce in the West. Their Chief was quite an original character: skinny under his bearskin, blind in one eye, he was a formidable orator; his word carried far and was always heard. His name was Tessouat, and the French would later give him the nickname “le Borgne de l’île” (the One-eye of the Island).9 He operated out of the Île-aux-Allumettes, requiring a right of passage from anyone wanting to continue on their way toward the Great Lakes. Regarding the Etchemins, also called Ouolostoks and who would later be called Malecites, they came from Ouigoudi (currently Saint John, New Brunswick) and travelled to Tadoussac by way of portages between the Acadia and the Saint Lawrence. Champlain does not have a name for the Chief, but it appears that he was called Ouagimou. The French were received with great attention by all the groups present. Champlain, like his companions, was impressed by the festivities and described them: Algonquian dances during which the women “showed their nature,” enemy scalps hanging from perches, foot races, and gifts being exchanged between peoples. It is from him that we know what happened at the “grande tabagie de 1603.” Of course, there is room for interpretation. Yet historians, for the most part, agree on one thing: although no actual treaty was signed, it was understood that a veritable alliance was formed between the French and the Montagnais, which

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includes the other two Algonquian Nations that were present. There was talk of the first Franco-Amerindian alliance. There was no negotiating or bargaining, no usurpation or ceding of lands; it was rather a cordial understanding, a reciprocity of interests, and an entirely unique pact in the annals of colonization. There was something in it for all parties concerned. The Algonquians, as we said, had been searching a long time for a solid partner to do business with and to combat their sworn enemy. They made a choice that can only be qualified as historic: opting for an exclusive arrangement with the French at the expense of the English, Dutch, Basque, Spanish, or any other foreign nation who wanted to associate and do business with them. Yet, in the context of the 1600s, this choice was necessary. The Iroquois were attempting to invade the Saint Lawrence valley, and so a Laurentien coalition was imperative to block access to the so-called river of Canada. More directly from an Innu perspective, the alliance with the French corresponded to a model that they favoured: the growing of the familial circle. Not only did they get a strong ally, but, moreover, if the French settle here, it would give them “new brothers.” As for the French, they saw an obvious opportunity. They tried to gain a foothold in North America: Cartier at Stadaconé, Roberval at Charlesbourg-Royal, La Roche at Île de Sable, and Chauvin at Tadoussac. Despite repeated failures, they continued to believe in a “new France.” Surely, King Henri IV was motivated by the ever-present tenacious wish to discover a passage to Asia, but he also took a keen interest in the riches and possibilities this vast country had to offer. What European monarch did not strive to expand the borders of his kingdom? Except Henri IV did not approach it the same way as the Spanish conquistadors did in South America. He hoped rather to develop diplomatic relations with the first occupants of the premises. In a missive written 8 January 1603, which preluded the journey of Pont-Gravé and Champlain, he mandated his representatives to “treat and develop to

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the same effect, peaceful alliance, confederation, and a good friendship, correspondence and Communication with said Peoples and their Princes.”10 In November of 1603, he integrated these instructions in the text of “Commission générale sur le nouveau territoire” (General commission on the new territory). That way, he recognized the sovereignty of the Indigenous Peoples in New France and showed his intention to trade with them on equal terms – on the condition, of course, that they are civilized, educated, evangelized, and become good and loyal subjects to the king. The alliance concluded in 1603 at Pointe Saint-Mathieu would take a few years to materialize, but it would last a century and a half and eventually give the French the keys to America. Without this agreement, considering the weakness of its numbers, French influence on the continent would have been paltry. This opening proved sufficient. Of course, it would all fall apart. Relations between the French and Innu would go awry in little time; Tessouat’s Kitchesipirinis would fall ill and be sacrificed; the Basque, English, and Dutch would undermine their loyalties; the Iroquois would obtain firearms and make murderous incursions into the Saint Lawrence valley. But the French, and eventually Canadian, explorers trekking across all of North America, from this time up until that of the Conquest, were spurred on by the original alliance. For Indigenous Peoples, we speak today of a founding agreement: the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples recognized that the official text of the “Commission générale sur le nouveau territoire,” signed by Henri IV in 1603, planted the seed for the recognition (four centuries later) of Aboriginal Rights in Canada.

Innu Oral Tradition, at least that which has reached us, does not include the festivities at Tadoussac to remind us of the first encounters with the French. Instead, the majority of stories evoke Uepishtikueiau, or Quebec. We are talking about “historic” (tipatshimun) stories collected

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at various localities of the Côte-Nord starting in the 1970s by a new generation of anthropologists. Are they true? Can we trust them? It would be wrong to comb through tipatshimun for an objective truth. This memory, reconstructed over generations, is itself worthy; it expresses a reappropriation by the Innu of a pivotal moment in their history. More than the accuracy of the facts, it is the perspective that is of importance. In other words: “Not only is it no longer possible to write Quebec’s history without the continued presence of First Nations, but there can be no reflection on this history without the knowledge and perspective brought by the First Nations.”11 In Oral Tradition, the site of Uepishtikueiau (in Innu meaning “the place where the river narrows”) appears as a veritable paradise. It is remembered as a fertile place, game-rich, with generous forests, bountiful fishing, and most of all there were sizeable birch with thick bark – only one was needed for crafting a canoe. If, according to several stories, the Innu assembled there in the summer, several other stories mention Quebec as the nation’s cradle. “We are all natives of Uepishtikueiau, each and every one of us, we come from Uepishtikueiau,” says Pierre Courtois of Nutashkuan. “That is where the Innu started to grow in numbers.” Michel Bellefleur from Unaman-shipu says it as well, “Even those from the Moyenne and the Basse-Côte-Nord, those from Unaman-shipu, those from Ekuanitshit … they are all natives of Uepishtikueiau … Innu ancestors from Pakutshipu and those from Sheshatshiu also come from there. After being displaced from Uepishtikueiau, the Innu went to these places … It was after being displaced that they came over here.”12 Recalling the first ship that appeared on the river: the sight of strangers, their massive sails, their accoutrements (their hats made the biggest impression), the Innu Elders were as afraid as they were curious. Some versions tell of violence and combat. After many misunderstandings, the two peoples eventually made contact. The French gave biscuits to the Innu – as Pierre Pastedechouan’s grandmother said, the Innu be-

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lieved that the dried biscuits were wood, and the wine they were drinking was blood. In fact, according to Oral Tradition, these strangers were first and foremost “searchers of lands.” For Joseph Bellefleur, of Nutashkuan, “The French saw that Uepishtikueiau was good land, be it for cultivating wheat or something else – like potatoes – and that it was sufficiently rich for all to live off … The French chief said to the Innu: ‘I am going to grow wheat and other things and this will make it so all needs will be provided for, including the Innu.’” In the words of Pierre Courtois, the French said, “For as long as you live, it is because you will have left us Uepishtikueiau that you will find you are provided for … Your children will not know famine either, and it’s thanks to this that they will also have enough to eat.” It was not a bad idea: the sower of wheat would be able to feed the hunter during famine. Joseph Bellefleur continues: “They say that the wheat grew tall. So the Innu had to say to the French: ‘If you grow wheat and become holders of Uepishtikueiau, do not hurt the Innu when they come.’” The versions vary; rather than wheat, some stories tell that the Innu allowed strangers to build a store or post to trade with the Innu. Regardless, there is always mention of a pact. The Innu accepted that the French settled in Quebec, as long as they provided food and protection if need be. And so, the French settled at Uepishtikueiau. Once they were set up, it is said, they behaved like landholders. Some say that once unloaded, they named a young sovereign as their leader. “And the sovereign demanded that the men be killed and the women spared,” said WilliamMathieu Mark, of Unaman-shipu. “The men were killed when they came down the coast and the French spotted them. The Innu and French killed each other.” In any case, the French ceased being nice to the Innu; they went to war and chased them out. It was also told that they took Innu women. Several versions mention a displacement of the Uepishtikueiau Innu to the Côte-Nord. Yet, these lands were occupied:

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the Innu had to kill the Mi’kmaq that they encountered and repel the Inuit further north, beyond Sheshatshiu. We will not be relaying the numerous versions of this founding narrative here. Just remember from this Oral Tradition comes the idea of betrayal: if the Innu allowed the whites to build houses in Quebec, it was because the whites, with the flour and firearms, were meant to help them in perpetuity. The Innu never wanted to cede their land to anybody. “They did not pay much heed to them,” states Pierre Mesténapéo, “because they thought that this land was theirs. Never did they imagine that they would be displaced and that their land would be taken. But the French knew that they would displace them when they would have sufficient numbers.” As we were saying, the Innu do not recall the 1603 alliance; they recall the dream of friendship, the sower of wheat coming to aid the hunter who had gone to the aid of the stranger, who in turn promised to help them perpetually, in war and everyday life.

The year 1608 is where written sources and Oral Tradition come together: indeed, the French, meaning Champlain and about thirty men of the same trade, land at Uepishtikueiau. Yet there is no trace of such a name; Champlain talks instead of “Quebec, such as the savages called it” – a term that is originally Mi’kmaq which, just like Uepishtikueiau, evokes the narrowness of the river.13 Also, curiously, there is no trace of the ancient Iroquois Stadacona, where Jacques Cartier had been on his second journey. The site is in Innu Territory, in southern Nitassinan. The first observers confirm this: it is an important gathering place for the Montagnais, but Mi’kmaq, Malecite, Algonquin, and even Huron also visit. For centuries, Indigenous Peoples would go there to fish for eel; they would catch it by the boatload, amassing reserves for winter. It is also heaven for duck hunting, as well as goose, Canada goose, pi-

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geon, not to mention beaver and woodland game. “For fish,” Le Jeune would later write, “here it is like its empire.” Despite such resources, even though the Montagnais shared what they had to eat, the first winter was cruel: two-thirds of the French died of scurvy or dysentery. As for the Montagnais, curious about the newcomers, they made themselves vulnerable by setting up camp near the Habitation: there would never be enough game in such a tight space to feed all these mouths, day after day, during the long winter months. In other words, the Habitation of the French disrupted the annual cycle of quite a few Indigenous families who imprudently would not go back to their hunting territories. This is where we see the origin of a certain apocalyptic vision: like many other foreigners, Champlain thought that famine, under such rotten climatic conditions, was the natural condition of these peoples. Now that he had settled in, Champlain had to respect his engagements to Anadabijou. “My wish was only to accomplish what I had promised them,” he wrote in his journal. In July of 1609, he took part in an expedition against the Iroquois in the company of allies from 1603, the Montagnais and Algonquians, but also another force of the antiIroquois coalition, the Huron. One year later, he left on another expedition, this time to the mouth of the Richelieu, to lend a hand to Huron and Algonquin warriors. In truth, war did not interest Champlain, but he knew that his military aid was essential; these two victories against the enemy contribute to consolidating the Franco-Indian friendship and, at the same time, ensuring security for Quebec and commerce between the allied Nations. Right after the second expedition, Champlain sent one of his recruits to live among an Algonquian group, the Iroquet, for one year, to learn the language and get acclimated with the culture. So, Étienne Brûlé was the first European to land the role of interpreter, or as was said at the time, “medium.” In exchange, Champlain was given a young Huron

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man, whom they called Savignon, and he would accompany the explorer to France where he was surprised to see so much poverty paired with wealth, so much repression, violence, and severity against children, and so many gallows. All this from a people horrified by the way the “primitives” treat their prisoners of war … On this basis, these “immersion sojourns” were common before their time: how many Algonquin, Huron, and Innu went to live among the French? How many French learned Indigenous languages and were introduced to nomadic life? To go with the Montagnais, Champlain nominated Nicolas Marsolet as medium, a complex and confusing character who, from coureur des bois to seigneur, was able to make a name for himself in America. A skilled interpreter in the Montagnais and Algonquin languages, he took an even bigger interest in the fur trade and the profits he could make from it. To Champlain, as we will see later, he would become nothing less than a traitor to his country. The turbulent relationship between the two men says a lot about the atmosphere at that time. Tension was all around: who would control the fur trade, and eventually, souls. The Montagnais, although France’s principal allies at the beginning, drove a hard bargain. They wanted the amity of the French to be exclusive and expected to obtain from them a maximum of European goods, like fabrics and metals, for their use, but also to distribute them widely, both inside and outside Nitassinan. Indeed, they played the role of broker: they passed themselves off as intermediaries between the French and the extended network of other Nations on the continent. It was an immense region. To be more precise, it went up the Saguenay to the west and north (present-day Abitibi and James Bay), being that the demand for merchandise and the supply of furs was unimaginable. Understandably, the Montagnais persisted in refusing the French free access to this Eldorado. So, after Champlain’s participation in the warrior raids against the Iroquois in 1609, the Montagnais committed to leading him to the famed “Sea of the North,” which he had heard so much about, but they

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did not keep their promise. It was out of the question that the French make contact with other groups from Lac Pekuakami (Saint-Jean). Yet, this situation was repeated in the west. What Anadabijou wants, Tessouat wants too. When Champlain, in 1613, attempted to push his explorations to Huronia, Tessouat blocked his passage under the pretext that the Nepissing, upriver, were dangerous sorcerers. Champlain would later understand that they were allies, and so would his interpreter Jean Nicolet, who would live among them for nine years. There was an abundance of lying, on all sides, as well as wiles, about-faces, and broken promises between the first inhabitants and the newcomers. In 1615, accompanied by Étienne Brûlé, who had been living with the HuronWendat for years, and guided by Iroquet, Chief of the Iroquet people, Champlain was finally able to successfully circumvent Tessouat and his Île-aux-Allumettes to reach the banks of a great lake he would call mer Douce (“Calm sea” or present-day Lake Huron). Bad news for the Innu, since our explorer discovered Wendake, where lived a Nation entirely different from any of those he had seen up to that point. The language, hairstyle, clothing – the Huron-Wendat set themselves apart from the Montagnais and other Algonquin Nations on many fronts. Primarily, they were not nomadic; they lived in houses, the famous longhouses, in about twenty well-organized villages where they cultivated the land. Indeed, they belong to the Iroquois family, the same as their sworn enemies, despite their kinship. Following the example of all the French, of all the missionaries who came to New France, Champlain was seduced by this region that was “very productive in tilling” and felt at ease among these people whose sedentary lifestyle was similar to Europeans. To prove his friendliness, he agreed to participate in a third warrior expedition, this time south of Lake Ontario in the territory of Seneca, a member tribe of the Iroquois Confederacy. Injured during the battle, he spent the winter in Wendake and used the occasion to explore the surrounding area. He went to the Petun, Ottawa, and Nepissing. This long stay made it

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possible to consolidate Franco-Huron relations, and more importantly, made Champlain trustworthy. The well-developed commercial ties between the Huron and the Neutral, Petun, and Algonquin groups established farther north and west created favourable conditions for fur collection and distribution of French merchandise, which was offered in exchange throughout the region east of the Great Lakes. From that moment, the Huron would occupy a prominent place in the commercial network that the French attempted to establish in New France, countering the Dutch who were pushing from their side with their Iroquois allies in the Hudson River Valley. This new agreement did not please the Montagnais. Once Champlain set his sights on the west and the Great Lakes, pressure mounted on the Quebec and Tadoussac front. Were the Montagnais not the first allies of the French, and for an even longer period than the 1603 alliance at Pointe Saint-Mathieu? That said, can we speak of an alliance when one of the partners shows itself to be superior, arrogant, and even worse, disloyal? Moreover, what right did the French have in imposing their commercial monopoly? That this monopoly was sanctioned by Henri IV or his successor, Louis XIII, be it held by the Sieur de Monts, the Prince of Condé, or any other company, what was French politics doing in Nitassinan business? The Montagnais were not fooled: this French interference hindered their freedom to trade with whomever they wanted and flouted their sovereignty in their lands. One may wonder, did Anadabijou cede Innu lands to the French in 1603? Did he give them the authority to reign over his brothers and sisters? And why would the Montagnais necessarily enter into a treaty with the French when they could have got better prices and better-quality goods with the Dutch or the English? There’s more. Affinities between the Montagnais and the French collapsed. Yes, the two peoples worked together. They observed and evaluated each other; they helped each other during hard times (one would bring the other game meat or eel, the other would provide peas), but

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their relationship remained complex, and often ambiguous. Not very consonant with Champlain’s image of a good understanding or submitting to charisma, if not power. Suffice it to say, there were misgivings from both sides; down the years, the enthusiasm of the first contacts gave way to reciprocal distrust. What put the French off with regards to Innu behaviour was their apparent furtiveness: they’d come and go, they’d appear and then disappear into the woods. Their peregrinations seemed erratic, and in some instances suspect. The French would have liked to follow them, walk a mile in their moccasins, but couldn’t: this country frightened and frustrated them, because they understood nothing about it. The mobility of Innu groups, the way they occupied the territory, their annual cycles, the link between the wooded interior and coastal exterior … all of this was beyond them. All they saw was random comings and goings between rocky desert and dark wild forest. “All these lands are very bad, full of firs,” wrote Champlain on his first trip to the Côte-Nord. This hinterland in which the Innu penetrate happily and freely, the French do not dare adventure too far into. And this did not favour healthy exchanges. Between 1608 and 1619, Innu-French cohabitation in the Quebec region was difficult. Here are some instances that aptly illustrate the tensions. In the fall of 1618, the bodies of two Frenchmen were found tied up on the shores of the river. These men had gone hunting around Cap Tourmente that spring and were missing. The motive for murder seemed obvious: one of the two victims had allegedly insulted and beaten a Montagnais named Cherououny in the small village of Quebec. Cherououny was suspected of having acted out in vengeance. A crisis ensued. The French wanted to take the guilty party into custody. The Montagnais refused to hand him over; as was Algonquin custom, they offered Champlain symbolic reparations, namely two beaver pelts. On both sides, there was fear of reprisals. The French retreated to the Habitation, and the Montagnais gathered eight hundred warriors at Metaberoutin (Trois-Rivières); rumours spread that they were going to

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slit the throats of every Frenchman. In the end, no such event happened. Nevertheless, this conflict highlighted the issue of justice between French and Indigenous universes. The Montagnais were vigorously opposed to the application of French justice. They stuck to their customs, their way of doing things; they had their honour. Wanting to maintain the alliance, albeit fragile, and the fur trade, Champlain chose to “sink this affair amicably.” Although this concession extinguished the fire, there was no reconciliation. The stench of sulphur hung in the air. The evidence of this was that three years later, the same Cherououny, whom the French nicknamed “the Murderer,” but who had become a respected individual among the Innu, attempted to organize an uprising to attack and destroy the trading posts at Quebec and Tadoussac. In reality, there was no longer any enthusiasm. At this point, speaking of the Montagnais, Champlain wrote in his journal, “We have no greater enemy than these savages.”14 In 1622, with tensions building ever more between the two camps, Champlain felt the necessity to have a face-to-face with the Montagnais. The Anadabijou from 1603 died around 1611, eight years after the first formal encounter. He was replaced by his son, who, following Algonquin protocol of the rebirth of great men, became the new Anadabijou. Indeed, he is one Chief among many others. Remember, it is not within the political mores of the Montagnais to appoint one sole speaker. Since this function did not exist, it had to be invented. During a pompous European-style ceremony, Champlain officially established Miristou as great Chief of the Montagnais, and he changed his name to Mahigan Aticq, meaning Wolf-Caribou. This new position came with a condition dear to the French: the newly appointed Chief had to convince his people to settle permanently around Quebec, “making an arrested dwelling,” and to cultivate the land. Champlain said to Miristou this is how he would keep them “as brothers.” This idea of “sower of wheat” can be found in the Oral Tradition. Sylvie Vincent sums it up nicely:

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The French wanted to turn the Algonquians into sedentary farmers. To convince them to do so was, in their eyes, helping them “progress” toward civilization. In practice, it was an attempt to get them to abandon their lifestyle in order to assimilate them more easily. The Montagnais interpretation was not the same: the French, specialists in agriculture, were going to make the fertile ground of the Saint Lawrence river valley bear fruit and share their harvest with their hosts who, during this time, would continue the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Agriculture was classified as an activity done by a different people, not as a superior way of producing food.15 In short, Mahigan Aticq succeeded in leading about thirty of his people on this adventure. They settled on a plot of land near the Baie de Beauport and started farming. Yet, this gesture had little impact. If Champlain believed he had found a malleable partner who was also a comrade-inarms, he needed to examine the evidence: Mahigan Aticq fiercely maintained his independence against the French and, more notably, he refused to fight the Iroquois. As difficult as it was for him to command, even himself, the Chief mandated by Champlain did not command anyone. The Innu were repulsed by the idea of staying in the same spot for too long, and so the agrarian effort did not last. Then, other influential Innu started to fuss. Champlain had to use tact and serious diplomacy to navigate between imposing and often ambiguous characters, namely Chourououny, Chomina, and Erouachy. Furthermore, to his dismay, it was not Mahigan Aticq who settled definitively the dispute of the two murders at Cap Tourmente. It was Erouachy, a close friend to Chourououny, who staunchly opposed the French applying their laws in murder cases involving the Innu. It is worth mentioning here that Erouachy was not easy to get along with: he openly declared that he did not trust the French. And his word had considerable weight.

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Chomina (nicknamed “the Grape” by the French, since his name means “little fruit,” like Escoumins by the way – or was it, as some say, due to his penchant for alcohol) was also a person of stature. His originality matched his personality, since he was a man with a mind as elegant as it was ambiguous: he enjoyed French company, tried to dress like them, and learn as much from them as possible, but at the same time he had his reservations. He developed a deep friendship with Father Joseph Le Caron, and when he had a son, he wanted to name him Père-Joseph. Despite his fondness for the missionary and all his admiration for the French (he accepted to have one of his sons baptized), he would never convert to Catholicism. Chomina was the epitome of the Innu attitude at that time: keep your enemies close. The Alliance of Pointe Saint-Mathieu had become more fragile than ever. Remember the King’s instructions at the time of the 1603 expedition. He mandated his representatives to deal with the peoples of New France peacefully and amicably. The Royal Commission of 1612, handed to Champlain during the regency of Marie de Médicis, aimed more to “subject, subdue, and make all the people from said land obey.” That of 1625, under the reign of Louis XIII, aimed to “establish and expand His Majesty’s power.” Throughout the years and reigns, the French paradigm changed significantly, the manner of speaking as well, revealed this change: Champlain, in his writings, went from “these savages” to “our savages,” increasingly using the very colonial possessive.16 By 1628, tensions were at an all-time high. Once again, two Frenchmen were assassinated, one being the servant of Marie Rollet, widow of colonist Louis Hébert. This quarrel led to a crisis more sensitive than that of 1617. Champlain detained one of the accused and, despite insistence from the Innu and their offerings and gifts, he refused to set him free. He informed the Innu Chiefs assembled at the Habitation that, until justice is served, his men will shoot any Indian who approaches without consent. In truth, the French were scared. They knew how precarious their situation was, and for good reason: the Innu, much

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greater in number, represented a real threat. But there was a turnaround in the situation: Chomina accused Mahigan Aticq of having perpetrated the crime. Champlain was sceptical. Matters were muddied and would never be resolved. Again, Champlain hit the wall of Innu sovereignty and was unable to apply French justice. In 1629, the Kirke brothers’ affair would lead to the fall of Quebec. To understand this twist, we must mention a few facts. First, the idea of evicting the French from the Saint Lawrence valley was always simmering in Innu circles. Next, the Montagnais were keen traders and masters of their affairs. As early as 1610, Champlain wrote, “These savages have become very shrewd and subtle”: as a matter of fact, they took advantage of the wealth of boats at Tadoussac and the ferocious competition between the traders of various countries to work their counteroffers. Then, they set their sights on the Hudson. Champlain learned from his “Chief” Mahigan Aticq that a Montagnais delegation had made its way, in 1626, to the region of New Amsterdam (present-day New York) to meet with the Dutch and the Mahicans (often mistaken for the Mohicans). Everywhere, plans were being hatched in the shadows. In 1627, Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to Louis XIII, created the Company of One Hundred Associates; it was heavily financed with Champlain as one of its shareholders. In exchange for a commercial monopoly, the company committed to populating and overseeing the French colony in North America. Yet, the following year, British forces captured the Company’s first expedition, comprised of four ships loaded with provisions and a contingent of four hundred colonists, in the Saint Lawrence estuary. It was a major disaster: the colony depended almost entirely on supply ships for subsistence. We say colony, but at that time, New France did not amount to much. In Acadia, about twenty men lived from hand to mouth around a habitation used to store furs, while all along the Saint Lawrence, from Gaspé to Tadoussac, activities were limited to a few trading posts. Quebec was the largest establishment, with eighty inhabitants, including those from

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Cap Tourmente. If we include the random missionary and interpreter, there was a meagre seven hundred people for the whole of New France.17 Moreover, most of them did not intend on staying. What remained was a handful of colonists who were trying to make a life for themselves in rather difficult, often adverse, conditions. There wasn’t enough to go around, starvation was nigh. This vulnerability did not go unnoticed to the Montagnais. Certain among them, like Chomina, came to the French’s aid; for others, those tempted by the Dutch or English adventure, the occasion was too good to pass up. A plot was organized to help the Kirke brothers seize Quebec – out with the French! It’s time for worthy partners! The Saint Lawrence had a reputation for being capricious and difficult to navigate: to get to Tadoussac from Quebec, the Kirkes needed allies. They would find them, from both the Innu and the French, one of whom was an experienced sailor, Jacques Michel, who commanded the enemy flotilla. The first attempt failed; even on his knees, Champlain resisted. In the summer of 1629, four ships appeared outside Quebec. The winter had been terrible, and the French were almost out of weapons and provisions; Champlain handed over the keys of the Habitation to the English. Much to his dismay, he learned that besides the commander, four other Frenchmen took part in the plot, two of his interpreters, Nicolas Marsolet and Étienne Brûlé, sided with the English. For Champlain, this is no doubt high treason. “You who were brought up as young boys on these premises, and are now selling out those who put the bread in your hand,” he adjudged. Before being repatriated to Europe, he condemned and disavowed them. History will judge them just as harshly. However, were the people who betrayed their homeland truly French? The interpreters spent years with the Indigenous Peoples, living, sleeping, eating as they did, “marrying” their women, having mixed-race children – it was total symbiosis. Marsolet, and especially Brûlé, had become wild to the point of being considered Indians. They had integrated with their adopted families so well (one with the Huron,

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the other with the Montagnais) that these young kids were rather unattached upon their arrival. Champlain himself said it: they were “young boys” – it is thought that Marsolet was twelve, and Brûlé about sixteen. At the time the Kirke brothers invaded, the Huron-Wendat and Montagnais were reconsidering their alliance with the French as well as flirting with the English; did it not go without saying that their adopted sons were working on their behalf? Brûlé and Marsolet were now, like their Indigenous brothers, free men.

There can be talk of failure – Champlain’s Innu failure. In 1608, his project was nice and ambitious: a new people evolving in a new, mixed France, with an immense abundance of resources. In 1618, his project had taken shape: Champlain sent two memoires, one to the king of France, and the other to the Paris Chamber of Commerce, both lauding and giving an inventory of these resources. Yet, the country to build, in Champlain’s mind, extended chiefly west of Quebec, all the way to the Great Lakes. As for what was to the north and all of the backcountry, there was no need to colonize; all that interested him was the riches to be had from those lands: furs, obviously, but also grease from seal, ivory from walrus tusks, fish in general, and silver, copper, and iron mines that were yet to be discovered. To Champlain, Innu country seemed uninhabitable, and its inhabitants not to be associated with. As for the Innu, they were led to believe that they would be the primary actors of a lucrative business. Little by little, the dream of constituting a hub for trade with Nations inland developed. Increasingly, the French allied themselves with the Huron-Wendat, and continued to discover new Nations closer to the Great Lakes. In 1632, after three years of English occupation, Quebec was returned to France. Champlain returned, but his relations with the Innu were tainted with bitterness. Never would he forgive them for the role they played in the Kirke brothers’ affair. The feeling was mutual; of what little esteem the Innu had

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for Champlain before his departure, none remained. The promise of friendship had run aground. At his death, on 25 December 1635, the small colony did not have much of a future: all was fallow, fragile, and seemed helpless. Years went by, confirming to the Innu that the French did not possess all the skills and truths. In 1639, the tiny village of Quebec, whose population did not exceed two hundred and fifty people, was going to erect a hospital, Hôtel-Dieu, to provide good care to the Indigenous inhabitants as well as to convert them. It was the Augustinians’ adventure that was starting. Marie of the Incarnation had just founded an Ursuline convent. On one hand, the Augustinians would see to the well-being of the Indigenous Peoples. On the other, the Ursulines and Jesuits would take care of their education. The idea was simple: do good to these people and they will understand the blessings of the truth. Converted, they will stop living as Savages. They will be made into civilized, Catholic citizens. This idea of transforming the Indian by erasing any cultural trace of his Indianness is as old as time. It quickly became an obsession and would have a lasting future in Canada. But the Innu did not ask for anything – no hospital (they had their own medicine), no school (they had their knowledge). All they asked was to be able to keep their nomadic lifestyle, and at the same time benefit from European technology. But these kettles and knives, axes and rifles, these incredible fabrics, all of that came with a price that none could have foreseen: disease. The more Indigenous Peoples who approached the counters at Tadoussac and Quebec, the more who fell ill. Was it witchcraft, evil powers coming from the black robes? Regardless of the explanation, the Innu quickly associated one with the other. Never had such an epidemic hit the population so hard and the Innu, as well as the Huron-Wendat (who were decimated), were completely shocked by this. Shocked enough to reduce the frequency of trading at the posts to a minimum, enough to keep as much distance as possible from these cursed places. They had to stay out of sight from the French, evade them, keep their distance, and avoid them like the plague.

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Very few Innu, vanquished by the disease, took refuge at Hôtel-Dieu, with the hope of getting some relief from their agony. Some families sent their children to school, but the kids escaped through the windows. The grand project of civilization would be quickly aborted. At the end of the century, the Innu no longer frequented the hospital, or the learning establishments. They withdrew from Quebec completely. With a simple phrase, Marie of the Incarnation made this failure famous: “It is easier to make a Frenchman a Savage than it is a Savage a Frenchman.”

This brings us to the strike of Mingan, three hundred years later, while a young anthropologist mused over all this, within a landscape called desolate. Back then, I often replayed in my mind the many stories that I had collected from the Elders. Among these stories, there was one from Mathieu Mestokosho about the first contact that the Innu from Mingan had with the whites. Mathieu had heard it from his grandfather who heard it from a white friend, old Joseph Maloney, who had read it in a “great book” in which, he said, “all was written.” According to this story, the Innu from Mingan were seriously afraid of the sailing vessels that had stopped right next to their village. So afraid that they took to shooting arrows at the ships as they showed up. They feared the strangers would steal their women and children, and so they hid them in the woods while they took up position in ditches close to the beach to loose their arrows. One day, at dawn, a French ship appeared in the Mingan channel. Three cannon balls were fired to scare the Indigenous inhabitants whom the French were trying to disarm so they could approach. Terrified by the blasts, they sprung out of their tents, without taking the time to grab their bows and arrows. The French then attempted to appease them by laying some merchandise in the sand, but fear kept the locals at bay; they took nothing. “Be not afraid,” said the French, “We want to offer you food, we will set up a store and a trading post. There will be many things in this store.” After a few days, the Indigenous

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inhabitants decided that the whites did not mean them any harm and went to meet them. Mathieu concluded his story by citing old Maloney: “We took care of you and were able to learn your ways and customs. And you became Catholic.” A curious tale from some unknown “great book,” that Mathieu remembered from his grandfather contained the following lesson: sometimes it was better to fight to preserve your goods. And, he might have added, your culture. Mathieu told it his way, and for example, during an exchange I had with him, he articulated this very meaningful sentence: “The Elders knew a lot before being Catholic.” During those summer evenings, while looking out to sea, I would imagine the sailing ships from Mathieu’s story. I also imagined, laid out on the beach, the kettles, axes, bundles of fabric, and biscuits. Then, I would turn my head and look to the village, searching for where the hunters would have taken cover to shoot their arrows. Mathieu said, “I remember those ditches, there was one close to the church, another close to the river, and another close to the sea.” Absorbed by these thoughts, I continued my solitary stroll. Often, I would stop in front of a seaside spruce, a resistant black dwarf, one of many on the coast, and all over the backcountry: the undergrown tree, the awful little “wood” of Jacques Cartier, the “nothing tree” of Samuel de Champlain. The one that brings opprobrium. Was it not because of it that the French so disparaged Innu country? However, they should have recognized in its tiny shoots the essence of greater struggles. The French roamed the fringes and banks of Innu land; uneasy, they skimmed the surface, travelling west hoping to find better, something gentler and more deciduous. The young anthropologist that I was in 1970 saw nothing “desolate” in these landscapes but rather was disappointed that people could dismiss the subtleties of this splendid boreal garden, as well as the nomad’s spirit, resolution, and belief, his incessant march in the vastness.

CHAPTER 4

Élisabeth’s Bread Nimishat, nutin shatshitauat assinu uapitsheushkamiku mak massekushkamiku Nimishat, nutin, shatshitauat anite ka pimikaut shipu anite ka pimikaut shakaikan minaiku uitamuepan nutauia

My sisters the four winds caress a ground lichen and moss rivers and lakes the place where the white spruce spoke to my father

Joséphine Bacon, Tshissinuatshitakana/Talking sticks

She looked tiny, my green Beetle, suspended in the air above the ship, hoisted just above the Fort Mingan that had transported it from SeptÎles. I settled in for a second five-month stay in Mingan and was glad to have my Volkswagen with me. I could cruise the gravel roads going from Rivière-au-Tonnere to Havre-Saint-Pierre. It was rather limited; on one side, you’d end up at Sheldrake River, and on the other in the subarctic plains, beyond Havre. Still, it was eighty kilometres of road, or “washboard” rather, an expression for the rippled gravel that jostles the tires, the seats … the whole car. Assembled on the pier, my Innu friends could not conceal their joy upon seeing the young anthropologist whom they had mocked so much the summer before, but at that moment they were especially interested in the strange vehicle being unloaded. They would soon see its utility. Adding to my role of anthropologist would be that of chauffeur. In Mingan, there was a society of old women. I came to know this discreet society through Élisabeth Nolin (Nishapet Enim in Innu), an elderly widow who lived next door to the house where I was being

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hosted. I will never forget her face, her cheerful demeanour, but above all her dark beady eyes, so lively and intense. She was splendid, always smiling, curious, and personable; all I had to do was show my face and she would start laughing. Élisabeth styled her hair traditionally, a bun rolled up behind each ear, almost always topped with a beret. More rarely, she could be seen wearing a Montagnais bonnet, the shetshipatuan-akusniskueun, this typical, colourful headwear that has been in the Innu community for two centuries.1 As for the rest, she wore a dark blue wool jacket, a long, ankle-length skirt, moccasins, and wool socks; she donned a sizeable crucifix on her chest and smoked a pipe. Had tourists ventured into the village, which never happened, they would not have been able to resist snapping a shot of this elderly woman, an authentic Montagnais from times of old. Élisabeth lived in a house with her son, a bachelor with a sombre disposition, which was a rare occurrence in these communities. In reality, she lived in her new “government house” part of the time. Her traditional tent was set up next to her bungalow, a white canvas prospector tent that she lived in from spring to fall. In other words, she only used her house during the coldest months of winter. Both her tent and her house seemed to be well kept, especially her tent, the interior of which was very inviting, comfortable, and cozy. Nishapet saw to the order of her belongings. Just shy of ninety years old, never would you find her idle. She would spend entire days seated just outside her tent, next to her fire; a fire, I should say, that she kept burning from one starry night to the next. Under the embers, in the sand, she cooked bread. It was a good-sized country loaf, round and nicely raised, unlike bannock, which is a kind of unleavened flatbread. It took a while to cook and required patience, hour upon hour of constantly stoking the fire so that the sand became fiercely hot. Yet, Nishapet looked as though she had all the time in the world. She distributed her pretty loaves to family and friends. Since we lived just next door, the Mollens and I were often lucky enough to be served first.

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Every day, either leaving or coming back to the house, I would stop by for a visit. Whenever I sat down next to her, a big smile would come across her face; she always offered me tea and some small game to snack on, beaver generally. Above her fire, she had kettles in which she was boiling water and cooking pieces of meat in fat. While tending to her fire, she would go about her other business, most of the time seated on her heels. This position is the most natural for humans; only Westerners, with their chairs, benches, and couches, over time have unlearned this way of sitting and working, even losing the necessary flexibility to find it comfortable. The Innu Elders were more comfortable in this position than seated in a chair. Nishapet could remain seated on her heels for hours, scraping beaver or seal hides that she would stretch and dry. These hides were no longer destined for trading post counters, like in the old days. They were instead used for craftwork, making moccasins and mittens, a job that kept her and her elderly friends occupied throughout the winter. We smoked, Nishapet and I, and we were happy, without having to speak a word to each other. The air smelled of sweet spruce wood, resin, and smoke. I felt as though I had been transported to the middle of a wild territory in tranquil times. Silence fell, and I sat motionless next to her, just watching her be, without her being surprised by it. It would happen sometimes that she would start talking, in Innu, in a very casual manner, telling me things I could only grasp in a broad context. One day, curious to learn more, I asked her son, the taciturn bachelor, to sit with us so he could translate Nishapet’s words. Through her son’s mouth, whose smile returned while relating his mother’s words, I received a valuable lesson in ethnography. Nishapet, a sparkle in her eye, nothing mischievous, said this to me, which I now repeat from memory: You hang around many of the old hunters, Kauishtut. I watch and observe you; you spend a lot of time chatting with one here

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and one there. You must hear some stories about caribou, meat, and blubber, great stories about great hunts without end. Well, you should know that those Elders do not tell the whole truth. They only tell of their hunting successes. Actually, I think the Elder hunters tell you their dreams. Because our men were good at hunting, it’s true, but they did not always get their kill. It often happened that they came back to camp empty-handed. So, it was us women who took matters into our own hands: we went ice-fishing and always made sure there were reserves of fish to eat – fish and also hare and partridge. It was the women who went fishing every day, who hunted and killed smaller game. We had to eat and to feed the children. Eating caribou was a feast, but it was the fish that kept us fed through winter, since ice-fishing and small game hunting was much more reliable than hunting giant caribou. These words from Nishapet sent a shock through me. I realized that men had always done traditional and classical ethnographies about hunter-gatherer societies, and their contacts were also men. The results of these studies, overall, had an obvious risk of being biased, or, at the very least, skewed. Did we systematically underestimate the woman’s role in everyday life? The wise Nishapet was right, the Elder hunters spoke in great detail (somewhat ideally) of their encounters with caribou, their successful hunts, and the pride they took in a good feast. Essentially, they recounted the momentous events that made memorable moments. Yet over long periods, on the whole, they were less loquacious. Were it not for the women of the territory to keep camp and see to everyday needs, all the Elders would be dead – that is what Nishapet thought, and that is the story her mocking eyes told. With what humility did the women ensure sustainability, a world reborn, without making a mountain out of a molehill? They took such care, dressing their man for the day of the hunt that he may be handsome and please the spirits,

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thus ensuring success, so the family may eat meat, blubber, and “animal courage” in the tent’s warmth.2 Nishapet also spoke to me about her previous life, her nomadic life that she and hers knew before the reserves: You know, Kauishtut, I’ve been all over in my life. With my husband and his brothers’ families, I made my way around the country, by canoe, on foot, along the coast, and in the woods. My husband liked changing spots every summer, he liked to go the different trading posts. We met up with other groups, saw family, then went and spent winter on our hunting grounds. I saw Uashat (Sept-Îles) and Mishta-shipu (Moisie River); I saw Atikonak Lake, Sheshatshiu where there is a river with big falls; I went to Winuakapau, Musquaro, Unaman-shipu, and Nutashkuan. As you see me standing here, Kauishtut, I travelled the world. I looked at her hands, her old yet agile fingers that deftly handled the dull knife and the mukutakan (the crooked knife). I saw her grab small logs of dried spruce that she stacked next to her fire with the simple, sure-handed dexterity of an artisan; her gestures were slow, she stopped often, taking much delight in smoking her pipe and pouring herself tea. I saw her on her knees in the sand, this petite woman before the fire, just outside her tent; surrounding her was a blanket of northern moss that ran to the feet of the black spruce, so thick that they formed a dark wall behind us, a sacred boundary. Nishapet inhaled the old Innu spirit that floated across the vastness of Nitassinan. Far from being alone in the world, Nishapet had a circle of friends, Philomène, Madeleine, Élisabeth, and Anastasie. Together, they formed what I mentioned above as a discreet society of old women. They all had pretty much the same lifestyle: a tent pitched next to the house, hides to tan, small snowshoes to make, and moccasins and mittens to

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sew. They hung out together, sat in the same pew at church. Some of them were more round and portly, others were very thin, like Nishapet. Some wore a scarf around their head, others wore the traditional bonnet for Innu women; all of them had a crucifix hanging around their neck. Nishapet was proud of her friendship with the anthropologist and the fact that I spent a lot of time with her. I learned later that she had bragged to the other women that she could requisition my strange vehicle and my driving services whenever she needed them. Having taken the initiative, she was tactful when it came time to present her request: she had her son intervene as translator and offered me an excellent dish of beaver fricassee. All she wanted was for me to drive her and her friends to a few specific spots in the woods and bogs to pick berries. You should have seen how gleeful she was, how proud and grateful, when I said I was their man, that it would be my pleasure to drive them wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted. She took a long look at me, like a grandmother looking at her grandson. My “job” as the personal chauffeur for the elder women of Ekuanitshit remains to this day one of my fondest memories from there. Just like Nishapet, her friends Philomène, Madeleine, Anastasie, and, let’s say, Élisabeth II were happy to leave the village, spend time together, and pick berries, especially cloudberries. They quickly appropriated the green Beetle, taking their seats as if the vehicle were just for them. I would go and pick them up in the morning, in front of each of their houses, and I would bring one group of three to a spot that they had carefully chosen about twenty or thirty kilometres from Mingan. Once the first group was set, I would drive back to the village and pick up the second. Then I would bring them from one spot to another, or from patch to patch, all day long, before bringing them home for suppertime. We were quite a sight to see, the Beetle kicking up a small cloud of dust, the elder women gabbing and guffawing, and the young driver taking his job very seriously. In return for my services, like in the old days of

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bartering, Nishapet and her friends would give me fruit and small artisanal tokens. But it was their trust in me that I held most precious. One day, coming back from gathering fruit, the old women (much like little girls) were one-upping each other, telling scary stories of malefic forces, abominable entities hidden in the thickets, stealthy animals that surprise you in the woods. Suddenly one, then another, then all started yelling, “Nakai! Kauishtut! Nakai!” which meant “Stop, Kauishtut, stop!” Immediately, the hair on my arms stood on end, I thought Matshi-Manitu, the evil spirit, had appeared. Nope. On the side of the road was the cadaver of a porcupine. We got out of the car and the women, very excited, trotted toward the animal. Hovering over it, they held a sort of caucus; turning it over, feeling it with the tip of their toes, they were determining how long ago it had been run over. Upon ascertaining the corpse was still warm and the blood fresh, the excitement kicked up a notch. They ran to get a blanket from the car and adroitly picked it up. No doubt about it, this was not their first porcupine. For the rest of the ride home, the package still warm in their laps, each woman honoured it in her way: “Hey, Kaku! So slow you are crossing the road! Oh, Kaku! Thank you for showing up on our path! Kaku! Of all the animals in the forest, yours is the best meat! Thanks to your quills, kaku, we will sew the nicest moccasins!” The next day, Nishapet sent me a sizeable portion of porcupine ragout and I confess that it was, truly, a delicious dish. For five months, spending time with these matriarchs was a privilege for me. Through them, I saw the passionate, at times grueling, history of a great people. Above all, I became a small part of the story, one unfolding over time. And it all happened while I was parked at the forest’s edge, waiting on my friends for hours, in total calm and solitude. I would smoke cigarettes, read a book, eat some of Élisabeth’s bread. I could not have been happier: I was the personal driver of living legends.

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When Nishapet said she had been around the world, it was true. She had wandered far in her world, accumulating knowledge from generations past. Truly, it was vast. Nothing defines better a traditional Innu than his or her travels: a steady, patient pursuit of comings and goings, ascents and descents, a sort of circular dance, an uninterrupted movement of steps treading over taiga, of paddles dipping into the water, and snowshoes sinking in the snow. These itineraries brought people together, linked places to the past, and trips to memories. As centuries passed, the Innu eventually explored and were able to recognize Nitassinan in its entirety. There were lakes where births took place and burial grounds. Landscapes rediscovered because they had once been familiar. Each step mashed the humus of distant childhoods, of dead souls. Every rustle and cracking awakened memories of great hunts, the fatty odour of old households, and the bitter taste of famine. The Innu represented the archetype of nomadic populations: they possessed the know-how of packing and transporting; they set up house and home wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted, in the time it took to put up camp, take it down, and pack it all to go somewhere else. The resources of the land being dispersed, they needed an immense domain to meet everyone’s needs. Families occupied vast spaces, adapting to the rhythm of seasonal variations and game migrations. Because hunters did not walk alone, no one in the Innu community was alone. The family was of paramount importance, not the nuclear family we know in our societies, far from it: it was an extended family, very extended. What anthropologist José Mailhot calls parenté extensible (“expandable parentage”). For example, “when an Innu speaks about his grandfather, nothing is more ambiguous. Nimushum can mean one of his actual grandfathers, or the spouse of his actual grandmother, or the man who raised his father, or the father of his godfather, or that of his godmother, the father of his wife even.”3 It was like this for all members of the tribe, close and distant, from a great grandmother to a little niece, to cousins linked by a spouse who has passed away. The unity of

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the Innu Nation stemmed from this wise network. Each person saw him- or herself through this web woven of relations, threads in an endless network. To travel this country was to visit its lineage, one camp after another. Listing all of one’s kinships amounted to having to cross all of Nitassinan, even beyond. Like the Great Hare of Algonquin mythology who, to grow the earth, stamps the surface while running, making larger and larger circles, the traditional Innu was constantly on a quest for new relatives to extend the scope of his or her existence. It is worth noting that the Innu, like many Indigenous Peoples, did not attach any particular importance to biological filiation. Adoption was common practice: the children were of utmost importance. They could come from another group or their own; grandparents could raise their grandchild; a large family may give their last born to an infertile couple; anything was possible and welcome in these societies that loved children unconditionally. There is a wonderful account given by Father Le Jeune (despite himself). Wanting to dissuade a sorcerer of loving several women, and unfaithful women of loving a man other than their husband, he warned “that this evil was among them, and he was not sure that his son, who was present, was indeed his son.” The sorcerer answered eloquently, “You lack wit. You, the French, you love only your own children, but we cherish universally all the children of our nation.” And the Jesuit concluded that the sorcerer “philosophized like a horse and mule!” For the European explorers and missionaries, nomadism seemed completely random. It took the arrival of the first anthropologists a few centuries later to establish that, on the contrary, these peoples, considered by the Jesuits as “errant vagabonds,” “erratic and fugitive,” had a very organized way of life. Starting with the structure of their society. As living on the taiga was hard, the Innu relied on strength in numbers to subsist. Consequently, they formed hunting groups; two, three, as many as six families moved and lived together, sharing shelters and anything they found to eat. From marten to hare season, from caribou to

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Canada goose migration, from windfall to forest fire, from frost to thaw, they followed the natural pace of life. As soon as the ice melted, the different family groups gathered for summer with other groups along the major rivers, around an inland lake, or at the seashore, forming a cluster of a few hundred head. Each cluster occupied a river basin with which it identified and from which it got its name. Had you crossed Innu Territory around 1650, paddling and portaging, surely you would have crossed people at Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay fjord, and others at the Péribonka, Mistassini, and Métabetchouan; people along the Portneuf, Escoumins, and Bergeronnes rivers; others on the Pessamit, Manicouagan, Godbout, Sainte-Marguerite, Moisie, and Mingan; then there were people from Natashkuan, Unaman-shipu, the Little Mecatina, Musquaro, and Pakut-shipu. Inland, there were other clusters whose existence remained unknown for quite some time, most notably the Michikamau, Petisikapau, Caniaspiscau, and so on, as Frank G. Speck identified them at the beginning of the twentieth century. The summer was the season for great collective fish outings and seal hunts; it was also a time for celebrations and exchanges. But most of all, it was an occasion to “mix blood”; the younger generation used these gatherings as an opportunity to meet people from other groups and form new families, new offshoots. These meetings also took on an international dimension. Through archaeology, we know that the first occupants sought out contacts beyond the borders of their territory. In the 1990s, several historic and prehistoric sites were discovered all over the Côte-Nord. One excavation, in particular, over two hundred kilometres inland (on the north bank of the Jean-Pierre River, a tributary of the Sainte-Marguerite), helped uncover many artifacts. Among them were twenty-one different types of stone: an indication that suggests much human movement, from the centre of Quebec to the north, which had gone on for four thousand years.4 A hypothesis, certainly, yet the fact remains that the missionaries, upon their arrival, attested to interrelations being entirely common and enshrined in the region’s mores.

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So, Nations from all over flocked to specific spots, either inland (around watersheds) or seaside. Places like Chicoutimi, Métabetchouan, Nekubau, Tadoussac, Tshishashipu, Métabéroutin, Uepishtikueiau. Trade fairs, art and gastronomy festivals, diplomatic summits; what name could be given to such gatherings where, in an atmosphere of singing and dancing, not only merchandise was exchanged, but also knowledge, and where as many military alliances were created as were couples? Through narratives and tales, Oral Traditions circulated from one Nation to the next, and myths (atanukan) were born and spread, hatching identities. Reciprocal adoptions between peoples occurred, allowing the adoptees to serve as interpreters and, in some ways, cultural bridges. The Innu spread their parentage to the Eeyou (Cree), the Nehirowisiiriniw (Atikamekw), the Anishinaabe (Algonquin), the Mi’kmaq, the Wolastoqiyiks (Etchemins-Malécite), even as far as the Abnaki Nations along the Atlantic Coast and the Wendat on the Great Lakes. The Wendat sparked much enthusiasm amongst nomadic peoples with their cultivated products, especially tobacco and corn, but also pottery, pipes, and beads, whereas the Wendat appreciated the quality of Algonquin canoes and furs from the North, considered the most beautiful. In sum, what foreigners described as “vagrancy” corresponded rather to prodigious mobility. Be they aboard their canoes or on hiking trails, the Indigenous Peoples covered thousands of kilometres for hunting, war, commerce, love, and perhaps just out of curiosity and a taste for adventure. In a Relation from 1640, the Jesuits reported the presence of an Anishinaabe family from Abitibi at the trading post in Tadoussac, without paying it much heed. However, these people had crossed almost all of Quebec, west to east, from the Eeyou and Atikamekw junction to Lac Pekuakami (Lac Saint-Jean), before making their way down the Saguenay. Just think about making that journey, even today. That is how Indigenous Peoples travelled throughout northeast America. Although it was Innu custom to welcome any and all “family” into their home, they enjoyed visiting their loved ones just as much, even if they were

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distant. Using secret inland trails, which were unknown to the French, they could make it to the Great Lakes. They also travelled on the major waterways, going up the Saint Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers. It was reported that they had also crossed the Gaspé Peninsula to find their Abnaki cousins, and into the Gulf of Maine. This demonstrates just how elastic borders were and how far alliances reached. In the very first Relation des jésuites, dated 1611, Father Pierre Biard, missionary in Acadia, described with a fresh eye, not yet perverted by decades of judgment, these remarkable journeys. In order to thoroughly enjoy this, their lot, our foresters start off to their different places with as much pleasure as if they were going on a stroll or an excursion; they do this easily through the skillful use and great convenience of canoes … And the best part of it is that they can land wherever they like, which we cannot do with our shallops or sailing boats … nevertheless we scarcely see these Savages posting along at this rate, for their days are all nothing but pastime. They are never in a hurry. Quite different from us, who can never do anything without hurry and worry; worry, I say, because our desire tyrannizes over us and banishes peace from our actions. There is much to be reported on the Innu of old, but there is even more left to the imagination. It must be said, we have taken much more interest in the Indigenous Peoples on the other side of the world (Mongolians, Laplanders, and Papuans) than we have in the nomads on our taiga. This was a strong trend among our lettered French Canadians, which was aptly depicted by sociologist and historian Gérard Bouchard: “In the image of European conquerors who treated the spaces of the Americas as if they were empty, they treated their memory as if it were blank.”5 Beginning with the first documented contact in 1534, there was such a brazen waste of ethnographic data, often due to dismissal, but

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even more so from misunderstanding. Irretrievable waste. When Jacques Cartier sighted Indigenous Peoples from his boat near BlancSablon, then around Nutashkuan, as was mentioned earlier, he took little care in his portrayal of them – even as he had to show some interest in them. At least he noted eventually that “they came from the great bay,” which gives us reason to believe they were Innu from Labrador. During summer, they gathered on the Basse-Côte-Nord and, if they weren’t Montagnais of Charlevoix (who were later called “Montagnais of Champlain”), they were nevertheless part of the same cultural nucleus. Again, nobody dug deeper. Because the first missionaries and explorers were not able to understand the Innu way of life, namely the system of bands or Nations, the scale of the territory and how it was occupied, they gave distinct names to all the small groups they crossed along the rivers, as if in Nitassinan there existed countless different nations. We know that these groups all shared the same language, traditions, and identity. The Jesuits eventually understood this and, much later, Speck merged them and gave them one single name: the Montagnais-Naskapi. An ethnonym that would stick to the point where the group itself, in the 1990s, exasperated with being identified any which way, imposed the name in their language. In 1927, Speck drew a map showing all the Innu country as it was in the first part of the twentieth century. This map is as precious as it is illustrative: the American anthropologist clearly showed the breakdown of Nations across the territory and identified them by the hydrographical basin each of them occupied. It is easy to decipher the rivers and lakes, the points of summer gatherings, and the mark and influence of the trading posts and evangelizing missions. On it are the Michikamau and Petisikapau Nations, a good example of groups of families living on the Labrador plateau, who did not make their way to the sea during summer, but rather gathered around these immense lakes. In short, Speck’s reconstitution illustrates the extent of the country and its original diversity; it is indeed an accurate portrayal of the situation around

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1900 and gives an account of the state of affairs since Cartier, if not much earlier. Regardless of the various changes undertaken or incurred by Nations to adapt to trading posts and missions, all lead us to believe that the principle of occupying hydrographic basins – one river, one Nation – had always prevailed, at least for as long as the Innu were nomadic and the families passed winters inland. Do we know how many families, how many individuals populated the Quebec-Labrador peninsula? Unfortunately, it is practically impossible to determine the number of Montagnais at the time of first contact with Europeans and, more particularly, during the preceding millennia. In Father Biard’s Relation, mentioned earlier, he reports having asked the savages how many of them lived in New France. They estimated the population of the Souriquois (Mi’kmaq) to be between three thousand and three thousand five hundred, the Etchemin around five thousand five hundred, and the Montagnais one thousand. How could the Indigenous Peoples from Acadia evaluate the numbers of those of the Côte-Nord? True, the Mi’kmaq moved around a lot, and we know they frequented Tadoussac starting in the second half of the sixteenth century – the toponym Tadoussac may have come from the Mi’kmaq word gtatosag, meaning “between the rocks,” or possibly from the Innu word tutouskak, meaning breast, alluding to the two round, sandy mounts situated east of the village.6 However, their estimation was very approximate. It did not consider the other Nations occupying the land, starting with the Abnaki, and further inland, the Iroquois, Algonquin, and Huron. As for the “thousand Montagnets,” considering how dispersed this population was over such an extremely vast territory, it was difficult to make a census of them, and so the numbers are way off. A second estimation came from Champlain’s travel stories. As was stated earlier, when the navigator arrived at Tadoussac in 1603, smack in the middle of a gathering, he noted there were two hundred canoes and a thousand individuals. Here again, there is no way to establish an

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exact number of Montagnais, since among them were a multitude of Etchemin and Algonquin allies. Furthermore, not all the Innu made the trek to the tabagie. To estimate their numbers in a more accurate and realistic way, we would have to know what was going on in the hinterland, cover all the rivers, principal and secondary watershed areas, all the lands dotted with lakes, big and small. Such explorations surely did not take place at the time of first contact, and afterward, under French and British control, they remained rare and episodic. Today, we acknowledge the existence of a single great and ancient geographic entity – Nitassinan – the country of all Innu from northeast Quebec and Labrador. This domain extends west to east, from the SaintMaurice watershed to Labrador’s Atlantic coast, via Lac Saint-Jean; and along the north-south axis, from the north bank of the Saint Lawrence (by Portneuf, downstream from Trois-Rivières) to Ungava Bay. Yet beyond conjecture and measurements, Nitassinan was and continues to be more than a country, it has always been a state of mind. Mentally, the old Innu visualized the entirety of their land, and they had a satellite vision of it. The names of lakes and river basins, the landscapes and reliefs, places linked to life events, sacred sites from mythical stories (like the faraway mountains where Papakassiku resides), some suspect places where the Atshen erred, these giant cannibals,7 everything held meaning for the so-called barbarians. In the details, they recognized every constituting element of their environment; they could read caribou traces on frozen lichen, as well as spot the minutest meandering of the smallest stream in the immense hydrographic network harbouring their parentage. And they were responsible for this world. Nature, as hard as it is generous, demanded they be impeccably rigorous, that they live according to the law of good hunters. Without this wise culture, centred on ethics, spiritual integrity, and practical skills, the Innu would never have survived in these places, established bloodlines, buried their dead, and loved their country.

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Innu culture: if these two words put together have a normal resonance today, for a long time they were considered antinomic. How could these poor people with no faith or laws, no writing or art, have any culture? To conceive the history, strength, and singularity of Indigenous Peoples, and in particular the Innu, we must swim across an ocean of prejudice. The fact that the nomadic way of life evaded observers is perhaps explainable, but the distorted reports, harsh commentary, the all-toooften-biased relationships reported by explorers and missionaries, who were the only witnesses from that time, these are the things that opened the floodgates to centuries of rejection – an effect that persists to this day. At the outset, from Jacques Cartier to Father Le Jeune, the tone was set: Indians were miserable beings in general, and nomads were even worse, human wreckage. Were they in fact human or, as Champlain wrote, were they “primitive beasts”? Historian Camil Girard, in the preface to Mathieu D’Avignon’s work, evokes Champlain’s double talk on Indigenous inhabitants: “On one hand, in order to write his stories within an official policy of ‘civilization,’ he qualified them as ‘barbarians,’ ‘cruel’ beings, ‘savages,’ and despised their culture, beliefs, etc. On the other, when faced with the North American reality, he recognized they were indispensable allies for explorations, commerce, and foundation, and qualified them as ‘peoples’ and ‘nations.’”8 When reading old texts, serious doubts arise as to the good faith of their authors. Certain descriptions verge on horror, and, in this case, malice is obvious. However, slight insinuations disseminated here and there are not so easy to flesh out, so much so that the reader becomes accustomed to it and eventually develops a kind of insensitivity. Here is an astute account from Janick Auberger, seasoned philologer on the subtleties of ethnocentric discourse: The Indian of Jacques Cartier … is without culture, barely more evolved than an animal; sometimes he is covered with hides, cooks his fish, and is therefore permeable to a certain education; the day

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will come when he will be mature for the civilization that the French, in its immense bounty, will bring him; but for now he is poor, miserable, crawls the earth like an animal, destined to receive the White man as liberator of his degrading condition; even their chief is no better off then his men: “the captain came, dressed in an old black bear hide.” Why automatically “old?” This adjective appears incessantly when it comes to Indian clothing; “old” and “nasty,” such are the hides with which the people dress; when you read the list of hides in question (dormouse, beaver, fox, etc.), you begin to doubt this scornful judgment.9 A lot of contempt can be read in documents from that time, but more bewildering are the ambiguities: parallel to this construction of cultural sordidness, you can read from the French observers several edifying, sometimes laudatory testimonies. In terms of physical appearance, generally, all agreed they are of good stature, well put together, and well proportioned. Father Biard wrote that they looked better than the French and preserved their youthful body: “You will not see among them a potbelly, hunchback, nor deformation; miserly, gouty, calculus, demented … they do not know what that is. Those among us who are with defect – one-eyed, cross-eyed, pug-nosed, etc. – are noticed by them straightaway and largely mocked.” The missionary even showed the same honesty, switching the point of view: “They often told me that we looked very ugly to them at the beginning, with our hair both on our mouth as well as our head; but little by little they became accustomed, and we started to appear not so deformed to them.” So how is it these beautiful people in tip-top shape and good health suddenly become, over the course of a sentence, hirsute and miserable beings, dirty and scrawny like beggars from Normandy? How could they live so miserably in a nature described by all newcomers as rich and generous, brimming with game and fish, a true paradise? To account for this double talk, we must get past the filter of mood and mindset, as well as examine the slightest

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judgment under the light of Christian morality; but most of all, we must reveal the hidden agenda of these chroniclers. When attempting to attract colonists, merchants, and investors, they made the new Eldorado shine bright. However, when their unstated goal was to sensitize financial backers, then they pitied the lot of the poor missionaries battling with shadowy creatures straight from the inferno! From the same author, you can read everything and its contrary. For example, let us take another look at the passage from Jacques Cartier at Gaspé. Out fishing, the navigator described the “large quantities of mackerel” that the Innu caught, and he listed the different foodstuffs with which they make their meals: millet, beans, plums, figs, nuts, apples, pears. A copious menu – and curiously exotic along this latitude10 – which did not keep him from writing that “these people can be called savages, since they are the poorest on earth.” To him, having only “a small hide with which they cover their nature” and spending the night under their boats turned over, these Indians were not worth “five ducats.” Yet Cartier knew they left their land to go fishing along the coast, and so the camp was temporary. It should be said that in terms of targeting, the adjective “poor” occupied a choice place in narratives from New France. Just remember, ironically, the young Huron boy Champlain brought to Paris: upon his return, he said he was stunned to have seen so much poverty there. One of the most important witnesses of the Innu life of old was surely Father Paul Le Jeune. Having arrived in “these destitute lands” in 1632, he accompanied a band of nomadic families in their travels for an entire winter. A true martyr, as he recounted in his letters, with a sense for the dramatic and a particular humour he was known for – forced to live in the woods and extreme cold, the refined, lettered Jesuit complained about everything, first and foremost about the shelter that has to be continuously put up and taken down, this poor bark cabin that he called both “a swine shed” and “the beautiful Louvre!” The cramped spaces,

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the suffocating heat from the fire, the smoky air, the starving dogs that walk over you, the bland food, all of it irritates him and makes him suffer, even the “nasty hide” that is used as a door. Eventually, he would get his very own cabin, with a real door and a real lock. His successor, Father Barthélemy Vimont, took a shot at this “floating hide” that, according to him, summed up well the Montagnais brashness: anyone can enter the cabins, which opened the door to dissoluteness. The Relation from Father Le Jeune contains a wealth of advice, but also an edifying repertory of judgments of all kinds that constantly alternate between the highest praise and the worst faults. And it goes from the chapter entitled, “Good things about the Savages,” to the one that follows, “Their vices and imperfections.” For Le Jeune, the Montagnais displayed great qualities: they are tall, straight, strong, and have good facial features, like Julius Caesar, Pompey, Augustus, Othon (!); their spirit is “well-tempered,” and their temperament is gentle and patient; they know how to be generous, are supportive of each other, and are resistant to the worst conditions. Yet, they are “full of errors”: arrogant, slanderous, dirty, lewd, ungrateful, lazy, spiteful, cruel, gluttonous, drunk, cannibals. The passion and vocabulary the missionary used to substantiate their shortcomings is truly an ineffable piece of anthology. Referring to Aristotle’s theory, according to which there are three stages to traverse to attain perfection, Father Le Jeune concludes, “However, I want to say our errant Montagnais Savages have yet to reach the first stage: Their only thought is to live, they eat so as not to die; they cover themselves to keep off the cold, and not for the sake of appearance. Grace, propriety, knowledge of the arts, natural sciences, and much less supernatural truths has as yet no place in this hemisphere, at least in these countries. These people do not believe there is any other science in the world other than that of eating and drinking, and in this lies all their Philosophy.” Was science not needed to survive in such conditions? Was it not philosophy when they said to Father Le Jeune, “Be brave,

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Chichiné! Have a tough soul, resist pain and labour! Be wary of sadness, otherwise, you will fall ill! Look, we never tire of laughing, even though we eat little.” In a book published in 1978, a work of reparations, it may be stated, anthropologists Bernard Arcand and Sylvie Vincent highlighted this process well-established by Western historians that consists of defining other cultures by their shortcomings: what they do not have, do not do, and do not know.11 As they demonstrated, this process operated for a long time in our national history when characterizing Indigenous societies. These poor people who lacked salt and tools, restraint and modesty, hygiene, faith, and religion… the list was long. The missionaries even established a hierarchy among the “savages”: not all were as barbaric as the Montagnais. To them, the Huron were infinitely superior, since they cultivated land and lived in houses and villages, which was more normal than transporting a cabin. On one hand, the beginnings of civilization; on the other, a sort of primitive anarchy and blind vagrancy. This notion of sedentariness opposed to that of nomadism would always obsess the missionaries, who unceasingly boasted one to condemn the other. Good savages or ignorant barbarians? Rich nature or poor desert? The world in which the old Innu lived, both the infinite inland forests and the banks of the great river, did not bear a resemblance to what we see today. It used to be even richer, truly unimaginable. In a letter dated 1618 to the Paris Chamber of Commerce, Champlain announced a New France teeming with exploitable resources: mines of silver, iron, lead, copper, and other minerals. Whale beards and oils, “teeth from marine cows,” seals, fishing for cod, salmon, and other fish, the commerce of wood and precious trees, and, of course, furs. He spoke of a potential annual revenue of two million eight hundred thousand pounds, which was an enormous sum for that time. Surely, Champlain was in search of backers to develop his projects and found it advantageous to show

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that off. But even though we are unable to judge his financial projections today (Were they exaggerated?), his was not over-enthusiastic. In his time, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence was brimming with fish and marine mammals; whales and porpoises tailed ships, seals were incalculable and killed each other like flies, the cod were as big as humans, and even the Innu, who did not go out to sea, had access to them along their coasts. Again, Champlain’s letter mentions an abundant presence of walrus (sea cows), and so we know he monopolized the beaches at Îlesde-la-Madeleine. They became so coveted for their protective ivory that, in little time, they disappeared from the region completely. To cod, we must add mackerel, and especially the mysterious eel, the reigning fish of the river that was practically the definition of miraculous fishing. All of that, without counting Canada goose, duck, pigeon, and white partridge that came in by the thousands. As well as the fundamentals from forest hunting: moose, “wild ass” (the name the Jesuits gave to woodland caribou), bear, beaver, hare, partridge, porcupines. In his Relations, Father Le Jeune carefully listed all the wild game and fish and how the Montagnais killed and prepared them. However, the missionary speaks only of famine and squalor. Not all was entirely black, nor was it entirely white. Nomadic life came with risks, and the boreal region was a difficult environment. Innu families were susceptible to the hazards of forest fires, extremely cold winters, fluctuations in wild game numbers, and illness. That said, was their lot any more tragic than that of the French peasant from that era, who, from famine to epidemic, had to eat grass to survive? Or that of the Parisian, feet in filth and head filled with sewer stench? Another paradox was Indigenous languages: many missionaries learned them, and some sincerely strove to speak them well. They wrote vocabularies, grammars, even catechisms, prayer books, and guides for confessors. Although Father Le Jeune assimilated thousands of words in Montagnais as well as basic conjugation and some particularities, like

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the difference between animate and inanimate objects, the language was something he feared he would never be able to master. In fact, in his letters, he described the language as “very rich and very poor, full of abundance and scarcity”; he considered it complex and nuanced, and then deplored the absence (always a lack) of all words related to theology, philosophy, science, math, medicine, justice, and governance. No, this world “of wealth and grandeur” was found “neither in the thoughts nor upon the lips of the Savages.” There could be found, however, much to the chagrin of our dear Le Jeune, an array of insults and swear words: “These vile nasty people utter the dishonest parts of men and women. They constantly have their lips smelling of such refuse … so I said to them that if swine and dogs were able to speak, it would be in their language.” Surprisingly, our scholar found that the Montagnais did not annunciate well; the Algonquin, however, whose language was closely related, had an “utterly cheerful and gentle pronunciation!” Another Jesuit, Father Louis Nicolas, who took a keen interest in animals of America and who produced the extraordinary Codex Canadensis, also wrote a remarkable Grammaire algonquine.12 His appreciation for the language is without nuance. Also, on this subject, he will get the final say: Having arrived from Old France in the Indies, I was convinced that, by leaving the delicacies of the Greek, the eloquence of the Latin, the gravity of the Spanish, the kindness of the Italians, and politeness of the French, I had said farewell to the beautiful sciences and that all I was to think about henceforth was attaching myself to the most barbaric language in the world, and instead of being among the refined people in our Europe, I now had to converse with nations that had nothing human and were held by no laws, neither divine nor human … I have to admit that I was most amazed when, after several years of study, I had discovered all the secrets to one of the most beautiful languages in the universe.

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Looking through these contradictory views that alternately denied or magnified, recognized or rebuffed, Innu culture has conserved its mysteries, deepened its traditions, and polished its visions in the shadows of the spruce forest and along the great rivers, resisting any and all contempt up to modern times. The words of yesterday, those which Father Le Jeune heard repeated over and over, were almost unchanged down the centuries; an island is still minishtuku, the gray jay is still called uishkatshan, today, like yesterday, the wind is nutin. There you have it; it is still “one of the most beautiful languages in the universe.” The territory still hears the same music, is inhabited by the same dreams, lulled by the same words. That is what Élisabeth meant when she said she had been around the world, around her world and that of Innu generations before her, from Uashat to Sheshatshiu, from Ekuanitshit to Lac Atikonak, and from Pakut-shipu to Matimekush and Musquaro and Winuakapau. Surely, in her time, it had been a long time that the Innu no longer wore face paint, tattoos, and scarification of old, but the families travelled along the same trails, occupied the same plateaus and valleys. They conserved their dress style, men and women alike. They ate like the older generations, feeding on wild game and fish, sticking to the traditional diet, except a few bags of flour. Nitassinan protected, as if in a capsule, the fundamentals of Innu tradition. Élisabeth saw tents and little tin stoves; she chopped wood, smoked pipes, packed and unpacked bags, prepared meals, baked bread, boiled water for tea, had taken hare from the trap and fish off the hook. In her head, she held images of frozen lakes, herds of “wild ass,” great family feasts along the banks of the river. These are the images that lit such a wild light in her small black eyes.

CHAPTER 5

The Animated World To those who frequent and like these types of men, everything in this genre appears spiritual Pierre Laure, Relations des jésuites, 1726

I was walking along a small trail behind the village of Mingan, in dense black spruce forest. The path was narrow and quite discreet. I knew I was heading toward the river. The smell of conifers wafted up the nostrils, I was content walking alone, pondering the age of the world and its peacefulness. Suddenly, my attention turned to something off the trail, something hanging from the branches of a tree. I walked up to it. Awestruck, I saw it was a skeleton. In fact, several parts of a skeleton: bones, ossicles, a skull. At first glance, I thought it was a dog, then I quickly understood they were wolf bones. “Ah!” I said to myself, “So this is what they did with the great white wolf that Apinam brought to the village a few weeks back.” The driver had accidentally hit it with the school bus, between Mingan and Longue-Pointe. Instead of leaving the cadaver on the side of the road, he had made the effort of picking it up and bringing it home. Silent, almost meditative, we observed the dead wolf, this impressive beast. It was massive, and it was undeniably white. I threw out the hypothesis of a stray Arctic wolf when my friend Georges pointed out that white wolves were abundant in these parts. One or two packs occupied the territories around Lac Magpie and Lac Manitou.

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On Apinam’s porch, we made a circle around the wolf, and everyone addressed it in a familiar tone as if it were someone dear. Each person had something to say: “What were you doing, my friend, on the road?” “Did someone play a trick and you fell for it?” One suggested that the wolf went off his normal path chasing after a caribou; another put forward the idea that he had been banished from the pack due to illness or old age. And so, the conversation continued like this between the hunters and the wolf, a respectful conversation with some affectionate mockery mixed in. I assume once the exchange was over, someone took on the task of removing the nice skin from the animal and cleaning its bones. Anyway, I had not heard anything about it since then. Now ambling along, I stumbled upon good ol’ Mr Wolf, and it was like seeing an old friend. As I observed in some detail its skull and its worn canines, readings in Algonquian cultural ethnography came to mind. At that time, I had already studied Franck G. Speck, in particular Naskapi, the Savage Hunters of the Labrador Peninsula, a precious and original book in which the American anthropologist summarized his research with the Montagnais-Naskapi between 1906 and 1930. In it, Speck speaks at length about Montagnais spirituality and focuses on the practice of hanging bones. He mentions the bear, and that they go as far as painting its head before hanging it, as if there was a concern for the direction the bear’s spirit would be looking, which landscape it would be contemplating. Indeed, mashku (bear) has always occupied a cardinal place in traditional Innu culture. That said, Speck reports that the Montagnais-Naskapi honoured the beaver with the same ceremony – either by suspending its bones in trees or by placing them in water – as well as most wild animals. In 1860, explorer and geologist Henry Youle Hind, while going up the Moisie River with Montagnais-Naskapi guides had already noted that families hung fish heads on spruce branches. Learning about this practice through anthropological literature was one thing but seeing the illustration with my very own eyes … that made quite a strong impression. I was alone, in the silence of the forest,

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enthralled by the sacredness of things. These bones brought to mind a holy shrine in a Gothic crypt and being in the woods was like being in a temple. I thought about the importance of these observances and the profoundness of these views. Suddenly, the forest became magical; it was alive, imbued with ancient spirits. The wolf was running before me, around the narrow trail. All the scenes from its hunts, its travels, images of its family; its entire life seemed projected into the air. Other animals appeared, and memories came flooding back: I remembered the bear last year that had appeared in Mingan out of nowhere, its presence stirring up tremendous excitement. It was a fine summer evening, and everybody – man, woman, and child, even the Elders – came out of their houses to see the bear in person. One was laughing, another yelling. Each person called to the animal who, curiously, kept its calm. The bear circled one house in particular; the house of an old man who was recently deceased, an old shaman, they said. As young hunters were about to take it down, a voice rose, the voice of an Elder who declared in a grave tone, “Do not kill it, for it’s the soul of Mathias coming back to search for something in his old house.” The opinion was heard and, under the respectful gaze of a now calm small crowd, the bear went around the house a few times, sometimes standing on its hind legs as if it were looking for something, then headed to the wood’s edge without a care. The Elder was right: he felt a presence. No one doubted that that bear was a spirit, and when I say no one, that includes me. Before entering the forest, mashku turned and looked at us, then vanished into nature just as simply as he had appeared, going beyond the spruce wall, as if withdrawing behind a curtain. Among my readings as a student, another anthropologist from the 1930s, Irving Hallowell, then sprung to mind. He took a keen interest in rituals for bears in the Ojibway-Anishinaabe culture. For Algonquians, the bear is considered to be like a human: it has the same attitude, depths, and behaviours. It is a human with no inhibition or modesty; it is a sort of caricature. It scratches its back, likes to sleep and play, eats

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its fill, and masturbates. It is both serious and facetious. It dominates animal society, posing as a kind, superior, and charismatic being that no other species dare attack. Spotting a bear, hunting a bear, talking about a bear – I noticed it on multiple occasions – always incited collective excitement in Mingan. Yet, this fascination was not only for Indigenous Peoples, far from it. In prehistoric times, up to the Middle Ages, myriad European peoples worshipped the bear (some went so far as to call it “grandfather”), to the point that this quasi-human beast, too human, became a hindrance with its evil inclinations. So, the bear was demonized, reduced to a freak, dethroned by the lion as the king of animals.1 However, with the Algonquin and, particularly, the Innu, the bear held its status, importance, and influence. Lost in my thoughts, I left the wolf ’s remnants behind me. I made it to the river, thinking about the white wolf, the bear, all the animals about which so much had been said by the Innu, actually in all traditional societies the world over who, unwittingly, created histories, comparable myths, and cosmogonies involving substantially the same forces. The view was astounding: the silhouette of conifers was cut on each bank, and I said to myself, “This is scenery, this scene in which so many roles and metamorphoses are decided, where everything is connected to everything.” The small can become big, the immense can make themselves tiny, beings go easily from one shape to another, and the dream world is more real than deceptive reality. Distance and time mean little to the spirit that travels; Atshaku inhabits all things, the world is full of life.

When the French entered into contact with the different Nations of North America, they arrived with a true obsession regarding clerics. During Champlain’s time, faith was not to be messed with. For missionaries, especially the Jesuits, the New World was a choice destination: cold, isolation, hardship, the cruelty of Indigenous Peoples … all this gave rise to great suffering, and, therefore, assured redemption. Imbued

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with Christian ideology, carrying small bags loaded with holy accessories and images of the damned, they claimed they were ready for anything, even shedding their blood to convert the heathens. In reality, each side having its dramaturgy, these were two great spiritual traditions coming together. Yet the Europeans did not see it this way. Sure of their truth, they showed little respect toward the first occupants’ beliefs; they never considered animism to be a religion. Yet, animism was possibly the first religion of humans. From Oceania to Mongolia, from Africa to pre-Christian Europe, the Ancients always believed in a universal force that animated all manifestations of life and matter. This beneficent force (Tshitshe-Manitu for the Algonquians) connected humans to the minutest parcel of existence in a kind of harmony and absolute solidarity between all elements of the universe. For the missionaries, animism was the true face of paganism. It was the enemy to be vanquished. Christianity had fought against it in Celtic and Germanic populations throughout the Middle Ages, and here it was rampant, in its purest form. So, they implemented a remarkable ruse for conversion: to entice the savages, they associated the Manitou with the unique Christian God. It was convenient since there were two manitous: Tshitshe-Manitu became the God of Good, and Matshi-Manitu, the “dark side,” the Devil. They were prompt in integrating these two figures into catechisms that they wrote in Montagnais and Algonquian. Of course, this sleight of hand would not suffice, not by a long shot, to weaken the scope of animism. Legends, myths, the pantheon of sacred animals, the spirit of the mountains, the soul of canoes … Indigenous spirituality was so vast and so rich that the preachings of a priest could never embrace it by simply playing on words. Speaking of playing, Matshi-Manitu sure knew how to! Missionaries saw the demon everywhere, from Indigenous ceremonies to the wild forest. The brushy nature, this suspicious unfathomable darkness … what a perfect refuge for an evil spirit! God’s soldiers were grappling

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with an immense army of fiends: trees, rocks, thunderstorms, animals, and the heathens too, the entire country teemed with devils, large and small. Such a challenge it was opposing the crucifix to the mark of Satan at every turn of the trail. Yet, suspicion came from both sides. What are these sorcerers dressed in long black robes? What is the point of their curious palavers and fussing? Did they have malicious powers? We know the arrival of epidemics later confirmed their apprehensions: without meaning to be, the “black robes” clearly became the source of all their ills. Meanwhile, Indigenous Peoples were wooed a bit at a time, impressed in good part by the highly theatrical nature of Catholic rituals. For those people of the church, there was no skimping on the power of images: Christ on the cross, Precious Blood, the bird of the Holy Spirit, the flames of hell … Their spectacular ceremonies, from baptism to extreme unction, and their colourful and gilded equipment (chasubles, tabernacle, illuminated manuscript) had everything to please the Indigenous imagination. Some Jesuits went so far as to paint very explicit works to illustrate their teachings. In a letter from 1669, Marie of the Incarnation described some of the paintings from a father, on a mission in the Iroquois Nation: “He made a large painting of Hell that is extremely dreadful, full of demons and damned savages. There are instruments of torture, fires, snakes and other dreadful representations … He made another painting of heaven, in which angels take the souls of savages who have died after receiving Baptism. These poor people are so enthused to see such figures … they follow the Father everywhere, and consider him the greatest genius in the world.” On the whole, all across America, Indigenous Peoples imagined that the newcomers were endowed with special powers. That said, these powers were no stronger than those of their shamans. The whites simply employed other processes and formulas. We have a compelling example of this written by Father Le Jeune, who reported one of his Jesuit colleagues, having some knowledge of medicine, often visited an ill

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Montagnais with the hope of curing him. One day, he found him in the company of a jongleur “yelling, screaming, banging his drum, grimacing as they do a thousand different ways.” The father was offended and lectured the two of them, “the ill man for having resorted to something other than God, and the charlatan for meddling with a person who already believed in Jesus Christ.” Did this sick man really believe in Christ like the French? People present retorted: “You lack spirit: you do all that you can to cure this sick man, but ultimately you won’t be able to; the other person wants to help you, and you get angry? Two people is not too many to heal such a sickness. You do your thing, he’ll do his, that is how to get along.” In an interview, historian Marcel Trudel brought up the different conceptions of the two peoples, especially regarding agreement. He used law and religion as examples. The Indigenous Peoples, he stated, did not commit long-term. For them, treaties represented an agreement “for that moment,” having effect only at the time of signing, much the same as being baptized did not make them believers for eternity. “Remember that Amerindians who had already been baptized would return the following day to get baptized again,” he emphasized.2 This point of view had the good fortune of relativizing the missionaries’ glory of converting. In effect, Indigenous Peoples expected nothing from Western religion: they had a worldview that perfectly fulfilled their spiritual needs. At the time of first contact, although the Indigenous Peoples had no doubt as to the nature of the Europeans, namely that they were indeed human beings, the inverse did not apply. The first question asked by the whites (in this case the bearded Spanish) about Indigenous Peoples of America regarded their nature in particular: do these creatures have a soul? In what class or category do we put peoples without writing, technology, or religion? The matter included considerable challenges: to determine if it were legitimate or not to subject them to slavery, first they had to establish if they were truly human or if they were demons, some

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kind of monkey, or, according to Aristotle’s categorization, natural “born slaves.” Having taken the matter under advisement, Pope Paul III ruled in favour of the Indigenous Peoples, recognizing in 1537 that they were like men and were a people endowed with a soul apt to receive faith. So, in what way, and by what means could they evangelize them, since these souls needed urgently to be saved? In 1550, Charles V, king of Spain, organized a great debate among the church intellectuals. Known as the Controversy of Valladolid, this profound reflection primarily pinned Dominican Bartolomé de la Casas, a staunch defender of Indigenous Peoples, against theologian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, a fierce supporter of conquest. The former advocated for a pacifist approach, whereas the latter, pointing out the idolatrous and cannibalistic rituals of the Indigenous Peoples, recommended a brutal, coercive conversion. No position had been taken at the close of the debate, other than turning to Africa to stock up on slaves: were Blacks not less human than American Indians? Samuel de Champlain, a few years before the missionaries, was the first to witness and take stock of beliefs in New France. Although the explorer showed he was open, even conciliatory, throughout his relationships with Indigenous Peoples, when it came to religion, his polite disposition came to a sudden end. In his 1603 journal, he reported a meeting he had with Tessouat. In response to everything the Algonquin Chief explained about the spirituality of his people (the existence of four deities, “a God, Son, Mother, and Sun,” the creation of man and woman from arrows buried underground, revelations through dreams), Champlain leapt up, claiming it was false, and that they were wrong. Now it was his turn to explain his God, to dictate to Tessouat his version, the one-and-only version of the world’s creation. This passage in his journal is particularly edifying, since from Sirius’s point of view, and through the lens of ethnology, you have to admit that, fable for fable, trilogy or quadrilogy, the two symbolic universes are alike and rather

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equal. However, not interested in knowing more about it, Champlain concluded: “That is all the belief I could learn from them, which is bestial.” The tone was set for centuries to come. Father Biard, after having stayed with the Mi’kmaq and Etchemin, gave a brief description of their mores and customs. Obviously, in terms of ceremonies, especially the “sacrifices to the Devil, for good fortunes in hunting, victory, fair winds, etc.,” he’d come up against a supernatural world that shocked his conceptions. “Yet all their religion,” he deplored, “is nothing other than sorcery and charms of Autmoins.” In Indigenous cultures, Autmoins was the name given to influential men who assumed the role of both doctor and priest. Champlain called them “Pilotois,” a Basque word for sorcerer. They were also called jongleur or magician, sometimes diviner, but for the most part, the missionaries qualified them as rogues, charlatans, liars, deceivers, abusers … Of course, these men were shamans, central characters in Indigenous spirituality. That these poor people were “on the precipice to the horrible pit of hellfire, even … rushing every day toward eternal pain and the abyss of damnation with no hope of deliverance” – such were the excellent and pressing arguments given by Father Biard to get his superiors in Paris to open their hearts and pocketbooks. Since, after all, if these peoples were “purely and utterly miserable,” it was surely due to the fact they were deprived of divine knowledge and grace. “O, God of mercy, wilt thou not have pity upon this misery?” Father Le Jeune, who landed in 1632, was a curious lad. Although in his view, all the stories of sorcerers were nothing but banter, he took an interest in certain aspects of Indigenous religious thought. Why was there a sense of the sacred across all nations on the planet but not for the Indigenous Peoples of the New World? Le Jeune was among the first, along with Franciscan Recollet Gabriel Sagard, to hear and retell the Algonquin myth of the world’s creation, which is very similar to the Christian flood. Discussing religion with a Montagnais, who conceded that “the God of France is much more powerful than the God of his coun-

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try,” because, he said, the God of his country descended from a water vole. And the Montagnais told this extraordinary story of Messou, the “Repairer married to a muskrat” which, in various versions, surely circulated by word to mouth from the dawn of time. A few decades later, around 1670, Nicolas Perrot, a fur trader and diplomat, obtained one of these versions, this time told by the Ojibwe-Anishinaabe and other Algonquin Nations of the Great Lakes. According to them, the world had been created by Mishtapush, the Great Hare – a trickster like Messou, Nanabozo, Nanabush, Glooscap, etc., a recurring figure within different Algonquin groups. For Perrot, who does well to illustrate the prejudices of his time, this story of world creation “is limited merely to confused and fabulous ideas that are so simple, so base and so ridiculous that they deserve to be brought to light to make such ignorance and profanity known. For us, it is marvellous and deserves our attention, at least as much as we have obsessed over the book of Genesis and all the texts of the Bible for millennia. Furthermore, the motifs found within it are practically universal. Mircea Eliade, historian of religion, studied the recurrence of the archetype that he calls “the cosmological plunge.” For example, in India a boar plunges into the “primordial waters.” So, let us judge this Algonquin fable for ourselves, which is as worthy as any other. They say that not all was water before earth was created, that on this vast expanse of water floated a large wooden raft, aboard which all the different species of land animals, including the Great Hare whom, they say, was the chief. He was searching for a clean, solid place to land, but since the only things to come in sight were swans and other river birds on the water, he started to lose hope, and seeing nothing else was to be done, engaged the Beaver to plunge down and bring some sand up from the water’s bottom, assuring him that, in the name of all animals, if he came back up with just one grain of sand he would make a land spacious enough to hold and feed them all. … The Beaver took the plunge. He stayed

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down for so long without resurfacing that the supplicants believed he had drowned, but then he appeared, motionless, almost dead. … The little hope they had to keep living had them next turn to the Otter, and they begged her to have a second attempt to go fetch a bit of soil from the water’s bottom. … The Otter surrendered to their just remonstrance, and plunged. She stayed at the water’s bottom longer than the Beaver, and she too came back up bearing no fruit. The impossibility of finding a dwelling in which they could subsist was making them hopeless, when the Muskrat proposed to go and, if they wished, endeavour to find the bottom and professed he would find sand. … So the Muskrat jumped into the water, and boldly plunged. After spending twenty-four hours underwater, he appeared aboard the raft, motionless, with his belly in the air, and his paws closed. The other animals received him, and collected him gently. They opened one of his paws, then a second, then a third, and finally the fourth, in which there was one small grain of sand trapped between his claws. The Great Hare, who claimed to be able to make a vast, spacious land, took the grain of sand and dropped it on the raft and it grew. He took a piece of it and scattered it. This made the mass grow more and more. When it grew to the size of a mountain, he wanted to explore it, and as he explored the mass grew. As soon as it appeared large enough, he told the Fox to visit his work with the power to expand it. He obeyed. The Fox, having found that it was sufficiently large for him to easily get his prey, returned to the Great Hare to inform him that the land was able to feed and hold all animals. Upon hearing this report, the Great Hare transported himself onto his work, explored it, and found it to be imperfect. Since then he has trusted only himself and to this day continues to make it grow, ceaselessly exploring the earth. This is what makes the Savages say, when they hear bellows from the mountain hollows, that the Great Hare continues to expand it. They honour

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him, and consider him as the god who created it. This is what these peoples teach us about world creation, that they believe to be carried on this raft still.3 Further in the tale, we learn that once the earth formed, the Great Hare created man and woman from animal cadavers. At the source of each line, each human would find an ancestor that was either a fish or a beaver, a bear or a moose … In short, all across the great Algonquin lands emerged the same vision of the world: humanity descended from animals and depended on them. Other great myths also existed in the Innu times of old, like the famous tale of Tshakapesh, which was heard by Father Le Jeune in 1637 (a “ridiculous fable”) as well as by several ethnologists some three centuries later. Rémi Savard studied every stitch of this founding tale. In the 1960s, as a passionate, engaged, and outraged anthropologist, he set out to show against all odds that Algonquin mythology resolutely had its place in the encyclopaedia of great world mythologies. Here is the tale in an overview. Tshakapesh is a little boy whose parents were eaten by a giant bear. In the forest, the “living forest,” to use the title to one of Savard’s books, monsters hid; these immense creatures, these super animals, these cannibals did not hesitate before devouring defenseless humans. To avenge his parents, Tshakapesh made himself enormous to scare the monster (with “such frightening force that trees were used as arrows for his bow,” recounts Le Jeune); he made himself tiny to elude him; climbed to the celestial regions and captured to the sun; was swallowed by a giant fish; transformed into a bird … The myth of Kuekuatsheu, or Carcajou, is also very common among the Innu. He is a trickster, another archetypal figure that comes in various forms in most cultures. Among the Nahuas of Mexico, it is an opossum. For the Apache in the southern United States, it is a coyote. Along the northwest Pacific coast, a crow. This player of tricks who makes and undoes the order of the world, this malicious scoundrel, this obscene buffoon is ready to give it a try, whatever it may be. Of course, Carcajou

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is funny; this “trickster,” to use the Claude Levi-Strauss’s expression, is clumsy, often comical, and he gets caught in his tricks, but through his adventures and horsing around, he guides humans in their learning. When the Innu felt the need to explain themselves, not the nature of Europeans (we already stated, they placed them in the category of humans), but how they could integrate these humans into the order of the world, they turned to Carcajou. The myth gave them their answer. One version goes as follows: Carcajou, coming back from a hunt, wanted to sleep with his sister-in-law. His wife, hoping to catch him, changed her clothes and crawled into her sister’s bed. Making love to whom he believed to be his sister-in-law, Carcajou said: “You make love like your sister.” Then his wife uncovered herself. Carcajou got angry and took her by every orifice, then left. Much later, he came back and saw his wife. He found a village full of different humans. There were Indians in tents, whites in wooden houses, Blacks, and a bit further off, awkward cannibals. “Who are all these people?” asked Carcajou. “They are your children,” his wife answered, “those you made the last night you took me.” So all humans, whoever they are, are the children of Carcajou. These universes are in such abundance that surely we cannot get to all of them here. We invite the reader to check out the fascinating work by Rémi Savard, to whom we owe the uncovering of this cultural treasure, the Innu version of Algonquin mythology. With his students and collaborators, Rémi Savard collected myths, the famous atanukan, to save them from oblivion, to understand them, and to make them admired. Several of his works helped restore the prestige of Oral Tradition; they are an ode to savage thought.

The first ethnographers to work in the field, the Turners, Speck, Hallowell, and Rousseau, were struck by the sacred aspect of everyday life in Montagnais families. The slightest act was symbolic, the smallest object was invested with a spiritual dimension. Eating, sleeping, pitching

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a tent, making a canoe, building a trap – the most common occupations came with a series of rituals. Animals were given particular qualities, characteristics, and roles. From fly to fisher, lake trout to gray jay, each played an integral part in society, insuring its harmony and cohesion, through the power of imagination and repetition. If nature was a temple, the bestiary was a bible: the whole of Innu culture could be read in it – its philosophy, poetry, memory, visions from hunters, ancestral know-how, it was the authentic face of the boreal forest. Nothing sums up this culture better than a sentence heard in the 1970s during a fact-finding inquiry in the Northwest Territories; it was uttered by an elderly Dene, but the statement could have just as easily been made by an old Innu hunter: “In the past, we were too spiritual to be truly religious.” Indeed, the Christian religion that they wanted imposed on Indigenous Peoples, with its rigid figures and codes, was up against a much bigger force: the profound spirituality of each individual. The Innu called this internal force mistanapeo, meaning “great man,” a kind of alter ego able to communicate with the world above. The royal way to access this world of spirits, invoke them, hear their messages, was through dreams. In Innu culture, any healthy person, without being forced to, maintained an intense, continuous relationship with his or her mistanapeo, in the sense that serious attention was paid to dreams and their meaning. To use the quaint formulation from botanist and ethnologist Jacque Rousseau, “To dream was to accomplish a religious act.” In a way, Innu society, like all animist societies, gave precedence to the invisible. Reality was but a pale reflection of the power of oneiric forces; true life was dreamt, particularly for hunters. It was in their dreams that they met animal spirits and received messages from them. It is in his dreams that the hunter first killed his prey, before taking it down the following day. The animal would offer itself up, enter the hunter’s mind during his sleep and tell him where to meet. Both looked to meet each other: the animal accepted to sacrifice itself for the hunter

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and his family, provided it be “eaten well”; the hunter committed to honouring the animal, handling it by respecting a series of rites. The act of killing, far from being fortuitous, represented the fulfillment of a contract concluded in a dream with one spirit or another, oftentimes Papakassiku, master of caribou, or Missinaku, master of aquatic animals. The same went for warriors. Before going on a raid or launching an attack, they attempted to interpret the shaman’s or Chief ’s dreams. Would their fortunes be favourable? Spirits manifested their directives and recommendations through dreamers. It was about lending an ear, knowing how to listen to them, and, especially, obeying them, “which is greatly unfortunate,” scoffed Father Le Jeune, “because if a savage dreams he will die if he doesn’t kill me, he will dispatch me the first time we are isolated!” Dreaming was the preferred way to contact the spirits, but there were other channels to get there, even if it meant provoking a meeting. Incantations, fasting, dancing, or drumming, these activities that drove the shaman into a trance were part of everyday life (today we would say “healthy living”), much like praying in most cultures. The ritual that most impressed the missionaries was without a doubt the shaking tent, that the Innu called kushapatshikan, literally meaning, “that which serves to see far.” For the rite, a small, cone-shaped tent was put up, a couple of poles covered with a hide and open at the top. Only the officiant entered, and he is the one who convokes the spirits and interprets their revelations, while all others sit around the tent outside. What happened to the families that left long ago? Was there an Atshen in the area? Where is the herd of caribou? Anything could be asked to the spirits, even news from a deceased person or family member. Malefic forces could also be conjured up to find an answer to desperate situations. Father Le Jeune witnessed this ritual: The juggler having entered, began to moan softly, as if complaining; he shook the tent at first without violence; then becoming an-

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imated little by little, he commenced to whistle, in hollow tone, and as if it came from afar; then to talk as if in a bottle; to cry like the owls of these countries … then to howl and sing, constantly varying the tones … ho ho, hi hi, gui gui, nioue … As he continued to become more animated, he fell into so violent an ecstasy that I thought he would break everything into pieces, shaking the house with such force and violence that I was astonished at a man having so much strength. In fact, according to belief, there was not only one man inside: whenever the voice of the officiant changed and grew deeper, or whenever the tent shook, it was a sign that the spirits were answering. One by one, they entered through the top of the tent, assembled in the tight space, and lent their voices to the shaman; the channel of communication was open. And while the shaman was yelling, sweating, “killing himself in this tent,” outside the community waited silently, seated in a circle, like an audience in a theater. No foreigner believed in this occult phenomenon. Champlain, who was the first to have sat at some of these ceremonies during war expeditions with his Algonquin allies, stated, “They said often that the shaking I saw in the cabin was from the devil, and not the person inside, even though I saw the contrary: since it was the Pilotois who was taking the poles of the cabin and thus making them move.” Centuries later, Jacques Rousseau also got to view the experience, but under the nascent, almost “revolutionary” light of anthropology. “To appreciate any foreign belief,” he wrote, “you must ignore your own religious baggage, place yourself in the same spiritual climate, and vibe at the same rhythm.” It is through this perspective, along with a sharp critical sense and a good dose of humour, that he reported divinatory rites that were still very much alive in Indigenous populations in the 1950s. Putting himself in the Innu’s place, he attempted to understand, or feel, this faith in the spirit world: “Only between heaven and earth, curled up, his imagination quickly

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populates the landscape. Like a child obsessed with night terrors, he attends the parade of fleeting beings and the trees themselves start to speak.”4

“In my dream, there were caribou trails that ran close to my tent. Then a voice asked for my knife. This voice morphed into a chant. Yes, someone was chanting from afar. … The caribou was there, right in the middle of the lake. Of course it was him, that large male who sung the night before … It is my dream that enables me to kill that caribou, and it is I who must kill it.” This is how Mathieu spoke, the old Mathieu Mestokosho who mumbled all day in his rocker, withdrawn to the corner of the family house, the house from the federal government; his voice made music continuously, everyday music, and no one paid any attention. Mathieu spoke about “flies and giants, stones that step and bears that sleep, fat hares and great lakes.” He lived nomadism and discovered Indigenous spirituality in all its innocence. As I was taking my first steps in the field, I could not have had a better testimony. Using a tape recorder, I collected his remarks, which his son Georges translated into French and which I turned into a book later.5 Throughout his life, Mathieu was in deep, constant dialogue with spirits. He always tried to be a good Innu, to live according to the commandments of the animal master spirits. For example, you should never drag a caribou foetus through the snow or let dogs near its bones; but above all, you should never waste its meat, bones, or fat. All prey was sacred and protected by a spirit. If the animal was left lying around, if each part of it was not honoured, the spirit may get offended. Serious infractions could lead to famine: animals stayed away and could do so for a long time. No one wanted a world in which the animal spirits were on bad terms with humans. A good relationship made all the difference between life and death.

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On this subject, Mathieu told me a story that could have ended badly. A band of hunters killed eight caribou. They took some of the best pieces and went back to camp, saying they would go back for the rest another day – it would be easier to transport the animals when the lakes were frozen. Yet, they kept putting this trip off, so much so that after a month had passed, the Elders of the group started to fear the worst: was the caribou master going to punish them? They set up a shaking tent to know where things stood. There was a shaman among them who went into the tent while the others stayed around it. And they heard Papakassiku, the master of caribou, make its entrance. He was is in a foul mood. “What have you done? I give you food and you do not take it. At the very least you could have brought back the caribou bones to make grease, brought back the skin to make babiche, brought back the heads that are such good eating.” Through the shaman’s mouth, the caribou spirit ordered the hunters, in a terrifying voice, to prepare grease from all the dead caribou and to eat all of it in one day, until nothing was left. Three of the hunters had to abandon, as their hearts were about to explode. Finally, it was the shaman who succeeded in eating all the grease. And so, they did another shaking tent: Papakassiku was satisfied and promised to help them in their hunts and give them caribou again.

Another well-known Algonquin rite is the sweat lodge, which the Innu called matutishan. A group of people sit in a small hermetically sealed tent with red stones that were heated in a fire; cold water is thrown onto the burning hot stones to create a cloud of vapour. This is the same technique used in saunas, a millennia-old invention of northern Indigenous Peoples, from Siberia to Lapland to boreal. It has been acknowledged that sweating has therapeutic qualities: shamans used it constantly to heal the sick. Here again, invoking spirits was associated with this practice. “They sing, yell, and groan in this oven and make

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speeches,” commented Father Le Jeune. “Occasionally the sorcerer beats his drum. They are so religious in this yawping and other foolishness that they do sweat lodges to heal themselves, or have a good hunt, or good weather. Nothing will be accomplished if they do not sing or observe these superstitions.” The missionary’s exasperation was due in part by the nighttime ruckus, since for the most part, these events took place at night, for hours on end, but especially, like all missionaries, he saw the devil at work: men and women were together, pell-mell, in “this box,” completely naked! The same as the dream, for the Innu, singing had religious significance. They sang “in their suffering, in their difficulties, in their perils and dangers.” They sang “to have a good hunt or to find something to eat.” Generally, the song came to them in a dream, a bit like a secret formula, and each had his or her own. Le Jeune mentions a sorcerer, wanting to go on a hunt, sang the same lines. “We asked him why he sang that to take animals. I saw, he said, this song in my dream, that is why I have remembered it and have used it since.” Jacques Rousseau talks about a similar experience. While he was accompanying a band of Montagnais-Naskapi in Ungava, in the northernmost part of their hunting territory, one of them, Coomis, received a mission in his dream: “Seeing myself hunting alone in the immense snows of the subarctic forest, a stunted spruce started to sing … ‘Here, in the middle of the earth, I am standing atop a treeless mountain. I know full well that I am not a man.’ And since then, Coomis goes to the sweat lodges repeating his lamentation.”6 This goes to show that this culture was able to save its authenticity up until today, to Mathieu Mestokosho who could hear the caribou sing. For the Innu, like for all Indigenous Nations, the drum – teueikan – was more than a musical instrument. It acted as a mediator in spiritual life. With its young caribou hide, its heartbeat, it was nearly a living being that made spirits travel and brought two worlds together. Father Le Jeune gives us, let’s say colourful, descriptions of the drum ceremony.

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This temperamental and deadpan Jesuit, although oftentimes irritating with his “yawping,” “banter,” “monkeying around,” and other acrimonious terms used to describe ceremonies, is nevertheless a meticulous witness of the everyday mores and ways of those inhabiting the boreal forest in the seventeenth century. So the shaman, describes Le Jeune, “would enter as if in a fury, singing, crying, and howling, beating his drum with all his might while the others howled as loudly as he, and made a horrible din with their sticks, striking upon whatever was before them; they made the little children dance, then the girls, then the women; he lowered his head and blew upon his drum, then toward the fire; he hissed like a serpent, drew his drum under his chin … he struck the ground with it with all his might … you would have said that he wanted to break the drum into pieces he struck it so hard upon the ground … This is how they treat their sick.” Ill intent aside, in this description you can feel the intensity of the relationships the Innu kept with spirits. This intensity reached its peak during makushan, these eat-yourheart-out feasts in which, after an immense banquet, everybody sings and dances to the beat of the drums. It was the biggest of the festivities, and the most important collective event done by the communities. Traditionally, the bear was honoured; although, it did happen that the caribou was celebrated as well. During the festivities, everything, I mean everything had to be eaten. The animal gave itself to the family; it gave the family shelter, food, kept it warm … That they dispose of it with recognition was the least they could do. Skinning it, butchering, collecting its grease, sharing it, eating it, each act was carried out in an authentic communion. You had to ingest the animal’s strength down to the last quarter of meat, to the last spoonful of grease. It was the duty of a good Innu to act in this manner, an act that would ensure the community protection from the world above. The bear spirit would be content with this feast, but he would be even more so if his skull were painted a bright colour and hung along a portage, in a spot where it could take in a good

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view of the landscape. To top it all off, there was the ultimate offering: place tobacco in the nostrils of its skull. That was heroic, and not everyone did it. As Jacques Rousseau explained, nothing was more precious to those isolated in the forest than tobacco. “To destroy the smallest pinch of tobacco [was] therefore a sacrifice, in every sense of the word,” he states. Yet, some hunters were clever. Having placed tobacco in the bear’s skull at the beginning of winter, they would go back in spring. “If the spirits, who are reasonable beings like you and I, were happy to sniff the tobacco and leave it intact, it meant that they reserved it for you or that they had no objections to you helping yourself!”7 Once the animal was celebrated and eaten, once the ceremonies were completed, all that was left to do was start again, resume the cycles of life. In these wide-open spaces, in this scarcity, the future was always a source of worry, and families sought to plan and prepare. To better read and untangle the web of destiny, they relied on a divinatory practice: scapulimancy. This consisted of placing an animal’s shoulder blade in a fire and letting it burn until charred on the surface. The bone then showed patterns, cracking, lines, and points that could be interpreted: What road do we need to take? When will the families, from who we have had no news, arrive? Will there be famine? Like reading a map, a mysteriously magical one that few can decipher. In the patterns and cracks, they identified lakes, campsites, groups of hunters, and of course, animals, their intentions, itineraries, and dispositions, good or bad. The shoulder blade of the caribou was often used; although, Speck, the ethnographer who described the technique, also spoke of, like in the case of tree hangings, beaver bones, and fish skeletons. For Algonquians, death was not the worst thing to predict. If they feared physical suffering, they were at peace with their finitude, because the dead did not really die. In the dream world, you could see the deceased and discuss with them; the dead were simply continuing their journey in an invisible state. No life was ever lost: the circle of kinship covered century upon century of individuals’ existence, past, present,

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and future. In the land of humankind, dialoguing with souls was a familiar whisper. Missionaries questioned Indigenous Peoples heavily on their idea of the soul. They asked the question a thousand different ways. Without realizing it, they touched upon the very heart of the animist’s vision, which at times reached the heights of poetry. Father Charles Lallemant, in a letter to his brother dated 1626, gives us some insight into it: With their dead they buried all their possessions, like kettles, hides, knives, etc. And one day I asked an elder why they placed all these belongings in the graves; he told me they put them there so the dead could use them in the after world; and so I replied that every time you looked in the grave, the belongings were still there, which showed that the dead did not use them; he answered that in truth the body of the kettles, hides, knives etc. remained, but the soul of the kettles, knives, etc. went to the after world with the dead, where they were used. Father Le Jeune, a few years later, made note of the same beliefs. According to the Montagnais, he wrote, the soul appeared as a human shadow, “with feet, hands, mouth, head, and all the other parts of the human body.” Souls ate and drank; and when someone passed away, he or she would be given the piece of meat that was on the fire. It happened that in the morning, next to the body, the “meat had been chewed overnight by the souls.” Le Jeune, with mocking scepticism, asked one of the people with whom he was speaking what souls could hunt at night, and the response he got was sublime: “They hunt the souls of beavers, porcupines, elk, and other animals, using the soul of snowshoes to walk on the soul of snow.” This is how the traditional Innu lived, within a universe of metamorphoses, passages, and bridges; there were no walls between life and death, past and future, this world or the after world. The singer’s voice,

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the drum’s beat, incantation, introspection, signs, the hare’s tracks, the crow’s caw, twilight – it all meant something, and it was all bound together. Mathieu and his grandmother Kukuminash, his friends Joachim, Pitane, Nishapet, Bastien, Poness, and down to the little ones, Moïse and Desneige, this is how they spoke: “What happens to the earth happens to us as well, since we are entirely connected to it. Our spirit travels, especially when asleep, especially when still. Nature speaks to us, especially when silent.” This is animism in all its beauty: alliances and contracts are carried out between animal and human families. To sum up, the Innu of old lived in a world that had achieved unity. Wood, stone, plants, snowshoes, tools, all assumed a sacred aspect, confirming the supremacy of the imaginary. Far from jeopardizing the practical efficacy of decisions and acts, on the contrary, this poetry reinforced it. Ingenious, meticulous, the Ancients had rigorous dreams. They were supported by their mistanapeo to become better hunters. They knew by heart the names of all the animals, trees, plants, and shrubs, of what they ate, and what healed them; they knew the geography and topography of their nation, and they mastered exceptionally well the hydrography and its networks. The knowledge contained in myths brought each to the essential: good families must work together, welcome, share, and maintain a respectful rapport with the spirit world. Tales, remedies, genealogies; building a canoe, sewing clothes; portaging, hunting, packing, hauling, paddling, singing, curing, dreaming; the accumulated knowledge and skillset of each individual and family amounted to a colossal sum of know-how that made up the cultural heritage of a world that we wanted to annihilate.

Starting in the twentieth century, freed from the distorted prisms of the missionaries’ views, we were able to inventory and study more closely Innu Oral Tradition. Since, in the beginning, the abundance of tales,

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myths, knowledge, all of it was beyond the comprehension of a Europe that had cut ties with the pagan imaginary about a thousand years earlier. Algonquin temporality is circular; it creates an allusive, poetic, and fantastic vision of things. The mythical tales are not as rigid as historic theses that are proven, reasoned, and documented across archival references and old manuscripts; these are living words, sequences that have constantly been readjusted, told and retold, for the pleasure of hearing them, for the joy of remembering them, and for the good it does for the mind. Here, animism produces the best utterances, and each of them surely opposes rationality and absolutely opposes Christian faith. After much effort, ruse, and several terrifying images of hell, Catholicism eventually took hold in nomadic societies of the Canadian North, especially among the Innu: the Jesuits worked tirelessly between 1632 and 1785, relaying the efforts of twenty-one missionaries, from Father Le Jeune to Father de La Brosse. The seculars took over after the Conquest up until 1841, the year in which the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate arrived in Canada; at the beginning of the twentieth century, the oblates were replaced by the Congregation of Jesus and Mary for a couple of years before coming back for good. This illustrates the extent to which the Innu had no want of “black robes” throughout their history. Around 1950, Jacques Rousseau and partner Madeleine Rousseau noticed the people of the boreal forest, despite being intensely Catholic and particularly pious, conserved their animist beliefs. They speak not of syncretism (since there was never any fusion between the two cults), but of religious dualism: the dogma of Catholic faith failed in stripping the original spirituality of the first occupants. One could say they had a formidable sense of adaptation; they were able to completely accommodate Christian faith and at the same time not disavow their vision of the world. As said earlier in this book, isolation was salutary for them. Protected from colonization due to the remoteness of their Traditional

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Territories and the difficulty the whites had accessing it, they were able to speak their language for a long time, tell each other old tales, spread their ritual, and ultimately see the world as they always had. On top of having to survive the onslaught of missionaries, traditional Innu thought also had to combat the ideologies of federal employees and defy the diktats of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Indian Act was modified in 1880, four years after its enactment, to include an amendment directly targeting Indigenous ceremonies and beliefs across the entire country. It became illegal to organize or partake in certain traditional healing ceremonies, including purification by smoke or steam. This government intervention in the sphere of religion was surprising indeed. To write such a piece of legislation, the government of 1875 believed, following the example of Father Le Jeune and the first Jesuit missionaries, that the First Nations were “food for crows, owls, and infernal cuckoos … the cursed quarry of foxes, bears, boars, and spiritual dragons.” The First Nations continued their traditional practices behind closed doors. However, unbelievable as it may seem, the Indian Act was not repealed until 1950. Everything had been done to kill off Indigenous animism, to kill their musings and superstitions, this work of the devil that nevertheless subsists yet today, with popular consent and the state’s blessing.

Ready to leave Mingan after having come to the end of my fieldwork, the Chief of the community, Pinip Pietacho, asked to meet with me alone. We met outside the village, in a dim, old warehouse near the pier. He knew very well that I had finished my work and would soon be leaving – maybe never to return. With infinite kindness and a piercing gaze, he wanted to relay to me his appreciation, and that of the community. I was very moved by his manner, both delicate and timid, and very simple. Four years earlier, he welcomed me to the village. He was aware of the nature of my research, ancient knowledge, tipatshimun, lives lived.

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He followed my progress. To thank me for it, he pulled a knife out of his pocket. It was a mukutakan, the famous crooked knife, the allpurpose knife used for working wood, making drums, “Montagnais” snowshoes, and canoe parts. The one he placed in my hand was an old artifact, dating back possibly to the nineteenth century. The patina of age had made the handle smooth. Furthermore, Pinip confirmed, “This knife has travelled far; it carries with it many memories.” Immediately I thought about the calloused hands that had used it, the family circles, the winter nights, summer conversations, near the post, here in Mingan. It was truly a great gift. Pinip must have been happy with “his anthropologist” to have offered a present of this stature. Since there is no doubt about it, the people of the community evaluate each and every anthropologist as they appear in their life; they grade each researcher come from afar, a species which, like the Canada goose, has landed every spring since at least the 1920s. It would appear that I passed the test.

CHAPTER 6

The Time of Fur Bundles of mink, fisher, marten, otter, beaver, squirrel, stoat, the canoe hauls cargo that will make a fortune and the high reputation of luxury stores, in Montreal and New York. Gabrielle Roy, Le Bulletin des agriculteurs, 1941

I found it hard to believe that there was still a Hudson’s Bay Company storefront in Sept-Îles at the end of the 1970s. Let’s just say you had to know it was there. The place did not look like much; it was a small, unassuming storefront in the shadows of Canadian Tire. Only those in-the-know knew where it was, and you had to be really in-the-know to detect in this humble store, the original nexus of the Sept-Îles community: it was a place to trade furs. Before the fishing town, before the private clubs for rich Americans and English elite who reserved the benefit of rivers and salmon, before the mines and the boomtown, there were the Innu, and there was a trading post. What remained of the Hudson’s Bay Company – a small sign above an ordinary door nestled between a retail store and a restaurant – was far from doing justice to the magnitude of its history. It was 1978, the year after construction of the bridge that spans the Moisie River was finished. The bridge was discussed at length; some said it was impossible to build because the wide river was sandy bottomed. They claimed no genius could resolve the issue and that there would never be a bridge. Each thing comes in its own time, and I suppose that

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a good economic reason was expressed, most likely some wood to chop or a mine to dig. Once the resource was identified, any technical difficulties dissolved as if by magic. The bridge across the Moisie was quickly erected, connecting for the first time the Moyenne-Côte-Nord to the country’s road network. That winter, in Mingan, my friend Michel spent a few months trapping inland. When Michel spoke, he did so discreetly, calmly, like a person who goes about his business without any bluster. When he came back from his outings, you wondered if he had simply left. With him, everything seemed natural. In the spring, Michel brought back pelts from beaver, fox, and otter. I knew him well enough to know just how happy he was with the weeks he spent in the woods, far from the reserve, two months doing what he loved most. He had taken on a darker hue, a testament to rough days living in the snow, under the winter sun. His elbows on the kitchen table, with his hand clasped together close to his face, he smoked his cigarette and told what territory he hunted with his brother and brother-in-law, the animals they trapped, and the weather they had. But, this time, he had a surprise, a twist to his ordinary tale. Gesturing for me to wait, he went to his room and came right back, displaying a beautiful ash-coloured fur, very lush. His smile expressed the exceptional character of this catch: it was a lynx of unique beauty. Michel said to me, of all the travel in his life, he had never seen such a remarkable animal. How much was this hide worth? With a knowing eye, he told me he had no idea, but we could find out if we hopped in the Volks and hightailed it to Sept-Îles. This is what Michel was leading up to from the start of our conversation. Since now there was a bridge spanning across the Moisie, the temptation to go to Sept-Îles was huge; his idea was to go there to sell his furs. Quite the blast from the past; at that moment, Michel was in 1978 just like it was 1878, in the time of trappers and trading posts, with varying prices, computations, and expectations. Just seeing and listening to him brought me back to past scenes that my old

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informants would tell me: journeys in the woods, winter hunts, groups of families gathering at the river’s head in spring, who then travelled together toward the sea, and the Hudson’s Bay Company – the hbc. At that time, the men could talk at length; they had not seen each other all winter and each gave a detailed account of their trapping season. Hunters liked to forecast: how much would they get for a marten this year? How much for a beaver pelt? By bartering, they could obtain products from the trading post that they needed. Of course, they always hoped for a good year, a hike in prices would allow for a few superfluous expenditures, like a boat, for example, with sails, to travel along the coast during the summer and visit family at other trading posts. Or even a house. They could pay fishermen to build them a small, shingled house in which to spend summer. There were years when prices for certain pelts skyrocketed, bringing in rather good revenues for families. The memory of these bountiful seasons stoked conversations. In the 1970s, on the Côte-Nord, some things had lasted. In just about any yard, next to houses, you could still see beaver pelts stretched over wooden hoops, scraped and dried seal skins. How can we not think back to past generations, whose subsistence depended on all these animals and the efforts made to capture them? Already then, the Innu had no real need for animals to eat or for anything else; no need for caribou to build tents and coats, no need for beaver to make mittens, seals for boots, wolverines for hemming a jacket. On the other hand, they had not entirely adopted the white man’s way of life: although they had left tents for houses, they still preferred the meat of woodland game to ground beef and bannock to sliced bread. Hunting, trapping, tanning hides, all these traditional activities continued to be practised and deeply loved, especially among the eldest of the community, like Michel Mollen. So, how much did he get for his gorgeous lynx hide? The next morning, we drove to Uashat (Sept-Îles), me behind the wheel and, sitting shotgun, the happiest of men. Along with his showpiece, Michel

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brought some otter hides and that of a wolf. Once we reached our destination, wasting no time he got out of the car and vanished behind the door to the small post of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Ignorant of how any of this type of commerce works, I expected him to come out with forty or fifty dollars maximum. So much was my surprise when I saw him proudly walking to the car with a fat wad of cash in his hand. Michel got eight hundred dollars for his lynx hide; with the other hides, he pocketed one thousand two hundred dollars. I did not have time to see the colour of it. Right after, he brought me to Canadian Tire, where he began buying a bunch of small trinkets, tools, materials, rubber boots, rope, glue, a bow saw, a hatchet, a new frying pan for Adèle, toys for the little one. I was aware that I was attending an old ceremonial: going to the trader’s store, get his pelts appraised, receive store credit, then acquire all the essential products for the family, along with items that were wanted but not needed. When a report on the Côte-Nord came out in 1941, a young Gabrielle Roy remarked the propensity for the Montagnais to spend avidly, yet without being too attached to anything. It was a game. However, she saw how important attire was and the immense interest they had for it: “The men wear new suits; they choose flashy ties, tie clips, metal flowers for their boutonniere, wide-brimmed fedoras for when they are not donning a Basque beret. A cigarette dangling from the lips or chewing gum tucked in the corner of the mouth, they pace back and forth across the village in comic splendour. The effort for elegance stops at the ankles; the feet remain shoed with pearled moccasins, except for a few rare dandies.” The same went for Montagnais women: skirts and ribbons, feathers and veils, they had a thorough sense of pomp. With Michel, I was witnessing the final exchanges of this kind. It was the end of an era that had lasted half a millennium if we consider the last trading activities on the Basse-Côte-Nord. The hbc had lost its monopoly since 1870 and its posts had closed over the years; here, in the

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most boreal regions of Nitassinan, removed from massive colonization, some remnants of traditions had subsisted. Freshly out of the Canadian Tire, Michel wanted to get out of SeptÎles as soon as possible; he was not at ease in the city. So, we hit the road back to Mingan. In the car, Michel counted his loot, one bill at a time. His small eyes glistened, and his good mood made him almost chatty. He talked about the lynx, guffawing repeatedly: in the Innu bestiary, peshu held a particular place – surely its lush fleece makes it the unavoidable object of innuendoes. I got a good look at it; commerce was deeply anchored in traditional Innu culture. They had the habit and aptitude for it, and it came from a long way back. If Michel did good business, he did not just owe it to the master spirits of the lynx and the wolf, but also to the Elders who knew how to turn a profit using the land’s primary resource and who transmitted this knowledge to him.

The fur trade was considered an eccentric activity for a long time; its pre-eminence was not always as recognized in the construction of America as it is today. The beaver (which is the emblem) generally appears in the opening paragraphs of any book on Canadian history, used as an introduction to the great “epic” only to disappear along the way, giving way to trees and lumberjacks, sawmills and forest developers, settlers, priests and parishes. In this context, the world of furriery was not presented as an actual economic activity, but as a simple prelude on the march to progress. The same treatment was reserved for Indigenous Peoples. Both beaver and Indian have been granted a purely folkloric value for decades; their respective legend was woven from the most common places. Believe it, the first documented bartering between Europeans and Indigenous Peoples marked our history for good, glorifying one and condescending the other. Remember, in the summer of 1534, at Chaleur Bay, Cartier and his crew attempted to drive out a group of

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Mi’kmaq that came near their craft. They came back the next day with nine canoes, displaying hides, “gesturing that they had come to trade.” Cartier’s men gave them knives and “other hardware” as well as a red hat for their Chief. Trinkets to the French that Indigenous Peoples received with “great joy,” sparking them to dance, celebrate, offer in exchange all they had, “so much that they returned home naked.” For Cartier, these pelts were “of little value”; of course, the navigator coveted different riches altogether, and the fur trade was not yet much of a sensation in Europe. Yet, the situation was going to cause a large shift in the balance of power; as we know, things would not stay as they were. Much has been written about the times of fur trading. All you have to do is read major works from authors like Harold Innis, Bruce Trigger, Marcel Trudel, and Denys Delâge, not to mention Lescarbot and the Jesuit scribes, to measure how considerably important this economic activity was across all of North America. Fur, beaver in particular, generated serious capital: it financed New France, lined aristocratic pockets, and was the first serious Canadian business. It made John Jacob Astor his fortune in the United States, as well as the colossal fortunes of the Scottish in Montreal, who were owners of the North West Company, and the English in London, associated with the Hudson’s Bay Company. The fur trade was justification for explorations and multiplying missions; it solidified alliances and led to wars, determined geopolitical stakes, favoured interracial unions, and disrupted the fate of Indigenous Nations. In short, it set the tone for and gave impetus to many twists and turns throughout history. One place after another, in each region on the continent, trading was practised in various sequences for a long period spanning close to five hundred years. Each state and province had an era of trading fur and the accumulation of these eras constitutes the very foundation of America today.1 In this saga, heroes are not in short supply. However, official history highlighted the exploits of the fur trade leaders. With regards to those who produced the resource (hunters, trappers, backcountry runners),

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it was their apparent misery and ignorance that was put forward. It is no surprise that these poor, hard-working folks were Indigenous, mixed race, and French Canadians. To meet the high demand of fur for the European consumer, a vast territory had to be covered, and only the Indigenous Peoples, and later the coureurs des bois, had the know-how. A skill that was never recognized for its actual worth. Yet, the Innu of Nitassinan, from the first day of trading to the nineteenth-century mountain men of the American West, these are the ones who (we cannot stress this enough) literally made America.2 Well, them and women: since just as many women, for the most part Indigenous – hunters, intermediaries, negotiators, pelt preparers – were part of the adventure. A few words on context: at the beginning of this book, well before Jacques Cartier, we spoke about the frequent contact between Indigenous and European cod fishermen and whalers. As secondary as it was when bartering first started, fur became very sought after on the other side of the Atlantic during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Basque, Breton, and Normand boats, which used to go back with tons of fish and other products from the sea in their holds, now went back loaded with furs. “Beavers from Canada … have been the primary cause of several merchants from France crossing this great ocean to get rich off their spoils,” wrote Recollet Father Gabriel Sagard, on mission among the Huron. In the new world, things changed suddenly: Indigenous Peoples, without having planned or wanted it, and without even devising it, had entered into the Western market of supply and demand. Of course, they stood to profit from it: copper kettles, axes, knives, not to mention rifles … all these new items facilitated their life. Those who hunted only to satisfy their own essential needs (food, shelter, clothing) became links in a production chain focused on accumulating wealth, and not helping their communities; it helped the few, the haves – a word, a notion, and a reality that was never in their vocabulary nor part of their value system. It was easy for Europeans to take control, both for the French in the Saint Lawrence valley and the Dutch in the Hudson.

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Yet, the Saint Lawrence was not easy to take over. Since Cartier, merchants from various origins disputed the privilege to do business there, people from Saint-Malo and Normandy constantly claimed their rights before the court. Starting in 1588 and up until English rule, the kings of France accorded alternately the fur trade monopoly to a dozen concessionaires and companies. This privilege, however, had conditions attached to it that disenchanted many: in parallel to the fur trade, those holding the monopoly had to ensure the populating of New France, meaning they had to get settlers established, as well as missionaries for converting the savages. This required huge investments that would surely take a chunk out of their profits. And the future would show it: merchants were not colonizers. The first attempt, in 1600, was a failure. Captain Pierre de Chauvin, who held the monopoly, chose Tadoussac to construct a “habitation,” “the most disagreeable and barren in the whole country,” Champlain would later comment upon his arrival a few years later. Although the site, at the crossroads of the fur trade routes, seemed promising for commerce, the project to make a colony turned out to be a disaster: of the sixteen men who spent winter in the very rudimentary fort that Chauvin had built, five survived, and that was thanks to help from the Montagnais. Nothing would be set up there for some time; Tadoussac remained a port, post, and strategic point for decades, but it was nothing that resembled a New France. Though for the Innu, who neither expected nor hoped to be colonized or evangelized, this post represented a turning point: it marked the beginning of a commercial alliance with the Mishtikushuat (those who travel in wooden boats) and all the good and bad that followed throughout their history. When we say fur, for that time and place, it was mainly beaver – amishku in Innu. It was used to such an extent that the precious mammal, well before being engraved on a Canadian coin, was a monetary standard in New France: the valuing of merchandise, including other furs, was for a long time calculated in multiples and fractions of beaver

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pelts. For example, a wool blanket could be worth six beaver pelts, and a marten was worth a half. However, before the arrival of the whites, amishku did not necessarily have the best rating on the Indigenous hunting board. According to Father Charlevoix (cited by historian Denys Delâge in an excellent summary covering the ethology of the beaver as well as its role in Indigenous mythology and its central place in the fur trade), “the hides of beaver were not those which the people used most to cover themselves, and the skin of bear, moose, and a few other wild animals apparently were better than that of the beaver. Nevertheless, they hunted them, and this hunt had its time and specific ceremonial.”3 In fact, acts surrounding hunting beaver were very ritualized. Like the origins of the bear, caribou, and Great Hare, amishku enjoyed superhero status: the first peoples honoured this great architect who sculpted America’s topography and constructed hydrographical basins so essential to their subsistence. Certain Algonquin myths talk of a great beaver, Mishtamishk, who was a big as a black bear. In the story of Tshakapesh that we mentioned earlier, it has to do with giant beavers. Did the Ancients, through Oral Tradition, have knowledge of this species of giant beaver (Castoroides ohioensis) that their ancestors most likely met in the Pleistocene era, ten thousand years earlier? Were they able to deduce its existence from fossilized bones? It is still that Missinaku, the beaver master spirit, was over solicited during those years: he who had to decide if his protégés were going to give themselves to the hunter would soon be overwhelmed and probably exasperated by this intense rhythm. The European beaver, called “bièvre,” which is where the English “beaver” comes from, knew a lot about the subject: tracked down to the last stream, it almost disappeared completely. It was sought not only for its fur, but also for its perianal secretions: castoreum, a scented oil for marking territory, was used in medicine, and it is used to this day in the perfume industry. Already at the end of the sixteenth century, there were no beavers to be found in Western Europe and those from Russia and the Baltic Sea were barely able to fill the demand. With Parisian fashion,

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the felt hat would soon hit the major capitals of the West, and the “discovery” of northern America was timely indeed. Although this presumed Eldorado did not seem to harbour many hoped-for metals, its forests were a veritable gold mine: beaver, “they were as many as fleas on a dog!”4 Not only was the species abundant, there was already a strong and experienced workforce on site, which delivered the product in a near-finished state, meaning already worn, also known as “coat beaver.” As a matter of fact, in Champlain’s time, when bear or moose were in short supply, during winter, Indigenous Peoples would cover up with beaver “robes” made from a dozen pelts sewn together, which they wore fur-side in to stay warmer. Over time and with friction, the long hairs would fall, leaving only the under fur, which was shorter, softer, and, therefore, used in felting: artisans were spared the laborious process of pulling, or the ripping out of guard hairs – the long fur. Furthermore, throughout one or two winters, the under fur would become imbued with sweat and natural oils, making it smooth and shiny. It was soon understood that “coat beaver” was the most prized among hatters. “Parchment,” which was stretched and sun dried, was also exported, but it was worth much less. The first part of business was, therefore, to find Indigenous families wearing beaver robes and offer them small items in exchange. It was a win-win situation. European merchants laughed under their breath upon seeing the Indigenous Peoples offload their beautiful, precious pelts for less than nothing. As for the Indigenous Peoples, they mocked these goofy foreigners who gave up such precious articles for their old ragged attire. Out of this came the famous tirade from a Montagnais, relayed by Father Le Jeune: “Missi picoutau amiscou. The beaver does everything perfectly well: it makes us axes, swords, knives, bread, in short, it does everything.” And he added, with a mischievous grin, “The English are not very sharp; they give us twenty knives like this one here for one beaver pelt!” Yet, although the Indigenous Peoples were satisfied with their bartering (besides the fact that metal was truly a revolution

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in their life), it was more their nature and less their naiveté. Most missionaries highlighted their disinterest in worldly possessions, their sense of sharing, and their total absence of greed. Regarding “all savages in general,” Father Sagard stated, “They do not bargain willingly, and are happy with what is honestly and reasonably offered them, despising and cursing our merchants’ ways of dickering for an hour over one beaver pelt.” However, as the demand for fur was exploding, the Amerindians came to depend increasingly on European merchandise for their daily activities, especially firearms. Either way, it was in their interest to develop a sense for business, which is what they did rather quickly and efficiently. No longer would traders be able to “enfirouaper” them – from English “in fur wrapped!” Demand did not only increase for beaver; the European market showed an appetite for deer and seal skins as well as other furs – mink, stoat, marten, fox, otter, lynx. This was how the Innu of old came to integrate more trapping into their annual hunting cycles; it was done, as we will see, without giving up their ways, traditions, and identity.

Around the middle of the seventeenth century, nothing was going well in New France – the small colony went under English occupation from 1629 to 1632, Iroquois wars were never-ending, there was the destruction of Huronia, some survived through famines, and the Company of One Hundred Associates went belly up. From Quebec to Montreal, passing by Trois-Rivières, and up to Pays d’en Haut, the Iroquois were disrupting, indeed paralyzing, the Franco-Algonquin fur trade. All that was left was the North, at least the North accessible to the France of that time, that could ensure the colony’s economic survival. In 1652, the Council of Quebec, established five years earlier by the Queen Mother, officially selected a part of Nitassinan (actually around half of Innu lands) as belonging to the Crown. This was the famous Treaty at Tadoussac, also

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called the King’s Domain: hundreds of thousands of kilometres destined not to colonization, but to the tapping of resources – pelts first, as well as salmon and seal oil, and to a much lesser extent, mineral prospecting. Geographically speaking, this was the southwest part of Nitassinan, a vast territory that formed a square, from the north bank of the Saint Lawrence to the Hudson Bay watershed, and from the Île aux Coudres to Sept-Îles a few leagues downstream. To sum up this system, the Council auctioned off this territory to the highest bidder, individuals or companies, who, in exchange for rent, would get exclusive trading rights with Montagnais hunters for a determined period of time. They were given the task of constructing posts, organizing their replenishment, and maintaining shop assistants. Entry to the domain was prohibited to any intruder, be they Indigenous from other Nations or whites not holding a permit to trade there. For close to two centuries, several lessees or “farmers” succeeded one another in the administration of the King’s Domain, which survived the Conquest and became the King’s Posts network. During this time, the Innu took advantage of this system set up on their ancestral lands. The King’s Domain has been thoroughly studied – we are not missing any details regarding leases, explorations, monopolies, annual production of pelts and barrels of oil, trading posts and life at them.5 Let us just remind you here of the context of its creation. From 1600 to 1650, the heart of the fur trade was at Tadoussac. The place, despite being situated at a crossroads, was unable to mete out all the fur from the backcountry on its own. It was inevitable that other posts got created to be closer to inland bands. So, the Innu were given a hard choice. On one hand, they did not want the French to go up the Saguenay; they kept their preserve protected. On the other, they were also conscious of the advantages that a network of posts disseminated along different waterways they occupied could provide. If they let merchants come to them, would they lose control of their business? Or… even worse? Since by frequenting Tadoussac, they contracted illnesses from the whites, and

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little by little, epidemics made their way into their communities. Increasingly, they feared the malefic power of the black robes. On this, the Innu were divided, since these same black robes managed to Christianize, at least on the surface, a significant number of families. The trade was getting mixed with religion, as if commerce had a god. The converted sought the company of the French; they even adopted some of their ways. They no longer painted their faces with bright colours (red, blue, black), much to the delight of priests, who used the disappearance of this custom as a yardstick by which to measure their success. Some Innu groups from Saguenay and Lac Saint-Jean paid a king’s ransom so that the French set up a trading store and mission in their region, so they would no longer have to go to the ill-fated destination that was Tadoussac: they abhorred the black robes and were generally wary of the French, all the while recognizing that they needed them for kettles, knives, and other merchandise. Overall, it is apparent that the Innu Nation was shaken by major controversies. Yet despite decimating illnesses, despite the psychological harassment the missionaries exerted over them and the fracturing they provoked within the different bands, most members were for French presence. Finally, after having kept any foreigner from accessing the interior of their lands for almost fifty years, the Innu lifted the restriction in certain areas: in 1647, the Kakouchaks (Porcupines) let a Jesuit missionary meet them up the Saguenay. Father Jean de Quen was, therefore, the first European to enter this impassable portion of Nitassinan and contemplate the beautiful Lac Pekuakami, which, with complete disregard for its original toponymy, he dully named Saint-Jean. Guided by Montagnais, he was able to gather knowledge on this “kingdom of the Saguenay” that the French dreamed of since Iroquoian Donnacona boasted of riches at François I’s court. The father quickly noticed the existence of large gathering sites along the river and around the lake, especially the mouth of the Métabetchouan. The Lac Saint-Jean, he wrote, “feeds off waters

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from about fifteen rivers or thereabouts, which the small nations use as pathways, who are inland to come fish in the lake, and to foster commerce and friendship amongst each other.” The religious enterprise of Father de Quen was complemented with scouting work: his trip gave the French insight into the serious potential for their own commerce in these well-established networks, both for the soul or for beaver. The missionary came to the region for many a stay. Through his writing we were able to follow the way things went: “I landed for this mission on the 16th of May [1652], in the company of twelve canoes that were headed to trade, meaning sell goods to the people of this beautiful lake.” Henceforth, the French had their ins. It is worth noting that it was at the beginning of that year, 1652, that the King’s Domain was established. From that moment on, the Innu country was much more open to commerce and missions (at every trading post was a small chapel), and with “civilization,” epidemics and mourning relentlessly followed. Despite such havoc, the big fur trade machine was up and running. Another twenty years went by before the Chicoutimi and Kakouchaks Innu were able to count on the presence of trading companies in the territories. In 1671, a post was built at Chicoutimi. Supplanting the one at Tadoussac, it became the nerve centre of the trade for a long time. The post used the old network that was already in place: Métabetchouan, Mistassini, Nekouba, then the post at Ashuapmushuan. For access to furs in the Haute-Côte-Nord, lands of the Tadoussaciens, Papinachois, and Ouchestigoueks, the French erected a chain of posts, notably at La Malbaie, Îlets-Jérémie, Godbout, Moisie, and Sept-Îles, the latter becoming important and lucrative. The King’s Domain, as was stated, covered southwest Nitassinan. The other part, northeast Nitassinan, that of the Oumamiouek and Naskapi, was exploited according to the seigniorial system prevalent in New France. East of Sept-Îles, to the north, two seigniories were granted, that of Terre Ferme in Mingan as well as on the isles of Mingan. The privileges of overlords were similar to those of

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the “farmers” who had leases in the domain: exclusive commerce on furs, salmon fishing, seal hunting, etc. On the Basse-Côte-Nord, at the mouths of rivers, overlords built posts in Mingan and Natashquan. An interesting fact: it was Louis Jolliet, who discovered the sources of the Mississippi, who would be the first to work the post of the Mingan isles. Beyond the Nordic Eldorado, the French had other pretentions. As their commercial activities stabilized in the King’s Domain, they also pushed their explorations toward the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and the Prairies in the west. This was started with journeys from Radisson and Des Groseilliers in 1660. During their expedition to Lake Superior, the two explorers met the Kilistinon, whom they called “Christineaux,” and the English called them Cree. This group of Indigenous Peoples was itself just passing through: originally from lands bordering the famed Sea of the North that the French had been looking for since Champlain, they came regularly to barter with the Great Lakes Ojibwe. Here they got set up: the Kilistinon showed the two explorers the exact location of Hudson Bay, this paradise where the finest furs were – the farther north you went, the richer the furs were. Radisson and Des Groseilliers hoped to persuade France to set up trading posts there to appropriate this promising market with the Cree, but upon their return from the expedition, they were rather poorly received. The governor of New France, accusing the two men of having done business without a trading permit, had their fur cargo seized and Des Groseilliers thrown in jail. Once freed, he returned to France attempting to receive reparations, to no avail. He used this trip to stir the authorities’ interest in his project, but again, he was thwarted. Irked by the mediocre treatment they received from the French on both sides of the Atlantic, the two entrepreneurs turned to New England. Through contacts, they found themselves in London and were received enthusiastically at the court of Charles II. Prince Rupert, the king’s cousin, was able to collect the necessary funds. And so, in 1670, relying on the skills and instinct of the two French explorers, the English took control of Hudson Bay.

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The entire North American subarctic, from the coasts of Labrador to the Rocky Mountains, this colossal domain of nearly four million square kilometres, eight times the size of the King’s Domain, became the exclusive property of the Hudson’s Bay Company; it was called Rupert’s Land. Of course, neither Cree nor Dene, nor any other Indigenous Nation that had been living on these lands for thousands of years was consulted – much like no one asked the Innu if it was acceptable that their ancestral lands be rented to foreigners. At that time, people spoke of terra nullius: lands belonging to no one, which were up for grabs. France made numerous attempts to nuire (“interfere with”) the English – a great expression from that time – yet despite repeated and tremendous efforts from Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville to annihilate British forts from James Bay to Hudson Bay, never was the error of Versailles redressed. The hbc was there to stay. It would create in the Canadian North a unique model for cultural and economic life. A world apart, at the margins in the walk to the history of America. In its own way, the King’s Domain did the same, pursuing its activities away from the development of New France, and isolating the Montagnais from the rest of the world. Nevertheless, at that time, merchants found the Indigenous Peoples’ independence and nomadism hurt trapping productivity. How could they ensure that, hunting with their families, they could spend enough time trapping more lucrative animals? Traders wanted fur, always more fur. Impatient and greedy for profits, they invited outside Indigenous Peoples to surreptitiously come and trap inside the King’s Domain. And this is how, in southwest Nitassinan, especially around Lac SaintJean and the Saguenay, new actors emerged: Abenaki, Wendat-Huron, Mi’kmaq, and mixed race. These groups did not bring their families to the woods with them, and they did not have the same annual cycle model of subsistence. To the delight of traders, they operated as veritable full-time workers. This was a practice completely foreign to traditional Innu culture. At the time, the Innu did not take notice: the expansiveness

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of the territory allowed numerous trappers to enter discreetly, without disturbing anyone. Yet, the Innu, over time, felt the repercussions. Major dislocation forces were in play; a kind of cruel story was set in motion. The strain on the fauna became too much. In certain places, animals had disappeared. Denys Delâge commented on the phenomenon: “During preliminary negotiations to the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701, ambassadors from nations allied with the French highlighted their difficulties in taking on debts and offering generous gifts due to overhunting beaver and now how rare they had become. They said ‘we destroyed and used up all the land.’”6 Early in the English reign, the King’s Posts were leased to merchant groups, then in 1788, they were rented to the North West Company. This company, which consolidated capital and interests from a few rich Scots established in Montreal from the Conquest, quickly became a giant in the fur trade and a threat to Hudson’s Bay Company. Besides the posts of the old King’s Domain, The North West Company took over the entire French-Canadian trade network in the Great Lakes region of Wisconsin, to the Red River on the Prairies, all the way to Athabasca. The activity of the Scots from Montreal eventually collided with that of the English from London, so much so that a war broke out. The confrontations, often violent, led to the fusion of the two companies in 1821; a new entity was created, and it kept only the name the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was for this reason that the hbc took over the North West Company leases in the King’s Posts and that the Innu got to know the “honourable Company.” Like the Cree in the west, like the Dene in the Northwest Territories, they were able to maintain their lifestyle and remain sovereign, seemingly of course, deep in their lands.

CHAPTER 7

Essipit, “The River of Shells” Since you know, Father, that we each have our own plot, our grandfathers had it before us, they left it to their children, and we enjoy this today… to where do they want us to withdraw if we have no banks along the sea for ourselves! Request from the Innu to Father Coquart, handed to Governor Murray, 1765

I drove the entire Route 138 hundreds of times, from Montreal to the far reaches of Minganie. Twelve hours to get there, twelve to get back; enough time to reflect on the landscape and its history, but also the philosophy of human beings. Montaigne said you only think well when on a horse; it is still true. For me, it is behind the wheel during a long haul that my mind gets to meditating. The 138, with its curves, is ideal for mulling things over; this road is “good for thinking.” Over the years, on each of my trips, infinity before me, the sky above, the sea on one side, spruce on the other, sheltered from the cold, wind, snow, rain, and flies with a simple windshield, I revelled in bringing the rocks, small trees, and wharves to life. Upon entering each village, I wondered about the names given to the places and their people. Who was Napoléon Comeau, Ti-Basse Saint-Onge, what did the name “Bergeronnes” mean, from where did all these toponyms come: Les Îlets-Jérémie, Papinachois, Manicouagan, Les Islets-Caribou, the Moisie, Tonnerre River, Romaine River, and Natashquan? Why did Montagnais families have French names, like Dominique, Picard, Hervieux, Moreau, Paul, Benjamin, Saint-Onge, not to mention Vollant, des Bacon, and des Bellefleur? And

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why did others have Algonquin-sounding patronymics: Mistanapeo, Pietacho, Menikapo, Ishpatau, Napess, Uashaulnu, Napish, Mestokosho? What did the word Escoumin mean, which closely resembled Escuminac used by the Mi’kmaq? Were they talking about the same min, these small red fruits that grow on the rock? What did Pessamit mean? And Essipit? The 138 is also a long trek across high-voltage power lines, HydroQuébec dams, aluminum smelting plants, and mining projects. So much industrial ruggedness, clear-cut forest, and promises of wealth. At Baie-Comeau, there is the 389 junction that goes to Labrador. A road built with no emotion nor pride, without any respect for nature or heritage. We wanted more energy, more profits; there is always a breach somewhere, so there can be light – a gold mine, a mountain of cold, hard cash, a glimmer of hope. We could have been proud of the 389, put up a sign announcing that this is the road of Innu country, a veritable throwback to paleohistoric times of gigantic glaciers and giant beaver. We could have written Bon voyage en Boréalie! We could have given this sacred path a name, a nice one. But no. Logging roads, when not abandoned, become gray, asphalted, isolated roads, used for mines, dams, and giant logging companies. That is how the history of the north was built: logging roads, or cloisters rather, carved scars into the heart of Nitassinan. For years, on each of my trips to the Côte-Nord, past Tadoussac, I would drive past the Escoumins reserve. This was before it was called Essipit. The name was not unknown to me; as part of a summer job, in 1967, within the lands division of the Ministry of Indian Affairs, I often saw in the archives faded folders filed under: “Montagnais Reserve of the Escoumins band.” A tiny, minuscule reserve off the main road, a space less than one square kilometre that could easily be overlooked if driving too fast. Most of the time, I drove by it without stopping, going farther down the coast to Escoumins proper, the village of the “whites,”

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next to the reserve. Nevertheless, I would occasionally make a stop in the Montagnais community to take in the beauty of the seashore and simply to learn more. In 1975, I attended a meeting on the founding of the Atikamekw-Montagnais Council, which took place at GrandesBergeronnes and was hosted by the Essipit community. At the time, I was a neophyte observer, a young anthropologist still getting his feet wet. I got to witness the political effervescence that invigorated the Chiefs of nine Innu villages and three Atikamekw villages gathered for the occasion. A few years later, I was in Escoumins again, this time accompanied by Pierre Lepage, who was working for the Commission des droits de la personne (the Human Rights Commission). We needed to get information on the existing tensions between the two neighbouring communities with regards to salmon in the Escoumins River. The quarrel went back a long way, and that was throughout the country. Since the adoption of the 1858 Fisheries Act (a law from Upper Canada that authorized the granting of special leases and permits that clearly benefitted sport fishing over subsistence fishing), all rivers with salmon were reserved for the elite, for rich Americans, bourgeois Canadians, and members of sports associations. It was the system of clubs. Private clubs. For the Indigenous Peoples, this meant, “No fishing!” Deprived of their millennia-old way of life, “strangers on their own rivers,” and suddenly criminalized, they contested it as much as they could through petitioning and political action. Without their rights necessarily being recognized, a moratorium from Quebec made it official that their fishing practices would henceforth be tolerated.1 So, you know what happens next: the whites, members of sports associations in particular, start whining and calling out discrimination. In those years, the Indigenous Peoples had got really bad press in francophone newspapers from Quebec; they were continuously being called poachers by hunting and fishing columnists who were very influential at that time. Many among

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them, incidentally, held important positions within said sports associations. “Get your member card,” they would say to the Indigenous Peoples, “and line fish like everyone else.” A 1981 study published by the Human Rights Commission concluded that “roughly, of around sixty editorials and opinion pieces, there were practically as many anti-Indian editorials or opinion pieces.”2 It is in this context of skirmishes that I heard for the first time the explicit expression from some of the white citizens of Escoumins: “Those Indians aren’t Indians; they are white like you and me and are taking advantage of their status to get special privileges.” To contest the right of “so-called Indians” to fish for salmon in the river (which was decimated by the logging industry and had been exterminated since the 1850s, but then had recently been painstakingly reintroduced), the strategy was simple: attack their status and call into question their identity. Some ten years later, in 1993, when the people of Les Escoumins were starting the process of cultural reappropriation and adopting the name Essipit (officially the Essipit Innu First Nation), one Mr Donald Trump, an ambitious entrepreneur with no scruples, attacked the Mashantucket Pequot of Connecticut under the pretext that their casinos were an unfair competition to his gambling establishments. The Pequot had the immense advantage, he argued, of not paying taxes, when everyone else had to … even him.3 So, if they wanted to own Indian casinos, yet again they had to prove they were Indians. Trump’s testimony before a committee in the House of Representatives was recorded and can be seen online. The argument boiled down to this very clever remark: “They don’t look like Indians to me!” That is racial profiling in its rawest form. Do we need to draw blood, have genetic testing to prove that one Indian or another is “legitimate?” Do we need to establish physical traits and take measurements? Do Indians have to live in the woods, walk with snowshoes, or wear a quiver to assert their status? The future president of the United States ignored history, flouted laws, and insulted racial mixing and the complex inner workings of cultural identity. Outraged,

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the committee leader lambasted him: “Thank God that’s not the test of whether or not people have rights in this country – whether or not they pass your ‘look’ test.” Let us just say his position made clear and explicit long-held prejudices and stereotypes, still present today, with regards to Indigenous Peoples. And that was our starting point, in Quebec and across America.

Fires have been burning for a long time on the hills overlooking the Saint Lawrence River here in Essipit (Esh Shipu, “the river of shells”). The history of this small seaside community should be told, in response to all the Trumps of this world. Its journey was remarkable and was, both figuratively and literally, a journey against all odds. Where did the Essipiunnuat get so much pride? From where did they gather such strength and patience that made their village a symbolic place of identity resistance? According to archaeologist Michel Plourde, the arrival of the first “human groups” around the mouth of the Saguenay dates back eight thousand years. Several sites, particularly the Cap de Bon-Désir and Anse à la Cave, were regularly visited across millennia by generations of Indigenous Peoples having come to hunt seal. Yet we cannot speak of Innu; at that time, it was not possible to identify the various groups who had been there and who could be identified culturally by their way of life and the objects they made. Was there some kind of affiliation between them? We cannot know. Only one cultural tradition was identified with certainty, even if we do not know what they came there to do or what became of them: they were Iroquois from east of the Saint Lawrence River Valley. They lived along the river, between Portneuf and Cap Tourmente, and frequented the estuary seasonally; Greenland seal and harbour seal, not to mention salmon, were an integral part of their diet. On various coastal sites, pottery shards were found (very characteristic of their art), which allowed us to date their presence to the Late

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Woodland period, going back as far as 1,000 years before the present (bp), but it may be closer to 750 bp.4 At Essipit, on the traditional site of Manakashun, over five thousand artifacts were recently exhumed that date back even farther, probably to the Archaic period (5000 bp).5 It is, for the most part, fragments of materials used for making tools with edges, like projectile points, as well as bits of polished tools, like gouges and axe heads. It is believed that this was a camp that served as a cutting workshop. Powdery concentrations of a kind of hematite indicate that we have some rare clues on red ochre production methods. This pigment was used in different ceremonies; Indigenous Peoples coated their faces and bodies with it, but they also drew motifs on their clothing and on “walls.” In Quebec, it is sometimes called rock art; to this day, around twenty sites have been located, like Nisula or Pepechapissinagan (in Innu “the rock thing upon which there is painting”) near Forestville. The pictograms found on the walls of a cliff, traced with a finger using red ochre, dates back 2000 to 2500 years bp. Yet, as mentioned at the beginning of this book, researchers are generally in agreement on establishing the “apparition” of the Innu, or Innu ancestors, precisely during that period. Were they the authors of these human and animal figures (possibly a fish), the meaning of which escapes us? Over the various sites and discoveries, paleohistory will eventually divulge its secrets. As for the past few centuries, there is no lack of information. Several historians have widely documented the annals of the Haute-Côte-Nord, from the arrival of Basque whalers to the establishment of the King’s Domain, up to the brutal development of the entire region. Jesuit Father Pierre Laure, who stayed in the region for some twenty years starting in 1720, logged some interesting observations. He called the Innu living on the coast between Tadoussac and Les Escoumins “les Montagnez de la mer” (Montagnais of the sea). He described them as being “slightly less crude and more refined than other inland savages.” His perception came surely from the fact that, working directly under the supervision

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of trading post clerks, they had adopted certain manners and idiosyncrasies from the whites. For example, they dressed in European style, or “Canadian style.” Father Laure appreciated the balance and equality between the sexes: he noted that those Innu, “very different from other nations who view their women as slaves, imitate the French way within their family and what is most reasonable, which is to help each other out.” The Montagnais women, he said, “compared to foreign savage women, [are] regarded as queens and sovereigns.”6 We know these Innu were well acquainted with the Basque who “beached” on their banks, and whose presence Champlain underlined. This description can be found in the journal from his first voyage in 1603: “Then, going on to Esquemin, you come to two small, low islands and a little rock near the shore … A little farther is a river extending a short distance into the interior.” Champlain called this region “Nouveau Biscaye.” For a hundred years, the two peoples most likely maintained trading and collaborative relations. Apart from numerous vestiges found on excavation sites and some rare testimonies, accounts of these relations are few and far between. Nevertheless, realizing that these sailors left their countries for prolonged periods (we know one captain and his crew wintered in the estuary in 1586–87) and that Indigenous Peoples enjoyed their sexual freedom before marriage, it is realistic to suppose the Basque men may have left a few traces behind. Besides, if biological race mixing is yet to be confirmed, there is no doubt as to cultural blends: The Basque and Innu shared their respective know-how. Furthermore, the Innu developed solid skills in terms of seals; they did not only use them for food, but they used every part of the animal for several different purposes. The skin of the seal, explains Father Laure, is used to make footwear, savage habits, or for covering caskets … The savage women and children ran promptly to shore when loaded canoes were

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approaching, and peacefully shared seal fins,7 chops, feet, flippers and head … It starts by skinning the victim, then the fat is taken off in one piece. The lard, used to make oil, is 3 to 4 inches thick, sometimes more sometimes less. In certain spots, the various pieces of fat are put together and thrown in the charnier, which is a kind of press in which, liquefying little by little, they produce more unctuous oils, which, it would appear, are better for tanning. In short, Father Laure confirms, “This is the trade by which oils are used for burning in this country, and for passing the skins in Europe.”8 The Innu-Basque period was followed, at Les Escoumins and in most parts of Nitassinan, by more than a century of relations with French fur traders and their employees. The same went for the Jesuits who, like the traders, always settled near Innu gatherings. At that time, the Montagnais of the sea assembled every year, from December to April, at Cap Bon-Désir (Grandes-Bergeronnes). This site, which they called Pipounapi, meaning “winter camp,” was ideal for hunting seal because the water did not freeze; the canoes could manoeuvre freely in winter so well that they produced double the amount of oil than in posts at Tadoussac, Sept-Îles, or Les Îlets-Jérémie. “Over the course of a season, each Innu could kill a hundred head of seal,” estimates Florence Parcoret, an ethnologist very engaged with the Essipit community.9 Hunting was done with a rifle; while two men steered the canoe toward drifting ice, a third shot the seals on it. At Pipounapi, there were a dozen families, enough to have Father Laure build a small chapel and house there. He called his mission NotreDame-de-Bon-Désir. After four years of wintering, he was abruptly ousted by workers from the trading post. “The pretext for chasing away the missionary,” he explained in his Relation, “was that last year little oil was made and it was very falsely alleged that all I did was occupy (the Innu) day and night with prayer, without giving them time to hunt.” Did the clerks ransack, or even burn down Father Laure’s facil-

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ities? It is believed to be the case. Nothing was left but a “new house and chapel in ruins.” The Jesuit regretfully left “this dilapidated and unrecognizable post” and brought his mission to Chicoutimi. Life continued at Pipounapi without mass or daily candlelit prayer, and even if “they did not see the priest on the rocks, and lost heart,” the hunters continued hunting. Yet, their hunts were not limited to seal. Much to the dismay of missionaries, who dreamed of seeing them settle once and for all, those Innu remained fundamentally nomadic. Although some built cabins near the sea, most still lived in tents. “Our savages, who bring their home with them, enjoy more their bark and pine than being under gilded panels and atop a duvet,” stated Father Laure. In fall, the offseason for seal hunting, families would head back to their traditional hunting territories, one hundred, sometimes two hundred leagues into the woods, in search of fur and woodland game. Sometimes they would go in spring as well, “to recoup after a winter of feeding on poor provisions.” According to historian Pierre Frenette, it was a commercial hunt just as much as it was for subsistence. Just for the year 1731, they reported “a production of one hundred martens, twenty-four lynx, and two hundred pounds of beaver.”10 Although the Montagnais of the sea had a favourable link with Missinaku, the master spirit of fish and all aquatic animals, they nevertheless kept a channel of communication open with Papakassiku, master of land animals. With the comings and goings of hunters, traders, seasonal workers, masons, and coopers who came to maintain the few buildings and ovens; with missionaries passing through to perform baptisms, weddings, and funerals; with the intense activity of the post in spring, the unloading of French ships in summer; with its small motley population – and its “rather attractive youth,” Father Coquart, the new Jesuit serving in Saguenay, observed that Pipounapi represented in the eighteenth century “a cosmopolitan and effervescent place.”11 This proliferation was explained simply due to its location: it was where the Saguenay valley,

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that of the Saint Lawrence, and the gulf coasts came together. The land of Essipiunnuat not only attracted Europeans but Indigenous Peoples from all over, themselves drawn by commerce with the Europeans. According to Michel Plourde, “the colonies of seal were certainly an important draw as well.” Here we are talking about the Iroquois, those whom Jacques Cartier met around Stadaconé during his second journey, and he called them “Canadians.” It appears certain that relations were established between the Iroquois of “Canada” and the Montagnais of the estuary. The Iroquois had precious materials to trade – pottery, pipes, maize, and possibly tobacco. In return, the Montagnais had large quantities of pelts and canoes at their disposal. Starting in 1580, the trail of these ancient Iroquois ran cold. Were they decimated, as posited by anthropologist Roland Viau in the essay entitled Amerindia, by diseases introduced during the settling of the ephemeral Roberval colony at Cap-Rouge? Whatever happened, when Champlain began his peregrinations on the river in 1603, they had mysteriously vanished. It would seem the Mi’kmaq took advantage of this eclipse to extend their influence beyond Gaspésie and the Maritimes. Not only did they build canoes sturdy enough to go out to sea, but they were also excellent navigators; they crossed both the Saint Lawrence Gulf and the Gulf of Maine. They also crossed the river at Matane and showed up in Innu country. Despite the two peoples establishing an alliance, they also made life hard on each other. Well, we know the Innu felt invaded and threatened. The following commentary from Father Laure offers some food for thought: “Mikmak coureurs, who, not knowing where to turn, spoil most missions, or beg for bread on the coasts and at Quebec. We have much to repent about having let them winter at Bon-Désir.” Innu Oral Tradition recounted cruel aggressions, confirmed by the Relations des jésuites from 1645: Mi’kmaq invaded the Acadian mission of Nepegigoüit (Nepisiguit, present-day Bathurst) and relished “their great war exploits at Chichedek, Bersiamite country [Pessamit], where

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they killed seven savages and took thirteen or fourteen prisoners, mostly children.” There were numerous visitors. As was mentioned in the previous chapter, not only Mi’kmaq, but the Wendat-Huron, Abnaki, Etchemin (Malecite) as well, were hired as professional trappers by the merchants of the King’s Domain. At the end of the French regime, the Innu no longer had free rein over their lands. Some, whose familial territory was more exposed than others to the activity of these “foreign workers,” protested to the authorities: these people were doing them harm, and their oversized greed was putting their resources at risk. The authorities listened to the Montagnais’s grievances, but took no action; the activity of these trappers perfectly suited the lessees of the Domain. More fur meant more profits. Eventually, the time came where beaver became scarce. “The post at Tadoussac close to the mouth of the Saguenay is depopulated of animals,” wrote Father Coquart in 1733, “and the only resource left is seal hunting.”

In 1760, caught up in the turbulence of the Conquest, the Innu from Saguenay and the Haute-Côte-Nord worried about completely losing their rights, their protections, and their relative tranquility on their ancestral lands. What would become of the French King’s Domain? Were the English going to open all of Nitassinan and put an end to the exclusivity protecting them from outside influences? It is true that the Royal Proclamation of 1763 used a lot of paragraphs to determine Indian rights under British reign. It was clearly affirmed that territories unceded by First Nations would remain Indian lands as long as they were not ceded in due form to the Crown. However, worried rumours circulated: the Indians’ distinct status could be abolished, and certain plots could be sold to the British military. Was the seigniory of La Malbaie not ceded to Scottish officers in 1762? Through hear-say, all the neighbouring Innu

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started fearing that they would be obligated to give up their nomadic, hunter-gatherer way of life in one way or another. A letter from Father Coquart, addressed to Governor Murray in 1765, lays bare the feeling of Innu dispossession: I have just received a deputation from my savages … Father, they said with little emotion, we learned that they want to give away our lands, not only to trade on, but to give them as property, a part to one, a part to another, so that we will be stripped of what we possess. … We will therefore have to pay these owners to have the life we live in the summer, on the rivers and lakes close to the rivers, since they will not let us hunt or fish without paying something for permission … For one hundred and fifty years, and beyond, which is to say long before those from the other side came and seized this country, our fathers and us have always inhabited the lands on which we live today, the shores of the sea and the inland depths for hunting in winter and summer … We have always been a free nation and we are becoming slaves, which will be hard on us after having enjoyed our freedom for so long.12 However, the foreseen catastrophic scenario did not come about. After the Conquest, the region of Charlevoix being the exception, the King’s Domain remained a reserved domain: for another century, it would keep its untapped status, having to provide furs for the King’s Posts. The nomadic Innu tradition was able to continue, as was mentioned earlier, the difference being the authorities were Scottish instead of French and, starting in 1801, they were Montrealers of Scottish origin, and owners of the North West Company. As for the Jesuit missionaries, their work was coming to an end: the English formally forbade them to receive or recruit many members. The last of a long line of Jesuits among the Innu of the Côte-Nord, Father Jean-Baptiste de La Brosse was sent there in 1766. He was an immense character, a great pedagogue,

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and completely devoted to the Indigenous Peoples and their emancipation. First and foremost, his goal was to make them literate. Besides a Montagnais dictionary, he wrote an alphabet and, again in the Montagnais language, a manual entitled Nehiro-Iriniui, a book of both prayer and catechism. He had one thousand copies printed at Quebec –– we can read the name of the city, Uabistiguiatsh, on the cover. Historian Pierre Dufour affirmed that “it is the first book in Amerindian language printed in Canada.”13 At the end of his ministry, Father de La Brosse made a list of all the Christian Montagnais. The title of the document was “General catalogue of the whole Montaignais nation.”14 Unfortunately, the original document was lost, but the work was taken back up and completed in 1795 by Abbott Jean-Joseph Roy, director of the Quebec Seminary. This exercise counted 1,124 Innu, ninety-two of which were connected to the Tadoussac site, twenty-six to Portneuf (present-day Portneuf-sur-Mer), and only fourteen to Bon-Désir. Despite new epidemics and the imminent disappearance of the Innu being constantly announced, camps still teemed with children, many children.

In the beginning, the Les Escoumins site was composed of a few families from Tadoussac and Bon-Désir who had cleared small lots there and built small wooden huts; they were called “squatters,” in other words improvised farmers on wild lands. These Montagnais hunted seal, as they had done for some time, some owned cows, but they also roamed the territory for food and trapped animals for fur. Then, as we saw, some nomadic families spent the winter in the forest and came back in the summer and set up their tents. Starting in 1838, settlers from Charlevoix, joined into one company, the Société des Vingt-et-un, pressured the government to open part of the King’s Domain to colonization. The forestry entrepreneurs would not be deterred; for years they had been eyeing the trees in the fjord and

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estuary of the Saguenay. They all wanted to get in on the action. Some got a head start and were harvesting the forests without government authorization. One way or another, the secular tranquility of the King’s Domain would not last. The government ended up bending to the pressure from entrepreneurs and colonizers; the integral protection of the territory fell in 1842. Southwest Nitassinan was officially open to whoever wanted to profit from its resources. The Innu from the region were brutally exposed to all sorts of spoliation. Their ancestral forests, up to that point reserved for the annual hunting cycle and fur trapping, were henceforth choice zones for the “lumber barons.” They were razed. Furthermore, colonization of the best lands was planned: manpower was needed, and all the workers who kept pouring in needed to get set up. The logger-colonist regime was planted, like the rest of Quebec, and the life of these Innu turned into a nightmare. The change was extremely expeditious, so much so that in 1843, the united Canada government decided to send a land agent to the HauteCôte-Nord to supervise and see that all ran smoothly. The agent, George Duberger, sent to La Malbaie, was married to an Innu woman, Charlotte Metshituaiskuen, from the Godbout Nation. Formerly, he was a trading post clerk from the Hudson’s Bay Company and was familiar with the language and culture of the area. Yet, despite these affinities, Duberger was not much a defender of Innu interests. He was a land agent, and as such, distributed plots, surveyed the land, and administered cutting permits in the huge river basins, where the trees were splendid. His mandate consisted of organizing the territory’s operations, “developing” it to bloat royalties for the Crown. Among his many activities, he was responsible for normalizing the situation of a few Indian “squatters,” but he was not at all concerned with Indigenous rights and the injustices of which the Innu were victim. Upon his first outing, Duberger noticed the rapidity with which sawmills were built. William Price, the future lumber magnate, was at Tadoussac; entrepreneur Thomas Simard was at the Bergeronnes; and

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the Têtu Company set up shop at Les Escoumins. Thousands of workers were in the forests and hundreds in the mills where high-quality planks and beams were produced. No one was fooled: the Indigenous Peoples were now a nuisance, an eye-sore on the landscape and nobody recognized their rights. They were not part of the plan. Between 1843 and 1850, the Innu in the King’s Domain incessantly made demands, protested, and alerted the authorities. They increased their petitioning, which was officially called “pétitions montagnaises.” These documents, sometimes written in Innu but for the most part translated into French by the religious authorities, left no doubt as to the nature of the problem. In one after the other, the same arguments were brought up: for generations, the Innu contributed to the Crown’s wealth with their lucrative trapping activities and they had not ceded their lands to any crown whatsoever, and presently, in just a few years’ time, by a regime change, they lost everything, becoming strangers in their own country, reduced to misery and poverty, despised and duped by entrepreneurs and the “logger bourgeoisie.” Rather than charity, they demanded exclusive hunting and fishing rights, protected territories, and recognition as a people. The first petition dates to 1 February 1843.15 This request cloaked a private element in it that gave rights to the Moreau families as well as that of Denis Jean-Pierre at Les Escoumins. Fear of being ousted by the loggers and colonists, these so-called “natural Montagnais” wanted their right of prior possession to be respected at the exact site where they built a house and cleared small portions of land. Their demand was supported by Thomas Simard, who encouraged the sedentarization of the Innu and regularizing the “squatter” situation coming from mixed unions. From a purely pragmatic point of view, making the Innu sedentary would “get them out of the woods,” thereby facilitating logging operations. Moreover, entrepreneurs shared the missionaries’ obsession (the Oblates of Mary Immaculate) and would have liked to turn the Innu into good Catholic peasants gathered around a steeple.

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These priests, often solicited to bring petitions to political entities, had no qualms with revising texts: they inserted doubtful affirmations into them, like the fact the Innu were willing to cultivate the land. Other petitions followed, which demanded rights little by little, not for individuals, but for the entire Montagnais Nation. Anthropologist Paul Charest summed up a petition by the Innu of Lac Saint-Jean, Chicoutimi, as well as the missions of Betsiamites and Godbout, addressed to Lord Metcalfe in 1845: First, they complained that Amerindian hunters from outside the territory [Mi’kmaq] came there to hunt … that “white men arrived in huge crowds, took land and drove the savages into the backcountry” … that they do not receive any government aid in the form of annuities, which is the case for “other savages,” yet this same government has always received important sums of money in terms of rent from the King’s Posts … and it will receive much more with sales of land that they always claimed was theirs in a communal manner.16 The Montagnais had an acute sense of the injustices committed by governments and attempted by all their means (what little means they had, we should say) to receive reparations. But the state’s bad faith carried it away with fervour. In short, allies were in short supply. There was one politician, compassionate, who highlighted the deep misery in which they were suddenly thrown. His name was Marc-Pascal de Sales Laterrière, deputy of Saguenay county, and he took it upon himself to address to Governor General Lord Elgin a memorandum in which he strongly supported a Montagnais petition that he had annexed; he denounced that the development of the region translated to an unjust dispossession with regards to the first inhabitants of the region. Next, he took the Innu’s side regarding high rent being collected at the King’s Posts and deplored the disinterest of the Hudson’s Bay Company for the territory

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since it had lost its exclusive operating rights on it. “So,” he continued, “the 25 families from the Saguenay territory and the 150 families from the King’s Posts on the Côte-Nord of the Saint Lawrence River were exposed to ‘all kinds of privations, even starving to death! Last winter, without the shelter and food offered to them by the compassionate Mr Peter McLeod at Chicoutimi, although in the vicinity of one of the Company’s posts, the vast majority of these unfortunate people would be dead from starvation and destitution.’”17 Laterrière, having a keen interest for law, invoked the fourth Article of Capitulation of Montreal, which stipulated that the savages had to be preserved in the possession of the lands they inhabited. Pushing his legal argument further (which was very modern for the times), he went back to the Royal Proclamation of 1763, in which one article specified, “The savages cannot be dispossessed of their lands without an arrangement with them and they must receive indemnities in return in the form of presents or ‘fixed and permanent annuity payments.’”18 In an extremely interesting research note, anthropologist Jacques Frenette rigorously comments on the petition from 8 April 1847, addressed to Lord Elgin by the Montagnais from Tadoussac, Les ÎletsJérémie, Godbout, and Sept-Îles.19 This petition was written in Innu at Essipit and oblate Flavien Durocher wrote the French version, under the direction of interpreter Pierre Moreau. In it are the signatures of 131 Innu, six of whom were Chiefs. The original version illustrates the extent to which the Innu language thrived at that time and the number of individuals who knew how to read and write it. This was the heritage left by the Jesuits, in particular the legacy of Father de La Brosse. Simply examining the names, written in Innu with the French equivalent, gives some food for thought. Some names are recognizable, like Bacon and Moreau, but what about Uestshinitshu, Apistapes, Nitshikuapeu, Mistanapéo, Shetus, Napinus? What became of these names? Where are their genealogies, registers, and inventories of patronyms? Without a doubt, therein lies an immense field of research since these original

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names completely disappeared, it would seem, at the turn of the twentieth century. The petition ended with this remarkable French expression, a literal translation from Montagnais: “Done at the Rivière des Huitres, on the VIII of the Goose Moon 1847.” Art historian Jean Trudel also noted a spectacular episode, immortalized by a painting from Théophile Hamel.20 Three Montagnais Chiefs and three interpreters went to Montreal in March 1848, to deliver a request in person to Governor General Lord Elgin. The painting reveals the three Chiefs dressed in their traditional garb, a long skin coat worn by hunters, long hair with a red and white Montagnais bonnet on top, a style that was still common for that time (women wore this for a very long time, and some elderly women still wear them to this day). At their sides, in an elegant frock, was one of the interpreters, Peter McLeod, also called Milaupanuish; he was a recognized figure around the Saguenay. Born from a union between a Montagnais woman and a Scot, he was an associate of William Price and had huge interests in the logging industry. Considered as the founder of Chicoutimi, he wore his Scottish hat when it was convenient for him, and a Montagnais one when it was to his advantage. Yet, one way or another, due to his origins, he demonstrated great compassion toward the Innu families thrown into poverty because of logging. A fun little fact: for a long time, Hamel’s painting was entitled Lord Durham et les Chefs indiens. It was a glaring error and it was not until 1975 that experts rectified it. This time, the request had 106 signatures. The three Chiefs, Jusep Kakanukus, Pasil Thishenapen, and Tumas Mesituapamuskan, had walked “across forest and mountain in snowshoes, with only their wisdom and knowledge of the woods as their guide” to reach the home of John McLaren at Port-au-Persil. With this interpreter, they went to Quebec on sleigh before taking “an omnibus with four seats” to make the journey from Quebec to Montreal, forty-eight hours of bumps that “broke our bodies.” It was John McLaren who told the newspaper La Presse, fifty years later, about the details of the trip.21 Deputy Later-

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rière, who also accompanied the delegation, was loyal to his ideals and an ardent defender of Montagnais rights. “The savages of the Saguenay, ha!” he exclaimed in La Minerve, which covered the expedition. “They are destined for destruction by the very quick march to civilization that nothing can stop at present … unless our new cabinet (if a feeling of philanthropy and justice exists somewhere) takes them under their protection.” Lord Elgin received the Montagnais coldly, typical of British colonialism at that time, and with a little something extra that was unspeakable: “You are quite the specimens of your race in terms of build,” he said to them, “and I do not doubt that your intelligence equals your build.” He added that he would present their request to Her Majesty Our Queen and quickly tried to leave the room. Tumas Mesituapamuskan held him: “We gave you a ‘book’ of our demands, give us one of your promises.” Lord Elgin answered, saying he would give the order to have medals struck for each one of them and would offer them arms and Union flags as a souvenir of their voyage. “Do you believe with that that we will be able to cross the forest and hunt for our survival?” retorted Tumas. On that, the governor general withdrew without answering. The Montagnais arguments were not taken seriously: although requesting lands and royalties, all they were given were basic necessities to alleviate their desperate situation. Rather than recognizing their rights, they opted for charity. In the column written by McLaren in La Presse in 1897, there was one final detail: “The chiefs received the gifts promised to them, and one chief killed himself accidentally with his rifle.” No doubt about it, those were cruel times for the Innu. For years, Montagnais petitions were presented in succession, put forward with evidence, yet without governments being sensitive to their arguments in any way. However, one thing is clear: people were fully aware of the causes and effects that had taken place; between 1842 and 1860, it was the general plundering of the Innu in that part of Nitassinan.

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In the 1840s, around twenty Montagnais families occupied the Les Escoumins site. In 1853, oblate Father Flavien Durocher, on the front lines, spoke of thirty families. A few years later, the Hudson’s Bay Company reported the presence of a hundred Innu at Essipit, or about twenty families. This shows that the numbers of the community oscillated around one to two hundred individuals. This was not the case for the neighbouring community of Tadoussac, whose numbers were dwindling from year to year. Only two or three Indigenous families, namely the Tchernish-Nicolas, of Malecite origin, remained on the site of the old trading post that the hbc was about to close for good and open a post at Les Îlets-Jérémie. For a few years, it was anarchy: agent Duberger conceded forested watersheds like they were nothing, as if no one depended on these “standing forests.” Montagnais petitions piled up, tirelessly asking for the same thing: protected lands and exclusive salmon fishing and seal hunting sites. The united Canada government took action. Inundated by protests coming from all regions of Lower Canada, where logging companies were calling all the shots, and pressed by these companies to find a solution to the problem of “Indians in the woods,” it enacted in 1851 a law entitled “Act to authorize the setting apart of lands for the use of certain Indian Tribes in Lower Canada.” For this law, the commissioner of Crown lands was given authorization to reserve a total of two hundred and thirty thousand acres for the exclusive use of Lower Canada Aboriginals. Yet, he divvied them up according to the pressing needs of logging companies. At Témiscamingue and in the Hautes-Laurentides, two sizeable reserves were created, Maniwaki on the Gatineau and Témiskamingue on the banks of the lake carrying the same name. The idea was to have all the Algonquin-Anishinaabe abandon their forest hunting and assemble at these two precise places where government officials and missionaries could devote themselves to the project of civilizing them. In Haute-Mauricie,

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the same was done, with a plot to sedentarize all the Atikamekw hunters. And so, the Wemontachingue and Coucoucache reserves were created. They even bothered to reserve some land at Kiskissink for the benefit of the Abenaki who once came to trap in the King’s Domain. The Innu of the Saguenay and Lac Saint-Jean were initially offered sites at Péribonka and Métabetchouan, but then ended up reserving only one site, that of Pointe-Bleue (Mashteuiatsh). Finally, for the Innu of the Côte-Nord, Tadoussac, Les Escoumins, Manicouagan, Godbout, SainteMarguerite, and Sept-Îles, the commissioner set aside a vast reserve at Manicouagan. Yet it was at Betsiamites (Pessamit) that said the reserve was constituted in 1862, because the site would better serve the oblates and the Hudson’s Bay Company. This “setting aside” of lands should not be taken as an act of compensating the Innu, nor of recognizing any rights whatsoever from the government. This was, rather, a manoeuvre clearly expressing their intent to see hunter-trapper nomads leave their vast territories and be grouped into one single place; by doing so, no more would an Indian get in the way of logging operations. In short, creating these reserves did not consider the demands and requests the Innu had expressed in their numerous petitions submitted between 1843 and 1851. Instead, Pessamit and Mashteuiatsh were centres for the “civilization of Savages.” The oblates were called in to manage this vast project of transforming hunters into farmers, and nomads into settlers. To better illustrate (is it necessary?) the government’s bad faith, insensitivity, and ignorance, let us mention that while the authorities were creating the Pessamit reserve, the very same authorities granted exclusive salmon fishing rights to the elite English, American, and Canadian bourgeoisie on every river and stream in the Côte-Nord. In 1860, as they were going up the Moisie River on an exploration, two Brits, the Hind brothers (one a geologist, the other a painter), guided by the Innu, noticed the salmon of the river were reserved for rich Americans. In a word, river

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salmon – so important to the Innu culture, and so crucial to their annual cycle of travelling, hunting, and gathering – had become inaccessible. If they took any, they would become poachers, outlaws.

In 1861, united Canada carried out its first census of the Canadian population. For the first time, we had in our possession a systematic list of Innu from “Township Escoumin.” Pierre Frenette writes: The census taker blithely slaughtered names: Ross became “Russ,” Bacon became “Pako,” Moreau, “Moros,” and “Molush” for “Petit Moreau.” Some references to adults, women in particular, retained only a first name of Christian origin, like “Marie” or “Angèle”… Not to mention surnames like “Betshiamiskoua” (“woman from Pessimit”) or “Dominiquich” (“little Dominique”), Josephish, Charlish, etc. Some references associate name and surname, like “Dominique Atikulnut” (“Dominique ‘caribou hunter’”). As you can see, it is an intelligent mix of Indigenous last names, Christian first names, and European patronyms. Frenette slips in this very eloquent commentary: “On the list was also Frédéric, Napintas, Uapanush, Duberger, Denis, Rousselot, Aglé, and five Bacon families whose traditional tents did not catch the agent’s attention.”22 Despite disinterest toward the “campers” and the casual taking of names, the 1861 census delivered some precious information: there were 127 Innu at Les Escoumins, divided into twenty-three families. Obviously, due to nomadism, the population fluctuated; from one year to the next, families may or may not have returned to the site. Not to mention the Pessamit reserve that, starting in 1862, exercised a certain power of attraction: on it was a Hudson’s Bay trading post and oblate missionaries resided there permanently. Nevertheless, over the years, the government realized that its plan to sedentarize would never really work.

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Pessamit became a large village assembling members of several regional Nations, but the reserve was a long way from rounding up all the Innu in the territory. And although the small Les Escoumins community lost half of its population to Pessamit, no less than a dozen families resisted and remained there. Between 1862 and 1879, oblates Charles Arnaud and Louis Babel operated as government officials for the Indians of the Côte-Nord. Father Arnaud, moreover, resided at Les Escoumins from 1852 to 1862. These influential missionaries were contact people, disbursed aid funds, and were experts at recognizing potential problems. All their interventions centred on the idea of sedentarization, agriculture, and civilization. Even if their reign in civil affairs officially ended in 1879 – Canada, now federated, voted in favour of the Indian Act and named an “Indian agent” to replace them – they played a role in all important decisions until 1911, for as long as they resided at Pessamit. The law enacted concerned all Indigenous Peoples across the country. It defined Indian status by creating a national register; any individual whose name was on the list was placed under supervision. It gave legal expression to their civil incapacity and it opened the way to putting Indians on reserves and into a band council system. This extraordinary law was also a declaration of principles relative to the urgency of needing to civilize the savages or, in other words, to eradicate cultural differences in favour of assimilation to dominant society. In the 1880s, Louis-Félix Boucher was the first official on the job on the Côte-Nord; Adolphe Gagnon succeeded him in the 1900s. These two men were typical “Indian agents,” which is to say they succeeded brilliantly in never once acting in the Innu’s best interests. They applied the federal law blindly and literally: in accordance with missionaries and being subjected to their strong influence, everyone acted in concert to quell traditional culture. The annual reports came in one after another, each one biased and meaningless, but legitimizing the agent’s work and disqualifying the Innu hunter-gatherer way of life. One of

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the first recommendations from Agent Boucher, resident at Les Escoumins, was to create a small Indian reserve at Essipit to regulate the infamous “squatter” situation. Slightly clumsy, definitely ill-informed, he proceeded, in the name of Indian Affairs, with acquiring a 230-acre plot, purchased by a private individual for the sum of two hundred dollars. The deal went the way of skulduggery, or all-out fraud, since, for the same price, the final area of the reserve turned out to be only ninety-seven acres. Boucher’s role in the affair was never clear. However, the agent had poorly defended the interests of his constituents. Furthermore, over a century later, these suspicious negotiations were the object of “particular” grievances from the Essipit band, whose case was heard in 2012. In the end, it was recognized that the Indian Affairs, due to negligence from their agent, had not fulfilled its fiduciary obligations at the time of delineating the Les Escoumins reserve in 1882. This fraud led to many prejudices toward the Innu of Essipit. For example, the Escoumins wharf, built in 1905, would have been on the reserve had it truly been 230 acres, as was originally agreed to. The new reserve, although tiny, saw the light of day. Nine houses and six families – the Nicolas, Denis, Napentie, Moreau, Dominique, and Ross families – made up the heart of the Innu village. To Agent Boucher, these small houses made of shingles and round timber represented the Innu’s future, a peaceful, sedentary life in a model village. Seeds were distributed, and the case was made for how beautiful gardens were. They encouraged all to turn to agriculture. But, following the example set by the oblates a few years prior, Agent Boucher lied to himself, and he lied in his reports to the government. In 1907, his successor, Agent Gagnon, remarked that the Innu of Les Escoumins were still hunting. They were hunting guides, fished for salmon in the river, continued to kill seal, worked in the forest, hunted for subsistence, trapped, and the women did crafts that they sold to tourists from Tadoussac and other foreigners passing through.

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In his book on the Innu of the Saguenay,23 Florence Parcoret notes interesting facts about families at Essipit in the nineteenth century. Flavien Moreau (who signed his name Papien Mono), son of Joseph, first of the Moreau, hunted on an immense territory between L’AnseSaint-Jean and Grande-Baie, along the south bank of the Saguenay, from 1850 to 1895. He spent his life in these grandiose landscapes, as a hunter-trapper, fishing guide, river keeper, game warden, devoting himself to activities connected to the wild nature of the territory. He lived with his Innu wife, Marie-Louise Régis, daughter of Laurent Régis and Marie-Louise Massilimagan. His son Édouard followed in his father’s footsteps: he was a hunter in the Hautes-Gorges-de-la-Rivière Malbaie. Sadly, his hunting lands became grounds for a private hunting club in 1900. He died at the foot of the mountain that is named after him today: Mont Édouard. Between the Malbaie River and the mouth of the Saguenay was a hunting territory called Ishkuteu-shipu, which means “river of fire,” and it was occupied and utilized by the Bacon family, then by one of Flavien Moreau’s grandchildren, Flavien Saint-Onge, who was the last Innu from Essipit to hunt on those lands. Another well-known hunter was Jacques Bacon, husband of Josephte Moreau, and Flavien’s sister. He wintered where the du Moulin River met the Saguenay, near Chicoutimi, and spent the summer on the reserve. He did this for thirty years. Born in 1830, son of Denis Bacon and Christine Kayapishapishit, he lived eighty-six years, a character of the time, a noble and typical representation of hunters from Essipit. Two patronyms crop up continuously in the Essipit community: the Moreaus and the Rosses. The Moreau line was established by two brothers, both of whom were clerks at the Hudson’s Bay Company, one at Mingan and the other Sept-Îles, and both were married to Montagnais women, Marie Vollant Iatshimapimat and Marguerite Laushaune. The two couples settled at Les Escoumins in 1822. As for Ross, the name

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harkens back to a legendary character of Essipit, Paul Ross, son of Simon Ross, a Scot who was a clerk at trading posts in the King’s Domain, especially around Lac Saint-Jean and Chicoutimi, and who was also married to a Montagnais woman whose name and origin is unknown. In an article, anthropologist Jean-Pierre Garneau charted his path. As a child, he was raised by his father and Montagnais mother. But after a few years, his father was remarried to a Euro-Canadian and he was placed in the custody of a Montagnais family at Tadoussac, and later, another family at Les Escoumins. As a young man, he married one of Joseph Moreau’s daughters, Lisette, and through the many children she bore, the Rosses took root at Essipit. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Innu language was still very much in use in the small community. However, from that period on, the Innu children of Essipit started going to French-Canadian Catholic school in the white village of Les Escoumins. A new school was built on the reserve around 1908, at the behest of Chief Édouard Moreau. Yet class was given in French and it was so effective that, by 1950, Innu-aimun was no longer in use at Essipit. Furthermore, during that time, Innu families of Essipit tightened their bonds evermore with the French Canadians in the area. The mixing of races, having been around for a long time, intensified. According to the logic of the Indian Act, which applied to all Indigenous Peoples in the country, Innu women who married whites lost their Indian status and consequently had to leave the reserve with their children. However, white women who married Innu men became, according to the law, Indians with full status. They, and their kids, could live on the reserve. This provision, very sexist and assimilative, was not revoked until the 1980s. Indeed, given these circumstances, it is not difficult to imagine the back and forth between cultures: Montagnais women became “whites” and lived in French-Canadian villages where they surely had an Innu influence on their family; French-Canadian women became Montagnais

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by marriage, lived on the reserve, and introduced new cultural values in the community. This did not please the church. Ecclesiastic authorities fought tooth and nail against mixed unions between Indians and non-Indians. As far back as 1775, Monsignor Briand, bishop of Quebec, published a formal mandate to this effect: “That our dear Montagnais daughters learn that the excesses in which some of them are absorbed, the hope of marrying their companion will never receive God’s benediction: and that the French remember the restriction in place for a long time on the crime of those who enrapture savages or who sin against the purity of the savagesses”24 can be read in both French and Montagnais. Despite this condemnation, race mixing continued consistently in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The people there could call themselves Indians when they had a Montagnais parent, but they could also choose to take on a Canadian identity and hide their origins. That said, most children of mixed unions never revealed their origins, preferring to blend in with the Canadian settlers, which explains why there was no “mixed-race nation” on the Saguenay, at Lac Saint-Jean, on the Côte-Nord and in Labrador. By not declaring or saying it, by not singing or writing it, as mixed-race people did in the west through poet Pierre Falcon, it was taken for dead, which seemed to arrange everyone. Despite all the change, despite losing its language, the community of Essipit was able to keep its identity intact over the many years. Not only did it proudly assert its Innu roots everywhere and anywhere, but the village also became a symbol of political and economic resistance. Through wedlock, new families appeared in the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, several women of Innu origin, married to white men, reclaimed their Indian status upon the repealing of the clause in the Indian Act that had excluded them from their community for such a long time. The Gagnon, Beaulieu, and Chamberland families appeared in the village. In a way, these families replaced those who had

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left the premises around 1930, the Denis family settled in Chicoutimi and the Bacons and Dominiques moved to Pessamit. This demographic loss was huge, considering the small numbers, but it was compensated for by the adoption of new members who became Essipiunnuats. This goes to show that identity resides more in the mind than in the law. In that sense, Essipit is not an exception. It is extraordinary that the whole of Indigenous society across America put forward this virtue of openness and inclusion that allowed so many French Canadians to become Indigenous. It happened in Saskatchewan and Montana, Alberta and Wisconsin. For the Innu of Essipit and elsewhere, the mixing of races was not up for discussion, even though it constituted a fundamental cultural dimension. Since, beyond genetics, the adhesion to a certain lifestyle is what is vital. If you respected traditions, adopted values, learned the language, and the ways of hunting and fishing; if you made it into the great family circle, through marriage or adoption, you were Innu. It is worth remembering: “When this great house is built, then our boys will marry your girls, and we will be but one people.” In essence, that is what Samuel de Champlain said to a group of Montagnais encamped at Kébec in 1633, who asked to have a habitation built at TroisRivières. The utterance is, in a way, premonitory; it announced a serious project. In pronouncing those words, did Champlain suspect already that France was never going to send enough French colonists to America to form a proper colony? Did he imagine a new nation built on marriages between his people and the Indigenous inhabitants? Did he foresee the long-term consequences of this race-mixing project? Or did he simply realize that all his people were men, young men, and that it was better to recognize that a good number of mixed-race children were about to be born? Regardless of what Champlain was thinking when he uttered those words, the fact remains: what he was talking about happened.

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Today, Essipit is a vibrant community. Since 1975, bolstered by a new generation of leaders, the people of the community decided to take their place in the world. Locked inside a far-too-small territory, they saw that they could not develop if they did not have any resources at their disposal to do so; above all, they recognized that they needed to rid themselves of the Indian Affairs’ retrograde paternalism. Essipit had, one could say, its very own “cultural revolution.” The community was successful in expanding the reserve and reappropriating its Traditional Territory having established, starting in the early 1980s, many outfitting businesses. The people of Essipit protected large swaths of forest, invested in the wood industry, developed commercial fishing on the river, and started recreational tourism businesses. In each of these development projects, leaders favoured a communitarian approach, and through handcraft and traditional celebrations, the Innu spirit was at the forefront of it all. Essipit is a prime response to all the Donald Trumps of the world. To be Innu is a state of mind, a declaration of identity that respects a certain memory, and a vision for the future as well. These are acquired and recognized rights coming from a long, patient resistance; a resistance shared by all the other communities. However, the unity of the Innu Nation remains to be seen; the original governance of one unified Nitassinan is yet to be conceived and put in place. This story is far from over.

In the fall of 2015, I was in a seaside condo. It was a habitation built by the Essipit community for visitors and tourists. Not luxury, but just the right amount of comfort, lots of charm, and nicely kept boreal gardens. Whales went by; I could see them through the big bay windows overlooking the river. After a couple of days, seeing whales felt normal. From the Basque ovens at Anse à la Cave to today, much time has passed. The

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rorquals and belugas can swim in peace along the coast. People come from afar to contemplate them, simply contemplate them. I think about this small miracle. Chased out of the territory once occupied by its ancestors, left to be forgotten on a dot of land, the tiny Innu community of Essipit refused to lie down. Not only did it not disappear, but it also imposed its values. Better yet, it turned its values into a trade image. From its love of sea and forest, the community developed a sensitivity for the environment and, reconnecting with its language and traditions, cultivated its cultural heritage. Most of all, it asserted its solidarity. In this village, nothing belongs to anyone; everything belongs to everyone. This mindset has not changed since the time of Champlain, since the first missionaries jotted down how much the Montagnais had a sense of sharing and helping one another. I filled up at the Essipit gas station. I bought some things for the road at the convenience store; I have several kilometres of reflection in front of me. I am going to drive to Montreal with Mont Éternité in mind, with Mont Édouard, Lac des Coeurs, Lac Gorgoton, thinking about the many petitions signed by Chiefs who passed away long ago. I am going to think about seal hunting, the meeting of cultures, projects of grandeur, and sweet dreams. I still think about the eighth day of the Goose moon, which is just before the Flower moon.

CHAPTER 8

A Sad Chapter for the Children of the State I looked at my dad, I looked at my mom, I looked at my dad again. You know what? I hated them. I just absolutely hated my own parents. Not because I thought they abandoned me; I hated their brown faces. I hated them because they were Indians. Mary Courchene, Pine Creek First Nation, Manitoba

Another laughable story has come to mind. This time it was with Georges, my friend Georges Mestokosho. We were crossing a wild lake “in a no-motor canoe” in the Côte-Nord backcountry. I got the urge to light up a tasty cigarette. It was a time when cigarettes were good, especially when smoked in the middle of a river, at a portage, in the blinding Labrador light, fully enjoying the beauty of our youth. I was at the front of the canoe, and Georges was steering at the back. We were worry free and all I could do was think about the indescribable pleasure I was having being there, in the canoe, on the water, with “Petit” Georges, as we called him, in these peaceful lands inhabited by so many Innu memories. I reached my hand into the inside pocket of my jacket, where I kept my pack of smokes, and out comes my wallet from another pocket that was gaping. It landed on the little stove, and just then a strong wave hit and made the boat heave. The wallet was tossed overboard and plunged into the brown water; id, driver’s licence, pictures, cash, some important notes … all of it sunk to the bottom. I watched it vanish, swirling in the sun beneath the lake’s surface.

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I was so upset that I thought about diving in to rescue my asset, but the water was so cold and the lake so deep. With my bulky boots and clothes, and no life vest, I was sure to drown. I stared into the water, defeated. Then George started to laugh, discreetly at first, then he guffawed, unable to contain himself. Exactly like Michel Mollen when I fell face first into the sand. The seconds kept ticking and he kept laughing; seconds turned into minutes, and he could not stop. He laughed so hard that the boat started to pitch and drift in the wind and waves. We had to go ashore hastily because Georges was unable to get a hold of himself. His laugh reverberated so loudly in the silence of the woods that even the black spruce were bent over. We call that contagious laughter. I was not laughing. Once ashore, I asked Georges to stop and to try and show a bit of empathy. He calmed himself, tactfully. We started a fire to cook some fish, but we smoked cigarettes mostly. Georges said to me, “Listen, brother, and listen well. This lake, for me, is now called ‘the lake where my Kauishtut friend lost his wallet to the bottom of the water.’” He wanted to let me know that I was part of history, his history in any case, and that of all the people to whom he was going to tell this anecdote. “Be happy, you did not lose your life or meet the devil!” Uttering that, again he roared into a knee-slapping laughter. “Oh! If you could have seen your face!” I remember Georges looking out at the river. His eyes were dreaming, seeing canoes out on the water, filled with families: “I wonder how many times we, the Mestokoshos, came through here, going upstream and down.” It was as though he was hearing his father’s voice: You can go in this direction for a month, to the source of this great river, and you can go another month, with your legs and canoes, much farther. You can travel east, west, north; this is your country, it is Innu land. Five days from where you stand, you will see your brother, or your grandmother, or your cousin, or a friend. Five days from where you stand, there will always be someone to receive you, who will know who you are. Everywhere life is waiting for you; the animals are waiting. You can go anywhere; there will

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be someone’s resting place, a path, an old campsite. The Innu spirit will be there, at the lake where your sister Desneiges was born, and the lake where you, my son, came into the world. You are a Mestokosho, remember that. You can return to the lands of your childhood, and then you will see what you may have been. Then, dwindling, Strangers came, and they made beaver reserves. They made them square, and each head of the family got his; they were numbered. And these strangers also surveyed our camps, they made reserves, Indian reserves. They built houses, also square, and numbered. They planted stakes all around. The land is no longer walked; it is skimmed through, squared, and enclosed. The path no longer follows the river’s curves or the vagaries of the old hills. The stranger’s path is straight. You can go one month there, or there, and beyond, but no brother will there be, no friend to tell you who you are. You will look for the lake of your birth in vain; you will no longer be a child of this land … During those summers on Lac Magpie, Georges had witnessed the capturing of a caribou by wildlife protection agents. Helicopters, nets, tranquilizers – they went to great lengths. Georges was not ready to forget this uncommon experience. When he told the story to his father, old Mathieu, he just nodded and said, “Papakassiku is angry at the moment, and he is going to punish us. There will no longer be any caribou at Lac Magpie.” The anger of Papakassiku was that of all Innu, old and young, and it was deep and repressed. These “Messieurs” thought they could do whatever they wanted; they roamed the ancestors’ land, the sacred land of the interior. They made laws, managed the fauna, built, and destroyed. It was this anger that pushed Georges, in his turbulent youth, to vandalize fishing lodges owned by Americans on the Mingan River. He cut the telephone line that connected them to the coast. That was also quite an incident. My friend could rebel against the entire world, but he lost all composure when in the presence of a missionary; at that time, there were always resident missionaries on the Côte-Nord. At Mingan, it was an

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oblate, Father Delaunay, apostle of morality and choler. Most gave in to his will; it was as if the priest held some power and, in general, the Innu feared him. This priest was a hermit who lived in a small presbytery adjacent to the chapel and did not mingle with the community. Yet he knew all and controlled his flock from afar. Without forewarning, he would lambast someone from the pulpit, in front of the entire village. One beautiful Sunday, I was victim to one of his bad moods during a clearly heard sermon regarding some matter that was personal to me … Georges got a good laugh out of it, and the rest of the village did too. Later, in the 1980s, Georges and his wife, Julie, were at church for their daughter’s baptism. They gave her a name that was popular at the time, Audrey or Stéphanie, I cannot recall which. As they were holding the baby over the baptismal font, the voice of Father Delaunay rose through the nave, “That is not a very Christian name; we shall baptize her Georgette!” The parish was named Saint-Georges-de-Mingan, which is where Georges got his name as well. The parents did not dare contradict the missionary; the authority had spoken. The anecdote has in it all the weight of paternalism that the Innu suffered for generations; missionaries, government agents, merchants, each of them gave their opinion, commanded, decided in their stead. And they all had biblical names: Marie, Joseph, Abraham … Every year, from the month of May, Georges spent a lot of time in the islands with his brother Moïse (Moses – Yep!). They hunted Canada goose, and black duck. They would leave with their canoes for days at a time, come back, and take off again. Their faces were cheerful, proud, kidding. Mathieu was proud of his sons: they would never go deep into the woods, as he did before. They possessed neither the skills nor the strength, but they knew how to manoeuvre on the sea and kill waterfowl. Georges got along so well with the geese! Each person had his or her animal: bear, caribou … For him, it was the Canada goose, and the goose returned the favour. However, for the Mestokosho brothers, like

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all the young people from the village, hunting on the island laid them open to fines and sanctions. Even though their catch went to feeding families in the community, they were considered poachers; they were not welcome on the Mingan Archipelago that the Innu had frequented for generations. “Subsistence hunting” did not resonate with governmental authorities. An “Indian animal,” consumed collectively by all Innu, did not exist. And “ancestral rights?” Ha! Like Indians could have any rights! Provincial and federal laws were written for sport hunting and fishing. The same applied to salmon in the Mingan River. Georges and the others caught them at night, like thieves, with a net or a nigog (harpoon), by torchlight. For the youngsters, “poaching” had an exciting ring to it, even though this delinquent fun can not allow us to forget this supreme injustice: the river has belonged to foreigners since 1859. Yep, 112 summers, 112 runs upstream, and still the same absurdity: the Innu who, from the time of great summer gatherings at the post of Mingan, fed on waterfowl, salmon, and seal, were stripped of a major part of their food sources. How did Georges not gnash his teeth when talking about these “gentlemen,” especially those gentlemen from Chicago who flew in on a private jet, landing at the small airport of Longue-Pointe, the neighbouring village? That was the atmosphere and strong bitterness that thrived on the reserves during those years. The reserves were prisons, and we talked about it a lot, Georges and I. The best stories belonged to the past and no one had the hope of again living the nomadic life of the Elders. That said, this time did not date back to the Flood. Just yesterday, families were one with the river, went far into the territory, and traces of these travels could be seen throughout the village. Tents, canoes, and all the old bowlegged men and women, who had suddenly become obsolete, walked among the houses, lost in the middle of gravel roads. Without really realizing it, the summer campsite, the trading post, the

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Mingan mission, all of it transformed into a federal reserve from one day to the next, just like all the others that were built in the Canadian North in the early 1960s. The worst was the boarding schools. The children had to leave a prosperous nomadic society to go and get “educated,” or “re-educated” even, away from their families; years later, they were put back into society, and they were sedentary, idle, disoriented, and in shock. It was a society they no longer recognized. And reciprocally, these children were unrecognizable. Georges was a case in point: born in the woods in 1946, brought up to be a hunter, he was the type of child targeted by government policy of the 1950s. The keynote: “civilize” these little savages raised traditionally. Or to use the sadly notorious saying from government authorities, “kill the Indian in the child.” To get there, they had to be removed from the influence of their parents and be ripped away from this miserable culture that had no future in after-war Canada. The implacable logic followed its path: they were pressed to assimilate this new cohort of kids, possibly the last of whom carried the traditions of old within themselves. Georges was six when police and officials arrived in the village. They went into his home and took him and a small piece of luggage (some clothes, a piece of bannock, and his bear tooth) and put him on a boat with other children from Mingan. The deck was already teeming with little boys and girls, red-eyed, who had been taken at La Romaine and Nutashkuan; they were being brought to the Indian residential school of Maliotenam (present-day Mani-utenam), near Sept-Îles. The boat that hit open waters in 1953 was for Georges, and all the Innu of the coast, the end of the world.

“When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits, training, and mode of thought are Indian.

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He is simply a savage who can read and write.” These uplifting words are from the honourable John A. Macdonald, prime minister of Canada and super-intendant general of Indian Affairs, while he was addressing Parliament in 1883. It was his argument, his way of justifying the creation of three industrial training schools in the west, the first residential schools that would mark Canada for more than a century. The only way to assimilate these savages, Macdonald continued, was to place them in establishments “where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.”1 In 1920, loyal to this mindset, high-ranking official Duncan Campbell Scott expressed his government’s position before a committee tasked with reviewing a reform on the Indian Act: “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.”2 We owe it to this deputy superintendent (equivalent to the position of deputy minister) for having so clearly announced the sinister motives of the Canadian policy on assimilation. And we owe him more. He knew living conditions on the reserves were unacceptable. Furthermore, he knew about how catastrophic the situation was in the residential schools: dilapidated buildings, overcrowded, unsafe, tuberculosis, malnutrition, physical abuse, abuses of all kinds … not to mention an alarming mortality rate. He never intervened. In his poems (because he turned out to be something of a poet when in the mood), ironically, he bemoaned the disappearance of Indigenous Peoples. His laissez-faire attitude cost thousands of children their lives. During this very same testimony, Scott said that he never had the opportunity to consult the Indians on any issue concerning them. Of course, he did ask their opinion on the major amendments that were about to be brought to the law of 1876: an official now had the authority to unilaterally revoke from a First Nations member his or her Indian status (it was called emancipation), and could even obligate a young Indigenous person, by force if needed, to enter a residential school. Mr

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Scott had major sway. At the head of Indian Affairs, politicians succeeded each other in total indifference. The ministers were there for appearances, having inherited a position with no glory or interest (often it was a political downgrade). Scott confessed to the commission that he was never able to get any minister “to sit down and grasp the complicated nature of the Indian business.” He could do as he pleased and had no intention to do otherwise. He stamped his incisive politics on his ministerial habits, and they became their own culture, never questioned, an exhortation to always push the assimilation program further. In the spirit of the Indian Act, never was there a question of a future for First Nations. In 1936, an eminent member of the Anglican Church confirmed this general sentiment: The best Indians assimilate, the others gradually fade away. In a few decades, no longer will there be an Indian problem.”3 Officials managed the “problem” accordingly, persuaded of the imminent disappearance of Indigenous Peoples; the concept of vanishing race influenced every decision. From 1936 to 1950, the department of savage affairs (such was the actual name of the “ministry” since the 1880s) was absorbed by the Ministry of Mines and Resources. All to lower costs. Yet, the Canadian government found itself trapped by its confusion. After the Second World War, the old ravings of Duncan Campbell Scott started to be truly embarrassing: instead of disappearing, Indigenous Peoples had a demographic explosion. Not only did this unforeseen situation flout every prediction, but the bills started adding up as well: under the infamous 1876 law (still in effect today), the minister leader was the guardian of all the Indians. More houses had to be built, more schools, residential schools for its “pupils,” and services had to be provided to the most remote regions. To the federal load was added thousands of Indigenous Peoples from more northern nations, the last of the American nomads who, up to that point, had not succumbed to the Canadian stranglehold, notably the Innu of the Basse-Côte-Nord and Labrador; faced with the invasion

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of their ancestral territories, they were soon going to be sedentarized.4 Mani-utenam became a reserve in 1949; Nutashkuan in 1953; Unamanshipu in 1956; Ekuanitshit in 1963; and Matimekush in 1968. In each case, consultation was reduced to a minimum. They surveyed, demarcated, and mapped without respecting, or even hearing, the will of the people. The plenipotentiary officials established surface area, the model of a house, and investment and work timetables, and succeeded in never once including the Innu in their programs of sedentarization. For example, in 1961, rather than create a reserve for the people of Pakut-shipu (Saint-Augustin), Indian Affairs forced them to move to the Unamanshipu (La Romaine) reserve, which was already launched. This “deportation” was a failure; less than two years later, some had walked back to their territory on foot (a month-long trip with canoes, sleds, children, and dogs), others followed shortly after, either by plane or boat. Against its will, the government caved to their establishment at Pakut-shipu and built houses there. As for the communities of Sheshatshiu and Natuashish, in Labrador, they were ignored for a long time. When Newfoundland integrated into the Canadian confederation in 1949, those Indigenous People had no status at all. Preferring to stick the new province with the bill, the federal government opted for the status quo. But after decades of discussion and troubling reports from the 1990s, which had shaken opinions worldwide (there were kids from Davis Inlet high huffing gas, screaming about their wish to die), the Canadian government finally consented to recognizing them and giving them access to programs and services provided for by the Indian Act. The people from the old village of Davis Inlet were relocated to a new site in 2002, the Natuashish reserve. Next, the Tshishe-shastshit community was turned into a reserve in 2006. A necessary evil or an evil necessity? Life on the reserve was a nightmare for most families, who were totally destabilized by the sudden disappearance of their way of life and their children as well, stolen from their sight and care overnight. This will, this obsession even, to want to

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take children from their parents to educate them, convert them to Christianity, and above all “deindianize” them was not new; it had been around from when the missionaries first arrived there. First, the Recollects sent six Indigenous youth to France (like Pierre Pastedechouan’s stay), an experiment that ended up failing miserably: four students died there and two came back deeply scarred. In 1620, they opened a residential school for boys close to the Quebec colony: it was close to nine years later, as they were unable to impose any kind of discipline on kids raised with total freedom. In 1635, the Jesuits thought they were very clever indeed, as Father Le Jeune writes: We have always thought that the excessive love the savages show their children would keep us from obtaining them; and it will be through this very way that they will be our pupils; for by having a few settled ones, who will call and retain others, the parents who do not know what it is to refuse their children, will let them come without opposition. And, as they will be allowed a great deal of freedom for the first years, they will become so accustomed to our food and clothing that they will be horrified by savages and their filth. Yet, they hit the same wall that their predecessors did; mothers and grandmothers refusing to hand over their children, they were only able to recruit a handful of boarders, most of whom ran away. The same scenario played out with the Ursulines and their school for young girls. “It is, however, a difficult thing, to not say impossible, to Frenchify or civilize them,” states Marie of the Incarnation, “We have had more experience than any, and we remarked, of the one hundred of those who have come to us, not one have we been able to civilize. There is docility and spirit in them, but when we least expect it they jump the fence and

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go run in the woods with their parents, where they are happier than with all the amenities of our French houses.”5 No lesson was learned from the past. From the 1880s to the closing of the last residential school in 1996, in Canada, there were around 139 of these establishments financed by the state and exploited by the church. It is estimated that fifteen thousand Inuit, mixed race, and First Nations children were placed in such places for months or even years, and very often it was against their parents’ will. There were six boarding schools in Quebec: Amos, Pointe-Bleue, and Sept-Îles were of Catholic persuasion; that at La Tuque was Anglican; and of the two at Fort George, one was Catholic and the other Anglican. There were also five secular residential schools reserved for Inuit from the north of Quebec. Although new boarding schools continued to open their doors in the 1950s, and even in 1960 as was the case at La Tuque, it had already been established that this enterprise was destined to fail. Indeed, starting in the 1930s it became apparent to Indian Affairs officials that the boarding school system proved to be counter-productive. If kids boned up and slaved away, it was much less in schoolbooks than in the fields, on farms, in kitchens and wash houses: under-financed, residential schools needed extra sets of hands to ensure their proper functioning. Moreover, the level of education the students reached was extremely low; a meagre 5 per cent of students who left the system were able to integrate into the work market.6 In a good number of establishments, daily chores took the place of professional training that students were supposed to be receiving; due to a lack of esteem for the intellectual capacity of Indigenous Peoples, the overall aim was to stick them with manual jobs. Ultimately, the system was truly a dead end. After decades of miserable attempts and extra expenditures, the department of Indian Affairs seriously considered transferring its budgets and staff to day schools.

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But the church had an entirely different point of view; they associated the residential schools with exercising a right, the right to be assimilated with the rest of the Canadian citizenry. “It is the solemn duty of the whiteman,” declared Mr Westgate of the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada, “with his advanced knowledge, to interpret to those less privileged than himself, the Indians included, the higher values of this present world, and to assist them in the difficult process of adjustment.”7 These same churches provided teachers for the students, a teacher devoid of any kind of human value or empathy whatsoever. In Quebec, a former boarding school student had this to say: “History classes were expected to emphasize ‘the purity of our FrenchCanadian origins’ … as well as the role God played in ‘the survival of our nationality.’”8 Finally, the religious congregations were able to pursue their assimilation work, without being bothered too much. As soon as they entered the residential school, the children were stripped of their traditional clothes and all that displayed their Indian nature; their hair was shaved, their names were changed, they were given a number, they had to wear clothes that were often used, poor fitting, and inapt for the season. They were punished if they spoke their language or if they showed any of their original spirituality: “I was number 116. I was trying to find myself; I was lost. I felt like I had been placed in a black garbage bag that was sealed,” confessed one student from the Saint-Marc-de-Figuery residential school, not far from Amos. An Inuit said he learned to “hate my own people, to hate my race.” Little Carmen Petiquay was nervous the day of her parents’ visit: “I was told Indians smell bad and they don’t talk, and I said to myself, ‘As long as they don’t come,’ ’cause I was ashamed … At one point my parents came and I was happy. I was pleased to see them, and I hoped that they would leave soon. Because it hurt so much to be to be taken away from one’s parents like that, and it hurts to say things about one’s parents and to be ashamed of them.”9

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Stripped of their identity, victims of negligence, and in many cases, poor treatment or sexual abuse, deprived of any show of affection, sooner or later the children of residential schools became depressed and suicidal. Is this what Commissioner of Indian Affairs Edgar Dewdney wished for, when he wrote in 1883, “We must take care of our youth and constantly keep them in the circle of civilization.” Contrary to the goal of killing the Indian in the child, “often they killed the child too,” stated artist Florent Vollant, himself locked in the residential school of Maliotenam for seven years. Not all died from tuberculosis or some other epidemic, not all committed suicide, but the vast majority came back dead inside. “It was losing the North. That’s what happened to us,” explained Vollant.10 Some had forgotten their language, and since their parents were unable to transmit their skills in hunting, fishing, trapping, hide preparation, they could not participate in the traditional activities of their community. Well, whatever was left of their community. Alcohol, addiction, violence, shredding of the social fabric, this is what a residential school education led to. Far from becoming free, emancipated citizens, Canadians among other Canadians; far from having been “raised to the level of civilization of the white man,” Georges and those of his generation were more isolated and marginalized than ever. Dans la grande chaine de la vie (In the great chain of life), as was sung by Raymond Lévesque, they got the short end of the stick. Idle, useless, empty, a profound wound opened up in the hearts and minds of these “children of the state”; their Innu self-image was shattered, with no alternative offered. They went to those schools for nothing and after years of forced exile became less than nothing. The office of Indian Affairs took care of everything: do not move, hunt, fish; do not harm regional development, we are going to pay for everything. In 1969, the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, exasperated by the bad reputation Canada was getting from his policies toward Indigenous Peoples, announced a new era. “The course of history must be changed,”

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wrote Jean Chrétien in the introduction to the White Paper, who at the time was minister of Indian affairs and northern development. “To be Indian must be to be free – free to develop Indian cultures in an environment of legal, social and economic equality with other Canadians.”11 The White Paper proposed to do away with Indian status, the Indian Act, and the Ministry of Indian Affairs. Forget the past and reset the counters to zero. In other words, First Nations people were invited to join the country as Canadians in their own right, without proposing anything in return that could ensure the future development and the distinct nature of their people. Claiming to put forward a revolutionary policy, all Trudeau’s government did was bring back old ideas from the nineteenth century, applied by Duncan Campbell Scott: assimilation at all cost. The White Paper was poorly received by the interested parties. The National Indian Brotherhood of Canada responded with the “Red Paper,” written in collaboration with Harold Cardinal, advocate and intellectual of the Cree Nation, and author of The Unjust Society, a reply to the Just Society of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. It rejected the government’s White Paper, which had so many shortfalls and so little hindsight: Where did our lands go? And our riches? Will there be a national excuse and compensation for our losses and humiliations? What are our rights? What power will we have in the new Canadian political landscape? The Indian Brotherhood suggested not to touch the paternalist system that had been in place for a hundred years without having first consulted the First Nations and addressed these essential questions with them. The involved parties did not come to an agreement. At an impasse, Jean Chrétien announced in 1971 that the federal government would discard the guidelines set out in the White Paper. Back to the beginning: purely and simply, Indian status, the Indian Act, the reserves would remain untouched … “I offered to abolish all that; I offered legal equality … the Indians said No, we are not ready. We want to keep our status,”

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Chrétien stated in an interview. “The discrimination that exists with regards to the Indians is not imposed; it is the Indians who asked us to keep that system in place.”12 Trudeau, in a fit of rage, added, “We’ll keep them in the ghetto as long as they want!” If we can thank the politicians for one thing, it’s that they, through their arrogance, set off a vast revival movement among the first peoples of the country. That, rather, was the mark of a new era, a time of affirmation! Major land claims were submitted to the Supreme Court, who, much to the government’s dismay, ruled almost always in favour of the Indigenous Peoples. New deals were negotiated, like the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement in 1975, a Quebec model that was ground-breaking. Over the years, Canadians were increasingly exposed to the great historical injustices that had hit the First Nations. The churches apologized for the abuses committed in their residential schools. The federal government, through Prime Minister Stephen Harper, did the same in 2008. Class actions indemnified tens of thousands of victims. This noise, which Canadian society had always been able to stifle, grew louder, like the beating of the teueikan, and reached the point of no return. Recently, we entered a long process of reparation. Over six years, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, set up to shed light on the Indian residential schools, went to every corner of the country to hear stories from nearly seven thousand victims and those in charge of the residential schools. In 2015, the commission submitted a report revealing what was hidden underneath this immense tragedy. For the commission, there was no doubt that the measures taken by the federal government toward Indigenous Peoples “were part of a coherent policy to eliminate Aboriginal people as distinct peoples and to assimilate them into the Canadian mainstream against their will.” Such a policy carries a name that Beverley McLachlin, chief justice of Canada, dared say publicly: It was, “in the buzzword of the day, assimilation, in the language of the 21st century, cultural genocide.”

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Some time before his death, I saw Georges at Sept-Îles. Seated a table in some sad restaurant on rue Laure, we spent an hour not eating the club sandwiches we had ordered. He was in rough shape, my friend was. Too much sugar, too much beer, too much Indian reserve, too much pain that he was never able to express. In the end, Georges’s wound was deadly. He took care of himself the best he could, one glass after another. His diabetes came from that; he spent his entire life with his soul on edge. Like always, Georges avoided difficult subjects. He preferred to laugh at his Kauishtut and hold onto the stories from our youth. That day, he reminded me of the time I accompanied him and his friends to hunt a moose that was spotted a few kilometres outside the village. Before leaving, Georges’s father, the venerable Mathieu Mestokosho, asked me to bring back the muzzle and cheeks of the animal. By evening’s end, we had returned with the large male’s remains. Having no mind of a hunter (I just observed, by the way), it was nevertheless a proud moment when I showed up at Mathieu’s house, not with a poor muzzle, but with a splendid quarter of tender red meat taken from the animal’s hind. Do we not owe respect and recognition to our Elders? Upon seeing the meat, Mathieu gave me a funny look. “Utshat?” he asked me. “Ushtikuan-mush?” he asked again. The muzzle? The head? Seeing my sheepish look, Georges and Moïse burst out laughing. “The Elders eat the head,” Georges told me, “It’s the best part!” And Moïse went one further, “Asking for the head, my father honoured you. He tasked you with the privilege of speaking for him to those who killed the animal.” I defended myself, saying Mathieu had spoken to me in Innu, that I did not fully understand. I tried to work my way out of it a bit more; then the brothers triumphantly pulled out of a large canvas sack … the giant moose head! They had me bring the back end to their father just to get a good laugh.

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This memory did us good. We picked up right where we had left off: one mocking, the other mocked. Georges got serious and asked me point blank, “How would you describe the Innu family?” I was going to drone on about the systems of parentage, the arbitrary character of filiation, etc. when he went on: “The Innu family is a father, a mother, two children … and an anthropologist!” By Georges! I had heard that gag a thousand times, but coming from him, it meant something else. That day was, above all, another occasion to laugh, to keep death at a distance. Georges talked to me about a book that he had wanted to write since he was in his twenties. Aptly, it was a book on anthropologists. It was still clear in his head (and with mocking eyes whenever he spoke about it); all the researchers, sticking out like a sore thumb, who he saw come into Mingan from the youngest age, and who attempted to discern who the Innu were and what they ate during winter. Georges would have liked to be a writer or a musician. He wanted to go and meditate at the grave of Sitting Bull, visit New York and Paris. I knew it was too late, none of that would happen, but for the anthropologists, I told him that I would help him with his research, on the condition that he gives me a good showing in his book. Our club sandwiches were cold. The waitress took our plates. We ordered tea. So much had we drunk together in the past, hunched over our little animal cards, struggling to translate certain terms; without mentioning it, we knew that this tea would no doubt be our last together. Georges held his hands tight around the cup as if we were outside in winter around a small spruce fire. We were silent for a moment, each in our thoughts. I regretted not driving to South Dakota with him. I regretted having not discussed enough with him about these great men: Big Bear, Little Pine, Wandering Spirit, these Cree rebels who, mustering much courage, denounced the Indian reserves imposed by the Canadian state. In 1876, Big Bear claimed that the reserves proposed by the English

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negotiators of Treaty 6 were a fox trap, a leash around their necks, a rope with which to hang themselves. Indians needed vast territories, he said, they needed to breathe; on an Indian reserve, the hunter would suffocate, the hunter would die. We saw this death, in 1971, on the Indian reserve of Mingan. Then, out of the blue, he said, “I was so scared.” Georges’s voice had a tone that I did not recognize. I looked up and saw he was reliving terrible moments. I saw Georges when he was just six. “I had never set foot outside the reserve, I had never left my father, my mother, my house … I was so scared on that boat, I was glued to the metal railing, I was cold through my shirt … When the village vanished, I thought I would never see it again.” All the years that we had known each other, this was the first time Georges talked to me about it. He did not name the residential school, he just said “there.” “No one understood anything. We were always afraid of doing wrong.” My friend who laughed so naturally, my fifty-seven-year-old friend, was now crying. There, they took away his pride and his bear tooth. We finished our tea, then Georges grabbed his cane and stood up painfully on one leg, the only one he had left. He had to return to Ekuanitshit. He was out of breath, in pain, but found enough strength to let out a small laugh: “You should have seen your face, Kauishtut, when you lost your wallet at the bottom of the lake!”

His tombstone reads Shaush Mishtikuhu. That is you, Georges Mestokosho; it’s the transcription of your name in Innu. There is no missionary, no Indian agent who decided in your stead. No one is going to try to make you forget who you are. You won, Georges. Every letter on your grave is in Innu. You are Manishuni Muanan unapema, husband of Marie Julie Mollen. Nanitam tshika tshissiitutatina, we think of you always. Iame, farewell, my brother.

EPILOGUE

They Will Be Here Tomorrow Burn me hang me as much as you’d like as much as history will repeat itself I’ll come back a hundred times over Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, La marche

Soon it will be fifty years that I’ve come and gone to Indigenous communities across Quebec. A half-century, I cannot believe it. How many times, how many lonely roads travelled, through cold that could pop a tire, did I return to the Innu, the Anishinaabe, and the Atikamekw? Over these comings and goings, I grew old. So old that on my last trip to Ekuanitshit, during the official inauguration of the Maison de la culture Innue (The Innu cultural centre), I was seated at the Elders’ table. Don’t think I was upset; I earned this spot and am very proud of it. I was even served one of the preferred dishes of the Ancients: I got to eat caribou marrow, a sacred food if ever there was. For generations of hunters, it was like ingesting pure strength and courage. To find myself seated amongst the Elders of Ekuanitshit was very moving, and it was a precious moment in my life. During the meal, Chief Jean-Charles Pietasho paid me a touching tribute; in fact, as one would expect, he affectionately had a good poke at me, much to the delight of the assembly. Being old in Innu culture is not a handicap. This state confers upon you a veritable aura of wisdom, which does not exclude humour, and Innu humour is timeless.

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At the same spot, some months earlier, I got a sense of this respect regarding my status as an Elder. I had come back from giving a conference at Havre-Saint-Pierre and was driving toward Sept-Îles, where I had to take a plane. I decided to stop at the Mingan cemetery to pay my respects to my friend Georges. Iame Shaush! I could not leave without first visiting the nice pavilion that was just a stone’s throw away and had just appeared on the landscape. I told you, the Maison de la culture Innue is a splendid place, well windowed, letting in large patches of sky and, beyond the dunes and tillers of black spruce, the sea. By chance, there was a conference on mental health on that day. Barely had I cracked the door and I was snatched up. How to describe this maelstrom? A gust of wind, a swell of friendship, a tide of strong, engaged women who brought me into their group discussion. The concern, the fundamental work of these masterful women at Ekuanitshit, like all Indigenous communities, is education, reparations, improving basic everyday living conditions. You should have seen how diligent they were, how they took issues to heart (and head on) that affected families, youth, and the future. That day, they were discussing mental health. The next day they were going to discuss suicide, drugs, the environment, but also the joy of belonging and rebuilding; celebrate the arrival of Canada geese, teach children how to bake bannock or make snowshoes, break the silence of men, trace, delineate, and clear a path to healing. The survival of these communities is at stake. Straightaway the organizers of the conference brought me to the main room, a cozy lounge filled with enthusiastic, good-willed faces, and then I found myself seated in an armchair, microphone in hand. I gave an improvised presentation, aware that they were listening to me as they would an Elder whose words are important. I do not remember what I said exactly, what impulse took me, what subject I rambled on about, but it was the act that counted. The bearded old man, Kauishtut, was back.

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I have been making rounds to these communities for a long time; I’ve addressed both small and large audiences, often young, even children. Everyone is surprised when I say that I tell Indigenous Peoples their history. And yet, do Quebeckers and Canadians know this history that is theirs? I tell stories of America before, and then after. I underline colonial violence, of course, but also the dignity and grandeur of these peoples assailed by the politics of assimilation. I talk about what their ancestors went through, from sovereignty to dispossession. I also talk about the present, the value of identity, language, and tradition. Everywhere, be it in a meeting room, a gym, a school, under a tent, I see eyes wide open, glum, and misted over. I sense the interest, curiosity, and always, toward the end of my ramblings, an immense pride. “Now I know why I cry,” an Elder woman from Mani-utenam confided, “and it does me such good.” These masterful women about whom I am talking, most of them will not make history, just as they don’t make the news. But the community knows them and relies on them. They are not linked with Indian Affairs or governments; they do not practise politics officially, nevertheless they are “governesses,” in the sense that they govern their lot, and in the sense that they are taking care of their people and doing everything possible to reconnect with their traditions so that they like who they were and who they are. These women know the young ones are capable of better. They will become learned, speak several languages; they will be surgeons, like Stanley Vollant; they will be specialists in education, like Marcelline Picard-Kanapé. They will be composers, musicians, like Philippe and Claude MacKenzie, Florent Vollant, and Shaouit; painters like Aness; filmmakers like André Vollant, Eddy Malenfant, and Kevin Bacon Hervieux. They will be writers and poetesses, like Rita Mestokosho, Naomi Fontaine, and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine; they will be bearers of Innu heritage, like Daniel Vachon, and like the great Joséphine Bacon; militant like Évelyne Saint-Onge, Michèle Audette, Mélissa Mollen

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Dupuis … the list could go on and on, as ambition, talent, and energy flourishes within these communities. The Innu of the future will be what the women and men want it to be, without having to sacrifice their culture, but valuing it rather, asserting it, and expressing it on the international stage.

We just went through a thousand years of history. After these reminiscences, these sad surprises, these indignations, we can say the word “resilience” has found its meaning. Indeed, it is extraordinary that Indigenous Peoples, especially the Innu, survived such staunch adversity. Underneath and against centuries of colonialism, they had to break out of their shell of submission to find their voice. An Antene Kapesh, an author, is one of these voices and was one of the first. From her, everything opened up, and all was possible. Born in the taiga in 1926, the daughter of a caribou hunter, this remarkable woman lived the traditional lifestyle until the Maliotenam (Mani-utenam) reserve was created in 1953. She brought nine children into the world and was Chief of the Montagnais band of Matimekush (Schefferville), and then, without ever having gone to school, started writing. Her first book, Je suis une maudite Sauvagesse / Eukuan nin matshimanitu innu-iskueu, was surely the first cry of the Innu people. Or at least (if we exclude the petitions from the nineteenth century) a first act of affirmation against Kauapishit, the “white” man, and using the white man’s means: “I thought long and hard at first,” the author confessed, “since I knew it was not part of my culture to write.”1 An Antene Kapesh had had enough of seeing her people exploited and despised, of seeing her land and animals, all this heritage assailed by the greed of developers. She took up the pen to denounce the misdeeds of civilization come to “ruin her children” and kill the dignity of her people (alcohol, police, courtrooms, schools, game wardens, journalists), but also to staunchly defend her belongings. “I am proud when, today, I am treated like a Sav-

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agesse. When I hear the white man utter this word, I understand that he is telling me again and again, that I am a true Indian and that I was the first to have lived in the woods. Yet everything that lives in the woods corresponds to the best life.”2 In those years, the 1970s, the memory of spoliation was fresh and the wound still open. So, they needed to regain a foothold on all fronts: risk language against general indifference, preserve vitality against the impulse of death, affirm beauty in the face of destruction, brandish pride to repel the raining down of insults, impose rights before the negation of legitimacy, show spirituality in the face of bureaucratic thought. All of that was done; Innu society held strong in the face of adversity. And the voice of An Antene Kapesh inspired others, who in turn wrote, told, sang, slammed, and filmed. Now, on stages and screens, in libraries, on the radio and social networks, Innu culture is taking its place all over, on all platforms, and new generations can express their creativity. Politically, the Innu world followed a path to emancipation. Although building dams and creating reservoirs on the Manicouagan River (mythical exploits from the Quiet Revolution) were done on Innu lands without anyone thinking about consulting the most interested party first, the time is up for this kind of impudence. La Manic was the last major project carried out offhandedly by Hydro-Québec and the provincial government. Today, going back to the worksite at Schefferville, building a railroad, transforming a quiet village into an industrial megaport, undertaking such projects behind the Innu’s back would be unthinkable. In any case, their cautionary statement would be heard; the Innu will have a seat at the table, and they will not settle for scraps. Not to mention they can give their opinion on how to pollute their environment less. And no doubt they will slip in a word, to whoever wants to hear, that it was not Father Babel who discovered the iron ore in the Labrador pit, as the official version states, but it was an Innu named Tshishenish Pien – a simple nomad, another remarkable forgotten one. “When the surveyor started measuring Indian lands,” wrote An Antene

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Kapesh, “it had been some time that the Indians had already finished surveying their own land on foot. There is not one parcel on this territory they have not seen or set foot on. And on their entire stretch of land, they gave a name to everything in their own language: every river, lake, mountain, and stream.”3 Indeed, many paths were travelled. What would the petitioners of 1848 have thought, those Montagnais Chiefs who journeyed to Montreal to meet Lord Elgin with only the strength of their legs and convictions? What would they say, those who were rebuffed by the governor general, if they came back today? The multiplying of territorial claims from the 1970s would no doubt be a pleasant surprise, as would the rulings handed down by the Supreme Court in favour of First Nations. Surely, they would be satisfied with the negotiating of major agreements with the government: the James Bay Convention, the Peace of the Braves agreement, and all those ongoing as well as those to come. No question would they be delighted by the formal recognition, in 1982, of their ancestral rights in the Canadian Constitution. The old Montagnais Chiefs would certainly look kindly upon these advancements. But they would also see what has not changed; they would still see many open wounds. Much remains to be done in terms of repair. There are still prejudices, discrimination, and tons of racism. We have not got over … in fact, we have not closed the vicious chapter on the poor treatment of Indigenous women across the country – women who have disappeared, been killed, and violated without the world taking notice. Too many Indigenous communities still suffer from endemic poverty and psychosocial woes, left to themselves in total desperation. The Innu at Sept-Îles were still, in 2017, claiming their right to fish salmon on the Moisie River. Will the Innu language – a language of hunting and territory – survive modernity and the world of consumerism? The younger generation speaks it less and less. What will be done to keep it alive and well in the future?

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Evermore, we speak of First Nations, especially in official ceremonies: we apologize, say we remember, and promise never to forget. But the more we speak about it, the more it seems like we are moving away from the subject. Canada and its provinces are not ready to rethink and redefine terms according to the future of the first inhabitants of this country. Between the rhetoric of reconciliation and the politics of reconstruction, many steps still need to be taken. Indigenous Peoples have rights, but which? They should have more power, but what kind? They have lands, but where? In the end, words, failing to truly answer and act, become frustrating. We are led to believe that politicians ignore the extent to which the injury hurt; some speak and palaver without knowing the pain etched into the “ailing body” of Autochthony, a pain that wreaks havoc still today. The big corporations, governments themselves, despite agreements and agreement projects, still do not accord to the First Nations the consideration they deserve. All too often, economic imperatives prevail over declarations of friendship. This blind greed would trouble our old Chiefs of 1848, who knew all too well the havoc unfettered capitalism wrought on their ancestral lands. Are these lands more respected today than they were yesterday? A movement as summoning and impactful as Idle No More, which mobilized thousands upon thousands of Indigenous Peoples from all Nations across Canada, did it garner attention, and more importantly benefits, equal to its importance? We know very well that it is not eloquent speeches that will change the course of history. But let us be hopeful. At the time of looking over the final proofs of this book, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (son of the one who supported the infamous White Paper in 1969) had just given a historic speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations. Historic, if only for the mea culpa: “The failure of successive governments to respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples in Canada is our great shame. And for many Indigenous Peoples, this lack of respect for their rights

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persists to this day.” He added that the time of excuses is over, that they must dismantle “old colonial bureaucratic structures.” This declaration is promising in that it breaks out of an old mould. We are reaching, in some way, a point of no return. The will of the Prime Minister to create a political and economic environment in favour of Indigenous selfdetermination marks a decisive turn. But will this willingness continue beyond his speech?

Examining hundreds of pictures for the present book, our attention turned to one of a young Innu, dressed up, participating in a powwow; it is an image that sends a powerful message: these children taken by government officials and religious authorities to be educated so that they no longer “resemble” Indians; these children whose clothes were confiscated, as well as any object reminiscent of their ethnic belonging; these children who were dressed in shoddy uniforms, they are back today, and they are more “Indian” than ever, proud as porcupines. To some observers, this pow-wow movement may seem “borrowed” or inauthentic. In truth, the matter is more serious: these dances, regalia, and productions are the sign of an identity renewal, a return to cultural balance. Let us all remember that the Ministry of Indian Affairs, in its heyday, had its agents calling all the shots on the reserves, and they banned traditional Indigenous ceremonies. The Indian Act outlawed dances, ceremonies, and any collective demonstration with any cultural connotation. The same ministry prevented persons from circulating and communicating between bands and Nations. To better rule, the federal state kept communities isolated. Following the same logic, Indigenous Peoples did not have the right to publicly gather for debates, nor could they hire lawyers to plead their claims. The government wanted, very knowingly, to break up the Nations by fragmenting them; it imposed the notion that bands were all dependent and vulnerable. It concealed

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the names of peoples, erased those of individuals, stamping out cultural traits only to retain numbers and statuses. Let us say it; it was “cultural genocide.” On 16 June 1884, when Chiefs Big Bear, Little Pine, and Poundmaker organized a thirst dance near North Battleford in Saskatchewan, a ceremony uniting over two thousand Cree, Ottawa took offense, and a hundred federal officers were dispatched to the site. Bloodshed was narrowly avoided, thanks to the pacifist exhortations from the Chiefs, who succeeded in holding the warriors back. Some five years later, in the United States, again it was because of a dance, a ghost dance more specifically (the Army spoke of a “dancers’ revolt”), that the Miniconjou Lakota fell under the machine gun fire from soldiers at Wounded Knee Creek, on the morning of 29 December 1890. On that frigid day, during a snowstorm, 143 Lakota were murdered. Among the dead were several unarmed women and children. Today, the Innu travel across America, and they are going to gather at the site of Wounded Knee, in South Dakota; they will bring new dance steps with them: the dance of silence, the thirst dance. They will lend their regalia, and a bit of pride and parcels of beauty. They can be reborn before all the ministries of the world, then dance in front of all the officials who controlled them so. Dance before this state that wanted so much to “kill the Indian in the child.” The Innu can travel to North Saskatchewan, where Big Bear courageously resisted affronts from government representatives, refusing to sign Treaty 6 in 1880, resisting the idea of being confined to some small reserve. The Innu traveller will be able to recognize the landscapes of his or her history. That the young Innu of tomorrow learn at school about the stories of Big Bear and Little Pine, Pontiac and Tecumseh, and those of Thanadelthur and Molly Brant; that they know and commemorate the hanging of Wandering Spirit, as well as the Métis people, like Louis Riel. In a better world, young Innu, better instructed, will know where they come from and who they are. They will learn about the expansiveness

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of Nitassinan and be able to contemplate the pre-Columbian geopolitical map; they will be able to restore the Innu Nation into the hall of the first peoples of North America. The time in which schools aimed to “deprogram” Indigenous students is over, as well as the time in which they were taught Canadian greatness at the expense of their cultural identity. Will they recover the precious nature of their maternal language? We have come back to the beginning: education. But education for all: it is the whole of Quebec society that needs to open up to the array of Nations present on the territory for millennia. The Innu will be here tomorrow. As for me, a friend, spokesperson, and dogged defender for a half-century, during a period in which these people needed allies, my journey ends here. Kauishtut sits among the Elders, he looks out to the sea, then inland; he contemplates the immensity of ancestral dreams, right in the middle of a circle inhabited by all animals, and by the images of tomorrow. The youth hold the talking stick and will know how to use it. Finished on the 27th day of shetan-pishimu (July), Kauishtut’s seventieth birthday.

CHAPTER 1

Notes

prolo gue 1 Serge Bouchard, Les corneilles ne sont pas les épouses des corbeaux (Montreal: Boréal, 2005). ch a p ter o n e 1 François Guindon, Rapport d’intervention archéologique 2016: Inventaire et fouille dans le Nitassinan de la Première Nation des Innus Essipit (Baie-Comeau: Archéo-Mamu Côte-Nord, December 2016). This report was submitted to the Conseil de la Première Nation des Innus Essipit and to the Ministry of Culture and Communications. ch a p ter t wo 1 Bouchard and Mailhot, “Structure du lexique,” 39–67. Our work was taken up by anthropologist Daniel Clément, who would push it further with great rigour and extreme finesse. 2 Turgeon, “Pour redécouvrir notre XVIe siècle,” 523–49.

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3 Turgeon, Auger, and Fitzgerald, “Des Basques dans le SaintLaurent,” 62–7. Original citation: Ils “trafiquent aussi avec iceux barbares de diverses peaux belles et fines.” 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.

1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

9

10

ch a p ter t h re e Savard, “Des tentes au maisons à St-Augustin,” 53–62. Ibid. Chrétien, Delâge, and Vincent, Au croisement de nos destins. Ibid. In singular form, Mishtikushu. This word comes from mishtiku (wood, tree) and ush (boat, craft, canoe). This term can also designate French Canadians since the French are called Tshishe-Mishtikushuat. Story from Scott, “La rencontre avec les Blancs,” 47–62. These two stories come from an article written by Delâge, “Les premiers contacts,” 101–16. Excerpt from “Saint-Malo” in his epic collection, La Légende d’un people, 1887. Regarding this subject, see: Delâge, Le pays renversé; D’Avignon, “L’alliance franco-mantagnaise de 1603,” in D’Avignon and Girard, A-t-on oublié que jadis nous étions “frères”?; Girard and Kurtness, Premier traité de l’histoire de la Nouvelle-France en Amérique. Following the Amerindian practice of the “resurrection of chiefs,” there were several “Tessouat” and “Borgne de l’île” among the Algonquins of Île aux Allumettes. Which was which? For more on this subject, read the essay by Savard, L’Algonquin Tessouat et la fondation de Montréal. Archives nationales du Québec, c11d vol. 1, #19; D’Avignon, “L’Alliance franco-montagnaise de 1603,” 32; cited in Girard and

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11 12

13

14 15 16 17

1 2 3 4

Notes to pages 50–76

Kurtness, Premier traité de l’histoire de la Nouvelle-France en Amérique. Chrétien, Delâge, and Vincent, foreword to Au croisement de nos destins. Chrétien, Delâge, and Vincent, “Les source orales innues: la fondation du Québec et ses consequences,” in Au croisement de nos destins. All of the stories reported are drawn from Sylvie Vincent’s research. We used the contemporary spelling for the names of villages. Delâge, “Kebhek, Uepishtikueiau, ou Québec,” 107–29. Literally, in Algonquin, “The place where it is blocked.” Some historians attribute the name Quebec to the Innu word kapak, which means “disembark.” For more details, see Beaulieu, “ L’on n’a point d’ennemis plus grand que ces sauvages,” 365–95. Vincent, “L’arrivée des chercheurs de terres,” 19–29. According to Delâge, “Kebhek, Uepishtikueiau, ou Québec,” 107–29. This information comes from an article by Trudel, “La NouvelleFrance,” 203–28. ch a p ter f o u r Back attempts to ascertain the origins of this headpiece in “Aux origines du ‘bonnet Montagnais,’” 32–5. This information comes from my friend Joséphine Bacon, a poet, director, and translator of the Innu spirit. Taken from the fundamental work by Mailhot, Au pays des Innus. The excavation work, part of a Hydro-Québec dam construction project, was undertaken by Cérane (Centre d’étude et de recherche en archéologie du Nord-Est), under the direction of Jean Mandeville. For more information, go to archeotopo.com.

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5 Excerpt from Bouchard’s preface to my book Récits de Mathieu Mestokosho. 6 According to the Commission de toponomie in Quebec. 7 For more on this subject, read the fascinating work by Speck, Naskapi, the Savage Hunters of the Labrador Peninsula. 8 Champlain, Premiers récits de voyages en Nouvelle-France. 9 Auberger, “L’humanisme selon Ctésias et Jacques Cartier,” 139. 10 Cartier’s figs, according to a text written by Michel Bideaux (Les langages amérindiennes dals les Relations de Cartier), were most likely a variety of dried plum. Champlain, during his voyage to Wendake in 1615, evoked “a sort of fruit with the shape and colour of small lemons, yet taste nothing like them, but inside is very good, and is almost similar to that of figs.” 11 Vincent and Arcand, L’image de l’Amérindien. 12 Nicolas, Grammaire algonquine.

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3 4 5

6 7

ch a p ter f ive For more on this subject, see the fascinating work by Pastoureau, L’Ours. Marcel Trudel interviewed by Mathieu D’Avignon, 21 August 2007, in D’Avignon and Girard, A-t-on oublié que jadis nous étions “frères”? Perrot, Mémoire sur les moers, 9–11. Rousseau, “Rites païens de la forêt québecoise,” 129–55. Bouchard, Récits de Mathieu Mestokosho. The book was first published in 1977 by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, entitled Chronique de chasse d’un Montagnais de Mingan. Rousseau, “Rites paiens de la forêt québecoise.” Rousseau, “Persistance paiennes,” 183–202.

195

1 2 3 4

5 6

1 2

3

4 5

6 7

8

Notes to pages 121–40

ch a p ter s i x To learn more, see Barman, French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women. See Bouchard and Lévesque, De remarquables oubliés, vols. 1 and 2. Cited by Delâge, “Du castor cosmique au castor travailleur,” 1–45. Delâge, “Du castor cosmique au castor travailleur,” 18. In the same article, Delâge cites Father Louis Nicolas, reporting the statements made by a “Savage from the north.” On this subject, refer to the exhaustive work by Lavoie, Le Domaine du Roi. Delâge, “Du castor cosmique au castor travailleur,” 19. ch a p ter s even For more on this, read Lapage “La ‘guerre du saumon,’” 103–11. Vincent, Chasseurs sportifs vs chasseur de subsistence. Study conducted by the Commission des droits de la personne (1981): cited in the interview with Pierre Lepage. “Why is it that the Indians don’t pay tax, but everybody else does?” he asked. “I do.” Remarks made in 1993 before a First Nations gaming committee. For more on this subject, read Plourde, L’exploitation du phoque. These digs took place in the summer of 2016 the firm ArchéoMamu, under the direction of François Guindon. Results are preliminary as of yet. Jones and Laure, Mission du Sagunay. Gauvin, “L’élargissement sémantique des mots issus du vocabulaire maritime.” In Quebec and Acadia, this term signifies “halibut belly or fin” or the “part of the fish adjoining the flippers” and, by extension, and it is the case here, a “small seal foot.” Gauvin, “L’élargissement sémantique des mots issus du vocabulaire maritime.”

196

Notes to pages 140–69

9 Taken from Parcoret, Le Pitchitaouichetz. Attainable upon demand at the eifnbc. 10 From a report by Louis Aubert de Lachesnaye (1731), cited in Frenette, Histoire de la Côte-Nord. 11 Parcoret, Le Pitchitaouichetz. 12 Delâge et al., Les Sept Feux, les alliances et les traités autochtones de Québec dans l’histoire, report from the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1995): 152–3. 13 Reported by Frenette, Essipis, Première Nation innue, unpublished report, 2010. 14 Its original title was in Latin: Catalogus Generalis Totius Montanesium Gentis. 15 This petition was presented and analyzed in the article by Charest, “La pétition montagnaise du 1er février 1843,” 105. 16 Expert report supporting the particular demands of the Innu Essipit First Nation for losses to their reserve territory (2015). 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Frenette, “L’original de la petition montagnaise du 8 avril 1847,” 77–91. 20 The article by Trudel, “Autour du tableau Trois chefs Montagnais et Peter McLeod,” 40–61. 21 Ibid. 22 Frenette, Essipit, Premère Nation innue. 23 Parcoret, Le Pitchitaouichetz. 24 Mandate from Monseigneur Briand to the Montagnais, 1775. ch a p ter e i g h t 1 Cited in Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canada’s Residential Schools, Part 2, vol. 1 of Final Report. 2 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canada’s Residential Schools, Part 2, vol. 1 of Final Report.

197

Notes to pages 170–86

3 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canada’s Residential Schools, Part 2, vol. 1 of Final Report. 4 It should be noted that four Innu reserves had existed for a long time: Mashteuiatsh (Pointe-Bleue), oldest (1856), Pessamit (1862), Essipit (1892), and Uashat, the “old reserve” of Sept-Îles (1906). 5 Dom Guy Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, Ursuline (1599-1672): Correspondance, nouvelle édition, Solesmes, Abbaye Saint-Pierre (1951), cited in Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canada’s Residential Schools, Part 1, vol. 1 of Final Report, 52. 6 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canada’s Residential Schools, Part 2, vol. 1 of Final Report, 4. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Cited in Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, The Survivors Speak. 10 From Fanny Lévesque’s interview with Florent Vollant (Le Soleil, 3 June 2015). 11 Chrétien, La politique indienne du gouvernement du Canada. 12 Television interview conducted by Guy Lamarche on Politique Atout on Radio-Canada (1971). epilo gue 1 Kapesh, Je suis une maudite Sauvagesse, 9. This edition is bilingual; the translation is by José Mailhot, in collaboration with Anne-Marie André and André Mailhot. 2 Ibid., 241. 3 An Antane Kapesh, “Ces terres dont nous avions nommé chaque ruisseau,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 5, no. 2 (1975): 3.

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CHAPTER 1

Index

1958 Fisheries Act, 148

guage with Mi’kmaq, 24–5; and whaling, 16, 19, 22–8

Algonquian (Anishinaabe), 27; beliefs,

Biard, Father Pierre: on culture, 98; on

91–6; on death, 110–11; historical narra-

nomadism, 78; on physique, 83; on

tive, 38–48; as an Innu parent nation, 77;

population, 80

Iroquet as subgroup, 53. See also Innu Algonquian language, opposition between forest and sea, 9 Anadabijou (Innu Chief), 45–6, 53, 55; death, 58 archaeological sites: at Anse à la Cave, 137;

Bouchard, Serge (Kauishtut): and the blackflies, 6, 10–11; canoeing with Michel, 3–5, 164; drive to Mingan, 12–14; living with Michel and Adèle, 29–34; research with Elders, 13–16; wife’s visit, 36–7 Brûlé, Étienne, 53–5, 62–3

at Anse aux Meadows, 17–18; at Cap de Bon-Désir, 76, 137; at Côte-Nord, 7–8, 76;

Cartier, Jacques: on Bay of St Lawrence, 23;

at Île du Havre, 7; at Manakashun, 138;

on trade, 25, 120–1; first voyage to North

at Point Rosée, 18; at Trois-Pistoles, 24

America, 41–3; on “poverty,” 84; second voyage to North America, 48, 142

Basque: at Côte-Nord, 138–9; pidgin lan-

Champlain, Samuel de: account of living

210

Index

with the Innu, 52–64; first voyage to

Innu: contacts with Basque, 16, 19, 22–4,

North America, 44–9; on Innu/Basque

26; contacts with Vikings, 17–19; early

meetings, 139; on Innu/French intermar-

Innu/French relations, 43–66; as inhabi-

riage, 160; letter to Paris Chamber of

tants of Nitassinan, 9–10; name meaning

Commerce, 86–7; on religion, 97–8; on

“human being,” 10

Tadoussac, 123

Innu culture (Innu-aitun). See Algonquian; Innu; religion

Eeyou (Cree): as an Innu parent nation,

Innu language (Innu-aimun), 10, 13–16

77; name meaning “human being,” 10 Ekuanitshit (Mingan), 7–8, 28; creation of reserve, 171

James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (1975), 177

Elders: on first contact with Europeans, 50, 65–6; as keepers of Oral Tradition, 13–6;

Kapesh, An Antane, 184–6

on scarcity of caribou, 35

King’s Domain. See Treaty at Tadoussac

Erickson, Leif, 17 Essipit (Les Escoumins): evidence of whaling station, 24; history of, 133–62 ethnoscience, 12–16

Laure, Father Pierre: on the Innu of Essipit, 138–43 Laurentien coalition, 45–6 Le Jeune, Father Paul: on biological filia-

fishing, 19–20, 23–8

tion, 75; on fur trade, 125; on Innu life,

fur/fur trade, 25–6, 116–32

84–9; on Innu beliefs, 95–114, 172; on Pierre Pastedechouan, 39–40; on the

Hudson’s Bay Company, 28, 30; and Michel’s lynx fur, 116–19. See also fur/

power of a Chief ’s words, 46–7; on riches of Nitassinan, 52–3

fur trade Huron-Wendat: relationship with France, 55, 63–4; as unique among Indigenous Peoples, 55–6

Mailhot, José, 16; on “expandable parentage,” 74 Mashteuiatsh (Pointe-Bleue): as southern border of Nitassinan, 9; creation of

Indian Act, 155, 188; and intermarriage, 158–60; modifications to, 114; and residential schools, 169–71

reserve, 153 Mestokosho, Georges: as assistant, 15–16, 34; the impact of resident schooling on,

211

Index

175, 178–80; and Kauishtut’s wallet, 163–

81, 104, 107, 141; and anger at the moving

8; on Michel Mollen, 4

of caribou, 35, 165

Mestokosho, Mathieu: on first contact with Europeans, 65–6; on Innu territory, 14, 106–7; and the moose rump, 178 Mi’kmaq: conflict with Innu, 51–2, 142–3,

Pastedechouan, Pierre, 39–40, 50–1, 172 Pessamit (Betsiamites): as ancient Innu community, 76; creation of reserve, 153–5

148; Europeans in Oral Tradition, 41; as

Ploudre, Michel (archaeologist): on early

an Innu parent nation, 77; meeting the

settlement of the Saguenay valley, 137,

Europeans, 42; pidgin language with

142

Basque, 24–5; source of sagamo, 47 Missinaku (master spirit of fish and all aquatic animals), 104, 124, 141 Mollen, Adèle, 10; in government housing, 29–34

religion, 90–115; Algonquin origin myth, 99–102; beliefs regarding death, 110–12; sacred practice of kushapatshikan, 104–5; sacred practice of matutishan, 107–8;

Mollen, Michel: canoeing with Kauishtut, 3–11, 164; in government housing, 29–34; trapping and trading furs, 117–20 Montaigne, Michel de, 21, 23, 133

use of drums in rituals, 108–9 reserves: creation of, 151–2; inadequacy of housing style, 30–2. See also sedentarization residential schools, 163–80

Nitassinan (“our land”), 8–11, 81; as part of the King’s Domain, 126–31

Saint Lawrence Valley: archaeological evi-

Nolin, Élisabeth (Nishapet Enim), 67–74

dence of habitation, 7–8; and Basque

nomadism, 64; and Élisabeth’s tales, 71–4;

whalers, 22–6; as boundary of Nitassi-

European views of, 75–6, 82–7; Jesuits

nan, 81; and Jacques Cartier, 42–3; con-

opposed to, 113, 141–4

flict over resources, 43–9, 61–3; and early European explorers, 17–21

Oral Tradition: the arrival of European explorers, 18–19; Innu, 112–13, 142–3; myth-

Savard, Rémi, 31–2, 101–2 sedentarization, 10–11, 29–32; Canadian

ical (atanukan) versus historic

efforts, 148, 154–7; with creation of

(tipatshimun) narratives, 38, 49–53, 58–9,

reserves, 170–1; French desire for Indige-

102; role of Elders, 13

nous Peoples, 58–9, 86

Papakassiku (master spirit of

land animals),

Speck, Franck G. (anthropologist), 16, 76,

212

Index

79–80; on practice of bone hanging, 91;

Verrazzano, 22

on practice of scapulimancy, 110

Vincent, Sylvie (anthropologist): on arrival of Europeans in Oral Tradition, 3

Treaty at Tadoussac (1603) (aka King’s Domain), 126–32, 138, 145–7, 153

8; on French desire to sedentarize the Innu, 58–9; on perceived “poverty,” 85–6

Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), 20 Turgeon, Laurier, 25

whaling, 22–6, 40, 138–9 White Paper (1969), 175–7, 187