Hudson Bay Watershed: A Photographic Memoir of the Ojibway, Cree, and Oji-Cree

Hudson Bay Watershed A Photographic Memoir of the Ojibway, Cree, and Oji-Cree

John Macfie and Basil Johnston

Published with the assistance of the Ontario Heritage Foundation, Ministry of Culture and Communications

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Hudson Bay Watershed A Photographic Memoir of the Ojibway, Cree, and Oji-Cree

John Macfie and Basil Johnston

Dundurn Press Toronto and Oxford 1991

Text ©John Macfle and Basil Johnston Selection of photographs John Macfle, 1991 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundum Press Limited. Editing: Judith Tumbull Cover design: JAQ Text design and production: Eva Payne Printing and Binding: Gagne Printing Ltd., Louiseville, Quebec, Canada

The writing of this manuscript and the publication of this book were made possible by support from several sources. The publisher wishes to acknowledge the generous assistance and ongoing support of The Canada Council, The Book Publishing Industry Development Programme of the Department of Communications,The Ontario Arts Council, and The Ontario Heritage Foundation. Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in the text (including the illustrations). The author and publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any reference or credit in subsequent editions. /. Kirk Howard, Publisher Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Macfie:John, 1925Hudson Bay Watershed ISBN 1-55002-088-9 1. Algonquian Indians - Pictorial works. 2. Indians of North America - Ontario - Pictorial works. I. Johnston, Basil, 1929II. Title. E99.A35M33 1992

971.3*1004973

Dundurn Press Limited 2181 Queen Street East, Suite 301 Toronto, Canada M4E1E5

C91-095559-X

Dundurn Distribution Limited 73 Lime Walk Headington, Oxford England OX37AD

Contents

Preface

7

Introduction

11

One

Living off the Land

13

Two

Hunting and Harvesting

31

Three

The Fur Trade

51

Four

Some Customs and Traditions

65

Five

Echoes of a Rich Culture

83

Six

Portraits of the People

107

The Hudson Bay Watershed in Ontario

Preface

This story in photographs is dedicated to northern Ontario's first inhabitants, the Ojibway of the interior (who call themselves Anishinaubae), the Cree of the seacoast (who call themselves Anishini), and finally the Oji-Cree. Collectively, these peoples are referred to by ethnologists and anthropologists as the Algonquians, because the languages they speak fall into the Algonquian language group. Centuries ago, they accepted European explorers and entrepreneurs into their land, and much later they made it possible for me to experience the magnificent, and let it be hoped everlasting, wilderness making up the farther regions of the province. My journey there began in the late winter of 1949 when I was helping my father cut sawlogs on Crown land at the rear of our farm in southern Ontario's Parry Sound District. When the government log-sealer came to measure our winter's cut of timber, I envied the easy day's work he put in compared to mine toiling at one end of a two-man crosscut saw. I asked him how I could get a job like his, and his advice proved reliable; the following winter found me employed by the Ontario Department of Lands and Forests in the capacity of apprentice log-sealer, travelling a circuit of half a dozen logging camps situated on the western fringe of Algonquin Provincial Park. That spring a friend in the department's Fish and Wildlife Branch drew my attention to an advertised competition for the position of trapline management officer in the remotest quarter of the province, a job offering fulfilment of boyhood

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Hudson Bay Watershed

dreams of northern adventure inspired by the books of Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.D. Roberts. I was the successful applicant, and in midsummer of 19501 arrived in the frontier town of Sioux Lookout to take up my duties. The air was thick with excitement and with the coming and going of floatplanes, for one of that region's periodic gold rushes was in full swing. I could hardly wait for the field work that would take me into the real North lying beyond. A little more than a year earlier the government of Canada, responsible for native affairs, and the government of Ontario, which regulated hunting and trapping in the province, entered into an agreement to work together in safeguarding the wild fur resources of the North in order, in the words of the agreement, "that a better livelihood may be provided for the people in pursuit of their chosen occupations." The pact came into effect on April 1, 1950, at which time Ontario began appointing trapline management officers to implement it at the field level. I was one of those recruited for the vast Patricia District lying north of the transcontinental line of the Canadian National Railways (CNR). When I arrived in Sioux Lookout, the groundwork had already been laid by Hugh Conn of the Indian Affairs Branch and Jack Grew representing Ontario, who three years earlier had travelled to all the northern settlements to meet with trappers of the region. Both men had backgrounds in the fur trade, Conn as a Hudson's Bay Company trader and Grew as a Mackenzie River trapper. Working through interpreters, they outlined - as best they could on the often sketchy topographic maps of the day - units of land representing the winter hunting grounds of hundreds of family groups. At the village of Big Beaverhouse, they met a Hudson's Bay Company fur-trader named Campbell Currie who was fairly fluent in the local native tongue. Grew was sufficiently impressed by "Cam" Currie to invite him to leave trading to work for the Department of Lands and Forests. When I came to Sioux Lookout, Currie was supervisor of trapline management for a region encompassing one-third of the province's total land area. I was one of three engaged to work under him. The others were Earl Stone, like myself in his mid-twenties, and Tom

Batchelor, a Scot who had come to Canada twenty years earlier as a trader for the Paris-based fur company Revillon Freres. Batchelor's coaching in the language and ways of the region made my dealings and travels with the Indians easier. Stone and I were field men for the western and eastern halves respectively of Currie's vast district, which extended west to the Manitoba border, east to beyond Nakina, and north to Hudson Bay. In practice, however, we did considerable filling-in for one another, which explains why many of this book's photographs were taken in places like Pikangikum, Deer Lake, and Sandy Lake, all near the Manitoba border. Like most civil service positions, my job involved a good deal of time behind a desk, issuing trapping licences, compiling records, and writing reports, but as a field man, I also went to the bush to resolve trapline boundary disputes, audit beaver house counts turned in by trappers, and monitor wildlife abundance and habitat. After working six years based at Sioux Lookout, I served for an additional four (in a somewhat different capacity that nevertheless still kept me in touch with the native population) at the more southerly postings of Geraldton and Gogama before returning to Parry Sound to finish my thirty-two-year career with the Fish and Wildlife Branch. Those ten years in the North gave me a unique opportunity to see and photograph native people going about daily life in a wide range of environments, from trackside settlements to the windswept tundra bordering Hudson Bay. This was in the heyday of the bush plane, when travel anywhere north of the CNR track depended on float- or ski-equipped single-engine aircraft. The Department of Lands and Forests operated a fleet of about fifty Norsemans, Beavers, and Otters, several of which were based at Sioux Lookout and satellite bases at Red Lake, Pickle Lake, and Armstrong. I would depart "civilization" in the comfort of one of these, and on arriving in a native settlement, I usually parked my bedroll in the home of the manager of the Hudson's Bay Company store, in most cases the only quarters available to the itinerant traveller. Out on the trapline, arrangements were more spartan. A small wedge tent, a drafty log cabin, a

Preface

wigwam, or on rare occasions just a starry winter sky provided a roof over my head. Travel was by snowshoe and dog-team in winter and by canoe in summer, usually a square-stern model equipped with a small outboard motor. Although I was not unfamiliar with snowshoes, my first extended winter journey, with a party of trappers from Bearskin, revealed me for the tenderfoot I was. My thighs and moccasined feet ached, and I would lag farther and farther behind the others as the hours dragged by. Travelling in the deep, loose snow of early winter, in six days we journeyed a hundred kilometres down the Severn River, then returned by an inland route, following the perimeter of a trapline whose outline I needed to map in order to resolve a boundary dispute with neighbouring BigTrout Lake trappers. Our pell-mell pace never slackened, not even on the day I experienced an attack of appendicitis. But when I arrived back at Bearskin, close on the heels of the others, I was a certified snowshoer. From the outset I carried a camera, beginning with an inexpensive folding Kodak and working up to a Rolleicord for black-and-white photography and a Zeiss Contax for 35 mm colour slides. I had no idea, then, that the way of life my pictures captured would change so radically, so soon. On a recent return trip north, I found today's generation comfortably plugged in to the age of electronic communication, motorized travel, and supermarket shopping. In presenting these photographs from forty years ago, I do not propose to depict a time that is either better or worse than any other. The collection simply represents one moment in the continuing evolution of the lifestyle of the northern Algonquians of this region. So much for my contribution to the book. In my search for someone with special insight into Algonquian culture to provide a backdrop for the pictures, I was fortunate in being able to engage Basil Johnston, respected Ojibway student and author, as my co-author. Basil has provided the introductions to the chapters that follow and helped compose picture captions. John Macfie

9

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Introduction

A

t the halfway point of the twentieth century the Algonquians of the undeveloped hinterland of Ontario still lived to a considerable degree on and from the land. They congregated in summer in centrally located communities, but in early autumn they dispersed to winter camps to hunt and fish for food, and trap fur-bearing animals. Although commercial fisheries were carried on in a few places, theirs was primarily a fur economy, as had been the case ever since French and English adventurers first demonstrated that the skins of animals could be exchanged for useful or attractive manufactured goods. The story of the northern Ontario native since the European invasion is one of rapid change. Since 1600, metal tools and utensils; firearms; rum; European languages, religions, and diseases; landsurrender treaties; exotic foodstuffs; and the internal combustion engine have imposed an uninterrupted train of dramatic - and at times traumatic change in lifestyle. In 1950 the flood was about to become a deluge: ready access to formal education; telephone, television, and scheduled air service in nearly every village; the snowmobile; government medical services; government-provided housing, and a broad array of assistance programs would draw the people of the region further into the Canadian mainstream. At the same time, a human population that had outstripped the capacity of the land to support trappers and a worldwide decline in the demand for wild fur relegated the fur trade to a subordinate role. The combined effect of this

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Hudson Bay Watershed

array of forces has been to all but extinguish the traditional northern Algonquian hunting-andgathering way of life. The objective of the federal-provincial furmanagement effort was to replace competitive and exhaustive - trapping with a sustained-yield system. Actually, this was a return to the old traditional system of sparing animals for the next year's needs. Dividing the land into legally constituted traplines and requiring trappers to confine themselves within the same boundaries year after year would, it was reasoned, provide incentive to farm rather than mine the resource. Also, a system whereby harvests were controlled by means of quotas, already in effect for beaver, was now extended to certain other easily overharvested species in order to rebuild and maintain stressed populations.

One

Living off the Land

Xhe North's forests, rivers, lakes, muskegs, and seacoasts form a vast storehouse of birds, mammals, and fish, plants and berries. Yet reaping is difficult when seasons are short, muskegs impassable, the soil shallow, waters treacherous, mosquitoes and black flies voracious, forest fires devastating, rainfall unpredictable, and winters numbing. Killing a moose or caribou requires hours, sometimes days, of tracking them in the snow. Beavers, the fur-trapper's mainstay and an important source of meat, are subject to periods of disease-caused scarcity, when occupied lodges can lie a whole day's walking distance apart. In early times, the birchbark canoe, propelled by paddle, bore men and women to their hunting, fishing, and harvesting grounds during the summer months. Today, outboard motors drive squaresterned canoes sheathed in canvas and synthetic materials rather than bark. In winter, the hunters and trappers travelled on snowshoe. The snowshoes manufactured today differ little from those worn by the First Nations natives when the Europeans arrived. Ash, tough and pliable, is still the best material for making the frames, but ash is scarce north of the Albany River. There, snowshoe-makers must make do with tamarack or white birch. The webbing for the middle panel of the snowshoe frame was made from lacing (called babiche) cut from the dehaired, untanned hide of moose or caribou, while the front and rear panels were webbed with finer babiche or cotton twine.

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Hudson Bay Watershed

It is said that the First Nations peoples did not use dogs as draft animals until the nineteenth century. Men and women carried or drew their possessions and cargoes on sleds. The dogs of the First Nations peoples in northern Ontario were often poor draft animals, without great strength or stamina. Three dogs could draw a lightly loaded toboggan over a good trail, but teams of from four to seven dogs were required for heavier cargoes. In the forest, the dogs were hitched in tandem between a pair of traces, but in the open on the tundra, the dogs were hitched in fan fashion, with each dog pulling on its own rope. The toboggans that the dogs drew were either factory-made of oak and purchased from a trader or laboriously hewn or whipsawn from tamarack. Heavy runnered sleds similar to those used by the Inuit were used further north on the tundra where the arctic winds whip the snow to the consistency of ice. At the end of the day, the teamsters customarily fed the dogs fish, either frozen or boiled. For their own meals, they prepared bannock, lard, and tea, supplemented by such game as might be killed on the trail. Lard was not only an ingredient in the recipe for bannock but served as a "butter" as well; the travellers dipped chunks of bannock in a frying pan of bubbling lard before eating them. A pound of lard might serve four people for a day. Night falls early in winter. Either before or after the meal, a shelter was erected. The traveller first tramped down the snow in a rectangle, then carpeted it with evergreen boughs for insulation and mattressing. Over this, a lean-to of evergreen brush or canvas was erected. With the introduction of canvas tents, the lean-to went out of style. In this vast and wide land, there were no services, no conveniences, no "benefits." The native hunters, trappers, and harvesters had to rely on their ingenuity, courage, and self-sacrifice to obtain what they needed. George Metatawaabin amputated his own leg at the knee, using his canoe knife as a surgical instrument, after his leg was crushed by a tree he felled at his camp two hundred kilometres up the Albany River from James Bay. After recovering, he resumed trapping, walking on three snowshoes, two of which were

attached to the tips of a pair of crutches. Danny Tuckesin of Savant Lake did not have the use of his legs, yet he regularly trapped, getting in and out his canoe unaided and driving a team of dogs. In the North, only those prepared to face hardship and make sacrifices could survive. In the sixties, snowmobiles began to replace dog-teams, outboard motors had all but displaced paddles, and aircraft were providing regular services to northern communities. Suddenly, life on the trail became easier.

Living off the Land

15

Henry Cutfeet of Big Trout Lake on a Fawn River portage. As a young man, Cutfeet worked with canoe brigades bringing Hudson's Bay Company freight up from Fort Severn to Big Trout. They made the 800-kilometre round trip three or four times a season, carrying such loads as twenty-five sacks of flour, each weighing 100 pounds, in a twenty-two-foot canoe paddled by five men. The daily food ration per man was three pounds of flour and some salt pork. With the coming of tractor and air freight in the 1930s and 1940s, this important source of summer employment dried up.

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Hudson Bay Watershed

A dogsled cached on the tundra between Fort Severn and Weenusk.

Living off the Land

Phillip Mathew and Douglas Kakekaspan of Fort Severn steering canoes down the Black Duck River.

Phillip Mathew and Douglas Kakekaspan poling up rapids on the the Black Duck River.

17

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Hudson Bay Watershed

Douglas Kakekaspan making a paddle. He chose a dry, straight-grained spruce about five inches in diameter from a recently burned patch of forest, split its trunk into halves, and in a few minutes hewed out a pair of paddles. The life of such a paddle was limited, for each time its pointed tip became burred from poling up boulder swifts, it was resharpened like a dull pencil.

Although outboard motors, when they became available, took much of the drudgery out of canoeing, they were costly and spare parts were hard to get. Angus Miles of Fort Severn has torn down his small motor in an attempt to get it working.

Living off the Land

19

Ontario's shallow Hudson Bay coastline is unprotected from storms, placing the traveller at the mercy of that frigid sea's moods and tides. Here Albert Koostachin of Fort Severn waits for the wind to abate.

Canoes on Hudson Bay, with Phillip Mathew running his ten-horsepower outboard motor.

Rivers crossing the Hudson Bay lowland sometimes meander acutely. In a few more years Shell Brook will break through the remaining barrier at this point, stranding about one kilometre of the present riverbed as an oxbow lake.

20

Hudson Bay Watershed

These men, photographed in the muskeg fifty kilometres inland from Hudson Bay, are wearing snowshoes appropriate for the wind-hardened snow of February (the loose snow of early winter demands a slightly larger size). Beginning on the left of the picture, the men are Bert Sutherland and Joseph Chokomolin of Hawley Lake; the third is unidentified.

Willie Coaster of Ogoki shaping a pair of snowshoe frames.

Living off the Land

Mrs. Mathew Coaster of Ogoki netting a new pair of snowshoes. It is midSeptember, and soon her husband will need them.

Luke Coaster of Ogoki hanging babicbe, newly cut from a moosehide, to dry in preparation for snowshoe-making.

21

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Hudson Bay Watershed

Moccasins worn by John Macfie. The moccasin of dry-tanned leather with an inner boot of rabbit skin or duffel cloth was universally worn for snowshoeing. Native-tanned moccasins are best in very cold weather; when the temperature rises to within a few degrees of freezing, they become wet and uncomfortable. The pointed ones are made of moosehide, the puckered ones of caribou. The term tenderfoot describes the moccasin-footed novice snowshoer precisely, for the soles, toes, and insteps all cry out in agony during the breaking-in period.

In marked contrast to the boreal forest and muskeg, the level tundra and stranded beaches bordering Hudson Bay offer easy going for summer travel on foot. Phillip Mathew, on the left in this photograph, once walked 300 kilometres from Fort Severn to York Factory to play his violin for the treaty-time dances.

Living off the Land

An overnight camp in the muskeg. Dogs needed to be tied firmly to prevent them from breaking loose and consuming anything edible, such as snowshoe webbing, and kept far enough apart to prevent fighting.

23

24

Hudson Bay Watershed

Jumbo, a handsome and powerful sled dog of the team used by Father Gagnon of the Oblate mission at Weenusk when he visited parishioners in their winter camps.

Father Gagnon helps Moses Koostachin sort out tangled traces.

Living off the Land

Moses Koostachin of Weenusk uses leftover tea to restore the glaze on a mud-surfaced sled runner during a noontime stop.

25

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Hudson Bay Watershed

A typical Ojibway dogteam, hitched in tandem and pulling a toboggan. The driver is Elizier Beardy of Bearskin.

Bert Sutherland and Joseph Chokomolin, whose runnered sled identifies them as Swampy Crees. A large part of their load is fuel in the form of frozen fish for the dogs.

Living off the Land

The lobstick spruce on the left, identified by its middle branches having been lopped off, marks the road through featureless muskeg. Although it is not clearly evident in the picture, each dog in this team is hitched to its own trace. During this trip, in February of 1955, a military aircraft passed low over our heads, causing us considerable wonder and speculation. Later events revealed that it was locating potential sites for the mid-Canada chain of radar stations, one of which would within a year be under construction beside the Winisk River. Escalating technology rendered the Winisk facility obsolete within ten years, by which time wage employment at the base had weaned many of the heads of families in nearby Weenusk away from wintering in the interior. Thus did an age-old Cree custom become a casualty of the Cold War.

27

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Hudson Bay Watershed

Bannock, concocted of flour, baking powder, and lard (perhaps supplemented with fat skimmed from a boiling duck or goose), was easily cooked on the trail, requiring only a fire and a frying pan. Alfred Mitchell of Fort Severn prepares the dish, then cooks it in the radiant heat of a low fire.

Living off the Land

29

Canoe travel along Hudson Bay's shallow south shore is subject to the dictates of tide and wind. Travellers have perished in the waves when their canoe settled in the gooey, sucking mud at low tide and then could not be refloated when a stormy sea returned. The canny traveller carefully calculated the tide's turn and gauged stops to coincide with the mouths of streams where fresh water could be had. Driftwood-strewn beaches yield an unfailing supply of firewood

Although the tastiest bannocks were baked slowly before the embers of the evening fire, a passable one could be put together in a hurry if the situation demanded it. I once timed Henry Cutfeet, seen here preparing a noontime bannock, at twenty-five minutes from the time our canoe touched shore until he had a bannock ready for eating (I made the fire). But such a "utility" bannock had to be eaten while hot, for as it cooled it turned to stone.

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Hudson Bay Watershed

The noon stop is a welcome Tbreak in a long day of travel by snowshoe. From left to right are Edward Fiddler and sons Tommy and Alex, and Elizier Beardy, all of Bearskin.

Two

Hunting and

Harvesting

Despite fluctuations in the numbers of moose, caribou, and other small animals and despite the acquisition of firearms, tinned food, tools, and manufactured tents, at mid-century the techniques for hunting animals remained much as they had always been. Hunters still called moose in the rutting season or tracked them in the snow. The killing of a moose or a caribou still was cause for a feast, a celebration. It brought a welcome change from the normal diet of fish, fowl, and beaver. Trapping methods, too, were much the same. Only the equipment had changed - steel traps instead of deadfalls; wire snares instead of bark, sinew, or leather. Similarly, the harvesting of berries, wild rice, herbs, roots, and medicinal plants was carried out in the traditional ways, though metal containers for gathering and storing displaced birchbark and splint baskets.

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Hudson Bay Watershed

Traditionally, moose were most commonly hunted by tracking them in the snow. Another tactic, used during the September mating season, was to lure an animal within shooting range by broadcasting the simulated grunts and groans of a rutting moose through a cone of rolled birchbark, as Henry Kechebra of Mattagami Reserve is doing.

Hunting and Harvesting

Although long absent from much of their original range in Ontario, enough caribou still roamed the muskeg south of Hudson Bay to support a small annual harvest here at Weenusk.

Charlie Agostie of Attawapiskat extracting brains from a caribou head. The brains would be spread on the hide to aid in the tanning process.

33

34

Hudson Bay Watershed

Dehairing a caribou skin.

Hunting and Harvesting

A big game skin being smoked over a low fire, the final stage in the tanning process.

Partly tanned caribou skins at Deer Lake.

35

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Hudson Bay Watershed

A smokehouse for curing meat and fish, at Weagamow.

Smoking a moosehide inside a conical smokehouse at Weagamow.

Hunting and Harvesting

Mrs. Suguanaqueb of Longlac tanning a moosehide.

37

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Hudson Bay Watershed

Skinning a snowshoe hare.

Ponasking (broiling) a snowshoe hare over the coals.

Hunting and Harvesting

These winter skins of snowshoe hares will be sewn into inner boots for moccasins or cut in strips for plaiting into a jacket or a sleeping robe.

39

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Hudson Bay Watershed

A Weagamow girl wearing a hareskin jacket.

A hareskin blanket.

Hunting and Harvesting

A trapper dragging home a pair of thirty-pound beaver. The value of the flesh as food for his family will about equal that of the pelts.

41

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Hudson Bay Watershed

Fox pelts had little value in the fur market in the 1950s, so those taken were often used domestically. The parka hoods of these boys at Weenusk are luxuriantly trimmed with red and Arctic fox.

The last of Hudson Bay's icefields to melt tend to ground on its southern beaches, with the result that two hundred or more polar bears come ashore in Ontario each summer. Although the occasional one was shot, in the 1950s the Swampy Crees did not deliberately hunt polar bears — in fact, they gave the huge, fearless predators as wide a berth as possible. At that time, the polar bear had no protection under Ontario's game laws, but with today's brisk demand for the pelts of rare animals and with ever-improving means of access to their home range, the killing of polar bears is closely regulated.

Hunting and Harvesting

43

The pelt of a polar bear hung beyond the reach of prowling dogs. The tubs hold seal meat preserved in seal oil.

This polar bear was shot by Elijah Albany while it was swimming in the estuary of the Severn River. When Elijah beached his canoe, word quickly spread, and all the men of the village came to admire the bear and hear his story of the kill. Then someone brought a heavy rope and all hands joined in dragging the carcass up the steep riverbank to the rear of the village for butchering. Elijah and his father gutted the bear; then the hide and its underlying three-inch layer of fat were removed in strips six inches wide, just as if it was a seal or beluga whale. Finally, flesh and bone were cut into ten-pound chunks. The cutting was directed by a community elder who referred to a piece of paper listing the number of dogs owned by each household. Elijah's final act in the limelight was to ceremoniously deliver the proceeds of the kill from house to house in a ten-gallon gasoline barrel slung from a pole resting on his and his father's shoulders.

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Hudson Bay Watershed

Although not highly regarded due to their lack of fat, grouse are a fairly reliable source of country food. The comparatively tame spruce grouse occurs throughout the Hudson Bay watershed, while the ruffed grouse is subject to periodic scarcity and is not found at all in high latitudes. The sharptailed grouse and ptarmigan, both northern species, spill over into the south during periodic population irruptions. Here a hunter bags a sharptail with his .22 rifle from a flock perched in willows.

Hunting and Harvesting

The Hudson Bay coast may be better known for its waterfowl hunting, but it also has excellent fishing. Most streams entering the Bay support brook trout like these from the Sutton River.

45

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Hudson Bay Watershed

This is Phillip Mathew with a bag of pintails at the Black Duck River.

Eseas Thomas of Fort Severn with a bearded seal, which he will use for dogfood.

Hunting and Harvesting

47

Geese killed in October and hung to freeze-dry provide winter meat. It is now February, and this is what remains of one Weenusk family's cache of snow geese.

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Hudson Bay Watershed

Because trees grow slowly in the subarctic climate of the Hudson Bay coast, the supply of firewood in the vicinity of a community gradually becomes exhausted. The spruce logs in this Fort Severn woodpile were cut miles up the Severn River and rafted down in summer.

Phillip Mathew salvages ironwork from an old shipwreck; he will use it as an anvil.

Hunting and Harvesting

49

The worth of ordinary wood was brought home to me the day Phillip Mathew discovered this piece of white birch stranded on a Hudson Bay beach. Birch does not grow near Hudson Bay, but occasional pieces such as this escape from inland beaver ponds and float all the way down to the sea. Phillip added the precious billet to our baggage, after pointing to the handle of our axe and exlaiming, "Minaiusinl" (the Cree word for "good").

A cat-tail rush mat, called a pa'-soomin-an, used for drying blueberries.

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Hudson Bay Watershed

Seal blubber and flesh at Attawapiskat.

Three

The

Fur Trade

B y the middle of the twentieth century, over 300 years had elapsed since coureurs de bois from the French colony on the St. Lawrence River began trading with the natives of northern Ontario, exchanging manufactured articles for furs. The variety of trade goods now far exceeded that available three centuries before. In nearly every community, one or more fur-traders now kept stores stocked with items the Indians needed or wanted, and each autumn they issued credit in the form of food, traps, ammunition, and gasoline to the heads of families as they departed for winter hunting grounds. It was understood that the debts would be repaid the following spring, or even as early as Christmas if the fall hunt proved successful. It was a matter of pride for a trapper to settle his accounts on time, and a serious blemish on his character, he believed, to have an overdue account at the store. The Hudson's Bay Company conducted the largest proportion of the trading business in the North. It had a store in most villages of any size, as well as outposts, usually staffed by natives, in smaller outlying settlements inhabited by a few dozen people. There also was the so-called camp trade, where a member of a winter encampment was entrusted with a small supply of provisions for issue to fellow trappers in the event they ran short during the winter, saving a long journey to the trading post. For years, Hudson's Bay Company post managers had been storekeepers to the natives. But by the 1950s, their duties and functions had increased.

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Hudson Bay Watershed

Family allowances, old age pensions, and relief payments were directed to them for administration, and the company's shortwave radio frequently provided the only communication link with the outside world in times of emergency. In most communities, the post manager's first-aid chest was the only medical supply available, so the manager and his wife were often called upon to tend to the sick or injured. Through its personnel, the Hudson's Bay Company provided a link between the natives and the outside world, giving it a special relationship with the people of the North. The main contact government wildlife officers had with northern trappers was at annual meetings held in May and June in about thirty communities. These were usually scheduled to coincide with the yearly visit of the Indian Affairs Branch treaty party, when most band members could be counted on to be in the village. Treaty time was the high point of the summer social season, when feasts and dances and catching up on the news marked the return from winter camps. The officers' chief objective in these meetings with the native trappers was to collect data on the previous winter's fur harvest and to urge conservation practices. Every trapper was required to fill out a form detailing his catch, and the head trapper on each trapline had to prepare a map showing active beaver lodges. He also had to submit an estimate of the number, if any, of other quota animals Oynx, marten, and fisher) in his territory. In the 1950s, beaver, mink, muskrat, and otter were the mainstay of the northern Ontario fur industry. Red and Arctic fox, weasel, red squirrel, wolf, and black bear were also taken but in much smaller numbers. The most valuable in terms of demand and money was the lynx, whose pelts provided a bonanza for the lucky trapper. Marten were found only in isolated pockets and seemed on the verge of extinction (in 1949-50 fewer than a dozen were taken by trappers in all of the northwestern one-third of Ontario), but they were to rebound dramatically in following decades. Fisher also appeared to be down for the count, but they too have recovered to normal levels as far north as their natural range extends. The rarest of all was the wolverine, found only in the far north.

Marten, fisher, and beaver were being restocked in places where they had disappeared, with animals live-trapped in southern game preserves and provincial parks and brought north. To what extent this helped to restore populations will never be known, but whatever the reasons, these species did come back. Trapping of beaver, marten, fisher, and lynx was controlled by quotas written into trapping licences. In the 1950s, a period of rebuilding, the beaver quota was a conservative one animal per active lodge (none at all if a trapline supported fewer than five lodges), and for the vast majority of trappers the allocation for the other quota species was nil. The trapping season opened at the beginning of November. Pelts of mink were then at their best from a furrier's point of view, so early trapping effort was concentrated on that species. Beaver became prime a little later in the season and were more easily caught through the ice, while otter trapping went hand in hand with both mink and beaver trapping. The muskrat hunt took place in the spring breeding season, when pelts were at their best and the animal habitually travelled widely in flooded streams and marshes. An average northern native trapper's annual catch of fur in the 1950s was on the order of a dozen beaver, ten mink, a couple of otter, and sixty muskrat, worth, with a few other incidental furs added to the bundle, perhaps $800 (1950 dollars) at the trading post. Adding on the value of beaver and muskrat carcasses used as food would raise the worth of the typical trapper's harvest to perhaps $1,000. Trapping peaked in late fall and early spring. In the depth of winter, thick ice and reduced activity among target animals made for a low return for the effort expended. Fur-traders, consequently, were busiest towards the end of December and again in May. Commonly, one or two members of a winter encampment, or all of them if the camp was only a couple of days' travel away, journeyed home for Christmas, delivering their fall fur hunts to the trader and returning with additional supplies. Spring catches came in with the canoes that brought everyone home for the summer.

The Fur Trade

53

In the 1950s, trapping remained the principal occupation of the northern native people. With the exception of those few who went out to find wage employment, mostly in the Pickle Lake and Red Lake gold-mining camps, virtually every male over the age of sixteen was a licensed trapper. In the ensuing years, the status of the fur trade declined. The human population increased substantially, but the land base remained fixed. As village life became more convenient and attractive, fewer families went on the traplines and resorted to winter camps. Demand for wild furs diminished, and the beaver pelt lost its purchasing power. Today, pressure exerted by the animal rights movement threatens to terminate this nation's first industry, thus severing the very lifeline of many of the First Nations people.

Trappers checking a beaver lodge in the headwaters of the Attawapiskat River. The presence or absence of a steam cavity beneath the snow covering the lodge will reveal whether or not it is currently occupied by beaver.

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Hudson Bay Watershed

A Moose Factory trapper dragging home two beavers. His snowshoes, moccasins, mitts, and canvas gun case are native-made.

The pulling cord is attached to an alder plug inserted through the nasal septum.

The Fur Trade

55

Mr. Echum of Moose Factory pelting a beaver. The bone tool he is wielding with a chopping motion will separate skin from flesh without risk of cutting it.

Elijah Baxter skinning a marten.

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Hudson Bay Watershed

A Moose Factory woman fleshing a stretched beaverskin. Under the prevailing division of labour, men caught and brought home the animals, and in some cases skinned them, while women prepared the pelts for market.

Mrs. George Baxter of Ogoki with a beaver pelt laced in a stretching frame. Mr. and Mrs. Baxter, with four sons and their families, spent the winter months in a cluster of neat log cabins on Washi Lake. Such camps typically housed three generations and occasionally four.

The Fur Trade

57

This beaver pelt, laced taughtly in a bent-alder drying frame and hung outside for several days to freeze-dry, is now ready for market.

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Hudson Bay Watershed

Elijah Kakegamic of Sandy Lake with a rare wolverine pelt.

The Fur Trade

59

Hudson's Bay Company clerk Martin Eva trading for furs at Weenusk. The store is unheated in winter, thus the heavy parkas.

Jack Gibb, clerk at the Hudson's Bay Company's Big Trout Lake post. A native of Aberdeen, Scotland, Gibb made the most of life in the Canadian wilderness, as attested to by this twenty-pound lake trout he has just caught.

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Hudson Bay Watershed

Chief James Masakayash raises the flag as a signal to members of the Osnaburgh Band to come to the council house for the spring trappers' meeting.

Cam Currie (in peaked cap), trapline management supervisor for the Department of Lands and Forests, consulting a map with Big Trout Lake trappers.

The Fur Trade

Tom Batchelor and the author (far left and second from right) of the Department of Lands and Forests, with Chief James Masakayash and Councillor Edward Kakekeskung at Osnaburgh.

The young men of a trapline filling out a fur report form.

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Earl Stone of the Department of Lands and Forests, meeting with trappers at Poplar Hill.

A trapping outfit cached near the mouth of the Niskibi River. Included are traps, pelt stretchers for beaver and otter, dog harness, and a toboggan weighted down with driftwood to keep it from blowing away.

The Fur Trade

63

Polar bear and timber wolf cubs, captured in the den, were sometimes shipped off and sold to zoos. This young black wolf is at Attawapiskat.

Prior to 1948, when the specially designed de Havilland Beaver first took to the skies, the Noorduyn Norseman was the workhorse of Ontario's Provincial Air Service bush-flying fleet. On the left is Harry Speight, a Second World War bomber pilot whose Norseman OBG carried the author on many trips to and from northern outposts. The others here at the dock at Bearskin are, from left to right, Gordon Douglas, Fred Mitchell, and Jack Gibb of the Hudson's Bay Company, and Vaughan Downey, OBG's engineer.

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Almost the entire population of Sachigo in front of that community's Hudson's Bay Company outpost.

The Hudson's Bay Company outpost at Kasabonika in the headwaters of the Winisk River. Although he neither read nor spoke English, the native manager in the doorway printed the company sign over the door, copying the old English lettering from a tea package (the larger sign was sent in later from headquarters).

Four

Some Customs

and Traditions

cree and Ojibway culture at mid-century had been much modified, and some aspects had been forsaken altogether. On Sundays, people attended services conducted by clergymen in a church of one of the Christian denominations. They readily espoused religion because it appealed to their sense of reverence for what was spiritual. Though many relinquished the old beliefs and evaded the traditional rituals and cermonies, a few clung to the old codes and perceptions, and took part in the traditional quest for visions and dreams through the offering of tobacco and through the Midewaewin exercises. Instead of telling stories and performing pantomimes and dance-like acts - traditional forms of entertainment and instruction - the people now danced the square dance, two-step, quadrille, waltz, and schottische to the fiddle and guitar. Gramophones and radios brought news and music from places hundreds of kilometres away. Television would soon follow. The architectural style of dwellings, too, underwent alteration. Though wigwams covered with bark, sod, canvas, and evergreen boughs were erected as temporary shelters on the trapline in the old fashion, the permanent homes in permanent villages were now constructed with logs and lumber in a style similar to urban dwellings. The primary source of income, too, was shifting from trapping and labour to pensions, family allowances, and welfare assistance.

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Making a gill net at Kasabonika. The twine is wound on a wooden netting needle of European design. Fishing was men's work, but women made and mended the nets.

Mrs. Duncan Gray and her daughter of Fort Severn untangle and remove debris from a gill net.

Some Customs and Traditions

Mrs. Eseas Thomas of Fort Severn with a gill net used to catch whitefish and brook trout in rivers entering Hudson Bay.

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Hauling firewood over the ice of Big Trout Lake. The arrival in the 1960s of the snowmobile relieved the lot of the sled dog.

The Hudson's Bay Company introduced the pitsaw three centuries ago, using it to make spruce planks for their forts. The lumber these men are making at Big Trout Lake is likely destined to become flooring for a home.

Some Customs and Traditions

69

The Hudson's Bay Company store represented "downtown," the place to meet and pass the time, in a northern village. This one at Sandy Lake is constructed of logs, one of the last of its vintage.

Unloading the annual Hudson's Bay Company supply boat in August, a two-day job, provided virtually the only wage employment at Fort Severn. It also gave young men an opportunity to display their strength and stamina by carrying 100-pound sacks of flour up the steep riverbank two at a time, instead of the customary one.

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The annual supply boat's arrival, after butting its way through the last of Hudson Bay's melting ice pack, was a high point of summer at Fort Severn. The shelves of the Hudson's Bay Company store would now be replenished, and each year's outfit usually included some attractive and previously unknown item of merchandise. For the only time in the year, fresh fruit and vegetables were also available.

A canvas-covered wigwam houses a family that has come south from Webequie to Lansdowne House for the annual visit of the treaty party.

Some Customs and Traditions

Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Methodist missionaries began to impact upon the spiritual life of northern Algonquians about the middle of the nineteenth century, and ultimately Christianity became the dominant religion. Even on the trail, most of the people I travelled with observed morning and evening devotions. Still, elements of older beliefs survived in places, including Sandy Lake, the site of this Roman Catholic mission.

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Waterfowl figure prominently in the diet of the Swampy Cree, so shooting is an essential skill. This is Sam Mathew of Fort Severn.

The winter camp of Chief James Masakayash (with hands in pockets) of the Osnaburgh Band. The toboggan in the foreground is native-made.

Some Customs and Traditions

The Cree village of Fort Severn, where the Hudson's Bay Company first traded for furs over 300 years ago.

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A newborn resident of Fort Severn in its moss-bag.

The highly portable cradleboard or tikinagan also served as a restraint to keep youngsters from tumbling into the water or burning themselves in a campfire. This Cree mother and child were photographed at Fort Severn.

Some Customs and Traditions

75

The bentwood bracket topping a tikinagan served a dual purpose. Cloth or mosquito netting draped over it provided protection from weather or insects, and if a cradle propped against a tree was knocked over, the child was prevented from falling on its face. This photograph was taken at Lansdowne House.

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A Sandy Lake mother and child.

A liner of sewn birchbark was fitted inside the tikinagan. Dried sphagnum moss served as a disposable diaper.

Some Customs and Traditions

A profusely beaded tihinagan at Lansdowne House. The lacing is tanned moosehide.

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Newly gathered moss drying at Lansdowne House for use as an absorbent in a child's moss-bag.

The main board of a tikinagan was usually made from a slab of spruce or cedar. This is Mathew Coaster of Ogoki giving a board a final smoothing.

Some Customs and Traditions

Using sticks whittled from saplings, these boys play hockey against a background of beaver pelts curing in the frost and wind.

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Square dancing, introduced at European settlements on Hudson Bay and the Red River, filled the void as traditional drumming and dancing declined. Fiddlers, with their unique ability to entertain, in some respects took the place of the shamans of old. Styles of playing and dancing varied from region to region; for example, Severn River fiddlers seemed always to sit back in their chairs and stepdanced as they played. These musicians are at Lansdowne House.

Some Customs and Traditions

81

The author (on the left, dancing with Sally Miles) and two American waterfowl biologists sponsored this dance at Fort Severn to compensate for their guides having missed the ship-time festivities on their account.

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Wooden grave marker at Fort Severn inscribed in both English and Cree syllables.

A lonely gravesite on the cotton grass-speckled tundra near the mouth of the Niskibi River.

Five

Echoes of a

Rich Culture

The passing away of the bow and arrow, the wigwam, the birchbark canoe, the feathered headdress, the leggings is not to be construed as the dissolution of a culture. The material aspects of the traditional native way of life do not reflect all the values, attitudes, and aspirations of the craftsmen or their nation. Rather, the heart, soul, and spirit of the native culture are found in its language and literature. While the physical culture is evolving along with everything else, the language of the Northern Ojibway, Cree, and Oji-Cree remains strong. The invisible essential substance of the culture stays firm. The traditional material creations - the tools, weapons, dress, means of travel - inspire admiration. How did their creators accomplish so much with so little? They must have been ingenious, hardy people, familiar with the properties of plants and wood and with the habits of animals. And they had to be resourceful and patient to cope. When William Moore of Mattagami Reserve, whose craftsmanship is illustrated in this chapter, made baskets as his ancestors had made them, he was paying them the highest tribute by imitating what they had done.

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John Paishk was one of the few people who nurtured the art of drumming through a period when it was nearly lost. Discovery of gold gave rise in the 1930s to the boom town of Red Lake, on the fringes of which rose a shack town of natives attracted by work in the mines. Into that environment Paishk brought his tayawaygun, with its moosehide head stretched over a frame of hoops made from the wood of the black ash tree. When in use, the drum hung from four pegs shaped like walking sticks, and several men sat around drumming in unison.

Echoes of a Rich Culture

John Paishk's drum, drumsticks, and a ceremonial pipe he carved out of soft stone garnered from a deposit in Pipestone Bay of Red Lake.

John Paishk and his wife.

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The only birchbark canoe I saw in use was built by Maria Mikenak of Osnaburgh, seen here with a grandson with whom she led a nomadic life paddling to places on Lake Joseph where rabbits, fish, berries, or wild rice could be obtained. When new, her canoe was made entirely of material gathered from the forest, but the last time I saw it I noticed she had repaired it with a wire nail or two and some cotton twine. Maria's dishes were also made of birchbark, which was folded and sewn into shallow baskets.

Echoes of a Rich Culture

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Aboriginal rock pictographs, rendered in iron oxide, of indeterminate age and whose meaning is known to only a few, are found throughout Ontario's Precambrian Shield. This rabbit in the headwaters of the Severn River was, like most of the pictographs, painted from a canoe.

Many pictographs, such as this one in northeastern Ontario, incorporate the thunderbird.

Echoes of a Rich Culture

89

When Albert Carpenter showed me a pictograph site near Sioux Lookout, he took a cigarette from his package of Players, crumbled it, and stuffed the tobacco in a niche in the rock beneath one of the painted figures. Albert said passing natives always left tobacco, which would be gone when they returned, taken by the mamakwayseeuk Qittle people) whom it was meant to placate. These were hairy little elves who lived inside the rock and who stole fish from natives' nets if not bribed. Some people, Albert said, had heard drumming coming from the cliff, and others avoided the place altogether.

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The Wabino Ceremony No native group in Ontario clung more stubbornly to their old beliefs than did the Deer Lake Band at the head of the Severn River. There, Christianity remained liberally infused with aboriginal doctrine, and chiefs and councillors invariably were the men whose conjuring and healing powers were recognized as being the strongest. Chief of the band from 1940 to 1968 was Thomas Fiddler, successor to his father, Robert, who had assumed the leadership role in 1907 when his own father, Jack Fiddler, was taken away by the North-West Mounted Police to be tried for the mercy-killing of an insane woman. Traditionally, it was a chiefs duty to perform this distasteful but necessary execution, when an individual posed a threat to the community. Jack Fiddler thwarted the white man's unbending law by taking his own life in captivity. Thomas Fiddler was a chief of the old school. His word, uttered in a deep, commanding voice, was law. In his bailiwick, Department of Lands and Forests officers did not call a trappers' meeting; Thomas Fiddler did, sometimes first letting us cool our heels for a day or two. He opened meetings with an impassioned speech, and although I suspect he had a fair command of English, he always used the language of his people and an interpreter when dealing with government officials. One evening in June 1952, I was invited by Chief Tom Fiddler to attend the wabino ceremony that he conducted and presided over each spring at Sandy Lake, the main village of the Deer Lake Band. It was a week-long session of drumming, dancing, and feasting which took place in a sixty-foot-long structure of arched birch saplings partially covered with canvas, called a wabinogamick. Inside were two stoves and a long table for cooking and serving moosemeat, fish, and bannock in large quantities. When I arrived on the scene at about dusk, the hundred or more men, women, and children present had just finished eating. Chief Fiddler then took up a position before a water drum consisting of a metal nail keg over whose open end a piece of wetted, tanned moosehide was tightly stretched. I had listened to the bewitching deep booming of this instrument the night before, from the Hudson's Bay Company compound a good two kilometres away. Tom Fiddler picked up a drumstick and for a minute or more thumped a measured beat. Then, at his command, Charlie Fiddler took over the water drum, and Tom began striking a second drum hanging from an arch of the wabinogamick. This one was like a large tambourine with snares, to which quills from large feathers were tied, strung across it. At this time, most of the men rose to their feet and began dancing in single file around the perimeter, turning at posts planted at

each end of the lodge. Both drummers chanted loudly. At one point I asked councillor Francis Meekis the meaning of the song, but all I could gather through the din and an interpreter was that they were at that point "drumming to Winnipeg." Winnipeg was the head office of the Hudson's Bay Company, which wielded considerable control over the fortunes of northern natives, and now in 1952, commercial harvesting of Lake Winnipeg goldeye was just starting in Sandy Lake, and the price for this delicacy was similarly controlled by Winnipeg-based fish markets. In the intervening forty years, such culture-modifiers as television and scheduled air service have impacted on Sandy Lake, yet the link Chief Tom Fiddler forged with the past has not only held firm, but is being reinforced by his successors. Before writing this, I spoke (yes, by simply picking up the telephone!) with Tom's grandson, Josias Fiddler, a councillor and former chief himself, and he confirmed that the wabino ceremony is still an annual event at Sandy Lake. When I told Josias that a likeness of Chief Tom Fiddler would be reproduced in this book, he assured me that the Deer Lake Band at large, to whom credit must go for safeguarding a tenuous cultural thread leading to the distant past, will be pleased to see their kitcbie Okimakan honoured in this way.

John Macfie

Frame of a wabinogamick at Sandy Lake.

Echoes of a Rich Culture

91

Chief Thomas Fiddler (left) and Charlie Fiddler, a shaman, drumming and singing during the wabino ceremony at Sandy Lake. Charlie is also shaking a rattle made from a condensed milk tin filled with pebbles.

Inside the wabinogamick at Sandy Lake, the author contributes a filling of tobacco for a ceremonial stone pipe held by Councillor Francis Meekis. Immediately behind Meekis is Councillor Thomas Harper, a celebrant of the shaking tent.

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Abraham Keeper of Pikangikum with a stone projectile point lost beside the Berens River by a hunter of prehistoric times.

Echoes of a Rich Culture

The frame of a child's tikinagan, fastened over a grave in the Osnaburgh cemetery.

Until recently a boy did his first hunting with a small bow and blunt arrow, and his first kill may have been a spruce grouse, the most easily approached of all game species.

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Two types of aboriginal Ojibway dwelling are reflected in these smokehouses. The domed structure sheathed with sprucebark is at Sandy Lake, and the conical wigwam covered with stitched panels of birchbark is at Longlac.

Echoes of a Rich Culture

95

Remains of an eskigan, or earth house, on the Hudson Bay coast. These winter habitations of the Swampy Cree were sheathed with clods of peaty soil.

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The Crafts of William Moore

A bow drill for making fire. The piece of tinder inserted in the notch at the tip of the spindle is dried bracket fungus (William called it pus-sag '-on). He sometimes drank a potion of it, powdered and boiled, to purify his blood.

Birchbark is best harvested in June when growing activity peaks. At this time the bark is under such pressure from within that simply running a knife blade down the tree causes it to burst open with a ripping sound. Not every tree yields usable bark. Short lenticels (the dark horizontal lines) are a sign of the suppleness necessary for basket-making. A canoe-maker looked for a tree with a heavy growth of lichens on the shady side of the trunk, and the basket-maker discarded bark displaying wing-shaped "swallows" on the inside, William said. Here he checks a tree, before going to the trouble of chopping it down, to see if it will peel easily.

Echoes of a Rich Culture

Carefully removing birchbark of a thickness suitable for basket-making.

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William remembered receiving dollops of the sweet, pulpy cambium layer of the birch as a treat during bark-gathering expeditions when he was a child.

To obtain a fine, pliable sewing material, William stripped the thin but extremely tough bark from a shrub he called chebaygoop, or ghost leaf (its scientific name is dircapalustris). He uses it here to stitch together layers of bark for a basket lid. William said brewing the bark also produces a medicine.

Echoes of a Rich Culture

William gives a basket a reddish tinge by rubbing it with boiled alder bark.

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To demonstrate an old Algonquian game, he folded and refolded a paper-thin sheet of birchbark, bit it in several places, then opened it to reveal a turtle.

Echoes of a Rich Culture

William called this ring-and-pin game a nabahon. The object is to swing the five rings (carved from the toe bones of a moose) outward and upward, then skewer as many as possible with the pin. William used a length of wire for the pin, but said the ones he used as a boy employed a bone from the leg of a lynx.

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Happening upon a sharply bent birch sapling, William chopped it off and roughed out a blank for a food ladle, then finished the job at home using a canoe knife, Sheffield-made and designed for the native trade over two centuries ago.

Echoes of a Rich Culture

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In its heyday the Hudson's Bay Company's Mattagami post annually grew up to 500 kegs of potatoes in its garden as food for people and livestock. These Early Rose potatoes grown by William Moore were, he believed, directly descended from seed brought up the Moose River from James Bay in the nineteenth century.

Echoes of a Rich Culture

105

When he was a boy, William Moore was shown a pictograph site whose doorway, by which the mischievous mamakwayseeukentered and left the cliff on their fishing expeditions, was plainly visible. He confided its location to the author, who is seen here looking out (the rock paintings are outside the scope of the camera).

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William Moore's paddles were made to be used. One day he told me he felt unwell and intended to see a doctor in Timrnins. I asked how he planned to go, and he said by canoe. And he did, paddling sixty kilometres down the Mattagami River to the far end of Kenogamissi Lake, then riding the short distance remaining in a logging truck. Another time he said he was on his way to the bush to find a "black birch" (presumably the species foresters call yellow birch, a few specimens of which are found that far north), from which to hew the boards for a new toboggan. He could afford to buy a factory-made one, but the old way was William's way.

Six

Portraits of

the People

in the 1950s, not only were Cree, Ojibway, and Oji-Cree still the languages spoken by the Algonquians in the North, but nearly everyone was literate in the syllabary introduced a century earlier by a Methodist missionary, James Evans. Formal education was minimal. Instruction in the basics - reading, writing, and arithmetic - was given by teachers in the summer months in churches, council halls, railway cars, wherever there was space. For further training and to complete their elementary education, some children were sent to residential schools in the south. In many instances, it was not the children's parents who chose this form of education, but the Indian agent and the missionaries, who acted under the authority of the Indian Act. Traditionally, as hunters, fishers, and harvesters, these northern First Nations peoples adapted to the seasons and to conditions of yield-supply. In the summer they remained in large encampments near lakes and rivers where fish were available and where berries and small birds and mammals could be taken. In late fall families dispersed to wintering quarters in the vicinity of the habitat of small and large mammals. If their summer's labour had been successful and they had stored away ample food, the winter was relatively comfortable; but if the summer's harvest had been lean, winter brought hardship. Winters were particularly difficult in the nineteenth century after the moose and caribou were severely reduced in numbers throughout northern Ontario.

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Hudson Bay Watershed

Within a short time of the arrival of fur-traders and the establishment of trading posts, the old pattern of moving with the seasons and the harvests began to change. Native hunters, trappers, and craftsmen came to the posts with their produce to trade for what the trader had to offer. They came, they socialized. Someone erected a log house, then someone else. In due course, loghouse villages surrounded the trading post. Such was the beginning of many of the present-day native communities in northern Ontario. Yet until very recently these settlements were virtually empty from October through April, when all but the very old or infirm resorted, in groups of one or two dozen people related by blood or marriage, to winter hunting grounds. Although the wintering grounds were loosely defined at best, their general outlines, transposed to government maps, became the framework for the registered trapline system. Soon after the middle of the twentieth century, this last strong element of the migrant life broke down. Such inducements as government housing, schools, and medical services, coupled with easier and faster means of travel (particularly the snowmobile, which burst on the scene in the 1960s), gradually turned the villages into yearround places of residence. In the process, hunters and trappers became commuters.

Portraits of the People

109

Henry Kechebra and a Royal Canadian Mounted Police constable on Treaty Day at Mattagami Reserve. Once every year a federal government party visited each northern community to hand out annual payments promised under treaties of land surrender (in most cases five dollars per person), check on the the health of the population, and hear submissions and complaints. An RCMP officer in scarlet tunic, symbolic of the authoritative and protective roles of the government, accompanied every treaty party.

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Hudson Bay Watershed

Henry Kechebra of Mattagami Reserve.

Swampy Crees of Fort Severn.

Portraits of the Peoble

Roderick Fiddler of Sandy Lake.

Some women of Webequei.

Ill

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Hudson Bay Watershed

Abraham Keeper of Pikangikum. The Pikangikum people, like other Ojibway now living in the Lake Winnipeg basin, are sometimes called Saulteaux because their ancestors once lived in the vicinity of Sault Ste. Marie.

The author with Antoine Moonias, an elder of the Fort Hope Band and a renowned backpacker in the days when Hudson's Bay Company freight came to the interior by York boat and canoe.

Portraits of the People

Chief Robert Wesley of Lac Seul.

Mary Jane Rae of Sandy Lake, with her grandson.

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A girl at Fort Severn.

Elijah Kakegamic of Sandy Lake.

Portraits of the People

Students of the Anglican Church's residential school at Pelican Falls near Sioux Lookout.

775

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Hudson Bay Watershed

Women and children at Sandy Lake.

Albert Koostachin and Phillip Mathew on the Hudson Bay coast near the mouth of the Niskibi River.

Portraits of the People

Boys at Big Trout Lake playing with a cast-off dog toboggan, made in the native style from thinly hewn tamarack boards.

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Hudson Bay Watershed

Magnus Turtle of Pikangikum.

A member of the Fort Hope Band, at Lansdowne House.

A Kasabonika man with the head of a black bear.

Portraits of the People

119

Men at Poplar.Hill.

Seen here are most of the adult males of the lonely outpost of Fort Severn, watching from the top of the riverbank as a Department of Lands and Forests aircraft taxis into the current to return south following the annual June trapping meeting. Early summer was a time of enforced idleness, in sharp contrast to later in the season when beluga whales and bearded seals (killed for dogfood) appeared in the mouth of the Severn River, and the new hatch of waterfowl took wing over the coastal marshes. Until the Hudson Bay ice cleared sufficiently to let the yearly supply boat come down from Churchill, usually in early August, the shelves in the Hudson's Bay Company store were nearly bare.

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Hudson Bay Watershed

A girl at Big Trout Lake.

Alice Chisel of Sioux Lookout.