Identity and Ethnicity at Lake of Two Mountains, 1721-1850

A Tale of Two Ethnicities: Identity and Ethnicity at Lake of Two Mountains, 1721-1850 M. JEAN BLACK University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill During the period between 1721 and 1850, Oka, on the Lake of Two Moun tains near Montreal, was an important centre of missionary activity as well as a centre for the fur trade and for the governmental administration of Native peoples. As such a centre, it was a mixing or melding pot of peoples of diverse origins. The Sulpician mission of l'Annonciation-de-la-Bienheureuse-Vierge- Marie d'Oka served both Iroquoians and Algonquians1 from 1721 through 1850. The Iroquoian community is perhaps better known at present while the Algonquians no longer are found as a separate community at Oka. Most of the Algonquian speakers left Oka before the close of the 19th century. During the period of their stay at the mission, however, they constituted a presence equal to or greater than that of the Iroquois there. They also maintained ties to their traditional territories and to Algonquian speakers who had not converted to Christianity. This paper is about the relation ships among the Algonquians at Oka and at their hunting territories in the Ottawa River drainage and other locations in the pays d'en haut. It is also about relationships between Algonquians and Iroquoians at Oka. Predom inately it is about Algonquian ethnicity and ethnogenesis. Historians have given relatively little attention to the Algonquins in the Ottawa River valley. In spite of the work of Gordon Day (1978) and of Bruce Trigger (1978) in particular, Algonquin history has yet to be written. The Algonquin played a central and important role in North American history but are often subsumed under the heading of "the French and their Indian allies" in histories. Recent revisions of history that have focused on the motives and actions of native peoples have centred on other areas and other :In this paper I use the term "Algonquian" to refer to any of the peoples of Algonquian languages, and reserve the name "Algonquin" for those speakers of Ojibwa who occupied the Ottawa River drainage during the historic period. 1 2 TWO ETHNICITIES peoples. I do not attempt a complete history of the Algonquin here, but offer one version of a part of it. This history is not one the Algonquin people would write, but may be recognizable to them. Recent works of historians like Richard White (1991) have emphasized the importance of Native peoples to the larger history of North America. Rather than dismissing them as the passive recipients of European action and culture, White describes Native people as active participants in the creation of new cultural and social forms, what he calls the "middle ground". In his work, White frequently refers to kinship ties among Indians of various tribal affiliations and between Indians and Europeans. While he does not focus on these ties, clearly kinship was an important element in the creation of his middle ground. Like others before him, White laments the absence of any documen tation of Indian history by Indians themselves. White and others believe that the reliance on records kept by Europeans necessarily confines us to a view of history associated with European political, social and personal meanings. I suggest that it may be possible to find native social meaning in some records even though they were kept by European writers. The reg istries of missions and church parishes contain the points of view of both the missionary record keepers and the native peoples about whom they wrote. The sacraments are certainly Christian and European and these doc uments reflect European values and attitudes toward non-Christians and native peoples. Without undertaking a full deconstruction of these records I may point out that the primary subject matter of church records is the very fabric of native society, that is, kinship. Kinship is an expression of Indian society contained in the registries that underlies all the European and Christian values they contain. It is the native voice in the documents. In analyzing these records I entered all names and pertinent data for every individual mentioned within the time period under consideration into a data file. This has enabled me to track times of visits to Oka by Algon quians and others as well as to formulate geneologies for them. The public record for the Oka mission on microfilm at the Public Archives of Canada was the source of these data. For the period after 1843, I was able to incor porate similar data from the registry of the Oblate missionaries who worked in the Ottawa drainage after that year. A microfilm copy of this registry is located at the National Archives of Quebec in Hull. The conclusions in this paper are based on generalizations from these two archival sources and field notes. The missionaries attempted to control and redefine Indian society by regulating baptism and marriages. As a result of reading thousands of pages of registries from Oka and other missions and churches, I believe that they were not especially successful in this during the period of 1721-1850. Oral / M. JEAN BLACK 3 histories lead us to suggest that native peoples also were able to manipulate the regulations surrounding baptism and marriage in attempting to exert control over their own social forms. In another sense, then, these records represent a dialogue between European culture and native culture. A dialogue about ethnicity is also contained in the registry from Oka in particular. Many other mission and parish records simply refer to people by generalized terms, like the offensive 'sauvage", 01 do not assign ?.r. ethnic label at all. At Oka the missionaries frequently attached ethnic, tribal or nationality labels to the individuals mentioned in the registry. This was true throughout the period but was especially so in the 18th century. These labels were assigned to both Algonquians and Iroquoians and were sometimes quite specific referring to particular villages rather than to larger groupings. While some of these labels remain unidentified, others reflect a wide sphere of cultural contacts. We will first mention some of the Iroquoian designations at Oka and then turn to the Algonquians. Iroquois Several different components of the Iroquois community at Oka were specif ically labelled by the missionaries during the earlier years of the mission at Two Mountains. Although most of the Iroquois community appear to have been Mohawk, there were also Onondaga and Cayuga from New York. These were a small percentage of the total, and designations of Cayuga or Onondaga identity in the records did not continue beyond the 18th century. Other Iroquoians were also represented, most notably Huron. These were even fewer in numbers than the Cayuga and Onondaga. Their families remained identifiable even to the end of the public registry in 1850 and after they were no longer labeled as Huron. The latest occurrence of someone receiving this designation in the registry was 1848 but this person did not reside at Oka. The smallest Iroquoian group indicated were the Erie, with only one probable occurrence in the early years of the mission. One man, identified as Chat and as being from Virginia, was baptised in 1760 at age 26. His parents were also named but were not present. After his baptism, he disappeared from the record and most likely did not remain at Oka. The other Iroquoians merged into the larger Iroquois population and by the 19th century the label used was simply Iroquois. It should be noted here that during the later part of the record, 1840-1850, some of the missionaries recorded only the Iroquois label and did not identify the Algonquians or identified them only by the term "sauvage" or as being "of this mission". Intermarriages occurred between Iroquoians and others. The majority of such intermarriages were between Iroquois and Abenaki. Iroquois and Ottawa, and Iroquois and French. Marriages between Iroquois and Xipissing or Iroquois and Algonquin were less frequent but notable. 4 TWO ETHNICITIES Algonquians The name Algonquin, meaning 'they are our relatives (or allies)' was bor rowed from Maliseet by (Day 1972:228). It is used here to denote the related bands of Ojibwa speakers of the Ottawa River drainage. The territory of the Algonquin extended to the St. Maurice River at Three Rivers in the early 17th century, and they travelled as far east as Tadoussac in 1603 (Cham- plain 1922:l:96ff). It is probable that this was not their first visit to that trading post (Biggar 1965:47). However, by the establishment of the mis sion at Oka in 1721, their territory had been encroached upon by French settlements and they had withdrawn to the Ottawa drainage in the western portion of their former territory. Another important component of the Algonquian community at Oka were the Nipissing. Closely related culturally, linguistically, and through kinship connections as well to the Algonquians, they initially remained sep arate from but closely associated with the Algonquin there. Their territories were to the west of the Ottawa River and they had been close neighbors of the Algonquin since pre-contact times. The Algonquin and Nipissing composed the largest communities of Al gonquians at Oka during the course of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Other Algonquian groups moved to the mission complex during that pe riod. These included Mississauga, Ottawa, Saulteaux, Ojibwa (other than the Saulteaux), Abenaki, Attikamek, and Cree. Some, like the Cree, made only brief visits and then returned to their own territories but others estab lished a more permanent presence. Although all tended toward endogamy initially, most gradually merged into the population with only Abenaki and Ottawa remaining distinct and labelled so by the missionaries.

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