EMERGENCE and COMMUNITY: the WASHAW SIBI EEYOUCH David Lessard Department of Anthropology Mcgill University Montreal November 20

EMERGENCE AND COMMUNITY:

THE WASHAW SIBI EEYOUCH

David Lessard

Department of Anthropology McGill University Montreal November 2013

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy McGill University Montreal, Quebec

©David Lessard, 2013

Abstract

Drawing on twelve months of multi-sited ethnography with members of the Washaw Sibi Eeyouch Association (WSEA), this dissertation investigates how notions of community and identity are constructed, interact with each other, and are transformed in a context of ongoing social and institutional change that allows a reflexion about the concept of emergence. Using both ethnographic and historical material, the body of this dissertation deals with different periods of the history of the Harricana River watershed, where Washaw Sibi’s traditional territories are located, namely: the early fur trade, the Treaty and post-Confederation period, and the establishment of the WSEA from the 1980’s to the current period.

The WSEA is an incorporated organization working for political recognition and the establishment of a village of their own in northern Quebec. The organization is working toward full inclusion under the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (JBNQA) as a Quebec Cree community, which will bring about probable financial, political and social benefits to the group. During the research, for many decades prior to the research, and still to the present day, members have been scattered across different locales of Northern Quebec and Ontario because of a history of nomadism and government policies which caused the relocation and the social and geographical fragmentation of the group at several times in the past two hundred years. Recognition as a community of JBNQA beneficiaries implies renewed relationships with state institutions and the establishment of forms of collective life similar to those of other Quebec Cree communities. It thus brings fundamental changes for the group and the emergence of a form of communal life that its members have never experienced before as Wahshaw Sibi Eeyouch, the village.

The analysis shows how colonial powers and the state have contributed to the emergence of local social and symbolic boundaries, leading to the historical exclusion of the Washaw Sibi group from historical treaties and from the JBNQA, among other things. The discussion analyses the different conflicts, gains and losses emerging when one claims a Cree or Washaw Sibi identity in a context characterized by a multiplicity of overlapping identities, a diversity of historical experiences, and singular political dynamics affecting the group. The dissertation builds on social anthropological theory of subarctic bands to emphasize the fluidity, adaptability and pragmatism of the social organization of regional aboriginal populations. At the same time, it involves concepts of symbolic violence and habitus to deal with the complex relationships between social reproduction and change, and more specifically with local experiences of colonialism as well as ongoing transformations occurring in members’ social networks and living conditions.

Résumé

S’appuyant sur douze mois de travail ethnographique multi-site avec les membres de l’Association Washaw Sibi Eeyouch (WSEA), cette thèse analyse comme les notions de communauté et d’identité sont construites, interagissent entre elles et se transforment dans un contexte de changement social et institutionnel appelant à une réflexion sur le concept d’émergence. À l’aide de matériel ethnographique et historique, le corps de la thèse traite de différents moments de l’histoire du bassin hydrographique de la rivière Harricana, où sont principalement situés les territoires traditionnels de Washaw Sibi. Principalement, ces sections traitent de la traite des fourrures, la période suivant la Confédération, l’ère des traités et l’établissement de la WSEA, des années 1980 jusqu’à la situation actuelle.

La WSEA est une organisation incorporée travaillant à la reconnaissance politique du groupe et à l’établissement d’un village dans le nord du Québec. L’organisation travaille à l’inclusion complète du groupe sous la Convention de la Baie James et du Nord québécois (CBJNQ) en tant que communauté crie, ce qui apporterait des bénéficies financiers, politiques et sociaux au groupe. Depuis plusieurs décennies jusqu’au moment de réaliser cette recherche, les membres de ce dernier ont été dispersés dans différentes localités du nord du Québec et de l’Ontario étant donné leur nomadisme traditionnel et une histoire de politiques gouvernementales qui ont amené la relocalisation du groupe et sa fragmentation sociale et géographique, plusieurs fois au cours des deux derniers siècles. La reconnaissance en tant que communauté bénéficiaire de la CBJNQ implique l’émergence de relations renouvelées avec certaines institutions autochtones et étatiques et le développement de formes de vie collective similaire à celles d’autres communautés cries du Québec. Cela signifie donc des changements fondamentaux pour le groupe et l’émergence d’une vie communautaire que ses membres n’ont jamais expérimenté auparavant comme Washaw Sibi Eeyouch.

L’analyse montre comment les pouvoirs coloniaux et l’état ont contribué à l’émergence de frontières symboliques et sociales locales, menant à l’exclusion historique du groupe de Washaw Sibi par rapport aux traités historiques et à la CBJNQ, entre autres. La discussion analyse les différents conflits, gains et pertes liés au fait de se réclamer d’une identité crie ou Washaw Sibi dans un contexte caractérisé par une multiplicité d’identités imbriquées les unes dans les autres, une diversité d’expériences historiques et des dynamiques politiques particulières affectant le groupe. La thèse se réfère à la théorie anthropologique concernant les bandes autochtones du subarctique qui insistent sur la fluidité, l’adaptabilité et le pragmatisme de l’organisation sociale au niveau régional. Aussi, la thèse s’appuie sur les concepts de violence symbolique et d’habitus pour traiter des relations complexes entre reproduction et changement social et, plus spécifiquement, des expériences locales du colonialisme.

Acknowledgements

This dissertation would not have been possible without the presence, the help and the support of many people to whom I wish to express my gratitude. First, I would like to thank the people of Washaw Sibi, living in Amos, Pikogan, Val d’Or, Timmins,

Cochrane, Waskaganish, and other localities, who participated in this research. More precisely, I want to thank chiefs Billy Katapatuk, Pauline Trapper-Hester, Alice Jérôme, and Steve Diamond. The list of people to whom I want to express my gratitude is too long to write here, but I owe debts of gratitude to the Wapachee family, the Trapper family the Polson family and, from Pikogan, the Mowatt and Kistabish families. In particular, I would like to thank Lillian, Fred, Aaron, Jim, Molly, Frances, Édouard, and

Beatrice.

I wish to thank many people from McGill. First, my supervisor Colin Scott provided invaluable support throughout my PhD experience and the preparation and writing of this dissertation. From the faculty and staff at the Department of

Anthropology, I also would like to thank Ronald Niezen, Lisa Stevenson, Alberto

Sánchez-Allred, Gretchen Bakke, Olga Harmazy, Cynthia Romanyk, and Kristin Norget for their support and feedback at different times during this project. I also would like to thank Marie-Pierre Bousquet from Université de Montréal.

Many friends and colleagues made the last six years at McGill more pleasant, taught me, and shared with me great moments: Noor Johnson, Jessica Dolan, Pascal

Gaudette, Gabriella Djerrahian, Mélanie Chaplier, Ivet R. Maturano, Lerona Lewis,

Claudia Masferrer, Paula Godoy-Paiz, Paige MacDougall, Carolina Pineda, Katherine

Scott, Corey Wright, Shanna Strauss, Sébastien Bluteau, Marie-Pierre Gadoua, Pierre

Minn, Karen McAllister, Amber Lee Silva Philippe Messier, Catherine Larouche, Brodie

Noga, Qiuyu Jiang. I owe special gratitude to my friend Anne-Elise Keen for the different tasks and projects on which we collaborated, for her support and for her friendship throughout my experience at McGill. This dissertation was possible because of the financial support received from the Fonds québécois de la 5illenniu sur la société et la culture and the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

I owe my greatest gratitude to my friends and family who provided me with moral and material support in their own ways. I would like to thank my friends Dan Grapé and

Robert Lavoie, for their active support throughout the writing of this dissertation, and

Sami Kozah, for his engagement, friendship, teachings and support in the last months of the writing process. I owe my greatest debt to my parents, Rock and Angèle, and siblings, nephews and nieces, Julie, Martin, Gaëlle, Éric, Fay, Éthan and Ellie, for their love and support, and who inspired me in following this path.

Montreal, April 2013

TABLE OF CONTENT

Abstract ...... 2 Résumé ...... 3 Acknowledgements ...... 4 Table of Figures ...... 10

Introduction ...... 11 Outline of the Chapters ...... 25

Chapter 1 “The One Who Started It All…” ...... 29 Washaw Sibi: The Ethnographic Context ...... 31 Territory ...... 31 Multiple Identities...... 36 Ethnographic Practice ...... 41 Participant Observation ...... 43 Interviews ...... 44 Other Material ...... 45 An Ethnography of Movement in Time and Space ...... 46 Multi-sited Ethnography ...... 46 Multiplicity of Identities ...... 48 Mobility and Cohesion ...... 51 Transitions and Temporalities ...... 51 Historical Multiplicities: Peter Trapper Narratives Blurring Time and Space ...... 55

Chapter 2 The Social Organization of a Subarctic Band: Kinship, Bands, and Hunting Territories ...... 65 The Role of Kinship in Early Social Anthropology ...... 66 Ethnographies of Algonkian Societies ...... 66 Kinship, Descent and Aboriginal Identities ...... 71 Social Organization and Narratives of Movement ...... 75 “Traditional” Forms of Organization in a Semi-Nomadic Band ...... 76

Power(s) and Leadership ...... 82 Oscillations and Movements ...... 88 The Family Hunting Territories ...... 90

Chapter 3 Colonization and the Marginalization of Washaw Sibi ...... 98 The Early Fur Trade with Europeans and the First Band Lists ...... 99 Trading Post Bands ...... 105 The 1867 British North America Act and the Indian Act ...... 111 The Beginnings of the State in the Subarctic: Treaties, Railway Projects, and Beaver Preserves...... 114 The Numbered Treaties and Treaty 9 ...... 117 The Railway Projects ...... 125 Beaver Population Decline and Rehabilitation of Hunting Territories ...... 127 The Relocation of the La Sarre Crees ...... 132 Tent Cities...... 134 A Rigidified Social Reality – The Pikogan Example ...... 140

Chapter 4 The Emergence of the Washaw Sibi Eeyou Association in the Post-JBNQA Decades ...... 144 The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement ...... 145 The Beneficiary Status and the Situation of Off-Territory Beneficiaries ...... 151 The Case of MoCreebec ...... 157 The Case of Oujé-Bougoumou ...... 159 Washaw Sibi Eeyou: The Forgotten Crees ...... 161 The Rise of the WSEA ...... 164 First Meetings: The La Sarre Crees of Waskaganish ...... 164 Incorporation of the WSEA in 1997 ...... 166 Recognition as the Tenth Quebec James Bay Cree Community by GCCQ in 2003 172 Finding a Village Site for the Community ...... 174

Chapter 5 How to Cross a Line: Habitus, Identities, and Semi-Nomadism in the Era of the WSEA ...... 183 Habitus: Objects and Subjects in the Midst of Complex Interactions ...... 184 The Division Between Crees and Algonquins ...... 189 Conflicts? ...... 189 Crossing the Line ...... 194 Talking about the Other...... 197 Diversity of Languages in Pikogan and Washaw Sibi ...... 197 Nitakinan or Eeyou Istchee ...... 200 Eeyou, Iyiyuu and Anicinape ...... 204 Anicinape and Apitipi8ini ...... 206 Washaw Sibi: Being Scattered and Maintaining Cohesion ...... 208 At the Margins of the WSEA ...... 209 Throwing Things in the Fire: The Moral Aspect of Identity ...... 212

Chapter 6 The Uses of Community, The Meanings of Washaw Sibi ...... 217 Theoretical Frame: Symbolic Violence and Community ...... 218 State Colonialism and Symbolic Violence ...... 218 Community and Identity ...... 221 Community and Corporate Groups...... 225 Community and the Village ...... 227 A Single Usage for Community?...... 231 Building a Cree Community ...... 233 Community as a Membership ...... 235 The Community as a Village ...... 238 “Acting Like a Community” ...... 242 Members’ Perceptions of the Project ...... 243 Reproducing Violence: Resistance and Cooptation? ...... 243 Outspoken Crees: “Could we live together?” ...... 245 A Community or a Reserve? ...... 247 “It Has Always Been This Way” ...... 249

Compromising ...... 252

Conclusion All Is Not Said… ...... 255 Community Lost ...... 257 Community Recoverable ...... 261 Community (Yet to Be) Found ...... 263

Afterword...... 270

Appendices ...... 272 Appendix 1 Map of the Harricana River drainage and area ...... 273 Appendix 2 Members’ community of residence in 2008...... 275 Appendix 3 Examples of Indian Affairs Correspondence about the La Sarre Crees, 1942...... 276 Appendix 4 Map of James Bay ...... 277 Appendix 5 Capacity to hold a conversation, by language, among Washaw Sibi members ...... 278 Appendix 6 Tables on WSEA members’ health condition ...... 279

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 281

Table of Figures

Figure 1. Amos and the administrative region of Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Qc...... 32 Figure 2. Map of Amos, Qc ...... 33 Figure 3. Map of different places where Washaw Sibi members live...... 34 Figure 4. Location of Joulac ...... 35 Figure 5. Rupert’s Land in 1709 ...... 100 Figure 6. The Dominion of Canada in 1867...... 112 Figure 7. Quebec and Ontario in 1867...... 112 Figure 8. Dominion of Canada in 1898...... 115 Figure 9. Quebec and Ontario Before Boarder Expansions...... 115 Figure 10. Detail of the map: Harricana Drainage ...... 116 Figure 11. Areas transferred to Quebec in 1898 and 1912 ...... 116 Figure 12. Numbered Treaties in Canada...... 118 Figure 13. Eeyou Istchee...... 203 Figure 14. Preliminary Plan of Washaw Sibi...... 240

INTRODUCTION

My dissertation investigates how notions of community and identity are constructed, interact with each other, and are transformed in a context of ongoing social and institutional change. More precisely, it analyses the case of the Washaw Sibi

Eeyouch, a group of indigenous1 people working for political recognition and the establishment of a more favourable institutional relationship with the state. Achieving recognition implies fundamental changes for the group because of a history of nomadism and government policies which caused the relocation and the fragmentation of the group at several times over the past two hundred years. Consequently, its members are presently scattered over a vast area of northern Quebec and Ontario, and present significant linguistic, cultural and social diversity. Yet, they have managed to maintain relative social cohesion through constant movement, visits and exchange between families. The social and institutional transformations accompanying the claim for recognition include the mobilization of the group into an incorporated entity – the Washaw Sibi Eeyou

Association (WSEA) – which officially represents the group. Its principal objective is to bring about the establishment of their own village in northern Quebec, which also implies a renewed form of collective life, similar to that of other Quebec Cree communities. The organization is thus working toward fuller inclusion under the James Bay and Northern

1In this dissertation, the term “aboriginal” will refer to people, things and concepts associated with the first inhabitants of the land; the term “indigenous” will refer to people and things involved in political action at least partly based on the principle of aboriginality; and the term “Indian” will refer to the legal status as it is established in Canada under the Indian Act.

Quebec Agreement (JBNQA) as a Quebec Cree community, as a means to bring about probable financial, political, and social benefits for the group.

This process of recognition and change is complex as it entails contradictory social and political dynamics that demonstrate how collective identities necessitate accommodation to, and differentiation from, imposed institutional and/or legal models.

This issue becomes particularly acute given the colonial and postcolonial history of aboriginal people in Canada that is crossed by emerging dynamics that imply complex internal discussions and debates about how members define their identity and sense of community through individual and collective projects. These internal dynamics are carried simultaneously with processes of negotiation and representation vis-à-vis other surrounding entities, including aboriginal and non-aboriginal groups as well as state institutions.

In this introduction I will first define the concepts of identity and community, and their treatment as social constructions in anthropology. Then, through a discussion of

Bourdieu’s concepts of symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1989, 1990) and habitus (Bourdieu

1977; Lizardo 2004; Wacquant 2010), I will discuss the complex relationship between social reproduction and social change. I will then unveil potentialities and obstacles faced by social agents engaged in significant transformation of their social networks and living conditions. The intricacies of the social networks investigated in this research raise compelling questions regarding the work of the ethnographer.

Defining the two concepts at the foundation of this dissertation – identity and community – is essential to its anthropological contribution. Cerulo emphasizes how identity operates in filiation with classic notions in social science such as Durkheim’s

“collective conscience,” Marx’s “class consciousness,” and Tonnies’ “Gemeinschaft”, i.e. notions that point to the “we-ness” of groups, defined in terms of assumed similarities and shared features that are somehow deemed essential or natural (Cerulo 1997). Such notions, inherited from 19th century typologies, have attached connotations of stability and continuity to the concept of identity, assumed to represent some essence proper to each individual and/or group. Understandings of identity have evolved from the 1970s onward, especially due to an increasing interest in ethnicity (Barth 1969) and social movements (Melucci et al. 1989), as well as an emerging focus on agency and individual contributions to social contexts. Identities, be they for individuals or for groups, often take the form of common denominators or sets of features that situate them in a distinct socio-cultural ecology. Indeed, different identities can cohabit or border with each other, and this diversity is largely tributary of interacting and intersubjective projections, perceptions and interpretations. Anthropology also started to focus on the plurality of identities existing at both the individual and group levels, and their association with specific spheres of social agents’ existence. According to Hall (1996), identity is a process that emerges out of specific social experiences and individual interpretations.

Barth’s focus on the notion of “boundary” has contributed to show how identity works at the political level, emphasizing that “the ethnic boundary […] defines the group rather than the cultural stuff that it encloses” (Barth 1969:15). Physical, social and symbolic boundaries therefore provide a frame, a constantly (re-)negotiated structure that is required for individual interpretations and group definitions to gain meaning.

In a review of texts about the concept of community, Hillery (1968) defined it on the basis of three distinct dimensions. A community is a human group that: a) shares a

13 given ecology; b) is characterized by a given social organization; and c) shares a set of common cultural and symbolic meanings. Every community presents these features at different levels and in different ways, which makes the concept vague and easily manipulated. Moreover, empirical definitions of community are often accompanied by some form of social Darwinism which associates community with stages of social evolution that pre-date more complex forms of organization such as the state. Definitions of community can also imply post-industrial nostalgia which sees community as an organic, even romantic form of life eclipsed by urbanism, modernity, and large-scale projects of development. Taking a distance from theoreticians who have tried to find a universal definition of community applicable in all instances where it is used, anthropologist Anthony Cohen (2000) has developed an understanding of the concept based on its multiple usages. He found that community generally implies a group of people having something in common and distinguishing themselves significantly from other groups, which often happens largely at the symbolic level. Just as the setting of external boundaries between groups, the similarities that bind members together and the differences that at times separate them are not consensually fixed, nor homogeneously conceived among members. However, there are processes of consensus at work in these matters; community identities are defined individually and negotiated collectively through people’s experiences, understandings, and interpretations of what constitutes the group and its social and symbolic borders. Briefly, the existence of a community does not imply homogeneity among members, but something closer to a coalition of interests, a space for individuals to express their social belonging.

Attempts to define the terms highlight how identities and communities are conceptually in constant interaction. In the concrete contexts where they are invoked, they are never “natural” nor are they stable, immutable matters. Indeed, negotiations take place about the very meanings of symbols, actions, reactions, positions, and forms of social belonging through which a group expresses its sense of collectivity and its identity.

In a context of relatively rapid social change, like the one analyzed in this dissertation, any simplistic or reductionist definition of the link between identity and community is called into questioned. In fact, in such a context, any closed, definite and immutable definition of identity or community appears partial and arbitrary.

Many authors now agree that configuration of the meanings, actions, perceptions, and interpretation which specific identities and communities take are socially constructed

(Hacking 1999). The notion of social construction implies that any object of consciousness (such as a social phenomenon, a concept, a meaning, a narrative, a mental construct, etc.) is derived from social interactions. This means that their content is learned, negotiated and channeled through socially and culturally contextualized systems of significations, institutions and typologies. The arbitrariness, randomness or contingency of the outcome of these processes of negotiation often becomes apparent, if not obvious, in times of social change. Authors (Wuthnow 1989; Moghadam 2004) who have unveiled the social construction of realities previously deemed natural or inevitable, such as class or gender, have often invoked a Marxist critique. Such a critique sees the invisibility or taken-for-grantedness of social relations to benefit specific groups, allow for exploitation and domination, and perpetuate relations of power. Social constructionist analysis de-bunks, unbuilds, or de-constructs the processes through which social

15 phenomena, as well as their underlying potentially contestable relations of power, come to be perceived as unavoidable. In this dissertation I propose to de-construct the process of establishing Washaw Sibi as a Quebec Cree community in order to expose its complexity, as well as the specific forms of violence that this deconstruction reveals.

The concept of social construction is closely related to that of symbolic violence.

If social construction suggests that every phenomenon is the outcome of social interactions, symbolic violence points out the power dynamics involved in this process, that often preclude social agents becoming aware of these complex processes. Symbolic violence refers to the imposition of a socially determined role upon dominated individuals and groups. Such an imposition has the effect of determining social and cultural capital, and contributes substantially to the emergence and stability of social hierarchies. Without being aware of changes that have already taken place within their social position, social agents eventually begin to observe and perceive the world in a way that both stems from and maintains their respective social position (dominating or dominated). In fact, they come to consider the categories and systems thus created as inevitable, “taken for granted,” and even “right” (Bourdieu 1979). This process is otherwise known as “hegemonic assimilation” (Doran 1971). In my ethnographic work on a transforming aboriginal society, it was important for me to de-construct and underline symbolic violence in order to become fully aware of the complex discussions and negotiations taking place in the present moment.

The project thus opens up to a whole new set of different potentialities. Yetthe various ways in which events unfold often present a certain regularity and continuity with the past. In fact, the process of recognition of Washaw Sibi is similar to the history of

16 other aboriginal communities who have undergone similar changes in the past. I will approache the complex relationship between social change and reproduction from two separate perspectives. Since social change is affected by power dynamics such as colonialism, I will discuss first the reality of the colonial mechanisms operating in the subarctic, and the marginalization or domination which allow certain groups or entities, notably the state, to exert control and manage the outcome of change.

Second, I will use Bourdieu’s habitus to analyze the way of life of the aboriginal people inhabiting this region, as well as the changes it has undergone over time. In sociology, habitus refers to a set of learned dispositions, skills, and ways of acting that are embodied by individuals, and that ensure social reproduction. It involves individual thoughts, ideas, perceptions, opinions, tastes, and actions that exist both independently and in interaction with social structures. Habitus not only contributes to the formation and maintenance of social groups and classes, but also to their constant adjustment to the unpredictable, day-to-day existence of individuals. Bourdieu situates habitus within the frame of what he refers to as a “theory of practice.” This theory emphasizes the practical knowledge of social agents and the everyday actions and interactions which allow them to deal with new situations. Habitus emphasizes how, in a given context, individuals have their own perceptions, thoughts, and opinions about their living conditions, and also how they fashion the interpretations emerging from their individual experiences. Yet these perceptions, thoughts, opinions, and interpretations continuously (re-)use elements, structures, preferences, etc. that are somehow specific to the collectivity in which individuals live. My double emphasis on power dynamics and on aboriginal habitus aims at a deeper analysis of the interplay of potential contradictions and complementarities that

17 exist between social change and social reproduction. This raises an issue: identifying what exactly is changing and what is not in a given situation, at the level of direct social interactions, is blurry yet important if one is to reflect on the agency of the various individuals and collectivities under study.

This constant and intricate intertwining of social reproduction and social change leads me to the concept of emergence in order to capture the oscillations and complementarity between change and stability. The concept of emergence cannot be applied to all kinds of changes. Emergence is used in academic literature to explain changes that admit no reductionist explanation (Sawyer 2001). Huaxia (2007) considers that emergence can apply to any social, physical, or chemical thing, pattern, configuration, behaviour, property, or order. In all these domains, the distinctive properties of emergence are 1) novelty, when properties of the final whole become different from those of its individual components and from those of its initial state; 2) wholeness, when the final whole has its own properties, laws and structure; and 3) unpredictability, when the final patterns cannot be deduced from the initial state. Because of its unpredictability, irregularity, unrepeatability, as well as its internal randomness that is somehow sensible to and consequential of initial conditions, Huaxia asserts that emergence operates “at the edge of chaos” (2007).

The process of emergence of a new assemblage generally takes place on a greater scale. This means that emergence leads to an increasing number, volume, and complexity of internal and external interactions (Deacon 2003). Anthropologist Michael Fischer

(2003) defines emergence in the sociocultural realm as a situation in which the complexity and the volume of interactions increase. More specifically, according to him,

18 emergence in anthropology leads to an “anthropology of late modernity”, i.e. an anthropology interested in the mutations of social and cultural institutions through scientific and technological changes, the reconfiguration of perception and understandings of reality. It implies ideas of transforming subjectivities, imaginaries, social organization, modes of production, and symbolic forms in which the “new” is never without historical genealogies, but these often require reassessment and excavation of their multiplicity” (Fischer 2003: 58).

Emergence is never completely disconnected from the past although the ways in which it unfolds are almost always unpredictable. Focusing on emergence in fact highlights some deep, constant features of a group by observing them in movement over a period of change. I introduced the concept of habitus as a middle ground to discuss interlocked aspects of continuity and change in the way people involved in the emergence of Washaw Sibi deal with their situation. As these individuals are often struggling to make sense and find balance in a transforming social and political context, habitus nuances the idea of novelty implied in emergence. It allows identifying the actual practices and modes of perception involved, and acknowledging that they could also be in continuity with the group’s past while recognizing that they have transforming consequences and implications for individuals, and for the group as a whole.

Furthermore, whereas emergence highlights the changes that are happening at the collective level, habitus allows connecting these collective dynamics to behaviours and forms of perception unfolding at the level of the individual.

As far as WSEA members are concerned, an original, unique sense and practice of collectivity is already taking form, although the process is conceived as transitory, not

19 consensual and constantly subject to (re-) negotiation Analyzing this moment of transition provides an important contribution to the anthropological understanding of social emergence, and shows how aboriginal peoples navigate through colonial and postcolonial policies as well as through institutional orders.

Relying on social emergence in this discussion circumscribes well the processes of recognition related to the collectivity itself. Achieving a collective project is not a simple event for Washaw Sibi. Rather, it is a complex progression that implies the abandonment of some of the members’ initial hopes. It requires compromise, and often necessitates looking for alternative solutions to problems. Historian Joan Scott (1987,

1991) wrote about the importance of acknowledging the often sweet and sour outcome of changes involving the “recognition” or “integration” of a group to a given institutionalized organization. She argues that one should question “decisive moments” in the recognition or integration of a group, because they sometimes mean that the group will still have to deal with difficulties, challenges, and dynamics of exclusion in spite of its new acquired status. As a result, discussing a social or political movement such as

Washaw Sibi’s should not lead to a binary “success versus failure” analysis, but to a more nuanced investigation of the different elements that distinct people can win, or lose, in this process.

Emergence will be used in this dissertation to refer to three different processes.

First, through a discussion of aboriginal social organization in the past two centuries, I use emergence to analyse how social cohesion was maintained in spite of the institutional, ecological and bureaucratic obstacles that have, throughout history, fragmented the group both socially and geographically, as well as culturally. Secondly, I

20 apply the emergence to the rise, since the early 1990s, of the WSEA as a legal and incorporated entity officially representing the members of the group. Finally, I use emergence to describe the process of thinking I went through while designing the ethnographic fieldwork on which this dissertation is based, and also while analyzing and interpreting my data. The design of my fieldwork experience was inspired by Candea’s reflections (2007) on the practice of ethnography, which emphasized the necessity for ethnographers to make decisions and leave aside some information, in order to define an arbitrary location, i.e. a blurry, thorny aspect of reality serving as an object of study, and a basis to reflect on broader theoretical themes found within the messiness and contingency of reality. As an ethnographer, I kept moving and adjusting as I trailed social agents and their relations within the vast social networks at their disposal. I was witnessing the constant emergence of a social reality which I could only envisage partially at the time I began fieldwork. This was imperative to my understanding of the relative cohesion, as well as the fragmentation of the group, due to a specific history of nomadism and displacements engendered by ecological, economic, and social contingencies as well as by colonial policies.

Dealing with emergence brings one back to these oscillations between social change and continuity. On the one hand, Rabinow, with his claim for an “anthropology of the contemporary” (2008), questions the tendency to historicize ethnographic contexts, and presents them as clear and coherent historical narratives. Accordingly, lived reality ceases to be so clear, or inevitably dependent upon a past that allows predictions for the future which often end up being proved erroneous. This approach to fieldwork focuses on the fragmentation of a broad emergent phenomenon into several smaller elements and

21 events that are “contemporary with one another” (Rabinow 2008: 58). The only uniting bond imposed on these elements is the fact that they are happening, emerging, and taking form synchronically. Thinking of each smaller element, event, experience or practice as at least partially independent from each other exposes the complexity of various dynamics involved in complex social realities. It leads to an interesting research program that remains critical towards any supposed or imagined coherent diachronic narrative.

Change and novelty are accordingly intrinsic elements of any event.

On the other hand, as this dissertation discusses the emergence of a renewed form of collectivity within an aboriginal group, and also analyses the transformation of its relation with state entities, history becomes an important component of social agents’ discourse. James Clifford (1988) and Aida Hernandez Castillo (2001) present similar situations in their work with aboriginal groups, the Massachusetts Masphee and the

Mexican Mames respectively, whose very identity was at times challenged and questioned by the state as well as by surrounding groups. They show how these identities were at times repressed, and hidden or silenced by the group. The conventional jurisdictions surrounding aboriginal communities at specific moments do not prevent communities from being lived and experienced in alternative ways. This gives individuals, families, and communities the ability to adapt to different situations, to cope with obstacles and exclusion, and to find different solutions to adversity. They can invoke different identities and claim belonging within different groups depending on contemporary social and political contexts.

In another vein, Valerie Lambert is a Choctaw anthropologist who wrote about the history of Choctaw nation building (2007). Lambert grew up in the Choctaw nation, but

22 left soon after the beginning of the mobilization leading to the edification process of today’s Choctaw nation. According to her, the historical period between 1970 and the beginning of the 2000s was the last moment in a series of many major ruptures and reconstructions through which the Choctaw nation reformulated its way of being in the world and of living together. She begins her book by stating how, when going back to the turn of the new 23illennium, she “was struck by the extent to which formal membership

(or citizenship) in our tribe had become a measure of Choctaw belonging” (Lambert

2007: 1). For instance, she remembered a time when the Choctaws defined the group as made of individuals who were both officially enrolled through the US Bureau of Indian

Affairs, and also non-enrolled. This was not so much the case anymore: the official enrolment played a major and increasing role in the establishment of a Choctaw identity, including access to the nation’s resources, services, and programs (Lambert 2007). Her work highlights the role of state policies in the emergence of social divisions among populations.

Historicizing their existence as a group, as well as their social and cultural practices, is a requirement that the Washaw Sibi group faces when making their claim to the government. And it is also an important feature of social agents’ exegesis of their living conditions and historical background. Understanding the meaning of different historical events and periods that have affected the group, as well as how the recent mobilization of the WSEA is affecting its members, leads us to examine what anthropologist Marc Augé (1994) refers to as the “history of the present” (i.e., an acknowledgment of how the present commands complementary or contradictory readings of the past). Indeed, this perspective makes room for the different histories that can exist

23 within a group, allowing changes to take different forms in various geographical places and social factions.

These two methodological approaches – the anthropology of the contemporary and the history of the present – have allowed me to handle the fluidity of social organization and the overlapping, intricate, and sometimes contradictory identities found among the same networks of social agents. They have also permitted me to account for the unpredictability of different, intersecting, or parallel historical paths and for more rigid nodes where narratives, places, and situations seem to sediment, rigidify, and articulate themselves. This led me to consider Washaw Sibi as a coalition of individual interests, as well as a set of collective projects. I could thus gain a broader outlook on the complexity, the adaptability, the contradiction, and the fluidity of the distinct sense of identity and community they were negotiating.

In conclusion, the contribution to anthropology of my dissertation is at once theoretical and methodological. At the theoretical level, I offer an important discussion of the notion of emergence, and consider how this concept may have different implications in distinct ethnographic contexts. Invoking the concept of social emergence, I explore the tensions between change and continuity in a precise aboriginal context. I use the notions of identity, community, and habitus to analyse these tensions and to examine their complexities. At the methodological level, I open up a rather classical theme of anthropology – the study of social organization among aboriginal groups of Canada – to an approach that allows observing the processes of community-building, identity- management, and boundary-setting in the making; through a methodology that is itself

‘emergent.’

Outline of the Chapters

This introduction outlines the main theoretical and methodological themes which organize the body of this dissertation. The chapters articulate these themes through an ethnographic discussion of the various definitions of the Washaw Sibi Eeyou group, and examine diverse social agents and the entities that invoke the group’s existence to refer to a sense of community or as a denominator of a distinct aboriginal identity. Yet, the community and identity mentioned in these definitions are not unitary, consensual, or monolithic. This is notable diachronically and synchronically, and these two intertwined axes will structure the chapters of this dissertation. On the one hand, there is remarkable diversity in the ways different people define the Washaw Sibi community and identity at this moment, partly attributable to the contemporary geographical, social and cultural spread of the community. On the other hand, the idea that Washaw Sibi refers to a distinct community and identity has had different implications throughout history. In fact, the present conditions of the group are partly influenced by this specific and complex history, but also by contemporary social, cultural, and political dynamics.

The body of this dissertation is divided into three main sections. The first section is composed of two chapters (Chapters 1 and 2) and situates this dissertation in the set of ethnographic issues at stake. Chapter 1 unveils how data was collected and is dealt with analytically in the rest of the dissertation. I will discuss how working at developing an anthropological understanding of Washaw Sibi’s current situation required a mobile ethnographic practice. I use the metaphor of movement in time and space to acknowledge

25 and highlight the multiplicity of perspectives and definitions, and the intersubjectivity relative to notions of community and identity as well as how they apply to Washaw Sibi.

Chapter 2 deals with the anthropology of social organization among subarctic bands, with an emphasis on kinship, on the notion of ‘band’ organization and hunting territories, and especially on how these three elements are intertwined. This section emphasizes the fluidity, adaptability and pragmatism of the social organization of the regional aboriginal population, yet also its caution in times of changes, and the regularity with which it mobilizes a regular core of related and acquainted families moving recurrently on specific territories.

The second section is composed of two chapters (Chapter 3 and 4) which deal with several periods of the history of the region respectively, using both ethnographic and historical material: the early fur trade and the Treaty and post-Confederation period

(Chapter 3), and the establishment of the WSEA from the 1980’s to the current period

(Chapter 4). For the purpose of analysis, this section dichotomizes aboriginal people’s practice and colonial powers. Taken together, these two chapters will show how the

Washaw Sibi Eeyou group is included within a vast social network spreading over the subarctic in Quebec and Ontario, including members the WSEA and of the James Bay

Cree nation and beyond, within legal, linguistic, and cultural groups now known as

Algonquin. I will demonstrate how colonial powers and the state attempted to impose boundaries to control aboriginal populations, leading to the emergence of local social and symbolic boundaries. Yet these policies did not follow the same logic: they were constantly transformed and adapted to short term political and ecological contingencies.

As a result, aboriginal peoples, colonial policies, and state officials contributed to a series

26 of social transformations that excluded and marginalized the Washaw Sibi group yet left different potentialities for the becoming and consolidation of the group.

The third and last section of the body of the dissertation includes two chapters

(Chapters 5 and 6) dealing with the contemporary ways in which identity and community take form for Washaw Sibi members. These final chapters allow us to see how questions such as “who is a Washaw Sibi member?” or “who is Cree?” are not simple, and reveal that identity assertions cannot be taken out of the context in which they actually hold meaning for group members. Indeed, these questions have implications and concrete consequences for social agents, as they create boundaries, generate instances of inclusion and exclusion, and directly affect their living conditions. I will show how these different definitions are contingent on different historical experiences, choices, narratives, and interpretations within the group, but also on contemporary dynamics related to the internal politics of the group including negotiations with other aboriginal and non- aboriginal entities.

In conclusion, I will demonstrate how contemporary forms of aboriginal identities and communities are influenced and take form through practice, narrative, and discourse.

These practices, narratives, and discourses are the outcomes of a continually emerging dialectic between past and present experiences, between politics and socio-culturally grounded schemes of perceptions, and between interpretation and action. Such a conclusion suggests that any single definition of a community and identity is always caught in the process of emergence, which means that its definition is always somehow transitional, subjective, and not universal. Yet the way in which community and identity emerge at a specific time and place often shows distinct regularity, rationality, and

27 continuity with what existed before, as well as what exists in other locations of a given social network. This relative regularity allows aboriginal people to constantly assert a distinct identity and form of life, i.e. a specific form of collective existence which exists in spite of tremendous adversity, in a way that has proven capable of spontaneous adjustments to all kinds of social and ecological circumstances. This dissertation thus highlights how a given sense of community and identity is negotiated among many social agents, is vested with power, and contributes to fashioning the contemporary living conditions of aboriginal peoples.

CHAPTER 1

“THE ONE WHO STARTED IT ALL…”

The Washaw Sibi Eeyouch2 originate as a hunter-gatherer semi-nomadic group of the Algonkian linguistic family living in the subarctic. Their traditional territory extends over large portions of the watershed formed by the Harricana River and its tributaries.3

They have lived there since time immemorial and are mentioned in historical records since the beginning of colonization in the region, throughout the fur trade and into the contemporary era. Over the last century, increasing pressures resulting from colonial intervention, exploitation of natural resources, as well as settlement and government policies have gradually forced them to adopt a sedentary lifestyle. Today, the Washaw

Sibi Eeyouch are scattered in different municipalities, villages, and communities separated by large distances throughout southern James Bay, the Abitibi region and the

Cochrane District, in Quebec and in Ontario. The current sedentary reality occludes to some extent the former nomadic lifestyle characterized by exchanges of goods and information, friendships, and partnerships taking place between aboriginal and non- aboriginal regional groups. Moreover, institutional neglect and legal invisibility have characterized the collective experience of sedentarization of the Washaw Sibi Eeyou

2 Eeyou (plural, Eeyouch) is the Cree word by which the Cree refer to themselves, as well as to other aboriginal people. Washaw Sibi, “the river that flows into the bay,” is the Cree expression referring to the Harricana River and refers to Hannah Bay at the mouth of the Harricana River in southern James Bay. 3 C.f. Appendix 1 for a map of the Harricana River drainage and the area.

29 group from around World War II to the 1980’s, causing their social and geographical fragmentation and partial assimilation into other aboriginal collectivities.

To this day, there is no village, reserve, or settlement established for the exclusive use of the Washaw Sibi Eeyou group. Members of the group live in different communities to which they are legally tied. According to the federal Register of Indians, they are, for example, Pikogan Algonquins, Wahgoshig Ojibwas, Moose Cree or

Waskaganish Cree, etc. These are some of the aboriginal communities where they have historically settled.4 In spite of being scattered, the group has managed to maintain a cohesive network of relatives, friends, acquaintances, and partners who live in different places. Since the 1990s, it has been socially and politically represented by the Washaw

Sibi Eeyou Association (WSEA). This organization counts about 560 members living in the towns and aboriginal communities of Northern Quebec and Ontario. The WSEA is currently working to establish a permanent village in order to re-affirm the group’s identity in a renewed lifestyle adapted to the changes that it has undergone. This implies a complex process of recognition by federal and provincial governments as well as regional indigenous institutions. The group currently works under the Grand Council of the Crees of Quebec (GCCQ), who recognized it in 2004 as the tenth Cree community in the province and provide it with substantial financial and political support.

This short summary raises questions concerning the ways in which subarctic aboriginal groups remain socially cohesive in spite of tremendous forces inducing fragmentation and disarticulation, as well as the appropriate ethnographic methods to approach these issues. I will explain the sociological and cultural frame of Subarctic

4 C.f. Appendix 2 to see a table showing members’ community of residence in 2008.

30 aboriginal groups’ cohesion in the course of this dissertation. But this chapter focuses on methodology. It aims to shed light on the practical challenges of ethnographic fieldwork within this social and geographical context. Additionally, it offers a discussion of the ways in which, while on the field, I responded to the group’s mobility, transformability, and socio-cultural variability in time and space.

Washaw Sibi: The Ethnographic Context

This section locates the Washaw Sibi on two planes. First, I describe the geographical spread of the group by enunciating the various places where members reside. Afterwards, I discuss how Washaw Sibi collective identity occupies a unique position within the legal and administrative authorities that frame aboriginal identities in

Canada.

Territory

The following quote was stated by the chief of the WSEA in 2009 during an interview in which I asked him what advantage the Cree nation could possibly achieve from the WSEA’s project of establishing a Cree village:

Amos is like a central area. You can actually go to Ontario, you can actually go down south to Montreal, Ottawa, from here close by. Chisasibi, upnorth, and all that, and also to Mistissini. It’s like a central place, which is good for the Cree people. A lot of them come here to go shopping and do their business here. So it’s going to be good for Washaw Sibi too.

The WSEA projected at the time to build the village near the town of Amos. His description of Amos expresses well, on the one hand, the central position of the town in

31 relation to the many places where Washaw Sibi members live, and on the other, the vast geographical networks in which they interact socially, economically and politically.

The WSEA has an office in Amos downtown area, which is the political, social, and administrative headquarters of the association. Approximately half the community of

Washaw Sibi lives in either Amos or in Pikogan, a reserve located less than five kilometers from downtown Amos and registered by the Aboriginal Affairs as Algonquin.

With its 14 000 inhabitants, Amos is the main urban center of Abitibi county in Abitibi-

Témiscamingue.

Figure 1. Amos and the administrative region of Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Qc.

Source: Zorion, CC-BY-SA, Wikimedia Commons

Amos is less populous than Rouyn-Noranda or Val d’Or, to the southwest and southeast respectively. A highway network connects the three urban centers and one can easily transit from one to the other in about an hour. Situated 70 km southeast of Amos, Val

32 d’Or is the entrance, to the Abitibi region when driving from southern Quebec and a transit gateway from Montreal to James Bay. Amos is located at the intersection of the northern highway to James Bay and two east-west highways (through Rouyn-Noranda and La Sarre) connecting to the Cochrane district in Ontario. Amos therefore occupies a central position through which a fair proportion of the transit between Southern and

Northwestern Quebec, and Northern Ontario, passes.

Figure 2. Map of Amos, Qc

Pikogan

Pikogan is located on the 109 highway to James Bay at the exit of Amos urban area and almost looks like a neighborhood of the town of Amos. However, it constitutes a community on its own, inhabited by about 600 people, most of whom are registered to the Abitibi-Dominion band, now called Abitibiwinni First Nation. French and Algonquin are the community’s main languages, although English and Cree are also spoken significantly. About half the membership of the WSEA live in Pikogan and, according to the federal register of Indians, are part of the Abitibiwinni band. Not all Washaw Sibi members live in Pikogan. The other half of the community lives in other northern

33 localities: Amos, Val d’Or, Matagami, La Sarre, Waskaganish, and Waswanipi in

Quebec, and Moose Factory, Timmins, Cochrane, and Wahgoshig, in Ontario.

Figure 3. Map of different places where Washaw Sibi members live

James Bay

Source: © Google 2013

An increasing number of people identifying as Washaw Sibi Cree have moved from these other places into Amos to live closer to the WSEA and join its membership. Their moving in was often motivated by personal relationships and sometimes led to marriages with members of the Abitibiwinni First Nation or other WSEA members. For instance, several Cree families from Moose Cree First Nation, in Ontario, have settled in Amos and now work for the WSEA or other Cree entities.

Washaw Sibi happens also to be an expression often used locally and colloquially to refer to Camp Joulac, a gathering place located about 115 km north of Amos at the junction of the 109 highway.

Figure 4. Location of Joulac

Camp Joulac *

Legend: A: Amos B: Matagami C: Joutel

Camp Joulac consists of a group of about thirty cabins built by members of the WSEA and financed by the Cree Trappers Association (CTA), a James Bay Cree entity working under the GCCQ and the Cree Regional Authority (CRA). One of the main

35 responsibilities of CTA is to provide logistical and financial support to Cree trappers, hunters, and fishermen, mainly through an income security program (ISP). Although nobody lives permanently in Joulac, the camp is always accessible to the families and relatives of people who own a cabin. A group of mutually related Washaw Sibi elders visit their camps for a few days on a regular basis and they often bring along extended family members, children and grandchildren. The site, approximately 100 km from the two closest urban municipalities, Amos and Matagami, is used by members of Washaw

Sibi for hunting expeditions or for celebration gatherings. Not all Washaw Sibi families have cabins at Joulac. Many among them have their own cabin elsewhere on family hunting territories, sometimes close to a road access, and sometimes in more isolated areas only reachable by skidoo, canoe, or portage.

Multiple Identities

As aboriginal people of Canada, Washaw Sibi members hold the Indian status administered by the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (known since 2011 as Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development; AAND). Each individual holding the Indian status is registered by AAND under a specific band affiliation. To hold the Indian status, one has to belong to a band officially recognized as such by the government. An individual can be registered to only one band at a time. Indian bands are the only collective units to which the federal government is legally and administratively accountable. In most cases band members inhabit a tract of land owned by the Crown and reserved for the band’s specific usufruct. Along with the village and infrastructure that they inhabit, the sum of band members is often colloquially referred to as a “community.”

This system allows band transfers, the parameters of which have been fixed locally by

36 band leaderships since 1985 (Dupuis 1991). Some individuals end up holding different band memberships in succession during their lifetime. WSEA members are registered within the federally registered bands of northwestern Quebec and northeastern Ontario.

In parallel, Quebec James Bay Cree hold James Bay and Northern Quebec

Agreement (JBNQA) beneficiary status. This status allows them to benefit from the

JBNQA signed in 1975 between the province of Quebec, the federal government, the

Grand Council of the Crees, the Quebec Inuit, and the Société de développement de la

Baie James. The only criterion to become a WSEA member is to hold the JBNQA beneficiary status, the attribution of which is a matter of provincial competence, making the JBNQA Cree beneficiary status independent from the federal Indian status. Members of the nine already established James Bay Cree communities can hold both an Indian status and a JBNQA beneficiary status as these communities are recognized in both systems. Washaw Sibi, at this moment, is not recognized in the federal system nor is it recognized in the JBNQA structure. Members therefore hold both statuses in other communities. Still, the WSEA administration compiles a local list of members.

This gives way to situations in which people hold three legal and administrative

“aboriginal identities:” a federal one (the Indian status), a provincial one (the JBNQA beneficiary status5) and a local one (the WSEA membership). For example, many

Pikogan residents are registered as Abitibi Algonquins with the federal government,

Waswanipi or Waskaganish Crees with the Quebec government; and they are also WSEA members. Each of these denominators grants them access to distinct resources and rights.

The same can be said of individuals who were born in or have transferred to Ontario Cree

5 Torrie and Lejeune (2008: 30) estimate that 68% of members reported an affiliation with Waskaganish, 22% with Waswanipi, and 9% with either Nemaska (5,8%), Chisasibi (2,2%), Mistissini (0,3%), or Wemindji (0,8%).

37 communities which are not signatories of the JBNQA but whose families have a proven history of contact and exchange with Quebec Cree, making them eligible for the beneficiary status, and hence also for WSEA membership.6

Beyond Washaw Sibi, this research investigates the intertwining of several identities and the ensuing contradictions and tensions experienced by aboriginal individuals. Some identities are enforced by the state or by sub-state entities that may be aboriginal or not, and some are self-attributed identities and some are informally attributed by others. The complexity of identities within the relatively small group of

Washaw Sibi Cree derives from the history of the group, and from personal experiences, which, one might say, is a corollary of this history.

For example, I met a woman in Waskaganish who was quite knowledgeable about the history of Washaw Sibi. We talked about members and employees of the WSEA and it rapidly became clear that she considered many of them relatively close family. I then asked her if she had joined the WSEA membership. I was expecting a positive answer.

However, her answer came as a surprise:

I feel like I'm already belonging to too many groups. Well, I was, when we first went to Ontario, we had my dad's, Rupert's House, band number. Then we transferred to Moose Cree. Then I got married, so I transferred to Attawapiskat. Then Bill C-31 came in and I transferred back to Moose Cree. And then, in-between all that, I'm a beneficiary of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement. So if I was to become a member of Washaw Sibi, that would be my sixth, sixth membership. So it's kind of a lot.

6 When reading an early draft of this chapter, a woman whom I interviewed for this research asked whether aboriginal and First Nation people should be referred as “citizens” (e.g. citizen of Washaw Sibi) rather than “members.” She told me that she would prefer Washaw Sibi people to be referred to as “citizens of Washaw Sibi.” Beyond the complexity of the identity dynamics at stake in this context, this indicates the current difficulty for Washaw Sibi to qualify the nature and the political extent of their belonging together. It also shows the different possibilities for political statements and actions that the mobilization of Washaw Sibi opens. However, as the WSEA uses “members” to refer to individuals within the group, and as the great majority of members also commonly use this term to refer to themselves, I will use it to refer to individuals who refer to themselves as Washaw Sibi people.

Among WSEA members, this woman's history is not singular. Many individuals, men and women, have successively held different statuses in different aboriginal communities and, through friendships, kinship, partnership, acquaintances, work relations, etc., have overlapping ties – institutionalized or not – through registration within different communities. One could ask about which community, or about which way of life we are being informed in the short life-narrative of the woman quoted above. This overlap of various self-attributed, legal and circumstantial denominations is complex and puzzling, though the potential for similar situations exists in many other places. The undecided aspect of Washaw Sibi identity is by no means unique within the landscape of aboriginal identities. However, Washaw Sibi represents a dramatic and unique case in the current

Canadian context as the group is so close to consolidating recognition in spite of being scattered regionally, and in spite of its internal social and cultural diversity.

Yet similar dynamics are characteristic of aboriginal identities all across Canada.

This was explained to me when I inadvertently invited myself to a meeting held by the council of Wahgoshig in November 2009. Wahgoshig is an Ontario Ojibwa resserve located close to the border with Quebec, with an estimated population of 250 people.

Wahgoshig includes a few members of the WSEA and stands within the tracts of land of

Washaw Sibi Cree’s traditional territory. It is in Wahgoshig that I came to realize the broad political, ethnographic, and theoretical implications of this research project: the complexity of the Washaw Sibi identity stands within a web of relatively similar situations which affect other aboriginal groups. Wahgoshig shares a common history with

Pikogan (which will be explained in Chapter 3) and many people living in Pikogan often mentioned that they had many relatives living in Wahgoshig. For these reasons, I thought

39 that I could meet a substantial number of WSEA members there. I went to Wahgoshig unannounced, to explore the possibility of conducting research there, hoping to get the names of some key people to talk, to or to set up an appointment with a band councilor to introduce myself and discuss the project. It was by accident that I entered the band council office just as a community council meeting was starting, and I was immediately invited to take a seat at a large round table in the conference room of the Wahgoshig council.

Counselors sitting around the table first listened to the presentation of my research project with attention, and then reacted to it by starting a spontaneous discussion in which

I did not understand all the references. At one moment, a counselor stated that my project could be held all across Canada: problems of overlapping identities and lack of tuning between official and/or legal denominations attributed by government entities, and customary or self-attributed identities, were common in all aboriginal communities.

Another counselor compared the task of understanding overlapping and adjacent aboriginal identities to that of completing a puzzle. As a result, such situations quite often lead to intra- or inter-community conflicts, as well as misunderstandings between state entities and non-aboriginal populations. I suddenly became aware that the walls of the conference room were covered with maps related to land claims, locations of camps, and situations of surrounding aboriginal communities. These maps were representations of similar identity and territorial overlaps.7

7 Councilors were explicit on the fact that current issues surrounding Ontario aboriginal communities were mobilizing more attention amongst Wahgoshig members than that of Washaw Sibi. I refused to enter this whole different set of issues, within which the problematic of Washaw Sibi remained marginal. I feared not being able to commit to Wahgoshig council’s expectations and needs. Also, as the table in Appendix 2 shows, no WSEA member has declared living in Wahgoshig. I subsequently attended a community

Ethnographic Practice

I had been involved with Washaw Sibi from January 2008 to June, before I started fieldwork for this dissertation. The WSEA commissioned my supervisor, Dr. Colin Scott, and the historian James Morrison to work for them on a history and genealogy project.

Scott and Morrison hired me to maintain a genealogical database, for which I conducted interviews with some Washaw Sibi members and discussed and travelled with some of the council members and office workers in areas where members live. When I started fieldwork for my dissertation in June 2009, many people already knew me and interpreted my presence for the most part positively, seeing me as someone who had already done something relevant for the community. That opened many doors and accelerated my entry into the field. It also impacted the information that was given to me.

Since I was known for my work on their genealogy, people often interpreted my research as based on ethno-history, which in many cases explains the nature of the information they shared with me. In turn I became interested in how individuals interpreted their personal history and life experiences. While working with the community, I faced some criticism, due either to my apparent proximity to the council, or to what had been interpreted as mistakes and errors in the history and genealogy report we presented in

September 2009 (Scott, Morrison and Lessard 2009).

The ethnographic fieldwork for this dissertation lasted from June 2009 to June

2010 and was initially motivated by studying the WSEA itself. Staying several months in

Amos gave me the opportunity to interact, participate, discuss, and conduct interviews

information session in Wahgoshig and had some interesting conversations with some inhabitants of the community. However, I did not do any in-depth research with this community.

41 with people working or involved with the WSEA. I spent time at the WSEA office with council members and employees, who were often visited by relatives, friends, colleagues, contractors, or delegates from other aboriginal communities or associations. On weekends or holidays I also regularly visited people at Camp Joulac. The daily life of

Washaw Sibi members is structured by numerous social and cultural involvements, alternative or complementary to those of the WSEA. Soon after beginning fieldwork, I felt the need to document these broader social and cultural dynamics and to travel through Abitibi and the adjacent James Bay region to meet members’ relatives, friends, and acquaintances.

By August 2009, on an almost daily basis, I began visiting individuals and friends indirectly related to the WSEA office at home, during social or family events or at work, in Pikogan and other Abitibi locales. Amos and the WSEA office remained the central spot to where I regularly returned between investigation trips to other places relevant to the complex Washaw Sibi networks. Notably, I spent about three months (November

2009 to February 2010) in the area of Timmins, Ontario, living with relatives of people I had met in Amos. I also spent two months (March and April 2010) in Waskaganish,

Quebec, on the shore of James Bay, where some Washaw Sibi members live or have lived part of their life.

As a result, my “field site” turned into an intricate web of places. Ethnography involved travelling the region, depending on what people consented to share with me and to where I was invited. I spent time with certain people on a regular basis, sharing the intimacy of daily activities with a few groups of families living in different areas of the three main zones covered by my fieldwork. Each of these core groups of people were

42 surrounded by numerous relatives, friends, and colleagues, with whom I also interacted but on a less regular basis. I visited some families in their cabins, accompanying them on maintenance trips or on hunting expeditions. Very soon I noted that the daily social activities taking place among members of local aboriginal groups were transacted within complex networks of extended family and community camps.

The places and contexts where research was conducted depended on many circumstantial factors: accessibility, time and financial limits, advice given to me by friends and informants and, last but not least, my own understanding, in any given moment, of what was most relevant for the research as a whole. Understanding the context in which accounts are produced is a crucial element for interpreting data appropriately (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007: 102). I achieved this by using several tools, including participant observation, interviews and research in archives that helped generate data and knowledge in diverse contexts through an adaptive, flexible, and efficient methodology, on which I constantly reflected.

Participant Observation

Participant observation is an important method for gaining trust, and engaging people in formal or informal interviews and discussions through which different aspects of reality may be unveiled (Hammersley and Atkingson 2007). I never concealed my position as a researcher, and at all times explained and subsequently clarified when people asked, which usually led to interesting informal conversations and sometimes invitations for formal interviews. Participant observation was a fundamental way to prepare formal interviews: it allowed me to engage with my informants, to meet interpreters and to reflect on my position within the communities. I documented,

43 observed, and accounted for different practices, settings, and events in which social agents played a role. I attended conferences, community events, and gatherings associated with or organized by Washaw Sibi members, but also interacted with people in their daily lives. I was present at diverse family, social, and political events as a participant or as a witness. In certain cases, I offered my help or volunteered to do different tasks such as counting votes during the election of a community councillor, or selling tickets for a draw at a golf tournament. I also participated in activities that were not organized by WSEA members per se. Conducting fieldwork implied learning the basics of the Algonquin and Cree languages, doing chores, playing games, or being initiated into bush skills. I was thus able to gather a vast array of data about current aboriginal social and cultural life in different situations and contexts.

Interviews

I took part in informal conversations, group discussions, and formal interviews in many different settings: houses, work offices, bush cabins, coffee shops, restaurants and shopping malls. People I interviewed were found mostly through my participation in community events and through references provided by friends or people whom I had already interviewed. I generally asked a person to participate in an interview when I felt the relationship allowed for an open and trustful dialogue.

I ran formal interviews with forty-two individuals, including young, adult and elder Washaw Sibi members with their relatives and friends, and also with aboriginal or non-aboriginal political leaders, and administrators of the GCCQ and of Amos. Two or three interviews were held with each person. I specifically targeted community leaders, people who volunteered at community events or worked in key community entities, and a

44 few elders who were commonly revered in the Cree community for their guidance and knowledge. Interviews were held with only one informant, except in cases where two or three informants asked to be interviewed together. For instance, I interviewed three elderly couples together and two young adults as well.

I digitally recorded most of the formal interviews and then transcribed them verbatim. Besides these, there were hundreds of daily informal, often spontaneous, often prepared, conversations that I had with dozens of people. I followed several methods. In some interviews I used open-ended questions around predetermined themes to allow flexibility and adaptability in the informants’ conversation styles. I also collected life- narratives which I consider an important methodological tool for analysing how people construct their identity (Olofsson 2004: 62). The degree of structure and formalization of interviews varied depending on the objectives of the interview and the status of the informant. I conducted more structured interviews investigating specific questions with community officials. Yet for the most part, interviews took the form of open discussions allowing the informants to unfold their own narratives. If I asked questions, that was when I felt my informant needed inspiration on a certain theme, or when I wanted to encourage him or her to elaborate certain topics. This kind of dialogue was especially useful with elders and during informal contexts.

Other Material

I incorporated secondary data into the analysis by consulting historical and contemporary archives that the members of the WSEA generously put at my disposal, such as minutes of meetings, popular media (written, television and electronic), documents distributed at conferences, community events, and gatherings, etc. Moreover,

45 working in the community history project gave me the opportunity to review a significant amount of public archives containing Hudson Bay Company and Indian Affairs correspondence, reports and other documents dating from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1970s.

An Ethnography of Movement in Time and Space

Multi-sited Ethnography

This research is largely inspired by Marcus’ discussion of “multi-sited” ethnography, which refers to the ethnographic study of a group, metaphor, story/allegory, life/biography, or conflict in several sites considered as relatively independent from each other (Marcus 1995). Anthropologist Matei Candea examines the notion of multi-sited anthropology and points out to the paradoxical tensions between the impossibility of a

“single ethnographic site” (a space crossed by a unique set of social and cultural narratives, processes and dynamics) and the inability of multi-sited ethnography to avoid

(multiple) site-boundedness, i.e. the action of arbitrarily delimitating geographically and socially the different places where ethnography is conducted. He concludes by emphasizing the necessity for all ethnographers to make decisions and leave aside some information in order to define an arbitrary location, a blurry, thorny aspect of reality found within the messiness and contingency of reality, and serving as an object of study and a basis to reflect on broader theoretical themes (Candea 2007). This applies well to my research. Moving around implied having to make difficult choices when being in one place made me miss what was happening in another. Yet it led me to construct a relevant

46 and unique understanding of the general context and extract an anthropologically fascinating set of social dynamics.

Multi-sitedness is mentioned in Marc Augé’s discussion of the concept of community. According to Augé (1992), community is central to ethnography, as the latter implies outlining a unit of observation within the world’s social and cultural complexity, if not messiness, and through the composition and vagaries of fieldwork. This unit of observation is often considered as a “community.” This process includes the establishment of an effective and efficient contact with specific individuals in a specific setting, termed a “sociological locus,” which becomes an analytical device defined by the ethnographer’s preferences and theoretical interests. In order to define it, ethnographers have to make conscious decisions and fix limits that will confer a certain representativeness to a given phenomenon.

Augé’s main argument is that the ways in which ethnographers define the community where they do research have to be redefined due to what he terms

"supermodernity" (surmodernité). Supermodernity is defined by constant references to a multiplicity of places caused by the acceleration of transportation, communication and migrations, and the disruption of territories. In order to adapt to this multiplicity, anthropology should not review its methods, but its objects and create for itself tools to apprehend new social forms and emerging or delocalized institutions (Augé 1992).

Michael Fischer also argued for a redefinition of ethnography through his study of the concept of social emergence (2003), as the concept of community can now apply to geographically scattered entities, social networks, transnational commercial trades, diasporas, and/or virtual groups. In fact, the expression of a community can branch into

47 different networks in which social agents give it alternative meanings. Candea’s arbitrary location, Augé’s supermodernity, and Fischer’s emergence allow ethnographers to construct or reinvent their own field site so as to discuss sociality in alternative, more contemporary terms.

Multiplicity of Identities

Identifying Washaw Sibi members and understanding how they related with others was not always a given. The complexity of the Washaw Sibi identity raises questions concerning the equation of identity, place, and time. In such a context, investigating identity demands a continuous assessment of whatever data is being collected. The question of relevancy becomes intricate and delicate, but nevertheless remains ever-present. The complexity of Washaw Sibi’s current features led me through tentative explorations, moments of doubt, and re-assessment of certain decisions.

Questions such as where to start the research, which trails to follow, which ones to avoid, and when to end investigation became thorny. Any attempt to understand the content and limits of the group took on a political color.

When I was in Pikogan, I faced a complex sociocultural situation, where members of the Abitibiwinni band may claim Cree and/or Algonquin identities. Stereotypically, according to residents of Pikogan, Algonquins speak mostly French as a second language and have a Catholic heritage, whereas Crees speak mostly English and have an Anglican heritage. Yet nearly all individuals are of mixed genealogy partaking of both identities.

Chapter 5 will discuss this situation in greater detail.

On another plane, Washaw Sibi has been and still is subject to forms of marginalization and different kinds of violence both from aboriginal and non-aboriginal

48 institutions. Margins are sometimes hidden, or not easily perceptible for the outsider. The paths to access them are at times crooked. They include seeing a reality from alternative, often sideways perspectives. So I decided not to look for informants solely in the list of the WSEA membership, but also within the social network of people who considered themselves close enough to belong to the group. Such a position turned out to be felt as a political act in many situations, like when, during interviews, informants tried to put in their own words what ‘makes’ the Washaw Sibi identity. I was often told that they took these interviews as opportunities to be heard and voice their positions. Many openly questioned the current criteria for membership, or the inclusion or exclusion of certain people.

For example, an employee of the WSEA at the beginning of an interview strongly identified himself as a James Bay Cree person (from Quebec), for he wanted to emphasize his legitimacy as a WSEA member:

I will always recognize myself as a Cree due to the fact that my dad came from Quebec. I always knew, from the time that I was a child, in my teenager years to my adulthood, that I am from the James Bay Crees.

This man had lived most of his life in Ontario and had his Indian status registered under the Moose Cree band. One has to know that defining the “origins” of WSEA members has been the source of debates and conflicts between “those from Ontario” and “those from Quebec.” Indeed, some see the former as potential opportunists and question their legitimacy. The historical sources of this debate, and how it unfolds in the present reality, will be discussed later. For now, I simply want to highlight how, during some interviews,

I heard “Quebec” members express their views concerning this issue. For example:

J’ai rien à faire avec eux-autres. Mais la seule chose qui peut-être me chicote un peu avec Washaw Sibi, c’est des Cris de l’extérieur qui commencent à venir s’installer. C’est pas que je suis pas d’accord avec ça,

mais à un moment donné, ce n’est plus des gens de Washaw Sibi qui gèrent ce building-là. Ce sont des gens de l’extérieur. Moi, ce que j’appelle du monde de Washaw Sibi, c’est du monde d’ici. Ce n’est plus du monde d’ici, c’est comme si quelqu’un viendrait ici pour gérer la communauté.8

These quotes show how an “I am” affirmation can implicitly be an answer to a “You are not” assertion. They exemplify how identity is not only a relative and socially constructed matter, but also a political one at various levels. Furthermore, if institutional and government forms of identification play certain roles in determining who is a member of the group and who is not, they do not play all the roles.

Consequently, I considered the terms in which individuals identify themselves as the central element of their identity. In order to fathom the social implications of a self- attributed identity, I constantly confronted it with what the entourage of the person in question, such as neighbors, fellow village inhabitants, or relatives living nearby or a few hundred kilometers away, thought of it. Assessing the relative nature of self-identification and identities attributed by others at the level of community interactions, in opposition to other forms of legal or official identities, was a central methodological tool I used for to make sense of Washaw Sibi. I made this decision in a context where all these forms of identities could potentially be contested, for I wanted to understand the social processes and dynamics at play from the social agents’ points of view – a central ethical and epistemological motif in the practice of ethnography.

8 I have nothing to do with them. But the only thing that bothers me a little with Washaw Sibi are the Crees from outside who are beginning to settle here. It’s not that I disagree with this, but at a certain point, it’s not people from Washaw Sibi who rule the building anymore. It’s people from outside. Me, those whom I call Washaw Sibi people, are people from here. It’s not people from here anymore, it’s as if someone was coming here to manage the community (author’s translation).

Mobility and Cohesion

In the context of subarctic aboriginal people, mobility appears to be a factor of cohesion, although these two terms are in constant tension. Families constituting Washaw

Sibi, as well as other subarctic aboriginal groups, have had mobile lifestyles in different ways and to various extents in order to maintain significantly cohesive social relations.

Movement on the land allowed groups to meet, exchange information, goods and people through marriages, friendships, and hunting partnerships. They occurred regularly, as people followed seasons. On certain occasions, they allowed for large groups to gather together and, on other occasions, to maintain a certain spiritual, cultural, and social unity in spite of fragmentation. The actual mechanisms of this form of social organization, along with the obstacles that it has faced historically, will be discussed throughout this dissertation. For the moment, I want to insist on the idea that at the level of ethnography, keeping mobile has helped me have a deeper understanding of the social dynamics in

Washaw Sibi, and to develop an original, relevant and singular point of view.

Furthermore, documenting movement and cohesion over large distances has enabled me to experience first hand the strengths and limits of this way of maintaining consistent relationships.

Transitions and Temporalities

Two aspects of the Washaw Sibi group imply a distinctive relationship to time in the practice of ethnography. On the one hand, since its members are geographically scattered, they somehow live in different temporalities. Anthropologist Keith Basso has shown in the case of the Apache how social agents develop a distinct form of consciousness, or perception of the place in which they dwell; “lived relationships” are

51 established with and within these places. Place becomes a state of mind, invested with a distinct emotionality and of a specific rapport to history (Basso 1996). In fact, I often felt that my moving around implied switching temporalities and this added another level of complexity to my field work and to the data I was gathering. People residing in different places do not discuss the same things, do not receive or transmit the same information, and do not relate to the same people. On the other hand, the transitional aspect of the situation of Washaw Sibi, which is subject to rapid change, implies that observations often have to be re-evaluated and validated. This research was done with an inner knowledge that any data gathered would be an ephemeral segment of a broader issue related to long-lasting anthropological themes such as identity, social change, and reproduction.

In a review of the usage of history in ethnography, Faubion (1993) notes that the importance of historical contextualization in ethnography is in appearance recent as it often positions itself in reaction to previous classic, a-historic, a-temporal descriptions of the “ethnographic present.” The resulting dichotomy between “previous,” supposedly decontextualized ethnographies and current, highly temporally sensitive ones, has itself to be historicized. This implies situating the “historicization” of ethnography within a transforming context that increasingly makes both anthropologists and social agents

“sensitive to the liabilities, lessons, and license that might be derived from the past, whether it be personal, disciplinary, or “ethnic”” (Faubion 1993: 36). In simple words, both anthropologists and social agents are aware of the relativity of their often circumstantial and even strategic interpretations. They are aware of the potential for the

“invention of tradition,” which refers to the complex processes through which certain

52 suitable or contextually relevant pasts are symbolically or narratively invested, or referred to in order to create appearances of continuity with these meaningful or significant eras

(Hobsbawm and Ranger 1993). Sociologist Thibault Martin (2009) argued that aboriginal identities provided a lever for groups to act upon their reality and the world, and to project themselves into the future in a way that often implies reference to a symbolic

“pre-modern.” Identity hence involves a specific understanding of the world that situates a group on a diachrony that allows past, present, and future to reflect upon each other.

The transformations occurring in Washaw Sibi put these movements between past, present, and future at the center of the analysis. Yet, writing history within ethnography blurs the lines between science and politics, and also the lines of myth, written records, memory, and forms of representation.

These intersections of different temporalities can be observed within Cree narratives and enunciation styles. When narrating past events, Cree individuals do not follow a straight line or simply recollect facts in chronological order. Cree oral historical narratives blur the boundaries between history, geography, myth, and genealogy. The

Cree language, like other subarctic Algonkian groups, distinguishes two types of narratives: tipachimun and atiukan. Tipachimun narratives tell of events or circumstances that took place in a relatively recent past, whereas atiukan narratives have mythic forms and content that strongly imply symbolism and cosmological references, providing moral and ethical guides concerning the meaning and origins of life (Morantz 2002: 29).

Although academics might tend to see tipachimun as narratives that are closer to the content of what is generally called a historical narrative, anthropologist Richard Preston questions the very idea of a dichotomy, and presents these two types of narratives as two

53 poles on a continuum (2002: 76). In his analysis of narratives of the first encounter between the Cree and Europeans collected in the 1970s and ’80s, Scott shows that elders reflected on their situation, vis-à-vis the state economy and their integration into a national community, following from the conflict over hydroelectric development in

James Bay which led to the signature of the JBNQA. These narratives involve the chronological past, mythic times, as well as contemporary sociopolitical preoccupations concerning threats posed by the society of consumption on their cultural values and identity, in particular the principle of reciprocity (Scott 1992).

While conducting interviews in the course of my fieldwork, people seemed to feel difficulties and discomfort when asked precise questions about history. Answers were often elusive, quite short, or reduced to “I don’t know.” Information was given to me in fragmentary ways or embedded within broader narratives. This is due to the fact that historical narratives emerge out of an intimate and pragmatic experience of the content and form of knowledge, and also out of different contexts in which knowledge is generated, enunciated, transmitted and given meaning (Tonking 1992 in Morantz 2002:

31). As a consequence, Cree individuals are often reluctant to discuss historical information, as well as any kind of knowledge in general, when it is taken out of an appropriate context of enunciation, i.e. out of a social context in which the enunciation of such knowledge is meaningful and pragmatically oriented.

Historical Multiplicities:

Peter Trapper Narratives Blurring Time and Space

This chapter has so far discussed two main challenges that I have had to deal with while on the field conducting ethnography: 1) Washaw Sibi Cree are geographically scattered over a vast stretch of land, and 2) they generally hold several combinations of formal identities mediated by policies related to federal, provincial and community administrations. To these complexities one can add informal self-ascribed identities and identities ascribed informally by others during direct interactions. Gathering data has meant travelling around to meet different social agents, involved to different degrees with the community, and collecting narratives that were largely informed by the temporality associated with each setting. As a result, the social and cultural relevance of an historical narrative or piece of knowledge became manifest when put in relation with other narratives. Considering the whole gave a better understanding of its different parts.

Accessing a set of narratives implies travelling to meet distinct people and exploring several places where variants of a story are told, and can be heard from various perspectives. I will illustrate this by discussing narratives about Peter Trapper.

Peter Trapper is a historical figure mentioned in the James Bay written records produced by the Hudson Bay Company (HBC). He was born around 1855 near Rupert

House (nowadays Waskaganish) as the son of Wanihikai, whose Cree name was translated into “Trapper” when he was baptized in the mid-19th century. Wanihikai – his

Christian name was Thomas Trapper – was identified as an occupant of the

Ministikawatin peninsula, located just east of Hannay Bay, and as having hunting territory in the Harricana River watershed (Scott and Morrison 1993:176-177). Peter

Trapper married an Inuit woman from Charlton Island (in James Bay) named Isabel

Kweto (or Quato) in 1876 and had seven sons and two daughters. Known at that time as a coaster, he became a trading captain who negotiated directly with European fur traders.9

Those features were shared by many men and women of his generation. Yet the content of the memories related to Peter Trapper makes him an outstanding and fascinating figure. The ethnographic importance of narratives about Peter Trapper became clear to me during one specific interview. This interview took place in April 2010, while I was in the last stage of my fieldwork, in Waskaganish. I was interviewing an elderly couple in the living room of the pre-fabricated house where they stayed when they were in the village. Their daughter translated the conversation. It was early afternoon and they had planned to go back to Smoky Hill, an agglomeration of camps where they spent most of their time. They were eager to go back to their camp and were answering my questions hastily, telling me generalities such as “back in the days, we moved around a lot.” As the interview went on, I was feeling a mixture of disappointment and shame due to my incapacity to communicate what I wanted to know in a way that would arouse their interest and provoke more than a laconic answer. Looking nervously at my notes, I began asking whatever questions spontaneously came to my mind. At the beginning of the interview, I had asked the couple if they knew some Washaw Sibi members. The daughter had translated for me: “He said the Washaw Sibi people are all scattered. Some are residing at La Sarre, some are residing at Senneterre, and some in Amos. There are many of them, he said. And also they are originally from here. We have some family members here as well. The Weistches and the Trappers are the original ones, of the

9 Cf chapter 3for the distinction between inlanders and coasters, as well as discussion of the role of trading captains.

Washaw Sibi people.” Looking at my scribbles linking to that answer twenty minutes earlier, I asked them who, within the Trapper family, was related to them and what was the story of the Trapper family.

This question triggered the couple’s interest and the ambience shifted. I felt the couple putting aside their hurry as the man sat back, ready to talk. There was a long exchange in Cree between the daughter and her parents in which they gestured towards different directions in the air. The daughter then translated. The story in fact turned out to be Peter Trapper’s:

Peter Trapper's traditional name was Mushabio. It has something to do with being without a wife, I think. Mushabio was the one who killed the cannibal monster. Did you hear the story, near the Stag Rock? There were two shamans and they were fighting to overpower each other. I don't know what went on during that time, they had a feast or something. Peter Trapper's family was in danger. The other shaman wanted to put a curse on them. And so he sent his spirit, his mistabeo, spiritual helper, something like that. But it was not a good helper, it was a bad spirit. So he tried to destroy this other family using his spirit, mistabeo, and that's when Mushabio, Peter Trapper went to the battle of monster and then it was a battle between the two shamans. And Peter Trapper's mistabio fought the other mistabeo and put him in chain. They could hear the rattle of the chains. Some say it's a legend, but some say it's true. I guess it's true in some kind of way because they had all these kinds of spiritual gifts, but they did not know how to use them in a good way. They used it against each other. That's why people today, they don't practice that anymore, because of what happened in the past, people using it against each other. So, anyway, the mistabeos fought, Peter Trapper's mistabeo won, and they put the other mistabeo under water near Stag Rock. And that was the end of the mistabeo, he couldn't hurt anybody anymore. But I don't know what the other shaman's mistabeo's name was, it was too long ago. I know that Peter Trapper was the one that killed the evil mistabeo.

It was then – during that interview done a few weeks before I left the field – that I realized the importance conferred on Peter Trapper by Washaw Sibi members. During the next few days, I re-read my field notes looking for mentions of him. And I found some stories I had already noted.

In Timmins, a woman in her fifties told me:

My great-grandfather, Peter Trapper, was all over the place, I guess you could say. He didn't really live in a community that I know. Most of his life was spent in the bush and he was a shaman. I think, during his time, the encroachment of Christianity, I don't think they sat well together in a community, which I think is why he didn't stay in a community very often besides living the traditional lifestyle, if you want to call it that way. But you know, that's what he did.[…] They travelled from Charlton Island, Katawagami area, the whole Washaw Sibi watershed to the Lake Abitibi, all the way across towards Nemaska over there and then of course on the Rupert River, and he moved around in that whole area. I know my father talked a lot about being around Abitibi and in the work I do, looking at traditional land use mapping of that land, I found that my family is identified down by Abitibi like a Cree family. And there are all kinds of Abitibiwinni people around us. We're very close to the Abitibiwinni people. And the rest of the Crees are up north.

Another middle aged woman also living in Timmins told me:

They were always in the bush, they were among the last people to live on the land. My grandfather would be Peter Trapper. She [my mother] said that he was so close to the spirit world and the real world, he was so close that he had those powers, she used to say her grandfather could fly. I would say: “how can he fly?” I didn't even know what that meant […].

What does it mean to fly?

It's jumping from one dimension to another. I asked my mother's brother, he just passed away, I went to him and asked: “what does it mean, my grandfather could fly?” He said: “I remember that, when we were kids,” because he remembers his grandfather too, “when we were kids, we would be leaving one lake, walking to another lake, in the winter. And my grandfather would be way behind, walking. And then, my grandfather says: “aauash taau: somebody's already here.” And he says, my grandfather would be sitting there and make fire. He could move, he had powers also at paddling. He'd be paddling. My grandfather was old and slow, he was always behind us, all of a sudden he was ahead of us. How did he get there?” I heard stories from my sister who said people told her, they used to talk about our grandfather, that he could fly, that's what they meant, he had powers to go into this world.

Peter Trapper’s photo is posted on the lobby wall of the Amos WSEA office and he is remembered as a “founding” figure of the La Sarre Crees – a name that was given to the Washaw Sibi Eeyou in the early 20th century. Quite often people working or passing by the office would point to that picture and tell me that Peter Trapper “started it all.”

Some would tell me that he was the one who gave Washaw Sibi its Cree name when, sitting on a cloud, he noticed that the river flowed into a large coastal bay, the Hannah

Bay. People in Waskaganish told me that they used to call Washaw Sibi families, including Peter Trapper’s descendants who had their hunting territory in the watershed of the Harricana River, meskinew iyiyutsh (“road people”). This meant that they had a distinct identity from the Waskaganish band. Some refer to him as a family patriarch or ancestor, as a “great-great-grandfather,” including the connotations of endearment generally used when referring to chisenuuch (elders), nuumishuum (grandfather) or kuukum (grandmother).

All these narratives present many similarities: Peter Trapper travelled a lot and never settled; he was a good communicator and lived with diverse groups; he had strong spiritual powers and gifts that made him an outstanding shaman who could communicate with, or move around, groups located at great distances from each other. If many

Washaw Sibi Cree people remember him as the “founder” of Washaw Sibi, or as “the man who started it all,” it would be erroneous and oversimplifying to conceive Peter

Trapper’s social or political circles, in his own time, as tantamount to the current assemblage formed by the members of WSEA. Peter Trapper is remembered as someone who accumulated, throughout his life, substantial social and spiritual capital by establishing bonds and relations with several groups hunting in different areas. Nowadays these family groups live in different aboriginal bands. In fact, his descendants live all around Southern James Bay, both in Quebec and Ontario.

There is no authoritative narrative of Peter Trapper’s story, and the existing plurality of versions shows how information, knowledge, and leadership circulate,

59 sometimes over huge distances, within the group. Yet people who carry these narratives hold experiences and knowledge that lend them the authority to relate events endowed with significance. They are most often middle aged or elders. Although younger people also generally know Peter Trapper’s stories, they mention them elusively, saying they do not remember well, or that I should ask somebody else. How and when the story is told hence depends on the narrator and on the context. For example, in the first quote, the place where elders narrated the story, Waskaganish, is of some importance. Peter Trapper and his family had been considered in their own time, by aboriginals and non-aboriginals, as coming from the Rupert House band which is now called Waskaganish. My presence in Waskaganish, made it possible for me to hear an early episode of Peter Trapper’s life. I could have heard this story elsewhere, but being in Waskaganish, close to Stag Rock, where these events are said to have taken place, made them more palpable and real.

Indeed, when the woman mentioned Stag Rock, she turned her upper body and gestured in its direction.

The extent of the land covered by Peter Trapper in the second quote is exceedingly vast, but not uncommon for people of that generation. It is fascinating though that Peter Trapper is presented as having passed through and participated in the social life of many communities, without settling down in any of them. People involved in the WSEA and working at the establishment of the community find this grounds a solid genealogical and symbolic bond between Washaw Sibi and James Bay Cree communities, in particular Waskaganish. In fact, it is mostly WSEA members living in

Amos, Quebec who told me that Peter Trapper was an early leader of Washaw Sibi per se. The metaphor of descent from on historical core of Cree people confers permanence

60 and continuity to the collectivity, which can be used strategically. Yet the social setting in

Peter Trapper’s time (second half of the 19th century) did not allow foresight into the changes that have happened to Washaw Sibi and other aboriginal communities since that period. On the one hand, calling Peter Trapper a leader, or, on the other, stating that he did not settle in a community, both have a similar effect: they blur the distinction between definitions of aboriginal communities that are specific to different historical contexts, namely the 19th century and the contemporary period.

In the second half of the 19th century, HBC traders and explorers applied the concepts of community or band to subarctic aboriginal semi-nomadic groups and families assumed to use hunting territories located around the same river system. This application was approximate as traders did not generally follow hunting groups inland on their hunting territories during the winter. European traders assumed that these groups formed a community as they generally traded at the same HBC post during summer gatherings, the principal moment when they could actually meet them. Permanent buildings were gradually built during the 19th century: they served as seasonal camps around the posts, first for the “home guard,” and then for an increasing number of families whose hunting lands were further inland and who resided for longer periods around posts. Then the definition of community gradually switched to refer more specifically to the sum of families trading fur in one post and residing for longer periods of time near that post. This phenomenon intensified after Confederation and during the 2th century, although families remained semi-nomadic until well after World War II, when most families began to settle for a year-round sedentary lifestyle.

The generalization of sedentary lifestyle, coupled with the legal constraints of the band system and the increasing exploitation and policing of the land by governments, contributes to the fashioning of contemporary aboriginal communities. Consequently, critiques of sedentarity, and nostalgia for an embellished “traditional” lifestyle, became ideologically important within aboriginal groups in the second half of the 20th century. In short, perceptions of tensions between sedentary community life and traditions are contemporary dynamics that do not belong in a description of life in the the 19th century, when the vast majority of aboriginal families were nomadic.

This discussion shows how the concept of community can apply to completely different realities. When the woman, in the second quote, adds “if you want to call it that way” after qualifying Peter Trapper’s lifestyle as “traditional,” she seems to be aware that she is applying a contemporary notion (tradition) onto a reality from another time. We can see here how the vocabulary used to interpret memories of Peter Trapper is influenced by the sociopolitical experiences currently affecting aboriginal communities.

The quotes above are furthermore interesting because they mention that Peter Trapper refused sedentarity, thus granting him agency, as if feeling himself some tension between a sedentary (community) life and a nomadic (“traditional”) lifestyle, he made his choice.

The fact that Peter Trapper is remembered by his descendants as “refusing” or “avoiding” to live in a “community” is particularly interesting when associating it with the recent history of Washaw Sibi. Finding oneself marginalized vis-à-vis increasingly sedentarized communities is part of the general, collective experiences that current members are struggling with.

Contemporary Washaw Sibi members find two kinds of explanations for the scattering in their ancestors’ lifestyles. First, Washaw Sibi people often went through difficult situations in which they had to assert a lifestyle different from that of the members of surrounding, increasingly sedentarized communities. That was done partly by choice and partly through being marginalized by others. Feelings of difference and exclusion are thus pronounced and embedded in their psyche in such a way that projecting them onto their ancestors’ experience, they use them to interpret the whole group’s history. In other words, marginalization, exclusion, and mobility have become the symbolic plane for the group’s defining, atemporal features.

Second, ancestors’ nomadism and transiting through so many places today legitimate their scattered presence over a vast stretch of land. They can then rightfully and reasonably continue to live this way and still consider themselves as a community.

As a matter of fact, maintaining cohesion rather depends on the mobility of members and their ability to continuously and strategically assert acceptable identities at any given moment, while transiting in different places and social contexts.

* *

There is a definite parallel between the contemporary mobility and fluidity of the

Washaw Sibi Cree and my own mobility in the field which allowed me to assess the relative importance and constitution of the various forms of identities active in different contexts. Being mobile gave me the opportunity to witness and experience the strengths and limits of the dynamics contributing to social cohesion well beyond Washaw Sibi members. In this chapter, I used Peter Trapper narratives to exemplify how getting pieces

63 of a broader narrative from different informants in diverse places allowed me to acquire a better understanding of the content of individual interviews and life-narratives. The content of these narratives highlights how movement contributes to the construction of a distinct Washaw Sibi identity at the margins of, and in relation to, surrounding groups and their identities.

The next chapter will discuss the early fur trade in order to fully understand the implications of what anthropologists, and others, have called the “traditional” form of social organization. Through a depiction of the Cree “traditional” lifestyle, and the various obstacles and transformations that such a lifestyle faced historically in the colonial contexts, I will explain more thoroughly how movement is a factor of social cohesion.

CHAPTER 2

THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF A SUBARCTIC BAND:

KINSHIP, BANDS, AND HUNTING TERRITORIES

This chapter addresses the social organization of subarctic hunter-gatherer bands of the Algonkian linguistic family. I will discuss this topic from three interconnected perspectives: a) kinship, which is a classic theme in anthropology, b) structural- functionalist studies of subarctic band composition, and c) ethnographic descriptions of land use and tenure. Through these three approaches I will show how ethnographic monographs, in the early times of the discipline, have generally represented groups as being ruled by sets of norms that are stable, coherent, and continually reproduced. I will discuss critiques of such representations, which I see as impregnated with a kind of simplistic determinism.

Post-WWII anthropologists developed nuanced understandings of social structures from a diversity of theoretical paradigms. Their respective perspectives allowed them to diversify their foci by looking at the construction of structures through individual behaviour, the power dynamics embedded in them, and their adaptability or rigidity during times of ecological or social change. They also highlighted the impact of colonialism on aboriginal constructs, and on the methods and content of ethnographic research seeking to investigate these constructs. My discussion engages these critiques, and insists on the fluidity of aboriginal social organization, its customary pragmatism,

65 and its ability to adapt to different situations, as opposed to the ideals of determinism and fixity in time and space. Kinship, band configuration, and collective systems of land tenure will be seen as intertwined elements of a broader pragmatic and adaptive set of principles through which a specific form of social organization emerged in the Subarctic.

The Role of Kinship in Early Social Anthropology

Ethnographies of Algonkian Societies10

The naturalization of kinship within a reproductive model – where kinship is a "hybrid" institution, connecting nature and culture – depended on the way in which nature could provide not only a grounding function, or context, for society but indeed a model for context itself. (Franklin and McKinnon 2001: 5)

The study of Algonkian kinship terminology dates back to the foundation of anthropology. L.H. Morgan’s pioneering and massive oeuvre, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, explored the kinship systems of 139 different groups and devoted one chapter to the "Algonquian Nations" (1997[1871]). Morgan introduced the idea, re-appropriated by numerous social anthropologists, that the ways people refer to their relatives, i.e. the kinship terminology, give ethnographers information about their culture and their social behaviour. Morgan took the Ojibwa and the Cree as exemplary of the “Northern and Subarctic groups,” and he based his reconstruction of standard

10 Since the beginning of the study of kinship in the 19th century, dozens of studies have been done on more specific Algonquian groups and unveiled the diversity that exists within the Algonquian family: "It would appear that when each new community is studied, the name for this community finds its way into the literature as a sort of separate branch or division of Algonquian speakers" (Hedican 1990: 2). To name a few, Cummins sheds light on the particularities of the Attawapiskat Cree (2004); Davidson, on those of the Grand Lake Victoria Algonquins (1926), Waswanipi Cree (1928a) and Tête de Boule (1928b); Dunning, on those of the Pekangemuk Ojibwa (1959); Henriksen, on those of the Davis Inlet Naskapi (2000).

Algonquian kinship terminology on the vigor of their languages (Morgan 1997[1871]:

201).

He notes that two gendered terms exist for grandfather and grandmother (used in fact for all ancestors above the parents), father, mother, son and daughter, but notes only one gender neutral term for grandchild (used for all the descendants below the first).

Then, he describes the terms for elder brother and sister, and the single term applied to both genders for younger brother/sister. Ego’s parents’ same-sex siblings (father’s brothers and mother’s sisters) are called by the same word as the one for "step-father" or

"step-mother", but not Ego’s parents’ opposite-sex siblings. Reciprocal relationships follow the same rules. Hedican, almost one century later, considered these distinctions between two gendered terms for elder siblings and one gender-neutral for younger siblings as a distinctive characteristic of Algonkian language (Hedican 1990: 4-5).

Anthropologists associated this terminology with social and cultural practices such as customary adoptions of orphan children by parents’ same-sex siblings. For example,

Hallowell noted that the Montagnais/Innu word for parallel nieces and nephews is a term meaning "my pet child,” etymologically distinct from son and daughter, and that the term for grandmother is close to that for paternal aunts. He associated these specific terms for parallel nieces and nephews with the common adoption by grandparents or parents’ siblings when parents died (Hallowell 1926: 139). Murdock introduced the idea of differential treatments of cross and parallel cousins in the study of Algonquian kinship

(Murdock 1965). For Murdock, as well as other functionalist anthropologists, bilateral cross-cousins were considered permissible, or preferential spouses, which is implicit in the terminology used to refer to them. The referential term for cross-cousin is equivalent

67 to “sweetheart” or “lover”, and the term for parallel cousin is sometimes the same as the term for sibling, while the terms used for parents-in-law are the same as those used for cross-uncles/aunts (Henriksen 2010: 74 ; Graburn 1975: 57 ; Dunning 1959: 109 ; Landes

1969: 5 ; Flannery 1938: 29).

From their analysis of kinship terminologies, social anthropologists drew systematic and structured portraits of social relationships taking place within societies which they considered as “primitive.” Such functionalist understandings of kinship and descent neglect the processes through which social organization actually takes shape and becomes meaningful for agents. Moreover, the causal relationship between linguistic and customary practices is questionable, weak, and unclear. It becomes blurry in cases of social, cultural or linguistic changes, when a practice continues in the absence of a word for it, or when a terminology persists although customary practices have changed.

In contemporary revisionism, classic studies of kinship have been criticized as being the projection of Western concerns onto diverse peoples, and as an incorporation of biologism into social science. Such social and ethnographic studies of kinship see reproduction and genealogy as the source of collective organization, and treat genealogy as a natural fact and as the foundational base for all cultures. However, it is dubious that such a normalized and organized structure would satisfactorily account for the fortunes, ambiguities, and contradictions of human life. In fact, the reduction of kinship to genealogical relations has long been questioned in anthropology.11 More recent works

11 Van Gennep (1960) distinguished parenté sociale (socialized in the same milieu) from parenté physique (through procreation). Pitt-Rivers’ consubstantiality emphasizes the idea that people mutually see themselves as related to one another because they share a common substance. This substance can be shared through nature kinship, which emphasizes procreation, or nurture kinship, when people were given the same food and socialized the same way (Pitt-Rivers 1973 in Holy 1996: 9-10).

68 question the actual existence of a domain of kinship universally recognized in every society:

[The contemporary critique of kinship] manifests itself in the move from conceptualising kinship as a way in which people everywhere cope culturally with the universal natural processes of procreation to the concern with specific cultural conceptualisations of what in different cultures constitutes relationships which people in the West call kinship… (Holy 1996: 3)

Keesing argued that the anthropological emphasis on kinship led to an imaginary and questionable construction of “primitive” societies for which kinship crucially mattered

(Keesing 1975). Schneider also questions the value of kinship terminologies as direct paths to understanding social reality (1984). According to him, the assumption that exotic, “primitive” group are kin-based societies – that is societies in which kinship is an ordering principle around which economic, religious, political, and social categories are constituted or integrated into one social system – is erroneous. His critique is based on a pragmatic conceptualization of kinship as transformable, not as an ideal, fixed normative structure that every individual follows without being aware of it, or without being able to act upon it. Kinship is rather constructed as a set of cultural metaphors which inform the contexts in which relationships are created (Schneider 1984).

In fact, kinship terms, when used in everyday life, do not follow a strictly genealogical or biological process. This has been observed particularly among the Crees, where metaphors that borrow terminologies from kinship are sometimes used to discuss relations that are not primarily associated with genealogy or biology. On the one hand, anthropologists working with the Cree have noted that there is no enduring middle ground between alien outsiders and kin-related individuals. Strangers are susceptible to two categorizations. First, Scott (1989) and Feit (2000) found that alien, potentially

69 dangerous outsiders are metaphorically associated with the mythical character of Atuush, a cannibal creature that is fundamentally opposed to kinship and rejects norms of reciprocity and sociality by enslaving or devouring other humans as prey. Second, Feit

(2000) and Darnell (1996) discuss how others, considered as well-behaving strangers, were able to better participate in relationships based on reciprocity, and were thereby integrated into communities through the framework of kinship terminology. In her study of the kinship system and terminology of the Plains Cree, Regna Darnell argues that kinship systems provide the metaphorical structure at the basis of all social relationships.

Kinship terminologies are negotiated, as are the social relations that they are used to delineate. For example, while in the field, I was often told by Washaw Sibi members things like: “You spent so much time here, we’ll have to adopt you”; “You’re like my new cousin”; “I will teach you how to do this like I taught my little brother.” Joking and imagining kinship relations served as metaphors to describe and reflect on social relations.

Regna Darnell (1996) mentions other factors explaining the complexity of the use of kinship terminology. In small communities, people often share many kinship ties with the same person, and mutual agreement between two relatives is necessary before a given tie is acknowledged, and not another. Furthermore, not everyone uses the same terms to refer to the same relationships. For example, aboriginal elders often speak vernacular languages with a more extensive vocabulary at their disposal, enabling them to describe social and kin relations in customary terms. Also, not all families are composed in the same way, so knowledge of certain terms varies according to individuals’ relational experience.

Kinship, Descent and Aboriginal Identities

The importance of descent and the bias towards kinship to determine identity is also notable in the Canadian legal aspect of aboriginal status and rights. Since the 19th century, the importance of blood and filiation, especially through the paternal line, has been central for the government to determine who can or cannot be granted Indian status, and also band membership. In the 19th century and throughout the 20th century, belonging to an Indian band became a legal sine qua non for individuals to hold the Indian status and assert their aboriginal rights. Marks (2001) discusses how during that period, national and ethnic identities became defined increasingly by the authority of genetics, biology and descent. These became important criteria for defining who people are.

Aboriginal rights, the Indian status, and band affiliations have been considered a matter of descent and inheritance, just like Canadian citizenship (Scott 2004: 303). This set of principles derives from European, rather than aboriginal, models of rights and belonging. In 1985, changes to the Indian Act empowered Indian bands by giving them rights to include or exclude members and to allow band transfers. These changes also included amendment C-31, which allowed Indian women who had married non-Indian men, as well as their children, to maintain their Indian status or recover it if they had lost it. Amendment C-31 re-affirms the metaphor of blood line and descent as a crucial component of aboriginal identities, but allows the operation of these principles through both paternal and maternal lines.

However, one engages with a different perspective when considering the mechanisms through which a “band” and its membership actually take form. Such

71 processes clearly demonstrate how filiation and descent partly, but not completely, define agroup. I was able to see the malleability of interpretations of filiation and genealogy when, in the first months of my fieldwork, the community history project report (Scott,

Morrison and Lessard 2009) was handed to Washaw Sibi membership. I observed how people reacted to the historical and genealogical data. For instance, a man who had lived most of his life in Pikogan, as an Abitiwinni who had obtained the JBNQA beneficiary status due to his filiation with Waskaganish, invoked descent and inheritance of rights to explain the relevance of genealogical work:

Ça [the report] va permettre aux gens qui sont Cris, d'origine crie, de s'apercevoir qu'ils sont plus Cris qu'Algonquins. Peut-être que ça va réveiller l'appartenance crie, parce qu'il y en a beaucoup dans les gens de Pikogan qui ont du sang cri plus qu'algonquin. Peut-être que ça va réveiller certains qui étaient pas contents de Washaw Sibi, qui viennent s'installer autour d'Amos. Parce que l'importance d'une famille, c'est toujours ta provenance.12

By simply seeing on paper their genealogy and their family ramifications, people who thought they were “only Algonquin or Ojibwa” may realize that they are “also Cree.”

Personal experiences, knowledge about the past, filiation, and genealogy interact with each other and generate potentialities within individuals for the affirmation of different identities or for different expressions of identity. Considering that many individuals are in the same situation as this man and do not necessarily identify with the same group, identity appears to depend on something more than mere descent from a particular historical group.

12It [the report] will allow people who are Cree, of Cree origin, to notice that they are more Crees than Algonquins. Maybe it will wake up Cree belonging, because there are a lot of people in Pikogan who have Cree blood, more than Algonquin. Maybe it will wake up some who were unhappy about Washaw Sibi, who are coming to settle near Amos. Because the importance of a family is always where you are from (author’s translation).

Determining whether an individual is a member of the group is thus a complex matter. When situating others in their social circles, both kin filiation and the nature of interpersonal relationships are considered and invoked by people to varying degrees. For example, I was sitting with two men in the lobby of the WSEA office, downtown Amos.

After looking at his family history, one saw he had a common ancestor with the man sitting next to him although they had gotten to know each other only a couple of years before, when the former moved from Ontario to Amos to join the WSEA. He was just trying to engage his interlocutor in a friendly conversation, joking about the fact that they were “cousins.” But the other man denied the reality of the genealogical relationship. A malaise followed: for refusing to acknowledge their kinship meant that he was also denying the kind of partnership or friendship that commonly accompanies such relatedness. The second man was obviously rejecting such a relationship. Since I had been the one who generated the genealogical report, they wanted to include me in their discussion and asked me to confirm whether or not they were related. Feeling rather uncomfortable, I said that they did share a common ancestor. But the angry attitude of the second man made me realize that my words had the opposite effect: for him, this shared ancestor was no proof of an existing tie between them, rather, this gave him a reason to doubt my credibility. As we can see, kinship intersects with personal experiences, and actual relationships may be more decisive in determining whether a tie is relevant or not.

For that reason, it is difficult to reduce kinship to biological genealogy.

During most formal interviews, I asked informants to tell me about their family history and origins. From people aged thirty and over, I received these answers:

“They [my grandparents] lived in Moose Factory. My grandfather took his children to Moose Factory, it might have been Waskaganish or… he used that

Harricana River a lot. That's where they went up, they went up that river from Waskaganish. And my grandmother, she comes from Waskaganish.”

“My father’s side comes from the west coast of James Bay, Fort Albany. Same with my grandmother, they were there. My father migrated from Fort Albany after World War II, he went to the war and he never went back. After World War II, he settled in Moose Factory. And my mother was from Washaw Sibi, Hannah Bay River. She was born in La Sarre and she moved to Moose Factory when she met my dad.”

“My mother's are Moose Cree all the way. Hmm? so my dad was born on Burntbush river which is South of [name of lake], our family's traditional area which we still occupy to this day. […] My father was born there. All his siblings were born somewhere on uaashaau siipii [the Harricana River] watershed somewhere, or in Waskaganish. That's basically where they all were, in that area. Hmm? my grandparents […] originally from Waskaganish, transferred to Moose Cree in the ’60s, I believe.”

These adults’ parents belong to the last generation having reached their adult age before sedentarization and the establishment of community life in reserves. However, young adults under thirty also shared similar stories of movement, and intergroup marriage, when telling me about their parents’ generation. For example:

“My grandparents? My grandparents from my mom’s side lived in Waskaganish, well, she’s from Chisasibi. They lived in Moose Factory for a while. Tent city, I remember them calling it that. Way back, way back. And from my dad’s side, he just grew up in Moose Factory and they’re from further, from the Quebec side, in Waskaganish.”

“The residential school was in Moose Factory, so everybody had to go to Moose Factory in Quebec. That’s how it was for my parents and my uncles too. Hmm? my father was a [family name] so his father comes from down south. They’re from the Bay area. But my grandmother is from Moose Factory but originally, my grandparents on my mother’s, which side came from Waskaganish. So they came to Moose Factory.”

“Ben, du côté de ma mère, ma grand-mère est descendue de Waskaganish avec son père pis mon grand-père, il vient de Temiskaming.”13

13 Well, on my mother’s side, my grandmother came down from Waskaganish with her father and my grandfather, he’s from Temiskaming (author’s translation).

By referring to their ancestors’ experiences, people often ended up mentioning several identities. They continuously referred to more than one group when describing the lives of former generations. Genealogical narratives mentioned grandparents and ancestors whose lives spread out over the whole region, unfolding complex webs of social and economic interactions. People never explained their origins and family history by drawing a straight line of descent; their family narratives always implied complex networks, references to many places, and frequent movements.

What surfaces from these narratives is a series of potential identities and not a clear, unquestionable, biologically determined identity. For individuals, the complexity of kinship can prove their belonging to a given group, but that does not necessarily negate their potential belonging to other groups. Yet mutual recognition between members of the group depends not only on legal membership or ancestry, but on the existence of the experiences and interactions that define one’s status.

Social Organization and Narratives of Movement

The social organization of Algonkian subarctic groups depends largely on their movements on the land. This discussion should not be seen in opposition to the previous discussion of kinship, but as a distinct approach toward the same issue – social organization.

“Traditional” Forms of Organization in a Semi-Nomadic Band

Invoking the concept of tradition in anthropology has symbolic, practical, and political implications. Discourses about “tradition” are useful to address what matters to people regarding their past, present, and future experiences. Pouillon (1991) defines tradition as something from the past and transmitted into the present where it conserves a particular meaning. Indeed, tradition is a practical way for a group to recognize and affirm its collective sense of identity and belonging via concrete forms and practices.

Traditions ritualize explanations for practices and/or narratives, and establish more or less fixed norms about how to conform to a group identity through appropriate performance

(Pouillon 1991). The purpose of discussing a “traditional” social organization is not to describe aboriginal society at a specific place and time, such as its pre-colonial past.

Rather, it is to understand the social and cultural processes inherent to the structuration of

Cree society.

Concerning the traditional way of life of Northern Algonquins, Anthropologist

Marie-Pierre Bousquet (2002) found that movement characterizes their identity in two different ways. First, she situates traditional subarctic Algonkian band ideology in narratives of aboriginal life before sedentarization, in the “times” of semi-nomadism.

These narratives evoke a different relationship to space, different spiritual commitments, particular social involvements, and cultural practices, including relations with forms of life other than human – animals, plants, land and rivers as well as the spirit world.

Bousquet finds that independently of generational or social variables, northern

Algonkians define their identity by traditions that took place throughout the earlier period of colonization which was characterized by movements on the land in relation with the

76 fur trade. Second, narratives of tradition are also structured around experiences of displacement (déplacement) which actually took the form of enforced sedentarization through colonial policies that led to the building of contemporary reserves and villages.

Movement, nomadism, passage to sedentarity, and displacement for institutional purposes are important facets of the historical experiences of aboriginal groups living in the subarctic. They structure local narratives about tradition.

Nostalgia for an idealized past is also a feature of narratives about tradition. In the context of his research in Zanzibar, Bissell advocates for ethnographic practices that pay attention to nostalgia rather than mistrust or ignore it. Indeed, nostalgia says a lot about people’s specific concerns and challenges regarding their way of life, and unveils areas of contestation in a given social reality (Bissell 2005). Regarding the idealization of the past often associated with nostalgia, Chiu shows how the latter is in fact ambivalent and sheds light on the impossibility or undesirability for an individual to “go back” to a certain place or temporal context. She thus puts forward the idea that nostalgia can involve both the idealization of a given past and a critique of it (Chiu 2008). I noticed something similar when people I encountered in the field referred to the “traditional lifestyle” and described the harshness of the life conditions that prevailed in olden days: the cold, the constant need to work to gather food, the insecurity of shelters on hunting expeditions, the lack of comfort, etc. Sometimes their eyes widened with excitement as they mentioned the complexity of the portage routes and the knowledge required to follow them and make a living. They also discussed the spiritual and technical qualities of the hunts, the better taste of the animals before regional industrialization, and the negative repercussions of big development projects, etc. Finally, they occasionally joked about the

77 big summer gatherings and family reunions celebrating marriages between people whose kin relation would nowadays seems too close for marriage, people’s sexual license (in the missionaries’ eyes), or the customary adoptions of children by grandparents or aunts and uncles that would confuse Indian Affairs agents who were trying to outline local bands and nuclear families.14 In short, people use such narratives to highlight how people in a partly imagined, partly rejected, and partly idealized past could do things that are now made easy, impossible, or complicated by contemporary possibilities and necessities.

These narratives are often accompanied by humour and jokes about the ways in which aboriginal people, “back in the old days,” could do things that are nowadays prohibited, considered morally questionable, or complicated by the contemporary situation.

The work of post-WWII structural-functionalist anthropologists sheds light on the complexities of the Subarctic Algonkian aboriginal social organization they observed, as it had already been impacted by the fur trade. Anthropologists often portray this organization as a set of built-in social units of variable scales, with outlines that are contingent upon social and ecological circumstances. Indeed, anthropologists working on this issue describe adaptive fluctuations between broader and smaller groupings devised to make the most efficient use of the environment and of the knowledge and experience of group members. Davidson offers a clear definition of the concept of band among the

Waswanipi Cree: it is a group of independent families that inhabit a geographical area, speak the same language or dialect, share similar customs, and conceive themselves as forming a political entity (Davidson 1928). In a semi-nomadic context, the anthropological concept of band refers to an ephemeral assemblage gathering at specific

14 Next chapter will discuss more in details the importance of band lists for colonial institutions.

78 times of the year, usually in the summer, for definite reasons. However, most of the year the “band” fragments into smaller units.

From this perspective, Dunning (1959) discusses the organization of the Ojibwa

Pekangekum band through four orders. First, there is the ethnic group itself, which is comprised of other Ojibwa or Cree bands, and opposed to the Euro-Canadians who have been inhabiting the region for only a few centuries – an opposition that might in certain contexts take the form of a distinction between “aboriginal” and “non-aboriginal.” There are factors that make interactions between aboriginal groups of different cultural backgrounds possible: bilingualism, the ability to emphasize social and cultural similarities, long-term exchange, trade, and marriage. Therefore, this supposed “ethnic” identity is not based on the emergence of a symbolic and social divide with non- aboriginals, but on the existence of an actual social, spiritual, and cultural network as well as a regional sense of belonging. Such a network allows people to engage with each other whenever necessary (Chute 2002: 49-56). Secondly, Dunning describes the band as a social totality that is locally defined by its members, as opposed to other Ojibwa or

Cree communities or bands. Third, there is the co-residential group, which is the winter trapping settlement, often made up of two male hunters with their wives and families who act as "trapping partners." Finally, those hunters – who at times can also be female – are the head of a commensal unit. The latter expression designates family groups whose members live together in one tent or house. When the band comes together during the summer gathering, the co-residential units form clusters of tents set apart from each other retaining a physical identity (Dunning 1959: 54-7).

In her ethnographies of Innu and Naskapi society, Leacock refers to four levels of social integration and situates them in terms of their place in the environment. Ranging from the smallest to the largest, these are: a) the multifamily group, which consists of ten to twenty individuals (two to five related families) who inhabit a lodge or a camp; b) the winter band, consisting of thirty-five to seventy-five individuals who leave the coast together in the fall then divide in the winter into different camps while remaining close enough to lend help if needed; c) the band (150 to approximately 300 people) which travels over roughly the same defined territory and occupies a cluster of tents during the summer gatherings, and finally; d) the gatherings (up to 1,500 people) which assemble around trading posts during the summer (Leacock 1973).

Cummins, who worked among the Attawapiskat Cree, described a similar structure based on the function of each grouping. He identified the household, the smaller functional social unit made of two nuclear families, headed by siblings or in-laws. The microband – two to five families travelling together – is the unit of economic production during most of the year and is characterized by a high level of economic independence.

The macroband – about fifteen families linked together by affinal ties and occupying a particular river drainage basin – gathers in the summer to fish, hunt migratory birds, and perform social activities such as marriages (Cummins 2004: 12-3).

This table summarizes the distinct typologies developed by these authors:

Author Categories Dunning (1959) ethnic group band co-residential group commensal unit Leacock (1973) gathering band winter band multifamily group Cummins (2004) macroband microband household nuclear family

The composition of each of these groups relies on intricate relations with ecological circumstances. Tanner’s ethnography of the Mistassini Cree pointed toward the variability in size and content of different social assemblages in different regions. For instance, he defines the family as a social unit which joins with other similar units to form productive and efficient hunting groups; still, each family eats and lives separately.

Tanner recognizes that these commensal units may be bigger in other regions, as is the case of the Ojibwa described by Dunning (1959). However, in the case of the Mistassini

Cree, especially in the Nichicun northern territories where resources are less densely distributed over the territory, hunting groups gravitate around a central married couple although they may include unmarried and widowed relatives. The hunting groups are formed by several such families who share the same communal lodge during the winter and, during other seasons, place their tents in specific arrangements to form a camp

(Tanner 1979). A decade before him, Rogers had accounted for similar differences. He enumerated four factors that contribute to the size of hunting groups: the subarctic environment which requires a certain degree of mobility and only allows simple

81 technology; the density of game animals; the informality of the distribution system from a hunter to the rest of the group; and the acculturative impact of the fur trade which creates competition over animals between hunters (Rogers 1963: 78-80).

Social configurations change over the course of the year, but also from one year to another. In his ethnography of the Davis Inlet Naskapi, Henriksen (2000) wrote about elements of continuity and rupture in the succession of summer gatherings and winter trapping camps. It is during summer gatherings on the coast that the composition of winter hunting groups is decided, based on the prestige and leadership of individuals, on kinship and compatibilities, and on environmental conditions. The best hunters take initiatives based on their recognized knowledge, and are thus perceived as leaders.

Power(s) and Leadership

If the social organization of northern Algonkians is often described as egalitarian, internal politics and power dynamics are nonetheless present. Egalitarianism does not entirely preclude all forms of inequality. Anthropologist John Murdoch (2007) uses the concept of spontaneous order to understand James Bay Cree social organization.

Spontaneous order allows an understanding of the circumstantial features of leadership and power dynamics in subarctic groups. It is a concept that was proposed by Hayek

(1945) and Polanyi (2001) to understand the emergence and maintenance of capitalism and of international relations in the absence of an institution holding the monopoly of coercive force. Spontaneous order refers to the emergence of a social configuration through the actions of individuals driven by their own interests, yet not actively planning collective order. This concept thus depends on the actions and behaviours of individuals at specific moments. Murdoch however finds an important difference between

82 spontaneous order as Hakek and Polanyi theorized it and what he observed among the

Crees:

The main distinction between Hayek and Polanyi's spontaneous order, on one hand, and Aboriginal spontaneous order on the other, is that where the former needs some rules or legislation to compensate for the lack of morality in a free market, the latter Aboriginal hybrid is characterized by a strong gravitational field which curbs any such amoral centrifugal force. (Murdoch 2007, 15)

In such a context, egalitarianism refers to the fact that the economy of influence, leadership, and prestige – the common indications of status in hunting groups – is also integrated into the general moral rules, such as those framing the notion of reciprocity, which characterize the social organization of hunting groups.

In brief, power relations are based on gender, age, and personal experience which create differences in terms of influence, prestige, and leadership in the group. In 1935,

Regina Flannery described sexual divisions of labor and leadership among Eastern Crees.

At that time, Cree society had already been transformed through its interaction with

Europeans which, as we will see below, reinforced certain gender roles. Yet, what she describes coincides with the way informants described men’s and women’s roles in the traditional setting. She found tendencies and preferences rather than “hard and fast rules”

(1935: 81) concerning gender roles. For example, men are most likely to be recognized as

“owners” of family hunting territories; inheritance generally follows the male line.

However, it is the role of steward or hunting group leader that passes from individual to individual, while inheritance of the hunting territory itself is collective. The leader

(nituhuu uuchimaau) is thus the nominal representative of a family’s rights to a territory.

Flannery noted that a widow with no adult sons is said to be the one in charge of the land.

Moreover, she mentioned that everything a man provides to his family is his wife’s

83 property, including the kills; she decides how the meat will be distributed. The status of a woman in a community is however linked to her judgment and generosity in sharing and dealing with reciprocity. Flannery insisted on the circumstantial arrangements of leadership and labour between men and women, which are usually defined in equitable terms. Although she noted a tendency for men to be more involved in hunting and women, in the domestic sphere, no hard strict lines separate them, and men can do women’s work and vice-versa. In short, the division of labor is mainly influenced by individual abilities and circumstances. Finally, and in a similar way, status in politics and religious activity depends mainly on ability and personality, and women can participate

(Flannery 1935).

Ethnohistorian Bruce M. White examined gender roles in Ojibwa society during the fur trade. He noted that if it was mainly men – European and aboriginal – who participated in the trade, that was mostly due to European constructs of gender roles. In fact, he noted that women participated actively in barter and in the exchange of other commodities occurring in the margins of the fur trade. Moreover, women could exert control as marriage partners of trading captains or of European traders. White concludes that women’s status and roles were shaped more by the spiritual aspect of power embodied within individuals than by any rigid gender-based division of labour or definition of power (White 1999). Ohmagari and Berkes (1997: 217) also noted that the complementarity of the people traditionally constituting a household, where men and women knew how to do all the tasks with diverse preferences and levels of ability, allowed for circumstantial arrangements that acknowledged and valued all types of individual knowledge.

Social attributes – the sum of what one could consider as cultural, social, or symbolic capital – are gained through what Turner and Wertman (1977) call the hunter’s career. This concept evokes the metaphor of learning hunting skills to understand the development process through which an individual, throughout his or her life, learns appropriates tasks, information, and knowledge, thereby expanding his or her social network. It refers to a process unfolding through the actions of individuals who create networks by navigating through ties of kinship and friendship in which they share experiences and knowledge.

Knowledge, alliances, and prestige influence one another. Yet, prestige and power do not translate into an accumulation of social or economic capital. Products circulate through common sharing which is a rule that obliges "any individual who is the holder of certain goods to share them equally with any other individual, regardless of the relationship between the giver and the receiver, and regardless of whether the receiver reciprocates" (Henriksen 2000: 40). This economic rule exists concomitantly with an egalitarian political structure in which there is virtually no authority structure outside the nuclear family. The household has a relatively autonomous domestic mode of production and is by and large internally characterized by what Sahlins calls generalized reciprocity

(1972). The domestic sphere produces most of what its members need to live and takes the most important decisions concerning movements on the land and regulating the procedure of events. Redistribution of resources and cooperation among households also takes place at summer gatherings and during visits to neighboring winter camps. Social mechanisms in the larger group ensure that no territory or resource is being over- or under-utilized, or mismanaged by local family and territory leaders (uuchimaauch).

Recognition of leadership is based on pragmatic and contingent concerns related to knowledge and to the survival of the group: "If a hunting boss's authority fails to result in collective benefit, due to inexpert decisions or unwillingness to share hunting opportunities, other hunters do not respect his decisions about the use of his grounds and a localized breakdown of the informal rules may occur until new leadership is initiated and accepted" (Scott 1986: 171). Therefore, the absence of a fixed and definite hierarchical structure does not mean that there is no political life. Power is mostly spiritual and juridical; it fluctuates depending on the circumstance, or on individual strategies, and is constantly being renegotiated. Inequality of status is part of the definition of the hunting group (Tanner 1979: 187).

Preston writes about the concept of Mistabeo, which was first defined by Speck

(1924, 1935) as an active companion to the soul, the essence of human life and a kind of ethical super-Ego. Preston defines it as an attending spirit manifesting itself in its influence over the behavior of other people, animals, or objects and which can be used effectively for conjuring. It implies the self-limitation of one’s freedom through a spiritual commitment to the contingencies of bush life that not all hunters choose to undertake. However, "the Cree prefer not to make an explicit separation of the environment from the social and mental context. They view phenomena not as something objective and self-contained but more in the context of the human significance of particular phenomena" (Preston 2002: 182). Therefore, one’s leadership is based on this intimate relationship developed with the Mistabeo and the environment, and on the recognition by others of his ability to extract meaning and significance which enhance the group’s productivity and interest.

In the case of Waswanipi Cree, Feit showed that hunters see themselves as potentially controlling the environment and the product of their hunts; natural elements, animals, and phenomena (e.g. winds, rivers, mountains, trees, etc.) are invested with intelligence and are integrated in the realm of “persons” with which a hunter has to maintain good relations. A hunter has great influence over the hunt and can make use of all kinds of strategies to enhance his/her productiveness. The Cree consider themselves as empowered and, with a significant level of knowledge and self-control, capable of extracting meanings and teachings from experiences and even changing the course of events. A good leader knows how to assert, share and let people appropriate the meanings that he or she associates with events. Ultimately, charisma and leadership allow people to identify with the leader’s experience, taking it as an exemplar to make sense of their own existence. Leaders are important for the integration of groups and for the organization of social life and solidarities, since they are people around whom others gather.

Morantz (1986: 79) suggests that there may have been more exchange between research on Athapaskan and Subarctic Algonquin groups given significant similarities in terms of social organization and ecological contexts. According to Legros, who worked with Athapaskan groups in Yukon, ambitious family leaders could create political alliances by marrying their children to those of other powerful men, thereby allowing them to hunt on other hunting grounds while maintaining the cohesion of the original groups (Legros 1981: 878). New alliances imply that movements on the land shape social networks. The fact that group members around them acknowledge leaders confers onto them a gravitational force that secures the composition of groups.

Oscillations and Movements

Hunting groups and households are seldom isolated or, more exactly, they do not conceive themselves as such. Families share dwellings in the winter trapping camps, can visit or share with other surrounding camps, and often live within multi-tent camps as well. Social networks and the constant reconfiguration of groups lead to porous frontiers.

Hickerson (1967) wrote about early 20th century ethnographic research which described

Northeastern Algonkians’ typical personalities as atomistic or particularistic that is favouring pragmatism, independence, control, and indifference (Speck 1915; Hallowell

1926). By extension, these authors assumed that such features allowed for a form of social organization based on private property. Conversely, Hickerson showed that such atomism precisely contributed to the formation of a broad structure allowing individuals and families to constantly expand their network through partnerships and alliances, and to take decisions communally, in an egalitarian manner. However, in practice, through cyclical nomadic movements on the land, it has been noted that Athapaskan bands oscillate between the atomist pole, or lower level relationships and domestic groups

(mainly sibling and conjugal ties) enjoying a great deal of autonomy, and the unitary pole of the group, based on the ties between the parents that draw people away or into alliances in times of need (Lanoue 1992). These oscillations are also noticeable in

Subarctic Algonkian groups, and they are important for understanding the articulation of individual experiences, identities, and senses of belonging.

Oscillations take place between larger and reduced forms of groupings. They are complemented by principles of social organization that put the focus not on the verticality of kinship (i.e., lines of descent), but on its horizontality (e.g. siblings, in-laws and

88 cousins). Accordingly, people seek to create relations with the two or three contemporaneous generations (Rogers and Black Rogers 1982; Mailhot 1997).

Honigmann writes: "It is likely that in each generation affinal ties to some extent created genealogical links between the constituent microcosmic units and formed the basis for circulation of people within the territory" (Honigmann 1956: 59). According to Tanner’s research with the Cree, association was established first within the domestic (commensal) unit and extended outward through partnership, friendship, and affinal ties. Inheritance is described as being passed to co-residents who are mainly, but not exclusively, kin.

Tanner highlights how inheritance is both a practical and a spiritual issue: as encounters with animals decrease for an older person, they increase for younger people. As specific individuals have more encounters on a given territory, they acquire knowledge and entitlement. Inheritance is thus a gradual and pragmatic process (Tanner 1973: 111). It creates a concept of a group with dynamic, possibly expanding, boundaries depending on its relative inclusiveness and processes of incorporation.

These observations are echoed by Ridington’s research conducted in the Subarctic

Athabascan- and Tlingit-speaking groups of Yukon. He maintains that any clear distinction between local or regional groups, based on social groupings or cultural practices, is arbitrary as the realities of group awareness and socio-political unity are mostly circumstantial and primarily based on consanguine and alliance kin networks which often spread beyond the immediate area (Ridington 1978). Bands have dynamic boundaries that cannot be fathomed without an understanding of the actual experiences of individuals.

Turner and Wertman developed a structural-functionalist perspective on this issue:

The aggregation, dispersal and reconstitution of production units should not be seen as being derived from more abstract cultural norms […]. Rather, residential patterns should be seen as a product of the principles which govern the configuration of labour, the same principles which, on examination, govern the formation of hunting-trapping partnerships[…]. (Turner and Wertman 1977: 28).

The ability of the group to generate a way of life allowing and acknowledging diverse experiences and interpretations is seen as a quality for the group, something through which the group asserts its uniqueness and its distinctive identity in relation to other surrounding aboriginal and non-aboriginal communities. Movement and diversity are integral parts of creating, managing, and maintaining social connections and cultural processes, as well as integral components of the collective identity of the group.

The Family Hunting Territories

What comes out of the previous section is an adaptive social structure built through cyclical movements on the land which are often referred to as semi-nomadism

(Bahre 1980). This form of social organization is contingent on a system of land tenure that is adaptive, but also made up of specific forms of relationships with the land by which social relations take place and gain meanings. I will concentrate on the study of the relation between aboriginal land tenure and social cohesion, which motivated a good portion of ethnographic research realized among subarctic Algonkians in the beginning of the 20th century.

American algonquinist ethnographer Frank Speck initiated these discussions when he coined the concept of family hunting territory; he defined it as a specific district of varying inherited since time immemorial within the same families (usually from father to son) where kinship groups had the right to hunt, trap and fish (Speck 1915). His ethnographies (1915; 1924; 1935), like those of many ethnographers of his time, are mostly based on interviews with a few select key informants, as well as on conversations with fur traders, HBC employees, and government officials. Speck collected their accounts and transferred them onto maps of whole regions, showing family hunting territories used by entire bands.

After Speck, some ethnographers used similar methods to complete, comment, amend or critique the definition. Notably, John Cooper, a priest ethnographer, supported the concept of the family hunting territory, to which hunters referred as nitastci (“my land”) or katcin’tohoyan (“the place where I hunt”) (Regina and Chambers 1986). He argued that the system may be attributed to the nature and distribution of fauna and flora.

He noted that hunting territories are used mainly for winter hunting and trapping of fur- bearing sedentary animals. According to him, people hunting migratory herds (such as buffalo in the plains) depended on a communal migratory system while those hunting and trapping more sedentary species in the woodlands developed more static modes of land tenure, such as the family hunting territory (Cooper 1939). Moreover, Cooper is the one who compiled data about specific family grounds in the early 1930s, in the region of southern James Bay and in northern sections of the Harricana River watershed, as well as in Moose Factory. His ethnography is based on one informant, Simon Smallboy, who was

91 able to retrace land use down from his grandparents’ generation, i.e. from about the

1850s.

Leacock built a fundamental Marxist critique of Speck's concept of the family hunting based on this point (1954, 1980, 1982). According to her, the aboriginal communal system was not a system of ownership but a structure of usufruct rights in which resources were made available to all members of the band. She emphasized how

Speck and Cooper failed to see, first, that the historical fur trade contributed to the transformation of the socioeconomic and political forms that existed within the band, and, second, the discrepancy between the rhetorical possession of individual territories and the uses of these territories.

Following Leacock’s critique, the concept became the centre of an important discussion in politics, as well as in academic anthropology, about the origins of the configuration hunting territories. The fact is that Speck’s definition stands out owing to its resonance with the notion of private property. Indeed, he defines the concept as a tract of land that stays in the hands of a “corporate” family group. Speck generally referred to the leader of the hunting group as the "owner" of a trapping and hunting territory who was entitled to punish trespassers and poachers. Feit (1991) and Leroux et al. (2004) clearly showed that Speck was writing in a particular context, and was advocating the aboriginal people’s rights to the land at a time when the opening of regions for Euro-

Canadian settlers threatened aboriginal people’s rights over the land:

[Speck] situe son désir de défendre la cause autochtone en fonction des procédures du gouvernement américain qui voulait éradiquer toute tenue collective des terres dans ses négociations avec les Indiens en imposant à

ceux-ci des politiques administratives qui visaient à diviser leurs groupes par un morcellement privé du territoire.15 (Leroux et al. 2004: 18)

In fact, Speck realized his most complete research among groups who were increasingly disrupted by colonizers, white trappers, and industries such as mining and forestry:

It is significant that Speck's central, legitimizing, and defining cases developed not from long-settled and disrupted areas, nor from the more northerly and isolated peoples in northern Quebec, [but] from areas in which colonization was several decades old and was intensifying, and in which there was an active political response or resistance to at least some aspects of the process (Feit 1991: 127)

For Leacock, who wrote from a neo-Marxian perspective, the family hunting territory was a consequence of the marginal integration of subarctic bands in a capitalist economy, of their increasing dependence on an outside market, and of the shift from communal group subsistence to individual family trapping activities (Leacock 1980: 79). Her understanding of the family hunting territory is based on an imagined dichotomy between trapping for exchange and trapping for subsistence, which has been critiqued on the ground that aboriginal people did not make this distinction. In fact, fur-bearing animals have been continuously used as sources of fur, as well as for food (Morantz 1986; Tanner

1979). In short, the debate over the origins of the family hunting territory encouraged a static and rigid definition of such territories.

However, in the 1960s and ’70s, after Leacock’s critique, the academic discussion shifted to the functions and modes of operation of the contemporary Algonquian land tenure system (Tanner 1986). Ethnographers working on the study of land tenure among subarctic Algonkians began to focus on the idea that family hunting territories were part

15 [Speck] situates his desire to advocate for the indigenous cause in relation to US government policies aimed at eradicating all modes of collective land tenure in their negotiations with Indians, and imposing upon them administrative policies dividing groups and fragmenting territories (author’s translation).

93 of a collective system. Although specific tracts of land were in the hands of particular kin groups, the use of hunting territories was negotiated, especially during summer gatherings but also to a lesser extent throughout the year, to decide which group, made up of which people, would hunt on which hunting ground (Henriksen 2000). Hunting grounds were commonly loaned for a season or two from the uuchimaau’s family in charge on a good will basis, giving the borrower the full enjoyment of the land with no obligation (Cooper 1939).

In fact, the hunting territories are tied to the notion of “hunting career,” which is based on the hunter’s ability to engage in new hunting partnerships and create a vast, reliable network of relationships. We saw in the previous section how aboriginal social organization was constantly re-negotiated and re-configurated. It was characterized by the movement of relatively stable groups of various sizes, depending on the time of the year, the region and the nature of the hunt. It is in this social context that the aboriginal system of land tenure has to be understood. People moved around on the land as they engaged in relations with other people and partnerships. Just as there were groups to which they were more closely related, there were also places where they established deeper relationships. For example, other kinds of activities such as goose hunting (a communal activity which requires the coordination of many hunters), fishing (activities which are practiced in the best areas a couple can find and based on a technique supporting the complementary roles of individuals within the household; Scott 1986), and the hunt for nomadic caribou (Leacock 1954) required different types of social organization which used family hunting divisions in different ways. Who hunted where

94 was thus continually re-negotiated throughout the year depending on the season, the type of hunt, and the circumstantial arrangement of social relations at the moment.

When conducting interviews with several hunters in the same band and comparing where people situated their family territory and where they had hunted, Turner and

Wertman (1977) noted the difficulty of drawing clear boundaries around hunting territories because of the complexity of people’s experience and the ambiguities of what

“ownership” concretely meant for them. People identified the places where their family usually trapped, but would simultaneously state that people could hunt wherever they wanted. If individuals identified their kin group oly with specific pieces of land, part of a hunting career was to hunt in a variety of places borrowed from different family leaders, or under their lead, in order to gain experience and prestige (Turner and Wertman 1977).

In fact, it is considered that the definition of hunting territories does not reify distinct territories, spaces, or places but rather points to networks of places. Descola borrows

Poirier’s use of the Australian concept of il-rah to understand a relationship created with the land, according to which occupation of the land does not radiate from a single point, but unfolds into a network of itineraries marked out with stops and more or less numerous markers (Poirier 1996; Descola 2005: 61). Just as in the structuration of social interactions, the value of reciprocity and the occurrences of inequalities regarding prestige and leadership were woven into the ways people maintained hunting territories.

Authors inspired by cultural ecology or structural Marxism argued that hunting territories formed a game management system (Feit 1971; Tanner 1979), or that they were an extension of property over fur to the animals before they were caught (Rogers

1963). Harvey Feit argued that the emphasis should not be only on the land itself; one

95 should rather account for the various types of motivation which explain the adoption of hunting territories. Among these, there is the management of animal resources (Feit

1978), the need to hunt more efficiently, to maintain reciprocity with other hunters, animals or elements of the environment, and to exercise one's leadership (Feit 2004).

Moreover, hunting territories may have been, in certain cases, the objects of cultural diffusion from other surrounding aboriginal groups (Feit 2007). Yet, it is improbable that fur trade or other colonial agents could account for the complex intricacy of social, ecological, spiritual, economic, and political motives that hunting territories represent

(Scott 1986). Family hunting territories are complex socio-cultural configurations proper to the aboriginal populations of the Subarctic that have proven able to change and adapt to social, colonial and ecological contingencies.

* *

This chapter dealt with the social organization of subarctic hunter-gatherer groups. I demonstrate how its composition and internal mechanisms resulted from interactions and negotiations between different individuals, families, groups and bands.

An important corollary of aboriginal organization is that even in small winter camps, individuals and families felt spiritually and socially tied to other similar groups spread over remarkable distances. They still considered themselves part of broad networks and webs of relationships and partnerships that included not only humans, but also animals and natural phenomena. In the 1920’s and ’30s, discussions of Algonkian social

96 organization were surrounded by important political and theoretical debates, which somehow contributed to the portrayal of these social configurations as static and atemporal. However, the end of such heated debates allowed for a greater diversity of foci and more organic constructs. According to these perspectives, three realities, 1) kinship, 2) band outlines, and 3) hunting territories, are negotiated contextually and pragmatically in ways that involve social, ecological and religious factors.

This discussion will be relevant throughout the rest of this dissertation to understand the different potential, sometimes co-existing ways of defining one’s community. In brief, many features of social organization discussed in this chapter are relevant to understanding contemporary formulations of identity and constructions of community, as well as the dynamic debates whereby Washaw Sibipeople negotiate who is a member and who is not. At various junctures in the dissertation, I will tackle the question of the incongruence of the relational and context-based approach to kinship discussed above with bureaucratic and administrative definitions of descent. This issue arises especially in Chapter 6, in dealing with the interaction between official definitions of the Washaw Sibi community and the common discourses circulating among members.

The implications of the concept of spontaneous order allowing oscillations between more local and region-wide networks will be particularly relevant in Chapter 5, which describes local inter-group interactions. Finally, the concept of hunting career and family territory, and the importance of deep experiences shared with people and places in the unfolding of social networks explained here, will be pertinent in the next two chapters dealing with the history of the group and the maintenance of relative cohesion in a context of social and ecological transformations.

CHAPTER 3

COLONIZATION AND THE

MARGINALIZATION OF WASHAW SIBI

This chapter discusses colonial presence in the Subarctic, which had the effect of increasing control over aboriginal inhabitants, and eventually forcing upon them a model for sedentary communities attached to specific tracts of lands. The first section of this chapter focuses on the history of the fur trade up until the early 19th century. It discusses early colonial attempts to take advantage of aboriginal populations and harness their organization to the profitability of the trade. Confederation in 1867 and the Indian Act in

1876 impacted all aboriginal peoples across Canada. These legislatures were the founding base for the implementation of a series of land policies and for the opening of Subarctic territories to Euro-Canadian settlement and exploitation, which had fragmenting and destructive effects on the lives of aboriginal people.

The next sections will thus focus on three important events that affected more particularly the Subarctic region at the border of Quebec and Ontario and especially the

Washaw Sibi Crees: 1) the signature of Treaty 9 and the establishment of the provincial border; 2) the construction of the railway; and 3) the creation of beaver preserves and traplines. Whereas aboriginal social configuration impacted the fur trade and contributed to its development in the early times of colonization, the situation switched after 1867 and the multiplication of policies considerably transformed the social lives of aboriginal

98 people and their relations to the land. That eventually led to the marginalization and disempowerment of certain groups in contrast with others.

The Early Fur Trade with Europeans and the First Band Lists

The cross-Atlantic fur trade marks a four-century long period. The term “fur trade” is an expression referring to a whole set of different practices that largely motivated much of the colonial explorations and settlement in what is known nowadays as Canada. In the subarctic area, the colonial presence was for a long time limited to the infrastructure and the staff required for that form of trade.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the French concentrated their military and commercial presence along the St. Lawrence River. The British settled on the East Coast of North America, but also explored the Northern portion of the continent by navigating north of what is known today as the Quebec-Labrador peninsula. The first explorations of

English navigator Henry Hudson (1610), who is said to have sailed down to the vicinity of Rupert River, and Thomas James (1631), gave their names to Hudson Bay and James

Bay. First explorations and trading missions led to the creation of the Hudson Bay

Company (HBC) charter in 1670 by King Charles II of England. As early as 1673, the

HBC erected a post at the mouth of the Moose River. The HBC – formally the

“Company of Adventurers of England trading in Hudson Bay” – became an important actor in the region covering the watershed of rivers flowing into Hudson and James Bay

(about 3.9 km2), called Rupert’s Land (Francis 1976: 8).

Figure 5. Rupert’s Land in 1709

(Source: Samuel Thornton (1709). Hudson Bay and Strait, Made by Saml: Thornton at the Signe of the Platte in the Minories London Anno. in Hayes 2002: 78)

Prior to the 19th century, colonial presence in James Bay consisted mainly of traders and employees of trading companies, mainly the HBC, but gradually, from the 1840’s onward, missionary presence in the region increased (Francis and Morantz 1983: 161).

Traders collected animal fur from aboriginal groups in exchange for various goods.

Throughout the fur trade, trading posts were located at the mouth of large rivers which were used as transportation and communication routes. In many places companies built posts in locations that were already used as summer gathering places by aboriginal

100 populations. The drainage basin of the Harricana River crosses the boundary between

Ontario and Quebec, and includes the southern section of Rupert House territories, the south-east section of Moose Factory Cree territories, and the northern section of the territories of the Abitibi (Abitibiwinni).

Three posts were particularly important for Washaw Sibi: Rupert's House, Moose

Factory, and Fort Abitibi (built in 1686 on Abitibi Lake). These posts are located around the drainage basin of the Harricana River. There was, at certain times, a secondary trading post at the mouth of the Harricana River, in Hannah Bay. For Euro-Canadian, aboriginal peoples’ identities were contingent upon their frequenting a given trading post.

Cree families for their part defined their own identities in association with their family hunting territories, nested within broad networks of kinship and established partnership.

Up utnil the end of the 18th century, the choice of the posts where transactions would actually take place was a matter of convenience, and not of identity, for hunters.

Yet the aggregates of people gathering annually for the summer months were named "regional bands" by traders and chroniqueurs, and later on by missionaries and state administrators. The fur trade contributed to transforming these gatherings, as it attracted aboriginal families to certain gathering places, leaving other places less frequented. Hannah Bay was a secondary post and was not operational every year.16

Harricana River Crees therefore had to trade at Rupert's House or Moose Factory, the closest posts, or travelled upriver to Fort Abitibi. Fur traders often negotiated with trade captains, which is the title given to men chosen by groups of hunters to negotiate with the

16 According to many Washaw Sibi members, the fact that it was not always open, and that it was actually permanently closed in the 1830’s, affected their frequenting of the site. Ulterior uses of the site, notably as a goose hunting camp administered by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources during the 20th century, contributed to its continuity up until the general sedentarization of the Washaw Sibi families in the 1960s and ’70s, when the site no longer served for important gatherings.

101 fur traders. Traders accorded these individuals deferential treatment and gifts, such as a

“captain’s coat” or other distinguishing apparel, which likely reinforced a certain image of leadership. In some cases traders also imposed a rule of primogeniture in appointing certain captains (Bishop 1994: 298).

European control over aboriginal social organization remained partial because there were very few effective devices of control when distanced from European concentrations. Europeans also did not want to interfere with a system that had proved profitable for the three centuries the fur trade lasted. For a long time, the extraction of fur in northern America was mainly based on aboriginal organization and technology: "The fur trade was not an economic enterprise developed in the Old World and imposed on the

New. Quite the contrary, trading practices were shaped in large part by the environment of the north and the cultures of the peoples who lived there" (Francis & Morantz 1983:

41). Aboriginal groups therefore retained agency and significant control over their participation in trade, and in the conduct of their lives.

Still, political and economic changes affected the fur trade and, ultimately, aboriginal groups’ involvement increased. The decades following the creation of the

HBC were characterized by a series of conflicts between France and England, which took the form of regional raids to gain control over the fur trade. For example, Elaine A.

Mitchell gives an account of the route taken by Chevalier de Troyes, a captain in the

French Navy, who, after building a fort in Lake Timiskaming, travelled to take over the

English outposts located along southern James Bay:

After building his fort and leaving four men in it, de Troyes and his party crossed the lake in a northwesterly direction to the Abitibi River which, in turn, led them down to the Moose River and finally to Moose Fort on its island in the mouth of that river, which they captured easily. The later

102

Montreal traders also generally used this route between Lake Abitibi and James Bay but there were rivers flowing into the lake which they could, and did, follow to the Bay. One of these is the La Reine, emptying into the northeastern sector of the lake and leading directly to the Harricanaw River and Hannah Bay, while at the eastern end of the lake the La Sarre leads northeasterly towards the Nottaway and the Rupert. The French in Timiskaming probably knew and frequented all these rivers for they traded en dérouine, that is, they carried trade goods from their main stations to the Indian lands, living in temporary shelters. (Mitchell 1977: 9-10)

This account is interesting for many reasons. It sheds light on the strategic importance of the fur trade, as well as the political and human investments it represented. Furthermore, it illustrates the use of the watershed spreading between southern James Bay rivers, such as the Nottaway and the Rupert, and Lake Abitibi through the Harricana River and other rivers that are part of the same watershed. Having access to such watersheds was crucial for the European powers and conflicts between European claims relied on aboriginal skill and knowledge of the land. Moreover, European territorial claims had deep implications for the lives of the first inhabitants of the region. The watershed mentioned in the quote above is actually where Washaw Sibi Eeyou group locates its traditional territory, i.e. the

Upper Harricana River and southern James Bay watershed.

We also note the constant exchange, trade, and movement between Abitibi

Indians, often referred to as Algonquins or Ojibwa, and James Bay Crees. This route was already well in use, and known by both aboriginal groups and European traders, in the

17th century. Mitchell eloquently and precisely documents how, on the one hand, movements across such broad distances were routinely initiated and how, on the other hand, a known and regular route existed between southern James Bay, Abitibi and

Timiskaming Lakes.

103

Conflicts between France and England in the region ended with the British conquest of New France and the signature of the Paris Treaty in 1763. However, the HBC still faced decades of commercial conflicts, especially with the Northwest Company, founded in Montreal in 1782. This rivalry resulted in the multiplication of fur trading posts both in coastal and inland areas, either located close to the competition or strategically positioned to block aboriginal groups from reaching competitors (Bishop

1994: 291). These strategies included the erection of palisades around more important posts, and also tighter surveillance of aboriginal groups, as well as the sale of alcohol and other goods to win business and furs, or the forceful appropriation of furs from aboriginals to make sure that they would not take them to the competitor. Needless to say, this period was accompanied by a history of violence:

At Frederick House in 1813 an Indian murdered the traders and a number of local Indians. The culprit was never captured, nor the post reopened. Farther west, the Crane and the Tinpot […] were especially notorious. In September 1803 the Crane threatened Osnaburgh House. On 9 September eight of the Crane’s sons declared they would pull the post’s stockades down to steal brandy. […] According to traders, other Indians fought amongst themselves, especially when intoxicated, and murders were relatively common. (Bishop 1994: 293)

In 1832, a similar event happened at Hannah Bay. A group of starving aboriginal people were refused help by the employees of the post and killed all the personnel. The HBC found the family they assumed had done it and killed all the males.17

The competitive climate of the 19th century increased incentives to coerce hunters to trade at only one post. Traders began to correspond with each other to ensure that when a hunter traded or took supplies at a different post, his transaction would be registered (Bishop 1994). Moreover, through this correspondence, traders began to agree

17 For more information on what is remembered as the “Hannah Bay massacre,” see Chabot 2010.

104 upon attributing each family a "home post" as a mark of provenance. They compiled lists of people trading at their respective posts in order to generate post loyalty among aboriginal hunters, and to make trade more profitable. Yet, these incentives consist of early attempts to enframe, "rationalize," and objectify complex networks into politically, geographically, socially, and culturally delimited collective units that would only have made sense to European traders. These early lists were compiled in partial and incomplete ways, but still have implications for contemporary notions of membership and community.

The next decades are marked by increasing organization of the fur trade. After decades of competition, the HBC and the North-West Company merged in 1821 to establish order and more harmonious trading relations. The resulting company kept the name of Hudson Bay Company and gained monopoly of the fur trade in the region. It made important posts stronger, such as Moose Factory and Rupert’s House Bay, and closed some of the posts that had been opened to maintain competition. New policies were enacted. For instance, trading liquor was banned and early conservation measures were introduced to re-establish the beaver population that had been diminished by over- trapping that followed from ferocious competition between the former HBC and NWC

(Rogers 1994).

Trading Post Bands

One important consequence of the foundation of HBC’s monopoly was the repetitive attempts, from HBC traders, to form “trading post bands.” These attempts first had consequences at the main coastal posts such as Moose Factory and Rupert House and then, gradually, in the outposts located further inland. Attempts to focus trading

105 relationships and fashion loyalty to certain posts and places, since the 17th century, are apparent in fur traders’ tireless work to build lists of band members for each trading post

(Scott & Morrison 2004). Given the complexity of the social processes at work in the subarctic, band affiliation was, up until the second half of the 19th century, mainly a

European traders’ problem. HBC traders’ control over aboriginal groups remained limited for most of the fur trade.

The HBC monopoly empowered the company to take measures enforcing trade by aboriginal groups at specific posts, with the possibility of transfers only upon the recommendation of a European chief factor. We have seen that it was customary for

European traders to address aboriginal captains who had previously acted as interlocutors and traders for family groups. As traders started to deal with individual trappers more frequently, they initiated the use of the word “chief” to refer to the person with whom they dealt concerning more general issues, such as the condition of the animal populations, the location of families on the land, the price of trading items, etc. (Rogers

1994: 323)18.

Bishop (1994) notes other ways in which trading posts contributed to the transformation of certain aspects of aboriginal social organization. As most families generally wintered on hunting territories in scattered inland camps composed of a few families, a few sets of families gradually began to winter closer to major coastal posts

18It is important to note that at the same time, through the 19th century, the administration and regulation of Indian bands was generalized and gradually unified with colonial Indian and early post-Confederation policy. These policies imposed the election of local chiefs and band councils on all southern aboriginal groups that had been more profoundly and intensely affected by colonization (Tobias 1991). As the Crown had put Rupert’s Land in the hand of the HBC to make the fur trade profitable, the HBC took the place of a virtual colonial government, and became the vector and agent of imposition upon aboriginal populations subject to colonial rule. The notion of “chief” has to be understood also within this re-organization of social and political life.

106 where they frequently traded. These sets of families, who often originally had their family hunting territories in the lowlands and coastal regions, received the name of Home

Guard. Lytwyn (2002) associates the Home Guard to what is later known in the anthropological literature as the coasters – as opposed to the inlanders. However, the title of Home Guard implies a relationship of service to the fur trading posts not necessarily defined solely by the geographical location of hunting territories. Some coasters had their hunting grounds close to trading posts and did not become Home Guard, and some coasters hunted as remote from the posts as did inlanders. The defining feature of the

Home Guard is the post where they traded, and to which they intimately became identified. Except for the Home Guard who worked for the traders, or established early sedentary residence around the posts, the amount of time aboriginals spent at a post over the course of a year was quite short compared to that spent on the hunting territories. In both summer and freeze-up seasons, the distances walked or canoed by people were usually quite considerable. Moreover, hunting territories were also locales for important ceremonial rituals and social events with kin networks, hunting partners, animals and spiritual beings.

From the European traders’ points of view, the Home Guard, who in many cases were of mixed-ancestry, made the trade easier as they facilitated communication between traders and hunters. They also could be used as cheap workers to maintain the posts. Yet from the non-Home Guard hunters’ point of view, they represented an increasingly distinct group with its own organization who were often looked down upon because of their proximity to fur traders and their decreasing presence on hunting territories.

Competition for leadership and power near the post happened at a completely different

107 level: people bought products in a market economy that did not confer prestige and leadership like hunting, trapping, fishing, and gathering did for people still participating in the nomadic lifestyle. In fact, people at the post were not in need of leaders as they participated marginally in an emergent wage economy (Henriksen 2010). By the mid-19th century, the Home Guard became associated with assimilation and an inability to live off the land. A pejorative connotation was hence associated with the word (Lytwyn 2002).

The following quote from Joseph Boyden’s novel Three Day Road gives a good idea of the connotations attached to the Home Guard during the 20th century when his narrator,

Niska, relates her passage through Moose Factory after spending most of her life in the bush:

“I went through the Indian part of Moose Factory first, looking for faces that I know. There were many that I recognized from my childhood and from my brief time at the residential school, and immediately it was obvious that an invisible wall, one impossible to breach, lay between me and the homeguard Indians of this white town. […] The Indians here seemed full, full of food, full of drink, full like I saw the white men look full. I became almost envious walking around, feeling the stares burrowing into my back. For so many years, it was as if I’d gone hungry. My body was smaller than the others’, having rarely been able to feed itself to full.” (Boyden 2005: 168)

Groups who had their hunting territories inland, further away from trading posts, were less subject to surveillance and policies imposed by European traders and officials.

Consequently, social and geographical boundaries continued to shift and be re-negotiated among aboriginal groups according to social events (e.g. marriages, hunter partnerships, friendships, etc.) and ecological contingencies for a longer period of time. In fact, given the fact that the production of fur was based mostly on aboriginal social configuration and technology, forms of colonial control over Subarctic aboriginal populations were always partial (Morantz 2002:64).

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In practice, not all regional bands identified as closely with trading posts, which gave European traders the feeling of a loose, chaotic organization. Hunters associated with other posts sometimes came to Hannah Bay store. The opposite also happened, as hunters from the Harricana River basin entered lands located in the vicinity of other regional groups. Toby Morantz' review of the HBC archives offers good examples of that situation:

In the records of the late 1700's and early 1800's, the hunters are named. For example, Pusso was the captain of the Hannah Bay Indians but he came in to trade at Rupert House, in addition to Moose Factory. His lands are not specified but he almost certainly hunted in what is now Ontario. However, the question is whether he was a "Rupert House Indian." The same question can be applied to his contemporary, Tishywyae, as well as to others. The fact that they were "Hannah Bay Indians" means that they hunted in that general region and in total they formed a small group. At one point, when the post at Hannah Bay was functioning, there were ten hunters. This is the likely size of the Hannah Bay group and it conforms to the local group described earlier. (Morantz 1985: 85)

Movement between Abitibi and James Bay was also common. For instance,

Chabot found references to Abitibi Indians trading at the Hannah Bay store in 1805,

1806, 1818, and 1819 (2002: 154-55). Morantz found the names of Hannah Bay Indians in many trading ports located around the Harricana River drainage basin. For example, some hunted up the Harricana River and went to Moose Factory to trade, on the extreme north-west of the Harricana River drainage. Nanpaweshin, on his side, traded in Moose

Factory; he had a winter hunting camp at Kesagami Lake, half-way between Hannah Bay and Lake Abitibi (Morantz 1985: 40-47). Similarly, in the early 19th century, Peter

Trapper’s grandfather, Governor, and his three sons Mutchiway, Namacoose, and

Wanihikai were considered Hannah Bay Indians and were reported to hunt on the southern end of Rupert Bay and on the north side of the Nottaway River, i.e. north-east of

109 the mouth of the Harricana River. These lands, just like those of the Diamonds (also reported to trade most often in Hannah Bay, as well as in Rupert’s House and Moose

Factory), bordered the lands of Waswanipi Crees on the south-east border of their hunting grounds (Morantz 1985: 71-72).

The Washaw Sibi group did not become a Home Guard. Its territories, located inland on the upper Harricana River, contributed to keeping the group at a significant social and geographical distance from the economic and social influences of any particular trading post. Nevertheless, social relations continued to take place between aboriginal neighboring groups. In the 1930s, anthropologist Regina Flannery interviewed

Ellen Smallboy, a Moose Factory elderly woman who talked to her about differences in the treatment of food between Moose Factory and Hannah Bay Crees. She reported the following event that took place in the second half of the 19th century, after the Hannah

Bay trading post was closed:

On this occasion they were visiting at Hannah Bay, and Ellen had a quantity of caribou meat that Simon had brought in shortly before. At the time of their visit, the camp at Hannah Bay was holding a caribou feast. Ellen felt sorry for the wives, who, following Hannah Bay norms, were proscribed from eating the choice parts (head and foreparts) which apparently Ellen was not constrained from enjoying. So she invited the women to her tent, giving them "a good feed" of all parts of the caribou. The Hannah Bay men thought this was quite amusing because, as Ellen put it, "It wasn't their hunt." (Flannery 1995: 37)

We note here that Ellen Smallboy is aware she is dealing with a distinct social group whose own cultural habits became apparent when they visit Hannah Bay. Yet that did not prevent “visits” between people of different bands in maintaining or creating social ties.

The fact that Ellen Smallboy disrupts the local ethics of meat sharing, and prefers sharing it in a way that makes more sense to her, is indicative of the fluidity and ability to

110 accommodate and pragmatically adapt to different settings; it is also indicative of the importance of reciprocal exchanges and social interactions within and between groups.

The quote attests to the idea of mutual understanding, and the ability to adapt to and reformulate each other’s habits. In other words, social and cultural borders were quite porous.

The 1867 British North America Act and the Indian Act

Signed in 1867, the British North America Act granted Canada the status of

Dominion: a self-governing colony within the British Empire. In general, in the decades following 1867, the relation between aboriginal groups and the state gradually changed due to an increasing sense of Canadian nationalism, the political desire to affirm geopolitical dominance (Milloy 1991), and the formation of a national market economy

(Dwidedi and Gow 1999). The early decades of Confederation were also characterized by the consolidation of the institutions and of the bureaucracy that defined relations between the state and aboriginal peoples.

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Figure 6. The Dominion of Canada in 1867.

Source : Desloges et Moldofsky, s.d.

Figure 7. Quebec and Ontario in 1867.

Source: J. Bartholomew (c1875). Atlas. in Hayes 2002: 253

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In the newly formed Dominion, Southern James Bay and the Washaw Sibi territories beyond its borders were included in Rupert’s Land, i.e. under HBC’s monopoly. The new government re-affirmed the previous British position which depended on the HBC and their trading post lists to inventory and register the identity of aboriginals, and to handle most of colonial policy. Confederation thus did not have any concrete impacts upon the subarctic per se. The administration of Rupert’s Land generally built on existing policies and modalities established in colonial times rather than on the establishment of new kinds of relationships.

In the subsequent decade, the colonization of the West by the Dominion provoked the need to unify Indian administration, a process that was formalized in 1876 with the promulgation of the Indian Act. At the administrative and legal level, these efforts at centralization and standardization had tremendous impacts upon the lives of individuals and collectivities. The Indian Act centralized administration regarding Indian bands and applied, and still applies, the same policies and regulations to all Indian groups independently of their social, cultural, or political differences (Lavoie 2007). As a tool of social control, the purpose of the Act was to define the relationships between Euro-

Canadian society and Indian bands, and individuals whose names were compiled in the federal Register of Indians (Gibbins and Ponting 1986: 21). From 1873 to 1936, the newly formed Department of Indian Affairs was attached to the Department of the

Interior (Lavoie 2007), which also had the responsibility of federal lands and natural resources. The Indian Act aimed at uniform assimilation of southern Indians inhabiting settled areas, and then also of northern groups in Rupert’s Land as they were gradually included in the Dominion through treaties. As a matter of fact, the colonization of the

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Subarctic and the Arctic in Canada was significantly delayed. Compared with southern regions of the Dominion, it took almost three more decades before colonial policy fully impacted groups inhabiting Rupert’s Land and southern James Bay. The political will to centralize colonial policies underwent many complications on account of geographical and climate contingencies over the course of the history of the country. The vastness of the Canadian “north” and the challenging circumstances of climate made the standardization of any policy difficult. Moreover, centralization required large-scale infrastructure projects such as railways, harbours, etc. (Dwidedi and Gow 1999: 42).

The Beginnings of the State in the Subarctic:

Treaties, Railway Projects, and Beaver Preserves

The regions that are currently considered as northern Quebec and Ontario were included within their respective provinces at different moments. In 1874 Ontario borders were expanded northward up to the Albany River whose mouth is located on western

James Bay. In a similar way, in 1898, the Quebec border was expanded up to the

Eastmain River, on the east side of James Bay.

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Figure 8. Dominion of Canada in 1898.

Source : Library and Archives Canada

Figure 9. Quebec and Ontario before Boarder Expansions.

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Figure 10. Detail of the map: Harricana Drainage

(Source: John Bartholomew (1905). Dominion of Canada (Eastern Provinces). in Hayes 2002: 255) Figure 11. Areas transferred to Quebec in 1898 and 1912

Source: Government of Canada 1975: 1.

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Quebec and Ontario were finally expanded to their current borders in 1912. These expansions of borders had virtually no consequence per se on the lives of people living in the subarctic. Nevertheless, they played an important role when treaty 9 was negotiated and signed.

The Numbered Treaties and Treaty 9

Treaties signed after Confederation from 1871 to 1921 were numbered in the order they were signed. These treaties were crucial elements for Canadian federalism to affirm its presence on the territory and legitimate its rights and sovereignty over the land and its inhabitants. Initially, treaties consisted of short texts signed by the federal government and aboriginal “leaders” in which aboriginals surrendered some of their rights over specific tracts of land. This action opened the land up to resource exploitation, settlement, and infrastructural changes in exchange for advantages such as annuities, food rations, or reserve lands for aboriginal signatories (Lavoie 2007). Some treaties were signed during the former British colonial regime, mostly in the 19th century, in what are today the Southern and urban regions of the country. The first treaties signed after 1867 in the Dominion concerned only reserve lands and small annuities (Taylor 1991: 209).

However, in time they became more innovative, as their terms were determined not only by government officials, but also by aboriginal people who at times initiated negotiations

(Tobias 1991: 213) and saw some of their demands acknowledged.

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Figure 12. Numbered Treaties in Canada.

Treaties bore ambiguities regarding the powers and entitlement to self-governance for the aboriginal people who signed them. These ambiguities still affect the definition of the powers retained by aboriginal peoples in virtue of these treaties. Graham White

(2002) casts these ambiguities within the concept of treaty federalism, which he borrows from Russel Barsh and James Youngblood Henderson (1980). The notion of treaty federalism represents an attempt to theorize the ambiguous role of treaty in maintaining the federation. It emphasizes how treaties in some ways provided the building blocks of federalism. Yet, as they consisted of contracts to annex lands and the aboriginal groups inhabiting them to the federal system, they bestowed upon them an unprecise position with regard to the state. In other words, it can be said that treaties paradoxically contributed to the inclusion of aboriginal people in the nation by giving them a form of limited, if not second-class, citizenship. Niezen has written:

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It can be argued that relations between indigenous peoples and colonial powers have been international, since the signing of treaties included a tacit or explicit acknowledgment that the original inhabitants of a territory were “nations” […]. Only as the balance of power shifted in favour of immigrant peoples with a growing settler population […] was the status of indigenous peoples as nations reappraised and legally diluted. (Niezen 2000b: 122-3).

The administrative “Indian” status thus gave individuals the enduring label of forced-in outsiders. Ambiguities also characterized the negotiation process of the treaties. Macklem

(1997) and Chamberlin (1997) both show that Indian groups sought, through the signing of treaties, to safeguard their ways of life. Chamberlin shows that the Canadian authorities and the aboriginal leaders recognized each other as separate political economic entities, and shared the objective of establishing a system with common standards that would allow diverse forms of living, aboriginal and European, to coexist

(Chamberlin 1997). Nevertheless, the general representation of aboriginal populations that gradually emerged from treaty signing, and the rise of Euro-Canadian nationalism, is that of "claimants" and "dependents" on the government. For example, in 1923 Howard

Ferguson, Ontario's Conservative premier, said: "every tribe that could possibly have a claim on the 'white man's' government had been taken care of" (in Long 1995: 23).

In the line of theorization of colonialism, Comaroffs' notion of state colonialism refers to a kind of colonialism by which the state administration sponsors trade, pacification, and contact with aboriginal peoples but is not concerned with their

“civilization” or their integration into settler society, and does not impose direct rules

(Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 198). Morantz built on this definition by coining the concept of bureaucratic colonialism to emphasize how bureaucracy-like practices were major vectors in the colonization of the aboriginal peoples living in James Bay. For

119 example, the Canadian colonial administration often delegated tasks stipulated in the

Indian Act to entities such as the HBC and other trading companies, as well as to

Christian churches. As a consequence, Morantz (2002) found that it was almost impossible to find any sense of concerted action in measures that were then taken to administer and deal with aboriginal peoples in James Bay. Moreover, the implementation of these measures took place in conjunction with attempts to make profits through the fur trade. The actions actually taken by the HBC, though partly enacted by the colonial administration, thus depended on contingent agendas and short-term political and economic concerns (Morantz 2002). This attempt to theorize colonization in the Subarctic will be relevant for understanding the ambiguities, as well as the short-term and long- term impacts, involved with the coercion of aboriginal people through administration, bureaucracy, and legal policies such as treaties.

Among the numbered treaties, Treaty 9 stands out as the one that impacted aboriginal populations inhabiting Northeastern Ontario, James Bay, and even Abitibi,

Quebec. Treaty 9, referred to as the James Bay Treaty, covers Northeastern Ontario. The federal government approached Ontario and Quebec in 1904 to participate in the negotiations of Treaty 9 with the aboriginal populations inhabiting the respective portions of the territory affected by the border expansions of 1874 (Ontario) and 1898 (Quebec).

Ontario reluctantly accepted to participate in the treaty, and the province of Quebec categorically refused. Moreover, like Ontario, Quebec had development plans, especially in forestry, in the new area, and Euro-Canadian families were beginning to settle in the region. Finally, both the federal and the provincial governments agreed that “Indian title” had never been recognized or surrendered in the province of Quebec, unlike Ontario.

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Quebec thus did not participate in Treaty 9, but with an understanding that Quebec would

“set apart” suitable Indian reserves “at proper times” (Morrison 1986: 23).

Unlike previous treaties, federal commissioners stated clearly that they did not want to turn aboriginal hunter-gatherer populations into farmers, nor make them establish residence in one fixed place (Canada 1964: 6 in Morrison 1986: 39). Yet, both the

Ontario and the federal governments were, at the moment, taking measures that would have implications for aboriginal peoples’ access to the land and resource management.

Ontario was issuing exploration permits for mining and forestry, and hired game wardens to police hunting, fishing, and trapping (over which Indians believed they had the exclusive rights; Morrison 1986). The federal government had already initiated negotiations for a provincial railway and opened opportunities for settlement and exploitation of resources (Scott and Morrison 2004: 31). In 1918, Canada promulgated the Migratory Birds Convention Act, which restricted Indian hunting (Long 1995: 29). In the decades following the treaty, the hunting or trapping of various species also became increasingly policed or prohibited due to projects of development and exploitation.

The Cree, like other aboriginal groups across Canada, did not interpret the Treaty the same way as the governments. Treaty 9 was promoted by federal agents as a humanitarian act and a fair set of compensation measures for Euro-Canadian development and exploitation of resources. Allowing such development projects and economic growth, resulting from the exploitation of resources, would offer aboriginal people opportunities to assimilate into Euro-Canadian society. Yet, the intensification of colonization and industrial development in the region had already brought waves of epidemics, increased aboriginal peoples' vulnerability, and reduced the portion of

121 accessible land. As early as 1884, chief Louis Espagnol from the Spanish River on Lake

Huron wrote to the Indian Affairs asking for protection from non-aboriginal trappers and help for the epidemic survivors; Albany River Crees petitioned the Crown in 1901 to determine their land rights given the increasing exploration for minerals and settlements

(Macklem 1997).

As a matter of fact, the Crees interpreted the treaty through the ethics of generosity and reciprocity, which are central to the maintenance of their social relations.

Paine (1971) defines these local values as a series of mutual expectations rather than one- on-one exchanges. Regina Flannery defined Cree notions of generosity and reciprocity as involving persons who shared, especially food, with relatives, elderly, and those in need

"and did so without expectation of any tangible return" (in Long 1995: page). Long, in his analysis of treaty signing ceremonies in Winisk, noted that Crees referred to the treaty as shatamakaywina, which he translates as “promises” (1995: 27). Regina Flannery considered that commissioners' promises were understood through aboriginals’ notions of generosity and reciprocity. For example: "At Moose Factory, [...] the Indian spokesman said they had all been looking forward to treaty for a long time and thanked the government men for promising law and order, schools and money, which would greatly help the poor and needy among them" (Canada 1964 in Morrison 1986: 35-6). The Cree generally understood that the government had committed to sharing resources, helping, and supporting without counting. According to Regina Flannery: "It seems evident that they had no notion they were giving up their land in return for what they were promised", thus suggesting that the federal government did not fulfill aboriginal people’s expectations of generosity and reciprocity (Flannery n.d.: n.p. in Long 1995: 23). On the

122 one hand, the government, never adjusted the measures included in the treaties, such as annuities or reserve size, which after a few decades already seemed ridiculous as they limited signatory Indian bands to poverty. On the other hand, the exploitation of the land that followed treaty signing often made hunting territories unusable. Aboriginal people thus often remember treaties as moments when they gave up much more than what they received in return.

Treaty 9 was negotiated through a period that ran for about one decade and was ultimately signed in sixteen locations during 1905, with adhesions in 1906, 1908, 1929 and 1930. In total, it involved forty administrative bands.19 John S. Long summarizes the content of this treaty:

[…]eight dollars per person on signing; a perpetual annuity of four dollars; reserves of one square mile per family of five; schools and teachers. Each chief was to receive a flag and a copy of the written treaty. In addition to surrendering all their lands, the Indians agreed to be good citizens and obey the law – including any restrictions on hunting, trapping and fishing which the federal government might adopt; in practice, Ontario also used the treaty to impose provincial game laws. (Long 1995: 25)

Treaty 9 affected groups and families using lands around the Harricana River drainage watershed in uneven ways. Initial negotiations and signature ceremonies were held during

1905-06 in the various trading posts, and government officials used a definition of residence based on the trading post band lists compiled during the fur trade (Morrison

1986). The signature ceremony took place at Fort Abitibi in 1906. It was known that bands trading at Fort Abitibi had hunting grounds on both sides of the border. Although the government officials mentioned during the early negotiations the possibility of including aboriginal families whose lands were close to the border (such as on the

19 These bands are politically represented since 1973, in association with Treaty 5 bands, by an association called Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN).

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Harricana River drainage basin), Quebec refused to do so and the federal government decided that their situation would be dealt with at another time.

Treaty 9 introduced an administrative distinction between “Quebec Indians” and

“Ontario Indians” at the Fort Abitibi trading post, which is located in Quebec but close enough to the border with Ontario to allow trade with aboriginal groups hunting in both provinces. Two administrative bands were created for the post by HBC employees: the

Abitibi-Dominion (those trapping in Quebec) and the Ontario-Dominion (those trapping in Ontario). At that moment, this distinction did not have any social or political basis, rather, it depended strictly on the location of the hunting grounds where the traders assumed individuals hunted. The distinction between Quebec Indians and Ontario Indians at Fort Abitibi began to have more concrete implications for people when Treaty 9 was signed in 1906.

The Ontario-Dominion group was allowed to sign the document, but the Abitibi-

Dominion were not (Scott and Morrison 2004: 32). The Ontario group was granted the reserve 70, now Wahgoshig, Ontario. The Abitibi-Dominion band was finally allowed to adhere to the Treaty in 1908 and was directed to the Ontario reserve, but the size of the latter was not adjusted. The Abitibi-Dominion band never moved to Wahgoshig, and the non-recognition of the Treaty in Quebec extinguished their rights over land east of the border. Pikogan was established in 1956 to accommodate the Abitibi-Dominion band by purchasing lots of farm land from the band funds.

That was the beginning of marginalization for the Washaw Sibi group. Officials did not recognize any alternative band affiliations within Fort Abitibi other than those noted earlier (Abitibi-Dominion and Ontario-Dominion). However, they were aware of

124 the presence of people from Hannah Bay and Rupert House, among other groups, at Fort

Abitibi during the negotiations and the signature ceremonies but did not acknowledge their situation in the text of the treaty, although nothing prevented them from doing so

(Scott and Morrison 2004: 32). Moose Factory affiliation was the criterion for people living in southern James Bay to be included in the treaty, and Fort Abitibi, for people trading further South of that area. For example, people who were on Rupert House trading lists were not collectively represented during signing ceremonies but were listed individually within treaty lists if they were in Moose Factory or Fort Abitibi during signing ceremonies, and became administratively associated to these bands. Some

Washaw Sibi Crees fell into this situation.

The Railway Projects

I mentioned how railway projects in southern James Bay and Abtibi contributed to the initiation of Treaty 9 negotiations. First, the Northern Ontario Railway

Commission began the construction of the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario (T&NO) in 1902, reaching Cochrane in 1909. Also, the construction of the northern branch to

James Bay began in 1921 and finally reached Moose Factory in 1932 (Surtees 1992).

Around the same time, the federal government began a branch of the transcontinental railway that would be used to open northern Quebec to development. It was completed in

1914, and crossed from Cochrane to Amos with stops in La Sarre, QC, and Low Bush,

ON (Andreae 1997). The construction of these railways had different implications for the aboriginal groups living in the region.

Many aboriginal individuals and their family were hired, mainly to bring supplies to camps as they had done for the fur traders generations earlier. They also opened up

125 pathways and guarded the camps. The railway contributed significantly to the migration of some aboriginal groups. As more traders gained access to the region, competition increased and attracted many independent traders. Fur was being purchased at a higher price, and goods were cheaper, especially compared to James Bay. This had the effect of bringing Cree hunters and families who normally traded at Rupert House and Moose

Factory further South, not only for trade, but also to hunt and trap (Scott and Morrison

2004: 34). As discussed in the previous chapter, such movements between southern

James Bay and Abitibi were not uncommon and customary relationships prevailed during the first decades following the building of the railway. Reciprocal exchanges and customary alliances gave these groups access to new hunting territories.

The railway projects brought development, urbanization, and industrialization in the region of Abitibi (Quebec) and in the district of Cochrane (Ontario). The exploitation of resources and the colonization by settlers entailed increasing ecological pressure.

These dynamics were exacerbated by growing numbers of James Bay people coming to trade in Fort Abitibi or La Sarre, and sometimes staying in the region to hunt or trap as they created new partnerships with local hunters. The implementation of provincial game and fishing laws close to settled areas led to repressive action against aboriginal hunters, such as fines and confiscation of meat and equipment. The railways also brought to the region Euro-Canadians trappers who wanted to profit from the fur trade. There ensued an increase in trapping and hunting in the region that did not respect customary tenure and contributed to pressure on populations of fur-bearing animals. At the same time, provisions of treaties and provincial legislations were in tension with aboriginal traditional and communal systems of land tenure. To sum up, while access to game and

126 resources was increasingly jeopardized for aboriginal groups who depended on it for their survival, state institutions began to police the movements of aboriginal peoples on the land.

Yet, pretending to hunt on a tract of land assigned by the HBC or Indian Affairs did not prevent people, once in the bush – i.e. away from the direct influence of fur traders and Indian Affairs agents, if sometimes subject to random encounters with game wardens – to hunt elsewhere or to assert customary roles and structures. It seems unlikely that subarctic aboriginal groups assimilated passively to the principles of a market economy characterized by bureaucratic land management corresponded throughout the first half of the 20th century. The fact that game wardens, RCMP officials, Indian Affairs agents, and HBC about aboriginal hunters who were not hunting where they were

“supposed to” – calling them trespassers or poachers – is indicative that aboriginal groups did not simply accept the new rules imposed by authorities. Rather, aboriginal groups produced a hybrid social and tenure system of their own (Feit 2007) which is testimony of the internal coherence of the customary system, its stability, and its adaptability.

Beaver Population Decline and Rehabilitation of Hunting Territories

As a consequence of the new developments and transformations affecting the region, in the first quarter of the 20th century the beaver population declined dramatically.

Of all furs, beaver fur was considered the most valuable by traders. Moreover, at the time beavers were a crucial source of food for aboriginal families throughout the year. The urgency of the situation, and the dramatic consequences that this had on aboriginal populations, forced governmental institutions to transform their strategies in the subarctic and to seek new solutions. This crisis was exacerbated by the restrictive credit policies of

127 the HBC and the increasing pressure by the company and Indian Affairs to consolidate band affiliations (Feit 1978).

It is at this moment that Frank Speck delivered his definition of the family hunting territory, mentioned in the second chapter. Speck was not the only one trying to raise attention to the emergency of the situation and to advocate aboriginal people’s rights.

Scott and Morrison (2004: 38-9) note a remarkable convergence in the positions held individually by HBC employees, Indian Affairs officials, missionaries, and ethnographers interacting directly with local populations. In fact, they exchanged a great quantity of letters, petitions, and articles published in the first third of the 20th century concerning the need to stem the invasion of outsider commercial trappers. This led to policies prohibiting non-aboriginals trapping in certain areas, and an increasing interest in aboriginal forms of tenure and their implications for conservation. In the specific case of Harricana River hunters, local Hannah Bay and Rupert House hunters, as well as the local HBC post director, James Watt, were pushing for the re-establishment of the aboriginal customary mode of tenure from the 1920’s onward (Scott and Morrison 2005: 42).

Speck’s concept of family hunting territory inspired a model of beaver preserves in the province of Quebec. This initiative represents "the culmination of a number of

Euro-Canadian efforts designed to cope with general fur and game scarcity and the breakdown of the traditional harvesting strategies and practices of Native people"

(Cummins 2004: 39). A system of “traplines” was put forward in the 1940s and ’50s.

Each preserve was therefore divided into traplines constituting administrative ‘districts’ within preserves. Officials wanted these traplines to coincide with the customary family hunting territories of the respective local aboriginal groups of each preserve. Hunters

128 responsible for these traplines, called tallymen, had to mark, estimate, and locate each beaver colony present on their district; make sure quotas were respected; and tell the supervisor of each preserve in cases of trespassing by non-aboriginals or Indians who were assigned other districts (Scott and Morrison 2005: 44).

Notably, the Abitibi and Grand-Lac-Victoria preserves were created in 1928; in eastern James Bay, the HBC created the Nottaway and Rupert House preserves in 1937

(Scott and Morrison 2005: 42). This was only the beginning of a movement that rapidly expanded in Quebec and Ontario. The Nottaway preserve is particularly relevant as it had three sections: Rupert House (north of the Rupert River), Waswanipi (south of the Rupert

River and north of the Harricana and Samson Rivers), and La Sarre (southernmost part).

The La Sarre section, which had been assigned to the La Sarre Cree families nowadays identified as ‘founding members’ of the Washaw Sibi community, due to administrative issues, was taken over by the Indian Affairs in 1941 and was included in the Abitibi fauna preserve. The Abitibi band, i.e. the band nowadays inhabiting Pikogan, later became involved for certain administrative purposes. Just across the provincial border, the

Kesagami preserve was also created, and assigned to the Moose Factory Cree band.

This system was more rigid and less accommodating of fluctuations in game species than the traditional systems (Cummins 2000). Increasing interests of the provinces to establish settlements and exploit resources led them to intensify their policing of aboriginal families (Craik 1986). Nevertheless, officials made an effort to establish district outlines that followed customary divisions of the land. The rules at the basis of the aboriginal and communal land tenure system were only partially implemented. Nevertheless, the regime of the beaver preserve in fact gave provincial

129 authorities considerable motive to police hunting, trapping, and fishing and to attempt to limit these activities within their territories (Scott and Morrison 2005: 47). It also generalized a simplistic understanding of aboriginal land use according to which families necessarily had, and had to have, their hunting territories within the beaver preserve corresponding to the post within the provincial jurisdiction where they traded. Groups associated with a given beaver preserve were expected to trade at local posts, reinforcing ties between specific hunters and specific fur trade posts. Furthermore, several Cree hunters trading into Moose Factory in Ontario were refused recognition of their customary grounds in Quebec; and correspondingly, several Cree hunters trading into

Rupert House and La Sarre in Quebec were refused recognition of their customary grounds in Ontario (Scott and Morrison 1993:101-107). Hunting became increasingly policed. Washaw Sibi members shared with me many anecdotes about game wardens arresting hunters, giving them fines, burning hunting camps or confiscating hunting gear or game when they found hunters not in conformity with the policy. The policy discourse fed into an idea that some “local” aboriginal groups were legitimate in a given area, while others were not, and were accordingly deemed “less civilized” or more nomadic, and eventually declared to be trespassers or poachers. After World War II, when the local distinction between Crees and Algonquins emerged, Algonquins were increasingly seen as descendants of local groups, whereas Crees were referred to as “originating from

James Bay” (thus not indigenous to the region itself).

This situation caused considerable problems for aboriginal families who had their hunting territories in one province and who traded, or had traded, in the other. Residence was reckoned in accordance with the location of the trading post. Families who had

130 hunting grounds in Quebec but traded in Moose Factory were evicted from their Quebec territories, and families trading in Rupert House but hunted in Ontario were also evicted from their Ontario territories.

This discussion described the decline of aboriginal customary or traditional constructs and the social fragmentation of regional networks, but the fact that aboriginal groups were able to accommodate, reformulate in their own terms, or simply ignore

(sometimes to their own risk and disadvantage) the policies that were enforced upon them cannot be overlooked. In their discussion of the reinforcement of dual names with patrilineal family naming among the Ojibwa (Black and Rogers 1980), Black and Rogers discuss how people partially adopted this system when they dealt with the state or missionaries but still used the aboriginal system of names in parallel, and in a way that limited frictions between the two systems. This rationale could also be used to understand hunting territories: while the Algonquian modes of land tenure caused considerable confusion to white agents, aboriginal people could still find ways to get around the competing system that European fur traders sought to impose on them. Their ability to adapt could restrain the interferences caused by colonial policies.

For example, the trapline boundaries mapped by fur traders and government officials did not coincide with the customary ways in which family hunting territories were constantly negotiated. The tracing of boundaries to fix the zones where a family could hunt, referred to by Craik as the "zeal for filling in the map" (1986: 176), glossed over and concealed the complex relations that nomadic families created with the land, the relations made of spiritually and emotionally meaningful itineraries. The rigid administration of traplines by HBC did not encompass all the depth and the complexity of

131 the communal land tenure system, and its social, economic, spiritual, and political ramifications.

The Relocation of the La Sarre Crees

Given the pressure felt in the 1920s and ’30s, Ontario and Quebec governments deployed considerable efforts on both sides of the border to expel trespassers from their respective territories and relocate them in the province where they traded (Scott and Morrison 2005: 47-9). Some families, notably Peter

Trapper’s children and grandchildren, hunted in Ontario on the Harricana River watershed but in the 1920s began trading in La Sarre due to the proximity of the post and higher fur prices and of the railway. As “Quebec Indians” – because of their trading in La Sarre – they were the object of several arrests, confiscation of equipment, imprisonment, and removal from their Ontario lands.20 Black Rogers and Rogers (1983) reported and analysed the gradual designation of a Cree group, known as the Cranes, as a socially and economically distinct group. Different barriers caused by social, colonial, and ecological contingencies led this

Northwestern Ontario Ojibwa group to be considered as a distinct ethnic group by both Europeans and other aboriginal groups.

Other features contributed to the creation of a symbolic border between the

La Sarre group and other aboriginal peoples living around Abitibi Lake. As these families had previously been trading in James Bay, they had been baptized by

Anglican missionaries, whereas Abitibi people had been baptized by the local

Catholic missionaries. Children were sent to residential schools depending on

20 C.f. Appendix 3 for example of Indian Affairs correspondence about the “problems” caused by the La Sarre Crees.

132 their parents’ confession: James Bay families usually went to Anglican Moose

Fort Residential School in Moose Factory while Abitibi children went to Catholic

Amos Residential School. These distinctions are mentioned in the correspondence that took place between French and Catholic HBC employees and Indian Affairs officials who stated that they generally considered the La Sarre group as less

“civilized” when compared with the Abitibi group.

Eviction from their hunting grounds in Ontario led to increasing pressure and competition between aboriginal groups for decreasing hunting and trapping lands on the Quebec side of the border around Abitibi Lake. Simultaneously, the provincial colonization plan of the region reduced hunting territories and access to the land. First considered as “refugees,” the group known as the La Sarre Crees were then called “trespassers” and “poachers.” (Scott and Morrison 2005: 51) and became the object of repressive acts. In 2009 the Washaw Sibi chief spoke about this repression:

Those people that used to live in La Sarre are people from Waskaganish and also some from Waswanipi. And because the traplines were close to the town of Amos, and La Sarre, they had no choice but to come in La Sarre and gather there in the summer, and live in tent frames and try to make a living by crafts, and also by working in sawmills, or hunting and fishing. And many times, there were made obstacles, like they were not allowed to kill any animals in the summer and they would investigate them. Lots of them would go to jail, for a while, or they would lose their tents. That's the problem. […] Game wardens and RCMP would be there to monitor them so they don’t kill any wild animals while they're living there. But they wanted to kill animals because that's their food. So many of them went a month to jail.

In 1942, the HBC and the Indian Affairs organized their relocation to Rupert House, where their families had been trading before moving their summer residence to La Sarre.

Indian Affairs compiled a list of thirteen families to be relocated. Scott and Morrison

133 worked on the impact of this relocation on the Washaw Sibi group (2005). The attempts to return families to Rupert House did not succeed. According to Peter Trapper’s son,

Obediah Trapper, four families came back from Rupert House to La Sarre after a year;

Obediah’s family and another family refused to be relocated; and two families moved their summer residence to Moose Factory. Only two relocated families ended up staying in Rupert House. In fact, later on, from the late 1940s onward, most of the La Sarre Crees were finally assigned traplines in the Hannah Bay division of the Abitibi fauna reserve, in the area of their customary lands. Recognition of their legitimacy in the region after attempts to displace them is indicative of their embeddedness in local socio-territorial configurations, and also of their sustained resistance to administrative manipulation

(Scott and Morrisson 2005: 50). The reversal also highlights the government’s confusion and the contradictions in their short-term decisions regarding the codification of aboriginal identities and their association with specific territories.

Tent Cities

The relocation of the La Sarre Crees in 1942 was not the first instance of relocation of an aboriginal group by the government. Similar procedures happened throughout the 20th century: colonization, urbanization, and exploitation of resources often forced more and more sedentary aboriginal communities to relocate. However, such displacements of groups acquired a palpable dimension given the growing sedentarity of aboriginal groups and the fact that Indian Affairs began building housing on reserve lands. The 1950s and 1960s are decades during which Indian Affairs consolidated the band policy and established infrastructure for year-round sedentarity among many groups. Living in a tent was likely common among aboriginal populations during the first

134 decades of the 20th century, although an increasing number of people, in particular the

Home Guard, may have been living in houses for certain periods of the year. In southern

James Bay, this changed in the 1950s and ’60 when band members started to gain access to Indian Affairs programs granting them houses and access to health services. The construction of permanent housing in James Bay communities reinforced the consolidation of band membership. Members were entitled to social, health, relief, and education services offered by the bands on condition of being officially affiliated with local bands recognized by the Indian Affairs. Aboriginal families not on the membership lists of these local bands where they lived fell in between Indian Affairs and provincial governments who ‘passed the buck’ between one another, and left unaffiliated Indians betwixt and between.

Yet movements continued among aboriginal families, mostly in order to follow opportunities and access resources. For instance, although a reserve land was outlined further upriver, the Moose Cree band established residence on the

Moose Factory Island at the mouth of the Moose River because it had already served as a gathering place. The HBC post, the most important hospital of southern James Bay and the Moose Fort residential school, were all located on the island. The band thus never inhabited the upriver land reserved for them, and

Northern part of Moose Factory Island, where most Moose Cree members now live, was eventually accorded the status of reserve land. Furthermore, many families from Eastern James Bay continued to move between Moose Factory and

Quebec communities, and ended up settling in Moose Factory either because of the hospital, for work opportunities, or because of the proximity of the residential

135 school. Also, Ontario needed trappers to relocalize beavers as some areas were overpopulated. Ironically, some Eastern James Bay hunters, mainly Waskaganish

Crees, among whom some relocated “La Sarre Crees,” were hired by the Ontario

Ministry of Natural Resources. For example, a Washaw Sibi member who spent most of his life in Moose Factory told me:

My family was one of the families authorized to trap in Ontario, but we lived in Ontario since 1955 or 1956 because of that hospital that had a sanatorium there. My oldest brother was there so instead of traveling back and forth from Waskaganish to Moose Factory each summer, my dad decided to move the family in ‘55 or ‘56 to Moose Factory and that's how we came to live and grow up in Ontario. Not by my choice, but my father's choice.

When I addressed the history of their community, young adults and middle aged members of Washaw Sibi who grew up in Moose Factory often remember the existence of a demarcation between people. An adult woman who grew up in Moose Factory, but now lives in Waskaganish, described this demarcation:

There was an imaginary line on an island, ok? And once you crossed that line, you were considered to be way up, meaning “up and down,” you know? […] Back then, there was already that notion of the origin of Native people living in one area and this all comes from the Ontario/Quebec border, you know? It came locally to way up and way down. Because way up was off-reserve, people that were not Moose Cree First Nation. Those that lived on the reserve, way down, were the Moose Cree First Nation.

She is quite explicit that the demarcation was not customary to local aboriginal groups, but rather came from government policies, especially those related to the

“Quebec/Ontario border.” In the wake of the consolidation of aboriginal policy and the establishment of sedentarity in many aboriginal communities, the different statuses resulting from government policies, and the entitlement of band members within their locality, led to tangible factors of exclusion.

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The area where she lived her childhood, “way up,” is often referred to as “tent city,” an expression that connotes the significance of people being excluded from relief, social, and health programs solely delivered to registered band members. They had access to some of these services from the provincial government, which, however, often refused as they considered delivering services to Indians a federal responsibility. An employee of the WSEA who has lived most of his life in Moose Factory told me:

We were not eligible for housing when we had that Rupert House band number. My dad had a Rupert House band number and he was known as a Rupert House Cree and we lived in a tent frame, with a canvas top and plastic from 1955 or ‘56, right up to 1968 or ‘69. This was when we had our house. […] To qualify for housing, you have to join the band. So that's what he did. He transferred his band membership, from Rupert House to Moose Factory band. So that's how he came to have a house in Moose Factory and we were one of the last families on the island that lived in a tent besides the tent city area where the MoCreebec 21 members lived.

Not having a house, or living in a tent, meant no entitlement within the administration of the band, and gradually became a sign of exclusion and disempowerment. Washaw Sibi members often associated inhabiting Tent City with “being an outsider.” A young woman interviewed in Timmins, who also grew up in Moose Factory but was related to many

Washaw Sibi members, told me:

My grandparents? My grandparents from my mom’s side lived in Waskaganish. Well, [my grandmother] is from Chisasibi. They lived in Moose Factory for a while. Tent city, I remember them calling it that, way back.

It is not only in Moose Factory where people remember clear distinctions in the conditions of life. Washaw Sibi people living in Pikogan remember similar distinctions.

For instance, an elder told me:

We lived on the reserve of Pikogan, maybe in ‘64… No, ’65 or ‘66. But we didn't have a house. We just lived across from my sister [married to a member of the band]. I didn't live all the time there, I was away all the time. I just came for the

21 MoCreebec refers to the political community formed by “Quebec Crees” living in Moose Factory. 137

holidays. And in the summer I would stay all the time there in Pikogan. But they called us "outsiders" because we didn't get no health, no kind of service. I tried to get welfare and I was told I was an outsider because my band number was from Waskaganish. We didn't get no service. When we lived in town, we had services from social services, that's all. But when we moved to Beatrice's family there, we couldn't get no services in Pikogan, because they called us outsiders.

The content of this quote echoes similar descriptions of Tent City in Moose Factory. Yet social distinctions happened differently in Pikogan. Some families of La Sarre Crees came back to La Sarre after their relocation at Rupert House, and their temporary camps on the local church yard were tolerated for a few years. At the same time, Indian Affairs committed to establish one village for the Indians of the region although there were two distinct but related aboriginal groups inhabiting the northern Abitibi region: the Abitibi-

Dominion band and the La Sarre group. Given factors such as their conversion to

Catholicism and their schooling in French, members of the Abitibi-Dominion band were associated with northern Algonquin groups, and were at the time “privileged” by the

Indian Affairs who saw them as more “civilized” and ready to contribute to Euro-

Canadian society. The La Sarre Cree group, who had mostly been baptized by Anglican missionaries in James Bay and had a growing reputation of troublemakers and trespassers, were promised housing, health, and social services on the condition of joining the Abitibi band, or else they had to “go back” to Rupert House.

In 1956, Indian Affairs finally established the “Amos reserve”, which was later renamed Pikogan. This reserve was established through the purchase of a farming lot desired because of its proximity to the Amos residential school, in Amos periphery. The

La Sarre Crees were consequently forced to join the membership of the band. Many elders and adults remember that when they joined the band, internal distinctions based on language and religion but also access to services granted by Indian Affairs, still

138 contributed to enforce a social cleavage. Yet in general Indian Affairs was slow in building housing and organizing other social and health services for the band as a whole, thus creating decades of varying access to services among members of the band. La Sarre

Crees, along with the Abitibi families who were socially distanced from the band council, often had to wait longer. For example, the following quote from a Pikogan woman who is a member of the WSEA and whose father was an original member of the Abitibi-

Dominion but whose mother was a La Sarre Cree, brings several nuances to the understanding of social divisions in Pikogan:

My family moved here from La Sarre in 1967. I was two years old when they first got a house in Pikogan. […] For my cousins, the Trappers, they were full Cree. When they'd come back from the canoe, they were teased and they weren't included in activities, I guess, or even jobs. Even I didn't have a job in Pikogan. I never applied, I never felt I would be included, I guess. Even my brothers, not until the past ten years, they've gotten jobs in Pikogan. I saw that it is mainly whoever's involved in council that will get jobs. So my father was not in the office. He was a loud-speaker, but he wasn't in the band council or anything. So even he felt he was discriminated by the people there, and I have always heard him say: “We shouldn't even be here, we should be over there at the Abitibi Point.” He would constantly say that and threaten to move us out of the reserve.

This quote emphasizes how the Indian Affairs’ band system, and decisions regarding housing, services, and job opportunities, created social divisions that were re- appropriated by the members of the band. Although the La Sarre/Abitibi-Dominion distinction was not the only such division, it gained a strong connotation and played an important role within the newly formed reserve. Dorothy Polson, an elder of Pikogan who was a member of Washaw Sibi, told me:

Some people say around here that the Algonquins sent the Crees back to Waskaganish. That's not what I saw when I grew up. I saw more the problem, like health. The Crees didn't have what the Algonquins had, like health services. They couldn't help them and when they called the doctor, they had to pay the doctor because they didn't have band numbers. And when we were talking to Indian Affairs, it was hard to get help for the Crees because they had band numbers in

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Waskaganish. This actually was a problem. Then the Indian Affairs said: “maybe it would be better if you go back to Waskaganish and they'll get the help you need.” And lots of people from Waskaganish, they believed that and they wanted to go back. And my family and my uncles and the other Trappers, they didn't want to go back. And the other way to do this was to join the Algonquins. You'd get all the help you need. I remember in the fall, when we went in the bush, we couldn't get the medicine. We'd have to pay to get medicine, like Aspirine and stuff like that. The only thing they could give you at the health department is services from a dentist, you get services for x-rays, in the summer, that's about it. But if you're sick and you're going to see a doctor, they don’t pay for it. Even if we had the number from Waskaganish, we still couldn't use it in this region.

This shows well how lack of access to housing and health services became a source of stigma for those excluded, and was used as a tool to pressure people into the limited numbers of reserves that Indian Affairs had created.

It is unclear how these policies were interpreted at the time. It seems like people were not always aware that their exclusion from services followed directly from Indian

Affairs policies and decisions. Yet at the beginning of the quote, the elder mentions how people blamed their exclusion on the “Algonquins,” i.e. people who were already registered members of the Abitibi-Dominion band when the reserve was established.

Exclusion and division, as well as access to generally limited resources, thus affected senses of belonging and social relations within the whole group. It created conflicts over resources and rights, and increased the pressure over already tense customary partnerships and forms of communal land tenure.

A Rigidified Social Reality – The Pikogan Example

“I received the attached letter from Indian George Reuben – member of the Ruperthouse Group, living at La Sarre, Que. […] This Indian writes and states as follows – “When Indian Department come here and told us, all the Ruperthouse Indians has to go back to

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Ruperthouse again. What are you trying to do to us? Why did you not explain to us what you want to do to us when you come here at La Sarre.” “ (H. Larivière, Indian Agent, to the Secretary of the Indian Affairs Branch, August 15th, 1942. Indian Affairs, RG 10, Volume 6749, File 420-10-4-1)

It is common in Pikogan to refer to oneself as either Cree or Algonquin. As seen in the first chapter, about one third of the members of the band claim Cree beneficiary status.22 In general terms, the distinction between Cree and Algonquin is often based on ethnic definitions, as well as on linguistic and religious cleavages. Whereas Crees are said to speak Cree and English, to come from James Bay, and to be of an Anglican tradition, Algonquins are said to speak mostly French and Algonquin, and are historically associated with the surroundings of the Abitibi Lake and Catholic faith. These lines are quite relative and arbitrary; in reality, they are also often blurred and not so clearly defined, as we will see in chapter five. For the moment, one has to take into account that in all kinds of circumstances, the members feel they have to define themselves according to one or the other denomination. It’s like an imaginary wall has sprung up between the two groups. People living today are deeply aware of this, and constantly refer to the ways

“things” were “way back” or “back in the days,” when people lived off the bush in tents, and not on reserves in houses. Back in “these days,” people were not divided, felt welcome to hunt “anywhere,” and shared everything.

When I was in Pikogan, I often encountered the name of Sally Diamond.

According to people there, she was the “grandmother,” or common ancestor, of most of the inhabitants of the community. In spite of the official and general Algonquin identity of the band that identify her as a common ancestor, she is remembered as a Cree woman from Rupert House who, in the first decade of the 20th century, travelled south to Abitibi

22 Most of them claim membership in the WSEA.

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Lake with her six children and married an Algonquin man from the region, Jean-Baptiste

Mowatt. These events apparently took place just after the construction of the railway, when several Cree families began trade at La Sarre or Abitibi to enjoy the better quality of products the railway brought. An employee of Pikogan’s band council, who is responsible for research on the band’s genealogy, told me:

Ben, faut dire aussi, les gens à Pikogan, quand je regarde l'arbre généalogique, là, plus de la moitié, plus du trois quart viennent des Cris, sont de descendance crie, à cause d'une madame qui s'appelait Sally Diamond. Tu regardes l'arbre généalogique, tout le monde se rejoint là-dessus.23

She is often remembered and mentioned when members of the band discuss their history, e.g. in community speeches during social or political events. In fact, her children integrated to the Abitibi-Dominion band and count among its first appointed chiefs. In the first half of the 20th century, a substantial portion of the Abitibi-Dominion spoke Cree along with Algonquin. Ethnic or “regional origins,” as well as socio-linguistic divisions, were not motives for social division but rather considered as opportunities for exchange and partnership. This does not mean there were no social or politics divisions. Boundaries existed between families or regional groups, but were porous and open to constant renegotiation. In one generation, social divisions between “Crees” and “Algonquins,” which did not really matter in the 1920s, by the 1950’s, had gained importance and had significant implications for social life.

* *

23 Well, also, people in Pikogan, when I look at the genealogical tree, there, more than half, more than three fourths come from the Crees, are of Cree descent because of a lady whose name was Sally Diamond, When you look at the genealogical tree, everybody comes from her (author’s translation).

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The different sections of this chapter have shown the history of colonization and state control over aboriginal groups inhabiting the region. These developments shed light on how colonization of the subarctic was mostly motivated by short-term agendas and circumstantial decisions. The imposition of colonial policies by fur traders and government officials reveals contradictions in their objectives, content, and methods. The ways which they were put in place made them oscillate between merely ignoring aboriginal systems of land tenure, and establishing rigid, sometimes contradictory modes of land governance.

Yet, those policies to a certain extent reached their aim, which was to have more control over nomadism, and favour the emergence of a sedentary lifestyle in the subarctic. This had deep and intricate consequences on the relations that people established with the land and on the configuration of social life. As far as the Harricana

River communities are concerned, the edification of colonial institutions led to their gradual marginalization from the state and from surrounding aboriginal communities.

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CHAPTER 4

THE EMERGENCE OF THE

WASHAW SIBI EEYOU ASSOCIATION

IN THE POST-JBNQA DECADES

In the preceding chapters, I have addressed the transformations aboriginal groups in Southern James Bay have undergone in the course of colonization. During that period, some groups were integrated into the administrative structure of the state while others were left over at the margins of these structures. Among these, some groups were alternatively labelled by others, notably by colonial agencies, as “Hannah Bay Indians,”

“Washaw Sibi people,” “Harricana River hunters,” or “La Sarre Crees.” Yet, about half a century later, when I went into the field, I faced a different situation for this group. Under one single name, the Washaw Sibi Crees were then institutionalized into a corporate association. They had gained access to specific resources and rights within the Grand

Council of the Crees, and were seeking more complete recognition from governmental institutions.

What happened in between? Relations of power changed between indigenous people and state institutions. Some groups were able to play an increasingly significant role in the negotiations with state authorities concerning the use of the land and their living conditions. In this context of transformation, Washaw Sibi were able to pull out a

144 movement of mobilization that generated the emergence of a political community. The objective of this chapter is to develop an understanding of this recent history.

The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement

After WWII, important changes affecting the dynamics of power between the state and aboriginal peoples took place. Postcolonial national and international concerns increasingly questioned the legitimacy of any attempt to unilaterally impose development and exploitative projects on local populations. In Canada, aboriginal people's newly acquired powers were accompanied by increasing mobilization, nationally and transnationally, on issues related to rights and governance. After changes to the Indian

Act in1951, aboriginal groups in Canada began to use legal courts to defend their claims to rights over land. In 1969, the White Paper, a policy document written by Jean Chrétien when he was Minister of Indian Affairs in Trudeau's Liberal government, proposed the abolition of the Indian Act, the rejection of land claims, and the gradual assimilation of aboriginal people into the Canadian population. The document generated strong mobilization among aboriginal people who unanimously opposed it and eventually forced the government to back away.

The aboriginal strategy of taking claims to court brought significant results. In

1973, the settlement of the Calder case in British Columbia confirmed that Aboriginal peoples’ historic occupation of the land gave rise to legal rights. Where no treaty had been signed, these rights had survived European settlement. This court case led the federal government to take action to negotiate the settlement of comprehensive and

145 specific aboriginal claims.24 The rules of the game were no longer the same, and new possibilities of increased power opened for aboriginal peoples.

The 1950s and ‘60s were also characterized by the decline of the fur trade.

Tanner, who prepared his ethnography of the Mistassini Cree in this transitional period, noted that this decline placed the Crees, and other aboriginal populations of the Subarctic, in a “position of irrelevance” in the eyes of the state (Tanner 1979). Interests in other resources and development models were emerging, notably in the forestry and mining.

Although the James Bay Crees had remained in the margins of the influence of state institutions and exploitative development projects (Morantz 2002), they were deeply affected in the 1970s by these changing rules. In 1971, during the rise of Quebec nationalism, Primer Robert Bourassa announced the construction of three mega-projects of hydroelectric dams in James Bay. In this movement, hydroelectric development played a major role for enhancing the province’s control over socioeconomic development.

Through the Association des Indiens du Québec, the Crees and Inuit brought their claims to the Quebec Superior Court and in 1973, Judge Malouf ordered the cessation of the construction. This decision was over turned in appeal a week later, but it forced the

Quebec government to negotiate with aboriginal groups inhabiting the region.

On November 11, 1975, the signature of the James Bay and Northern Quebec

Agreement (JBNQA) – the first modern “treaty” settling a comprehensive claim after

1973 – concluded the first chapter of the judicial saga opposing the James Bay Crees to

24 A specific claim refers to the grievances of an aboriginal group with the Crown regarding an unfulfilled treaty obligation or a breach of responsibilities regarding the Indian or treaty status by the Crown. A comprehensive claim refers to an aboriginal claim over an area of Canada that is not under any treaty (AAND 2010).

146 the government of Quebec around the construction of hydroelectric dams in James Bay by the state corporation Hydro-Québec. 25

At the table of signature were present:

 the government of Canada;

 the government of Quebec;

 Hydro-Québec and the Société de développement de la Baie James

(SDBJ);

 the Grand Council of the Crees (GCCQ);

 and the Northern Quebec Inuit Association.

The JBNQA settled the claim of the James Bay Crees and the Inuit following the beginning of hydroelectric projects on major rivers of the Eastern James Bay watershed such as the La Grande, the Great Whale, the Nottaway, the Broadback and the Rupert rivers. The JBNQA mainly established:

 a regional and local model for collective and political life, and for social

and economic development;

 a financial compensation of $225 million for the disruptions caused by the

hydroelectric development in James Bay;

 a structure for local and regional self-governance;

 and an advisory and consultative committee to address issues related to

land and the environment.

25 For further discussions of the provincial, national and international contexts in which the JBNQA was negotiated and signed, see Vincent et Bowers (1988); La Rusic (1979); Mainville (1993); and Salisbury (1986).

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Also, it established a land regime including three categories:

 Category I land, which mainly includes residential communities,

was reserved for the exclusive use of the Crees (the system is

slightly different for the Inuit). There were initially eight lots of

Category I land in James Bay intended for James Bay Cree

communities, and fourteen lots in Northern Québec meant for

establishing villages primarily inhabited by Inuit.26 In total, all

pieces of Category I land27 spread over 14 000 km2;

 Category II land refers to twenty-two larger tracts of land totaling

about 150 000 km2: JBNQA attributed one such tract of land to

each of the eight James Bay Cree communities and of the fourteen

Inuit villages. James Bay Category II lands are subdivided into

hunting territories, or traplines, owned by a tallyman appointed by

the Cree Trappers Assocation (CTA). Category II lands are owned

by Quebec, but the Crees and Inuit have exclusive rights of

hunting, trapping, and fishing, while authority concerning the

exploitation of resources is shared between aboriginals and non-

aboriginals28;

26 In 1978, the Northeastern Quebec Agreement (NQA) allowed the Kawawachikamach Naskapi to join the JBNQA. One lot was then added for them close to the border with Labrador. 27 In the context of this dissertation, Category I lands and the villages built upon them will generally be referred to as James Bay Cree communities and Inuit villages. 28 Quebec retained the ‘right to develop’ on Category II lands, subject to replacement with lands of equivalent value from Category III, if such development resulted in permanent infringement of the value of the land for traditional activities. In the Afterword, I discuss important changes to land policy in James Bay since I completed field work, and how these changes have affected Washaw Sibi.

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 Category III land refers to the reminder of the James Bay and

Northern Quebec region, totaling about 908 000 km2 where the

Crees and Inuit have some exclusive and preferential hunting,

trapping, and fishing rights, and where the authority for other

activities is shared.29

The James Bay territory is often called Eeyou Istchee by Cree people (commonly translated as "the land of the Crees").30 The following table shows the name of the James

Bay Cree communities and Inuit villages built on Category I land and included under the

JBNQA in 1975:

JAMES BAY CREE COMMUNITIES: EEYOU ISTCHEE COASTAL COMMUNITIES INLAND COMMUNITIES Located on the coast of James Bay: Mistissini Waskaganish (Rupert House*) Nemaska Eastmain Waswanipi Wemindji (Old Factory*) Chisasibi (Fort George*)

Located on the coast of Hudson Bay: Whapmagoostui

NORTHERN QUEBEC INUIT VILLAGES: NUNAVIK Located on the coast of Hudson Bay: Located on the coast of Hudson Stretch: Kuujjuarapik Umiujaq Ivujivik Inukjuak Puvirnituq Salluit Akulivik Kangipsujjuaq Quaqtaq Located on the coast of Ungava Bay: Kangirsuk Kuujjuaq Aupaluk Kangiqsualujjuaq Tasiujaq

* Former or alternative name, and/or name of the historical trading post associated with the band.

29 C.f. Appendix 4 for a map of James Bay showing the JBNQA land regime. 30 Chapter 5 will define more precisely the meaning of this expression.

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This chapter focuses specifically on the effects that the JBNQA has had for the James

Bay Crees. Two regional institutions have represented the Crees: the Grand Council of the Crees of Quebec (GCCQ) and the Cree Regional Authority (CRA).

On the one hand, the GCCQ was formed in 1974, in the context of negotiations preceding the signature of the JBNQA. Its main role was to represent the interests of the whole Eeyou Istchee community which generally became known during the 1980s as the

Cree Nation. Since its beginning, the GCCQ – the ‘political arm’ of regional governance

– was composed of the local chiefs of the eight communities, one regional grand chief, and one deputy grand chief, each of whom was appointed democratically. They have been generally elected from among educated adult generations, i.e. mostly people who attended Indian Residential Schools and some of whom achieved degrees in law and other social disciplines in urban Canadian universities. This model of governance has remained unchanged since 1975.

As for the CRA – the ‘administrative arm’ of regional governance – it was formed in 1978 to manage the administration and the logistics of implementing the JBNQA. The

CRA has also managed the multiple amendments to the JBNQA and evolved with subsequent changes in the distribution of power between the Crees and governments that have happened since 1975. Owing to different court cases opposing the Crees with other parties, several agreements were signed after 1975, giving the Crees further financial compensations and enacting measures to complete, review or transform the original

JBNQA. The CRA has had to accommodate these changes and to adapt its modes of management accordingly.

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On the whole, different opportunities of a geographical, sociological, and political nature opened for the Crees, and the impact of these opportunities was not only local, but reached beyond James Bay. The Cree Nation and the Grand Council of the Crees

(GCCQ) ended up holding substantially more financial resources and political power than most Canadian aboriginal groups, including those inhabiting nearby areas such as those of the northern Algonquins, the Ontario Crees and the Ojibwas.

The Beneficiary Status and the Situation of Off-Territory Beneficiaries

The JBNQA shaped new ways of organizing life for the Crees. It ensured the autonomy of their local and regional governments, it created the Cree Board of Health and Social Services of James Bay as well as the Cree School Board, and it initiated economic and community development programs including local management of police, justice, and protection of the environment. The JBNQA thus affected all social, economic, political, cultural, educational, and health-related aspects of James Bay Crees' lives. Individuals enlisted as "beneficiaries of the JBNQA" could access these services and resources. This status was generally granted to members of the eight James Bay Cree communities placed under the umbrella of the GCCQ in 1974. They were given ID cards with a beneficiary number that gave them access to the benefits, rights, and services dispensed by JBNQA institutions. Beneficiary ID numbers were attributed independently of federally ‘registered’ Indian status and were always associated with one of the James

Bay Cree communities. They thus constituted an alternative, parallel institutional identity granting individuals access to specific rights (e.g. voting for local council and GCCQ elections, hunting specific species in Category II and III land, etc.) and social resources

(e.g. post-secondary education funding through the Cree School Board, the Income

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Security Program (ISP) for hunters, trappers and fishers, etc.) specifically defined by the

JBNQA and by subsequent agreements signed with the James Bay Crees.

From 1975 onward, any person related to or descending from a person registered on historical fur trade band lists, or contemporary James Bay Cree community membership lists became eligible for the beneficiary status. This includes people living beyond the JBNQA territory, such as members of the families who for one reason or another had moved away from Eastern James Bay at the end of the 19th century or during the 20th century, before or after the signature of the JBNQA. Some individuals were thus granted beneficiary status although they did not live in one of the initial eight James Bay

Cree communities.

Furthermore, shortly after the signature of the JBNQA, Cree leaders noticed that clusters of people living in the periphery of James Bay, in Ontario and Quebec, were eligible for the JBNQA beneficiary status. Notably, certain groups of people in Moose

Factory, Pikogan, and Wahgoshig, among other communities, could apply to attain

JBNQA beneficiary numbers. Cree representatives and delegates began visiting these places and explaining the conditions for inclusion of those residents as beneficiaries. At the time becoming a beneficiary was presented as being advantageous and was associated with individual benefits. Yet there were also collective advantages for James Bay Cree communities themselves, for community funding was calculated based on the number of members, independently of their place of residence.

Retrospectively considering the conditions of eligibility, for two main reasons many deemed them to be arbitrary, if not causing conflict. First of all, in non-JBNQA

Cree communities, beneficiary numbers were granted to some local families, but not to

152 all, which established social divisions otherwise absent within local aboriginal customary ethics. For many, it was difficult to translate one’s place of origin from customary nomadic and environmentally embedded understandings in terms that made sense to administrative officers. As a Moose Cree woman, now member of Washaw Sibi and living in Timmins told me:

I remember when they went around to all the people in Moose Factory that originated from the East coast, from Nemaska and Mistissini. They asked us to sign because they needed the numbers for the Agreement in order to have a good pay check. I remember asking my grandmother, you know: “where were you born?” And she was just: “In the bush, why? Why are they asking me those questions?” These kinds of things.

Second, beneficiary numbers were also a source of conflict in the sense that they came with a package of benefits that people had not necessarily asked for, had not been able to negotiate, and that did not really suit them. For instance, the same woman mentioned how disappointed she was when she learned that rights regarding hunting or financial support applying on JBNQA territories did not include territories located on the Ontario side of the border:

And not knowing that we weren't going to have full benefits like those who reside in Eeyou Istchee, that it was because of that boundary. I don't know what they think Eeyou Istchee is, but I think I live on Eeyou Istchee at Katawagami.31 But politically not in Quebec's eyes, or the Grand Council, you know, when they did negotiate that.

She, like many others, critiqued the James Bay Crees’ system of governance and the arbitrariness of a social, geographical, and symbolic border that did not fit the aboriginal conception of hunting territory. For in the customary understanding, on both sides of the provincial border, the Harricana River watershed had from time immemorial been part of

31 Katawagami is a river flowing in Northeastern Ontario and is part of the Harricana River watershed.

153 the social and geographical domain frequented by the James Bay Cree, including

Washaw Sibi ancestors in particular.

The number of individuals granted JBNQA beneficiary status grew rapidly after the signature. People living in Northern Ontario and Abitibi areas mainly obtained

Waskaganish beneficiary numbers, and a few who lived around Matagami and Senneterre areas obtained Waswanipi numbers. When I asked informants in Pikogan or in Northern

Ontario their reasons for applying for a JBNQA beneficiary status, four reasons were primarily cited:

 the right to hunt on JBNQA land, especially caribou;

 access to the Cree Trapper Association membership and the accompanying

Income Security Program (a financial help given to people who practice

traditional trapping, fishing and hunting activities on the land);

 access to Cree School Board postsecondary education sponsorship funds;

 and access to employment in the Cree structure of administration, services,

and enterprises.

A third form of social division associated with JBNQA beneficiary numbers gradually emerged. In spite of the JBNQA's inclusiveness, it became difficult and demanding to grant complete benefits to beneficiaries living outside of James Bay Cree communities. This occurred for a different reason. Besides the arbitrary limits of JBNQA land mentioned above, not living in a Cree community where JBNQA institutions could administer and deliver social, education, and health services made the delivery of services more complicated or more onerous. The James Bay Cree administration thus created a policy regarding beneficiaries living “off-territory”: people who had never lived in a

154 formally-recognized James Bay Cree community or who had resided for more than ten years outside of any formally-recognized James Bay Cree community were designated

"off-territory beneficiaries." Policies gradually began privileging territory-based beneficiaries. As a result, off-territory beneficiaries developed a sense of marginalization and limited status compared with other James Bay Crees who lived in JBNQA territory, and that caused supplementary tensions. For instance, all beneficiaries in the 1980’s could have access to funding packages for post-secondary education given by the Cree

School Board. ISP, which was already difficult to access for people whose hunting territories were in Ontario, became inaccessible for off-territory beneficiaries. Some

Washaw Sibi members also report that employment opportunities decreased for off- territory beneficiaries. In the 1990’s, things changed: the Cree School Board began limiting the number of packages offered to off-territory beneficiaries. On this matter, the same informant quoted above had this to say:

I did go to school, I did get sponsored and then, half-way through they wouldn't sponsor me because of the ten-year clause.

What's the ten-year clause?

Ten, year, clause. You have to have lived in the James Bay Cree territory, the Quebec side, within the last ten years.

They implemented while you were in school, so they cut you off.

Yeah, so I got cut off. So, that was that. Thank you very much for those few years. And then I just got sponsored by Moose Cree afterwards. Yeah. And then, that's the only thing. Other than that, we haven't seen any benefits from it. I do believe we do have benefits under the Cree Trappers Association that we have not been able to, or I have not been able to, or my father even looked at, accessing.

Another woman living in Waskaganish but who grew up in Moose Factory summarized in her own words the issue of off-territory beneficiaries:

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I remember when they came to Moose Factory. They were taking names of people who were from Quebec. And they told us: “Ok, we're going to put your names down because your dad's name is (…) and he came from Quebec.” So we said: “ok.” But I didn't really know what it really meant at the time because I was only thirteen years old when they did that. Well, not when they did that, but when the Agreement came into effect. I think it was in 1979 or 1981 when they started collecting those names.[…] So my dad, me and my daughter, three generations out in one shot, and I didn't really ask any question, I didn't know what it was about. Then, as I got older, I started to realize what it was and some of the benefits that I got so it would be ok for me. So I did apply for funding and I did get funding through Cree School Board. And then, that was in 1991, I believe, or 1992, they sent us a letter saying that we had to live in the territory in order to get funded. So I couldn't get funded again because I didn't want to de-root my family and move to Quebec for six months.

The different forms of social divisions created by JBNQA became a vector for further social and political changes. It affected several groups that were not included in the original eight James Bay Cree communities and prompted them to take action. In this respect, I will discuss the MoCreebec and Oujé-Bougoumou cases, two dramatic examples of the impact of JBNQA on regional sociocultural and identity dynamics. The first case builds on what has just been discussed concerning the off-territory beneficiaries and represents an early chapter in the history of the WSEA. The second exposes more clearly the process of joining the Grand Council as a community of its own on an equal footing with the eight initial communities. These two cases led surrounding groups to perceive the JBNQA less as a final and rigid agreement, but as one that could be renegotiated and eventually be used to defend the interests of groups who had been left aside. The JBNQA acquired a relative malleability that subsequently had major implications for the Washaw Sibi group.

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The Case of MoCreebec

A group of families living in Moose Factory area associated with Eastern James

Bay, mainly Waskaganish, started calling themselves MoCreebec in the 1980s, which stands for the Moose Crees of Quebec. Those were mainly people who had lived in “Tent

City” until the 1960s and who transferred late, or did not transfer at all, to a Moose

Factory band number. Their mobilization started after some of them attended JBNQA post-signature information meetings in Moosonee and Moose Factory.

The MoCreebec group numbers today about 400 people established mainly on

Moose Factory Island, located on the periphery of the Moose Cree First Nation. Many families who are currently part of the Washaw Sibi membership have also been involved in MoCreebec, for MoCreebec includes many members who have their traditional hunting territories in Hannah Bay and along the Harricana River drainage. In fact, its membership currently overlaps with that of the WSEA, and many individuals are part of the two groups simultaneously (in addition to their federal Indian and JBNQA beneficiary statuses). MoCreebec admits people living in the Moose Factory area who have a beneficiary number or who are eligible for one. Given members’ preference to stay in

Ontario in the vicinity of Moose Factory, where generations of established members have grown roots, MoCreebec was granted local association status within the GCCQ but was kept on the margins of James Bay Cree political, social, and cultural life in Quebec. Not only were members never granted Category I or II land, but their access to full JBNQA benefits, rights, and resources was compromised by the provincial border and because

Northern Ontario communities had already signed Treaty 9.

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An employee of the WSEA who had spent most of his life in Moose Factory told me about the creation of the MoCreebec group. He described the MoCreebec association as an initiative of Billy Diamond. Billy Diamond was a Waskaganish Cree, from a family who had hunting territories on the southern section of Waskaganish traplines, close to the border of Ontario. His family was thus relatively close to the La Sarre and Harricana

River Crees. He was able to bring political and financial resources to the MoCreebec group as he was the first Grand Chief of the GCCQ. He had also been a chief of

Waskaganish and a Cree negotiator of the JBNQA:

Billy Diamond, in his years as a chief of Waskaganish, had made plans to open what they call an “Ontario chapter of the Crees” and through his efforts, [he] established the MoCreebec. Before the name came up, they were known as the Ontario Crees. So he established an office with the intent of turning it into an Ontarian chapter of the Grand Council. That was the original intent. That was in 1980, and I worked for MoCreebec from 1980 to 83 and I do remember that in setting up the office, we had to consider incorporating as a non-profit organization and also setting up the urgent needs like housing for the members. We set up a non-profit office with housing program, and for the land, we negotiated with the Anglican Church of Canada to release some of their property, so we could situate these houses on the land. So there was some negotiations that MoCreebec had with the Anglican Church of Canada. And we had jurisdictional problems on Moose Factory Island due to the fact that the federal government owns where the hospital and post office are situated, and the residential school was situated on what was considered federal crown land.

The MoCreebec association represents a first attempt to settle the issue regarding a relatively cohesive group of Crees with direct genealogical, social, and cultural relations with Quebec in Moose Factory area. The history of MoCreebec preceded the recent mobilization of the Washaw Sibi Crees. This may be understood as an early episode that foreshadows the present mobilization of the Washaw Sibi membership to reverse their exclusion from the JBNQA. It is however important to say that the majority of WSEA

158 members are residents of Quebec, although a substantial minority of members and potential members reside in Ontario, including a portion of the MoCreebec membership.

The Case of Oujé-Bougoumou

Oujé-Bougoumou is a James Bay Cree community of almost 800 members located near the towns of Chibougamau and Chapais. The group joined the GCCQ in

1989 and built their village in 1993 after more than a decade of political action. In fact, representatives of the group attended JBNQA negotiations, but the group ended up being excluded from the document that was signed in 1975. Abel Bosum, former chief of the community, recalls why things did not work out:

[…] the land issue was perhaps the most complicated aspect of the JBNQA. [Our delegate] tried to obtain at least one square mile for the community. Unfortunately, […t]here was a lot of opposition to our request from the neighbouring municipalities and the mining and forestry companies. This made it very difficult for the negotiators. As a result we were left out of the JBNQA and were not identified as a community in the agreement. (Bosum 2001: 278-9)

Paul Wertman is an anthropologist working for the Grand Council who became involved in Oujé-Bougoumou’s recognition process. He explained the exclusion of Oujé-

Bougoumou in a similar way but added an additionalelement: the first election of the

Parti Québécois in 1976, which postponed the recognition of the community as potential beneficiaries of the JBNQA:

[Oujé-Bougoumou] was not mentioned in the Agreement per se, but it came up in the negotiations. [...]all the parties, the federal government and the provincial government, said, let's deal with this after. And, of course, immediately, or very shortly after the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement was concluded, there were changes of government provincially and also federally and the corporate memory was very, very short, with respect to that commitment.

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Due to this change in government, the impetus to establish Oujé-Bougoumou lost its drive. Several months of difficulties and absence of progress followed.

Nevertheless, Oujé-Bougoumou gained political momentum when the Quebec government, in the 1980s, decided to continue Phase I (La Grande River) of the James

Bay hydroelectric projects and initiate Phase II on the Great Whale River. Oujé-

Bougoumou supported the GCCQ, and in return received its recognition. Oujé-

Bougoumou was thus included in an agreement signed in 1986 with the eight other communities under the GCCQ. That gave the group political and financial support for their land claim (Bosum 2001). Paul Wertman also commented on that period:

The opportunity that presented itself for Oujé-Bougoumou was the desire, on the part of the Quebec government, to move forward with the Great Whale River hydroelectric project. The Quebec government really wanted the Cree Nation to allow that project to go ahead. And they believed that if they showed favorable gestures towards the Crees, the Crees would be more favorable towards the Great Whale hydroelectric project. So, at a certain critical point, Oujé-Bougoumou blocked a road on their traditional territory to call attention to their situation. High level Quebec officials came to Oujé-Bougoumou and said, let's negotiate. And within a few short days, Quebec and Oujé-Bougoumou reached an agreement whereby Quebec agreed to provide some limited financial assistance for the creation of a village and a commitment to negotiate amendments to the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement that would incorporate Oujé-Bougoumou as the ninth community.

The group began to establish permanent structures on the site they had selected, and blocked roads to maintain pressure and visibility. Eventually, negotiations were re- initiated with the federal Ministry of Natural Resources, which led to an agreement signed in 1989. In this agreement, the Oujé-Bougoumou was acknowledged as the ninth

Cree community comprising the GCCQ. The Oujé-Bougoumou village was built and inhabited in 1993 (Bosum 2001). In spite of their recognition as a distinct group, Oujé-

Bougoumou Crees were registered under Mistissini membership, the Cree community

160 closest and most related to them. It was not until 2009 that an independent list of Oujé-

Bougoumou Cree beneficiaries was compiled. However, to this day Oujé-Bougoumou still have no Category II land of their own, and they continue to share territory with

Mistissini.

To sum up, the recognition of Oujé-Bougoumou resulted from a long process. The group was able to take advantage of specific opportunities, but also faced several dead ends that required changes in strategy. These opportunities and obstacles depended on both the GCCQ and the governments’ interests. By strategically handling those moments where they were not necessarily the centre of attention, the community managed to move forward and achieve its collective projects. In this respect, Abel Bosum summarizes the lessons learned by the group:

[We learned,] first of all, to take advantage of all opportunities, to look around and see what is happening and find out what we could do. Second, we learned to never stop working; if we had stopped, then our people would have started to question our leadership and our desire to build a community. Third, we learned to keep the issues alive. We could not just stick to one strategy; we had to develop a whole bunch of different approaches and they all had to have some movement. (Bosum 2001: 285)

Washaw Sibi Eeyou: The Forgotten Crees

In 1975, the Washaw Sibi group, also known as the Harricana River, Hannah Bay or La Sarre group, was diffuse. Its members were scattered, and are still scattered, over

Northern Quebec and Ontario. They generally had their individual federal Indian status in the bands where they lived: in Pikogan, they were mostly registered as members of the

Abitibi-Dominion; in Wahgoshig, as members of the Abitibi-Ontario band; in Moose

Factory, as members of the Moose Cree First Nation, etc. No mention was made of them during the negotiations of the JBNQA. Those who would later become the Washaw Sibi

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Crees began applying individually for JBNQA beneficiary ID numbers after 1975 and throughout the 1980s, and in most cases theyobtained numbers associated with

Waskaganish or Waswanipi. As more and more persons obtained JBNQA beneficiary status, a collective conscience started to emerge among Crees living in Pikogan and other

Abitibi localities. This collective conscience crystallized mainly around the idea of

"having been forgotten" in the JBNQA.

When I interviewed him, Paul Wertman referred to Washaw Sibi Crees as the

"truly forgotten Crees." Regarding this matter, I asked a woman:

So, what are the criteria to be a Washaw Sibi Eeyou?

I think history would show that it would be these people that were forgotten.

They were forgotten by?

By people, by the Indian agents, I guess you could say. You know, they formalized these communities along the coast and wherever else. I guess they refused to move to these communities (beyond Eastern James Bay) too.

It is unclear in her statement whether she is referring to Treaty 9, to the Indian

Act, or to the JBNQA, although the reference to Indian agents is more representative of the legacy of the Indian Act and Treaty 9. In fact, when I asked Washaw Sibi members what were the injustices they suffered, I generally received vague answers such as

“throughout history,” “since Treaty 9,” or “it’s always been like this.” Such a chronological vagueness suggests that the omission of the Washaw Sibi Crees had been ongoing for generations, and is not yet over.

Many WSEA members told me that they felt they had also been forgotten during the negotiations of the JBNQA. For instance, an employee who had attended a JBNQA

162 information session in the 1970’s in Matagami, lamented how disappointed he was that no measures had been taken at the time to inform the group of their collective rights:

Ils venaient à Matagami donner des informations. Ça, je m'en rappelle. Mais je déplore, aujourd'hui, pourquoi Washaw Sibi est dans une telle situation. S'ils avaient consulté les Cris de La Sarre dans le temps, on aurait déjà une communauté crie ici. Les Cris de La Sarre, Washaw Sibi, ils ont été oubliés. C'est pour ça que Washaw Sibi se bat, je pense que les Cris le savent qu'on a été des oubliés.32

His main critique of the process of negotiation of the JBNQA is that the Washaw Sibi

Crees, referred to here as the La Sarre Crees (Cris de La Sarre), were forgotten as a group and were not collectively recognized.

Some WSEA members attribute their absence from the original JBNQA to their invisibility given that they lived in Pikogan, a reserve officially registered as Algonquin.

A woman in her forties living in Pikogan told me:

From what my mom told me, there was a time, way back in the early seventies, when Billy Diamond came to Pikogan asked if we wanted to be included in the James Bay Agreement. And at the time, the chief, I'm not sure if it was Richard Kistabish, or the other one, Tom Rankin, I'm not sure which one, refused, and said: “There's no Crees here.” But, they weren't made aware of that… some people knew there was Crees, but those Crees were never notified about it. And in the eighties, some realized the importance of having a beneficiary number, so they let go of their band number here and registered with Waskaganish.

For the members of the WSEA, it was as if the signatories of the JBNQA, by being silent about the existence of the Washaw Sibi Crees, were reproducing the same paradigm of marginalization that followed Treaty 9 or the implementation of the provincial border. In fact, the Washaw Sibi chief mentioned how both Euro-Canadian and aboriginal

32 They were coming to Matagami to give out information. This, I remember. But I resent, today, why Washaw Sibi is in such a situation. If they had consulted the La Sarre Crees at the time, we could have had a Cree community here. La Sarre Crees, Washaw Sibi, they were forgotten. It is for this reason that Washaw Sibi is fighting, I think the Crees know that we were forgotten (author’s translation).

163 institutions could be agents of exclusion and marginalization. He noticed that when he had to convince delegates of the GCCQ of his Cree identity:

I really had to pressure on the Cree Nation to help us, because we're Crees. We told them we're Crees, no matter where we live, we were born Crees and we will be Crees forever. And we told them we really need them to help us. And because of what the Department of Indian Affairs did in the past, like pushing us into Algonquin Nation, which was wrong, and that injustice was done by the Indian Affairs so we want that injustice to be corrected.

The exclusion of the Washaw Sibi Crees from the JBNQA was interpreted as the continuation of the group’s history of structural violence and marginalization not only on behalf of governments and colonial agencies, but also on the part of other regional aboriginal groups. In spite of their postcolonial features, from the simple fact that they wielded power, the JBNQA and the GCCQ had the potential to replicate such injustice and violence.

The Rise of the WSEA

First Meetings: The La Sarre Crees of Waskaganish

The last chapter demonstrated how social divisions emerged between Pikogan

Algonquins and the descendants of the La Sarre Crees living in Abitibi, on the peripheries of La Sarre, Amos and Pikogan. Those Crees shared common experiences dating from their occupation of Tent City, along with accumulated feelings of exclusion and marginality. According to many Abitibi Crees, it is the exasperation and frustration of some families that led them to create an association. I was told many times that the mobilization started when a staff member from the local Pikogan elementary school refused to teach Cree to children. A Cree elder from Pikogan told me about this anecdote:

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Hum, it's been a long time. And here, kids have the school here. And they don't want him to be taught Cree…Crees asked to be taught their language too. Something like that, and most of the people there, they think they mistreated them in this reserve here. And that's when they started off, to look for another place. […] Oh, they called everybody that lived up north over there to go to a meeting in La Sarre, they had it in La Sarre.

For Cree families who had always been reluctant to live in Pikogan, this event was the straw that broke the camel's back.

The rise of MoCreebec and Oujé-Bougoumou had demonstrated that there was room for accommodation within the parameters of the GCCQ and the JBNQA structures.

More specifically, the recognition of Oujé-Bougoumou in the 1980s, and the increasing number of related individuals who had off-territory JBNQA beneficiary status in Abitibi opened the way to the emergence of a collective conscience. It is in this context that

Crees living in Abitibi began to weigh whatever possibilities were available in order to attain recognition.

Meetings began to be held in the mid-1980’s. The motive was to maintain contact and nurture cohesion among friends and relatives based in Abitibi, and to discuss life conditions and future perspectives. They were more like informal events held in people's homes with no definite hierarchical structure or official leadership. They took place mostly in La Sarre because many people still lived in that area in the 1980’s, or remembered having lived there. About thirty people who had been granted off-territory beneficiary status regularly attended those meetings. When I was shown lists of attendance I was surprised to find many familiar names. In fact, the group was mostly composed of adults who nowadays have become elders and who are currently involved in regional social, cultural and political life. Their continuing involvement from the 1980’s, up until the time when I realized my research, is indicative of the group’s stability. As

165 elders, they now often stay on the margins of direct political action, although one suspects that twenty years ago, when they were younger adults, they were more politically and socially active. Yet the authority of these elders (akin to that of deceased ancestors) plays an interesting role in Washaw Sibi. I mentioned above how the leadership of the GCCQ was generally elected from adults formally educated in the postsecondary school system. Things were not the same for the early La Sarre Crees of

Waskaganish who presented a pattern closer to customary forms of leadership: they gathered around a group of older adults and elders. In fact, elders played and still play a gravitational role for the group. Their family and the people they know refer to them when they define their belonging to the community.

The first meetings of the “La Sarre Crees of Waskaganish”33 provided the group spaces to tell and exchange stories, which helped the group to generate a collective perspective on their past and present experiences. Very little archival records remain from these early meetings. In the archives available in the WSEA office, the documents do not date back earlier than 1997. The only remaining traces of the meetings held in the late 1980s and the early 1990s are found in a few individuals’ personal archives, and in their memories.

Incorporation of the WSEA in 1997

At the beginning, in the year 1997, Washaw Sibi was given funding from the James Bay implementation office. […] Yeah, and through Waskaganish. The Waskaganish group was the main First Nation that, through Billy Diamond's efforts, organized the initial meeting where there were representatives from Waskaganish and of Washaw Sibi, or La Sarre Crees, and representatives from Waswanipi. So, there are records in the office that there were efforts made to

33 The group identified itself with “Waskaganish” because they mostly had their JBNQA beneficiary numbers in Waskaganish.

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finance on an annual basis with the assistance of Waskaganish First Nation and Waswanipi. That's how they were organized in 1997. (Man in his sixties working for the WSEA)

A lawyer was invited to some of the meetings at the end of the 1980s and in the beginning of the 1990s. She motivated the group to contact Billy Diamond, the very man who initiated the emergence of MoCreebec and who had played a significant role in the organization of the Cree Nation. In fact, Billy Diamond already knew, or was related to, many local people who were established in Abitibi and also in Pikogan. The group met with him for the first time in 1990 and continued to meet about once a year, mostly in La

Sarre, but sometimes in Amos and Pikogan area. As a former chief of Waskaganish where a growing number of members of the group had their beneficiary numbers (as off- territory beneficiaries), Billy Diamond became involved in the group. During that period, the group examined different possibilities regarding their position as a Cree community and established relationships with other GCCQ communities, mostly Waskaganish and

Waswanipi.

In 1997 the group gained observer status within the GCCQ. This new status was accompanied with more substantial financial and political support. Waskaganish delegates regularly attended meetings held in La Sarre or Amos and were exposed to procedures and policies pertaining to the GCCQ. The GCCQ, mainly through

Waskaganish, began to fund the group, allowing it to register itself as an institutional corporation and to work as a non-profit association. The incorporated association was registered under the name of “Washaw Sibi Eeyou Association” (WSEA) and functioned under the leadership of a council of five people (Chief, Deputy Chief, and three councillors). For nearly the next decade, the WSEA was mandated to examine different

167 possibilities for a long-term consolidation of the group. It was during those years that the new association designed its eventual role.

At that stage, the association only committed itself to defend its members' interests under the JBNQA, to reunite and create bonds among its members, to protect

Cree culture and the traditional way of life, and to politically represent its membership vis-à-vis Cree institutions as well as within provincial and federal governments (WSEA archives). Given that many stakeholders, politicians, and people involved in this process implicitly or explicitly considered the group as a part of the Waskaganish community, the group had to justify its belonging to the Cree nation as a distinct community. Moreover, less than five years after the settlement of Oujé-Bougoumou, which had required substantial patience and effort, the building of a tenth Cree community would have appeared ambitious in the eyes of the GCCQ.

With the new structure in place, the WSEA saw the necessity of appointing younger adults leading positions. With their formal education received mainly in Indian residential schools and in postsecondary education, these young leaders were better prepared for the tasks and mechanics of the WSEA. A former director of the association, said retrospectively:

La création de Washaw Sibi a été faite tout juste en 1997. Parce que je travaillais au Ministère de la main-d'œuvre et de la sécurité du revenu. Quand Washaw Sibi a commencé, ils voulaient avoir une personne qui connaissait l'entente de la Baie James et qui connaissait la job de bureau, la bureaucratie. Donc, dans le temps, j'avais déjà de l'expérience. Ils sont venus me chercher. Pis j'ai accepté. Donc, j'ai été le premier directeur, premier coordonnateur, qu'on pourrait dire, coordonnateur et président de Washaw Sibi. Parce qu'on a été obligés de le créer sous forme d'association. D'ailleurs, je pense que c'est toujours le cas légalement. […] Ça a été bien. Au début, on dépendait de Waskaganish. Waskaganish, je pense, nous a pris en main pendant 4, 5 ans, je crois, ou plus ou moins.34

34 The creation of Washaw Sibi was done in 1997. Because I was working at the Department of manpower and income security. When Washaw Sibi started, they wanted a person who knew well the JBNQA and

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Obviously, there was a growing demand for people who knew how to work in an institutionalized bureaucracy and follow the rules and procedures fixed by the GCCQ and

CRA. During my fieldwork, many employees of the WSEA explained to me that they had been hired for their bureaucratic skills and for their understanding of administrative tasks.

Beyond the new staff and the administrative tasks of the WSEA, a community model gradually began to emerge. It affected social relations and the ways in which all members defined their sense of belonging within the group. But most importantly, it imposed itself as an implicit condition for obtaining funding and political support.

A task force was organized in 1999 with a mandate to conduct genealogical research and investigate history and the spread of the group. It conducted interviews and exchanged archival data with other Cree communities. Also, procedures to treat applications for membership were established and the WSEA began to locate potential members, i.e. people related to the La Sarre Crees but living in other areas. Eventually, different committees formed within the WSEA met with Cree institutions such as the

Cree School Board, the Youth Council, and the Cree Board of Health in order to decide which services could be organized for Washaw Sibi members. These committees took time to put in place, and the people who actually participated in meetings with Cree institutions were often the same as those who were working on the executive committee.

Moreover, actions were taken to enhance ties with other James Bay Cree communities. In the end of the 1990's further possible exchanges between the latter and

who knew office work, bureaucracy. So, at the time, I already had experience. They came for me. And I accepted. So I was the first director, first coordinator, we might say, coordinator and president of Washaw Sibi. Because we were obliged to open it as an association. In fact, I think it is still the case legally. […] It was good. In the beginning, we depended on Waskaganish. Waskaganish, I think, took us in hands for 4, 5 years, I think, or more or less (author’s translation).

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Washaw Sibi were envisaged, revealing the potential social, financial and economic advantages the entire Cree Nation would gain if they had a tenth Cree community in

Abitibi, closer to urban centers. At the social level, in 1999, an annual report of the activities of the association noted that the Recreation Committee had been very active in meeting recreation directors from other Cree communities, allowing the community to participate in the main events happening in other communities. At the political level, a representative of Waskaganish was officially appointed to the Washaw Sibi council, and members of the board of the association regularly attended Waskaganish assemblies and council meetings. In return, Washaw Sibi Crees played a significant role in the construction of the access road to Waskaganish35 either by working as construction workers or by putting Waskaganish in contact with contractors based in Abitibi. The road finally came into operation in 2001. In order to explore possible commercial exchanges between Abitibi towns and Washaw Sibi as well as other James Bay Cree communities, and to establish a network of tourism contacts in France and Belgium, the chairman of the association attended meetings of the Amos and Val d'Or chambers of commerce as early as 1999. At the time of my fieldwork tourism and the proximity of an important market that could benefit all Cree communities economically and financially were still the main arguments invoked by the WSEA to promote the village project.

That was also a time when the bureaucracy of the association was a constant source of complaints and gossip among members and employees. The necessity of improving transparency and efficiency was considered by members to be one of the biggest challenges that Washaw Sibi faced. Historical experiences of geographical and

35 This non-paved road links the community to the 109 James Bay highway. Before its construction, Waskaganish could only be accessed by boat or plane.

170 social fragmentation, as well as marginalization and social exclusion, had generated within members a sense of suspicion towards official bodies including governments, the

GCCQ, and even, in certain cases, the administration of the WSEA itself. The situation was exacerbated by the limited job opportunities in the WSEA, leading to a competitive atmosphere, constant complaints of favouritism, and accusations of incompetency.

Furthermore, the implantation of bureaucracy caused a clash between generations. During my fieldwork, Washaw Sibi counted on its council of five people, including two elected women who happened to be elders. The presence of elders is not so common nowadays in

Cree councils, where most politicians or councillors are chosen from younger generations, i.e. the generations that attended Indian residential school and, more recently, the generations who attended community-based schools. In this new context,

WSEA members often complained or joked about having elders on the council or on committees because they considered that elders misunderstood the contemporary political context, written by-laws and official documents.

This situation gave Washaw Sibi a reputation of disorganization. Three members of the WSEA told me about the past disorganization and disorder of the association:

Very unorganized, lack of leadership, poor governance, yeah. I ended up almost chairing them. I was actually sitting in the back, watching, eventually I was sitting at the table, eventually I was telling the chief and his staff what to do.

At one point, due to lack of professional managers in the administration or managers that completed a good level of education, there was some organizational problems due to some of the finances, as each organized group encounters. At one time, the Crees had almost discontinued financing Washaw Sibi because, the reason being they don't want to have to finance another friendship center.

Au début, ça a été bien, mais ça a été ardu par après. Parce que, comme on dit, tout le monde, il voulait être chef. Pis ça a été ardu parce que les gens ne comprenaient pas le processus "bureaucratie." C'était tout nouveau pour eux- autres, pis tout le monde voulait faire quelque chose, mais de la mauvaise

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manière. Pis là, à un moment donné, la chicane a pogné. […] Le gros problème à Washaw Sibi, c'est que les gens sont pas formés pour siéger dans un conseil d'administration. C'est la base d'un organisme. Faut que les gens comprennent bien dans quoi qu'ils embarquent.36

This reputation of disorganization reached such a point that stakeholders, including the

GCCQ, contemplated closing the WSEA. A young man who worked at times in the

WSEA office remembers how his family, who then lived in Moose Factory, got involved in the association and then moved to Amos:

[My father] was passing information, how to do this, the steps to do that and… he got one phone call that Roderick said that we have to close Washaw Sibi, we have to close the door. So my father said actually, don't close the door, put your foot in the door. Do not close it, whatever you do, don't close it, because what you're doing for the people is a good thing. And if you close it, it will just be good for nothing. So that is when I realized that my father was really involved with the issues regarding Washaw Sibi. And I guess during the summer, I come and visit and, so, in the summer of 2003, I finished college already. Roderick came up to me and he says, I'm looking for certain employees in Washaw Sibi and since you have some education, I think you would be a good employee for us to hire you at Washaw Sibi. At that time, my father was just a representative, he was not a councilor or a deputy chief or a chief here.

The events referred to in the quotes above happened at the beginning of the 2000’s and triggered changes both in the membership and in the relations with other entities.

Recognition as the Tenth Quebec James Bay Cree Community by GCCQ in 2003

Internal conflicts and threats to close Washaw Sibi transformed the WSEA: it led leaders and directors to look for help, expertise, and support within a broader network

36 In the beginning, it was good, but it was difficult afterward. Because, as we say, everybody, they wanted to be chief. And it was difficult because people did not understand the process of bureaucracy. It was brand new for them, and everybody wanted to do something, but not in a good way. And at a certain moment, there were fights. […] The big problem in Washaw Sibi, it is people who are not educated to sit on anadministation committee. It is the basis of an organization. People have to understand what they are getting into (author’s translation). 172 based on extended kinship relations and friendship. The beginning of the 2000’s were thus characterized by growing and diversifying membership. The WSEA went from a small group linked together by common experiences and often intimate social ties to a larger political community using historical ties and customary partnerships. Members researched the genealogy and the history37 of the group and began to see ties expanding beyond the families of the “Waskaganish Crees of La Sarre.” Many members of Ontario communities (mostly Wahgoshig, Moose Cree First Nation or MoCreebec) began applying for a WSEA membership, and in many cases moved to Amos to be closer to the core group, and to become involved in the association. In particular, some MoCreebec found that by joining the WSEA and joining a Cree community in Quebec, they could access more JBNQA benefits. Needless to say, those developments benefitted the whole group, for the growing membership of the WSEA amounted to increasing its political weight.

In the meantime, important events affecting the whole Cree Nation occurred which had specific implications for the WSEA. In the early 2000's, the provincial government decided to pursue new hydroelectric development and resource exploitation projects in James Bay. This led them to re-think the development of the Cree nation with the GCCQ and the CRA. In 2002 the Paix des Braves was signed between the Crees and the government of Quebec. It “provide[d] for the sharing of revenues derived from mining, hydroelectric development and forestry carried out on the traditional lands of the

37 It is in this context that the WSEA leadership mandated Jim Morrison and Colin Scott for the community history and genealogy project mentioned in the first chapter. I participated in this project as a research assistant early in my doctoral program and this employment opportunity put me in contact with the Washaw Sibi Crees. The final report was handed to the community in 2009 (Scott, Morrison and Lessard 2009). In fact, the community council hired Morrison and Scott because they had already realized a similar project with MoCreebec and thus had already indirectly documented the history and genealogy of a significant part of the group (Scott and Morrison 1993).

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Cree People” (GCC, n.d.). It also gave the Crees the responsibility for economic and community development over the next fifty years. In 2007, after three years of negotiation and mediation, the Crees also signed the Agreement concerning a new relationship with the federal government, which included further financial compensation and measures to facilitate the implementation of Canada’s obligations under the JBNQA

(GCC, n.d.). In 2003, the GCCQ admitted Washaw Sibi (i.e. the WSEA) as the tenth Cree community under the umbrella of the GCCQ, just after the signature of the Paix des

Braves, and a few years before the New Relationship Agreement.38 Both agreements were cornerstones for the establishment of Washaw Sibi: they secured financial support and generated a basis for political recognition.

Finding a Village Site for the Community

The integration of the WSEA under the GCCQ generated consensus over the necessity to establish a village community for Washaw Sibi members, and not just transfer them to already established Cree communities or maintain a local association indefinitely. A new phase began for the WSEA. Although the WSEA remained legally a non-profit organization, members and non-members began using an electoral- bureaucratic vocabulary borrowed from James Bay Cree communities. For example, the directors began being called"chief" and "deputy chief." The community also began renting an office space in downtown Amos that served as a political headquarters and a service point for members. It became clear that some members had, since the beginning, wanted to establish a village for the community. Members often remember 1997 as the

38 In fact, sections 5.4 and 6.5 of the 2007 federal New Relationship Agreement provide CRA funding for the creation of a tenth Cree community, Washaw Sibi.

174 date when this project entered into the discussions. An elder woman living in Pikogan and member of Washaw Sibi said:

My parents, my dad, they have been talking about Washaw Sibi. Ever since we've been living in La Sarre, he used to say: the government, they used to negotiate with the government. I don't know why, we were supposed to have a village near La Sarre, then we were supposed to have another village across from the reserve [Pikogan]. […] we never had nobody to negotiate with I guess. But, since 1997, that's the beginning. We started talking about it again.39

For these people, the decision of the GCCQ to recognize Washaw Sibi in 2003 was a major advance for a project dreamt for a long time.

The choice of a site, which would eventually become the JBNQA Category I land zone for the construction of a village, was at the same time challenging and divisive for the WSEA. It led to numerous debates and conflicts among members and with surrounding aboriginal groups. Three major rounds of discussion took place respectively during 2004, 2007, and 2009. Once the village was established, the council of Washaw

Sibi and the GCCQ would negotiate with the Quebec government a land regime of

Category II for the community.

In 2004, the council explored eight sites. One was located near the town of Amos and another near the town of La Sarre. The other six sites were not located near urban areas and were therefore qualified as "bush," "rural," or "northern" sites by community members. These rural sites were situated along the "Selbaie Road", i.e. the access road to the ghost town of Joutel on the 109 highway (joining Amos to Matagami), crossing to the west side of Abitibi and connecting to the 111 road (joining Amos to La Sarre) in La

Sarre area. These sites corresponded well with the group's initial expectations. People

39 In fact, the HBC and the Indian Affairs did correspond about the possibility of relocating the “La Sarre Crees” to a reserve of their own between 1930-50, before the government decided that the simplest way to deal with them would be to merge the group with the Abitibi band living in Pikogan (Scott and Morrison 1993: 109-110).

175 wanted, and in many cases still want, a rural, northern community. That suited their wish to be distant from the influence of urban centers and closer to the model of other established Cree communities.

In the summer of 2005, debates over the acquisition of a land base for the village were accompanied by a symbolic re-appropriation of customary Washaw Sibi land. With the support of the GCCQ, members of the community walked 105 km on the 109 highway, from the Washaw Sibi office located in Amos to establish the traditional camp at Lake Joulac. This event mobilized people from all generation and from diverse family groups, sheding visibility on the WSEA. Many remember well the strong social cohesion that pervaded the community afterward. Speaking of this event, a woman in her forties from Pikogan said eloquently:

Yes, at that time, there were members who did not get along. But on that event, I saw that members that can put aside their differences, who had the same goal, who have the same vision and put aside those differences and do that march together from that arena here. I saw that we could do it, even now, we could still make it possible.

On a different note, an important faction of the Pikogan Algonquins felt threatened by the mobilization of the WSEA to build a new village which would deprive them of about one third of their present population. Some Algonquins dreaded the fragmenting and detrimental consequences that the establishment of Washaw Sibi could have on the

Abitibi band. A young man from Pikogan told me:

Qu'est-ce qui m'a frappé, c'est que Pikogan, eux-autres, ils veulent pas nous laisser partir, parce qu’ils vont perdre une grosse partie d'argent. […] J'ai ressenti de la colère qu'il y avait chez eux-autres, là. On a pu passer, ils ont rien dit, ils ont rien fait parce qu'on avait des caméras, on avait des policiers cris qui ont marché avec nous-autres, je pense qu'ils venaient de Chisasibi, Nemaska, Waskaganish.40

40 What struck me, it is that in Pikogan, they do not want to let us go, because they will lose so much money. […] I felt the anger that they felt. We were able to pass, they did not say anything, they did not do

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We see here that the walk to Joulac is remembered for the conflict between members of the WSEA and Pikogan Algonquins which took place at that time and during the two years following this event.

In 2006 and 2007, three sites were added to the preceding sites, two by the WSEA and one by the GCCQ. The WSEA launched an internal referendum in which people had to choose between a rural and an urban location. Given the pro-Washaw Sibi momentum of the time, an information kit detailing the importance of this choice was distributed to the members in 2007. As a matter of fact, at that moment most other Cree communities promoted the establishment of Washaw Sibi and agreed to support it financially and politically. Yet, the information kit stated the need for Washaw Sibi to demonstrate the seriousness of its project. It also mentioned GCCQ’s preference for a site that would reduce completion time and financial costs, which many members understood as advocating for an urban site.

The WSEA referendum ended up proposing a choice between two sites: an urban one located south of Amos and a rural one. On one hand, groups who supported the

"urban site" argued that such a site would cost much less, as the town of Amos could already provide health and educational services and the town's infrastructure including roads, electricity, running water, and sewer canalizations which could simply be extended to the village site. The town could provide jobs, opportunities, and entertainment to the members of the community. Many considered that the CGGQ would also benefit from having a community close to an urban center: Washaw Sibi could then host major anything because we had cameras and Cree policemen who walked with us, I think they came from Chisasibi, Nemaska, Waskaganish (author’s translation).

177 negotiations concerning business and politics, with a village that would be easily accessible to a larger urban centre.

On the other hand, groups who supported the "rural site" generally considered the town of Amos a potentially source of negative influence. They were concerned about having to learn and speak French in order to access services or to get a job. According to them, the entertainment facilities in Amos such as bars and poolrooms would expose the community, especially the youth, to alcohol and drugs. A 30-year-old native of Moose

Factory but now working for Washaw Sibi told me:

The main problem would probably be drugs and alcohol because it's all over. Everywhere, wherever you look there's a bar or there's a depanneur that has beer sold. In Ontario we had a liquor store and that was it. There was a time limit and here, you have, eleven o'clock it's over, you know, so you can go late and have alcohol. So the drugs and alcohol play a role. It's a big problem for all Cree nations, not just for the Cree people, but for the non-Aboriginals as well. Drugs and alcohol are a bad thing for us. It's one thing I wouldn't like to see happen to our community, but if it does there's some stuff we'll have to do to walk around that and that's what I want to do. I want to make sure that our youth grow up in a community where there's no drinking at home with the families, where parents don't have to bring alcohol and their friends over.

Other people who supported a rural site believed that a rural community would decrease the influence of French or English, and fashion a context in which people could speak aboriginal languages, namely Cree and Algonquin. The proximity of the bush and of customary territories would enhance the practice of traditional lifestyles, and at the same time would force members to generate their own services and businesses in a way that would suit them. Finally, they argued that in a rural site it would be easier for the community to preserve its socio-political autonomy and its cultural specificity.

The majority of the membership voted in favor of the urban site. The result of the poll disappointed several factions of the WSEA membership who did not want a

178 community close to Amos. In this connection, an elder who lives in Abitibi commented to me:

Ils les ont fait les élections. Pis j'ai pas voté, ni par téléphone. Ça sert à rien de dire quelque chose parce qu'ils vont le faire en ville, pas loin d'Amos. Ça m'intéresse pas. Ça sert à rien de dire quelque chose. C'est dommage parce que c'est nous-autres [the initial group] qui voulaient avoir… parce qu'il a mal compris ce qu’on avait fait. Plusieurs ont mal compris.41

According to this man, establishing Washaw Sibi close to a Euro-Canadian town simply diverted the project from its initial objectives.

The WSEA leadership initiated discussions with the town of Amos and with the owners of the land lot they wanted to purchase. However, the community faced opposition from the local farmers' union who refused to re-zone what was considered as valuable agricultural land. Rather than confronting this opposition, the GCCQ and the

WSEA council decided not to insist, thereby maintaining amicable relations with the town of Amos and its inhabitants.

In the following months, the WSEA asked the Amos council to examine which other lands could be purchased by the community. At the same moment, Amos became increasingly concerned with the conflict between Washaw Sibi and Pikogan, and also with the complaints of inhabitants regarding the establishment of a second aboriginal community within the limits of the town. Discussions that followed the 2007 poll ended up consolidating positive relations between Washaw Sibi and the town of Amos.

Meetings were held between Amos representatives, Pikogan council and the WSEA

41 They had elections. And I did not vote, not even by phone. It is useless to say something because they will do it in town, not far from Amos. I’m not interested. Saying anything is useless. It is too bad because we [the initial group] wanted to have… because they did not understand what we did (author’s translation).

179 council, and a declaration of intention for good relationships was signed in the summer

2009.

At about the same time, the town also informed the WSEA of the existence of different possible sites. A list of those was posted in the Washaw Sibi office. A preliminary examination of the sites was realized by Dessau, and a report in French and

English was made available to all members (Dessau 2009). In July 2009, a community meeting took place in which the members deliberated, discussed and eliminated the sites they did not want. Two sites were kept as open options. Present members overwhelmingly voted for site #2 was close to Pikogan. A second back-up option was identified a few kilometers north of the center of Amos (site #4W). The association started negotiations, as well as further investigations of the sites, in order to assess the possibilities of building a community there. A few months later, the offer for site #2 was retracted and the community started to further examine site #4W. At the moment I left the field in June 2010, the WSEA was still conducting tests and engaging in negotiations concerning the possibility of establishing a Cree village on that lot (#4W).

To illustrate the general atmosphere in which the future development of Washaw

Sibi was being decided, I will recount the July 2009 meeting that I attended in Amos, during which the membership was invited to vote on the sites proposed by the town of

Amos.

Preparations began in April 2009, when Dessau engineering company completed the information booklet in French and English exposing results of preliminary studies mandated by the WSEA leadership concerning the different potential sites. The booklet was distributed to the members prior to the meeting. Moreover, representatives of Waskaganish, Waswanipi and Oujé-Bougoumou, one lawyer and Paul Wertman, representing CRA, were present. The organization of the meeting first met with difficulties related to the group's geographical spread across northern Quebec and Ontario. A

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series of letters, phone calls, emails, newsletters, posters, and face-to-face invitations were issued by employees of the WSEA to contact and inform all members. A toll free phone line was established for the day of the meeting to allow members who were not in Amos area to vote.

In spite of all this preparation, only a little more than forty people, mostly members from Pikogan and Amos area, and GCCQ/CRA delegates attended the meeting. Few people were able to come from Val d’Or or other areas, such as Ontario or Southern Quebec. This raised concern for the members present at the meeting about the validity of representativity given the small attendance. Members did not feel entitled to take such an important decision regarding the village site. The legitimacy of the decision of the assembly then became a topic of discussion and contention.

Although most members at the meeting had apparently agreed that Washaw Sibi would be built in the limits of the town of Amos, a significant group expressed their disappointment concerning this past decision and argued for other sites located “in the bush.” That led to a discussion about the implications of being Cree – as opposed to people of other First Nations. Soon, the discussions deviated from the necessity to select a site to the need of defining a foundation for the project: “What do we want to do exactly with this assembly?” A delegate from another Cree community warned the community of the dangers of establishing a community close to an urban area. He argued that Cree people are not "urban Indians" and cited the example of the Mohawks of Kahnawake, the Hurons of Wendake,42 and the Pikogan Algonquins – all aboriginal groups who had lost contact with their customs and traditional territories. Moreover, such a location close to a town, where all the services were already organized, would hamper the youth's motivations to organize their own community and start businesses. It is interesting to note that these comments came from a GCCQ delegate: he insisted on the need to emulate the model of other established Cree communities. Yet, his advice paradoxically went against the pressure from GCCQ/CRA who were decidedly in favor of an urban community.

Towards the end of the day, just before the vote was actually taken, a Washaw Sibi elder who lived in Pikogan walked toward the table where I was sitting and rubbed his eyes, humorously mimicking a child’s sobbings: “I lost my community. My community will not be in the bush.” The collective agreeement to vote for the sites proposed by the town of Amos was indeed interpreted as a loss by a faction of the membership. According to this faction, building a village in the urban site proposed by the town would disempower the group and would make it more difficult for them to

42 Wendake is a Huron-Wendat reserve located on in the close vicinity of Quebec City, while

Kahnawake is situated on the South Shore of Montreal.

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retain control over the setting of the community, and the organization of social life. In an urban context, the group would have to negotiate with their “neighbors,” such as the town of Amos, other villages and towns of Abitibi, and Pikogan. Members feared that Washaw Sibi’s autonomy would constantly be limited on account of that. People argued that two years before, in 2007, they had chosen a site but their decision was ultimately defeated by Amos agricultors. All day long, jokes were made about one of the sites proposed by the town of Amos which happened to be located a few hundred meters away from the municipal dump. Many people suggested that through this proposition, the town took no heed to people’s interests. In brief, people expressed concerns about “neighbors” on each site. Furthermore, members were concerned with the risk of seeing their choice of site invalidated as had already happened in the past.

In the end, the assembly voted in great majority for site #2, and site #4W came second. The choice of the site was apparently conditioned by the fact that a significant portion of voters attending the meeting had spent all their life near Amos (in Pikogan) and the area had become “homey.” The site was thus meaningful to them. Elders and older adults expressed publicly their preference for site #2 because it was located just across from Pikogan on the 109 North, between Amos and Pikogan. These elders appreciated the fact that the community would be located close to the river, for they remembered camping there before moving in Pikogan. Memories of these past experiences made the site more acceptable for them.

* *

In this chapter, I have presented the recent history of the Washaw Sibi group. It features the laborious passage from a diffuse collectivity interlocked within other regional groups to an organized and corporate association known as the tenth Cree nation of Quebec, working on a definite community project. The project to establish a residential community is still undefined and in the process of emergence – it has not been completed yet. The shape that it will ultimately take is unforeseeable. This situation leaves many questions open and several conflicts unresolved. The next chapter will aim at clarifying the different issues associated with the realization of the community project.

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CHAPTER 5

HOW TO CROSS A LINE:

HABITUS, IDENTITIES, AND SEMI-NOMADISM

IN THE ERA OF THE WSEA

The rise of the WSEA built on different sets of symbolic and social borders such as those between 1) Cree and Algonquin identities; 2) JBNQA beneficiaries and non- beneficiaries; and 3) beneficiaries living on JBNQA land compared to those living off- territory. These borders can at times be crossed as people find in their personal experiences the means or the opportunities to engage alternative identities and to become members of different collectivities simultaneously. The objective of this chapter is to highlight how social boundaries and identities are currently lived and experienced in ways that allow for such overlaps. I consider these dynamics to be continuous with previous experiences of the group, including its semi-nomadic past, and as a strategy to cope with the sedentarization and social fragmentation that happened over the course of colonization. The notion of habitus will be used as a conceptual tool to bridge the contemporary state of the group with its past and with people’s current living conditions and expectations. It will also provide insight into the way people define their own

183 collectivity and draw lines between themselves and members of other groups, and also how they may at times cross these lines. I will also show how crossing such lines has contributed to the maintenance of a relatively cohesive collectivity in spite of its social and geographical fragmentation.

Habitus: Objects and Subjects in the Midst of Complex Interactions

The Latin concept of habitus has a long history in western philosophy and humanities. The Greek equivalent, hexis, referred to the active feature of knowledge, a

“disposition” or a “way of being” that lasted longer than a temporary emotion and/or that allowed an intention to materialize (Stern 2008). The term entered early social sciences through Marcel Mauss (2000), who used the term to transpose at the individual level his notion of a “total social fact,” that is, an event or activity that has impacts in all spheres of a society(economic, legal, political, and religious). In this sense, habitus works as a connector between the physical, psychological, social, and cultural dimensions of individual action. More recently, German sociologist Norbert Elias (1994 [1939]) also contributed to the use of this concept in the social sciences by defining it as an imprint left on individual and social behavior by sets of preexisting networks, social configurations and relations of power.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977) gave the concept the definition it has in contemporary social science. He defined habitus as a principle structuring perceptions and actions and influencing sensibilities, tastes, aptitudes and social structures. More precisely, habitus refers to:

systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the

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generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor. (Bourdieu 1977: 72)

Bourdieu defined habitus as a system of dispositions that implied a past that survived in the present and tended to perpetuate itself in the future. Habitus represents Bourdieu’s attempt to negotiate the aspects of continuity and change involved with individual and collective action. Habitus also takes into account the complex, ambivalent relationships between these actions and, on the one hand, existing social regulations and, on the other, people’s individual objectives. Bourdieu considers habitus as the (re-)producer of acquired and socially emerging schemes of thoughts and means of expression, while being the basis for intention-less and regulated improvisation (Bourdieu 1977).

Authors in the social sciences have interpreted habitus mostly as a concept that theorizes social reproduction. Habitus has been critiqued for its determinism, as some authors consider that it suggests a lack of autonomy and generative capacity for individuals, and the objective existence of structures independent of social agents’ consciousness (Frère 2005). As a matter of fact, his definition followed a long tradition of classic sociologists and anthropologists such as Marcel Mauss, Émile Durkheim and

Claude Lévi-Strauss who were interested in the perpetuation of social structures.

Yet, habitus is first an embodied and individual disposition, the outcome of socialization in all kinds of spheres (hobbies, food, culture, work, education, consumption, etc.) that allows individuals of a specific group to move within a given social world, and to interpret it in a specific and appropriate way. Thus, with the concept

185 of habitus, Bourdieu did not exclude the notions of social structure and of structured action, but focused attention on the constant (re-)emergence of these structures as they build on individual actions (Lizardo 2004). Habitus is also close to philosopher Merleau-

Ponty’s “embodied consciousness,” a concept suggesting that one’s consciousness, world and body serve as tools for perception and are mutually engaged in individual and collective actions (Merleau-Ponty 1945). Within a given group, habitus then contributes to structure and to “uniformize” behaviors and forms of interpretations: it allows social groups and collective action to build on individual practices and interpretations.

Loic Wacquant wrote that Bourdieu elaborated habitus in order to go beyond the debate in social sciences between objectivist theories, which consider practice as determined by social structure, and subjectivist ones, which tend to consider individuals’ will and intentions as the main sources of their actions (Wacquant 2010: 112). As a matter of fact, Bourdieu defined habitus at a moment when discussions in sociology and anthropology were emphasizing reflexivity, subjectivity and agency. Instead of rigid social structures, individual actions and subjectivity were increasingly perceived as constituting identity. The notion of habitus was a contribution to this discussion, as well as to an understanding of social transformation, emergence, and changes in the thoughts, ideas, perceptions and actions existing within a group. Bourdieu envisaged such transformations simultaneously and in interaction with pre-existing social structures, reflecting on how they also contribute to the emergence of social groups. In Bourdieu’s theory, social agents are not completely passive, rather they are creative beings that contribute to the construction of social reality. Habitus thus refers to malleable and transmissible dispositions that are acquired gradually through experiences and

186 socialization, are reproduced through practice and everyday actions, and vary depending on individuals’ social positions and trajectories (Wacquant 2010). It consequently allows for conceiving “plural individuals,” i.e. acknowledging that people can hold multiple sets of social norms and also improvise, thus producing new behaviors and defining unpredictable identities in different situations (Frère 2005).

In fact, sociologist Anthony King emphasizes how Bourdieu situated habitus within a broader framework which he refers to as a “practical theory,” which is in contradiction with habitus in certain respects. His practical theory highlights social agents’ practical knowledge and everyday forms of active and knowledgeable interactions. It argues that actions are constantly negotiated; each negotiation subtly changes the meanings of past interactions therefore gradually transforming the social and cultural landscape within which habitus is defined (King 2000). Individuals who are native of a certain system can be considered as sociocultural “virtuosos” who do not act according to precise rules or principles (which, in any social or cultural context, are fuzzy), but who have integrated the blueprint script so deeply that they are able to improvise and elaborate. Practical theory partly makes habitus a principle of transformation: in a given group, habitus forms a repertoire of potential actions, a social and cultural horizon that is broad, yet limited and always negotiated among individuals.

Habitus is relevant to this dissertation for two reasons. On the one hand, it allows thinking about individual actions, subjectivity and social change in a way that acknowledges and takes into account regularity, reproduction, and continuity in a given group. On the other hand, habitus is a useful methodological device for documenting the ways in which people participate in changes at both the individual and social levels.

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Researching habitus requires an immersion in “le tourbillon de l’action43” (Wacquant

2010: 116). Such immersion can bring a detailed understanding of the production and implications of social changes. The concept of habitus challenges ethnographers to apprehend the maintenance and constant emergence of practices, mechanisms, sensations and perceptions attached to a given social world, while reflecting on both social structure and individual subjectivity (Adams 2006).

I already explained how fieldwork led me into different sites related in different ways to Washaw Sibi and their community building project. Going to these different sites allowed me to observe how the people involved had distinct perspectives about the project and ultimately abou the identity of the group. The next sections will discuss instances of alternative projects and ways of expressing a Washaw Sibi identity that exist in parallel to the project advanced by the WSEA, and that are deeply rooted in people’s modes of socialization. These discussions will reveal the multifaceted aspect of members' identity and their ability to consider themselves as members of groups other than the association. The concept of habitus becomes relevant here to understand the different principles upon which these alternatives bonds build, at certain times contributing to the development of the WSEA, and at other times challenging it.

43 “The whirlwind of action” (author’s translation).

188

The Division Between Crees and Algonquins

Conflicts?

I have previously mentioned that one third of the people living in Pikogan are simultaneously on the membership list of the Abitibiwinni band and also on the WSEA list, therefore they can participate in the social, cultural and political life of both groups.

Adding to their federal Indian status, these members of the Abitibiwinni band either have a JBNQA beneficiary status, or are knowingly eligible for one, but refuse to or cannot join the WSEA for some reason. Hence, tracing the boundary lines between members of

Abitibiwinni and those of the WSEA is a topic of continuous negotiation among the local aboriginal population.

In fact, when I arrived in the field at Amos for research in June 2009, I expected to find a situation of conflict between the WSEA and the members of the Abitibiwinni band living in Pikogan. I apprehended finding myself in the presence of conflicts between the Crees and the Algonquins mainly because the establishment of Washaw Sibi in a new residential community could deprive of Pikogan of one third of its membership.

Moreover, I knew that the WSEA was recognized and supported by the GCCQ, which caused an important political and financial imbalance between WSEA and Pikogan. I hence thought this situation could only exacerbate conflicts. Moreover, many non- aboriginal people living in Amos confirmed to me that the relations between Washaw

Sibi and Pikogan were tense. For instance, Euro-Quebecers living in Amos described the rise of the Washaw Sibi group as the resolution of an ongoing “tribal” conflict and controversies between Crees and Algonquins. Some had told me that Crees and

Algonquins had always hated each other; others presented the Washaw Sibi Crees as

189 people who had recently arrived in the region to settle down: "Ils s'en viennent s'installer"44 (“They are coming to settle down”). This phrase was usually followed by a movement of the arm indicating that they had travelled from far away and/or a facial expression of disapproval. Another perspective on the issue was to say that “Pikogan

Crees” wanted to “secede” or “separate” from the rest of the band. All these narratives insisted on the potential conflict that could arise between Washaw Sibi and Pikogan.

As I got closer to Washaws Sibi members, I asked them if there were any conflictual relations between Pikogan and the Abitibiwinni band. Washaw Sibi members generally told me that conflicts between the two groups, the Algonquins and the Crees, happened mostly between 2004 and 2007. In 2004 Washaw Sibi was recognized as the tenth Cree community in Quebec by the GCCQ, and discussion of establishing a village intensified. It is during this period that the conflict became most visible. People from both the Abitibiwinni band and the WSEA told me that some general assemblies in Pikogan turned into open arguments and even fights; protests were organized in downtown Amos in front of the Washaw Sibi office, and Washaw Sibi office workers there received physical threats, some had their houses vandalized.

People generally agreed that since 2007 these conflicts have decreased and have almost come to a stop. According to most Washaw Sibi members, the 2007 election of

Pikogan’s chief, Alice Jérôme, had re-opened cordial discussions between the two leaderships. Most people saw her as moderate, placing value on social work and development in Pikogan. For these reasons, Washaw Sibi and Pikogan people assumed that she had decided to enter into formal discussions with Washaw Sibi and Amos to

44 This expression connotes the idea that one makes him/herself comfortable to the expense of those who were already there.

190 investigate what kinds of advantages the Abitibiwinni could get from this situation. Many

WSEA members told me that her descent from an Eastmain Cree grandfather also probably explained part of her moderation.

Instances of direct and violent conflicts had come to an end by the time I arrived in the field. Yet, did that mean that the members of the two groups had stopped seeing the situation as potentially conflictual or divisive? In fact, it would be difficult for aboriginal people living around Amos not to perceive the situation as opposing Crees and

Algonquins. The WSEA and the council of the Abitibi band are political institutions claiming to represent the respective interests of these two groups thus they have the potential to impact interpersonal interactions. I discussed above how the concept of habitus turns the focus onto the interactions between social structure and individual behavior. Social structures and institutions influence individuals’ perceptions and interpretations of a situation, as well as their behavior.

The following situation will show how distinctions between Cree and Algonquin identities can become manifest in a specific context. In June 2009, my third weekend after arrival and settling into Amos for field research, I bumped into a friend, a WSEA member who invited me to go join his cousins at a pool bar. Once in the bar, I noticed two groups of young aboriginal men and women sitting at opposite sides of the bar. I joined the first group, hanging out at the bottom of the bar and playing pool. They were my friend's cousins, relatives, or close friends. The second group was standing around tables closer to the door, around the dance floor. Wanting to join some of my new acquaintances smoking outside, I moved towards the door. On my way out, I felt a hand on my arm. It belonged to a man from the second group who asked me: "T'es qui toi?

191

Comment ça se fait que tu te tiens avec les Cris ?" (Who are you? How come you are hanging out with the Crees?). This sentence suggested that there was an Algonquin group and a Cree group and that suddenly became palpable. In fact, my new interlocutor explained to me that the group with whom I was spending time at the bottom of the bar were “Crees,” and that his group was made of “Algonquins.” I was not given an opportunity to answer: his hands dragged me into the second group and I was spontaneously introduced to everyone.

Most of the customers in the bar on that night lived in Pikogan. As I started to ask questions about their relations to each other and about their everyday lives, members of the first group introduced themselves by assuming their Cree identity, while people in the second told me they were “proud Algonquins.” As everyone within each group introduced themselves to me, they also explained their mutual kin relationships. As is often the case in small communities, relations of close friendship in many cases overlap with kinship ties; they were each other’s cousins, in-laws, or siblings. However, each group remained silent about the kin relations that they may have had with members of the other group. Still, the two groups were generally friendly to each other, shouting jokes across the bar, and individuals often crossed over for short conversations with people from the other group. I spent the next half hour going back and forth between the two groups, getting to know new people.

I asked a few individuals within each group what they meant by saying that they were Cree or Algonquin. Their answers mostly referred to the institutions that respectively represent each group – the WSEA or the Abitibiwinni band council – which shows the structuring effects that these institutions are having on social and individual

192 behavior. Those in the “Cree” group generally told me that they had applied or were considering applying to Niskamoon vocational training programs delivered by Hydro-

Québec.45 I had seen some of them at Camp Joulac. They were also receiving or seeking

JBNQA benefits such as postsecondary funding packages or CTA Income Security

Program. However, some of them spoke Algonquin and also participated in Pikogan social life: they worked at the local school or kindergarten, or were employed at the band council. A few were dating or had married individuals whom they considered as

Algonquins.

People from the "Algonquin" group told me that they worked, or were from families who worked, for the Abitibiwinni band administration at various levels. As they were in their twenties or thirties, some told me that they held a JBNQA beneficiary number for punctual benefits such as the Cree School Board postsecondary education funding package to attend CEGEP or university without being more interested in Cree social or political life. They did not look for as many benefits from their JBNQA numbers as people from the other group did, and did not get involved with Washaw Sibi. They told me that for them, their beneficiary number was only a number or a formality.

In fact, there was no animosity between the two groups. As the WSEA and the

Abitibiwinni First Nation Council are structures that work at representing the interests of specific groups and were, at that time, involved in mutual discussions, it was not surprising that individuals experienced and reflected on their present situation through

45 The Niskamoon Agreement was signed in 2004 by Hydro-Québec and the GCCQ/CRA to facilitate the implementations of a series of agreements that have taken place between the Crees and Hydro-Québec since the signature of the JBNQA. These agreements, notably the Paix des Braves, planned on the hiring of qualified Cree workers by Hydro-Québec, aimed to put in place training programs. The Niskamoon Corporation, created in 2004, provides vocational training for Hydro-Québec-related jobs for JBNQA beneficiaries in Rouyn-Noranda, Amos, Chibougamau and Gatineau. It also provides an environmental management program (Niskamoon Corporation 2012).

193 this duality, as an opposition between Crees and Algonquins. Their answers and general attitude vis-à-vis each other reflect the structuring effect that formal institutions have on social relations and, reciprocally, reveal how interpersonal relationships contribute to structure members’ involvement in a given institution.

Crossing the Line

The dialectic between social structures and individuals’ behaviors is intricate. If people constantly explain situations and contexts by referring to the existence of two distinct groups, since several members and families are simultaneously members of both the WSEA and the Abitibi band, the membership of each group appears to overlap with the other in everyday reality. In August 2009, on the invitation of the Abitibiwinni chief and councilors, I attended the Annual General Assembly of the Abitibiwinni First

Nation.46 This event was usually organized on-reserve, in Pikogan. But that year, the council decided to hold the event "in the bush,” in a place where members would be closer to their customary grounds. More precisely, the assembly took place in the ghost town of Joutel47, where band members could easily find a clean spot to fix their tents or park their trailers. Joutel is nowadays a section of regenerating forest crossed by cratered paths of oxidised asphalt. It is interesting to note that the remnants of Joutel are located a few kilometers away from Washaw Sibi’s Camp Joulac. In fact, Camp Joulac is actually

46 Abitibiwinni (plural: Abitibiwinnik) will be used to refer to the Indian band and community registered as the Abitibi-Dominion band in the Indian Affairs registry, and Pikogan will be used to refer to the village that this band inhabits. 47 Joutel used to be a mining town of up to 1200 residents. It closed in 1998 after about thirty years of existence.

194 located on the field that used to serve as the Joutel municipal camping ground, at the intersection of the 109 road and the access road to Joutel.

It was the first time that I found myself in a social event organized by and for the

Algonquin band. Before the first meeting began, I walked around the site to see how it was organized. By holding the assembly in that area, attendees could enjoy easy access to the Harricana River. People had randomly installed camping gear such as tents or trailers around the meeting center where a huge tent stood furnished with a stage, tables, and chairs for people to attend the assemblies, eat, and play card games in the evening. Right next to it stood the "kitchen tent" where food was prepared and served. Community police officers were on duty at all times during the assembly, and nurses from the

Pikogan health center, who came with a caravan serving as a small clinic, were also present. Finally, a mosquito net tent was set up in the middle of this ephemeral community intended for those who were looking for shadow and protection from the voracious flies, especially when accomplishing such quiet and long-sitting tasks as peeling potatoes or corn to feed the hundreds of people attending the assembly.

When the meetings began and the attendees gathered under the main tent, I realized that I already knew many of them. They were either active Washaw Sibi members, or friends or relatives who had been somehow involved in a Washaw Sibi event. I had met more than half of them earlier in the summer, but mostly in the context of activities or events organized by Washaw Sibi or in Camp Joulac. In fact, some of the people attending this Pikogan Annual Assembly had cabins there and came back and forth between the two places during the week of the assembly. However, the behavior of people whom I knew was slightly different in this context. For instance, some of them

195 had until then spoken to me mostly in English or Cree, the WSEA official languages. To my surprise, I noticed they were now addressing me in French – and in some cases addressed each other in Algonquin.

To summarize, this first contact with Pikogan members did not confirm that I was dealing with two distinct groups. I realized that I had underestimated the extent to which entering into Washaw Sibi’s social networks also meant entering into Pikogan’s and the

Abitibiwinni band’s. I discovered that people’s habitus allowed them to present themselves as simultaneously members of two distinct groups, and to display different behaviors, adjusting and asserting appropriate identities when dealing with specific institutions or groups. People could collectively create a setting perceived and recognized as being Algonquin – or Cree, depending on the moment. Finally, I realized that although the current political context, with the mobilization of the WSEA, contributed to the maintenance of a social division between Cree and Algonquins, people also constantly challenged it, accommodated it, ignored it, or resisted it, by intermarrying and sustaining exchanges of knowledge, services and goods.

My point is not to determine precisely when frictions and tensions surrounding aboriginal identities in Amos area began or ended. It is rather to show how social divisions have penetrated individuals' everyday lives in a way that brings people to engage and assert differently certain identities. Social ties based on kinship, friendship, partnership, general affinities, or occupation are important factors in defining people’s identities. Getting a new job, marrying someone from the other group, having a relative married into another family, or making new friends are all factors that bring people to consider themselves, or be considered by others, as Cree or Algonquin, and as members

196 of one faction or another. The composition of both communities cannot be reduced to simple factors or to a set of essentialist features. In brief, affirming a Cree or Algonquin identity is, to a certain extent, a choice that one makes or an opportunity that one seizes depending on specific rights, resources and responsibilities.

Tacit rules dictate with whom one can establish friendship or partnership and the extent to which individuals can invest and assert an identity without questioning their commitment to other identities. In fact, for social agents, defining the bond existing within a collectivity of people is never entirely descriptive, but also normative, and dependent on specific circumstances (Steeves 1998). As a result, when interpersonal conflicts take place, people may invoke the Cree/Algonquin distinction as part of a repertoire that also includes gender-based, class-based, or generation-based distinctions thereby strategically situating one's relative position in terms of kinship, political ideas, involvement in distinct collectivities, etc. One uses the Cree and Algonquin terms to define someone’s inclusion in or exclusion from one’s group in very contextual ways.

Talking about the Other

Diversity of Languages in Pikogan and Washaw Sibi

The contextual and adjustable aspect of identity is influenced by people’s subjectivity, but also by social and cultural structures that allow them to engage within the collectivity. People’s habitus allows them to conceive of their identity in malleable ways and to perceive of themselves as part of broader or more exclusive groups in different settings. I will use some features of languages spoken among Washaw Sibi

197 people to illustrate how individuals can perceive of and perform their identity/ies in a way that actively positions them vis-à-vis others.

The sessions of the general assembly in Joutel were simultaneously translated into

French, Algonquin and English. It is generally admitted that the band's "official" languages are French and Algonquin. People commented to me that they were translating into English because the Crees in Pikogan generally spoke English and Cree. They often added paradoxically that the Crees in Pikogan often spoke more Cree than the

Algonquins spoke Algonquin. Yet, many insisted that as an Algonquin band, the only aboriginal language into which they ought to translate was Algonquin. Making

Algonquin the only aboriginal language spoken at the assembly was a way of stressing the Algonquin character of the meeting. Throughout my research in Amos area, I noted that although people generally tend to simplify the situation by saying that in Pikogan

Algonquins speak Algonquin and French, and Crees speak Cree and English, the local sociolinguistic situation is not that simple. It is in fact difficult and irrelevant to attempt to fix a clear, objective boundary between Cree and Algonquin linguistic, cultural, and social realms.

Young adults and youth seldom speak Algonquin in everyday contexts. They generally speak French but with stylistic effects affecting the vocabulary, the intonation, and the speech rhythm that can be perceived as a local "accent" distinguishing them from local Euro-Quebecer speakers living in the region. Children receive Algonquin classes at the elementary school on the reserve. Usage of the Algonquin language depends on one’s family history, personal interest and motivation, closeness and relationships with elders, participation in a hunting, trapping and bush lifestyle, participation in community life,

198 and level of education. Algonquin is often used between adults in everyday life or when speaking with children of pre-school age, in bush camps and in church48.

French remains the everyday language for most of the members of the band, and is the primary language used for of bureaucracy, in institutions, and for education. Yet even when speaking French, some Algonquin words are systematically used by all inhabitants of the community to refer to certain traditional food (e.g. banoque, or "Indian bread", is generally called pak8ecikan49) as well as to animals (e.g. moose is generally referred to as mos). Pikogan elementary school offers an Algonquin language and culture class. La Calypso, Amos high school for grades 7 to 9, also has an agreement with

Pikogan, and offers an Algonquin history and culture class to students from Pikogan.

Cree and English are also spoken to a certain extent in Pikogan. Many elders speak Algonquin as a first language and adults introduce them or refer to them as monolingual Algonquin speakers. I noted that this assertion is often more a perception than a reality, since they often also speak Cree and English at different levels. When speaking to elders, Pikogan adults use Algonquin if they can, but switch from Algonquin to English for certain punctual words or expressions (such as "next week," "Christmas," or numbers). Many Pikogan elders use Algonquin to deal with the local Pikogan institutions and with adult members of the community, English to deal with regional institutions (for example, Amos hospital), and Cree when dealing with Cree institutions – such as the WSEA office. While conversing with Pikogan elders, I was often told how easy it was to switch between Algonquin and Cree given the similarities between certain

48 There is only one active church in Pikogan, a Pentecostal church, and all speeches are simultaneously translated in Algonquin and French. 49 The "8" is pronounced like "w" in English. This form is still generally used in Pikogan.

199 words, such as "White man" (Algonquin, 8emitikoci and Cree, wemishtikushiiu) or "I am tired" (respectively, nit eiekocin and niteyeskuchin).

Pikogan families in which members speak mostly Cree and English are referred to as Cree, or as mostly Cree, by members of the band. They generally descend from late migrations from the James Bay area or are partly made up of people from James Bay

Cree communities who have moved to Pikogan after intermarriage. The elders and some adults in these families use Algonquin with other inhabitants of Pikogan, mostly elders.

The Cree language is also spoken within a regional political and sociocultural life linked with James Bay Cree communities (where more than 90% of the population speak Cree) and Northeastern Ontario. It is also spoken during Pentecostal ceremonies, as Pikogan

Pentecostal church sometimes received preachers and attendees from James Bay Cree communities invited by the church or who happen to pass through Amos. French or

French and Algonquin speakers from Pikogan who get married to a Cree person and move to a James Bay Cree community are often said to come back speaking good conversational Cree50.

Nitakinan or Eeyou Istchee

To reflect on the relationship of habitus to identities and languages, I will invoke the notion of linguistic code-switching and its cognates, such as code-mixing or code alternation, in the most inclusive way, as the alternation between two languages or varieties of language (Myers-Scotton 2000). It is an everyday phenomenon among the aboriginal population living in Amos area to switch between different varieties of Cree,

50 As half of the WSEA live in Pikogan, the linguistic situation is quite similar among Washaw Sibi members. Appendix 5 shows the results of a survey realized with one hundred Washaw Sibi members, i.e. a fourth of the membership (Torrie and Lejeune 2008).

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Algonquin, French, and English. Unique linguistic varieties emerge from the ways in which these different codes are used, but also mixed. In other words, as linguist Robert K.

Herbert noted in Johannesburg, "the fact of codeswitching, which occurs frequently within the conversation, serves such a communicative function" and forms in itself a linguistic variety (Herbert 2000: 239). As a matter of fact, the different written and oral repertoires that are at people’s disposal allow them to symbolically present themselves as one single group at times, and at other times as positioned on either side of the symbolic line between the Algonquin and Cree realms. As a result, at certain times they have the ability to think of themselves as members of a group that encompasses both Algonquins and Crees. At other times, they may also think of themselves as members of either of the two groups. This duality is inscribed in the languages spoken by people and in their uses of different words.

Translating identity denominators into French or English is a difficult task since words in Cree and Algonquin have different meanings and are used in a specific sociocultural context. In fact, local aboriginal people have to define their identity in a way that makes sense simultaneously, on the one hand, to members of other groups and non-aboriginal people and institutions, and, on the other hand, to other members of their own group. Whereas people’s habitus allows them to consider themselves as members of more inclusive or exclusive groups depending on the context, Euro-Canadian institutions and structures tend to reify identities and memberships, and assume that words represent to objective realities. The following anecdote shows how the same expression can have a different meaning depending on whether it is used in an aboriginal context or in a Euro-

Canadian or institutional context.

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One of the sessions of the 2009 general assembly concentrated on a map that had been recently drawn by an anthropologist mandated by the Algonquin Anishinabeg

Nation Tribal Council (AANTC)51. The word Nitakinan ("our land", in Algonquin) figured at the top of the map. The map presented the preliminary outline of the territory based on various sources such as archaeology, archives, and ethnohistory, and showed the vast territory traditionally used by the seven communities that are now members of the AANTC. The band council was explaining that the AANTC was in the very early stages of envisaging what could be done to symbolically and politically reaffirm ownership and claims over this extensive portion of land.

During that presentation, I was sitting next to an elderly couple. The man was partly of Cree ancestry, but from early migrations. His family, since his grandparents’ generation, lived closely and intermarried with the Algonquins, in the Quebec Abitibi region. He thus spoke better Algonquin than his wife who belonged to a family that had migrated more recently into the area and who still maintained relatively close relations with Cree communities such as Waskaganish and Moose Factory. As explanations of the map were given in Algonquin and French, she turned to her husband to tell him that she did not understand what they were talking about. Her husband showed her the map, followed with his finger the outline of the land represented on it and told her in Cree,

"They say this is Eeyou Istchee". For the man and his wife, using the words “Eeyou

Istchee” to refer to traditional Algonquin territories made sense.

However, the fact that he used these words, in this context, left me puzzled and confused for several reasons. It surprised me because before that incident, I had heard this

51 The AANTC was formed in 1992 to help on land claims and support the advancement of aboriginal rights for 6 Anishinabeg communities: Abitibiwinni (Pikogan), Eagle Village, Kitcisakik, Kitigan Zibi, Lac Simon, and Long Point, from Quebec, and Wahgoshig, from Ontario.

202 expression mostly in political or institutional contexts to refer rather to James Bay Cree territories. Indeed, “Eeyou Istchee” is an expression often used by the Cree bureaucracy and political bodies such as the GCCQ and the CRA.

Figure 13. Eeyou Istchee.

(Source: Eeyou Istchee Tourism 2010)

Furthermore, since 2007 the Quebec provincial bureaucracy has adopted Eeyou Istchee to refer to all the James Bay Cree communities and their territory as a whole. Since 2004, the former federal electoral riding of Abitibi-Baie James-Nunavik was renamed Abitibi-

Baie James-Nunavik-Eeyou, as a reference to Eeyou Istchee. In such contexts, Eeyou

Istchee is generally translated as "the land of the Cree" and used to talk about a specific territory: the contemporary James Bay Cree communities. How could the man I was sitting next to at the assembly use Eeyou Istchee to talk about Algonquin territories?

When the man used the words Eeyou Istchee to explain to his wife what the

Algonquin Tribal Council called Nitakinan, I immediately thought that this expression could not be used to talk about something other than James Bay Cree lands. I then realized, through my own reaction, the effect as well as the success of the GCCQ in asserting symbolically and politically its sovereignty over a given area and set of entities.

In fact, Eeyou Istchee is an expression used by aboriginal people and also an increasing

203 number of non-aboriginal people. Its transfer from one sociocultural context to another has generated "powerful bilingual images" (Montes Alcala 2000): a few elements of metaphor, style, and interpretation coming from the source language can accompany a word or expression that transfers into another language. Still, for the most part, words or expressions change or gain distinct meanings when used in the structure of the other language, and in their own contexts of use.

Eeyou, Iyiyuu and Anicinape

This section will explore what Eeyou Istchee (or iyiyuuaschii) means for Crees and Algonquins in order to understand how it made sense for the man to use the expression when referring to Algonquin land. In an aboriginal context, Iiyiyuuaschii could also be translated as “(aboriginal) person/people's land". The expression is made of the verb Iiyiyuu and of the noun –aschii. Iyiyuu (plural, Iyiyuch), or Eeyou, is the word used by the Crees to refer to themselves. It is in fact a verb that can be translated as "s/he lives." For this reason, the word can be considered as referring to a "community/totality of living things" (Scott 2006: 61). In fact, the word is also used to refer to:

1) a person, as opposed to non-living things or animals;

2) an aboriginal person, as opposed to "white men" and non-aboriginal people;

3) a Cree person, as opposed to someone from other aboriginal groups (Scott

2006: 61).

In the expressions iyiyuuaschii and nitakinan, -aschii and –aki- are cognates that have the same root and meaning – land or territory.52

52 The Cree and Algonquin languages are not mutually intelligible; rather, they are close relatives within the Algonkian linguistic family. The familiarity existing between these two words is one entry in a long list

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Iyiyuuaschii could be translated into Algonquin using the expression anicinape aki. Yet, in these two expressions, whether these words refer to Cree or Algonquin land remains unclear. In fact, Algonquins use the Algonquin term anicinape (plural: anicinapek) to refer to themselves. Many people in Pikogan explained to me that it comes from the root anici- (real, or pure) and nape (man; anicinapek8e for a woman) and often translated it to me as the "pure, or real men." It hence has slightly greater potential for exclusion depending on how people interpret and define this "purity" (anici-). Anicinape in fact carries moral and performative implications and it is interesting to note that French speakers from Pikogan constantly use the word anicinape, even when speaking French.

For example, a woman in her thirties from Pikogan was once talking to me about people in the reserve who did not like to go in the bush, and did not know very much about the traditions. She compared them to good Québécois hunters from Amos and concluded: "I have many white friends who are more anicinape than them [the people from the reserve who did not like the bush]". However, anicinape, the vernacular word, is more inclusive than the French or English words, Algonquin, since other groups such as the Ojibwa also use it to refer to themselves, and it is used to talk about any aboriginal person or group in opposition to non-aboriginals (Clément 1993).

The Cree iiyiyuu and the Algonquin anicinape can hence be understood contextually and relationally. They are more inclusive and do not suggest rigid distinctions such as the one existing between Cree and Algonquin53 in European

of paired words in which the sound –ki- in Algonquin is regularly paralleled by the sound –chii- in Cree. For example, ki (Algonquin, "you", or verbal prefix for the past) and chii (Cree, used in the same context) ; kimenan (Algonquin, "it is raining") and chimuwin (Cree) ; okima (Algonquin, "chief, boss") and uchimaau (Cree, "boss”), etc. 53 In fact, the origins of the words Cree and Algonquin are unclear. Clément has shown different levels of ambiguity associated with the term Algonquin (1993). If the use of the term in written documents dates from Champlain's meeting with the Indians in 1603, it might have been borrowed from indigenous groups

205 languages. As a matter of fact, the same bilingual (Cree/Algonquin) aboriginal speaker will refer to him/herself as Iyiyu when speaking Cree, and as Anicinape when speaking

Algonquin. Another example of this inclusion is the fact that the Cree language is usually referred to, in Cree, as Iyiyuuayimuwin and the Algonquin language, in Algonquin, as

Anicinape monan. However, when speaking French or English, people will often say that they speak "Indian" to refer to any of these languages. It is the inclusivity of these words that allowed the old man to refer to “Algonquin’s land” as “iyiyuuaschii.”

Anicinape and Apitipi8ini

To complete this discussion of vernacular ethnonyms, I return to the Algonquin word Apitipiwinni (colloquial transcription), or Apitipi8ini (standardized form), which I have used earlier in this dissertation. Apitipi8ini is the word used by the people living in

Pikogan to refer to themselves as a band, in opposition to other Algonquin (Kitcisakik,

Lac-Simon, etc.) and aboriginal bands. Abitibiwinni (plural: Abitibiwinnik) is used in

Wahgoshig, Pikogan's "sister community", i.e. the reserve that was formed with the

Abitibi-Ontario band. It is thus more exclusive than anicinape. Since Abitibiwinni is also the institutional name of the band, it may also be seen as a civic identity, as opposed to an ethnic one.

The word literally means "the people from Abitibi". “Abitibi” is the name of the lake where the band traditionally gathered during the summer months and where the

HBC established a fur trading post in the 18th century. It is also the name of the region

other than those defined as "Algonquin". Moreover, if the term is now used to define ten communities in Ontario and Québec, and to qualify local or regional political organizations such as the Secrétariat des programmes et services de la nation algonquine, the vernacular ethnonym used in these communities is Anichinabe (and its variants Anishinabe, Nishnabi, etc.).

206 surrounding the lake and inhabited by the band. The idea of border, or demarcation line, is contained within the word: apit- relates to the idea of "half"54. The Algonquin word

Apitipi is a contraction of apit- and nipi (water) which means "boundary waters" and is at the origin of the name of the region, Abitibi. As a matter of fact, the height of land separating the rivers that flow southward towards the Ottawa and Saint-Lawrence Rivers, and those that flow northward towards James Bay, dissects the Abitibi region.

This geographical feature has had important social and cultural implications. The gathering place at Lake Abitibi is remembered in Pikogan oral tradition, as well as in history (Mitchell 1977; Long 2010), as a meeting point for people from different linguistic and regional groups, that draws in people from the south (Temiskaming), the west (nowadays Ontario), and the north (James Bay). The word apitipiwinni may sound more exclusive than anicinape as it is often used to distinguish the band from other aboriginal and Algonquin bands, however it is inclusive and indicative of the diversity of the origins of the group and of its cultural, regional, and complex linguistic features.

Abitibiwinni is therefore an example of what Hernandez Castillo called "border identities" (2001), a local identity that is at the border, or at the intersection, of distinct groups that can at times identify together and unite.

In fact, when discussing the diversity existing within the band, Abitibiwinnik paradoxically use French and English group names such as Algonquin or Cree to refer to their social and cultural composition. For instance, inhabitants of Pikogan sometimes say that the Abitibiwinni band, although recognized as Algonquin, is mostly made of Cree and Algonquin families. In this context, these two words, although they are not

54 Apit, or apita, can be used in both languages to ask for the half of something (like half a pie) or to say "half and hour". Apita8ise (Algonquin; aapihtuun chiishikaau, in Cree) is the word for Wednesday.

207 vernacular ethnonyms, remain useful for describing sociocultural realities and distinctions that are currently meaningful and relevant in the contemporary sociopolitical context.

This discussion of local denominators in different languages shows how aboriginal groups use conceptual and symbolic tools to conceive of themselves in certain respects as similar and united, and in other respects, as different and fragmented. A solid understanding of the meanings and connotations of each word is necessary to acknowledge how individuals can easily oscillate between these two poles. I have also shown how identity can be defined differently depending on the context, on the people who are asserting a given identity, and based on involvement in a given situation. People also rely on notions and terms pertaining to different codes and languages, thus creating a unique and complex configuration. These words also help to reveal the complexity of alliances and rivalries, and their fluid, context-specific aspect.

Washaw Sibi: Being Scattered and Maintaining Cohesion

In the process of colonizing aboriginal groups through sedentarization, the

Washaw Sibi group was scattered across Northern Quebec and Northern Ontario, and the maintenance of internal cohesion has been a challenge for the collectivity. Yet, in spite of the challenges posed by distance and sedentarity, the group has remained significantly cohesive and capable of thinking of itself as a distinct group. The group continued to be closely attached to customary territories, living conditions, and modes of subsistence until well into the 1960s and ‘70s, about one generation later than other groups living in

208 the Abitibi region (Scott and Morrison 2005: 55). In spite of sedentarization, the group maintained cohesion by engaging in regular movements on the land, which are in turn associated with a habitus strongly defined by its semi-nomadic past. Although now living in a sedentary setting, Washaw Sibi people and, to a certain extent, members of other aboriginal communities in the region, see themselves and act as a semi-nomadic group.

This is noticeable in the way people gather for the accomplishment of certain rituals, and in the way such movements contribute to the social reproduction of the group and to the ascription of normative and moral features to the group’s identity. The components of the group’s habitus associated with semi-nomadism remained relevant to the group as it acquired new meanings and became useful for the group in remaining cohesive in spite of sedentarization and scattering over a large territory.

At the Margins of the WSEA

A significant portion of the Washaw Sibi group currently lives in Ontario, and a significant part of the group’s history and of individual members’ experiences unfolded there. I hence decided to do research in Ontario, and moved to Timmins in November

2009 for three months. I met some of these individuals and they also gave me information about other local potential informants, including people to converse with and social events to attend. The data that I collected in the Cochrane district of Ontario snowballed into a set of ethnographic data completely distinct from what I had found in Quebec.

People in Ontario did not feel the presence of the WSEA as strongly and were not always aware of its latest developments. In Ontario Washaw Sibi referred to something different, felt through informal, often kin-related, relationships and movements on the

209 land established through visiting friends and relatives living on both sides of the provincial border, in southern James Bay and in the Abitibi region. Whereas Quebec informants often defined Washaw Sibi as the Cree living in the Abitibi region, Ontario informants generally told me that Washaw Sibi referred to people who had gathered in

Hannah Bay or in La Sarre up until the 1940’s or 1950’s. The Washaw Sibi people whom

I met in Ontario frequently mentioned alternative forms that the group had taken in the past, before the mobilization, and often implied that such forms were still vibrant today.

This contrasted radically with the situation in Quebec, where the Washaw Sibi collectivity was mostly experienced through sociopolitical and cultural events associated with the WSEA. As a result, the various ways in which Ontario Cree outlined the

Washaw Sibi collectivity did not always overlap with the WSEA identity policy parameters.

For instance, I interviewed two young adults from Moose Factory who lived in

Cochrane and had been referred to me by Washaw Sibi members living in Amos. They were formal members of the WSEA, but, during the interview, they told me several times that they had little knowledge of where the project was heading. I asked them if they thought they would move to the Washaw Sibi village once it was established. Their answer was that they did not know for the time being. And they carried on by saying:

Informant 1: Do I feel that I have any relation [with Washaw Sibi]? Oh yeah. They’re my family, like, they’re both [my family and a community project].

Informant 2: Some of my cousins work there.

Informant 1: If we would go there more often, we would find out more. But I did go to their grounds there, they call Joulac? Yeah, I went there. And when they did the walk I went to the feast. From Waskaganish, we drove in…

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What would it take you to be interested by the new community, Washaw Sibi?

Informant 1: Money, or…I don’t know, never really thought about, I mean… We just want a security.

They explained that they were currently working, studying, and raising their respective families in Timmins. They told me that as long as the future Washaw Sibi village was not established, there was no way of knowing whether it would be a place where they wanted to live.

They demonstrated no interest in moving anywhere in the future unless family concerns, partnerships, or job opportunities “brought them there.” At the moment of the interview, they saw in an eventual Washaw Sibi village more as a place where they could go to visit relatives and friends. They did not envisage “inhabiting the village” as necessary to consider themselves members of the group and to maintain relationships with co-members. On the whole, they considered the community as a collective assemblage that could live independently of a residential village thanks to movements, visits, creation of partnerships through the practice of traditional activities, as well as social, working or schooling experiences. Their social networks overlapped partly but not completely with the WSEA membership as well as members of other groups, and at the same time went beyond each of them. Finally, visiting and travelling around was part of life-long experiences: people remembered their parents taking them to different Northern communities to visit relatives and friends, just as they themselves continue to do. The way in which they highlighted the possibility of moving around to maintain contact caught my attention as I had already witnessed and experienced how movement could contribute to maintaining community cohesion and social ties.

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The practice of “visiting” plays an important role in maintaining contact with friends and relatives. Visiting can happen in all kinds of places: in train stations, in bars, in houses, at the library, in the work place, etc. It can be planned or can happen spontaneously or even randomly, through coincidental meetings. Visiting friends and relatives is a common activity that people do on evenings or weekends, or sometimes for days or weeks. While in Timmins or Waskaganish, I met many people I knew from Amos and Pikogan who were going to visit family members or old friends. When arriving in

Northern towns, people go to places where they are likely to meet a friend or relative. For example, before going to Timmins, I was advised by several friends to go to a bar called

“The St-Charles.” When passing by Matagami in transit before Waskaganish and Amos, people would often stop at local restaurants to eat, but also to find out who was also traveling.

Visiting is an occasion for exchanging information or “gossiping” about common acquaintances or relatives. “Gossip” is an important means of maintaining meaningful relationships, and ensuring social cohesion and regulation among semi-nomadic groups, whose units often live scattered, at great distances from each other (Preston 2002: 73;

249). At another level, it is a political act, as members of the community discuss relatives, friends and acquaintances, and argue about who is included in the community and who is, or should be, excluded.

Throwing Things in the Fire: The Moral Aspect of Identity

While I was in Timmins, I also met a woman from the Trapper family who was a member of the WSEA and who worked at a local office for the Moose Cree First Nation, the band where she had her federal Indian status. After the interview I had with her, she

212 showed me pictures of summer gatherings to which she attributed significant importance.

Along with her siblings, she had been working over the past few years on organizing gatherings involving her entire extended family, beginning with her parents’ generation.

Over time these events have become the “Annual Memorial Trapper Gatherings.”

When I met her brother a few months later, he told me:

I know one of the things they're actually talking is actually trying to get a Trapper family reunion. Like a real big Trapper, not just our family, but all the extended family, extended Trapper family, the ones that live in Mistissini. We are trying to see if we can get everybody together, and see maybe all the descendants of Thomas Trapper (Peter Trapper’s father).

I asked him how these gatherings had started:

“I'm the last one, so, he [my father] said, I'd like to feast, muckshanoo my sisters.” So, we did as he said: “I want you guys to tell all my nieces and nephews, all the descendants of my sisters too, to come to the camp and to have a feast.” So we did that. We said: “your uncle wants you to come out and have a feast at his camp.” And so, they said: “Ok, everybody said ok.” And the first year, there was about a hundred and twenty people. Second year was last year. He passed away in the spring, so then he told us to continue it on, to go on for four years, so we'll continue it on for four years. I'm not too sure, we might just keep going after four years because a lot of people really find that it's really… we used to have that type of closeness within our family, within our clan, I guess you can say. We used to have that closeness in Hannah Bay, because my father, and all his sisters and all their families would all go to Hannah Bay, and they'd stay there in the fall. The allusion to Hannah Bay shows well the relationship between these gatherings and the

Washaw Sibi group. I attended the next edition of this annual gathering, organised in July

2010, like the years before, on the shore of Kattawagami Lake, 140 km north-east of

Cochrane, Ontario, in the Harricana river watershed. The family of these two siblings had started by inviting their close relatives. By spreading the message and putting them in contact with other relatives, they had reached more than 150 guests coming mostly from surrounding Ontario aboriginal communities, Moose Factory, Pikogan, and Quebec

James Bay Cree communities. They now used social media to share information between

213 kin members and participants in the gathering who are scattered over Northeastern

Ontario and Northern Quebec. A few members of the WSEA came.

In fact, the attendance at the gathering overlaps with the WSEA membership.

When I mentioned my research on the Washaw Sibi group during the 2010 gathering, most people were generally evasive about it, as if the organization of the gatherings was separate and independent from it. Those who lived in Ontario said that they had not heard much about it or that they did not really know what the project was about. People from

Amos who lived closer to the WSEA office mentioned the association when sharing recent personal news. It was generally agreed upon that we were in a setting that gathered people for a purpose that was different from the WSEA.

The purpose of the gathering was to maintain social relations, and to perform certain rituals. Traveling, visiting and gathering provide members of the community with opportunities to accomplish rituals. Ritual practices are linked to the moral aspect of community membership and identity. During her interview, the woman who had first mentioned the gatherings to me gave me the reason why she did not want, at that moment, to participate actively in the WSEA. Her explanations began with descriptions of her family’s customs relative to hunting:

Thanking our ancestors[…] for carrying out the respect for the land and the animals, for the animals to still be there to feed us like it fed them. Offering the food to the fire, you know, and all that55. Because I know there are people out

55 The ritual practice that she mentioned during her interview was in fact an important moment of the 2010 event. In the late afternoon, when the traditional feast was ready, nine people were summoned to the cooking tent. They were chosen from among the organizers’ children and grandchildren. They were given the responsibility of representing the organizers’ father’s siblings, cousins and other relatives. Each filled up a plate with the food prepared for the feast and stood in line, listening to an elder’s prayer, during which they presented the plates to the four directions. And then, one after the other, they entered a tent where a fire was lit on the ground and threw the plates to the fire.

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there, in different families, that laughed when we offered food to the fire, because they didn't know. What are you doing? Ha ha ha. […] You know, that's a different practice, different morals, different values. And I'm pretty sure, our family, we all did that, we all do that today. My dad did it daily, everyday. It wasn't like a big gathering or celebration[…] Our family, we were taught and I don't know about other families, the ones that might come on to the Washaw Sibi list, I don't know where they came from, what their histories are.

Identity is presented here as a moral question that depends on the respect of certain rituals. Not sharing the same principles, customs, and understandings relative to the right ways of doing things possibly implies a moral difference.

This suggests that the mobilization of the Washaw Sibi Crees represents a field of tensions that go well beyond Crees and Algonquins. It is a field for debate about the

“right way” to be Cree (or Algonquin) and to correctly perform such an identity. The woman was clear on the fact that not participating in the WSEA activities, events and mobilization did not prevent her from expressing and asserting her own identity as a

Washaw Sibi Cree in ways that she considered ethical, moral, and more respectful of her customs and education. In fact, she defined her own identity in a form that did not rely on recognition from formal organizations. A few months later, when attending the Annual

Memorial Trapper Gathering, I realized that her own position did not stop her from actively participating in the social life of a group closely related to the Washaw Sibi

Crees. If the gatherings served to establish contact, communication, and friendships between acquaintances, friends, relatives and descendants of Washaw Sibi Crees, it was in a mode that differed sensibly from the WSEA.

Local identities seemingly refer to floating entities with constantly moving boundaries, depending on individuals’ behaviors, morals, and positions within social networks. The concept of habitus became relevant to approach these identity issues

215 because it stands at the intersection of different apparent conceptual dualities. Habitus 1) reveals dynamics ensuring stability in a group as well as prompting change, 2) allows seeing interactions between processes taking place at the individual and collective levels;

3) pays attention to both the complementarity and contradictions between social agents’ perceptions and actions; and 4) considers structures as partly determining current actions and as being in the process of emerging or transforming through those same actions. The encounters and anecdotes discussed in this chapter reveal how the borders existing between Cree and Algonquin identities are relevant for reaching a better understanding of the context in which the WSEA emerged. Yet, these borders are complex as they intersect and outline overlapping groups in which individuals can hold multiple identities simultaneously. Moreover, each identity has its own history and takes on different meanings given specific instances of regional social and cultural diversity. People engage in different groups in ways that are indicative of a semi-nomadic habitus: they sometimes focus on smaller, more direct contacts, and at other times they expand their social network over vast distances through movement and contact with friends and relatives.

The next chapter will show how the rise of the WSEA conveys a distinct, increasingly rigid, conventional and formalized notion of community that in several aspects is at odds with the fluid processes described above.

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CHAPTER 6

THE USES OF COMMUNITY,

THE MEANINGS OF WASHAW SIBI

I think that there are distinct clans in Washaw Sibi area, where certain family members are in a group together… there always seems to be a group that strongly disagrees with whoever is the leadership. So that’s a challenge. I guess they have to learn to work together… And, it's not that bad, but here [in Waskaganish] it's not the same anymore because we've grown to a bigger size. They're still not developed and maybe it's something we went through in the 70’s or something. It's something they'll have to grow out to accomplish a goal collectively, you know. (S. Diamond, 2010 Chief of Waskaganish)

The last two chapters revealed a discrepancy between the ways in which the

WSEA’s official position represents Washaw Sibi identity, compared to the actual constitution of group membership d its members. Due to customary practices allowing the group to expand or to downsize depending on social or ecological circumstances, members perceive themselves as part of broad networks that overlap with the outlines of the Washaw Sibi membership, but do not limit themselves to it. Yet, the association continues to work at establishing a list based on objective criteria defining who is a

Washaw Sibi Cree. The goal of this chapter is to discuss the role that the collective model put forward by the WSEA plays in the process of mobilization, organization and recognition of the Washaw Sibi group.

My discussion will first focus on two concepts, that of symbolic violence and that of community. Symbolic violence will refer to features specific to Washaw Sibi’s

217 experiences of colonization, notably their exclusion, oblivion, and lack of recognition as a group in itself. Then, I will discuss how, in the contemporary context, the notion of community serves as a model for resisting the impacts of this colonial experience on the group’s social and cultural integrity while simultaneously fashioning and imposing a given model of collective life on the group thereby replicating colonial dynamics in some regards. The resulting tensions are visible in the debates taking place within the group, notably around site selection and membership.

Theoretical Frame: Symbolic Violence and Community

State Colonialism and Symbolic Violence

I mentioned in chapter 3 that the integration of vast expanses of Northern lands to the Canadian state generally followed a pattern akin to what John and Jean Comaroff termed state colonialism (1992) and Morantz, bureaucratic colonialism (2002). State or bureaucratic colonialism developed in instances where the state sponsored regional administration, trade, and the pacification of aboriginal people through treaties, but only minimally engaged in the imposition of direct rules or in integrative “civilizing” policies.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, this pattern of colonization involved the state’s assertion of authority over the Subarctic, including the James Bay area, mostly through treaties and agreements signed with aboriginal groups.

Mainly after WWII, negotiation with aboriginal people opened spaces for the home-grown emergence of governance and representative structures confronting the state and attempting to defend aboriginal interests. As a result, aboriginal populations established structures modeled after the state in order to sit at the negotiating table with

218 the state. The GCCQ emerged in 1974 to represent the James Bay Crees' collective interests in the course of the judicial saga that accompanied hydroelectric development in the region. La Rusic et al. (1979) showed well how the GCCQ and the CRA emerged and took shape at a moment when the state exerted its authority over the James Bay Crees.

Trudel (1979) has argued that with the JBNQA, the government retained control over the powers allocated to the Crees and favored the emergence of a class of aboriginal civil servants modeled on those of the federal and provincial governments. During the

2000’s, the organization shifted from generally presenting itself as the Grand Council of the Crees (of Quebec) to calling itself the Grand Council of the Crees – Eeyou Istchee

(GCC-EI) thus manifesting a form of self-determination in its nomenclature. The GCCQ and the CRA are bureaucratic institutions that follow a formal hierarchy in which the role of each leader and staff person is clearly defined. They are institutions regulated by internal, written, and archived by-laws and sets of rules. Reproducing this model of a regional government, the GCCQ/CRA have centralized their resources in a network of buildings, such as the GCCQ headquarters in Nemaska, the offices in Montreal and

Ottawa, and the Cree Embassy in Quebec City. These institutions hold specific powers and authority over a specific territory and, as the representatives of the James Bay Crees, are recognized by the state as the main intermediaries and interlocutors for negotiations.

Because of its comparative exclusion and marginalization from the political and administrative sphere, the Washaw Sibi group had an experience of colonialism partly distinctive from the rest of the James Bay Crees. Their experience is exemplary of what

Galtung termed "structural violence" (1969), where a social institution harms a group by preventing them from fulfilling their needs. Namely, until well after WWII, provincial

219 and federal policies caused the social and geographical fragmentation of the Washaw Sibi group and its marginalization in relation to surrounding aboriginal and non-aboriginal groups. As a result, Washaw Sibi was left aside and excluded from treaties and agreements negotiated with the state, notably the JBNQA. The collectivity was empoverished and became virtually invisible and irrelevant for state structures.

Beyond structural violence, dynamics pertaining to symbolic violence characterize Washaw Sibi's experience of colonization. Symbolic violence is another concept developed by Bourdieu which refers to the imposition of a socially determined role upon dominated individuals and groups that ultimately affects social and cultural orders. Such imposition has the effect of undermining dominated groups’ social and cultural capital, and can contribute substantially to the emergence of stable social hierarchies. On the topic of symbolic power, Bourdieu wrote: “The power to impose and to inculcate a vision of divisions […] is political power par excellence” (Bourdieu 1989:

23). Symbolic violence implies the ability to shape social reality by imposing a particular vision of the world. For Bourdieu, the state tends to accumulate legitimacy and monopoly over symbolic violence; in fact, the modus operandi of the state is to combine forces of specific institutional structures with mental and perceptive structures (Bourdieu 1990,

1997).

Authors theorizing colonization as it developed in the 19th and 20th centuries have invoked symbolic violence as underlining policies aimed at rationalizing the presence of aboriginal groups. The band and treaty lists compiled in the Subarctic echo measures taken in a variety of colonial contexts aimed at increasing local investment (Woolford

2004) or facilitating social control (Scott 1998). Tim Mitchell (1988) showed how during

220 the 19th century, colonized populations were framed, divided and bounded in enclosed spaces in order to increase their industriousness and facilitate the monitoring of their behaviour. The concept of symbolic violence is relevant for understanding the implications that such measures have for social life. Symbolic violence can affect both a group’s relationships with other groups as well as the interactions taking place between its members, thus affecting the internal structure of a group.

Once social divisions are imposed, social agents from groups placed in both marginal and affluent positions come to consider the resulting economic, political or social inequalities as “natural,” expectable, and unavoidable. The effects of symbolic violence include processes that de-politicize submission, alliances, belongings, coexistence, and render them "natural" or unquestionable. Yet, imposing specific frames of reference is only possible at the cost of considerable energy and the deployment of a complex apparatus (Bourdieu 1994).

The WSEA’s current official project is in some respects at odds with the present way of life of some of its individual members. In fact, although the group continues to work against its exclusion and fragmentation, the rise and the political recognition of the group also exposes it to power dynamics and different forms of symbolic violence that pervade the sociopolitical life of aboriginal people in Canada. I will discuss this issue by taking the concept of community as a starting point.

Community and Identity

In the course of this dissertation, I have used the term community in different, sometimes contradictory ways, notably to refer to a) the early colonial and fur-trade era networks of nomadic family groups scattered over fairly vast regions; b) the current

221 scattered membership of the WSEA; and c) the village-like residential locales that have been built on reserve and JBNQA Category I lands. But what reality does the concept truly encompass? I will discuss the use of the concept of community in social theory and its rapport with three distinct notions relevant to this dissertation: identity, corporate groups, and village (or residential community).

The concept of identity first appeared in the field of psychology. Notably, social psychologists such as Erikson (1974), Tajfel and Turner (1986), and Turner and Oakes

(1986) used identity to point to a sense of continuity and coherence in an individual’s personality, as well as to the development of personal idiosyncracies. According to these authors, identity is a complex and plural combination of many traits, with each combination being unique to each individual. The notion of identity was subsequently borrowed by social science disciplines, and applied to groups and to social assemblages.

Identity commonly refers to an intersection of social and cultural features shared by members within a given group. Early definitions of group identity suggest the existence of some type of social and cultural boundaries within which distinctive cultures develop. Such an understanding reified groups and their distinctive features; social agents were assumed to express group identity through homogeneous social and cultural features considered as atemporal, or at least as stable and continuous. Those supposedly homogenous groups were identified by ethnonyms or ethnic designations, which also impacted social scientists’ assumptions about internal homogeneity and political, cultural, and social unity (Brown 1974: 30). In the North American context, anthropologists have long contributed to the perpetuation of such representations of groups by applying such terms as band, tribe, and community, and by assuming that such social units respectively

222 shared a common language, a territorial contiguity, and an integrated political organization (Sharrock 1974; Chun 2001).56

The existence of such clearly defined units has not remained unquestioned.

Anthropologists have asked whether they were not just "analytical abstraction[s]"

(Sharrock 1974: 97), i.e., ideal types that find some utility only on account of their analytical and epistemological purposes. Naroll labelled cultunit this construct which includes people sharing the same language and belonging to the same group, and argues that this notion of well-bounded groups has been fashioned within the context of ethnographic fieldwork and academic dialogue, as well as in accounts of state and colonial administration (Naroll 1964 in Sharrock 1974: 97).

Anthropologists have more recently focussed on the plurality of identities existing at both the individual and group levels, and their association with specific spheres of existence. They left aside primordialist constructions of identity strongly based on

“belonging,” on biology, and on genealogy, and explored the idea that identity is socially constructed and formed by political choices. From the 1970s onward, the constant adjustment of internal features and intergroup boundaries in the definition of a group's identity became an important focus in anthropology. Notably, an increasing interest in ethnicity (Barth 1969) and social movement (Melucci et al. 1989), as well as an emerging focus on agency and individual action in social contexts (Giddens 1979, 1991), contributed to this field of inquiry. Barth’s focus on the notion of “boundary” has shown how identity works at the political level, emphasizing that it is "the ethnic boundary that defines the group rather than the cultural stuff that it encloses" (1969:15). Boundaries

56 The emergence of the trapline system and of beaver preserves during the 1930's and '40's, seen in chapter 3, is a good example of the synergy between policy-makers, anthropologists, and aboriginal people in defining clustered groups of aboriginal people.

223 therefore provide a framework, a constantly (re-)negotiated structure in which individual interpretations and group definitions gain meaning.

This raises an important question: if one posits that social borders are porous, constantly changing, or literally imagined by anthropologists, what are the characteristics of collective identity denominators that are invoked by social agents themselves? Along these lines, anthropologist Ronald Niezen has underlined an apparent paradox. On the one hand, the dominant paradigm existing and conveyed in anthropology and in cultural studies over the last decades has emphasized the "invented-ness" of tradition (Hobsbawm and Rangers 1983), the malleability of ideologies and boundaries (Amselle 1998), and the artificiality and difficulty of finding unanimity in processes of inclusion and exclusion

(Obeyesekere 1990), thus calling into question the existence of clear boundaries between local, national, and international groups. On the other hand, Niezen notes that aboriginal groups were the loci of a “reinvigorated identity as a source for group memberships

[publicly represented] as bounded entities with discrete histories” (Niezen 2010: 4). The preceding chapter explores this paradox in the case of the WSEA and Abitibiwinni band, and of their overlapping memberships.

There is an apparently irreconcilable gap between how social sciences present local identities and how people who own these identities present themselves. As a result, aboriginal people’s attempts to represent and assert identities as stable, discrete, and clearly defined social configurations have often led to doubt, internal debate and conflict over a groups’ authenticity and connections to the past. For instance, Ceuppens and

Geschiere (2005) use African and European examples to describe how notions of historical marginalization, movement, and instability – often associated with definitions

224 of aboriginality and indigeneity – generate apprehensions, insecurities, and internal conflicts concerning the authenticity of groups. In brief, the interests of the group are plural and sometimes contradictory; accusations of bad faith within the group highlight the confusing aspects of these interests as well as the moral and ethical components attached to identity and belonging. I will use theory on corporate groups to complete the discussion of this particular issue.

Community and Corporate Groups

The concept of corporate groups is relevant for considering, on the one hand, representations of identity as a discrete entity clearly distinguished from all others and, on the other hand, for reflecting on the fact that social borders can sometimes become more or less rigid and changeable through time. Dow indicated two 19th century sources from which concepts related to corporateness were borrowed by anthropology (1973). First, based on its definition in English jurisprudence, Sir Henry Maine developed a sociological definition of the concept of corporation. According to this definition, a corporation is a perpetuate entity legally considered as one person, in terms of rights and ownership, whether it is composed of a single individual or of a group (Dow 1973, 1974):

"Corporations never die, and accordingly primitive law considers the entities with which it deals, i.e. the patriarchal or family groups, as perpetual and inextinguishable" (Maine

1917: 122). Second, Weber’s Verband was translated as "corporate group" and used to refer to a closed group that followed a set of institutionalized norms enforced by a leader or a sub-group of leaders (Dow 1973).

Cochrane, building on Maine’s definition, argued that corporation is a unique product of English law, and that the only acceptable use of the term is to designate

225 entities that possess all of the characteristics implied in its legal definition (Cochrane

1971). Yet, Maitland wrote about the etymology of the term as referring to a "fictitious person, a juristic person, which has rights and duties distinct from the rights and duties of its members" (Maitland 1966 in Goodenough 1971: 1151). In a similar way, Smith argued that the characteristics most commonly applied to corporate groups are a) the autonomous and collective identity of a membership, b) the work on exclusive common affairs following specific procedures and forms of organization, and c) the presumptions of perpetuity (Smith 1996 in Brown 1974: 32). As it leaves aside the legal content of previous definitions, this definition is arguably more suitable for anthropology and its comparative project. It also highlights how corporate groups, in spite of claims and appearances of being stable, continuous, and characterized by a clearly defined organization, are in fact homeostatic: they constantly regulate their inner environment in order to take account of and adapt to external changes.

Homeostasis introduces a critic of the presumed fixity of ethnic identity: groups can be perceived by their members or by outsiders as fixed, perpetuate, and well organized, but these features depend on the groups' ability to handle internal and external changes relative to political, social, cultural and legal systems. For ethnic groups and other kinds of collectivities, maintaining bonds and sustaining a given social structure does not happen "naturally" and is not only dependent on a shared collective identity among members. To point to the social and cultural components of such local dynamics,

Sahlins (1999) coined two concepts that nuance our understanding of the ways in which local groups handle changes: the inventiveness of tradition (the ability to permute or displace older forms and adapt to new situations) and the resistance of culture (rather

226 than culture of resistance). Ensuring that a group remains stable, meaningful, and potent in an ecologically and socially constraining context requires ongoing actions; it unfolds through complex socio-cultural dynamics and processes involving a constant micro- adjustment of conventions.

To conclude the discussion of the paradox mentioned above, Niezen describes how aboriginal groups' claims of collective unity, social and political stability, and cultural authenticity take form at a moment when identity and belongings are being increasingly juridified and policed. The contemporary context provides group leaders and spokespersons opportunities to protect and reinforce community boundaries in the legal realm. The reification of identity is therefore part of a strategic politico-legal process

(Niezen 2010). However, it is important also to note that such juridification and political actions are not the only social and cultural process in which people are involved.

Community and the Village

In classical social theory, community refers to a social unit larger than a small village, sharing common values, and made of individuals interacting in a given environment. Mason has attempted to synthesize an objective definition of community that is recognizable in reality. According to him, community is "constituted by a group of people who share a range of values, a way of life, identify with the group and its practices, and recognize each other as members of that group" (Mason 2000: 21).

In a review of ninety-four definitions of community, Hillery (1968) enumerated three distinct dimensions that characterize community: shared ecology, social organization, and shared cultural and symbolic meaning. Accordingly, community is a concept whose actualizations or concretizations in the real world in actual, observable

227 cases present these features at different levels. Most of the authors that he considered were inspired by 19th century theorists, who were interested in universalist models for social life. German theorist Ferdinant Tönnies established a distinction between

Gemeinschaft (often translated as the word "community"), which was characterized by shared norms, beliefs, loyalty to family, ascribed social status and limited division of labour, and Gesellschaft ("civil society"), which was presented as an association of individuals centered on their own interests wherein the division of labor was more elaborate and conflicts were more likely (Tönnies 2001). Emile Durkheim distinguished between societies based on "mechanical solidarity", characterized by homogeneity and intolerance of dissimilarities, and societies based on "organic solidarity", characterized by the integration of differences and the interdependence of specialized individuals

(Durkheim 2010). The term “community” can be used to talk about groups as broad as

“national communities” while still implying some connoted and emotion-triggering features like the “warmth” of friendship, the loyalty of family, or the fact that members should be individually and personally concerned by the affairs touching the community.

Henry Maine distinguished between "status-based” societies (ascriptive, founded on immutable hierarchies based on blood-based rank order) and more advanced "contract- based” societies (greater degree of freedom and founded on legal agreements; Maine

2003).

By and large, since the Enlightenment, definitions of community have oscillated on a continuum. At one end of the continuum, the term referred to groups based on micro, face-to-face, individual interactions, while at the other end, it referred to larger, macro assemblages and broad, global phenomena. Yet, along this continuum, community

228 often carried the same connotations and the same relative position vis-à-vis other types of social configurations. Community seems to be defined in relation to such concepts as society (nowadays considered as broader and more complex social assemblage than community) and household (a smaller and simpler configuration); it may be alternatively understood as an opposite, or concurrent entity, as a metaphor or a substitute for these other, smaller or broader, local or global, more or less exclusive, entities.

Moreover, community has long been considered as opposed to society, or as its negative reflection. Delanty (2010: 10) finds in political and sociological theories that have emerged since the Enlightenment, such as liberalism, republicanism, conservatism, communism, and their many variants, multiple doctrines and political ideologies focussing on the supposed historical collapse of community, or its comeback. These grand narratives argued that social changes prompted by urbanization, industrialization, sociocultural heterogeneity and development were necessary, if not inscribed in a natural history of human civilization, and prompted what Maurice Stein has called "the eclipse of community" (1972). Society became understood as a more complex and as larger form of social organization associated with a higher degree of social development than community which remained closer, at least symbolically, to the warmth, emotional bonds and textures of interpersonal relations.

However, after WWII, social problems such as criminality, delinquency, psychosocial troubles, etc., were considered as symptomatic of an alleged destructuration and pathological fracturing of community caused by development, bureaucracy, modernization and urbanization, and mainly by the state's failure to handle social problems. These new expectations relative to community were based on the fact that

229 community allegiances may be an important factor, and a source of motivation, for channeling human activity and mobilizing groups and populations. Such movements are useful, and in many cases needed, as they have the actual potential to empower individuals by enabling the social circles with which they identify to become meaningful.

Within this attribution of responsibilities, community became imagined as a geographically specific local village and considered as “the most appropriate collectivity to address social problems" (DeFilippis, Fisher and Shragge 2010: 99). In such a context, community becomes simultaneously a product and an agent of contemporary political and economic ideology, shifting the debate away from critiquing the involvement of the state in citizens’ well-being.

Such a celebration of community in the management of social life raises suspicion that it may also represent an adaptation to a system that in many cases has let people down (especially in the case of colonized groups) and does not question the overall logic of state policies (DeFilippis, Fisher and Shragge 2010: 102). Although these are sold as locally empowering alternatives to neoliberalism, they are also ways in which the state and managerial powers can infiltrate local communal dynamics while remaining unaccountable in the case of failure.

In other words, “community empowerment can backfire, putting community members in a position where they can only blame themselves in cases of failure. In brief, the rhetoric of community emphasizes solidarity while it is symptomatic of a withdrawal of the state from social and local affairs. Local initiatives are celebrated while the state or higher levels of social organization stay off the radar. Community ultimately becomes a device used to lighten the responsibilities of upper forms of organization, such as society

230 or the state, and to legitimize their withdrawal from the social sphere. Also, by these means, organizational institutions retain their continued hold on power while rendering them unaccountable to, and unreachable by, citizens. To illustrate how the theoretical features of community materialize in this specific ethnographic context, I will now turn to

Washaw Sibi’s current situation.

A Single Usage for Community?

Dominique Collin (1988) noted that aboriginal people often describe their band and/or community as "organic wholes" that ought to be socially and culturally homogenous, and unified under a singular project in which all parts have a role to play.

However, such communitarianism does not mean that all members necessarily agree on what the unifying project ought to be. Anthony Cohen (1994, 2000) has noted that

“community” is often used in several ways in the same context, leading him to avoid proposing a universal definition. According to Cohen, community refers to a coalition of interests, a space for individuals to belong that is "greater than kinship but more immediate than the abstraction we call 'society' " (Cohen 2000: 15).

In all its different usages, community generally implies similarity and difference: community suggests a group of people having something in common that also distinguishes them significantly from other groups. Cohen (2000) considers that these alleged similarities between members, as well as differences with others, were largely symbolic. The actual content of these similarities and differences is not necessarily consensual nor homogeneous, for community is understood and defined by social agents through individual experiences, understandings, and interpretations of what constitutes mutual ties and borders. Yet, in a given context, because people have similar references,

231 individual experiences and interpretations usually follow relatively regular patterns.

Community should not be conceived as an objective reality, but rather as a "cluster of symbolic and ideological map references with which the individual is socially oriented"

(Cohen 1989: 58). It is a form of consciousness, a notion that allows seeing how distinct forms of sociality and collective bonds emerge.

Cohen’s perspective allows thinking about community not as a uniform and unitary arrangement, but as an open and malleable system that can change and be transformed. In fact, he was inspired by Victor Turner's concept of communitas (Turner

1969), which refers to a particular type of social rapport that emerges when structures are resisted or suspended, for example in situations of liminality,57 marginality, or inferiority.

Such moments place social agents in opposition to regular social structures and this position gives them an opportunity for creativity in the expression of their sociality. In fact, communitas refers to a group of equal individuals placed in a space that is characterized by an absence of structure, yet embedded in a broader set of social structures. Communitas is thus in an intimate relation of complementarity and opposition with structured social relations (Turner 1969). In other words, any structure creates margins or spaces where people can aggregate on the basis of alternative, inferior, or subversive principles that have been fragmented or given a lesser importance within more central structure.

57 Liminality is a concept borrowed from van Gennep (1960). It refers to the transition phase occurring between the separation (the detachment of individual/group from an earlier status) and the aggregation (the point where they reach a new status). Liminality has ambiguous features: individuals pass "through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state" (Turner 1969: 94). Turner was interested in the social aspect of liminality, its "blend of lowliness and sacredness, of homogeneity and comradeship."

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Cohen’s definition posits community as a subversive space involving dynamics that pertain to both broader, more structured, and more complex arrangements such as society, and smaller, simpler ones, such as the family or the household. This perspective allows for observation of how a group defined as a community is constantly involved in processes of defining itself in relation to other forms of collectivity. It also considers internal debates and conflicts as intrinsic parts of a community, instead of seeing them in opposition to consensus or harmony. Alternative ways of defining a given group ought to exist simultaneously, and contribute to the maintenance of any community.

Building a Cree Community

The Washaw Sibi Crees consider themselves victims of historical injustice. The

WSEA has spent significant time and energy, including financial and human resources, in attempting to describe the deteriorating effects that structural and symbolic violence have at the social and cultural levels on the well-being of the membership. In a few official documents that explain its collective project, the WSEA identifies some problems that emerged over the course of their collective history. For instance:

The people of Washaw Sibi have had their inherent rights, their language, culture and identity so undermined by government policies, the residential school system and their relocation under an Algonquin administration that they have difficulty in openly and publicly expressing their goals and aspirations. (Cardinal 2004: 2)

And further:

In describing the hierarchical model, which in our country, has the queen and her government representatives on top and a hierarchy of people of power arranged in a pyramidal structure downward (sic). The average

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Canadian is near the bottom of this pyramid, the Algonquians are underneath them, and the Washaw Sibi people are underneath the Algonquians." (Cardinal 2004: 4)

In the same line, an excerpt from the 2008 Report of the Cree-Naskapi

Commission was distributed to the members in the summer 2009. It mentioned the work of the WSEA as a way to counter the different implications of the social injustices experienced by the group throughout its history:

[In a meeting with the Commission, the Chief of Washaw Sibi] spoke about the "coerced" relocation58 of the Washaw Sibi Eeyou from their traditional lands and the resulting injustice of having to live elsewhere in a minority situation where they are last to receive benefits. In addition, Washaw Sibi Eeyou, in the present situation, risk losing their language and culture. Moreover, they neither have the full benefits of membership in the Abitibiwinni First Nation nor the full range of benefits to which beneficiaries of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement are entitled.59 (CNC 2009)

A document produced by the association in 1998 describes the general living conditions of members and the effects of their exclusion in comparison with other James

Bay Cree communities. After summarizing the general features of Washaw Sibi’s collective history, the report mentions that:

Washaw Sibi participants are less educated, less trained, have lower levels of employment, and have greater financial insecurity – including food insecurity – than people in communities in Iiyiyiu Aschii. They also appear to have higher levels of chronic diseases, including diabetes, and to be living with more disabilities than are found in Iiyiyiu Aschii.60 (Torrie and Lejeune 2008: 1)

No wonder, then, that members have expectations of tangible changes and

58 This quote refers to the 1942 relocation, by which the Indian Affairs inadvertently determined the marginal and minority situation of the group. 59 It is also in similar terms that the work of the WSEA is presented in the media (Radio-Canada 2006; EEN 2004, 2005a, 2005b, 2006; Roslin 2004; CNW Telbec 2005; Bonspiel 2005a, 2005b). 60 Appendix 6 shows some of the quantitative information generated by the report.

234 improvement of their living conditions, especially regarding the future establishment of a community. As an officially recognized group, Washaw Sibi can claim territorial rights, put social and health programs in place, focus on cultural maintenance and revival, and initiate negotiations for compensation and royalties on development or exploitation projects occurring over the group's customary lands. However, it is relevant to critically consider at what the rise of the WSEA has meant, and currently means, in terms of power dynamics.

Community as a Membership

At first sight, outlining the WSEA membership seems like a simple task. In June

2009, at the beginning of my fieldwork study, I was sitting with the WSEA chief in his office for a formal interview and I asked him to explain to me the history of the members of the association. His answer was straightforward:

Because a long time ago, up in the mouth of the Harricana River, as they call it, Washaw Sibi used to live there. And they used to hunt geese, and trap there, and they would come in the winter to trap. And most of them lived around this Hannah Bay area, which is called Washaw Sibi today.

According to these words the WSEA is a body that represents politically and socially the descendants of this original group.

Applying this narrative to definition of the current membership is nonetheless not so straightforward. The descendants are now scattered in different villages and localities, and are registered under different Indian bands and agreements (such as Treaty 9 or the

JBNQA). The scattered-ness of members, and their different institutional forms of membership, complicate the identification of members. Bonds between Washaw Sibi members exist in the midst of complex customary and emerging networks based on

235 kinship, friendship, partnership, and interpersonal relationship. It is consequently difficult to define belonging to WSEA in simple terms. In the Northern communities, the line between members and non-members is in many cases thin and, for some members, quite arbitrary.

The application process is individual but most members told me that they began to become involved in the association and applied for membership along with other members of their family or after the birth of their children. After submitting the application, receiving membership was sometimes postponed or was complicated for individuals in particular situations. For example, a woman from Pikogan told me that although all of her siblings were members of the WSEA, her application for a JBNQA beneficiary number was constantly denied because the spelling of her name on her birth certificate was not the same as on her current ID cards. Also, some individuals married to

Algonquins who are refractory to the WSEA’s project do not apply for membership so as to avoid conflicts with their partner or with their in-laws. Given the complexity of the group’s historical experience, even using a simple criterion based on descent from a past group as the basis for WSEA membership can become delicate.

Beyond the difficulty of clearly identifying members, there are significant concerns regarding the composition of the membership itself. Among members it is assumed that the WSEA should represent a homogeneous descent group united by specific historical experiences, associated with distinct characteristics. Members are concerned about the presence of opportunists, i.e. people who are not “real,” “authentic” members seeking to join association just to receive access to more JBNQA benefits. In the eyes of many members, such opportunists in the WSEA membership affect the

236 credibility of the project, and jeopardize the legitimacy and social cohesion of the group.

In the quote below, a man from Pikogan expressed his concerns about the presence of outsiders in Washaw Sibi, namely people from Ontario:

La seule chose qui peut-être me chicote un peu avec Washaw Sibi, c’est des Cris de l’extérieur qui commencent à venir pis s’installer. C’est pas que je suis pas d’accord avec ça, mais à un moment donné, ce n’est plus des gens de Washaw Sibi qui gèrent ce building-là. C’est des gens de l’extérieur. Moi, ce que j’appelle du monde de Washaw Sibi, c’est du monde d’ici. Ce n’est plus du monde d’ici. C’est comme si quelqu’un viendrait ici pis viendrait gérer la communauté ici.61

Many members who have resided most of their life in Quebec and who joined the group in the 1990’s, before the incorporation of the association in 1997 and its expansion in the early 2000’s, share similar concerns. These groups often define Washaw Sibi members as residents of Quebec Abitibi, which has created conflicts among members given their diverse origins and places of residence. The presence of Cree families from Ontario on the membership list, and the fact that they moved into the area and got positions in the

WSEA office in Amos, upsets many local members.

The WSEA claims to represent the descendants of the Hannah Bay Crees. Still, at the present moment, the only official criterion to become a WSEA member is to hold a

JBNQA beneficiary number. For instance, anybody living in any of the already established Quebec Cree communities, or having a JBNQA beneficiary number and living “off-territory” in Quebec or Ontario, can become a member. Keeping the doors of the WSEA so wide open is basically a strategy to increase the membership numbers in order to obtain funding, and also, indirectly, political and social capital.

61 “The only thing that bothers me a little with Washaw Sibi, it is Crees from elsewhere who are beginning to settle here. It’s not that I disagree with this, but at a certain point, it is not people from Washaw Sibi who rule this building anymore. It is people from elsewhere. For me, people from Washaw Sibi are from here. It is not people from here anymore. It is as if somebody would come here and start managing the community here” (author’s translation).

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Tensions relative to the composition of the membership become messy when one acknowledges the tenuous distinction between a potential beneficiary and someone who does not qualify. Conflicts are exacerbated by imbalances in terms of access to the resources, benefits, and rights at stake. Members can accuse someone of fallacy or opportunism when a person does not have a known place within the core set of kin or social relations acknowledged by others, and/or does not share certain common experiences or habits with other membesr. Such accusations impregnate the social life of the WSEA which claims to represent Hannah Bay/La Sarre Crees’ descendants.

The Community as a Village

Members generally describe their mobilization as a process aiming at the building of a James Bay Cree village community. The recognition of the group by the GCCQ in

2003 constituted an important step in this process, but not its completion. Since this recognition, official discussions of the WSEA have centered mainly around the selection of a site that would become a JBNQA Category I land where a village would be built.

During an interview, the deputy-chief of the WSEA shared with me an image of how she saw the future village:

Well, I think we need a setting just like the other nine Cree communities. Every time I go to a Cree community, I have that in my heart. Ah! I wish I could see that day come when I enter Washaw Sibi and I see houses and streets, and this and that. I go to Mistissini, Waskaganish, whatever. Oh yeah, it becomes stronger, I really hope it would come soon, but as for this too close, I don't think it would be too advantageous for us economically. Because if we're too close, even Pikogan, they could have more business opportunities if they moved a little bit further out. Right now, everybody is depending on the town, like take out, whatever. You know, opportunities, they could make little businesses in their community.

Her words highlight the importance of a residential village where an organization different from the current situation of the group could emerge. Her description contains

238 features associated with already-established aboriginal communities such as James Bay

Cree communities, Pikogan, or Moose Factory. It also mentions the importance of local businesses. According to her, Washaw Sibi's autonomy is conditional on the local development of business, and on a culturally specific service economy employing members and adapted to their specific needs. In this line, Pikogan is mentioned as an example of community that has not succeeded in asserting its political autonomy and socio-economic self-sufficiency.

In 2004, the WSEA council mandated an engineering company to attempt to determine the layout of the future village (WSEA 2004). Members of the WSEA explained to me that the purpose of having the plan in hand was to have an idea of the kind of village they would like to have. When I was discussing this project with WSEA officials, or with office employees, they showed me these plans a couple of times.

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Figure 14. Preliminary Plan of Washaw Sibi.

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This plan includes all the GCCQ and CRA facilities that characterize James Bay Cree communities. It is separated into four distinct geographical zones:

1) a political and administrative area providing social services and defending the interests of the group (the white circle);

2) a commercial and industrial zone (in red);

3) a residential zone (in yellow);

4) a gathering area, providing opportunities to learn, practice the Cree language and live according to traditional ways of life.

The first zone includes a band council administration building, a community school, a health center, a commercial space, as well as office buildings for JBNQA and

CRA institutions. This cluster of buildings would be located at the meeting point of a stream and a river, represented by blue curvy lines. The third zone would radiate north from this service center, but also leaves spaces for "future developments" on both sides of the stream. The second zone would serve as a buffer zone between the administrative center and the residential streets.

The main water body in blue at the bottom of the map is not named, for the map is a template model which will be adapted to the specificities of the site the WSEA choose for the future village. However, at the moment of my fieldwork, people generally assumed that it would be the Harricana River. The fourth zone refers to an area for traditional activities, planned to stand on the riverbank. Most James Bay Cree communities have such areas, where traditional shelters serve to teach customary practices and crafts, and to prepare food for community feasts.

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The village is important to the WSEA for many reasons. Building a village is considered by many as a condition for securing the group's access to substantial JBNQA benefits. Furthermore, it is planned that after establishment of the village, the group would begin negotiating a Category II tract of land with the provincial government and with other aboriginal groups inhabiting the region. These expectations show that the project of forming a village community has become a strategy for accessing political recognition and improving collective social, financial, political, and material capital.

“Acting Like a Community”

The gradual recognition of the group has had implications for its internal structure. For example, in August 2009, I discussed the emergence of Washaw Sibi with anthropologist and CRA delegate Paul Wertman. He compared the conditions for recognition of Washaw Sibi by the GCCQ/CRA to the early state of Oujé-Bougoumou, before this community was integrated to the GCCQ:

Well, the first, the first step was to develop a local organization. The concept behind that is, if Oujé-Bougoumou was to claim that they are a distinct Cree group, distinct from any existing Cree communities, they had to act like one. So we established a local organization.

His words show how, at the moment of their respective recognition by the GCCQ, a given, ideal community model gradually became a normative pattern for both Washaw

Sibi and Oujé-Bougoumou. They also suggest that the process of political recognition of the WSEA by the GCCQ and the governments demands for a specific structure for the group, with council following Cree conventions, and committees involved in the different

Cree institutions (CSB, CTA, CRA, etc.) has, and requires, structures effects for the group. The requirements for recognition are ambivalent: the group has to show evidence

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of its autonomy, distinctiveness, and specific history, yet it also has to centralize and structure itself following a recognized model.

To support its rise, the WSEA establishment made several compromises with other aboriginal and non-aboriginal entities. Its members had to negotiate certain aspects of the project among themselves, notably when selecting the site where the village would be built. Such negotiations also led to a few concessions that proved difficult to accept for some members. Furthermore, the process of establishing a regime of governance for the group happened in a way that forced the group to share or to give up their powers to other institutions such as Waskaganish or the GCCQ.

Members’ Perceptions of the Project

The last section dealt with the main features of the WSEA’s project. Yet, there is a whole set of alternative ways of presenting the project that question or challenge the work of the WSEA. The next section will discuss the main features of these alternative perceptions.

Reproducing Violence: Resistance and Cooptation?

Members disagree about whether the process of mobilization and recognition is presently empowering the group. Whereas some of them see their mobilization and collective work as a way to assert their own social and cultural way of life and gain a greater access to self-governance, rights and resources, the process has shown that the completion of the project does not only depend on their preferences, but also on

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stakeholders and local, regional, provincial and federal governments.

This aspect of Washaw Sibi is an example of Etzioni-Halevy’s concept of co- optation which refers to the incorporation of elements of dominant and elite structures into social movements and organizations that are emerging or in opposition to some form of power or dominance in exchange for moderation, collaboration or management.

According to her, co-optation has contributed to the stability and expansion of the democratic and liberal state and, ultimately, to the perpetuation of power hierarchies

(Etzioni-Halevy 1990). Resistance and co-optation are two distinct ways of dealing with domination that are often considered as opposed to each other.

As it appears, the rise of the WSEA is crossed by dynamics pertaining to both resistance and co-optation. In fact, Abu-Lughod has shown how the opposition between resistance and co-optation is an analytical construct, for these two notions often materialize simultaneously (1990 in Gupta 1995: 398) as human beings are rarely

"hyperstrategic," but always at least partially unpredictable and potentially creative of something "new" (Gupta 1995). In the same line, Brown has criticized the fact that the notion of resistance in anthropology opened the door for reducing social interactions to the domain of power games (1996).

Dynamics pertaining to resistance and co-optation are hence intricate and often lead to at least partially original, unpredictable results. They also materialize in situations and interactions involving social and cultural dynamics that ought not be reduced to transactions of power. Next sections will show examples of how different members deal with the potential exclusion or marginalization of the Washaw Sibi group.

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Outspoken Crees: “Could we live together?”

When discussing their history, Washaw Sibi members explained to me that the scattered-ness and marginalization of the group was not only caused by others. It could also have been a consequence of Washaw Sibi people’s general attitude and preferences.

According to these discourses, Washaw Sibi members historically played an active role in keeping the group away from formal structures because they were, compared to other local aboriginal groups, too mobile, or nomadic, or too confrontational and direct in expressing their opinions. Many adult members describe their family elders and ancestors, and sometimes themselves, as too outspoken to live in a community with others. These comments coexist with – and in many cases serve as a balance to – narratives of victimhood. They can be interpreted as a way to claim agency and responsibility over the historical exclusion of the group.

It is indeed a fact that the La Sarre Crees and their descendants, the group that is said to be at the origin of Washaw Sibi, sedentarized and settled in different aboriginal communities in the 1960s and 1970s, about one generation later than the rest of the

Abitibiwinni band (Scott and Morrison 2005: 55). Their history of imposed relocations contributed to the maintenance of a semi-nomadic way of life. Moreover, I mentioned how in Quebec Abitibi their conversion to the Anglican Church created a division with the local Abitibi-Dominion band in the 1950s and ‘60s and inspired Indian Affairs agents unfavourable prejudices. A Washaw Sibi woman living in Timmins told me:

And our ancestors, they [Indian Affairs] didn't want them to have a reserve, because there were a lot of outspoken people. They would call them wild Indians. My cousin said Indian Affairs would stand up not giving those Washaw Sibi Indians a reserve because they were too wild. I sort of believe that. 245

At the time of creating Pikogan in the 1950s, the emerging divisions between Algonquins and Crees favoured the Algonquins and Indian Agents did declare the La Sarre Crees

“not civilized enough” to be granted a sedentary reserve (e.g. Indian Affairs, RG 10,

Volume 6749). What is interesting to note here is how contemporary members of the group transformed these negative stereotypes into current elements of pride. Yet, whereas

“outspoken” generally means to be “bold in speech,” it refers here to a general opposition to sedentarity.

In fact, I was told that at the end of the 19th century, Peter Trapper, whom

Washaw Sibi members present as their common ancestor who gave the group its distinctive identity, had this typical attitude regarding living in a sedentary community.

Another Washaw Sibi woman from Timmins recounted:

And my great-grandfather, Peter Trapper, was all over the place. He didn't really live in a community that I know of... I think, during his time and the encroachment of Christianity, I don't think they sat well together in a community, which I think is why he didn't stay in a community very often besides living the traditional lifestyle, if you want to call it that way.

Once again, we notice that she presents “not living in a community” not as something that was imposed on the group, but, to a certain extent, as a deliberate choice that this ancestor made.

Finally, these narratives about the community continue to articulate the local distinction between Washaw Sibi Crees and Abitibiwinni Algonquins. Algonquin friends from Pikogan often told me that the Crees wanted to leave Pikogan because they were simply incapable of settling and sharing a space with others in a sedentary community.

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On this topic, a Washaw Sibi member living in Pikogan told me about the distinction between Crees and Algonquins living in the area:

La mentalité n'est pas la même. Les Algonquins, eux, ont été dans un milieu urbain. Les Cris n’ont jamais été dans un milieu urbain, ils ont été tout le temps dans une communauté retirée, reculée, qui ne faisait pas face aux gens du milieu urbain. Les Cris, eux, font face à cette transition-là, tandis que l'Algonquin, il est déjà dans le bain du milieu urbain. Donc, ça fait une espère de différence de culture, de langue, et de mentalité aussi.

Such narratives are emotionally charged as they refer to a difficult history of exclusion and marginalization, yet they build on elements of collective pride: the ability to maintain traditions meaningful and to uphold living relationships with the customary territories. They bring Washaw Sibi members to make sense of their history. Yet, they do that in a way that challenges their victimhood and the neglect their suffered through colonization.

A Community or a Reserve?

While conducting research on the field in Amos area, I took the habit of referring to the future Washaw Sibi settlement as a community. The local portion of the membership and the leadership generally used this word to refer to the project, and also to already-established villages built on Indian reserves and JBNQA Category 1 lands (e.g.

Pikogan or Waskaganish). They used community to call both the settlements and the groups of people inhabiting them. In so doing, they symbolically put both on a same level, thus metaphorically entitling the group to political recognition and to a village on a selected site.

Community comes locally as a term that connotes internal cohesion, homogeneity and collective enablement, and many members of the WSEA or of the Abitibiwinni band

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find the use of the term community empowering and mobilizing. For them, the concept suggests access to certain collective rights, resources and recognition, and also mobilization toward common goals. In many instances people from Washaw Sibi and

Pikogan told me that they felt the terms reserve, Indian band, or aboriginal village had colonial connotation and reminded them of the Indian Act. For that reason, they considered those terms as less politically correct or loaded with unpleasant memories.

Moreover, in the specific case of the James Bay Cree villages, community has become handy in the absence of a better word. JBNQA Category I lands and the villages built upon them are not legally and technically the same as Indian reserves regulated by the federal Crown. I have mentioned in chapter 4 the different competencies and benefits held by the James Bay Crees under the JBNQA and the complex administrative and legal system associated with the JBNQA. The Crees and other inhabitants of Category I land commonly refer to these villages as communities, to take a distance from the colonial and legal connotations attached to reserve, or to carry more warmth than settlement or village.

However, not all Washaw Sibi members share this view. I already mentioned in the last chapter how Washaw Sibi members in Ontario defined the group differently and had ambivalent opinions about the potential residential village. In fact, I noticed that community was not the word that Ontario members used to call the WSEA's project. For instance, I met a friend's great-uncle who had asked to see me when he got wind that I was in Timmins. I questioned him about his expectations regarding the future Washaw

Sibi community. The man did not seem to understand the question. I asked it again, and he told me that my French accent was too strong. I asked my friend to translate the question in Cree. It was only then that the man understood what I was talking about and

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said: "Oh, you're talking about the reserve they want to build up there!" In the man’s understanding, the project consisted in the establishment of a reserve, and not of a community.

In fact, the distinction between reserves and JBNQA Category I lands is mainly a legal and an administrative one. Collective life and experiences lived in settlements built on Category I land are in some aspects often seen as similar to Indian reserves managed by the federal government in other regions of the country by their inhabitants. Cree inhabitants are not always fully aware of the subtle legal and administrative differences between federal Indian reserves and JBNQA Category I land. As a matter of fact, I heard many people from James Bay Cree call these settlements "the reserve" or "the rez."

As WSEA members associate different connotations to community and reserve, the use of both words brought me to reflect on the conditions in which the WSEA project took form. It was as if members simultaneously saw the project as empowering them and as reproducing colonial dynamics. Could the process of mobilization and recognition reiterate dynamics generally associated with symbolic violence or the kind of state or bureaucratic colonialism experienced by aboriginal inhabitants of the Subarctic? To which extent did the WSEA hold control over decisions regarding the membership, the site selection process, the access to specific rights and benefits, and the general aspect of the future settlement?

“It Has Always Been This Way”

I will use the tension between the connoted terms community and reserve to introduce the double-edge aspects of the mobilization for Washaw Sibi. The question of

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disempowering dynamics present in the process of emergence of Washaw Sibi is a thorny issue. As the group has made and continues to make important gains relative to its political recognition as well as with regard to social and cultural capital, many Washaw

Sibi members fear the association leadership are not powerful enough to defend the membership’s interests as they must contend with more powerful institutions such as the

GCCQ or governments. Consequently, they are distrustful and wary vis-à-vis the unfolding of the project.

I witnessed members’ skepticism early during my fieldwork, when I carried out my first interview with a Washaw Sibi elder woman. In June 2009, a friend took me near

Val d’Or to visit his mother who knew a lot about the history of Washaw Sibi. However, the conversation with her was difficult and challenging, as she mentioned the different places where she had lived during her life. She talked about different moments of her life when Indian Affairs or other government officials had promised housing or services to her family. She insisted on the disappointment that she and her relatives had felt when they realized that these promises would not concretize, or were inevitably conditional.

Knowing that in her youth she had spent a lot of time around Matagami Lake,

North-East of Amos, where her parents used to fish for local companies, I asked:

Est-ce que vous vous rappelez la création de Matagami [in 1963]?

Un peu. Le gouvernement n’a pas tenu ses promesses quand ça s’est fait. Ils nous ont dit : « tout va bien aller, pis on va vous construire une belle maison. » Pis on a jamais rien eu.62

62 “Do you remember the creation of Matagami? A little bit. The government did not hold its promises when it was done. They told us: “Everything will be fine, and we’ll build you a beautiful house.” And we never had anything” (author’s translation). 250

The reserve planned at that time to accommodate groups living in Matagami did not materialize. Her feelings about the JBNQA were that it could reproduce the same kind of disappointment. She remembered feeling quite suspicious when she first heard about the agreement, and attended a meeting in the 1970s where there was no interpreter. She ended up not applying for a beneficiary number until the rise of the Washaw Sibi group at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Yet, the way in which the project unfolded left her quite dubious:

Je pense qu'ils paient beaucoup pour construire la réserve, beaucoup d'argent. Mais là, le projet avance pas, on dirait. Ça avance lentement. Ça va réussir ? Ça réussira pas ? Tout le monde se pose la question.63

The series of relocation and forced displacements that she experienced in her life made her suspicious of the ability of the group to succeed to establish a community that would fulfill members’ interests.

I mentioned in chapter 4 the vote in favour of an urban site. Many members saw the decision to establish the village on the territory of Amos as having been pushed by the

GCCQ/CRA, and said that to lower building costs, the GCCQ had pressured members to vote for an urban site. Members who wanted a rural site felt that the decision had already been made before the vote even took place. For this reason, some people even told me that they had decided not to vote. A significant segment of Washaw Sibi membership believes that such an urban location may disempower the group vis-à-vis local non- aboriginals residing in Amos. For a group who has lived for decades in the geographical, social, and political margins of other aboriginal communities, the fear of having to settle

63 “I think they spend a lot to build the reserve, a lot of money. But still, the project does not move forward, one might say. It moves slowly. Will it succeed? Will it not? Everybody is wondering” (author’s translation). 251

for another marginal position is pronounced. This is an example of rationale that leads some members to believe that their power and capacities to assert their own interests are being chipped away from them, in spite of apparent recognition. Many members are critical toward issues that delay the completion of the project or that potentially divert it from its initial objectives.

Compromising

By taking time to question how the project is unfolding and where it is going,

Washaw Sibi members remind their interlocutors – and themselves – of the original and central implications at stake in their mobilization. For many members, the village project was never an end in itself, but rather a means to access certain rights, to defend their interests, and to assert their distinctive cultural values and way of life. Nevertheless, the planned village has become a crucial step in achieving complete recognition on all levels.

Comparing Washaw Sibi to the nine already established James Bay Cree communities,

Simeon Trapper, a Waskaganish man who worked several years as a representative ensuring communication between Waskaganish and Washaw Sibi, told me:

I can't say it [Washaw Sibi] is an equal community. I think it's only a group of people that are from Waskaganish and from Waswanipi. You know? I think we can only say that [they are an equal community] once they have their community, they own community, and they go buy land. Right now, I think it's just an arm and we support them.

The settlement and building of the village became an unavoidable issue, making site selection the central problem members were grappling with at the time I carried out my

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fieldwork. The process of recognition, and the discussions about potential sites, have required compromises from all parties involved.

In this context, ongoing questionings and critiques of the WSEA official project by the membership put considerable pressure on the leadership, and on the individuals who maintain relations between the association and its interlocutors such as government agencies or the GCCQ/CRA. These people have to constantly explain, and even justify, the actions and decisions taken by the WSEA council or by the GCCQ/CRA to the membership. When I discussed the project of establishing a community with the WSEA chief, he enunciated issues that the membership repeatedly mentioned to him:

And many [WSEA members] have asked me: “Why are you not building near your territory, near trapline areas?” Sure it would be good for us to build near the traplines, but it would take so long, because I don't know if they can keep that money too long for us to build. So that's why I want our members to select a place where we can go forward faster and get our community soon.

Washaw Sibi Crees endured almost four decades of alienation and exclusion from the

JBNQA and from the GCCQ/CRA structures. At this moment, the WSEA is precisely working to remedy that situation. Dealing with relatively powerful institutions – who have now become allies – actually requires a learning process and several significant adjustments.

WSEA members have to change their perspective on other James Bay Cree communities and on the GCCQ/CRA: instead of seeing them as potential excluders who denied them certain rights, they are gradually coming to see them as allies, and acting accordingly. Taking the time to establish good relations between Washaw Sibi and the

GCCQ is important for the building of mutual trust, which cannot happen spontaneously.

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A significant period of time is necessary for Washaw Sibi to learn how the

GCCQ/CRA functions. Namely, the bureaucracies that were generated after the JBNQA developed their own mechanisms and ways of dealing with political or social issues.

Being recognized as a member community by the GCCQ and the CRA has required

Washaw Sibi Crees to learn and integrate specific policies, and to go through a process of accommodation which in turn has transformed the way members relate to each other, and also to members of other communities such as Pikogan. Also, in this new context, we have seen how Washaw Sibi beneficiated financially and politically from the support of the GCCQ and from other individual James Bay Cree communities. However, those forms of support are not unconditional. Within the GCCQ’s decision-making process,

Washaw Sibi’s interests can be scaled down in relation to the interests of other member communities, or of the Cree Nation as a whole. In other words, these processes of trust- building and of learning ways of doing and negotiating with fellow Cree communities, constitute challenges for Washaw Sibi members who are gradually learning to think of themselves as members of the Cree Nation and behave accordingly.

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CONCLUSION

ALL IS NOT SAID…

Studies of emerging phenomena offer important contributions to social theory and ethnographic practice. They unravel original and delicate theoretical and ethnographic issues, for they focus on the fluid and shifting aspects of identity within a given situation.

I have examined the process involved with the recognition and of organization of

Washaw Sibi as a distinct community in its making, which added specific methodological challenges to this project, and fashioned its originality.

The members of the group are currently spread over Northern Quebec and

Ontario, and they live in different settings. Conducting research with them required multilocal research strategies and constant shifting between sites while recording complex identity dynamics. In such contexts, crossing symbolic, geographical, linguistic, and cultural boundaries was a defining feature of the group and, consequently, of this research. It led me to make an innovative contribution to the anthropological understanding of social change and to the notion of community in algonquinist studies.

The situation I observed is fascinating; members of Washaw Sibi have to define their future collective life from scratch. This gives members significant freedom to define the margins of their identity through asserting their own individual hopes, expectations, and criteria. The diversity of visions and tensions present among members regarding the features of the community should not call into question the legitimacy of the collective 255

ties that hold the group together, but reveal the uniqueness of Washaw Sibi’s historical and recent experiences.

The rise and actions of the WSEA have partly reconfigured the collective structure and have transformed the social and cultural dimensions of the group. Washaw

Sibi members are in the process of profoundly changing the way they relate to each other and to “others:” they move on the land to visit each other, they participate in community gatherings, they are gaining increased access to specific JBNQA rights and benefits, and they are returning more frequently to the bush – partly thanks to CTA support programs.

Recognition and access to rights has also placed the group in a series of positions where members are being forced to make difficult choices. Members engage in this process by using an amalgam of already established entities, including customary networks as well as institutionalized organizations such as the GCCQ or the structures created by the

JBNQA. The chapters of this dissertation have shown the importance of observing how things build up, and how they do not always follow a single path: different people live one and the same transition in diverging, sometimes contradictory ways. Also, emerging phenomena affect the very social and cultural fabric of a group by cultivating its initial characteristics.

Beyond an analysis of social change, this dissertation offers a reflection on colonialism, as it reshaped Subarctic Canada. Namely, colonialism brought the emergence of an administrative system for aboriginal populations inhabiting the region and deepened the social boundaries between groups – such as that between Quebec

Indians and Ontario Indians, or that between Crees and Algonquins. That had deep consequences on people’s living conditions, social and cultural lives and, ultimately, on

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their identity. In fact, aboriginal people have incorporated some elements of colonialism or transforming them into strategies which minimize exclusion and actually resist colonial violence in some regards.

* *

Delanty (2010) summarizes his review of social theory on community by stating that individuals and groups often present their community as irrevocably lost, recoverable, or yet to be found or achieved. Community is thus a project, and people involved have only a partial idea of where it is leading them, although it is not yet entirely defined. Communal ties are invested with shared, yet mixed feelings of nostalgia, emergency, and hope that bring people together sometimes in harmony, and at other times in conflict.

Community Lost

Chapter 2 discussed how the notion of “tradition” reveals what, within a group’s practices and customs, has been partly lost, but still remains meaningful and important to its members. In many ways, Washaw Sibi members’ discourse on tradition is similar to those of other aboriginal groups inhabiting the region, but it also exhibits some specificities. These specificities are indicative of the group’s singular history and of the unique circumstances in which its members have lived throughout the 20th century. 257

The way of life associated with semi-nomadism was not specific to Washaw Sibi.

Like many other aboriginal people living in the Subarctic, members invoke “tradition” to refer to a way of life characterized by movement and semi-nomadism that was practiced in the Southern James Bay and Abitibi regions throughout the pre-Confederation fur trade era up until the 1930’s and ‘40’s. Groups moved on the land, following the seasons: they lived in small inland hunting camps of a few households during the winter, and attended large gatherings at the mouth of big rivers in the summer. The oscillation between small and larger groups was negotiated collectively through exchanges and interactions with other families, marriages, visits to friends, explorations of new tracks of land, and quests to establish new hunting partnerships. All these social dynamics led to large and adaptive social networks spreading out over broad areas. At another level, semi-nomadism was associated with a distinct vocabulary, and depended on a certain type of material life and on myriad practical and spiritual skills.

Beyond seasonal moves on the land, this way of life allowed for the ongoing complex social order characterized by egalitarianism, as well as deep connections with the land, with places, and with animals (Chapter 2). I mentioned in Chapter 5 that the

Cree word Iiyiyuu means “s/he lives.” It is in fact the word that is used to refer to a person; however, it can also refer to a whole community of living things. Cree hunters in fact practically and spiritually included features of the land and non-human living beings, as well as spiritual entities, within their social networks, through establishing relations of exchange and reciprocity with them. People recognized situational and temporary leaders depending on the social or ecological circumstances, and on the tasks or activities at stake

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at each moment. It was thus a highly adaptive social configuration that forged a particular habitus within Subarctic semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer groups.

This way of life came at odds with colonial agencies such as the HBC or with the treaty and band systems implemented by the governments. Throughout the course of colonialism, the adaptability and pragmatism of aboriginal society were at times exploited, mainly during the fur trade, but for the most part they were jeopardized or controlled by colonial policies. In fact, policies enacted by Canadian settler societies gradually favoured a regime by which people who were given the Indian status could only hold one aboriginal identity, and had to settle in one place. Many social and cultural changes brought about by colonization are considered or interpreted as losses, and people fear that traditional practices and skills may no longer be transferred to younger generations.

Such is the case for Washaw Sibi. Still, the group had a distinct experience of colonialism, mainly because it stayed on the margins of this system for most of the 20th century. Besides the imposition of sedentarity considered above, Washaw Sibi collectively experienced specific losses that happened at two different moments. The first instance of collective loss specific to Washaw Sibi can be traced to the fragmentation and dislocation of the group following colonial strategies that put important pressure on their cohesion, their cultural and linguistic integrity, and their general well-being. Historical archives such as HBC’s records and Indian Affairs agents’ correspondence mention the

Hannah Bay Indians or the La Sarre Crees as a “problematic group,” making it the target of arrests, displacement, etc. The 1942 list mentioning families to be displaced from La

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Sarre to Rupert House is nowadays invoked by the WSEA as evidence of the group’s long-term existence (Scott, Morrison and Lessard 2009).

The second instance of loss could be considered as a collateral outcome of the present mobilization. In spite of the gains realized by the group in the last years, nostalgia tinges Washaw Sibi members’ feelings about the current process. To fathom that, one has to recognize that any past, even if it contains features of marginality and disempowerment, can be idealized in periods of change. I mentioned that the group’s

“semi-nomadic” habitus contributed to the maintenance of a collective identity, and of a network of social relationships, in spite of collective exclusion and marginalization.

Washaw Sibi members were scattered in different aboriginal groups, thus making their identity virtually invisible. Paradoxically, local forms of exclusion, such as living in “tent city” during the 1950’s, contributed to the maintenance of cohesion – at least in each place where they were forced to settle – between local families. Nowadays, the Washaw

Sibi Crees pride themselves for having continued to rely on hunting at a moment when surrounding groups had mostly settled in reserves. Moreover, they turn their past marginality into something positive by associating it with the group’s freedom, its refusal to compromise, and its “outspoken-ness” which they say complicated their settlement in any sedentary community, and demonstrated their ancestors’ determination to carry on a

“traditional” lifestyle.

In Chapter 6 Turner’s concept of communitas allows for seeing how a marginal group can appropriate its position and end up defining itself as a negative reflection of imposed social structures. Chapter 6 also highlights how marginality has become part of

Washaw Sibi’s discourses about their own “tradition” which have been integrated into to

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the group’s identity. This transition from a marginal to a recognized position is accompanied by an internal re-structuring of group, and the emergence of new power relations within the group, and these changes are partly perceived and lived by members as a loss.

Community Recoverable

Washaw Sibi members are mostly driven by expectations and hopes of repairing the historical injustices that they have faced. For many members, their collective marginal situation was not optimal and had to be changed. In the absence of official recognition, the cohesion of the group became vulnerable, and Washaw Sibi people’s status in any community was constantly limited as they were treated as a second-class category. These frustrations became palpable in the 1980s, when members accessed

JBNQA beneficiary statuses, but were put on the “off-territory” beneficiary list. The mobilization of the Washaw Sibi Crees began at the turn of the 1990’s, gradually revealing the historical exclusion and marginalization of the group vis-à-vis state structures, but also in relation to the GCCQ. Members’ concerns gradually crystallized into an official discourse of historical injustice and of having been forgotten. The community thus developed a plan of action to challenge these aspects of their collective history.

As the notion of “recovery” or “reparation” is embedded in the social justice aspect of the WSEA’s claims, it needs to be examined. From the group’s perspective, living in a community is a way to assert their identity, culture, and language, as well as 261

all the features that are specific to their group, some of which are considered threatened.

The settled community is a strategy intended to keep certain skills, practices, and traditions alive. Moreover, it is an unavoidable step for the group to affirm its long- established relationships with customary territories and to establish its legitimacy over them. The group could then claim to have an input in decisions regarding these lands, and demand compensation if development projects are conducted there. In fact, although this was not on the WSEA’s short-term agenda when I conducted fieldwork, once the village is established the association was planning on claiming a piece of JBNQA Category II land.

Gupta and Ferguson have argued that invoking community serves people in finding "a moral location" (1997: 36). In this sense, Washaw Sibi’s claims are about asserting long-established social and cultural practices as well as relationships with a specific territory. For members, those are tied to deep moral, social, and cultural codes that contribute, as far as members are concerned, to the assertion of who they are in relation with other aboriginal and non-aboriginal groups. Furthermore, claiming rights over Category II land is a means for them to assume their role as stewards of the land – just like the nituhuu uuchimaauch (the hunting traditional leaders) have done for generations – and to engage with the different animals and spiritual entities that inhabit those territories.

Gupta and Ferguson (1997) have also showed how communities are associated with an imagined way of being. Considering that a specific way of being is implied in

“community” leads to the idea that the concept of community plays a role of its own in determining the content of people’s expectations. Broadly speaking, I have shown that

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“community” generally fixes those expectations around the axes of homogeneity and organic cohesion. On the one hand, as Li has noted, aboriginal communities undergoing social and political transformations often evacuate or silence disparities in their narratives about the group (Li 1996). On the other, Collin has observed that aboriginal people in

Quebec often imagine their community as organically integrated and impermeable to social hierarchies and inequalities; any evidence of a lack of organic cohesion and communalism is something that ought to be fixed, on the grounds that is not part of the

“normal” state of the group (1988). The connotations of homogeneity or organic cohesion attached to the notion of community tend to conceal social and power inequalities as well as the forms of dissent and tensions that run within the group. The concept of community thus implies an element of symbolic violence. The apparent ineluctability of the settlement of Washaw Sibi into a residential village, modelled on other James Bay Cree communities, is indicative of the way in which the notion of community conveys norms that emerged throughout the era of bureaucratic colonialism.

Community (Yet to Be) Found

As the group is going through an important transition, the multiplicity of ways in which the project of community can be imagined is significant. Members come with a great many opinions, experiences, and ideas about what the community ought to be. The process of gathering these different perspectives is important, but it is complex and it affords the group different potentialities that make uncertain any authoritative statement about its future. In an article on the multiple meanings of community, Li highlights how 263

aboriginal groups, when having to define their community, often get involved in

“struggles over resources,” which are concomitant with “struggles over meanings” (Li

1996). In fact, the conflicts and dilemmas taking place over the distribution of rights and resources are reflected in controversial representations and images of community. For that reason, she reminds her readers that these debates are actually tied to real world problems for the people involved (Li 1996). The debates taking place among Washaw

Sibi members show well how struggles for resources in the community are reflective of, and complementary to, struggles over the meaning of the group’s mobilization and of

Washaw Sibi identity.

Whatever resources are available to a community, they must allow it to make greater sense of the social bonds existing between its members. Abel Bosum (2001) and

Peter Penashue (2001), former of chief of Oujé-Bougoumou and former President of the

Innu Nation, respectively, have written testimonies focusing on the importance of integrating many voices and experiences in community planning in order to develop alternative strategies to solve problems, and to deal with political instability. Speaking about the settlement of Nemaska, QC, and New Post, ON, Preston has written: "I deeply believe that cultures thrive when there is a strong and coherent spiritual basis for living well with others and that only then can political and economic factors make a substantial difference in people's life chances" (2008:49). He warns us about being blinded by exclusive focus on the economic and political advantages, and on the allocation of resources, that come with the creation of a community and the organization of its membership. In the same vein, Bruno Barras, a leader of the Yshiro-Ebitoso people from

Paraguay, describes similar tensions in his own community. He argues that community

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projects raise those kinds of issues in aboriginal communities because beyond mere development, they represent crucial “life projects” for the people. His words show well the deep connections existing between resources and the deep meanings that are associated with one’s community:

I call it that [life projects] because our plans and projects are oriented to achieving autonomy in deciding our own future. We do not want somebody else taking us by the hand to lead us wherever they want to go. We want to advance our own projects so that what is done in the communities has continuity […]. Who better than ourselves to do this and to fight and defend our territories? For us to carry on this life project we need the respectful support of donors and financing institutions. (Barras 2004: 51)

Opportunities for wealth, and access to political or financial capital, are important but other factors that cause people to live together must be considered as well. People's actions cannot be reduced to a liberal notion of rationality and intentionality, or to benefits from economic or political opportunities.

Ongoing debates have played, and continue to play, a constructive role in the mobilization of Washaw Sibi. Chapter 6 discussed tensions relative to the membership of the group, the criteria for membership, and the doubts that some members sometimes feel regarding the existence of mutual bonds uniting the group or the advantages of pulling out of a collective project. In this situation, political action must also have effects on the composition of the group and provide members the opportunity to define what unites them:

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[Being involved in the mobilization] permet ainsi aux agents de se découvrir des propriétés communes par-delà la diversité des situations particulières qui isolent, divisent, démobilisent, et de construire leur identité sociale sur la base de traits ou d'expériences qui semblaient incomparables aussi longtemps que faisant défaut le principe de pertinence propre à les constituer en indices de l'appartenance à une même classe.64 (Bourdieu 2001: 190)

Discussions and frictions provide people involved with the project opportunities to consider several avenues when facing complex issues, to question and challenge the process they are engaged in, and to make clear what they individually and collectively want – and what they do not want. These debates lead to fundamental questions such as:

Who is a Washaw Sibi Eeyou? Who and what does the group represent? Defining the limits of inclusion and exclusion in the group is, however, a delicate task, as Washaw

Sibi’s history has led the group to occupy a space in a vast social and cultural network spreading over the Southern James Bay and Abitibi regions. Within this network,

Washaw Sibi Crees do not see themselves exclusively as members of Washaw Sibi. They also acknowledge their ties and belongings to other groups, some of which are communities that have been settled in villages for decades. Washaw Sibi’s transition takes place in a context where people have different allegiances and thus participate in different kinds of communal or collective life. This is an outcome of the different relocations and policies of exclusion endured by each group, but also of its ability to move and adapt to these varied circumstances.

Furthermore, the Washaw Sibi Crees are appropriating political and economic factors, to which they have recently gained access, that are unfamiliar to them. The

64 “[Being involved in the mobilization] allows actors to find common features among themselves beyond the diversity of particular situations that isolate, divide, demobilize them, and to build their social identity on the basis of traits or experiences which seem incomparable as long as is missing the principle of relevance constituting them in hints of belonging to a same class” (author’s translation). 266

project of establishing Washaw Sibi as an aboriginal community recognized by governments unfolds in the context of complex aboriginal-state relations as they have developed over the last half-century. This period is characterized by a shift to large-scale development projects aimed at the exploitation of new resources, beyond those traditionally used by aboriginal groups inhabiting the region. These resources attract large investments from the state or from the private sector. This creates the potential for the creation of wealth within the local populations, but also, large scale development projects may also impoverish aboriginal groups. Finally, independently of the role played by aboriginal groups in resource exploitation projects, such as mining or forestry, these new developments lead to the emergence of new relationships with the land and with wealth in general, as well as with other aboriginal and non-aboriginal interlocutors.

In chapter 1 I mentioned the ephemeral aspect of the WSEA, and the transitory characteristics of the association. This research revealed a process of transition characterized by constant change and relative uncertainty regarding the completion and the settlement of the community. Throughout this dissertation I have described how members generally expect these changes to affect their lives. What comes out of this discussion are several uncertainties relative to the future of the community. Whether the establishment of the community fulfills their expectations and ambitions in the end is impossible to know at this moment. However, in the last decade, the group has achieved a status that is recognized by more and more institutions, and also gained access to an increasing number of benefits and resources. This dissertation shows how specific institutions – the Indian Affairs, the JBNQA, the GCCQ, etc. – had a defining role for

Washaw Sibi as they oriented the group toward a series of events and strategies of self-

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affirmation, allowing the group to find allies and define its project in greater detail. These institutions now play a defining role in common perceptions about what constitutes aboriginal identities and collective life experiences.

In the case of Washaw Sibi, recovering the “forgotten community” means establishing a form of communal life that its members have never experienced before. As the group has never lived together in a settled, sedentary community, reparation involves creating something heretofore unseen. However, this model of village community presents itself as the most strategic way to structure a claim and enjoy benefits. This model has become unavoidable in the settlement of aboriginal claims such as Washaw

Sibi’s. The idea of “recovering community” is complex and involves the emergence of something new in the way members relate to one another. For individual members, the line between what is acceptable and what is not is often thin, yet it remains important.

They will not lightly accept any novelty: emerging configurations have to make sense for them in order to be considered acceptable, and that generates debates in the community.

Several uncertainties remain, that are relative to the actual form the village project will take. To begin with, no firm decision has been made concerning the site where the village will be settled. In addition, the precise configuration of the village, the people who will inhabit it, or the outline of Category II lands attached to it are still difficult to define. The rise and establishment of the WSEA has generally been seen as empowering for the group, however, Chapter 6 highlighted how the support from institutions such as the GCCQ was perceived by the membership as being attached to conditions that were not always welcome.

268

* *

These changes have deep implications for the group’s identity, their living conditions, the actions and experiences of people involved, the configuration of social relations, and their engagement with others and with the world in general. The terms of the discussion, and the alliances and adversities, may fade or switch focus. As a matter of fact, it is unlikely that discussions regarding the purpose of Washaw Sibi, however defined, will come to an end. Communities constantly face challenges from the outside, and from the inside as well. The settlement of the Washaw Sibi village community will not be the “end of story” for the group, but the beginning of another transition.

269

AFTERWORD

Between the end of the ethnographic research and the submission of this dissertation, substantial changes have affected the WSEA. In 2011, the WSEA headquarters office moved from the downtown of Amos to a location on its westerly outskirts. Also, in July 2012, the Grand Council of the Crees – Eeyou Istchee (GCC-EI) and the Government of Quebec signed the Agreement on Governance in the Eeyou

Istchee James Bay Territory, commonly referred to as the “New Governance

Agreement.”

Through this agreement, the Grand Council and CRA obtained greater powers and responsibilities over Category II lands: they gained the jurisdictions, functions and powers attributed to a municipality, and recuperated those that were granted to the

Municipalité de la Baie James (which includes non-Cree communities located in James

Bay, Chibougamau, Chapais, Radisson, Lebel-sur-Quévillon and Matagami). Regarding

Category III land, the New Governance Agreement establishes a Regional Government for the James Bay municipality, with Cree and Jamésiens (a self-designation adopted by

Euro-Canadians inhabiting the James Bay region) representatives. This Regional

Government holds the same powers and responsibilities over Category III land as a

Quebec municipality, with special powers regarding, among others, the right to establish

270

a locality65, to pass by-laws or resolutions concerning certain parts of the territory, and to impose a general property tax.

The New Governance Agreement brought significant changes to Washaw Sibi’s project. The agreement defines the James Bay territory as lying between the 49th and 55th parallels. As Amos is located at latitude 48º34’00’’, it falls south of the territory on which the agreement is applicable. GCC-EI and CRA thus decided to abandon the idea of establishing Washaw Sibi near Amos, to avoid having a community with fewer powers than other James Bay Cree communities. Negotiations taking place around and within

Washaw Sibi thus now favour the establishment of a rural village that will not, however, necessarily be surrounded by Washaw Sibi’s eventual Category II lands. These changes have transformed the debates and changed people’s positions within the project that must remain the object of a later discussion.

65In the context of James Bay, a locality refers to an inhabited area of service receiving municipal services. James Bay localities include the nine already established James Bay Cree communities, as well as Matagami, Lebel-sur-Quévillon, Chibougamau, Chapais, and Radisson. 271

APPENDICES

272

Appendix 1

Map of the Harricana River drainage and area

273

274

Appendix 2

Members’ community of residence in 2008

2008 2012 Community of residence N % N % Pikogan 169 46.4 160 28.6 Val d’Or 38 10.4 60 10.7 La Sarre 25 6.9 10 1.8 Amos 25 6.6 50 8.9 Lac Simon 18 4.9 Chisasibi 11 3 10 1.8 Waskaganish 9 2.5 120 21.4 Louvicourt 7 1.9 Matagami 7 1.9 20 3.6 Moose Factory 7 1.9 20 3.6 Notre Dame 7 1.9 Sennettre 7 1.9 20 3.6 Val Paradis 7 1.9 Thunder Bay 6 1.6 Wemindji 6 1.6 St. Félix 5 1.4 Timmins 3 0.8 Rouyn 2 0.5 Mattagami ON 1 0.3 Mistissini 1 0.3 2 0.3 North Bay 1 0.3 Wahgoshig 1 0.3 Waswanipi 1 0.3 80 14.3 Whapmagoostui 1 0.3 Cochrane ------10 1.8 Total 364 100 560 100 Source : Torrie et Source: WSEA Lejeune 2008: 29 Membership List 2012

275

Appendix 3

Examples of Indian Affairs Correspondence about the La Sarre Crees, 1942.

Source : Indian Affairs, RG 10, Volume 6749, File 420-10-4-1

276

Appendix 4

Map of James Bay

Source: Société de développement de la Baie James 2009 277

Appendix 5

Capacity to hold a conversation, by language, among Washaw Sibi members

(Torrie and Lejeune 2008: 33)

278

Appendix 6

Tables on WSEA members’ health condition

Table 1. Perception of health as ‘fair’ or ‘poor’ by age group, Washaw Sibi and Iiyiyiu Aschii

Source: Torrie and Lejeune 2008: 41

Table 2. Satisfaction with life (Very Satisfied or Satisfied) by age group and gender, Washaw Sibi and Iiyiyiu Aschii)

279

Source: Torrie and Lejeune: 43

Table 3. Food insecurity, Washaw Sibi and Iiyiyiu Aschii

Source: Torrie and Lejeune 2008: 53

Other information:

- 21% of Washaw Sibi members aged 20 years or more who participated to the survey reported studies past the secondary level, compared to 30% in Iiyiyiu Aschii;

- 27% of Washaw Sibi participants aged 18 years and over reported being employed full time, part time or occasionally, compared to 46% in Iiyiyiu Aschii aged 15 years or over. (Torrie and Lejeune 2008: 34-35)

280

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