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ORAL and RECORDED HISTORY in JAMES BAY TOBY MORANTZ Mcgill University

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ORAL and RECORDED HISTORY in JAMES BAY TOBY MORANTZ Mcgill University ORAL AND RECORDED HISTORY IN JAMES BAY TOBY MORANTZ McGill University Introduction The purpose of my presentation is to show that a blend of documentary and oral history is essential to writing honest, thor­ ough histories of Algonquian peoples. My concern here is with histories developed for the non-Indian public. We must ensure that these histories agree with our sense of credibility, integrity and relevance. The particular combination or blend of oral and documentary history for use by individual Algonquian groups must be their decision to suit their needs (in the school setting, for example) . What we produce as ethnohistorians would be a local or re­ gional history, broadly categorized as "social history". Fortu­ nately, now in the 1980s, one does not have to justify to every historian the validity of social histories that concentrate on the events connected with the lives of ordinary individuals in far- flung regions, rather than on nation state centered political, mil­ itary, administrative, diplomatic and ecclesiastical themes that are promulgated, instituted and documented by an elite. How­ ever, it seems to me that we still have to prove to historians and to ourselves the validity of the oral tradition, of folk history, particularly for Algonquian history. In our area of interest much of Vansina's pioneering promotion of oral history, based as it is 172 TOBY MORANTZ on African chiefdoms with long-standing established oral tradi­ tions, does not apply. Having myself completed a first attempt at writing an Algonquian regional history based on documentary sources (Francis and Morantz, 1983; Morantz 1983) , I feel it be­ hooves me to demonstrate the richness and accuracy of the oral tradition by showing how the documentary and oral accounts complement each other to form a more complete, vital portrayal of events. Other Algonquianists such as Gordon Day (1972) and Sylvie Vincent (1981) have made highly significant contributions towards this goal and my work draws on theirs. Approach The data I use to illustrate my points come from two principal sources. These are the archival and published documents for the James Bay area and of its principal occupants, the Cree. As well, there are the oral history accounts supplied to me by Cree Way, a curriculum development program in Rupert House, James Bay, Quebec. I believe a number of these were originally collected by Richard Preston (1975) for his work on Cree narratives. The written sources are materials that I and others have col­ lected over the past several years for the whole eastern James Bay Region in northern Quebec covering the historic period from the early 1600s to the mid 1800s. The richest records are the journals and correspondence books of the Hudson's Bay Company, but missionary records of the 17th century Jesuits and 19th century Anglicans also offer important details. With this archival data at our disposal, my colleague Dan Francis and I have produced various historic accounts of life in James Bay. While doing so we were mindful that we were not providing a full or well-rounded account, since we were missing the Indian version. At the time, just synthesizing and analyzing the great volume of data we had collected seemed an impossible task. We did not then incor­ porate to any extent the oral histories which in style differed so much from the Hudson's Bay Company records, although a number of the details were integrated into our writings. Never­ theless these oral histories were consulted and what we learned ORAL AND RECORDED HISTORY 173 from them was applied in our interpretations. The collection of oral history materials available is what I have now analyzed for this paper. It is far from complete in that all but one account has been collected from Rupert House peo­ ple, whereas the history written from documents covers a much larger geographical area and population. Furthermore, since the collection of the historical narratives was not made for historical purposes per se, the collection is also incomplete in coverage. Another consideration impeding the writing of a more represen­ tative regional history is that of the 30 or so oral histories I have on hand only about half of them seem to fall in the period for which I have done the archival research, i.e., up to the mid- 18003. Consequently in view of the above I have not examined these records with the intention here of writing a parallel his­ tory or revising certain statements already made. Rather, my approach is to tantalize us ethnohistorians with "what could be" if we were to expend as much energy seeking out the oral history records as we do the written ones. Oral History "Oral history" as defined by Vansina (1965: 1) is simply un­ written historical sources which enable a non-literate people to preserve and transmit a reconstruction of the past. Vansina de­ veloped his notions and precepts governing the application of oral traditions in centralized states, as in Africa, where there were specialists for the transmission of traditions. One can eas­ ily see that the Algonquian form of oral tradition does not mea­ sure up to the New Zealand or Hawaiian ones (Vansina 1965: 34) where a single mistake in recital was claimed to be enough to bring about the teacher's immediate death. Yet, Preston (pers. coram) reports that his chief informant refused to recount stories for which he could not recall all the details. Similarly Day (1972: 103) writes of the careful and deliberate training of young Abenaki children until some know the old stories verba­ tim. The fact that Algonquian historical accounts have survived more than 300 years in recognizable form is further evidence of a 174 TOBY MORANTZ sense of pride and interest in carefully transmitting the accounts. The wide geographical spread of Algonquian myths from Alberta to the east coast also indicates the importance attached to the transmission of the stories. Algonquians, specifically the Cree in James Bay and the Mon- tagnais of the Lower North Shore, distinguish in their oral tra­ dition two types of stories or narratives—one mythical and the other real. These they term atiukan and tipachiman. Preston (1975) , Vincent (1981) and Scott (1983) all explain the dis­ tinctions between these two types. Suffice it to say here that the atiukan or myths are stories concerning the creation of the world when, as Vincent explains (1981: 11) , men and animals were not differentiated. The tipachiman or true stories are of real people, living, or their ancestors. These distinctions are found among other Algonquians such as the Ojibwa (see Hallowell 1960: 56-57; Rogers and Rogers 1982: 156) , among Athapaskans (Mc- Clellan 1975: 67) and among the Inuit (see Vincent 1981: 11) . The category known as tipachiman is, of course, the Algonquian equivalent of history. A Cree story teller usually makes it clear which type of story he is telling. One of the common characteristics of Algonquian histories is the disregard for a standard chronology as we view it. In addi­ tion to lacking a mathematical ordering of time, the oral histories tend to focus on a topic much as we do in our unrecorded folk his­ tories. We use dates only in official written accounts—in formal history. How many of us can be precise in recalling and dating past events? Usually we relate them to past personal occurrences such as births, marriages or deaths. It is easy to understand that when narratives are transmitted over several generations, time and events become telescoped and scrambled. What we are left with in oral history then is what McClellan (1975: 72) has so aptly phrased as the quality of time rather than its quantity or diachronic nature. Similarly, it seems over time that the events rather than the personalities become transcendent so that what happened is more important than who was involved (Allen and Montell 1981: 36) . It is here that the fit or complementarity ORAL AND RECORDED HISTORY 175 with recorded history is so important, for the recorded history enables us to satisfy our need in western society for ordering the historical data (time and actors) while the tipackiman stories provide the content in many cases. The skeletal structure of the written, official documents is fleshed out with the human details from the Indian version. The time dimension is not entirely lacking in the oral his­ tory as there are clues that can be used to assign a time period. Vincent in her analysis of Montagnais oral histories has isolated some of these indicators, all to do with the presence of the white man. For example, these are periods when there were only In­ dians (i.e., no white men), only game (no flour), only hides (no cloth) and so forth. As will be seen, the events themselves also can often be dated. The indicators are names of people and specific happenings which can be dated precisely by recourse to the written record. This brings us to a sub-classification of the tipachiman stories that Vincent (1981: 11) noted and is also ap­ parent in the collection I have used from Rupert House. There are what she calls "relatively fixed" narratives, ones usually of great age and with unidentifiable actors. Also there are often several versions of the same account. In contrast are more per­ sonal or family accounts of a more recent period. These Vincent refers to as "commentaries". Again, these distinctions are not always easily made and a continuum would best represent the variety of historical accounts. At one end one might set down a "universal history" and at the other "personal history". Because it is a social history one is interested in, both are equally impor­ tant in light of the information they impart.
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