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Innu (Montagnais) in Newfoundland

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Innu (Montagnais) in Newfoundland CHARLES A. MARTIJN Ministere des Affaires culturelles, Quebec Introduction A number of years ago in an article with the intriguing title "A Nice Place to Visit, But . .", Tuck and Pastore (1985) outlined how during the course of prehistory various native groups, Amerindians as well as Paleo-Eskimo, moved from the mainland, across the Strait of Belle-Isle into Newfound­ land. Due to the "closed" nature of food resources on this island, there appears to have been a cycle of extinctions with each prehistoric group be­ ing successively replaced by new immigrants. Not surprisingly, such native population movements, although on a reduced scale, also continued to take place during post-contact times. The present discussion1 will focus on voyages made during the past three centuries by Montagnais Indians (or Innu as they call themselves) from Quebec and Labrador. They travelled to Newfoundland to hunt, to trap furbearers and to trade, and in some instances to settle there perma­ nently. This constitutes a chapter in Montagnais history which nowadays is largely forgotten.2 Few old people survive who were actually born there, JI am indebted to Moira T. McCaffrey for her invaluable suggestions and editing services. My sincere thanks are extended to Jose Mailhot, Ingeborg Mar­ shall, Toby Morantz, Ralph T. Pastore, Francois Trudel and Sylvie Vincent for commenting on earlier versions of this paper presented at the First Labrador Straits Studies Conference in Forteau, Labrador, September 15-17, 1988 and at the Twenty-First Algonquian Conference in St. John's, Newfoundland, October 27-29, 1989. I also wish to express my appreciation to Ed Dahl of the National Archives in Ottawa, and to R. Calvin Best and other staff members of the Provin­ cial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador in St. John's for their courteous and professional assistance during the course of this research project. The accompa­ nying map is the work of Richard Mailhot, cartographer at the Avataq Cultural Institute in Montreal. 2The subject has been summarily dealt with by the following authors: Anger (1988:5, 55, 59-60); Bellefleur (1979:14-15); Blake (1888:907); Cormack (1928:57- 62); Gosling (1910:152); Harp (1964:152-153); Howley (1915:22, 26-27, 52, 148- 227 228 CHARLES A. MARTIJN or who can still remember stories by their parents or grandparents about such trips. Unfortunately, little has been done to interview them and to write down the particulars of those events. One has to make a painstaking search through archival records to obtain a glimpse of what took place. Such accounts are usually by Eurocanadian observers, and as a result we rarely possess any detailed information as seen through Amerindian eyes. Our vision of the past can be obscured or falsified by misconceptions and prior assumptions. For example, we are used to looking at maps which show native tribes neatly distributed within specific contemporary political boundaries: the now-extinct Beothuk in Newfoundland, the Micmac in the Maritimes, the Maliseet in New Brunswick, the Montagnais in the Quebec- Labrador Peninsula, and so on. We tend to forget, or simply to be ignorant of the fact that in the past these native groups did not remain within fixed boundaries. In recent contributions to Northeastern ethnohistory, Prins (1986), Bourque (1989) and Martijn (1989) have shown that such bound­ aries contracted or expanded in response to a variety of factors, cultural as well as environmental. Consequently, to improve our understanding of what took place in the past we need to examine more closely the factors which were responsible for these population displacements. The question of how far back in time the Montagnais can be traced in Quebec, Labrador and Newfoundland, and who their ancestors were, has been debated by archaeologists for several decades. A growing num­ ber of researchers consider a regional late prehistoric manifestation, called the Point Revenge complex (1200-400 BP), to be directly ancestral to the present day Montagnais (Fitzhugh 1978; Loring 1983). No classic Point Re­ venge sites are thus far known from Newfoundland itself, but archaeologists such as Pastore (1987, 1989) and Pintal (1989) have identified other late prehistoric components there as well as along parts of the Quebec Lower North Shore, which they refer to as the Little Passage Complex (1000-400 BP). This culture is now generally thought to be an ancestral stage of the Beothuk Indians (Pastore 1985; Robbins 1989:21-23). The Point Revenge and Little Passage complexes share a number of affinities and it has been proposed that they may constitute two phases of an earlier common prehis­ toric population (Pastore 1987:59; 1989:59-61). The occasional presence of Ramah chert from northern Labrador on sites of the Little Passage Complex in Newfoundland illustrates the movement of people and materials across the Strait of Belle-Isle. More than a century ago, T.G.B. Lloyd (1874:36) predicted that some 150, 278); Jukes (1842(2):129); F. Lloyd (1886:27-28); Marshall (1981:74-75; 1988:59, 63, 75); Parent (1985:775, 792-793, 867); Pastore (1987:57-59); Robbins )]lll^ J\' R°gerS (1911:132); Speck (1922:33-36, 118, 126-127, 155); Tanner (1977:9); Usher (1980:93-94); and Whitby (1977:7, 14-15) \ ATLANTIC OCEAN Bclk .. {} I fSaloo I : 7,500,000 , ,-r 9 ICJO 2f!O lull 230 CHARLES A. MARTIJN of the archaeological remains found in Newfoundland would turn out to be "mountaineer" sites of the historic period. Up until now, however, none have been reported by researchers working there. While this may be simply a reflection of the actual state and scope of survey activities in the western part of the island, we might also ask the practical question, how would one recognize such Montagnais sites? Thus far, archaeologists have not yet looked into this matter. The following analysis of the available documentary evidence will focus on the question of whether or not Montagnais crossings to the island were undertaken at the behest of Europeans. Hopefully too, this discussion will lead to a more precise problem orientation from an archaeological point of view, and serve as a stimulus for new efforts towards locating Montagnais sites in Newfoundland. Montagnais Voyages to Newfoundland during the French Regime The early contact sagas relating the explorations of Norse seafarers (McGhee 1984), and later European records dating to the 15th and 16th centuries, are usually so brief and vague in their descriptions that it is often impossible to distinguish between specific native populations in the Northeast at those time levels (Quinn 1981). Beginning in 1529, mention is made of various unnamed groups in the Strait of Belle-Isle.3 Some of these were said to be friendlier than others, engaging in trade with European fishermen and merchants, and at times working for small rewards to assist the whalers in cutting up and boiling whale carcases to extract the oil (Whitbourne 1622:2). There are descriptions of at least four different native groups in that region during the course of the 16th century. We can tentatively iden­ tify these as the Beothuk, the Montagnais, the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, and the Inuit (Tuck 1987:63-67). The first known use of the name Mon­ tagnais (i.e., "montaneses") appears in an account by the Basque historian, Lope de Isasti (1850:154), which though written in 1625, appears to incor­ porate information dating to the late 1500s. Referring to native people in the Strait of Belle-Isle, he stated that the "esquimaos" were very hostile, whereas the montaneses" and "canaleses" exhibited a friendlier attitude towards the Basques and would warn them of Inuit raiding parties. These last two names are certainly not indigenous words and must be of Spanish Basque origin. The "canaleses" or "people of the canal" (i.e., strait) may tZ T « f0^" Selma Barkham' Pers°nal communication). In con bv rLr f m°ll T- T PresumabIy so called because they descended by river from the interior Quebec-Labrador highlands each year in order to ^7^::e7:zt^Tphy dealins with the presence of native groups in INNU (MONTAGNAIS) IN NEWFOUNDLAND 231 spend the summer on the coast. It should be noted that the encounters between Isasti's compatriots and local natives seem to have taken place primarily along the north shore of the Strait of Belle-Isle (Barkham 1980), and there is no direct reference to Montagnais in Newfoundland during that period. By 1580, and increasingly so after 1620, Inuit bands began to frequent the Strait on a seasonal basis. During the interval 1640-1690 there may even have been a small resident Inuit population on the Lower North Shore, between Brador and St. Paul's River (Martijn 1980:122). These newcomers could have temporarily displaced the Amerindian groups who used to ex­ ploit this area (Pastore 1987:57). This situation began to change towards the end of the 17th century. In 1702, Augustin Le Gardeur de Courte- manche was granted a concession by the French king which covered the entire coast from the Kegashka River as far north as Hamilton Inlet (Roy 1940 (1):16-17). From an account written by Courtemanche (1927:3687) in 1705, it is clear that the Amerindian guides who accompanied him on a journey of exploration along the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence were well acquainted with the Brador region and its fauna. These local natives were most likely Montagnais who seasonally exploited the coastal food resources of the middle and lower north shore of the Gulf, as well as the southern coast of Labrador. In an unpublished article, Trudel (n.d.) has examined in detail how, from 1702 onwards, Courtemanche tried to attract Amerindians to his es­ tablishments, first at Old Fort and later at Brador.
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