Perspectives on Indigenous People and Settler Folk in Northern Ontario

PERSPECTIVES ON INDIGENOUS PEOPLE AND SETTLER FOLK IN NORTHERN ONTARIO Le Canada ou Nouvelle France The Indigenous People of the “New World,” as our European forebears called it, have been living in the Western Hemisphere for at least 15,000 years. They arrived before the last glacial period ended some 10,000 years ago, and they have lived here through the Holocene Period. During these millennia, they became so grounded here that they came to see Turtle Island as the place of their origin. These facts mean that the five hundred years of their experience with European immigrants represents only a small part of their history. Some recognition of this reality and some very useful maps are to be found in Michel S. Beaulieu and Chris Southcott, North of Superior: An Illustrated History of Northwestern Ontario (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company Ltd., 2010), 12-21. The rest of this book touches on the periods mentioned below. A detailed study of the latter part of the first period, the entire second period, and some of the third period is provided by W. Robert Wightman and Nancy M. Wightman, The Land Between: Northwestern Ontario Resource Development, 1800 to the 1990s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). We do well to recognize at least three periods of history since Europeans arrived on our continent. The first period encompassed many challenges for Indigenous People, including the infectious diseases that killed so many and 1 decimated whole communities. To say that no one knew the cause of these epidemics does not lessen the horror that it represented. It may even have increased the horror, due to the failure of tried and true medicines developed by their healers over the millennia of their experience in the Americas. Despite these losses, the first period was one of commercial exchanges in what is now Northern Ontario and of benefit to both sides in these fur trade exchanges. First Nations were not only trade partners during more than three centuries 1497-1850; they also became allies in war after the initial period, when their warfare involved struggles among themselves and against the European invaders. These early wars complicate our efforts to understand the culture of Indigenous People, a fact that needs to be recognized in the next section of this survey. The second period, in which Canadian imperialism was focused on Indigenous Peoples for more than a century, was very different from the preceding period. It is this period that has been focused by KAIROS in its development of a Blanket Exercise, designed to sensitize Euro-Canadians to the experiences of their Indigenous neighbours. Early in this period, First Nations who had been partners and allies managing their affairs with great skill were reduced to wards of the state, as Euro-Canadians pursued genocidal aims. There can be no question about the Canadian intention to change the cultures of the Indigenous People; some may question whether the aim was to let the Indigenous People die out by means of starvation policies and lack of health care. The third period, still little appreciated by most Canadians, is the current era in which the Indigenous People struggle to assert themselves and re-establish their communities. The Canadian state may have abandoned genocide, but it has experienced great difficulty in becoming a partner with First Nations and other Indigenous People. The redeeming factor has been the Supreme Court of Canada, which has asserted the honour of the Crown in a number of vital decisions. In our era, Euro-Canadians are challenged to develop respect for Indigenous People and to find ways of creating trust between themselves and Indigenous People. If citizens think they can do little to advance these goals, they forget that democratic governments reflect the will of the people. These governments will behave differently than they did in earlier years if their supporters demand such action! And when they do not meet this challenge of the third period, it may be due to incipient racism among their supporters! The following pages draw upon the historical record to help us to understand each of these three periods of the history of Indigenous People and their interaction with Euro-Canadians. Of necessity, these excerpts from documents, articles, and books are mere glimpses into the past. Those items that are of interest should be further pursued. The intention is to foster understanding and respect. As we understand each other better, we will find new reasons to respect each other. And as we achieve this respect, we may find new ways of developing trust between and among us all within the large boundaries of Canada. As one of the items in the third part tells us, various words have been used to describe the people who have lived in North America from time immemorial. The words used in the various documents and secondary authorities below have almost always been respected. One instance is revealing. The French in the seventeenth century expressed their sense of cultural superiority by calling the people they met les sauvages. When Reuben G. Thwaites and his colleagues at the Wisconsin Historical Commission were translating the Jesuit Relations more than a century ago, they simply transliterated the word into English. In the third excerpt, there remain hints of this choice in the Jesuit Father’s discussion of a dance “characterized by nothing of savagery.” This language indicates the social challenges the Indigenous People have faced in the country they have allowed us to share! 2 THE FIRST PERIOD DISCOVERIES From the time Christopher Columbus sailed to Hispaniola in 1492 and John Cabot came upon the New-Found-Land in 1497, Europeans knew that they had discovered a New World. In the Great Lakes basin, however, it was the Indigenous People who discovered newcomers to Turtle Island. At the middle of the nineteenth century, there were at least three such traditions of discovery. The first published was written by W. W. Warren, the son of a New England trader and—through his mother, daughter of the notable fur trader, Michel Cadotte— the great-grandson of White Crane, the hereditary chief of La Pointe village on the south side of Lake Superior. Warren presented a tradition relating the journey of “a principal and leading Me-da-we priest” named Ma-se-wa-pe-ga and his wife—following on a dream about “white spirits” the priest had—to the St. Lawrence River where they discovered the gifts that European traders offered: “When about to depart to return home, presents of a steel axe, knife, beads, and a small strip of scarlet cloth were given him, which, carefully depositing in his medicine bag, as sacred articles, he brought safely home to his people at La Pointe. Ma-se-wa-pe-ga again collected the principal men of his tribe in council, and displaying his curious presents, he gave a full narrative of his successful journey and the fulfilment of his dream. The following spring a large number of his people followed him on his second visit to the supposed ‘white spirits.’ They carried with them many skins of the beaver, and they returned home late in the fall with the dread fire-arm, which was to give them power over their much feared enemies. It is on this occasion also, that they first procured the fire-water which was to prove the most dreadful scourge and curse of their race.” William W. Warren, History of the Ojibway Nation (Minneapolis, MN: Ross & Haines, Inc., 1957), 11 COMPLEX COMMERCIAL RELATIONS When Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River in 1535, he found substantial communities where Québec (Stadacona) and Montréal (Hochelaga) are now located. When Samuel de Champlain came up the river sixty years later, these communities were gone. In fact, his first report included a celebration at the mouth of the Saguenay River by the Kichesipirini Algonquin (whom he later found living on the Ottawa River) of a victory they had achieved that summer of 1603. Had they dispersed these Courtesy of BAnQ - Bibliothèque et Iroquoian communities in order to deal directly with the French traders? Archives nationales du Québec. Anthropologist Bruce Trigger has argued that Mohawk attacks on the Mahican during 1624-28 (in what is now the state of New York) exemplified the complicated relations that developed when Indigenous People and Europeans competed for furs: 3 “By this time European-Indian relations had become a game that had well-defined and generally-accepted rules. Until the eclipse of Iroquois power in 1701, none of the strategies that Indians or Europeans were to pursue would be anything more than attempts to determine how far self-interest might be indulged without endangering the system. It was to the advantage of the European traders to have friendly relations with as many separate tribes as possible, in order to be able to trade competitively with them; conversely, however, if prices were to be kept low, it was desirable that no single tribe should be allied with two or more rival groups of European traders. While it was in the Indians’ interest to trade with more than one European power, no tribe in the area was sufficiently self- confident that it was prepared to acquiesce that its enemies, or even potential enemies, should trade with the same European power with which it had an alliance. Because of this, the pattern that emerged was for Indian tribes to be allied and to trade with only one European power at a time. Attempts to circumvent this limitation, by Indians or Europeans, inevitably proved unstable. Finally, as French writers make very explicit, the necessity of holding onto allies made the continuation of Indian rivalries not only desirable, but essential.

Load more