A Cree Community in Northeastern Ontario

Apportioning Responsibility for Cumulative Changes: a Cree Community in Northeastern Ontario RICHARD J. PRESTON and JOHN S. LONG McMaster University Kashachewan, Ont. In memory of Peter Sutherland, Sr., 1915-1998. In the aftermath of failed negotiations with Ontario Hydro,1 we are continuing to collaborate in specifying the processes of change that have been affecting the environment, economy and culture of the Cree commu nity known as New Post over the past 130 years. We use the metaphor of a "conduit" for the transmission of cultural and environmental change, and are selectively defining the contents of the conduit in terms of a series of major modernizing processes. Our account of modernization is organized around: (1) travel; (2) larger scale (late fur- trade) transport; (3) industrial-scale (railroad) transport; (4) industrial- scale natural resource development; and (5) the implementation of govern ment programs and supervision. Apportioning responsibility for the modernization conduit is a difficult challenge. It requires that we identify specific externally caused changes, assess whether they were, on balance, damaging or helpful to the regional environment and indigenous culture, and then assess the approximate dollar value of the net negative effects ("impacts"). Our theoretical context for assessing cumulative cultural change was conceptualized along lines parallel to those currently being developed for 1 The immediate cause of this paper: we both worked as members of a negotia tion team, Richard Preston as a consultant to the New Post First Nation, and John Long as the "neutral facilitator" of the group. Long also provided a great deal of detailed information on the history of the region. Both the First Nation and Hydro members of the team were working toward the goal of assessing Ontario Hydro's degree of responsibility for impacts which were being grieved by the contemporary New Post First Nation, until (in our opinion) a change within Hydro's senior adminis tration ended the process. Both the Ontario Hydro and New Post members of this team prepared documents and tabled them, criticized each other's documents in writing, provided alternative calculations and interpretations of cumulative impacts, and met in person to discuss these issues, in hopes for a mutually satisfactory resolution of the grievances. APPORTIONING RESPONSIBILITY FOR CUMULATIVE CHANGES 265 cumulative environmental impact assessment (Lees and Bates 1990). Lees and Bates theorize about the assessment of cumulative change within the complexity of ecosystems, where cumulative change is seen as either the consequence of a single type of change of long duration, or of changes of several types which have mutually strengthening effects. To make the shift from nature to culture, we draw on previous theore tical studies of cultural change, especially on the theory of multilinear cultural evolution (Steward 1955, Murphy and Steward 1956). While not currently in fashion in anthropology, this focus on the technology-ecology nexus leads us to examine the way that changes in technology and environment limit people's options, and also transform their ability to draw adaptively on their traditional knowledge and skills. Given the scenario that we describe below, the evolutionary perspective seems to us quite compelling. It allows us to incorporate the theory of political economy, focussing on the conflict of cultures in terms of a marked disparity in structural power (Wolf 1980). We also have used acculturation theory, focussing on the adaptation and adoption of new cultural ideas, attitudes and behaviour (Sapir 1930, Hallowell 1950, Preston 1986), to account for the survival of families that had close experience with the "company family" culture of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). We believe that the three surviving (in fact, flourish ing) families were able to rely on their previous experience in relocating to find a more secure means of living. But this was more than taking the risk of moving to a new place and fluency in the dominant language. Most importantly, it was their bicultural technical and social competence in making periodic shifts to settlements for wage work. To account for the stark contrast with the other, more exclusively traditional "bush" families (Schuurman et al. 1992) which have (literally) died out, we follow the perspectives of cultural disintegration theory. Here we are focussing on the dysfunction or maladaptation of some trusted traditional cultural ideas, attitudes, and behaviour in the context of radically transformed ecological and social settings (Honigmann 1966, Shkilnyk 1985). To account for the recent development of a reserve-based culture, we use loss of freedom theory, focussing on the frustration of cultural integrity and continuity (Manuel and Posluns 1974, Driben and Trudeau 1983), and resistance theory. 266 PRESTON AND LONG Our understanding of the cultural history of the New Post people was gained through successive attempts by several persons (Richard Neff, Linda Archibald, Lisa Schuurman, and the present authors) to distil this history, recording oral history and reading historical documents, making cultural-historical interpretations, and most recently by a "joint problem- solving" negotiation process. We both spent time with elders and others at New Post and especially with Peter Sutherland at Moosonee, people who generously shared their individual experiences with us. At the joint problem-solving stage of our analysis, we chose to use a time chart and "hang text on it" according to the major factors in develop ments, bringing in other impacting factors as they relate to the five major factors listed above and now described in detail. TRAVEL The earliest conduit is organized around travel for subsistence and trade in recorded history: Ojibwe or Algonquin people2 in the New Post region would have been trading into Lake Abitibi, Moose Factory, Frederick House, Flying Post, Kenogamisee, Mattagami, and Kesagami. Travel by white men through the New Post region goes back to the early days of the fur trade: de Troyes travelled through from Montreal in 1686 on his way to capturing the HBC posts on James Bay. Annual visits by Catholic missionaries of the Oblate order begin in the 1840s, and a Methodist missionary was settled briefly at Moose Factory in the 1840s, followed by Anglicans of the Church Missionary Society from the 1850s to the present. The HBC established New Post in 1867, at the site of a convenient way-station on the Montreal-Ottawa-Temiskaming-Abitibi- Moose Factory river route. The "Cree-ification" of New Post (which previously had been populated by non-Cree from the Lake Abitibi region) began around 1900. Two families who had already moved south to Moose Factory from the west side of James Bay moved again, to the New Post region. We know that many "company family" people were sent south about 1902 in a Company downsizing (Long 1985). We suspect that the David Wynne family, from Fort Albany, who appear on the first New Post treaty list 2 The nomenclature is uncertain. These people include the Esau Omakees family; William Gull; John Luke; Daniel, Donald, Harriet and William Squirrel; Angus and Louisa Weenusk, Cecile Weenusk; and others. APPORTIONING RESPONSIBILITY FOR CUMULATIVE CHANGES 267 (1905), was one of these families sent by the Moose Factory manager. Perhaps this was also the case for Thomas and Annie Sutherland, from Cape Henrietta Maria, who were also on the 1905 treaty list.3 Sidney Archibald, the son of David Wynne's half-brother William Archibald, was adopted by the Wynnes and later married into the New Post band. TRANSPORTATION Gradually, travel became involved with more than the local people's subsistence and the fur trade, and included Cree experiments with living "outside". By 1915-30 Cree people were travelling or sometimes sojourn ing outside of the New Post region as squatters around railway towns, or as students at residential schools. Some years before the railroad arrived at Island Falls in 1923, New Post people could take a cart ride to Cochrane for excitement and trading. One person adventured much further: Thomas Archibald, Sr., went off to World War I, and stayed out for some years, marrying a Scots woman and having three children. Kinship ties led to visits, and sometimes marriages, to Moose Factory people, Kesagami Lake people, and Rupert's House people.4 The kind of conduit had also changed to a larger geographical scale of transportation of goods and people originating from outside the region: HBC personnel and missionaries and their goods travelled through, and Cree people worked at freighting Company supplies on the river. The river road became increasingly a conduit of people, goods, disease, and knowledge of the outside. Disease (notably tuberculosis5) may have caused the deaths of 5 of the 20 New Post hunters in the winter of 1880-81, including the best 3 The Sutherland family moved south from the area between Severn and Winisk to Moose Factory, where the father, Peter James Sutherland, died. Some of his sons, including Thomas, then moved further south. David and Elizabeth Wynne, and David's half-brothers William Archibald and Thomas Taylor, moved south from Fort Albany to Moose Factory. William and Laura Archibald moved south from Fort Albany, and their son Sidney attended the Anglican boarding school at Moose Factory, subsequently working for both the church and the HBC, as well as trapping, wherever he could make a living. 4 For example, Sidney Archibald went to Rupert's House, and, after *e birth of his first son (Peter Sutherland) and the death of his wife (Bella Omakees Archibald), probably married Nancy Moses there. Later, Helen (Moses) Morrison and her uncle wintered with Peter Sutherland. 5 For a general discussion of tuberculosis in this region see Herring and Hoppa (1998). 268 PRESTON AND LONG hunter, and "before they had given in a skin" (HBCA D. 14/27). RAILWAY TRANSPORT In 1900, the Government of Ontario created the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway (T&NO, now the Ontario Northland) to enable the development of natural resources and other commercial activities in the Moose River basin (Long 1997).

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