THE WASHAW SIBI EEYOUCH David Lessard Department Of

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 suc