James Bay Cree Culture, Malnutrition, Infectious and Degenerative Diseases

RICHARD J. PRESTON McMaster University

One of my post-retirement projects is as co-investigator on a project where my role is to identify the cultural-behavioural (Hallowell 1955) factors associated with the incidence of disease, for four James Bay Cree communities, 1820-1970, including accounting for the different disease histories of each community. This is proving to be more difficult than I anticipated. Reports by White people and Cree oral tradition are the main sources of information. Both types of report have serious shortcomings. Cree oral tradition tells us eloquently of the personal meanings and behavioural consequences of hardship and, sometimes, disease, but we are not told the extent to which it afflicted the area. A severe shortage of food animals coincided with these diseases.There is remarkably small mention of disease, considering the extent of its documented ravages, and considering the much larger number of hardship stories from the same period of time. Perhaps stories are not so often made or repeated when there is no known way of coping with the hardship of diseases. White people's reports, whether resident or travelers, are based on what they see and hear at the post or en route between posts. These reports do not tell us what was happening back in the bush where Cree people were trying to get on with their lives. A further complication is that there is a scholarly inclination to give written reports greater force of argument than they deserve. What one man writes about what he sees or hears in one place may be true for only a small number of Cree people, a single season, or a small area. If a traveler's report were true for many Crees, continuing over many years, and characterizing an entire region, it would be a powerful statement indeed. But we can't count on it. It may report one hard season for one local group. For example, James Bell reports in 1903, I am told that the number of Indians in the Moose basin is rapidly dimin­ ishing. This is due in part to the large annual migration southward to the Canadian Pacific railway, and also to the terrible decimation of the tribe of late by tuberculosis and measles. The latter disease swept off quite flfth the ulation of ?nA; J°f P°P Moose Factory during the summer of 1902, and this summer during my short stay in the region the mortality JAMES BAY CREE CULTURE AND DISEASE 375

from tuberculosis was really tragic. In fact, the present condition of the Moose Indian is most deplorable....they are a miserable, squalid, poorly clad, and sickly people... (1903:178-179) Bell would have seen something of this for himself, and would have been further informed by whatever the HBC factor and others chose to tell him. I have not yet found other confirmation of 100 or more deaths at Moose Factory from measles in 1902, but it seems general to the whole James Bay District, so it may be true. This very large number of deaths was reported for 300 km up the East Coast of James Bay at Fort George and Great Whale River that year. But when Duncan Campbell Scott's treaty party came just two years later, they "commented favourably on the Moose Factory Indians" (Long 1978:6). Something is wrong; we have two different pictures of the peo­ ple and the place, at nearly the same time. The "annual" out-migration Bell reports is also less than accurate. In 1902,12 families were dismissed and sent south, but this was not an annual event. Arthur Ray tells us that, as a result of the Canadian Pacific Railway being opened, the Hudson's Bay Company was dramatically reducing its Moose Factory staff and shifting their headquarters to Winnipeg. In 1900, the staff had consisted of employees and their families, totaling 193 persons; with "hangers-on" it totaled 571 persons (1990:209). This is a very large number of people for the Company to sustain, partial through their support may have been. So to the HBC it was reasonable that many of these Crees and Scots were instructed to move south and find their living near the railway. But it was not an annual out-migration. Bell's report has considerable useful infor­ mation, and measles and tuberculosis had indeed killed many. But the overall picture may be too narrowly negative and over-generalized. Problems of this kind would be quite enough to deal with, but the project involves much more than compiling reports of sickness, since I want to try to establish the relevant cultural-behavioural factors, and espe­ cially to relate specific culture changes to health changes. For example, tuberculosis was a scourge of arctic and subarctic peoples (including the James Bay Cree) for an extended period during the late colonial fur-trade, and is a main concern in our study. We will have to establish how the infection moved into the region, and then go beyond the mobility of per­ sons that allows the transmission of contagious diseases. Active TB is sig­ nificantly attributable to the cultural impacts of displacement. Let me explain with an extended quote from Cohen's Health and the Rise of Civ­ ilization. 376 RICHARD J. PRESTON

Illness may actually result from the reaction or overreaction of the human body as much as from the activities of the parasite - or more. The response of the body depends, in turn, on a number of factors, including nutritional state, the presence of other infections, and even the emotional state of the individual. Tuberculosis, in particular, may be a disease largely controlled in such a manner... In fact, illness almost always resulted from the reactivation of bacilli stored in the body long after the initial spread of the germ. The reactivation appears to be correlated with malnutrition, chemical stresses on body tissues, and the social displacement and psychological disorientation of potential victims. (1989:10-11) Herring and Hoppa report that TB "was both chronic and endemic at Moose Factory by the mid-to-late nineteenth century", concentrated in those aged 15-44, for whom it was noted as a cause of death more often than all other listed causes. (1997:121). Unfortunately, the Anglican Church burial records rarely indicate whether the correlated factors men­ tioned in the Cohen quote above were present. But we can find other reports from James Bay in the early 20th century that do include the fac­ tors that Cohen lists as generally contributory: malnutrition (starvation), extreme exertion in hunting, dislocation of families, and a radically new sense of insecurity on the land. The extent of TB in the region may well be a result of these non-pathogenic factors, and it is this sort of evidence that we are hoping to document. The remainder of this paper examines these factors: malnutrition/starvation, chemical stresses of the body, social displacement, and psychological disorientation. While there are a few medical reports, most of the relevant material will not be explicitly to do with disease. This behavioural data will, as we all know, not be flagged to attract notice, but requires reading the docu­ ments closely for helpful clues. This would include information on move­ ments into the Cree territory by non-natives (Borron 1890:85-89). The methodology is difficult, however, since mobility and hunger are histori­ cally common and so must be examined to see in which specific examples they are conducive to disease. Of course, health practices in the region began with traditional Cree skills and remedies (Speck 1915), including poultices, splints, and some potions. John Blackned, of Waskaganish, was 34 years my senior, born and raised inland up the Eastmain River, had a phenomenal memory and was my mentor for many years, starting in 1963. John told me of what must have been the world's first spray-on band-aid; the heated (until it bubbles) musk-oil from a beaver castor, spread over the wound, would cool into a film that might be peeled off JAMES BAY CREE CULTURE AND DISEASE 377 after a few days. He also spoke from personal experience of a remedy for respiratory sickness - a few drops of skunk musk in some tea (no, its just a little bitter) which brought him good results when he was a young man. Missionaries and traders added their medicine chests to the Cree pharma­ copoeia. The Company maintained a surgeon at Moose Factory, and the Federal Indian agents were initially also physicians. But contagious epi­ demic diseases such as TB, measles, whooping cough, and the like were far beyond any of their abilities, and a great many perished.

STARVATION AND OTHER MALNUTRITION Starvation is a kind of gradual, cumulative bodily injury, causing weakness in resisting disease and physio-chemical stresses in sustaining the actions required by daily living. John Blackned explained to me that it was not the feeling of hunger that was troubling, but the weakness that hampered them when people had to try harder to snowshoe to other areas in search of food. It was hard, too, for a hunter to come home to a starving family with no food to provide them, and women might keep the children inside the tent in the evening, to make the man's approach less difficult. Stories recount finding the emaciated body of a hunter where he had fallen to his knees and was unable to get up and continue. It was an occa­ sional and local fact of life that there were too few animals to sustain the people, and hunting groups would move to other locales in hope of find­ ing more food. Sometimes, however, the important food animal population cycles would bottom out at the same time, over a large region, and the resulting human famine might claim many lives. The bodily injury of starvation was what Bell saw at Moose Factory post in 1903, and thought those peo­ ple miserable and wretched. They would have had a very hard winter, and appeared emaciated and weak - perhaps also sick. But in a year or two these same people might have lived well on the land and appeared to the 1905 treaty party to be quite fit, healthy and admirable. Starvation that looks to the inexperienced observer like a more or less permanent dimin- ishment into physical and mental poverty, is in actuality a transient condi­ tion that may go either way depending on one or two season's recovery, or loss. TB is similarly a gradual, cumulative bodily injury, causing weak­ ness and making the sustained action required by mobility more difficult. One consequence of hardship years between 1925 and 1948, was that parents might place some of their children in a residential school (estab- 378 RICHARD J. PRESTON lished in the 1900-1905 period at Fort Albany and at Moose Factory) so that they would have food security. The schools would have been a likely location for the transmission of TB.

SOCIAL DISPLACEMENT Boyce Richardson borrowed the resonant phrase "strangers devour the land" from The Bible for his book about Quebec's Baie James hydro­ electric project, with its flooding of hunting lands. Northern Ontario was different in that the intruders came decades before there was any hope of effective Cree resistance. Intruders on the land became a part of the daily life of the Crees, beginning about the time of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and increasing after World War I. One of the effects of the railways was to bring immigrants into the areas near the rail lines. Some were homesteading, others prospecting, and others trapping for themselves and opportunistically buying furs from the natives. The natives who had hunted in these areas often chose to move away from the strangers and deeper into "Indian country". But they, in turn, crowded some of those who had been hunting locally. A ripple effect, of native population disturbance, has been described (Anderson 1961:160- 164; Cooper mss., Renison 1957) and attributed as the principal cause of the breakdown of traditional trapping territories in the early decades of this century. Some Crees who found the security of their hunting grounds threatened had the possibility of reacting by relocating to the railroad towns, which were economically and socially exciting for those with the skill and confidence to adapt to the frontier town sub-culture (Peter Suth­ erland, in Schuurman and Preston, 1992). The characteristic Cree response was to avoid confrontation and to withdraw to less disturbed areas. This passive resistance minimized vio­ lence, but when the Crees gave up on traditional land use rights they grad­ ually became alienated from their traditional spiritual and economic relations with their natural environment, as is described in the many histo­ ries of northern development. Detailed work by John Long, Fikret Berkes, Richard Preston and Lisa Schuurman on the Moose River Basin (Long and Preston 1997; George, Berkes and Preston 1995; Schuurman and Pre­ ston 1992) describe the specifics and the personal significance of these changes, as they emerged in reaction to these larger scale events. In direct consequence of the intrusions described above, beaver and other economically important animals were killed at a rate well beyond JAMES BAY CREE CULTURE AND DISEASE 379

the sustainable yield ("carrying capacity") of the natural environment. The intruders took as much fur as they could, with little or no care for the continuance of the populations of these species. Some native trap­ pers, recognizing their helplessness to prevent intrusions, decided to give up on their traditional harvesting values and strategies for a sus­ tained yield, and simply take all the fur animals they could before strangers got it. The major economic and cultural impact of this over-trapping was a beaver population crash, and a regional shortage of food animals for two d~cades or more, starting about 1925 and lasting until the moose and cari­ bou recovered, which for the Attawapiskat region was 1948. (Honigmann 1961; Denmark 1948; Anderson 1961:183-190). Death by starvation as recently as the 1930s is documented in the Albany and Attawapiskat drainages. I have not yet documented starvation deaths for the Moose drainage after those in 1881, but hunger and other hardship was wide­ spread in the James Bay region, and contributed to the heavy mortality from disease.

PSYCHOLOGICAL DISORIENTATION AND THE WELFARE STATE IN THE VILLAGES The dislocation of people from the psychological and practical secu­ rity on their hunting grounds was a result, then, of intruders on the land, withdrawal to less disturbed areas of the Crees, the crash of animal popu­ lations for an extended period of years over the whole region, and the harsh fact that the traditional home that each hunting group had in their hunting grounds was either deserted by the Crees or by the animals. Peo­ ple realized that they could not rely on their hunting skills to feed their families, and for traditional hunters, this constitutes psychological disori­ entation. This was the low ebb of traditional Cree society and culture, and the point of major stresses contributing to illnesses such as TB. To extract themselves from this low ebb, and be able to feed their families, they had to try to find some new place and techniques of getting a living, since the old seasonal cycle was not viable. The Flannery model of the seasonal cycle of hunting activity (1995:xiv) does not fit the last half of the 20th century because of the shift of locus of home, from the bush to the trading post villages, or railway towns such as Cochrane and Mattice. People went in search of jobs. Honigmann (field notes) found, on his return trip in 1955, that about half 380 RICHARD J. PRESTON of the people who were at Attawapiskat in the summer of 1948 were gone south to Moose Factory or Moosonee or further south, in search of jobs. I agree entirely with Morantz (in press) that the prime reason for the most radical social and cultural shift came from the Cree responses to the intervention of the Canadian welfare state, in health, education, and wel­ fare. Following World War II the Federal government responded to the severe hardships undergone by northern Native peoples. The intentions were unquestionably humane; the goals were to assimilate Native peoples to the Canadian mainstream; the means were concentrated in the trading post villages, and the result was the psychology of dependency. A nutritional study in 1943 found serious vitamin deficiencies (Moore et al 1943) and a James Bay survey resulted in two food-oriented ethnographies in the late 1940s. John Honigmann at Attapiskat and A. J. "Moose" Kerr at Rupert's House were the first substantive government initiative, and this was quickly followed by building the Moose Factory Indian Hospital (with a TB focus) and setting up community nursing sta­ tions in the 1950s. But by this time the severe epidemics were over. Education began with traditional Cree life-long apprenticeship to humans and animals, who were believed to be good teachers. Schooling began for some few Crees with the ministrations of missionaries, traders, or a member of their staff. At treaty time in 1905 the Catholic residential school at Fort Albany was running, and the Anglican residential school at Moose Factory was close behind. The curriculum was intended to replace traditional education with school training in English or French for reli­ gious knowledge, farming skills, and entry into the culture of Canadian mainstream society ("learning our one-two-threes- and yes ma'am's). The prohibition or ignoring of Cree language and content explicitly or tacitly downvalued the ability of parents to teach their children something of value, and left them at the will of teachers and missionaries. Day schools in each community were opened in the 1950s, but curriculum fashioned for Cree was little developed until after our study period, in the 1970s. Welfare began with modest but welcome relief and debt given by the trading companies and missionaries, at first at the Company's or mis­ sion's expense, but eventually with Federal funds. This made a huge dif­ ference during hardship years, and the fact that "no-one starves now" can hardly be overestimated for its importance to the Crees. Then, in the 1950s, came the Canada-wide Federal subsidies: family allowance, old age pensions, and welfare. These were a big change in people's economic JAMES BAY CREE CULTURE AND DISEASE 381 security, but also in the way economic relations were acted out. The wealth at the disposal of the Indian Agent was given, rather than loaned with the expectation of reciprocity, and the amounts given were far beyond that of the HBC or the Missions. Given the traditional Cree eco­ nomic notions (Preston 1995), these outright gifts of goods and money were getting something for nothing; a radical departure from the Cree norm. The expected response was to be willing to conform to (and depend on) the policy goals of the IAB, as articulated or perhaps only indicated by the Agent.

SUMMARY In summary, hospital, nursing stations, day schools, and welfare all came together in the 1950s. People shifted from seasonally shifting homes in the bush to permanent residence in the trading post villages, with access to health, education and welfare services. The bush was now a place to go for hunting the animals, but increasingly as a sortie from the village, and families were increasingly left in the village and the men went hunting without them. Mobility was diminished, starvation a rarity, malnutrition reduced and transformed by a high-carbohydrate diet. People were relocated off the land and into sedentary villages, with dependency on government services and payments. Psychological disorientation had surged with the arrival of many intruders and the long periods of region-wide hunger. These contributed to the loss if a feeling of security on the land, and the insecurity was made less painful with the offers of security in village life. Dependency was an unintended consequence of social displacement, psychological disorienta­ tion and the primary need for food security. People relocated and re-ori­ ented their lives around dependably available government-provided resources. It was an easier, more secure, and less disoriented life, but with the loss of traditional relations to the land, the animals, and each other. The recovery of independence and the development of new urban forms of relations began slowly in the 1970s, and continues today.

NOTES ON MOBILITY Shifting group membership and hunting group mobility was a long­ standing 'traditional' characteristic, as was periodic starvation. Groups coalesced and dispersed according to seasonal cycles, animal population 382 RICHARD J. PRESTON fluctuations, environmental changes, trading opportunities, and personal preference. Looking specifically at our four study villages, coalescence seasonally for fur trade at Moose Factory and Fort Albany began in the late 17th century, but the Attawapiskat post was opened only in the early 20th century, and Kashashewan only formed as a post and village in mid- century. Smaller bands (Kesagami Lake, Kapisko, Lake River, etc.) that summered at rivers or lakes within reach of the posts shifted into the post villages only in mid-century, mainly for government services of health, education, and welfare. But more is at stake than the movements to and from trading posts. The "traditional" seasonal cycle of movement illustrated by Flannery (1995:xiv) differs according to whether people were coasters or inlanders, and according to the game populations that people were hunting. Besides the differing ecology of the coastal and inland regions, there is a general north-south gradient in the animal ecology. Animal populations were more thinly dispersed, the further north we look. Caribou were in the north, moose in the south, and the line between them shifted in accor­ dance with their foraging resources and their respective population cycles. In general, when people in the more northerly lands were starving, those in the most southerly Moose River Basin and around Lake Abitibi might be doing well. Small game (especially hares and fish) was very important, and crucial when large game was scarce. Large game facilitated larger hunting camps and periodic gatherings in the bush for feasts. Hoppa has provided our research team with some preliminary summaries of mobility at Moose Factory in 1852-62 and 1892-1904. He has documented a sub­ stantial drop in travel in the turn of the century period compared to the middle of the 19th century. "Traditional" movements were already under­ going changes. Also, the seasonal cycles present themselves nicely in the annual graphs. Three of the four study communities have a long history of travelers from the outside; one does not. Moose Factory and Albany were points of transit for goods and people to and from the Bay. Moose Factory received the ships from Europe and Montreal, until the railway was completed to Moosonee in 1932. In the case of Albany, especially after the CPR went in, there were large numbers of other Indians as well as White men who brought freight down the Albany River in York Boats. Kashashewan was a splinter community that broke off from Albany in the mid-1950s, and so shared the Albany history up to that time. Attawapiskat people and others JAMES BAY CREE CULTURE AND DISEASE 383 even further north traded into Albany, but were brief sojourners. When the post was set up at Attawapiskat, this sojourning was much diminished, but by then some children were taken to the residential school at Albany.

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