crees and algonquins at the front: more on 20th-century

Crees and Algonquins at "The Front:" More on 20th-century Transformations

RICHARD J. PRESTON McMaster University

What can we now theorize about the processual characteristics of cultural

change, decline, resilience and transformation? W e are wise enough to be

less bold than the evolutionists who spoke of "inevitability." W e are also

perhaps too timid to account for the obvious similarity of kinds of change

that are now so widely documented in specific community studies and prob

lem-oriented studies. Generalizing studies are too few: Robert Bright-

man's Grateful prey (1993) for subarctic ideology; Jean Comaroff s Body

of power, spirit of resistance (1985) for resilience theory.

Following on this general point, the concept of transformation is still

poorly developed, and w e are apparently not yet ready to account for spe

cific, actual transformational processes that have brought about the

marked changes in subarctic and arctic communities. W e are very suc

cessful at documenting consequences of changes, but is there not a kind

of "soft causation" that produces these consequences? I think so, and a m

working on this problem. M y current research is focused on documenting how some radical

changes got to the James Bay region. I regard the construction and use of

railroads (see map) as crucial conduits for change and, more specifically

for m y current project, as very attractive and efficient conduits for the

transmission of contagious diseases to the James Bay region. The rail

roads transported people much faster than canoes or snowshoes, so that

for the first time the incubation period was longer than the time in transit

from, say, Montreal to Cochrane. B y transcending the boundaries of the

incubation period, people might not be diagnosed, and thereby perhaps

quarantined, until after they had arrived at their destination. This potential

for rapid transmission came just a few years before it carried the infamous

1918 influenza epidemic, regarded as the first global epidemic (McNeill

1976) and affecting many Native people in the Canadian north. But I will

not focus heavily on disease here, since the epidemiological work has not

been completed. I will address many processes of change in this paper.

Papers of the 34th Algonquian Conference, ed. H.C. Wolfart (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 2003), pp. 311-320.

312 R I C H A R D J. P R E S T O N

Because they are few in number, easily localized in time and space,

and fairly well documented, the railroads are a convenient topic for

research. The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was built in the 1880s,

using a fairly southerly route that had relatively little effect on the region

of the present study. But there were some significant effects. Temiskam-ing Station and Missinaibie Station were points of connection in travel to

C R E E S A N D A L G O N Q U I N S A T " T H E F R O N T " 313

the Moose River region, and the measles epidemic of 1901-1903 came

with Cree guides returning north from taking the J.C. Cochrane party to the railway at Temiskaming.

Then, in the early 20th century, the Temiskamingue and Northern

Ontario Railway (now the O N R , Ontario Northland Railway) was built

from Toronto, north along the shore of Lake Temiskamingue to Cochrane

by 1907 and was finally completed to Moosonee on James Bay in 1932.

Getting to Cochrane in 1907 allowed for the profitable transport of mate

rials and men for the building of the east-west National Transcontinental (now the C N R , Canadian National Railway).

Construction of both railways came through lands of Algonquin peo

ples and into lands of Cree peoples, and for the first two decades of the

20th century they were the principal conduits for change. The Transconti

nental line was referred to by Hudson's Bay personnel as "The Front,"

which aptly calls to mind this term as a wartime label for the line of battle - where the action is.

W h o was at the front at the time? Railroad construction gangs were

located every 50 to 100 miles along the surveyed line, with between 500

and 1,000 men working at each site. In Ontario, at least 35 towns devel

oped rapidly along the O N R and C N R lines north of the C P R crossing at

North Bay. Homesteading farmers, prospectors, loggers, White trappers,

free traders, tourists and others were drawn by the ease of access and the

optimism that so often goes with rapid growth. To the Native people in

the region, it was a flood of strangers. The hunting grounds of the Algon

quins of the Lake Temiskamingue Region were on both sides of the O N R

line, and the Algonquins of the Lake Abitibi region were on both sides of

the C N R line. The hunting grounds of the Crees of the N e w Post Band

were also on both sides of the O N R line and on both sides of the C N R

line, just to the west of the Abitibi Indians. For this paper, I will introduce

some individual Crees and Algonquins whose stories embody the changes

I wish to document. The Temiskamingue-Abitibi region has a history

comparable to that of N e w Post, and I have so far found three interesting

books by Native authors from the region. T w o are autobiographical, and

the other a regional history. The following is based on one of the auto

biographies. Madeline Katt was b o m in 1907, a year after the O N R reached into

the Lake Temagami region. She was raised by her great-grandparents,


whose hunting grounds were about 30 miles from the railroad. They were

kind and caring of her, and she remembered them with great warmth.

Madeline began learning English by looking at an Eaton's catalogue. At

age 15, she was married, by arrangement of her great-grandparents, to

Alex Mathias, then 17 and an orphan. They were given the family hunting

grounds of her grandfather, and did well at trapping for five or six years

until Ontario Lands and Forests closed beaver trapping from 1928 to

1937. She tells us that they lived happily together and raised her two

younger siblings and their own children. Alex was fairly fluent in English,

and helped Madeline to learn. During these years they took on new activities that entailed their

becoming more bicultural. American tourists came, via the railway, to

hunt and fish in the Temiskamingue region. Alex guided tourists during

the summers; they looked after an American-owned tourist camp near

Temagami; they took part in making the documentary film The silent

enemy (1930); and they also traveled to sportsmen's shows in the U.S.

But in the late 1930s, tuberculosis affected them both and so weakened

Alex that, although only 29, he could no longer go trapping. H e decided

to not leave his wife and children in order to go to the hospital. Then

Ontario Lands and Forests reassigned their hunting grounds because Alex

was not working them. With little chance to work for income, and financ

ing the household by selling off their possessions, Madeline looked after

Alex in their home for three years, until he died. Madeline was then put in

hospital at Haileybury to cure her tuberculosis, and her two daughters

were sent hundreds of kilometers west along the C P R to a residential

school in the town of Spanish. She was in hospital for 26 months. With

herself and her children in institutions (what w e call "total" institutions,

providing all the practical needs of life), the conditions for cultural transformation were a constant, obligatory presence.

She tells us that, after being discharged from the hospital, she made

the decision to enter the Whiteman's culture by becoming a domestic

worker for one of the nurses, and later a receptionist for one of the doc

tors. At age 39, she married again, a Whiteman (thereby losing her Indian

status), and worked nights as a matron in the Haileybury jail. During the

night hours she made rag rugs and also sewed, for extra money. Her sec

ond husband left after ten years, and she moved to North Bay, where she

raised her two grandchildren, saw them through their schooling, and then


had the satisfaction of seeing them living well in North Bay. In her eight

ies she moved into a seniors' residence, where she wrote her autobiogra

phy (Theriault 1992). It is remarkably free from bitterness or blame, but

she significantly focuses a hundred pages on childhood and the happy

years of her marriage to Alex, and only 20 pages on the later half of her life.

The Cree frontiersmen included Thomas and Annie Sutherland and

their son Peter. Thomas had come from a H B C family who worked as

provisioners for the Company. When Thomas was twelve, they moved

from the Severn River area on Hudson's Bay to Moose Factory on James

Bay. His father died soon after, and Thomas was then sent to the N e w

Post area, inland. This mobile background accounts for the relative ease

he had in moving yet again. Some time before 1905, he married the N e w

Post chiefs daughter, Annie Omakees, and later, with no children of his

or her own, they adopted Peter Archibald. Then Thomas decided to move

his family off the land for some years, so Peter spent part of his childhood

in the railroad town of Mattice, and had as a playmate someone who grew

up to be a lawyer there. This gave young Peter a bicultural experience that

stood him in good stead when later, as a married man and living back on

his family's hunting grounds, he realized that, with limits imposed by

Provincial beaver quotas, he could no longer depend on hunting to sup

port his family. Peter went to work for the railroad, and moved his family

to Moosonee. He worked well with the Whitemen of the section gang, and

they helped him to prepare for the examination that qualified him to

become a section foreman. After years as a foreman, he was able to retire

with a pension and thereby also be able to afford to return to the bush. He

had lived to a fine old age when I knew him in the 1980s. Parts of Peter's

life have been recorded (in English) by John S. Long. As a H B C Scots-Cree Metis George Elson found that he had little

future with any of his several employers. He was b o m in 1876, about a

generation earlier than Peter Sutherland or Madeline Katt, and as a youth

was employed as a labourer for the H B C at Rupert's House. Then a new

Factor made him his "factotum" or personal servant; when this Factor

(McTavish) left after nine years, George moved to The Front at Missinai-

bie, in 1901 and worked for the C P R as cook, survey party chief, and per

haps in other jobs. At this time (1902) he saw his father summarily sent to

The Front when he was deemed too old and infirm to be useful to the


Company. While at Missinaibie, George was hired as a guide and became

somewhat famous for guiding two N e w York adventurers across Labra

dor. They were overtaken by winter, and George was able to save only

one of the men. In 1905 he guided the dead man's widow over the same

path. Both the surviving man and the widow published books on their

travels (Wallace 1907, Hubbard 1908), and George was briefly a cele

brated guest in the U.S. He performed in a sportsmen's show in New

York, and then guided another American couple across Labrador. Back in

the James Bay region, he managed some small posts (Churchill, Mis

tassini, Eastmain) for Revillon Freres. Probably about 1915, he gave up

his dream to marry a White girl and become a fully recognized White per

son. Instead, he married Ellen Miller, a much younger Scots-Cree of

Nemiska. He worked for Revillon for at least 20 years, but this too failed

to promise a better future. Finally, he and his wife opened an independent

trading post at Hannah Bay, where they did well for some years, and then

retired to Moosonee in the late 1930s. They had no surviving children.

His story is an instructive personal narrative of one man's adaptation to

the disintegration of the Hudson's Bay Company's empire, and is very

well documented in a forthcoming book edited by Roberta Buchanan.

Both Peter Sutherland and George Elson are Cree embodiments of

several of the processes that became powerful as the south encroached in

a variety of ways. In their two cases, the changes were not noticeably

damaging in their impact, but rather opportunities to adapt to new circum

stances in new ways. Three N e w Post families, the Sutherlands, the

Archibalds, and the Wynnes, were successful in moving and adapting as

the need arose. For the other families trading into this post, who did not

move and adapt to life out of the bush, life was not so kind; the impact of

loss of their land-based food security and the ravages of tuberculosis,

influenza, measles and other diseases were very damaging. For N e w Post,

the death rate from 1903-1912 was 33%, probably in large part due to

tuberculosis. As we have seen in Madeline's story, tuberculosis might

have been either the primary or secondary cause of death. From 1913-

1922, because of the influenza epidemic, the death rate was a devastating

76%. From 1923-1932 it was again 33%, leaving 21 survivors, of whom

11 were shown as living in the N e w Post area in 1933. The post was

moved to the rail line in 1926 and closed in 1930. Also, perhaps in that year, Crees living in the railroad town of Mattice were told to move back


to Moose Factory. There had been a summer settlement at Mattice since

about 1918. It is said that their houses were destroyed.

What can w e take from these three very brief biographical pictures

that will help to clarify the actual processes of cultural transformation? It

can be helpful to scale down the level of analysis to actual persons. In his

much quoted but not much used insight into the place of the individual in

culture, Sapir (1949:535) told us that the true locus of culture is in the

interactions of specific individuals, and on the subjective side, in the

world of meanings which each abstracts for himself from these interac

tions. Let us try.

For Madeline Katt, the transformation of culture that she personally

underwent might be said to have started with trying to speak the words in

an Eaton's catalogue, taken a big step with her working with tourists, a

movie crew, and work in the U.S. at sportsmen's shows. But the big leap

came with her hospitalization for over two years and the loss of her hus

band and, for most of each year, her children. Having little left to lose and

no clear place to go in the culture that she grew up in, she chose deliber

ately to enter the White culture as a maid and then a receptionist, and then

as a wife and a jail matron. Immersed in these roles and activities, it

seems hard to imagine that she would not undergo a radical (though not

total) change of language, culture and identity. Conscious of the long-

term processes in her life, she created her autobiography.

For Peter Sutherland, the transformation began when his father rec

ognized the need and had the ability to move out of the bush into the town

of Mattice, where Peter found a non-Cree playmate and growing familiar

ity with town life. Probably his father was fluent in English, and certainly

Peter became so. When, in his turn, he found that getting a living for his

family in the bush was no longer secure, he followed his father's example,

moved his family to Moosonee, and took a job with the O N R , working in

English with an otherwise all-Whiteman section crew. They helped him

to succeed, and he did. As with Madeline, immersed as he was in these

roles and activities, it seems hard to imagine that he would not undergo a

radical (though not total) change of language, culture and identity. And be

able to move back to a Cree mode of life when he could afford it, and

chose to. Finally, George Elson. George grew up as a Company servant,

thought of himself as a Whiteman but was bicultural in language, bush

318 RICHARD J. PRESTON

skills and social style. He then took his facility in language and mobility

to The Front, working for the railroad, buying a house in a railroad town,

and looking for a wife. He took the Cree role as a guide for naive Ameri

can adventurers in an area he did not know personally, survived great

hardship and then some American celebrity as a friend and protege of

Mina Hubbard. His ambition whetted, he got the responsibility of a series

of small posts with the Opposition Company (Revillon Freres), and mar

ried a Metis woman. But he eventually recognized that working as a

Metis manager would not lead to recognition or promotion, and tried an

independent trader's job, with better results. Immersed in these roles and

activities, it seems hard to imagine that he would not achieve a radical

(though not total) change of language, culture and identity. But this was

soft causation, not able to penetrate hard racial boundaries. He managed

to adapt in several ways, but his goal was too extreme and did not work

out, and so he fell back on his other cultural option, and retired back to a Cree/Company-family community.

In each case, we have seen people developing facility in two lan

guages, having the ability to choose to shift roles and activities towards

new cultural norms, and the competence and fortitude to transform their

daily lives at a fairly fundamental level. The processes are not so very

mysterious or complex or obscure. They do, however, become visible

only at the personal level. Cultures change by the agency of the people

who constitute it, and it is these actual people who will reveal, in their

lives, the processes we wish to understand. By moving back and forth

between the interpersonal level and the group level, we can move toward a good understanding of cultural transformation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Funding that covered travel costs and archiving expenses was provided

through grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Coun

cil of Canada (332-1615-17) and the (U.S.) National Science Foundation (BCS-0094449).

REFERENCES

Brightman, Robert A. 1993. Grateful prey: Rock Cree human-animal relationships. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CREES AND ALGONQUINS AT "THE FRONT" 319

Buchanan, Roberta, ed. [in press]. "// is all so grand and beautiful:" The Labrador diaries of Mina Benson Hubbard and George Elson. Edited by Roberta Buchanan, with a biography of Mina Benson Hubbard by Anne Hart, and new maps, scientific results and canoeing analysis by Bryan Green. Kingston & Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Comaroff, Jean. 1985. Body of power, spirit of resistance: The culture and history of a South African people. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hubbard, Mina. 1908. A woman's way through unknown Labrador: An account of the exploration of the Nascaupee and George Rivers, by Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Jr. London: John Murray.

Mandelbaum, David, ed. 1949. Selected writings of Edward Sapir in language, culture and personality. Berkeley: University of California Press.

McNeill, William H. 1976. Plagues and peoples. N e w York: Random House.

Theriault, Madeline Katt. 1992. Moose to moccassins: The story of Ka Kita Wa Pa No Kwe. Toronto: Natural Heritage/Natural History.

Wallace, Dillon. 1907. The long Labrador trail. N e w York: The Outing Publishing Co.

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