Members of any given regional band tended to be related to each other by close bonds of kinship, to occupy and identify with specific places and territories, and to recognize leaders among their number. They also tended to speak in ways that made it possible to distinguish them from their neighbours: the meticulous linguistic study of two seventeenth-century French-Montagnais dictionaries betrays evidence of as many as a dozen different dialects. But linguistic, social, and political boundaries between regional bands were fluid. Culture and language united, rather than divided these peoples, both within and across the broad “Montagnais” and “Algonquin” categories.14 Some Algonquins could thus be referred to in the early 1640s as “neighbours of the Montagnais, and as if mingled with them,” a description that likely accounts for the ethnic ambiguity that surrounds many individuals and family bands that appear in the sources, and that anticipates Father Laure’s observation, eighty years later, that the Algonquins of Trois Rivières and the Montagnais referred to themselves by the same name – Nehiro Iriniu.15
Innu and Algonquin social organization reflected the challenging environment of the boreal shield, where poor soil and long winters meant that agriculture could not be counted on as a reliable source of food. Abundant animal and vegetal sustenance could be found through the summer months, but in wintertime these resources became too scarce to allow the existence of large groups. Fall was accordingly a time of intensive and generalized hunting, fishing, and foraging for everything that might be stocked to complement the winter’s hunt and provide a measure of insurance against the attendant seasonal threats: the unusual vigor of the cold weather; the unexpected rarity of game; the death, injury, or illness of a hunter. Access to resources through the fall and winter was facilitated by the distribution of families over a large territory, thus minimizing competition. Accordingly, each of these family hunting bands spent nine or ten months out of the year in relative isolation.16
Men directed movements and selected sites of encampment. Usually the most skilled and experienced hunter was recognized as head of a hunting band, though his power and status was informal. A man, his wife, and their dependents, young children and elderly parents, commonly joined with one, two, or three grown sons and their families, or perhaps with a more distant relative and his own family. The same few families tended to join their efforts from one year to the next, and to return to specific territories to which the head of the band claimed an exclusive right to hunt. Over time the composition of every hunting band evolved: a son might break away and join another band, for example, often that of his wife’s family, or form one of his own. Marriage was exogamous in a way that led to the perpetual recombination of hunting bands and integration of individuals from more distant groups. The flexibility of the kinship system, whereby belonging could be transmitted bilaterally, either in reference to the father or mother, further facilitated geographical and social mobility in times of scarcity. The same environment which imposed restrictions on group size thus fostered the existence of expansive links between families, regional bands, and neighbouring groups. To have relatives in communities spread over a great distance was the norm.17
Seasonal abundance made it possible for large numbers to assemble. Towards the month of May, the hunting bands began to get ready for the trip to summer gathering places often contiguous with the territories where they had spent the winter. Algonquian speakers called these great seasonal agglomerations outenau or otenaw, the same word which was used to describe a village.18 Through the months of June, July, and August, family bands reconnected with relatives and friends, shared news and stories of winter adventures, and contracted marriages. These gatherings often corresponded to the regional band unit – the nation or people – and tended to foster a localized sense of belonging, though it was not uncommon either for members from more than one regional band to come together for a season, or to visit briefly another regional band’s gathering site to reinforce alliance networks and coordinate military expeditions. If times of dispersal and cold weather called for smaller, more temporary huts or wigwams, conical in shape and assembled from a dozen poles covered with four or five rolls of birch bark or animal skins, gathering season occasioned the construction of larger and more solid structures. Some were also conically shaped but framed with twenty or thirty poles. Others were shaped like an elongated rectangle, reminiscent of the longhouses of the Iroquoians and more southerly Algonquians, albeit not as large. These larger dwellings could accommodate fifteen to twenty people each, though Champlain reported seeing an uncommonly spacious one at Tadoussac where some eighty to a hundred people were seated for a feast. When the time came to disperse once again, houses large or small were dismantled, with the choicest pieces of bark that had gone into their covering being rolled or folded to be reused at the next encampment.19
Structural suppleness characterized this social organization, as did the sharing of a common world view and environment, the existence of an extended relative network, and the primacy of individual autonomy and freedom of movement. A gathering site might be temporarily abandoned in response to ecological, demographic, or strategic pressures, and a new gathering site designated, at which point individual families affiliated with it had the option of satisfying themselves with the new location or of affiliating themselves with a different regional band. Marriage and other personal motives also led individuals and families to voluntarily abandon one regional band and habitual gathering place for another. These multiple movements did not necessarily entail the abandonment of hunting territories, but they did foster a perpetual redefinition of networks of belonging.20 This too explains why an individual described as an “Algonquin” in one issue of the annual Relations might thus be described confusingly as a “Montagnais” in another.21
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The point at which the Saint Lawrence River narrowed most dramatically – variously called Uepishtikueiau or Wabistigouiak in Innu dialects, Wabitikweiang or Kipwatikweiang in Algonquin ones, and Gepeg in Mi’kmaq, all of which meant “narrowing of the water” – occupied an important place in this Algonquian landscape. Several related bands of Innu and Algonquins periodically returned there. For a handful of family bands which returned in wintertime to hunt large game, these surroundings appear to have been a preferred or reserved hunting territory. In the summertime, however, the area drew large numbers owing to its numerous natural advantages. The narrowing of the river made this a prime fishing location. Migratory birds flew through and could be caught in what to the French seemed infinite numbers. Innu oral tradition also reveals that in this area the bark of birch trees attained a thickness particularly suited to the crafting of canoes.22 So too did the French recognize Quebec – a francization of Gepeg – as an advantageous site, though more for strategic purposes than for reasons having to do with the bounty of nature. The narrowing of the river made this the best site from which to control the access of commercial competitors’ ships to points upriver. Moreover, the height of land afforded an unusually long range of observation, and its cliffside had much defensive potential. It was here that the French established, in 1608, the habitation or fur-trading compound that would eventually become the colony’s capital. For a decade after its foundation, Quebec remained little more than a trading post, staffed by a few dozen men. Nevertheless, from the outset there was a marked contrast between French and Algonquian modes of occupation. The colonial settlement featured permanent architectural structures, both residential and defensive, and was a site of agricultural activity. As early as 1608, the initial post’s first residents cleared a garden and began dabbling in the culture of rye, wheat, maize, and a great variety of local and imported garden vegetables. Farming operations expanded with the arrival of the Recollets in 1615, and the following year with the landing of a first family of settlers.23
This is not to say that the sedentary, agricultural life was entirely novel and intrinsically foreign to the Algonquians of the Saint Lawrence and its tributary rivers. Maize was for both Algon
quins and Montagnais an appreciated resource. Quantities of it, in the form of dried kernels and meal, were regularly obtained by exchange with neighbouring intensive agriculturalists. Some Algonquin bands from the Ottawa valley, like their Nipissing neighbours, were known to habitually encamp for the winter near Wendat villages in the area of Georgian Bay to avail themselves of this food source.24 In addition to this trade, Algonquins also produced their own crops on a small scale. During his first journey up the Ottawa River in 1613, the French explorer Champlain came across a summer encampment of Kinouchepirini at Muskrat Lake (near present-day Cobden, Ontario) and saw “their gardens and fields, where there was some maize.” He learnt that they prepared land for cultivation by cutting and burning the trees, then stirring up the ground a little and planting kernels one by one. Further upriver, among the Kichesipirini at Alumette Island, Champlain saw not only corn, but also squash, beans, and peas – the latter was not a native species, and had been obtained through trade with the Europeans on the Saint Lawrence.25
Algonquian agricultural – or horticultural – endeavours represented an extension of the knowledge base and skill used in the harvesting of seemingly wild resources such as fruits, nuts, leaves, and roots. The gathering of such foods and medicines was indeed not a random and happenstance search, but rather a process that involved a cyclical return to familiar locations and often a degree of management in the form of weeding and sheltering.26 The scale of maize cultivation in the Saint Lawrence valley and its tributaries at the time of contact is impossible to quantify with any precision, but fleeting references in the earliest exploration accounts make it clear enough that it was quite modest. It was real enough, however, to give lie to the persistent dichotomy in the historical and anthropological literature between Algonquian foragers and Iroquoian farmers. A less simplistic conceptualization of modes of subsistence in the region might – as with language – present itself as a gradation, rather than as a rigid contrast, ranging from the intensive agriculture of the Iroquoians and southerly Algonquians, to the less intensive agriculture of the Algonquins of the Ottawa River and upper Saint Lawrence to Trois Rivières, and to its absence among the Innu further north and downstream. Thus Champlain could observe that the Algonquins of the Ottawa River were “more given to hunting than to tilling the soil, contrary to the practice of the Ochataiguins [Wendats],” and that, though the soil near Quebec was very good and suitable for cultivation, the locals did not “take the trouble to sow Indian corn, as do all their neighbours, the Algonquins, Ochastaguins [Wendats], and Iroquois.”27 It is telling that the Innu words for maize (mentamin) and seed (mentaminikan), as recorded half a century later by the Jesuit missionary Antoine Silvy, were of Algonquin origin.28
Agriculture of a more intensive sort was also, for Saint Lawrence Algonquians, a feature of a not-too-distant ancestral past. Algonquins still referred to the Island of Montreal as Minitik outen entagougiban, “the Island where there was a village.”29 This was, most certainly, an echo of the community known as Hochelaga in Jacques Cartier’s writings of the previous century, or of another less well-known successor village. The Saint Lawrence Iroquoians who had at that time occupied the Saint Lawrence valley did not form a discrete political unit, but they shared key cultural traits, including palisaded villages comprised of longhouses, intensive agriculture, and a rich ceramic tradition. Their disappearance from the region by the turn of the century has long been the subject of debate. The current scholarly consensus, grounded in historical and archaeological evidence and supported by oral traditions, points not to a complete disappearance, but instead to a wide dispersal and relocation, as war captives or refugees, among neighbouring groups. Population growth, coupled with continued climatic cooling, seems to have provoked social and political strife. Many of the Saint Lawrence Iroquoians were incorporated within Wendat and Iroquois societies, as they shared very similar patterns of residence and modes of subsistence, but many also merged with Saint Lawrence Algonquian bands.30
The intergenerational memory of ancestors’ village life and reliance on intensive agriculture was sometimes very concrete: “My grandfather,” explained one elderly Algonquin when touring the Island of Montreal with a Jesuit, “tilled the soil on this spot. Maize grew very well on it, for the sun is very strong there.” Taking in his hands some earth, he added: “See the richness of the soil; it is excellent.”31 At other times, this recollection was expressed – or recorded – as a more abstract collective claim. The Onontchataronon, or Iroquet Nation, whose very name suggests a filiation with the Saint Lawrence Iroquoians, for example, told the French that their “ancestors formerly inhabited the Island of Montreal,” while the Kichesipirini and other Algonquin nations similarly explained that they had “in earlier times cleared the land, and had a settlement” near Mount Royal, on the island, but that they had been forced to abandon it “as they were too often molested by their enemies.”32 Here and there in the Saint Lawrence valley, reminders of this not-too-distant past could still be observed during the early decades of the seventeenth century. At the juncture of the Saint Maurice and the Saint Lawrence Rivers, where the French would eventually establish the town of Trois Rivières, “the ends of […] blackened stakes” could still be seen, “remains of a good palisade, which formerly surrounded a village,” near which there were cleared fields where corn had been cultivated.33 The Algonquian world had roots reaching back to the Iroquoian world.
The Iroquois were often singled out in Algonquian collective memory for destroying these older villages, and the military threat they continued to pose was cited to explain why people had “lost the habit” of agriculture.34 Asked by Champlain, during his 1613 visit, why they continued to inhabit a location as barren as the upper Ottawa valley, the Kichesipirini explained that “they were forced to do so, in order to be safe, and that the roughness of the region served as a bulwark against their enemies.” But, they proposed, should the French build an outpost at the rapids on the Island of Montreal, as Champlain had suggested that he intended to do, “they [the Algonquins] would leave their abode to come and live near us [the French], feeling assured that their enemies would do them no harm while we were with them.”35
This was a seminal moment, or at the very least the earliest recorded iteration of mutual pledges that may very well have been voiced in other undocumented settings. From his base at Quebec, Champlain had quickly grasped the centrality of the Island of Montreal as a crossroads of the Saint Lawrence, Ottawa, and Richelieu Rivers, and concluded that an advance post there would greatly benefit the fur trade and his western explorations. In 1611, he had surveyed a site on the south side of the island, at the foot of the Sault Saint Louis (Lachine) rapids, and ordered the trees there to be cut and the ground to be levelled to prepare for building what he named “Place Royale” or Royal Square. As he waited for his allies, Champlain had his men prepare two test gardens, one in a meadow and the other in a wooded area that they cleared. The seeds that they sowed, he observed, “all came up quickly and in perfect condition, which shows the good quality of the soil.”36
Champlain, having sailed back to France in the fall of 1611 and returned to the colony in the spring of 1613, now announced to the Kichesipirini that his people would collect building materials within the year, with the aim of constructing a fort and cultivating land at the Island of Montreal during the next. “When they heard this,” reported the Frenchman, “they gave a great shout of approval.”37 The prospect of having French allies reclaim for them the Island of Montreal and its vicinity as a site of summer gathering and trade was an appealing one. But Algonquin willingness to settle down would not be tested so soon, as Champlain was in no better position to construct an outpost than he had been three years before, obliged as he was to periodically return to the metropole to defend the colony’s interests and his own. Having spent the summer of 1613 in the Saint Lawrence valley, he again left for France, where he stayed another year and a half. Only three decades later would the French succeed in
establishing a permanent settlement on the Island of Montreal.
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From the outset, New France’s administration was entrusted by the Crown to a succession of financiers and merchant partnerships which promised to settle and develop the territory in return for exclusive rights to its furs. Seen through the commercial prism, Indigenous peoples were understood as partners or, more callously, mere suppliers. Champlain’s declarations to the Kichesipirini in 1613 must be understood in this context. He was enthusiastic at the idea of extending the reach of the fur trade, and the establishment of a paired Franco-Algonquin settlement on the Island of Montreal was a means to achieve this aim. His approach was likewise informed by preconceived notions of the merits of the agricultural and sedentary lifestyle. In accordance with biblical and classical influences, early modern Europeans, including the French, conceptualized civilization as synonymous with these traits.
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