2
Between the Missionary Eras
The antagonism between women and men that characterized many domiciled bands and others within the Jesuits' scope did not wash across the boreal forests in the ensuing years. But the record does suggest that in the priests' wake an undercurrent of disagreement—centering on loyalty to traditional ways—gradually caused a pattern of gender-based tensions. This was a slow process, however, which affected groups unevenly and manifested itself only subtly.
Jesuit efforts among Cree, Ojibwa, and Montagnais-Naskapi proceeded fitfully throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Competition with other religious orders and the establishment of a diocesan organization in 1658 hampered the missionaries' freedom of movement. Traders and government officials, moreover, aggravated by the priests' long-standing opposition to the practice of plying Indians with brandy during fur trading sessions, generally did little to bolster the Jesuits' activities.[1] Intertribal warfare also took its toll on the missions. In 1670, the Tadoussac Montagnais escaped the ravages of Iroquois raids and smallpox epidemics by fleeing north to James Bay, and by 1685 the Jesuits had abandoned the mission at Sillery to the military following similar Montagnais dispersals. Although Father François de Crespieul tried to maintain a steady field presence among the Montagnais from 1660 until his death in 1703, the mission languished until rebuilt by Father Pierre Lauré in the 1720s. Finally, many Indians had become disenchanted with the Jesuits, whose novelty had worn thin. The priests were hard taxed in some areas to retain the loyalty and buttress the faith of converted Indians.[2]
The northern Great Lakes missions had their problems as well. With the death of Father Charles Albanel in 1696, the mission at Sault Ste. Marie collapsed; the crown order of 1697 that closed the fur trade led to the abandonment of the posts at St. Ignace (Fort Buade) and Michilimackinac (Mackincac).[3] By 1711, bereft of converts, the Jesuits had relinquished Mackinac. Although they revived the mission in 1715, when the French reopened the military and trading posts, it now served an exclusively French and métis (mixed-blood) congregation. Their Indian activities increasingly revolved around the Huron and Iroquois missions along the St. Lawrence and among Illinois tribes to the south.[4]
The Jesuits' domain continued to dwindle as the crown pressured the troublesome order and finally restricted it in 1761, effectively blocking recruitment to the remaining New France missions. Control of the territory passed to the British through the Treaty of Paris two years later; thus, when Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society of Jesus worldwide in 1773, Britain dissolved the order and claimed the Jesuits' Canadian holdings. The missionaries, their numbers now reduced by death to eleven, fought the edict for sixteen years, but as the priests expired so did their posts. Tadoussac fell in 1782, and by the end of that year only four fatigued and elderly Jesuits survived. They dropped all pretense of missionary work to concentrate on protecting their holdings from the Protestants, relinquishing the establishments only in 1790, when the British guaranteed to convert the Indians. The Jesuit missions had come full circle; the remaining clerics completed their days as pensioners, performing charitable deeds until the last died in 1800.[5]
The declining years of the Jesuit missions resulted in a hiatus in missionary activity in the interior; for a span of eighty years Ojibwa, Cree, and Montagnais-Naskapi rarely encountered missionaries. Throughout the eighteenth century most North American colonial denominations neglected Indian missions to focus on their own growth, while European missionary societies ceased most activities following the American Revolution.[6] Christianity's prospects among the native populations thus hinged on the influence of converts and the tenacity of traditionalists in each band, as heightened mobility during this pe-
riod removed Indians further from the missions spiritually, temporally, and geographically.
Native territories shifted from the 1660s on as the fur trade sparked Ojibwa expansion west and northwest from Lake Superior. Displaced bands of Cree, having retreated into the hinterland beyond Lake Winnipeg, were frequently compelled to trade through Ojibwa and Ottawa go-betweens. But when the Hudson's Bay Company secured posts on western James Bay and Hudson Bay after 1670, virtually all groups between the bays and Lake Superior gravitated toward the British commerce. Impressive contingents of up to fifteen hundred Inland Cree trekked to York Factory on Hudson Bay for the spring trading. Spurred to compete, the French created the Compagnie du Nord in 1676 and opened for business at Fort Camanistogoyan on Thunder Bay, Fort la Maune on Lake Nipigon, and Fort de Français (in 1685) on the Albany River. By the 1730s, French posts festooned the forests west and northwest of Lake Superior, setting off yet another movement of Ojibwa and Cree—this time westward—which lasted four decades.[7]
Montagnais and Naskapi on the lower Labrador Peninsula and Eastern Cree at James Bay also increased their mobility. During the sixteenth and most of the seventeenth centuries the French had encouraged them to bring pelts down to the St. Lawrence. By the late 1600s, as the British established trading posts on the eastern coasts of Hudson and James bays, the Montagnais, Naskapi, and Cree moved into the north and to the eastern bush of Labrador. Contact with Europeans steadily decreased, to the point that James McKenzie, admittedly an unsympathetic observer, reported that the Naskapi were practically in an aboriginal state. "The Nascapees may still be regarded as the primitive inhabitants of the coast," he explained,
whose ancient habits, usages and absurdities they, to this day, retain in all their savage purity. . . . They resort with their bear, marten, fox, and carribou skins once a year, either to Hudson's Bay, Great Esquimaux Bay, or the King's Post, to exchange them for the most necessary articles, such as axes, knives, guns, ammunition, &c. Their number is about five hundred souls, and there are some among them who have grown old without having ever seen an European, and who still form their utensils out of bones and stones.[8]
The bounding competition between eighteenth-century English and French fur traders incited economic and political disorder, provoking further turmoil in native communities. Although the Compagnie du Nord vied mightily with the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), its competitive edge had flagged by midcentury. Then, in the 1760s, an influx of French-Canadian and Scots traders from Montréal revitalized the rivalry, and the HBC, finding itself on the defensive, was forced to construct new posts farther inland. With the establishment of the early North West Company in 1779 by a syndicate of fur-trading firms, the fur trade verged on open conflict. The HBC again increased its territory and forts, with trading posts now following aggressive factors who struggled to stake their turf in the interior forests. For Indians, these developments provided a fine opportunity to play the contending traders against one another and obtain the best credit for furs. HBC factors, North West Company traders, and agents of the short-lived X.Y. Company (1798–1804) found themselves unhappily courting Indian trade.[9] "The consequence will be," one trader groused, "that the Indians will get all they want for half the value and laugh at them all, in the end. . . . The Indians have lost all industry and are becoming careless about hunting and paying their credits, as they very well know that no one will refuse."[10]
But the coalition of the HBC and the North West Company in 1821, together with ecological changes, conspired to deprive Indians of the upper hand. By 1805, unchecked beaver trapping had diminished the pelt harvest, affecting much of the northern interior within the decade and forcing Indians to turn to smaller peltry animals such as marten and muskrat. The virtual elimination of moose and caribou populations during this period also removed a mainstay of Cree and Ojibwa subsistence, making starvation a frequent specter. The situation created by the merger of the Hudson's Bay and North West companies, which led to new policies on debts and summer furs and the closing of several posts, proved disastrous. Indians found credit cut, prices up, access to trade goods severely curtailed, and furs rejected. With the shortage of "country" food, they became increasingly dependent on the trading posts
for foodstuffs during harsh winters.[11] Many found themselves bound to the Europeans, restricted to the vicinity of the posts by their reliance on trade goods.
Reduced mobility and the emphasis on fishing and hunting small game also resulted in relatively stable hunting groups based in villages near important lakes and rivers. In addition, native men gradually took over fishing and the snaring of small animals, activities that before the 1820s had generally been women's responsibility. In earlier years, "any young man would think himself disgraced [to] even be seen setting a Net to catch fish or a Snare for Rabbit," Charles McKenzie had reported, "& when recourse was had to such means in the times of scarcity it was left entirely to the women's province."[12] Because hares and martens were the women's own property, snaring had provided them with collateral for trading and bargaining. By the 1830s, however, younger men had taken over many of these activities—and simultaneously, fish and hare became more crucial to the diet. This shift had significant economic implications, which were later compounded when fishing became the primary source of cash.[13]
Throughout the chaotic period in which these changes transpired, traders, factors, and explorers pursued their fortunes and curiosity into the interior, seeking native contacts for furs and building new posts. While the overt goal was profit, personal religious commitment often aroused in these men a keen interest in native spirituality, and in journals, diaries, and reports they frequently expounded on the inner life of Indian communities.[14] To be sure, the Europeans' particular purposes in being in this land shaped their narrative depictions of what they encountered; nevertheless, their records provide an occasional glimpse of gender relations among native groups in this period of limited missionary activity but momentous socioeconomic change.
Traders and explorers generally shared the Jesuits' conviction that native women were debased, especially among Western and Plains Cree beyond Lake Superior.[15] Henry Kelsey, a Hudson's Bay Company trader from 1687 to 1724, insisted that Western Cree men considered a woman merely "a Slead dog or Bitch."[16] Although Peter Grant, a trader at Lac la Pluie,
concurred that women were drudges and slaves, in his 1804 treatise on the Saulteux he wrote that Ojibwa women were nonetheless a force to be reckoned with: "They are not . . . without their Xanthippes, who, equal to the most celebrated heroines of the ancients and moderns, can assert the rights of their sex, with a vengeance."[17] Philip Turnor and other HBC factors found, on journeys from York Fort to Cumberland House in 1778–79, that they needed a solid reserve of trinkets if they were to compete successfully with Canadian traders. "Such like presents greatly gain the Love of the Women," Turnor observed with exasperation, "and some of them have great influence over their Husbands particularly the Young people who would carry part of their Furrs to the Canadians if it was for those trinkets only."[18] John McDonnell, a North West Company trader at Red River, similarly concluded in 1797 that among the Cree at River la Souris, "daughters are as much esteemed as sons by the Indians, and, indeed, they bring them much greater emoluments. . . . Women, in general, have a great ascendency over their husbands."[19]
David Thompson, a seasoned veteran of the bush married to a mixed-blood Ojibwa, was one of the most astute observers of native life during the period. Apprenticed to the HBC at the age of fourteen, he worked for first the HBC and then the North West Company from 1784 to 1812. As a young trader, he often was the sole European traveling in company with "packet Indians" who carried messages between the far-flung posts. Their companionship on those trips introduced him to belief systems and lifeways that intrigued him and prompted his intensive study of their cultures. Thompson eventually focused on the Cree from Ile à la Crosse and the Churchill River, whom he considered uniform in their beliefs and "the only Natives that have some remains of ancient times from tradition"—besides, that is, the closely related Ojibwa, "the religionists of the North."[20] As he transcribed tales and gathered information in the course of his journeys, Thompson recorded only practices he believed to be untainted by European influences. He relied exclusively on old men for facts about customs and rituals, deeming younger people unsatisfactory informants at best. Yet even though he depended on elderly men to supply
details, his commentary stressed women's emphasis on traditional observances. This fact suggests that he was unable to obtain female informants: women may have been reluctant to associate with him or to provide him information on their practices.[21]
Thompson, like all Europeans, was struck by gender differences in the bands he sojourned with, but the position of women among the Cree, "who think much of their women, and love brave men," particularly impressed him.[22] He was convinced that females were the stauncher traditionalists, and although they took unabashed delight in European baubles and tools, Thompson judged women less susceptible than men to Christian influence. "I found many of the men, especially those who had been much in company with white men, to be all half infidels," he reported, "but the Women kept them in order; for they fear the Manito's [supernatural helpers]."[23]
In his Narrative , Thompson recalled an instance when some women wanting beads and ribbons agreed to supply him in exchange with marten skins:
Early the next morning, five young women set off to make Marten Traps; and did not return until the evening. They were rallyed by their husbands and brothers; who proposed they should dance to the Manito of the Martens, to this they willingly consented, it was a fine, calm moonlight night, the young men came with the Rattle and Tambour, about nine women formed the dance, to which they sung with their fine voices, and lively they danced hand in hand in a half circle for a long hour; it is now many years ago, yet I remember this gay hour.[24]
While the men on this occasion obviously encouraged the propitiatory dancing, Thompson felt that overall women expressed far more concern with ritual practices than did younger men. They carefully disposed of animal remains to avoid displeasing the game's spirit and prudently placated the supernaturals who controlled the bush. He noted, moreover, that when villagers gathered around the fires on a winter's evening it was women who awed and intrigued them with tales of the creation and the exploits of trickster heroes—of times when people were stronger, animals more numerous, and humans could converse with the bear and the beaver.[25]
Duncan Cameron, like Thompson, was a veteran of the bush who began his career with the Northwest Company in 1786 and later headed its Nipigon, Lac la Pluie, and Red River districts until being captured by the HBC in 1816.[26] He, too, frequently queried old men about their practices, and his long years in the field provided him ample opportunity to scrutinize Cree and Ojibwa lifeways. Many of the observations in his 1804 commentary and journal focus on gender relations. Women's heavy manual labor disposed him to tag them as social inferiors, "mere slaves to their husbands."[27] He described in wearisome detail their preparation of furs, food, and fires, care of the lodges, and fishing activities. Onerous as some of these chores undoubtedly were, Cameron seemed unaware that the domestic responsibilities of Euro-American women were at least as burdensome, and further complicated by larger families.[28] But he observed that native men certainly were not indolent, and he even gave a nod to the interdependency of many male and female tasks:
The men hunt, build canoes, (which the women sew and pitch,) snowshoe frames ready to net and which the women must finish; they make axehelves, paddles, traines for hauling in winter and every other crooked knife work [carving]. Still, they undergo as great hardships in winter as the women, for very often one man has to hunt and provide for fourteen or fifteen persons.
Although he maintained his conviction that women's position was a lowly one, he did admit that "some of the bolder hussies nevertheless make themselves very independent and 'wear the breeches' when the husband happens to be good natured."[29]
Native women's staunch loyalty to traditional practices amused Cameron, and, while not claiming that religiosity had disappeared among men, he contended that males exploited women's beliefs in order to control their behavior. He gave as an example the sacred, or medicine, bundle that most men carried: "Women are as much afraid to touch it as they would be to touch a venimous snake or toad. These women are very credulous and their husbands make them believe whatever they please and, among other things, that by virtue of this bag they will know whenever their wives prove unfaithful to them or
misbehave in anything."[30] Hudson's Bay Company factor James Isham said much the same: "The men pretends to be great Conjurer's, tho' Know nothing of any such artifice, and all I cou'd make of itt, is Very Eronious and purely Design'd to frigh'n the women and Children."[31]
Initially, these seem little more than diverting examples of naive wives gulled by scheming husbands, but on further consideration they suggest that although females and males both continued to refer to traditional beliefs, their reasons for doing so were beginning to diverge. Men, it appears, deliberately used medicine bundles to manipulate their wives, but women may have employed credulity to their own advantage. Their loyalty to the old system allowed them to retain control over their personal activities, as Cameron's account reveals: "The consequence of this [use of the medicine bags] is that they [women] are pretty chaste when sober, but when the least in liquor, they indulge themselves in such sport as comes their way; when found out, they will say they remember nothing about it, and were senseless at the time, so that it was not they who misbehaved but the liquor [the liquor's spirit]."[32] Because Ojibwa, Cree, and other Algonquians believed that liquor—or the bottle in which it came—contained supernatural entities that oversaw their actions, an individual was not responsible for anything he or she did while under the influence. The women, therefore, could blame any misconduct found out by the medicine bundles on the liquor.
This behavior suggests a continuity with the pattern established during the Jesuits' tenure: namely, women continued to adhere to older beliefs and did not hesitate to use tradition to protect themselves against men's efforts to regulate their lives. Cameron's account did not intend to suggest open conflict between the sexes, but he did depict a society in which men—perhaps influenced by stepped-up contact with European culture and values—attempted to establish new controls over women. In response, women gradually developed tactics that, by capitalizing on the leeway that traditional beliefs provided (in this instance, regarding the supernatural powers of liquor), avoided direct confrontation yet allowed them to retain independence. Women's ritual observances worked to their advantage; whether
their allegiance was heartfelt or calculated, tradition afforded them a means of retaining control, a strategy for surviving in a rapidly changing world.
The case of Net-no-kwa, a powerful figure in her community, illustrates this point. She was an Ottawa living among Ojibwa north of Mackinac and also foster mother of the captive John Tanner, whom she adopted in the 1780s as a replacement for her own dead son. "I have never met with an Indian, either man or woman," Tanner asserted, "who had so much authority as Net-no-kwa. She could accomplish whatever she pleased, either with the traders or the Indians; probably, in some measure, because she never attempted to do any thing which was not right and just."[33] She reinforced her authority through a pronounced reliance on tradition. Tanner cited, for example, an instance when, at a time when band provisions were perilously low, she dreamed of a fat bear's hiding place. For Ojibwa, Cree, and other Algonquians, dreams were an essential conduit for communication with the supernatural world and a validation of one's spiritual condition. Hunting dreams came to women and men alike. Animal spirits visited individuals when food was scarce, revealing lure songs, prescribing propitiatory rituals, or indicating the location of game.[34] Tanner admired the results of Net-no-kwa's dreaming but believed that his mother had tracked the bear to its lodge in advance. He thought perhaps she feigned spiritual validation when it was not immediately forthcoming: "Artifices of this kind, to make her people believe she had intercourse with the Great Spirit, were, I think, repeatedly assayed by her."[35] Whether Tanner's charge resulted from simple disbelief or actual observation of Net-no-kwa's deception is impossible to determine. Be that as it may, Net-no-kwa's dreams—real or otherwise—did reinforce her prestige in the band. Similarly, Blue Robed Cloud, of Chequamegon Bay, had gained spiritual power from a vision received during her first menstrual seclusion, which she used to assist male hunters in finding game.[36]
Women's involvement in the Midewiwin (Mide), or Medicine Lodge Society, further indicates how they used religion to remain a force in their communities. This society, oriented around curing rites, flourished among the same Ojibwa whose
powerful shamans and profuse rituals had so impressed David Thompson.[37] Widespread among Southern Ojibwa, the movement also claimed followers as far north as Berens River in Manitoba and Ontario. Although the Midewiwin may have been a revitalization movement organized in response to European incursions, by the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries its elements were clearly Ojibwa and consistent with aboriginal concepts of the supernatural, probably derived from shamanistic practices and earlier medicine societies. It also drew loosely allied kin groups together into unified communities as migrating Ojibwa formed new, larger villages at trading sites on Lake Superior.[38]
According to North West Company trader Peter Grant,
no people are more tenacious in their religious opinions, and less communicative on religious subjects than the Sauteux [Saulteaux Ojibwa]. To question them on such a subject [the Midewiwin] is not only frivolous, in their opinion, but impertinent; some will laugh and pretend ignorance on the subject, others will relate, with a most serious air, a long story of absurdities which they had by tradition from their ancestors.[39]
Mide membership was attainable through participation as a patient in curing rituals, but position as an officer in the society came only after lengthy, expensive instruction (one nineteenth-century initiate paid thirty thousand dollars in beaver pelts)[40] and a formal initiation. The Mide taught herbal knowledge and proper ethical behavior and honoring of manitous to maintain health. "The Mitewie is a mysterious ceremony, rather of the nature of our Free Masonry," Grant explained in 1804, "but with this remarkable difference that both sexes are equally admitted as members. Those who put up for candidates must be of a respectable footing in society and make presents to satisfy the number of members requisite to constitute the meeting of the Order."[41]
The Mide stressed traditional beliefs that acknowledged both women's ritual and actual importance in the community. Even into the twentieth century, Midewiwin origin tales emphasized women's centrality: "First a woman was born and then a man was born . . . the woman wondered how she would multiply. So
the Great Spirit allowed the woman a man, knowing her wishes. Thus Indians originated."[42] Another version, perhaps an interesting twist on Christian lore, described how the Great Spirit fashioned the first Indian from a handful of dirt:
At the assembly, the Indian had noticed that the Characters [manitous] were two of a kind, of animal, bird, and fish. And she . . . wondered why she was all by herself—for the first Indian was a woman. All the Characters read her thoughts. The Indian requested that the animal [of Earth] or fowl [of Sky] Spirit make her an Indian companion. A spirit was named to meet this wish. As the woman slept, he moved around her to see if he could detach a part of her body from which to shape another Indian. Finally he removed the woman's lower rib. So on wakening, the woman found herself lying with another person, made like herself. That is why a woman has fewer ribs, on both sides, than a man.[43]
Tanner's mother, Net-no-kwa, was a regular at Mide ceremonies; the Midewiwin undoubtedly provided her and other women with an avenue both for communicating with supernaturals and for enhancing their authority.[44]
The development of the Wabeno, or Wabenowin, one of several rival cults to the Mide, suggests that women needed to protect their interests—religious and otherwise. According to David Thompson, the movement flourished among the culturally alienated, those to whom "it appeared the old Songs, Dances, and Ceremonies by frequent repetition had lost all their charms, and religious attention." He stated that the Wabeno sprang from the dreams of several disaffected chiefs who claimed that all the order's belongings were sacred. By 1798 the movement, which promised hunting success, had been strong for two years. Disgusted traditionalists insisted that only fools joined the order, Thompson reported, and claimed that idle men and poor hunters provided the mainstay of its festering success.[45] Respectable people, John Tanner explained, condemned the Wabeno as "a false and dangerous religion." Its rituals, such as an obscure rite that involved juggling and swallowing hot stones, differed perversely from those of the Mide and were "usually accompanied by much licentiousness and irregularity."[46] Although the cult apparently had some female
members, the Wabeno, unlike the Mide, considered women unfit to touch sacred items.
The record is too incomplete to allow more than speculation on whether women actively worked to protect traditional beliefs against some men's pressures to leave the old ways behind. However, while the evidence is only suggestive, the windigo , or wiitiko , phenomenon is provocative in this regard. The Windigo was a supernatural cannibal monster, a huge and hideous man of ice who stalked the boreal forests of the Cree and Ojibwa, greedily consuming any unfortunates who crossed his path. A human person could also unwittingly "become windigo" (or develop what anthropologists now call windigo psychosis) and crave human flesh to the point of devouring family and friends. James Isham claimed that while Indians would not eat raw meat, they would eat one another when starving; he cited the example of a couple who ate their four children.[47] Not all entered into such behavior involuntarily, however. Duncan Cameron explained that "there are a few who are cannibals by inclination and go about by themselves hunting for Indians with as much industry as if they were hunting animals. The track of one of these is sufficient to make twenty families decamp with all the speed in their power."[48] Prospective victims occasionally distracted the bedeviled windigos with gifts or dosed them with massive quantities of hot tallow.[49] The most reliable solution, however, was to kill the cannibal. The miserable soul would be dispatched stealthily by an axe blow from behind, often at the hands of an anxious wife or relative.
Posthumous proof of the syndrome was that the windigo's heart had turned to ice. To prevent the cannibal from reviving the executioners poured hot tea or water into the chest cavity or in some other manner destroyed the heart. George Nelson described the efforts of one group to dispose of the remains of a young man turned windigo who had told them, as the illness overcame him, that they must be certain to destroy his heart. After his brother and friends had shot him,
not a drop of blood was seen—his heart was already formed into Ice . Here they seized and bound him and with ice chissels and axes set to work to dispatch him. According to his desire they had collected a large pile of dry wood, and laid him upon it. The body was soon
consumed, but the heart remained perfect and entire: it rolled several times off the Pile—they replaced it as often: fear ceased [seized] them—then with their (Ice) chissels they cut and hacked it onto small bits, but yet with difficulty was it consumed!!![50]
Duncan Cameron referred to the case of a Cree woman who killed her husband for fear that he was scheming to bolt down the family (Nelson claimed that windigos turned on their families first). When she saw him drinking blood from an animal's body she took the opportunity to split his head with an axe. The windigo's heart, Cameron attested, was full of ice within his still-warm body.[51]
George Nelson, a fur trader with the North West and Hudson's Bay companies, found that Cree and Northern Ojibwa believed that turning windigo was a punishment from the supernaturals for ignoring or ridiculing ceremonies.[52] This dreadful fate seems to have been viewed as primarily befalling men. As David Thompson explained, "The word Weetego is one of the names of the Evil Spirit and when he gets possession of any Man, (Women are wholly exempt from it) he becomes a Man Eater."[53] Although cases were reported of women suffering from windigo psychosis, the cannibal syndrome was characterized as male; Ruth Landes's study of twentieth-century Ojibwa indicated that only women following male practices were believed susceptible.[54]
The historical record on windigos is vague at best, but it is noteworthy that accounts of the cannibals rose as external pressures and internal conflict increased. Perhaps as gender divergence over commitment to tradition escalated, women sometimes took action against men who flouted tradition in favor of European ways, viewing their individualism as a cannibalism whose consuming hunger threatened everyone's survival. The windigo syndrome might, then, be seen as a metaphor for impending cultural crisis as bands found themselves caught between traditionalism and the mounting pressures of the fur trade and westward expansion.[55]