The indigenous people of the Laurentians

by Joseph Graham      

According to Serge Laurin, the author of Histoire des Laurentides, the Algonquin Amerindians who lived in this region were the Weskarinis, cousins of the Kichespirinis. Both were branches of the Lower Algonquin, being a part of the same language group, but having different dialects. The Upper Algonquin lived in the Abitibi region.

The Weskarinis lived along four river systems, the Lièvre, the Petite Nation, the Rouge and the North. Their principal summer encampment was at the mouth of the Petite Nation River at Montebello, which was probably a permanent camp. It was the French who gave them the name Petite Nation. It is surprising to learn that before 1600, they summered in large numbers on the Ottawa River, and then in autumn returned upriver on the tributaries to spend the winter in small family groups along the shores of their lakes and the valleys of the rivers. Imagine the excitement of traveling downriver each spring, the group of cousins growing larger and larger, sharing the news of births and deaths, of difficult winters and all manner of adventures, until the whole Petite Nation was reunited for a short summer season. Imagine the return upriver, the changes that summer may have wrought: a son married and gone with another family, or a new son-in-law returning; an elderly member deciding that the rigours of the journey would be too much and staying. The challenges of winter must have been great. Serge Laurin suggests that these groups would have been as small as 15 people when they arrived at their winter encampments, and that this would have improved their chances of survival. They must have had to hunt through the fall to prepare their winter supplies.

Their beliefs encouraged a respect of the natural order. Manitou, a name evoking the numinous, was manifest in all things suggesting a belief system akin to Animism. There was no overarching concept of good and evil, nor any objective perspective on the world – they were a part of a totality. Their economy was based on trapping, fishing, dried fruit, maple syrup, manufacture and trade. They formed trading alliances with the Huron and exported clothing, meat and dried foods in exchange for grain in the form of corn, and very likely beans, squash, tobacco and sunflower.

The research available describing the Weskarinis is limited and Eurocentric. They likely would have called themselves, as their descendants do, the Anishinabi, a name that refers to the Algonquin people and means simply, the people. Their own history describes a migration from the Maritimes over a very long period, following the guiding ways of their prophets. The Prophecy of the Seven Fires, from their oral history, documents this, and it is not until the fourth fire that evidence of the arrival of Europeans is predicted. At that time, the prophecies declare that the Light-skinned people will come wearing either the face of brotherhood or the face of death, and it warns the Anishinabe that the two faces look very similar. Subsequent fires describe the arrival of disease and the destruction of the Anishinabe.

From the time of the arrival of Champlain, the Weskarinis formed part of the alliance that was maintaining its territory against the Five Nations of the Iroquois. Champlain began to trade with the Algonquin, and ultimately alienated the Iroquois. Therein lay the beginning of a long story of tension that endures even today. Champlain actively took the side of the Algonquin, chasing the Iroquois south in 1610-11. His presence seems to have surprised the Iroquois, who returned later in greater numbers. So began the French and Indian Wars – the name the British used to describe the period of the 17th and 18th centuries. The Weskarinis, as well as other Anishinabe, benefited from the fur trade with the French until 1629 when the Kirke brothers captured New France for the British. During the three years that the British held the colony, the Iroquois monopolized the fur trade, but when the colony was returned to the French in 1632, trade with the Algonquin and the Huron resumed. The Iroquois and other farming peoples living in the path of the expanding British colonies, became dependant upon furs for trading, but the furs were not a characteristic of their farming environments. Since their conventional lives were being destroyed and European diseases were threatening their numbers, they had little to offer the northern people in trade and resorted to violence in order to acquire the furs that their European clients demanded. They were well equipped for war, since the British and Dutch merchants supplied them with arms. Between 1640 and 1650, the Huron Confederacy, fatally divided between their traditional beliefs and Catholicism, collapsed under their onslaught. By 1653, the Weskarinis, or Petite Nation, cornered on the shores of the Petit Lac Nominingue in the Laurentians, were massacred without mercy. Our history says that there were only two survivors – a child and an elder – but there are still people who identify themselves as descendants of the Weskarinis.

Today, among some of those people and other Anishinabe, the prophecies of the Seven Fires are still respected, and although the Europeans have proven to be a scourge of unimaginable proportions, still they hold out a hope for an eighth fire where the Light-Skinned people will make an enlightened choice, finally contributing to peace and brotherhood. If they make the wrong choice, though, their decision will result in a great destruction of people the world over.