Identification and History

The Abenaki, Delaware, Malecite, and Mi’kmaq comprise the Eastern Algonquian-speaking peoples. The Passamaquoddy, who are linguistically and culturally related to the Malecite, currently have no representation in Canada, although their population in times past may have extended northward into New Brunswick. Ethnohistorians occasionally place the Passamaquoddy, Malecite, and Mi’kmaq in the Eastern Abenaki category, since all four groups participated politically in what was known as the Wabanaki Confederacy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet linguists hold that the Passamaquoddy and Malecite dialects together form a language apart from Eastern Abenaki proper and that the Mi’kmaq language also retains its own linguistic distinctiveness.

Abenaki is a self-ascribed term which means “dawn land people” and relates to a number of groups whose traditional homelands extended from Maine to northeastern Massachusetts. A linguistic and cultural division exists between the Eastern Abenaki, resident in Maine, and the Western Abenaki, who originally occupied New Hampshire and Vermont. The exact geographic location of this boundary remains ambiguous, however, since after 1724 all the Western Abenaki either migrated to Canada or swelled the ranks of the Penobscot of northeastern Maine. The few remaining fluent speakers of the Western Abenaki language today reside on 500 hectares at Odanak, near Sorel, Quebec. Descendants of Eastern Abenaki live at Becancour, on the south shore of the St Lawrence River opposite Trois-Rivières, Quebec.

The Eastern Abenaki linguistic category subsumes speakers of the Penobscot, Kennebec, Arosaguntacook, and Pigwacket dialects whose traditional homelands in Maine lay along the Penobscot, Kennebec, Androscoggin, Presumpscot, and upper Saco rivers. During the early seventeenth century these peoples formed a confederacy under a chief named Beshabes, but they suffered political disunity upon Beshabes’s death in a war between the Abenaki and the Mi’kmaq. None practised intensive horticulture, although they grew some corn, beans, squash, and tobacco. In the early 1600s, when annual winter climatic conditions were colder than today, evidence of marginal horticulture was sighted only as far north as the upper Kennebec River. Most came to the coast to hunt sea mammals, collect shellfish, and trade, and, in so doing, fell prey to European-introduced diseases and became embroiled in local wars with English colonists covetous of their lands.

During King Philip’s War of 1675–76 in New England, thirty Kennebec-speaking Wawanock, unjustly charged with having conspired to injure English settlers near Pemaquid, migrated to the Jesuit mission at Sillery on the St Lawrence. Although religious and trade ties between these people and the French had been close since the 1640s, the Wawanock movement constituted the first of a series of permanent Eastern Abenaki removals to Canada. Owing to severe social disruption bred by repeated epidemics and native-settler conflict, none of the peoples originally united in the early seventeenth century under Beshabes’s confederacy, except the Penobscot, retained a presence by 1750 in their traditional homelands. Increasingly involved in intercolonial warfare by 1690 on the side of the French, most left for Canada following a devastating English attack in 1724 on a Jesuit mission at Norridgewock.

By contrast to the coastal Eastern Abenaki, Western Abenaki such as the Sokoki and Penacook were interior peoples who inhabited the middle and upper reaches of the Connecticut and Merrimack rivers of New Hampshire and Vermont. Villages were formed of arrangements of multi-family long bark dwellings, each of which housed members of one patrilineage. Their hunting territories extended northwest, almost to the Canadian border. Encouraged by the French, the Sokoki and Penacook launched war expeditions after 1642 against the Iroquois, who harassed French trade, and Iroquois retaliations drove many northward during the 1660s. By 1670 Sokoki resided near Montreal and Trois-Rivières, and a substantial Penacook village arose at Missisquoi on the eastern side of Lake Champlain. When the Jesuits established the Saint-François mission at Odanak in 1700, they not only drew Western Abenaki from settlements already situated along the Saint-François River, but also attracted Sokoki, Penacook, and Eastern Abenaki from a Jesuit mission on the Chaudière River whose earliest residents had relocated from Sillery. These Abenaki retained close relations with their kin still remaining in New Hampshire and Vermont, and fought side by side with them until the close of the French and Indian Wars in 1760. The Saint-François community remained neutral during the American Revolution and after 1783 absorbed most of the remaining Western Abenaki into their settlement. When the Western Abenaki relinguished northern New Hampshire in 1798 for the purposes of white settlement, they did so in the name of the Saint-François chiefs.

In 1805 the British Crown granted these Abenaki a second site on the Saint-François River, at Durham. Following the close of the War of 1812, in which Abenaki fought on the British side, some families returned each year to their ancestral lands south of the border to hunt, fish, and guide, while others utilized grounds north of the St Lawrence River abandoned after 1830 by Algonkin near Trois-Rivières.

As a tribal name, Delaware refers to descendants of about forty culturally and linguistically related village bands which, until the early seventeenth century, occupied lands on either side of the Delaware River in northeastern Massachusetts, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Prior to epidemics and piecemeal migrations, this population exceeded eight thousand. Villages were composed of hickory-sapling and chestnut-bark longhouses encircling a chief’s dwelling, which doubled as a council forum and whose walls hung with large wooden masks denotive of chiefly status. Delaware are scattered throughout the eastern and central United States, and representatives of their two principal linguistic and cultural subdivisions, Unami and Munsee, migrated to southern Ontario in the late eighteenth century. Unami Delaware today reside on 1,250 hectares at Moraviantown, east of Thamesville on the Thames River, while Munsee dwell on 1,040 hectares at Munceytown (Muncey), upriver from Moraviantown. Unami also live among the Six Nations Iroquois on the Grand River.

Hailing originally from the northern sector of the Delaware homeland, Munsee-speaking groups migrated northwest after conflicts with the Dutch, settling by the early eighteenth century on the north branch of the Susquahanna River. After 1765 most of these Munsees moved to Goschgoshing on the Albany River in northwestern Pennsylvania, where Moravians erected a mission in 1768. By this time a single-family, peaked-roof house type had replaced the traditional longhouse.

Unami speakers, forced from the Lehigh valley by the Pennsylvanian government in 1737, settled first on the north branch of the Susquahanna River and then spread into Ohio. Some joined the Six Nations Iroquois and, though retaining their distinct Algonquian identity, ended up after the American Revolution on Six Nations lands in southern Ontario. Most, however, formed the core of a new expanding tribe known as the Lenape, which means “the people.” By 1750 this entity had emerged from under a burden of Iroquois domination which had loomed over the Delaware since the mid-seventeenth century. Moravians from Goschgoshing and their Munsee converts after 1770 set up missions among the Ohio Delaware. Around the same time an Ohio Muncee group, unconnected directly with a mission, moved northward and eventually settled at Munceytown on the Thames. Moravian Delaware, following a massacre in 1782 by American militiamen at the Ohio Moravian community of Gnadenhutten, fled to Michigan and from there to Canada, where in 1792 they established Fairfield (now Moraviantown, Ontario). Today, descendants of these Delaware live in settlements little different from other native communities in southern Ontario.

Malecite reside in New Brunswick and southern Quebec and speak a language which is intelligible to northern Maine’s Passamaquoddy speakers and related only somewhat more distantly to eastern Abenaki. The name Malecite, which means “lazy or bad speakers,” was ascribed to them by the Mi’kmaq. The Malecites’ name for themselves is Wolastokwiyok, meaning “people of the beautiful river,” which relates to the way they view their principal homeland along the drainage basin of the Saint John River in New Brunswick.

The Malecite currently possess six reserves along the Saint John River: at Edmundston (Madawaska or Saint-Basile), Kingsclear, Oromocto, St Mary’s (Devon), Tobique, and Woodstock. These tracts, with a total land base of just over 3,600 hectares, vary considerably in size. Tobique, located near Perth and the largest New Brunswick reserve, contains 2,690 hectares, while that at Oromocto encompasses less than 20 hectares. Viger, 3,700 hectares in size, lies in Quebec south of the St Lawrence River near Rivière-du-Loup.

Malecite territory originally covered a far more extensive area, including parts of southeastern Quebec, the interior of New Brunswick, and northern Maine. This region’s climate is continental, with hot humid summers and cold snowy winters. Mixed deciduous and conifer forests blanket the rolling landscape, cut across by interconnected rivers, streams, and lakes. Yet the local native population, identified in the early seventeenth century by Samuel de Champlain as belonging to a group he termed the “Etchemins,” has remained small. Although it has been estimated that prior to 1590 their population may have reached 7,600, by 1612 their numbers had been reduced to 2,500 by epidemics, a tragic legacy of contacts with European fishermen bearing diseases against which the native inhabitants had little immunity. Today, the population stands at over 4,000.

Unlike their Mi’kmaq or Passamaquoddy neighbours, the Malecite were not a maritime-oriented people. Their prowess in trade and warfare lay in their expert canoe navigation of the upper river and lake systems drained by the St Croix and Saint John rivers by which they could reach the St Lawrence valley in eight days. With the coming of European trade, first with Basque, Breton, Norman, and Portuguese fishermen, and later with French, Dutch, and British colonists, semi-permanent Malecite settlements arose to reap the benefits of such exchange at the mouths of major rivers flowing into the Atlantic. The palisades around the village of Ouigoudi on the Saint John River enclosed large multi-family rectangular lodges as well as conical bark wigwams. A central council house, as big as a “market hall,” accommodated assemblages of over one hundred persons.

By the late seventeenth century, relations between the Malecite and the Europeans traders had changed so substantially that the influence of the grand sagamore, a chief whose territorial jurisdiction encompassed an entire river system, began to wane. The insistence of French colonial administrators that missionaries live in Malecite communities undermined the reputations of chiefs and traditional men of knowledge, since the missionaries were equipped with medicines and healing techniques better able to combat European-introduced diseases. Recollect priests maintained a mission on the Saint John River from 1619 to 1624. Malecite also visited missionaries labouring among Abenaki peoples to the south of them and, after 1632, the Jesuits stationed at Rivière-du-Loup. In 1671 the Recollects returned to the Saint John. One early task of these missionaries was to encourage the Malecite to relinquish their coastal trading communities for strategically situated interior sites with riverine communication to the Penobscot to the south and the French to the north. From 1690 to 1700 the French commandant in Acadia, Joseph Robinau de Villebon, had his headquarters on the Saint John River, first at Jemseg, later at Nashwaak, and finally at the river’s mouth. With local Recollect support and inducements in the form of annual gifts from the French Crown, Villebon directed his native allies during King William’s War (1689–97) to conduct raids on New England. In time the missionaries successfully induced the Malecite, who formerly had depended on the hunt and riverine fishery, to raise corn, beans, pumpkins, potatoes, and grain. Since horticulture obviated the Malecite’s former reliance on summer trade expeditions to their southern Abenaki neighbours for corn and other foodstuffs, the French found that they could call during the summer on Malecite villages for men to fight in their colonial wars and find most of the male population at home.

For the next sixty years the Malecite joined the French during intercolonial hostilities against the British, especially when roused to action by the incitements of their priest, Father Germain, who laboured among the Malecite from 1740 to 1763. Yet the Malecite were not pawns of the French. Missionaries such as Germain knew that the native population was fighting as much for their own interest in protecting their lands as they were for French presents. Like traditional sagamores, the priest might persuade but he could not coerce. Nor were the British the Malecite’s most dreaded foe, for sporadic warfare continued with the Mi’kmaq until the mid1750s. Wooden palisades about the major horticultural village of Meductic, located on the Saint John River below present-day Woodstock, and a smaller settlement located on the Nerepis River were erected as much against Mi’kmaq attacks as they were against the Iroquois and English.

Following the end of French rule in the northeast, the Malecite abandoned Meductic and many of this village’s former inhabitants moved to Aukpaque, on land granted them by the British in 1767 near present-day Fredericton. Each year Aukpaque’s residents met in council to settle disputes and allocate winter hunting territories on a large island near their village. Although the Malecite participated in three treaties of peace and friendship with the British, in 1725, 1749, and 1760, the claims of American rebels in 1776 that British settlers eventually would take away native lands led a Malecite splinter group to join an abortive attack on Fort Cumberland. This incident split the Aukpaque council into pro-British and pro-American factions. Lieutenant Governor Michael Francklin, who as a young man himself had experienced a year of captivity among the Malecite during which time he learned their language, and his deputy, James White, successfully persuaded the Malecite to continue at peace with Britain. Yet the rebel warnings proved prescient, for Loyalist expansion after 1783 meant the end of the Malecite’s traditional hunting and fishing way of life.

After the loss of Aukpaque to Loyalists in 1794, the Malecite population grew more dispersed. Most of the former Aukpaque population moved to nearby Kingsclear, close to a Roman Catholic mission station, where they obtained a reserve. They also received two small islands called “the Brothers” near the mouth of the Saint John in 1838. Other bands continued a hunting and trapping existence along the upper reaches of the Saint John River where they came into conflict periodically with Mi’kmaq hunters and trappers moving inland from the Gulf of St Lawrence coast. One camping ground located near the Roman Catholic mission of Saint-Basile in the vicinity of Edmundston became a reservation. Farther south along the Saint John River, a large tract at Tobique, originally embracing 6,400 acres, was set aside to encourage agriculture.

Meanwhile, opportunities to engage in commercial ventures and wage labour attracted Malecite both to the south shore of the St Lawrence and to the lower Saint John River. Several families from Tobique migrated to Isle Verte and Cacouna townships in Quebec where a reserve was eventually set aside for them at Viger. By the late nineteenth century, small reservations were established at Woodstock, Oromocto, and in the vicinity of Fredericton as Malecite progressively became involved in commercial handcraft ventures, boat loading, and river driving.

Until the early twentieth century, the Malecite also held a reserve near the mouth of the St Croix River. Gradually the Malecite abandoned uneconomic reserves like those on the St Croix and the Brothers. Small non-reserve settlements disappeared. By the mid 1800s rectangular houses with pitched roofs and lean-to outbuildings had replaced the conical wigwam almost entirely. After 1900, whole families migrated seasonally to participate in the commercial potato and blueberry harvest, while, starting during the World War II, large numbers of men and women seeking permanent work began to move to industrial centres in Maine, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Many who left returned after a time, however, drawn by loyalties to their extended families and strong cultural and community ties.

Another Eastern Algonquian people, the Mi’kmaq, speak a distinct language, of which three different dialectical variations are spoken respectively in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and southern Quebec. While the name Mi’kmaq has been translated variously as “allies” and “ones of high ability,” the Mi’kmaq refer to themselves as elnu, meaning “the people.” Their territory included all of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, lands in New Brunswick along the Northumberland Strait and the Gulf of St Lawrence, the Gaspé peninsula, and a sector of southwestern Newfoundland. It is also possible that they occupied southern coastal New Brunswick before Malecite expansion downstream to the mouths of the Saint John and St Croix rivers in the late sixteenth century. Mi’kmaq occupation of Newfoundland, prior to the early eighteenth century when French colonial administrators encouraged Mi’kmaq warriors to join French military expeditions to this island, remains controversial. Oral traditions recount that bands regarded southwestern Newfoundland as an alternative resource area whenever moose became scarce on Cape Breton Island. Archaeological evidence substantiates that, prior to their contact with Europeans, the Mi’kmaq hunted seals and walrus on the Magdalen Islands, and thus it is possible that a population so well equipped for marine travel may have ventured, by way of St Paul’s Island in the Cabot Strait, to Newfoundland as well. Mi’kmaq birchbark canoes exhibit raised gunnels amidships which militate against the craft swamping in rough water. These mariners also obtained shallops in trade by 1600 and sailed them as far as southern Maine.

Mi’kmaq currently occupy communities throughout their ancestral homelands. Because their reserves cut across a range of different ecological zones, resources and economic opportunities differ from place to place. On Nova Scotia’s southwestern coast, community members have access to lobster, crab, and shellfish beds, while settlements on large rivers in New Brunswick and Quebec like the Mirimichi and Restigouche focus on seasonal runs of salmon. Some villages still employ a distinctive identifying mark; for example, since the late seventeenth century a salmon has represented the Restigouche peoples. Major reserves include Maria and Restigouche in Quebec; Big Cove, Burnt Church, Eel Ground, and Red Bank in New Brunswick; Annapolis, Arcadia, Bear River, Cole Harbour, Gold River, Horton, Millbrook, Pictou Landing, Pomquet-Afton, and Shubenacadie in Nova Scotia; Escasoni, Membertou, Nyanza, and Whycocomaugh in Cape Breton; Lennox Island in Prince Edward Island; and Conne River in Newfoundland.

French clerics and colonists at Port Royal established positive enough ties with the Mi’kmaq that in 1610 the sagamore Membertou and twenty-one members of his band requested baptism. In following years Mi’kmaq-Acadian intermarriage occurred. Members of the Mius d’Entremont family in southwestern Nova Scotia retained close and lasting connections with the native women by whom they had children, although they never married any of their consorts. In one instance a Mi’kmaq chief, Jehan Claude (Glode), married Marie Salé, a French widow. Such unions gave rise to the surnames Mius, or Muise, and Glode in use in Mi’kmaq communities today.

The Mi’kmaq after 1690 proved such valuable military allies that, when the Treaty of Utrecht transferred mainland Nova Scotia to British control in 1713, the French tried to relocate bands on Cape Breton which was still in French hands. When this plan failed, French colonial authorities after 1720 began to distribute annual presents, which they transported from the newly erected Fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton to bands who resided deep inside British territory. Such distributions most frequently took place on Cape Breton. Between 1716 and 1722 the Abbé Antoine Gaulin settled bands in nascent horticultural communities at Antigonish and Shubenacadie. Gaulin, along with the Abbé Pierre-Antoine Maillard and the Abbé Louis-Joseph Le Loutre, was one of three graduates of the Séminaire-des-Missions-Étrangères in Paris who laboured indefatigably among the Mi’kmaq most of their lives. In 1724 the main Antigonish mission moved to Mirligueche (Malagawatch) on the Bras d’Or Lakes in Cape Breton, where in 1735 it came under Maillard’s auspices. At each site the Mi’kmaq planted some corn, beans, squash, European-introduced potatoes, and grain but produced no surplus for transport to Louisbourg as the French had hoped. Engaging in economic endeavours more suited to their culture, all-male groups set off annually for the seal hunt on the Magdalene Islands to satisfy Louisbourg’s demands for sea oil, leaving their wives and children behind.

From the 1720s to the late 1750s, the French at Louisbourg divided up the coastline of the Mik’maq’s territory into “commands” which they viewed as being under the aegis of prominent men. Commissions, gifts, and medals were allocated to these chiefs, who were encouraged to attack British crews that came ashore for water or provisions. Whenever war erupted between France and Britain, Mi’kmaq ransomed the captured crews and sailed the ships to Louisbourg to obtain prize money. These practices continued until 1745–46, when a terrible plague accompanying an ill-fated French expedition ravaged native bands so extensively that their population fell to one-third its previous size.

Such a disaster evidently gave certain bands pause to reflect on their options, for after this date several began making overtures to the British. When Le Loutre left his Shubenacadie headquarters for a visit to France in 1752, a native delegation from his own mission signed a treaty of peace and friendship with the British at Halifax. Other bands soon followed suit. This seeming defection from the French cause often has been cited as evidence that the Mi’kmaq lacked even a nascent tribal organization. However, in 1754 a grand sagamore by the name of Argimault called for removal of both English and French forts in the Isthmus of Chignecto region on behalf of the entire Mi’kmaq people. His petitions and those of others demonstrated that the Micmac’s most pressing concern lay with the native community’s ability to retain a measure of political jurisdiction over its traditional territories in the face of warring colonial powers intent on dividing up the same lands for their own interests.

Owing to a treacherous attack made on a Mi’kmaq band at Jeddore by British sailors, the main body of Micmac rededicated itself to fighting the English until the fall of New France in 1760. Mi’kmaq also assisted certain Acadian families during the Acadian removals of 1755 and 1758 and in some instances adopted Acadians into their bands. Yet at least one chief, Penall Argomartin from Gold River in Nova Scotia, went to Quebec and fought alongside the British on the Plains of Abraham. To encourage the Mi’kmaq to sign peace treaties in 1760 and 1761, Lieutenant Governor Jonathan Belcher verbally promised to remove settlers from a vast tract of land extending from the Baie-des-Chaleurs southeast to Cape Breton and inland to Shubenacadie. On such assurances, representatives of all bands signed peace agreements in 1760 and 1761, only to have the British fornmally retract them later.

Finding British settlement after 1760 rapidly obstructing their use of former hunting and fishing grounds, the Mi’kmaq adopted a peripatetic existence, selling baskets and wooden implements to rural homesteads. Their population numbers, hovering near 1,000, were too small to excite major concern in the growing British villages and towns, although, during the American Revolution, bands along the Northumberland Strait were, with some reason, suspected of “nefarious” activities against Loyalist newcomers. A number of chiefs in 1783 received licences to occupy lands, and until 1810 a few individuals and small groups had lands granted to them. A series of orders-in-council between 1820 and 1840 secured yet more tracts for occupation, and by the turn of the nineteenth century Mi’kmaq were living on more than sixty allotments. Several engaged in farming had purchased property in the Annapolis valley area, while chiefs along the Mirimichi and other rivers in New Brunswick struggled to manage a burgeoning system of land and resource leases under their reserves’ jurisdiction in the face of settlers who sought to wrest land from native control.

In 1940 and 1941 the Nova Scotian government undertook to settle all Mi’kmaq on two reserves at Shubenacadie and Escasoni. Encouraged to participate in this centralization program by offers of housing, jobs, and educational and community services, many Mi’kmaq relocated, only to find that neither of the communities’ economic bases could support increased numbers. By the mid-1950s many had moved back to lands they once had vacated. On Prince Edward Island and in Pictou County in Nova Scotia, bands did not possess formal reserves until the late nineteenth century, when tracts were set aside for them. Though much former Mi’kmaq land has been expropriated or ceded over the years, additional lands occasionally have been purchased, and the community at Conne River in Newfoundland only recently has acquired reserve status.