Economic Life

While Woodland Algonquians today rarely engage in traditional occupations, they still evince pride in their heritage as hardy and ingenious inhabitants of an environment characterized by alternating seasonal abundance and scarcity. Groups historically maintained a portable settlement pattern, fashioning their belongings from materials which were light in weight and extremely resilient. Their modes of transportation, dwellings, clothing, tools, and utensils all testified to their adeptness in barkworking, woodworking, hideworking, stoneworking, clayworking, and weaving reed and fibre materials derived from their mixed forest surroundings. Equipped with a birchbark canoe, bark lodge coverings and bark storage containers, families could travel easily in the spring and fall. Sometimes moosehide, spruce-bark, or elmbark canoes also were used. Snowshoes and toboggans facilitated transportation over winter hunting grounds. Women transported infants comfortably and safety on their backs using wooden cradle boards.

Canadian Algonquians tended to be hunters, fishers, and gatherers rather than intensive horticulturalists. North of the upper Great Lakes, horticulture where it existed at all remained marginal and settlement patterns changed seasonally. Bands dispersed into small extended family groups during the winter. A few closely related men, with their wives and children, departed to hunt under the jurisdiction of the eldest male or best hunter. These groups congregated during the warmer months into larger assemblages at well-known camping grounds near riverine and lacustrine fishing sites. The composition of these summer bands nevertheless changed from year to year, as families spalled off and migrated throughout a region at will, visiting for trade, social reasons, or because of natural vicissitudes such as game scarcity or forest fires.

In the present-day Maritime provinces, crops other than tobacco were not grown prior to the arrival of Europeans, although furs, hides, copper, chert, and shell were traded for corn with horticultural groups south of the Kennebec River in Maine. As was the case around the upper Great Lakes, group size fluctuated seasonally. Hunters sought woodland caribou, moose, bear, and beaver for food and clothing, while smaller fur-bearing species such as fisher, fox, lynx, and muskrat provided pelts for domestic use and trade. Farther south, deer and the now-extinct woodland bison provided meat and hides. During the early twentieth century, deer ranges moved northward to replace caribou in the Maritimes, southern Quebec, and lands bordering the upper Great Lakes.

Along the Atlantic seaboard, Algonquian groups hunted sea mammals and collected shellfish and crustaceans. Anadromous and catadromous fish such as alewives, salmon, smelt, sturgeon, bass, and eels were taken seasonally during runs by spears, hooks and lines, shallowseine nets, and riverine weirs. In the Great Lakes region, similar fishing techniques were used to harvest seasonal runs of whitefish, lake trout, pickerel, and sturgeon. Gathered foods included ground nuts, wild grapes, and fiddlehead ferns in the east and wild rice in Ontario and Manitoba. Medicinal plants were also sought after. Migratory birds, especially waterfowl, offered an important resource in both eastern and central areas. Bands living in regions with an annual growing season of well over one hundred frost-free days raised corn, beans, squash, and tobacco and traded crop surpluses with their neighbours for furs and other goods. Since stored horticultural produce constituted a significant proportion of these peoples’ winter diet, their settlements had a more permanent character than those farther north.

Women cared for children, tanned hides, and made hide and fur garments, bark bowls, boxes, other bark utensils, and, prior to European contact, pottery containers. They sewed bark with split spruce root and used babiche, or rawhide thong, to web snowshoes. They also employed earthen pigments, shell beads, porcupine quills, and moosehair to decorate their garments and belongings with symmetrical double-curve motifs in the east, and floral and geometric designs farther to the west. Men fashioned items of stone and wood; among these were stone and wooden pipes, stone and wooden weapons, shields, traps, tools, snowshoe frames, and wooden ribs for birchbark canoes. Men’s and women’s economic roles were complementary and remained so well into the twentieth century.

Major changes occurred in these traditional economies after 1600. While exchanges of staples such as corn, dried fish, and peltry always had been important among indigenous populations, the fur trade led to the formation of trade and supply centres at new locations, accessible to Europeans. Bands eagerly sought iron and copper implements – kettles, axes, knives, needles, and guns – and developed a taste for glass beads, broadcloth, and introduced foodstuffs. By 1626 colonists in present-day Massachusetts had begun to trade with the Eastern Abenaki, exchanging wampum obtained in southern New England for furs. The Abenaki, in turn, reintroduced this wampum into the Quebec trade.

As a degree of dependence on European trade items ensued, both French and English sought to manipulate the distribution of these goods to induce the aboriginal population to act in accordance with colonial policies foreign to the bands themselves. Emphasis on trapping sedentary fur-bearing animals gave rise to a system of family hunting territories, inheritable in the male line. Chiefs along the maritime coast who channelled the transport and exchange of furs to their own advantage initially gained influence. After 1680, however, when the French redirected their primary energies from trade to colonial warfare, the status of such leaders waned. Jesuit and Capuchin missionaries sent to live in the native villages usurped the role of intermediaries between native bands and French colonial administrators. Horticulture, encouraged by missionaries, provided both a source of winter emergency rations and provision for warriors engaged by the French in raids on the English. By the early eighteenth century, the political milieu exerted a major influence on native ceremonial clothing styles as well, with chiefs’ broadcloth coats, obtained in gift exchanges with colonial authorities, sporting epaulets and trim reminiscent of European military uniforms.

When the French era ended, the settlement of New England “planters” and later of Loyalists on former hunting grounds in the Maritime region led Malecite and Mi’kmaq to seek alternative forms of employment based on traditional skills but developed in new and creative ways. Men’s woodworking abilities found outlets in the making of commercially saleable utilitarian items: potato and apple baskets, hampers, butter tubs, churns, axe handles, toboggans, snowshoes, wood baskets, and barrels. Mi’kmaq women sold the finely crafted quillwork bark baskets that they had made since the mid-1700s. “Fancy baskets” appeared on the eastern market as early as 1815. Men and women worked together in their production: men prepared the black ash, white ash, or maple splints, and women undertook the intricate basket weaving. While some products such as eel pots were indigenous, the fact that native splint basketry shows parallels with Swedish and German prototypes suggests that Europeans introduced this form of industry to southern coastal Algonquians and, over time, knowledge of the skill diffused northward. In the Maritime provinces around 1850, native craftspeople received free passage on steamboats and trains as an incentive for them to get their products to market and so remain self-supporting. Some enterprising individuals opened craft shops. For instance, in 1860 one shop on the St Mary’s reserve near Fredericton offered Malecite, Mi’kmaq, and Huron merchandise for sale. The fancy basket industry continued to grow, with newer forms of braided sweet grass, or splint and sweetgrass together, taking their place beside older basket styles.

During the nineteenth century, men obtained income from guiding, river driving, lumbering, assisting on surveys, prospecting, and stevedoring. Guiding earned a man prestige, although, since it was gauged for an outside market, it precluded the use of traditional hunting strategies. Trapping for peltry and hunting to obtain moose hides continued, but competition with white settlers resulted everywhere in scarities in fur-bearer and game animals by 1870. As well, damming of rivers in the Maritimes and Ontario after the 1840s severely damaged fish stocks in many rivers upon which bands had formerly depended. At locations well within the one hundred frost-free days needed to bring crops to maturation, families farmed until the first decades of the twentieth century, although they sometimes had difficulty acquiring the equipment and funds needed to sustain such enterprises. Uncultivated reserve lands quickly fell under the eye of covetous whites and many hectares were alienated as the result of settler lobbying.

Earlier this century, Abenaki, Algonkin, Ojibwa, and Ottawa joined lumbering camps both in Canada and the United States, and Mi’kmaq men from Restigouche, Quebec worked on high-steel construction projects in Boston. On-reserve industries that were governed less by the seasons included stores, garages, and small construction enterprises. Since 1900, Malecite and Mi’kmaq families have gone seasonally to northern Maine for blueberry raking in late summer and potato harvesting in September and October. Fiddlehead fronds gathered by the Malecite in the spring find a ready market.

During the 1970s there was an emphasis on economic specialization as reserves sought to establish marinas, parks, tourist cabins, restaurants, craft shops, and small art galleries. In some regions industrial pollution created serious obstacles to development: for instance, in the Kenora district of Ontario or at the Pictou Landing community on Boat Harbour, Nova Scotia. Yet increased knowledge of economic issues and problems also has led to more careful monitoring of economic development. The handcraft industry has diversified, with the Mi’kmaq leading the way in creating delicately coloured wood-splint flowers. The market for “dream catchers,” based on an indigenous variant of the “cat’s cradle” found among many northeastern Algonquian cultures, has grown phenomenally. At the same time, native youth have entered professional careers in art, medicine and other health professions, journalism, business and resource management, the justice system, education, law, and social work.

Unemployment levels remain high on Algonquian reserves. At Golden Lake, east of Ottawa, the unemployment rate is 30 percent, and it exceeds 70 percent in some Maritime communities. Attendant social problems are various, depending on area. Where residents depend on limited funding for housing from the Department of Indian Affairs, dwellings are often small and overcrowded. Plans are being made, however, to rectify these problems and provide affordable attractive housing suitable to families with school-age children. Problems such as drug and alcohol abuse are being addressed at government-funded rehabilitation and health centres. Many communities have an educational counsellor, native police officers, an alcohol and drug abuse counsellor, nursing staff, and sometimes a social worker, all of whom may be native. But the challenges remain formidable. Local counsellors, medical personnel, and social workers often remain too overburdened to cope more than on a caseload basis with the mental and physical consequences, on both individuals and families, of systemic racism, unemployment, inadequate on-reserve housing, and lack of a good economic base for local development.

Some creative local solutions have been forthcoming. Dedicated individuals are involved in devising and managing sports and recreation programs. The native justice system in the Maritimes is experimenting with a locally controlled diversionary program which enables minor offenders to make reparations through community service. Architects are looking at the impact of housing on social issues and designing units, sometimes using local materials, with native cultural values in mind. All reserves have a central band office and several have attractive multipurpose cultural and recreational centres. Both modern and traditional elements have been blended at Wikwemikong on Manitoulin Island in the construction of a distinctive healing lodge modelled on the shape of an eagle, whose “wings” house the occupational therapy and counselling services and whose “breast” contains a central fire pit for traditional healing ceremonies.