Innu

The Innu speak two Cree dialects, Nascapi and Montagnais, and number approximately 15,000, of whom approximately 2,000 live in Labrador and the remainder in Quebec. The Innu of Quebec reside in ten settlements: Quiatchouan (Montagnais du Lac Saint-Jean); Les Escoumins (Montagnais de les Escoumins); Pessamiu (Betsiamites); Montagnais de Pakuat Shipu (Saint-Augustin); Uashat (Sept Îles; Uashat mak Maniutenam); Ekuanitshu (Mingan); Nutashkuan (Montagnais de Natashquan); Uanaman-shipu (Montagnais de La Romaine); Maimekush (Montagnais de Schefferville); and Kawawachekamach (about nine kilometres from Schefferville, also known as Fort Chimo Nascapi). The Labrador Innu live primarily in two communities, North West River (Sheshatshui) and Davis Inlet (Utshimassit). The largest communities are Montagnais du Lac Saint-Jean, which had a population of 3,979 in 1993, and Betsiamites, with 2,722. Montagnais de Pakuat Shipu (Saint-Augustin) is one of the smallest Innu communities, whose population numbered only 213 in 1993.

The name “Innu” means “human being” and is used by Innu to distinguish themselves from Inuit and other non-Innu. They regard themselves as a distinct people who inhabit Nitassinan, “our land.” Innu do not see themselves as belonging to discrete bands but as part of a fluid population. Those who inhabit the heavily wooded southern parts of their territory closer to the St Lawrence River and Gulf drainage system have been called Montagnais or “Mountaineers” by the French. Nascapi is a derogatory term meaning “uncivilized” and was inappropriately applied to the northeastern Innu who inhabit the tundra of the North Atlantic and Ungava Bay drainage area. The words Nascapi and Montagnais, however, are still used to distinguish two of the three dialects of Eastern Cree. The Nascapi dialect is spoken by the Schefferville and Davis Inlet Innu; the remaining Innu communities speak the Montagnais dialect. For many Innu, French is an accepted second language.

Innu prehistory is poorly known and controversial. Their territory was occupied by a hunting people adapted to both marine and land animals. The Innu may have had a maritime culture before being forced inland by Thule/Inuit people and may have been linked to the now extinct Beothuk; their socio-economic system focused on big-game hunting, sealing, fishing, and trapping. Some time before contact, the Innu may have moved into the Subarctic as a result of Iroquois expansion into the Gulf of St Lawrence. As a non-horticultural people they were mobile, and extensive territoriality was an important feature of their economic system. The Innu were likely one of the first Subarctic Northern Algonquians to come into contact with Europeans, perhaps meeting the Jacques Cartier expedition in 1534. It is also likely they had encountered and traded with earlier Europeans such as the Basques, if not the Norse. Groups of up to 1,500 were reported to have met European ships for trade. At this time, the Innu have been estimated to number 4,000 people. After contact in the sixteenth century, the Innu became dependent upon new technologies such as muskets, powder, and shot, which intensified their intertribal warfare with the Iroquois and the Inuit. Trading vessels from Europe gradually contributed to the redirection of the Innu’s seasonal movements towards the Gulf of St Lawrence.

The Montagnais-speaking Innu had a diverse economy based upon eels caught in the fall from the St Lawrence River, porcupine, beaver, bear, beaver, waterfowl, and caribou. Their hunting territories extended south across the St Lawrence River, and they participated in a regional trade with agricultural peoples such as the Abenaki, from whom they had access to cornmeal and tobacco. They traded these goods to Nascapi-speaking Innu, following trade routes and protocols established before contact. The Nascapi-speaking Innu relied to a larger extent on the hunting of caribou on the barren lands in the Ungava Bay region.

Innu settlement was characterized by extensive movement coinciding with seasonal cycles and community membership. This pattern was inimical to efficient fur trapping and to later attempts by missionaries to foster sedentary settlement. As trade goods became important to the Innu, however, seasonal cycles were modified to include visits to the fur-trade posts. The trade monopoly held by the HBC encouraged a process whereby the location of trading posts became important to Innu settlement and social organization. As the posts diminished in number and relocated to the coast, the Innu reorganized into much larger groups near the posts, thereby decreasing the size and number of bands. By the mid-twentieth century, large centres of permanent populations had emerged at Betsiamites on the St Lawrence, Schefferville (Innu were relocated there fromFort Mackenzie in 1947), Sept-Îles, and Happy Valley near the Goose Bay air base on Hamilton Inlet.

The seventeenth-century Innu were organized in multi-family lodges housing between ten and twenty people. Several lodges composed larger winter bands of between thirty-five to seventy-five people. Membership was flexible within the groups and exogamy was usually matrilocal in nature, the husband joining his wife’s group. The hunting group was the central socio-economic unit. Women worked with leather to make clothes, snowshoes, containers, and coverings, while men were specialists in wood work, including the making of canoes, toboggans, wooden utensils, and frames for snowshoes.

Innu social organization was undermined by the fur trade as sudden wealth inundated local bands. The effects of the fur trade were mixed: trade goods may have arbitrarily created a dependence of the women on male heads of households and may also have intensified polygamy as a means of securing additional labourers for the processing of furs. Within the fur trade economy, women trapped for furs and prepared hides but men controlled the exchange of goods. The gradual adoption of European ways increasingly displaced the equality that had formerly prevailed in the economic roles of men and women.

A skilled and generous hunter who could acquire influence and a following became a leader, a wotshimao, and made critical decisions concerning locations to find game and to camp. Good hunters tended to be polygamous, since having more than one spouse indicated a hunter’s ability to provide surplus meat. Rites of passage for men were closely tied to hunting ability. Personal autonomy, however, was paramount for the Innu, and it was reflected in a strong ethic of self-sufficiency and independence. The Innu saw themselves as part of a seamless creation that included humans and non-humans alike. Caribou were the centre of a religious ceremony called the mokoshan, a communal sacred feast which involved the use of caribou marrow and long bones to honour the spirits of the slain animals, as well as to avert and cure sickness. The best hunters were recognized during the feast and awarded guardianship over the bones. Hunting was a sacred act which required the wearing of elaborate painted ceremonial robes of caribou skin.

Some Innu, whose participation in the early fur-trade economy had declined with the growing depletion of fur-bearing animals, became attracted to Catholic missions near the St Lawrence River. They subsequently joined colonies such as that established in 1638 at Sillery, Quebec, which is often described as the first reserve in Canada. Missionaries, however, did not have major success until the mid-1800s, when many Montagnais-speaking Innu began converting to Anglicism and Roman Catholicism.

Religious observances were often mixed, incorporating both traditional and Christian concepts. The Roman Catholic Church became influential among the Innu of the St Lawrence and the eastern part of Labrador. Although the church discouraged first-cousin marriage, which would have included cross-cousin marriage (the marriage of children of siblings of opposite sex), and promoted farming over hunting, the absence of regular priests permitted the Innu to merge Christian and Innu religious beliefs.

After the 1920s, reduction in the Labrador caribou herd forced the Innu to move into clustered camps in Voisey’s Bay, south of Nain, a change marked by disease, starvation, and an increasing dependence upon government. Later, with the Hudson’s Bay Company closing of its small interior posts in the 1940s, the Innu concentrated their trading at select coastal communities such as Sheshatshui. Newfoundland’s entry into Confederation in 1949 had a profound impact on its Innu population, who now came under the control of the province. Since Newfoundland game laws are among the most restrictive in Canada, the Innu risked arrest every time they hunted. As the Innu found their land arbitrarily severed by Newfoundland and Quebec boundaries, they were further subjugated to legislation by both provinces that overrode their hunting and trapping rights.

The Innu were forced onto reserves in the 1950s to make way for large-scale industrial development, and by 1971 most Innu had moved into inferior government-built houses in settlements with inadequate sanitation. At the same time, beginning in the 1960s and continuing to the present, Innu territory has been sought for logging, mining, and hydroelectric development. Many Innu have entered a cash economy in conjunction with neighbouring Inuit and non-Innu, though fur trapping, fishing, and hunting are still important. Income derived from commercial fishing on the coast for cod, salmon, and arctic char, trapping of mink, otter, and foxes, and the sale of moccasins and snowshoes is supplemented by wage labour and social assistance. The traditional ethic of sharing has been undermined in the context of a wage economy and social assistance, for wages and welfare payments, unlike caribou meat, are not shared. Increased access to medical aid and dependable food supplies, however, have contributed to an increase in Innu population.

Innu artistic achievements are closely associated with spirituality, and hunting plays an important role. Innu women excelled in arts converting animal and plant materials into sacred objects including special embroidered cloaks and game bags used for hunting. Handmade moccasins and mittens are still worn today and sold to non-Innu. Storytelling remains an important aspect of Innu culture, and it helps to close what has become an enlarging generational gap between children and elders. The Innu still make sweat lodges and use ceremonial clothes to hunt.

By the 1970s most Innu children were in school, where they were taught by non-Innu who deprecated their culture and language. Innu parents were denied social assistance if their children did not attend school. Today, the situation is somewhat better. Some teacher’s aids are Innu, and they are encouraging a restructuring of the school system to accommodate the spring and fall hunts. Increasingly, as well, Innu women are playing a major role in the education of their children and in literacy programs.

Still, enormous problems remain. The suicide rate in northern Labrador is seventeen times the national average. The Innu also suffer from alcohol addiction. The Innu believe that this type of self-destructive behaviour was unknown until the mid-twentieth century, when they began to lose control over their lands. They have increasingly turned to native healing to resolve these problems and have sought assistance from native-healing organizations across Canada. At the same time, they have organized politically. The early 1970s witnessed the establishment of three Innu political entities: the Conseil Attikameg-Montagnais in Quebec, the Nascapi Montagnais Innu Association in Labrador (now known as the Innu Nation), and the Nascapi of Schefferville. The last group was excluded from the James Bay Agreement in 1975, but it negotiated a separate agreement in 1978, known as the Northeastern Quebec Agreement, which granted them a new village (Kawawachikamach) and the right to local government.

A later piece of legislation, the 1984 Cree-Mascepi Act, recognized the native right of self-government and established a system of land management. The Labrador Innu, through the Innu Nation, began land-claims negotiations with the federal and provincial governments in July 1991. A framework agreement was signed on 29 March 1996, whereby the parties agreed to link self-government and land-claims negotiations. Talks regarding self-government began in May 1996, and a framework agreement was signed that October. In 1998, negotiations over a final agreement were still under way.

The Innu received worldwide attention for their protests against the building in 1979 of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air base at Goose Bay, Labrador. A few years later, in 1988, the Innu invaded the air base to protest low-level flights which threatened to decimate animal populations and end their hunting culture. Hundreds of Innu were arrested. Further protests followed, but in February 1996, after an environmental-review process from which the Innu withdrew on the ground that it was biased, the federal government and NATO signed a new agreement that allowed low-level flight training. Innu Nation president Peter Penashue denounced the government for ignoring the “rights and interests of Aboriginal people by entering into arrangements that alienate our lands and make it hard for us to practice our traditional lifestyle on the land.” Notwithstanding this defeat, the campaign against NATO flights– a campaign led by elders and women – has given the Innu a new sense of direction as they reassert their ownership over their lands and their identity as a people.

The Innu have also been active on another front. On 20 August 1997 more than 250 Innu and Inuit protestors blocked construction of a road and airstrip designed to service a proposed mining development at Voisey’s Bay, Labrador. The Newfoundland Court of Appeal granted an injunction to the Labrador Inuit Association against the Voisey’s Bay Nickel Company, halting construction until the Court had an opportunity to hear an appeal of another court decision allowing the work to proceed. At this point, the company decided to suspend construction activities and to enter with negotiations within the Innu and Inuit. The Innu position in these negotiations is clear: as Innu Nation president Katie Rich has put it, “Any development on our land must be done on our terms, with our consent.”

Still another political battle has been waged by the Nascapi-speaking Innu of Davis Inlet. Innu settled on the Labrador coast in the twentieth century. Although more removed from contact with Europeans than the Montagnais-speaking Innu, at the beginning of the twentieth century they moved south to the St Lawrence River or to the Atlantic coast to winter near white settlements. Nascapi-speaking Innu also regularly congregated in the warmer months with the James Bay Cree at large interior lakes draining into the St Lawrence River, Hudson Bay, or Davis Inlet. Many Nascapi-speaking Innu remained largely independent of the fur trade, concentrating instead on the hunting of large game.

The Nascapi-speaking Innu of Labrador were forced to relocate to a post on the coast near Davis Inlet after a failed caribou migration in 1916. These Davis Inlet Innu originally consisted of two separate communities, one at Davis Inlet and the other on the adjacent barren grounds, but the two groups merged in 1924 as a result of the ministrations of a Roman Catholic priest. Because of their split residence on the coast and the barren grounds, two forms of community life emerged. The Innu on the barren grounds continued to hunt and maintain traditional social values, while those in the coastal settlement experienced the social disruption associated with twentieth-century reserve life. Following the controversy triggered in 1993 by the attempted suicide of six children, the federal and provincial governments entered into negotiations with the Innu over a proposed relocation. The Innu themselves were anxious to end their isolation in Davis Inlet, which is 300 kilometres distant by air from the closest Innu settlement and hospital. Negotiations proceeded slowly, however, concluding only in November 1996 with the signing of the Mushuau Innu Relocation Agreement. Under this agreement, the Davis Inlet Innu are to be moved to the community of Natuashish (Little Sango Pond) on the mainland, where they will have a land base of about 2,000 hectares and services equivalent to those of other aboriginal peoples in Canada. The relocation is to take about five years. According to Katie Rich, the agreement “is a great achievement for all our people, but especially for the Elders who have been struggling for thirty years to build a better future.”