Algonquin

Algonquin
Algonquin Couple, an 18th-century watercolor.
Total population
11,000
Regions with significant populations
Quebec, Ontario
Languages
French, English, Algonquin
Religions
Midewiwin
Related ethnic groups
Abnaki, Innu, Anicinàpek (Nipissing, Ojibwa, Mississaugas, Saulteaux, Odawa and Potawatomi)

The Algonquins (or Algonkins) are an aboriginal North American people speaking Algonquin, an Anishinaabe language. Culturally and linguistically, they are closely related to the Odawa and Ojibwe, with whom they form the larger Anicinàpe (or Anishinaabe) grouping. The Algonquin peoples call themselves either Omàmiwinini (plural: Omàmiwininiwak) or the more generalized name of Anicinàpe. Many Algonquins still speak the Algonquin language, called generally as Anicinàpemowin or specifically as Omàmiwininìmowin. The language is considered one of several divergent dialects of the Anishinaabe languages. Among younger speakers, the Algonquin language has experienced strong word borrowings from the Cree language.

The Algonquins were the victims of unfortunate European politics. The banding together of the Iroquois Confederacy had driven the Algonquins from lands that were once theirs, and when the French arrived trading firearms for furs, the Algonquins responded to the opportunity to establish an alliance. However, although the French were good friends to the Algonquins, the alliance was not victorious. Though the Algonquins were defeated by their rivals the Iroquois, the Dutch, and later the English, they were never destroyed, and the Algonquin Indian culture lives on in pockets of their once-vast territory.

Name

File:Algonquian langs.png

Distribution of Algonquian languages

The term "Algonquin" derives from the Maliseet word elakómkwik (IPA: [ɛlæˈɡomoɡwik]), "they are our relatives/allies".The tribe has also given its name to the much larger, heterogeneous group of Algonquian-speaking peoples who stretch from Virginia to the Rocky Mountains and north to Hudson Bay. Most Algonquins, however, live in Quebec; the nine Algonquin bands in that province and one in Ontario have a combined population of about 11,000. (Popular usage reflects some confusion on this point, in that the term "Algonquin" is also used to refer to all Algonquian-speaking societies).

History

Pre-colonial period

In the earliest oral history, the Algonquins were from the Atlantic coast. Together with other Anicinàpek, they arrived at the "First Stopping Place" near Montreal. While the other Anicinàpe peoples continued their journey up the Saint Lawrence River, the Algonquins settled along the Kitcisìpi (Ottawa River), an important highway for commerce, cultural exchange, and transportation. A distinct Algonquin identity, though, was not fully-realized until after the dividing of the Anicinàpek at the "Third Stopping Place," estimated at about 5,000 years ago near present day Detroit.

Archaeological sites on Morrison Island near Pembroke, within the territory of the Kitcisìpiriniwak, reveal a 1000-year-old culture that manufactured copper tools and weapons. Copper ore was extracted north of Lake Superior and distributed down to northern New York State. Local pottery artifacts from this period show widespread similarities that indicate the continuing use of the river for cultural exchange throughout the Canadian Shield and beyond. Some centuries later the Algonquin tribe moved in and inhabited the islands and shores along the Ottawa, and by the 1600s the first Europeans found them well-established as a hunter-gatherer society in control of the river. The Kitcisìpiriniwak showed entrepreneurial spirit. On Morrison Island, at the location of where 5,000-year-old copper artifacts were discovered, the Kitcisìpirini band levied a toll on canoe flotillas descending the river.

Before European contact, most Algonquians lived by hunting and fishing, although quite a few supplemented their diet by cultivating corn, beans, squash, and (particularly among the Ojibwe) wild rice.

Colonial period

At the time of the first European settlements in North America, Algonquin tribes occupied what is now New England, New Jersey, southeastern New York, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, all of Canada east of the Rocky Mountains, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and were occasionally present in Kentucky. They were most concentrated in the New England region. The pre-historic or pre-contact homeland of the Algonquian peoples is not known. At the time of the European arrival, the hegemonic Iroquois Federation was regularly at war with their Algonquian neighbors, forcing them to settle in regions unoccupied by Iroquois.

After contact with the Europeans, the Algonquins became one of the key players in the Fur Trade. This led them to fight against the Iroquois due to their rivalry in the fur trade; and formed an alliance with the Montagnais to the east in 1570.

The first group of Algonquian that the French encountered were the Kitcisìpiriniwak ("Ottawa River Men"; singular: Kitcisìpirini) whose village was located on an island in the Ottawa River; the French called this group "La Nation de l'Isle." The first recorded meeting between Europeans and Algonquins occurred at Tadoussac in the summer of 1603, when Samuel de Champlain came upon a party of Algonquins, led by the Kitcisìpirini Chief Tessouat. They were celebrating with the Montagnais and Etechemins (Malecite) a recent victory over the Five Nations Iroquois. Champlain did not understand the strong totem/clan system that socially united the Algonquins rather than the European-styled politically united concept of nationhood. Consequently, there were several Algonquin bands, each with its own chief, needing political approval from each of the band's clan leaders. So, from 1603 some of the Algonquins allied themselves with the French under Samuel de Champlain. At the time of their first meeting with the French in 1603, the various Algonquin bands probably had a combined population somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,000.

Champlain made his first exploration of the Ottawa River during May, 1613 and reached the fortified Kitcisìpirini village at Morrison Island. Unlike the other Algonquin communities, Kitcisìpiriniwak did not change location with the seasons. They had chosen a strategic point astride the trade route between the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence and had prospered through the collection of beaver pelts from native traders passing through their territory. They pointed with great pride to their corn fields, a skill that they seemed to have acquired just before the arrival of the French. At first, the term "Algonquin" was used only for a second group, the Wàwàckeciriniwak. However, by 1615 the name was applied to all of the Algonquin bands living along the Ottawa River. Because of keen interest to gain control of the lower Ottawa River the Kitcisìpiriniwak and the Wàwàckeciriniwak came under fierce opposition. These two large groups allied together, under the leadership of Sachem Charles Parcharini, maintaining the Omàmiwinini identity and territory.

The Algonquin Indians were the victims of unfortunate European politics. The banding together of the Iroquois Confederacy had driven the Algonquins from lands that were once theirs, and when the French arrived trading firearms for furs, the Algonquins responded to the opportunity to establish an alliance. Though the French were good friends to the Algonquins, they did not make such good allies. The powerful Iroquois, aided first by the Dutch and later by the English, defeated the French and Algonquins alike.

In 1632, after Sir David Kirke's occupation of New France had demonstrated French colonial vulnerability, the French began to trade muskets to the Algonquins and their allies. French Jesuits began to actively seek Algonquin conversions to Roman Catholicism, opening up a bitter divide between traditionalists and converts.

Through all of these years, the Iroquois had never dared to attack the Kitcisìpirinik fortress, but in 1642 a surprise winter raid hit the Algonkin while most of their warriors were absent and inflicted severe casualties. On March 6 (Ash Wednesday), 1647, a large Mohawk war party hit the Kitcisìpiriniwak living near Trois-Rivières and almost exterminated them. The Kitcisìpiriniwak were still at Morrison Island in 1650 and inspired respect with their 400 warriors. When the French retreated from the Huron country that year, Tessouat is reported to have had the superior of the Jesuit mission suspended by his armpits because he refused to offer him the customary presents for being allowed to travel through Algonquin territory. Some joined the mission at Sillery and were mostly destroyed by an epidemic by 1676. Others, encouraged by the French, remained at Trois-Rivières and their settlement at nearby Pointe-du-Lac remained until about 1830, when the last 14 families, numbering about 50 persons, moved to Oka. The Sulpician Mission of the Mountain was founded at Montreal in 1677, and some Algonquins settled there together with Iroquois converts. However many did maintain attachment to the traditional territory and the trading traditions. While those that agreed to move to the established reserves or joined other historic bands and were then federally "recognized" by the Canadian authorities, many others did not re-locate and were later referred to as "stragglers" in the Ottawa and Pontiac Counties.

Starting in 1721, many Christian Algonquins began to summer at Oka, a Mohawk settlement near Montreal that was then considered one of the Seven Nations of Canada. Algonquin warriors continued to fight in alliance with France until the British conquest of Quebec in 1760. Fighting on behalf of the British Crown, the Algonquins took part in the Barry St Leger campaign during the American Revolutionary War. The British estimate in 1768 was 1,500. Currently, there are almost 8,000 Algonquins in Canada organized into ten separate First Nations: nine in Quebec and one in Ontario.

Loyalist settlers began encroaching on Algonquin lands shortly after the Revolution. Later in the nineteenth century, the lumber industry began to move up the Ottawa valley, and some Algonquins were relegated to a string of small reserves.

Culture

Algonquin family in their tent. Although the historical Algonquin society was largely hunting- and fishing-based, some Algonquins practiced agriculture and cultivated corn, beans, and squash, the famous "Three Sisters" of indigenous horticulture. Bring primarily a hunting culture, mobility was essential. Material used had to be light and easy to transport. Canoes were made of birch bark, sowed with spruce roots and rendered waterproof by the application of heated-up spruce resin and grease. It was easy to move and the material readily available. During winter, toboggans were used to transport material and people used snowshoes to walk on the snow. For babies, tikinàgan (cradleboard) were used to carry them. It was built with wood and covered with an envelope made of leather or material. The baby was standing up with his feet resting on a small board. The mother would then put the tikinàgan on her back. This allowed the infant to look around and observe his surroundings, therefore start learning how everyday tasks were done.

Algonquian-speaking people also practiced much agriculture, particularly south of the Great Lakes where the climate allows for a longer growing season. Other notable indigenous crops historically farmed by Algonquins are the sunflower and tobacco. Even among groups who mainly hunted, agricultural products were an important source of food and were obtained by trading with or raiding societies that also practiced agriculture.

The Algonquins of New England (who spoke eastern Algonquian) practiced a seasonal economy. The basic social unit was the village of a few hundred people related by a kinship structure. Villages were temporary and mobile. They moved to locations of greatest natural food supply, often breaking into smaller units or recombining as the circumstances required. This custom resulted in a certain degree of cross-tribal mobility, especially in troubled times.

Wigwam with birch bark covering

Traditionally, the Algonquins lived in either a birch bark wìkiwàm (wigwam) or in wooden mìkiwàm. In warm weather, villages were constructed of light wigwams for portability. In the winter more solid long houses were used, in which more than one clan could reside. Food supplies were cached in more permanent, semi-subterranean buildings.

In the spring, when the fish were spawning, the natives left their winter camps to build light villages at coastal locations and waterfalls. In March they caught smelt in nets and weirs, moving about in their birchbark canoes. In April they netted alewife, sturgeon and salmon. In May they caught cod with hook and line in the ocean, and trout, smelt, striped bass and flounder in the estuaries and streams. They put out to sea and hunted whales, porpoises, walruses and seals. The women and children gathered scallops, mussels, clams and crabs, all dishes in New England today.

In April through October, they hunted migratory birds and their eggs: Canada geese, brant, mourning doves, and others. In July and August they gathered strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and nuts. In September they split into small groups and moved up the streams to the forest. There they hunted beaver, caribou, moose and white-tailed deer.

In December when the snows began they recombined in winter camps in sheltered locations, where they built or reconstructed long houses. February and March were lean times. They relied on cached food, especially in southern New England. Northerners had a policy of going hungry for several days at a time. It is hypothesized that this policy kept the population down. The northerners were food gatherers only.

The southern Algonquins of New England relied predominantly on slash-and-burn agriculture. Fields were cleared by burning brush, allowing for one or two years of cultivation, after which the village moved to another location. This habit is the reason why the English found the region cleared and ready for planting. The native corn (maize) of which they planted various kinds, beans, and squash improved the diet to such a degree that the southerners reached a density of 287 persons per square hundred miles, as opposed to 41 in the north.

Even with this mobile form of crop rotation, southern villages were necessarily less mobile than northern. The natives continued their seasonal occupation but tended to move into fixed villages near their lands. Society made the adjustment partially by developing a gender-oriented division of labor. The women farmed and the men fished and hunted.

Religion

The Algonquins were practitioners of Midewiwin; they believed they were surrounded by many manitòk. With the arrival of the French, many Algonquins were proselytized to Christianity, but many still practice Midewiwin or co-practice Christianity and Midewiwin.

The Midewiwin (also spelled Midewin and Medewiwin) is the Grand Medicine Society of the aboriginal groups of the Maritimes, New England, and Great Lakes regions in North America. Its practitioners are called Midew and the practices of Midewiwin referred to as the Mide. The Midewiwin society is a secretive animistic religion, requiring an initiation, and then progressing to four levels of practioners. A particularly powerful and well-respected spiritual leader, who had reached the forth level of the Midewiwin, was called a Jaasakiid or Jiisakiiwinini, also known as a "Juggler" or "Shaking-tent Seer."

Tribal identities

Algonquian tribes of the New England area include Mohegan, Pequot, Narragansett, Wampanoag, Massachusett, Nipmuck, Pennacook, and Passamaquoddy. The Abenaki tribe is located in Maine and eastern Quebec. These tribes practiced some agriculture. The Maliseet of Maine, Quebec and New Brunswick, and the Micmac tribes of the Canadian Maritime provinces lived primarily on fishing. Further north are the Betsiamites, Atikamekw, Algonkin and Montagnais/Naskapi (Innu). The Beothuk people of Newfoundland are also believed to have been Algonquians, but they disappeared in the early nineteenth century and few records of their language or culture remain. In the west, Ojibwe/Chippewa, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and a variety of Cree groups lived in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Upper Michigan, Western Ontario and the Canadian Prairies. The Arapaho, Blackfoot, and Cheyenne are also indigenous to the Great Plains. In the Midwest lived the Shawnee, Illiniwek, Kickapoo, Menominee, Miami, and Sac and Fox, many of whom have since been displaced over great distances through Indian Removal. In the mid- and south-Atlantic are the traditional homes of the Powhatan, Lumbee, Nanticoke, Lenape, Munsee, and Mahican peoples.

The tribal names used to identify individual groups of Algonquian peoples and their languages are often misleading. These divisions have often been imposed by European efforts to manage native peoples, and to give them a European-style political identity better suited to the colonizers' ends. Within their communities, identities were often more fungible. Even today, intermarriage and tight inter-community alliances are common across the Algonquian peoples. Their languages are also quite similar. Across Canada, Cree speaking people may be able to understand each other with little difficulty, and the Ojibwe language is close enough to the Western Cree languages to remain partially understandable. In fact, the Algonquin language has experienced strong word borrowings from the Cree language.

Contemporary Algonquin

The Algonquin are one of the most populous and widespread North American Native groups, with tribes originally numbering in the hundreds, and hundreds of thousands who still identify with various Algonquian peoples. Many have been active in efforts to protect their homelands from commercial development.

In 1982, members of the Algonquin tribe successfully blockaded a commercial rice-harvesting venture that was given federal governmental permission to harvest the wild rice that the tribe has traditionally gathered by hand for centuries. Hundreds of people blockaded roads, and despite police helicopters, paddywagons, and "a lot of hostility and pushing and shoving," according to Harold Perry, honorary chief of the Ardoch Algonquins, the tribe and its supporters held their ground for 27 days—long enough for the federal government to reverse its decision and revoke the commercial permit.

Tensions with the lumber industry have flared up among Algonquin communities, in response to the practice of clear-cutting. In Ontario, an Algonquin land claim from 1983 called into dispute much of the southeastern part of the province, stretching from near North Bay to near Hawkesbury and including Ottawa, Pembroke, and most of Algonquin Provincial Park.

In 2000, Algonquins from Timiskaming First Nation played a significant part in the local popular opposition to the plan to convert Adams Mine into a garbage dump.

Members of the Algonquin tribe began a peaceful blockade of a uranium mining operation on their sacred lands north of Kingston, Ontario on June 29, 2007.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1983. ISBN 0809001586
• Moondancer and Strong Woman. A Cultural History of the Native Peoples of Southern New England: Voices from Past and Present. Boulder, CO: The Bauu Institute, Bauu Press, 2007. ISBN 097213493X
• Pritzker, Barry M. A Native American Encyclopedia: History, Culture, and Peoples. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 0195138775
• Waldman, Carl. Atlas of the North American Indian, Revised Edition. New York, NY: Checkmark Books, 2000. ISBN 0816039755
• Waldman, Carl. Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes. New York, NY: Checkmark Books, 2006. ISBN 9780816062744

External links

All links retrieved April 21, 2009.

• Algonquin East Annual Events
• Algonquin Nation
• Ardoch Algonguin First Nation's website
• Lee Sultzman. History of the Algonkin
• Aboriginal Perspectives Watch the documentary Ojigkwanong - Encounter with an Algonquin Sage
• Facts for Kids: Algonquian Indian Tribes
• Algonquin Culture and History
• Native Languages of the Americas: Algonquin (Algonkin, Anishnabe, Anishinabe, Anishnabeg)
• Timiskaming First Nation

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