The community used in the essay is that found around the University campus of Trent University located in 1600 W Bank Drive, Peterborough, ON K9L OG2, Canada. Trent campus in Peterborough is one of the native territories of the Anishinaabe – a group of Indigenous people who are made up of the Odawa, Ojibwa, Potawatomi, Mississauga, Delaware, Chippewa, and Algonquin communities who had control of the Great Lakes Basin since the early periods of the 1600s. Before the land became known as Peterborough, the name of the area was Nogojiwanong, which means a place at the end of the rapids in the Ojibwa language. The language, which was widely spoken by the Indigenous people in the community, before replacement of the cultural and Indigenous language practices with Christianity and the English language, was Anishinaabemowin. Through the process of land claims and the treaties, the Curve Lake First Nation, Hiawatha First Nation, Mississaugas of Scugog First Nation and Alderville First Nation had established their communities in the Trent campus area. The various nations indicated above officially refer to themselves as the Mississaugas. The community we live in and the lands we live is a homeland to diverse and many Indigenous groups who continue to live in Canada. The main crux of the essay is to research the history of the community as a means of illuminating the Indigenous presence – both historical and contemporary. The essay explores the history of the whole group of the Anishanaabeg in Great Lakes and then delves into the Mississaugas of the Hiawatha First Nation, a sub-tribe of the Anishinaabe speaking First Nations. The essay starts with the history of Aboriginals.
Canadian Indigenous Studies
The community used in the essay is that found around the University campus of Trent University located in 1600 W Bank Drive, Peterborough, ON K9L OG2, Canada. Peterborough is the native territory of the Anishanaabeg – a group of Indigenous people who are made up of the Odawa, Ojibwa, Potawatami, Mississauga, Delaware, Chippewa, and Algonquin communities who had control of the Great Lakes Basin since the early periods of 1600s. Before the land became known as Peterborough, the name of the area was Nogojiwanong, which means a place at the end of the rapids in the Ojibwa language. The language which was widely spoken by the Indigenous people in the community, before replacement of the cultural and Indigenous language practices with Christianity and the English language, was Anishinaabemowin. Through the process of land claims and the treaties, the Curve Lake First Nation, Hiawatha First Nation, Mississaugas of Scugog First Nation and Alderville First Nation had established their communities in the Peterborough area. The various nations indicated above officially refer to themselves as the Mississaugas. The community we live in and the lands we live is a homeland to diverse and many Indigenous groups who continue to live in Canada. The main crux of the essay is to research the history of the community as a means of illuminating the Indigenous presence – both historical and contemporary. The essay explores the history of the whole group of the Anishanaabeg in Great Lakes, then delves into the Mississaugas of the Hiawatha First Nation, a sub-tribe of the Anishinaabe speaking First Nations. The essay starts with the history of Aboriginals.
The Aboriginal Peoples’ origin has been the subject of intense debate. Frideres (2016, p. 3) noted that based on the Beringia Theory, it is believed that between “11,000 and 12,000 years ago, two glaciers along the continental divide began to separate’ a corridor emerged that allowed people to move southward from the Bering Strait. This ice-free corridor enabled hunters to follow ice age mammal as they migrated south”. Another explanation for the origin is based on the North-West Coast route; suggesting that early migrants used watercrafts to travel and moved from Siberian coast southward along the bridge of land of Alaska and then moved south to North America. However, recent evidence has offered a new theory as archeologists have discovered human tools as well as human bones that are 13,000 years old in North America especially in the Anzick archeological site in Montana. Regardless of when the Aboriginals came to North America, researchers have also focused on the reasons why they moved to North America. It is a widely accepted fact that the First Nation People arrived in the present day Canada thousands of years before the arrival of the European settlers. The reasons offered in literature include climatic conditions that were favorable (Frideres, 2016).
Even though the Europeans used different names for the people and the places that they encountered, there are some consistencies in the patterns of marriage, trade and warfare; thus giving an indication that at the time of the French colonialism, the Indigenous identities of the Anishinaabe remained relatively stable, and coherent. From the perspective of the Anishinaabe, there were limited inroads made by the French into the Michilimackinac region. When the French arrived in the community, White (2010) noted that the Indigenous people appeared to live in shattered worlds where characterised by horrific and persistent attacks by the Iroquois. The French listened to tales of existing and long running wars between the Iroquois and Algonquian speaking groups. The majority of the tales were told by the Huron intermediaries. When the Hurons were finally scattered and uprooted from the territory in 1649, the French missionaries were of the belief that the Hurons were the last to suffer. Upon finding refuge in the small communities of Algonquians in the west and north, the French came to the conclusion that the Algonquians were a remnant of a larger group of Indians who had faced the violence from the Iroquois. Since the communities of the Indigenous people were not dense, the belief of the French was that the world of the Algonquian had collapsed (White, 2010).
At the point of the contact between the French and the Algonquian, the Algonquian may have been in a period of flux but not a state of collapse as indicated by the French. The majority of the accounts of the Indigenous people of the Great Lakes stress the consolidation and expansion of the people who are called the Anishinaabe across the region in the century preceding the Europeans arrival. The above statement of account of the Indigenous people – “human beings” or “original peoples” – indicates that the Anishinaabe was a group that was self-referent i.e. made up of multiple groups of people speaking Algonquian who jostled for the space in the pays d’en haut with the other speakers of Algonquian as well as the Iroquoian and Siouan speakers in the region.
The Anishinaabeg has come to the region around Lake Huron from the east approximately 100 years before the Europeans arrival. They mixed with the other communities who were living in the Great Lakes through intermarriage and trade. Archeological evidence as well as oral traditions suggest that the Anishinaabeg had recently arrived from the valley around the Ottawa River. They moved northwest steadily, probably, under pressure from the various Iroquois groups who were located in the south (Witgen, 2007). Through the interactions with the other Indigenous people that Anishinaabeg communities encountered in the way, research has come to recognise three main groups of Anishinaabeg – in the upper Great Lakes. The group that moved further northwest into the Lake Superior and Lake Huron pine forests were known as the Ojibwas. The group that moved into the fertile ecological zone of the Carolinian forest of Lake Michigan were known as the Potawatomis. The people who would be known as the Odawas or the Ottawa stayed in the transitional Canadian –Carolinian forest zone mostly around Lake Huron’s northern shores.
At the time of the French arrival in the pays d’en haut, Anishinaabeg had occupied the majority of the area and had dominated the Great Lakes’ upper reaches as well as the surrounding rivers. However, to the French, the occupation by the Anishinaabeg did not make sense as the occupation was characterised of many clusters of Indigenous people in villages and towns of various sizes in resource rich and strategic lakeshore locations. The occupied areas were more or less permanent as the population of the Indigenous people would disperse during the winter with smaller groups hunting away from the villages. While in the summer, the villages were occupied. In parallel with the seasonal migration of the small groups, there was also seasonal mobility – more long term in nature – where the small groups would leave the small groups and join larger communities in other villages for a period of time usually a year or more for safety and or trade (Witgen, 2007).
Further compounding the European confusion, the groupings at the winter camps and the summer villages did not allow for easy identification of the Indigenous groups in the villages. The majority of the villages were multi-ethnic in nature and in some cases even multilingual. The French attempted to designate the groups as either Ottawa or Saulteur but observers on the ground noted presence of a variety of nations in any particular site in the villages (Schenck, 2007). The French believed that the multiethnic and mobile villages were seeking refuge – the belief was that the communities were brought together due the attacks by the Iroquois. Historians have made discoveries that the villages were not under any pressure but instead were cohesive, stable and coherent communities for the Indigenous people who lived in the communities (Harmon, 1998) As noted by Michael Witgen (2007), the communities were held together by the strands of fictive and real kinship that has been established through intermarriage, language and trade. The strands crisscrossed and intersected over a vast space, knitting together disparate places and people across the Great Lakes. The kinship strands connected the village communities and the winter bands across the pays d’en haut, shifting with the changes in time as kinship and trade relations changed (Witgen, 2007; Richter, 2009).
Through the split in the Nations, scholars and other Canadian Indigenous researchers have come to understand the Anishinaabeg based on the definition of the Odawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwa. More recent work has also pointed to the other layer of identity amongst the Anishinaabeg. Research on political and social organization have noted the new layer of identity played an important role in the shaping of the relations in the 17th century. The identity that help the Indigenous community together was the doodem. The work of Heidi Bohaker (2006) and DeMallie (1998) noted that kinship networks were significantly important for the Anishinaabeg people. Doodemag (kinship networks) were an important component of the collective identities of the Anishinaabe. Doodem identities which were usually ascertained through the use of pictographs and based on some form of other-than-human progenitor were inherited from the fathers. The doodem identities implied a sense of obligation towards the people of similar lineage. Therefore, alliance patterns, travel to long distances and marriage were shaped by the Nindoodemag. The kinship networks were also used in the negotiation of the community resources access.
Historical sources, linguistic evidence as well as origin stories suggest that the relationships based on doodem continued to shape Anishinaabe world in complex and powerful ways. The Anishinaabeg did so in complex ways that were hard to understand for the Europeans. The collective identities of the Anishinaabe were not restricted to particular geographic areas or space, or continuous occupation, possession and the defense of certain places but were based on the origin stories, shared descent as well as spiritual practices (Bohaker, 2006).
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