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3. Daily Life - East
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| A. Aboriginal Canada →→ 1. Turtle Island → 2. First Nations - East → 3. Daily Life - East → 4. First Nations - West → 5. Daily Life - West → 6. First Nations - North → 7. Daily Life - North →→ B. Early European Explorers |
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Contents |
Coping with Challenge & Change
Each aboriginal group that came to Canada brought with them a culture and way of life related to their own arctic, tundra, woodland or seacoast surroundings.
As they spread throughout North American they adapted their ways of hunting, travelling, clothing themselves, preparing their food, raising their children and governing themselves to best survive in a sometimes harsh environment.
They coped with their new and changing surroundings by inventing unique weapons, tools, clothing and shelter so they could use the natural resources to their advantage. They learned to cure their sick and keep themselves healthy by learning the healing and medicinal properties of the surrounding plant life. And as the population of aboriginal America grew into the millions, each new nation developed their own ways of handing down wisdom to the young, through oral histories, legends and ways to relate to each other, and to nature and the Great Spirit.
Newfoundland's Beothuk
Not much is known about the Beothuk because they avoided contact with Europeans. Most Beothuk lived in extended families of 30-55 people on or near the coast, where they harpooned seals from canoes, fished for salmon and harvested the rich bounty of shellfish. In winter they sent parties to the forest and tundra to hunt caribou and moose.
The Micmac referred to the Beothuk as Red Indians, because they loved to adorn their bodies, faces, hair, clothing and tools with a paint made from powdered red ochre mixed with fish oil or animal grease. They also used it in burials. The term "redskin" -referring to aboriginals was likely first used by European fishermen in Newfoundland, whose metal implements were often stolen by Beothuk.
The Beothuk wore clothing that was similar to neighboring tribes, with caribou-skin coats, moccasins and gloves. They used birch bark for cooking and building wigwam, as well as canoes, including the humped-back style the Micmac used for ocean travel.
The Beothuk's traditional enemies were the Micmac and Labrador Inuit, but they intermarried with the Quebec Montagnais and Naskapi. After the Europeans and Micmac occupied their traditional coastal areas, the Beothuk retreated inland, where their culture died out, some say because of starvation as much as disease and warfare.
Mi'kmaq, Maliseet & Abenaki
The Micmac, Maliseet and Abenaki were Algonkian hunter-gatherers who survived by fishing, hunting deer and moose, and harpooning sea mammals. They practiced some farming depending on their region, and tapped maple trees for sap.
The Abenaki in particular grew corn, beans, and squash - one French report said the Missisquoi of Lake Champlain had over 250 acres of corn fields. Some even used fish as fertilizer to boost their yield.
These Eastern Algonkians used birch bark for their humped seagoing canoes and for wigwams. One was a cone-shaped winter version for the woods that housed up to a dozen people; the other, a large, oblong wigwam that held 10-24 people, they built for their summer fishing villages. In winter, they moved about easily in deep snow using snowshoes, sleds, and toboggans. Our word "toboggan comes from the Micmac word "taba'gan."
For clothing, they usually wore fringed buckskin. Men wore breechcloths in summer and both men and women wore fur coats and leggings in winter. In the 1700s, Micmac women began wearing a pointed felt cap. They are renowned for their elaborated quilled birch boxes and baskets.
The Micmacs believed in one Great Spirit, but had lesser gods, including Glooscap, a cultural hero that some think is modelled on a Scotch captain, Henry Sinclair, who may have reached Nova Scotia in the 14th Century.
Many Micmac, including Chief Membertou, adopted the Roman Catholic faith when the French arrived in Acadia, and married Micmac women. Most Micmac today have French surnames.
The Abenaki formed a Confederacy with the Micmac after 1670 to protect themselves from the Iroquois and English colonists. They usually retreated to Canada during wars, which served the New Englanders as an excuse to take most of their land in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont without compensation. Only the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy signed treaties and kept some territory.
Montagnais, Naskapi & Attikamek Cree
The Montagnais Cree were typical Algonkian hunter/gatherers, living in bands of extended families along the St. Lawrence and other rivers in summer villages, and moose hunting camps in the interior in winter. They wore buckskin clothing, lived in birchbark-covered wigwams, made birchbark canoes and lived on moose, seal, salmon and eel. Their Naskapi cousins lived farther north on the Labrador Plateau, where they lived on caribou, fish and small game. Naskapi wigwams were usually covered with caribou hide, since birchbark was scarce. They wore heavier, fitted clothes like their Inuit enemies.
For Algonkian peoples, dream interpretation was done by shamans, who communicated with the spirit world, guiding men's lives, and healing the sick.
The Algonquins (Algonkins) & Nipissing
The Algonkian-speaking Algonquins were also hunter-gatherers who lived just north of the wild rice and corn growing regions of the northern Great Lakes. Their location on the Ottawa River meant that they became great traders, travelling great distances to link the French on the St. Lawrence River with the tribes of the western Great Lakes. Their Nipissing allies specialized in trading copper to the Algonkian tribes on the Atlantic coast.
Most Algonquins and Nipissing lived in small, semi-nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers, like their relations the Ojibway. Groups would gather during the summer in fishing camps, but when winter grew near, they separated into small hunting camps of extended families. Like most Algonkians, they were patrilineal with hunting territories being passed from father to son, but some tribes used the mother's line of descent to determine kinship.
Anishinabe Nation - Ojibway, Ottawa & Potawatomi
Eastern Ojibway men hunted or fished alone or in small groups, while women gathered food such as wild rice, berries and maple sap, and made clothing and moccasins coloured with red, yellow, blue, and green dyes and decorated with quill and moose-hair designs. They had domestic dogs, that were often served at special feasts.
Like their Cree neighbours in the northern Great Lakes region, they lived in small family hunting groups, each with its own recognized territory, during the winter months, moving into band villages during the summer.
The largest unit was the band, linked by language, kinship and about 15-20 patrilineal clans or families. The power of the chiefs was limited, and tribal council were rare, and limited to making war.
Ojibway who moved west differed from their eastern cousins. Some - the Bungee - cultivated corn, squash, beans, and tobacco. Others like the Saulteaux adapted further, and adopted the Buffalo culture.
The Ojibway used birchbark for canoes, cooking utensils and decorated storage boxes called makuks, that were shaped by steaming, sewn with fibres and sealed with gum to make them watertight. When they moved camp, they rolled up the birchbark covering of the wigwam and carried it along with them.
In the summer, the Ojibway men wore buckskin breechcloths, and both sexes wore vests, leggings and moccasins, with fur and decorated hide garments in the winter, and colorful sashes with zigzags and stripes woven on looms.
After first contact with French, bands became larger and the power of Ojibway chiefs grew, since they were called upon to negotiate with the fur traders. This also left them open to war - from 1630-1700 they fought the Beaver Wars with the Iroquois. they were also struck by European diseases that overwhelmed the power of the shamans who had relied on herbal medicine. The Midewiwin (Grand Medicine Society), a secret religious society open to both men and women, evolved at that time to perform healing ceremonies. The society kept records on birchbark, the only written records kept by Great Lakes tribes. The Midewiwin also forged tribal cohesion, and made the Anishinabe Nation one of the most powerful and unified tribes on the continent.
Iroquoians of the Eastern Woodlands - Huron & Iroquois
The Iroquois and their Huron cousins inhabited a territory to the west and south of the Algonkians. There were many differences between the two language groups depending on their more southerly territory. The Iroquois had a matrilineal social structure - the women owned all property, including the fields, and determined family kinship. After marriage, a man moved into his wife's longhouse, and their children became members of her clan. Most individual Iroquois tribes were divided into three clans - bear, turtle and wolf - each headed by a clan mother.
The Iroquois and Hurons lived in large semi-permanent stockaded villages. They made their longhouses of elm bark draped over semicircular frames. These communal clan buildings were often over 70 metres in length. Since they used slash and burn farming, they had to move on to a new territory every twenty or so years, when the soil became exhausted.
The Iroquois and Hurons relied heavily on growing corn, beans and squash - known as "deohako" or "life supporters". They held six festivals each year with prayers of thanksgiving for their harvests. After the harvest, the men left the village for the annual hunt and came back in midwinter. In spring they fished, cleared new fields, rebuilt the longhouses and fortifications, and practised warfare and defence. Iroquois warriors wore their hair in a scalplock, removed all other hair, and decorated their faces and bodies with tattoos. Some were members of the False Face society, that used grotesque wooden masks to chase away the evil spirits that caused sickness.
The Iroquois developed a strong and well organized political culture.
The Haudenosaunee or Rotinonshon:ni (People of the Longhouse) developed a League of Peace and Power (Iroquois Confederacy) in the 1400s, that gave them a unity and purpose that allowed them to defend themselves against the more numerous, mobile and better armed Algonkian hunters. Because they had a sophisticated system of checks and balances to resolve disputes and keep the peace, the organization of the League had a strong influence on the framers of the US Constitution.
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A loose confederacy at the beginning in the 1400s, the Iroquois League had to be strengthened to present a united front against the Europeans in Quebec and New England. Using military prowess and skilled diplomacy, the Iroquois played off the English, Dutch and French for over 150 years. The Confederacy lasted until the American Revolution, when its internal unity finally failed through infighting and a tendency of the original Iroquois to feel themselves superior to newcomers.
Today's Iroquois are concentrated on the Six Nations reserve near Brantford, Ontario, around Montreal at Kanesetake and Kahnawake, and at Akwesasne, beside Cornwall on the Ontario-New York border. The Iroquois language has given us many major place names in the east, including Canada (kanata, or the settlement), Quebec (kebec - where the river narrows), Ontario (laughing water), and Toronto (place for fishing weirs).
| First Nations - East - Gallery | Stories & Texts | Web Links | Student Activities | Daily Life | Student Projects |
| A. Aboriginal Canada →→ 1. Turtle Island → 2. First Nations - East → 3. Daily Life - East → 4. First Nations - West → 5. Daily Life - West → 6. First Nations - North → 7. Daily Life - North →→ B. Early European Explorers |
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