Native People
Innu children at Emish (F.Waugh photo)
The History of the Innu Nation
According to Innu oral tradition, the world is an island created by wolverine and muskrat after a great flood. The Innu, however, came from another land situated to the southeast called Tshishtashkamuku which is connected to the world by a narrow bridge.
The archaeological record shows that Labrador and eastern Quebec were inhabitated more than 8,000 years ago. The first people to live in the territory are called Maritime Archaic Indians and their remains can be found all along the coast of Labrador as far north as Saglek Bay. Whether the Innu people are related to these early residents has not yet been determined. But one thing is clear - the Innu and their ancestors have occupied Labrador and eastern Quebec for a minimum of two thousand years. Archaeologists say the Innu descended from the "Point Revenge Indians." Point Revenge sites have been found in many parts of Labrador including Voisey's Bay and the Meshikamass area north of Churchill Falls.
At the time of contact with Europeans, the Innu had established an extensive trading network throughout the Quebec-Labador peninsula. Ramah chert, a strong quartz material from Ramah Bay, Labador, was exchanged in one direction, and pottery and other products in the other direction. The caribou herds of the peninsula supplied the Innu with clothing, tent covers, babiche for their snowshoes, tools, as well as meat. The caribou also nourished the Innu spiritually. To this day, the caribou master is the most important of all the spirits in the Innu religion, to whom great respect must be shown. This respect is shown is various ways including the communal feast known as makushan and the disposal of caribou bones in the fire or on scaffolds.
A few elders from Davis Inlet remember the days when caribou were speared from canoes as they crossed the George River. They remember living in mitshaupa (teepees) and when such dwellings were heated by open fires on a hearth in the tent. They remember hunting partridge with bow and arrow, and wearing caribou-hide clothing.
Since the mid-1970s, the Innu Nation has been recording the history of their people on maps. These maps show travel routes, camp sites, burials, birth locations, harvest areas for caribou and other wildlife, locations of mythological significance, caribou migration routes and other details. The maps also record Innu names for many of the lakes and rivers in Labrador and eastern Quebec. Some of these names are recorded on Canadian government maps. For example, Minipi Lake located south of Goose Bay, is an anglisized version of the Innu name Minai-nipi, meaning "Burbot Lake." Innu elders can describe their lives on the land with the assistance of Innu placenames. They are further proof that Labrador and eastern Quebec are not a "wilderness" but a cultural landscape that the Innu have left their mark on for numerous generations.
To the Innu, the land is their history, their culture, and their future. It is like a bank, a storehouse of wildlife, that has sustained them for generations, and which, they hope, will continue to provide for them in future years. Tshishe-manitu gave the Innu a special custodial responsibility towards the territory and its resources, which partly explains why environmental protection features so strongly in the Innu Nation's response to resource exploitation on their lands.
The arrival of Europeans disrupted Innu history in many ways. Their integration into the fur trade made them increasingly dependent on the Hudson's Bay Company and other merchants. The traders tried to manipulate them so as to "attach" them in one way or the other to various trading posts. Missionaries tried to manipulate them as well to get them to abandon their religion and to try to "civilize" them into the mainstream of the industrial society. In the late 1800s, non-Innu trappers invaded some of the best Innu trapping regions which contributed to the economic hardship of the Innu.
The worst impact of European presence, however, was disease. At the turn of the century, the Innu were still being hit by several European diseases. In 1918, 40 Innu died of smallpox and are buried in the Voisey's Bay area. Spanish flu, tuberculosis, syphillis, scarlet fever, whooping cough, measles and other diseases took a horrible toll and reduced the Innu population by as much as two-thirds. A Canadian government ethnologist by the name of Frederick Waugh reported in the 1920s that the Innu population at Voisey's Bay had fallen from about 250 to 75 people in the space of 8 years as a result of disease. The crossed-out names of dead people in family trees of all Innu people in Labrador reflect the impact of disease and the extremely high mortality rates they experienced just a few decades ago.
By the 1940s and 50s, the Innu were in a desparate situation. The fur trade had collapsed, and the industrial society had expanded into more of their harvesting areas. For example, the iron ore mines in Schefferville, Labrador City and Wabush, the shipping terminus at Sept-Iles, and the military base at Goose Bay alienated vast quantities of land from the Innu even though no treaty had been concluded with them. Tuberculosis was still a major scurge and starvation was a frequent threat.
While the federal and provincial governments were eager to settle the Innu in coastal communities so as to assimilate them into the mainstream of Canadian society, the the Innu "were ready for settlement" due to disease, starvation, and loss of land to European settlement and resource extraction.
Unfortunately, life in government-built villages turned out to be a major trauma for the Innu. Treated like children by missionaries and government bureaucrats, subject to humiliating racism by their non-Aboriginal neighbours, punished by Newfoundland hunting regulations, the Innu fell into a quagmire of rock-bottom self-esteem, alcohol abuse, family violence, and other forms of cultural collapse.
In the late 1970s, the Innu began to turn the tide on this terrible situation. They lobbyied for, and obtained, programmes to transport their people out to the country again so that harvesting skills, knowledge of the land, and oral traditions could be passed onto younger generations. The Innu language and culture were introduced to the school curriculum to counter the negative messages conveyed to them in the regular curriculum that relegated their culture to the dustbins of history.
In the 1980s, they began intensive alcohol treatment programmes so that they could heal the wounds inflicted upon them as a result of government policies and alcohol abuse. Hand-in-hand with these developments, the Innu have been assuming increasing levels of control over their lives by taking over many elements of public administration, municipal services, and local government.
This is just the beginning as far as the Innu are concerned. They look forward to the day when their history in, and rights to, the territory are properly recognized, and when they will be equal partners in all decisions that affect their land and wildlife.