Looking for Cree Country, Finding Mushkegowuk
The sun was bright as we loaded our canoes on the banks of the Moose River in northern Ontario. Evergreens framed an inlet that emptied into a channel that would take us to subarctic James Bay. The view before me was everything I had imagined of a northern wilderness—the kind of place where, in the words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, “the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man” (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Moose River, Crossing, Ontario, 2019. Photograph by Robert W. Snyder.
But as the historian William Cronon has observed, it’s a mistake to think of wilderness as something apart from human beings. Doing that erases people who were living in what we call Canada long before Europeans arrived, obscures the relationship between humans and nature, and leaves the native people—in this case the Cree, the largest indigenous group in Canada—frozen out of history, as if they and the landscape were eternal and unchanging (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Geopolitical Map of Canada. E Pluribus Anthony.
I’d read enough Canadian history before our journey to know that Europeans were trading with indigenous peoples in northern Ontario in the late seventeenth century, but most of my preparation for the trip involved polishing my paddling skills. If wilderness is not the word for the lands on the banks of the Moose River, what is? As I packed a canoe, I wondered about finding the right words for the Moose River country (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Moose River Basin and James Bay, 2019. Reprinted with the permission of Yukari Hori from an essay available here.
My journey began two days earlier on the west side of Manhattan, where I put my bags in a rented car and set off with my Rutgers-Newark colleague Paul Sternberger. Two days of solid driving took us to northern Ontario, where metropolitan Ottawa gave way to cottage country, farmland, and then seemingly endless forests. We met our guide, Rick Isaacson, a Canadian of Finnish descent and proprietor of Howling Wolf Expeditions, in Smooth Rock, Ontario where he lives. Rick, slight but sturdy and an expert paddler, makes a career of guiding canoe, kayak, and raft trips.
Short of flying, or a difficult winter trek by ice road, there are two ways to get to Moosonee: riding a train called the Polar Bear Express or paddling down the Moose River. Our plan was to take the train to a good launching spot, get off, paddle downriver to Moosonee over four days, and then take the Polar Bear Express back south.
“It’s a mistake to think of wilderness as something apart from human beings.”
Just north of Smooth Rock, at a little railroad crossing called Fraserdale, we loaded our canoes and gear into the train’s freight cars, then settled comfortably into the passenger section for hours of riding through deep woods. Our fellow passengers included tourists, Cree people, and a Boy Scout troop.
Our assistant guide Ben Tozer met us along the way at an informal train stop. Ben, who comes from a Moose Cree family famed for its bush skills, made us a party of four men in two canoes. Further on, the train ground to stop again near a big bridge at Moose River Crossing, where the rapids of the upper river give way to the smoother waters that we would paddle. We lugged our gear to the riverbank, loaded our canoes, and pushed off.
Beneath a big, vaulted sky, the broad Moose River carves a waterway through deep forests. In many stretches the river is hundreds of yards wide, but owing to low summertime water levels it was only inches deep. Most of it would be rated easy class one rapids.
Our first afternoon of paddling anticipated much of what would come: strong winds and intricate passages between rocks and shallow spots. From the stern I set our general course, while up in the bow Paul’s sharp eyes and last-minute course corrections kept us clear of most obstacles. Whatever challenges the river poses, as the indigenous peoples figured out long ago, in a land of dense forests canoes are the best way to travel.
Camping was equally easy. Paul and I helped with chores and went swimming or fishing when it felt right (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Campsite on Moose River, 2019. Photograph by Paul Sternberger.
We pitched our tents by the river while Rick cooked hearty meals and Ben built ample fires. The thickly forested country around us looked wild to me, but to Ben it held different stories. Our first night’s campsite, he said casually, was just across the river from a childhood fishing spot. It was my first lesson in how my wilderness was Ben’s home country, a place rich in sustenance.
Ben—tall, lean and strong—displayed great skill with fishing gear. When a sand hill crane flew by he looked it over and said, “Around here, we call that flying ribeye.” Somewhere along our journey, I heard the following joke: “What do you call a Cree who’s a lousy hunter? A vegetarian.”
Ben’s knowledge of the river helped us find routes through twisty shallows. He also explained that when water levels are higher, local people use big, sturdy freighter canoes rigged up with outboards to motor upstream. Freighter canoes might have ancestors in ancient bark canoes, but with modern construction and motor power they help the Cree navigate the Moose River on their own terms in our own times.
Around the campfire, Rick talked about hunting and trapping, and spoke knowledgeably about the merits of moose meat over deer meat. (He prefers moose, and saved some terrific moose sausages for our last night of camping.)
“The bad treaties and cultural clashes found in the United States have many counterparts in Canada.”
On the river, he gave us useful canoeing tips and maintained high standards for safety as he built us up for the white water to come: the Kwetabohigan Rapids (pronounced quaduh-BAY-gin), rated as high as class three, on our last full day on the river. Paul and I both confronted them with a degree of apprehension, but were buoyed by Rick’s safety check, pep talk, and navigation.
With big waves and big water rumbling to the right, we descended along the left bank. On one drop we got hung up on a narrow passage, but I stuck my right leg over the side, shoved off, and again we were on our way. Following Rick and Ben, we briefly paddled upstream in an eddy. Then we pivoted, zipped down a chute of fast-moving water, and it was all over. We had met our biggest canoeing challenge and it hadn’t been all that hard.
Learning the history of the country we paddled through, and what to call it, came more slowly.
The region’s natural history is relatively easy to grasp. The landscape (sometimes called the James Bay Lowlands) is flat and defined by rivers and forests. To the north, James Bay gives way to Hudson’s Bay and, ice permitting, a water route to Europe. To the south, since the early twentieth century, dams and mining have been a significant presence. The Moose River may run free, but hidden from sight on our trip were the dams on its tributaries (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Campsite on Moose River, 2019. Photograph by Paul Sternberger.
As we got closer to Moosonee, the relationship between people, history and place became more complex. We saw a modern house with a tipi pitched alongside it, a visual expression of Cree efforts to reconcile tradition and modern life. (And an illustration of the benefit of spending the summer in a tipi, which is much better ventilated than a standard house, anthropologist Richard Preston later explained to me.)
When we passed the sites of French and British struggles for dominance of North America and its fur trade in the eighteenth century, I was reminded of political scientist Peter H. Russell’s point that Canada’s history is a story of incomplete conquests, among them Europeans over indigenous peoples and English over French. Incomplete is the key word, for both the French and the Cree, and I looked forward to learning more when we landed in Moosonee.
Our last campsite was on a beach where Paul found a prehistoric coral fossil in sight of power lines leading into Moosonee. We woke up and finished our last day on the river early, pushing hard to avoid getting caught in tidal currents that surge through the Moose as it gets closer to salt water at James Bay. When we landed at Moosonee, and then crossed the river in a powerboat to the island of Moose Factory, we began a 24-hour crash course in the complex relationship between past and present that defines Moose River country.
A long day walking around Moose Factory and Moosonee with Paul led us to a tentative conclusion: Moosonee and Moose Factory embody the deepest complexities and ironies of a region where the indigenous peoples have suffered from land disputes, dispossession, and wrenching change, but have nevertheless endured with remarkable resilience, adaptability, and cultural presence (Figure 6).
Moose Factory was founded by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1673, back when “factory” was another word for a trading post; its nineteenth-century staff house, and outbuildings, are still preserved. But today the island is largely a reserve for the Moose Cree, and we slept comfortably in the Cree Village Ecolodge, designed to give the local Cree a place in the region’s tourism (Figure 7). The dock and beach outside the lodge gave me a chance to examine freighter canoes (Figure 8).
Figure 6. 1905: Moose Factory on the edge of great changes. Collections of the Archives of Ontario.
Figure 7. Cree Village Ecolodge, Moose Factory, Ontario, 2019. Photograph by Paul Sternberger.
A walk around the Island took us past more houses with side-yard tipis to a Cree cultural center, where we saw traditional forms of housing. The cemetery of a venerable Anglican church testified to the Scottish and Cree presence in the area (Scottish fiddling has influenced the fiddling of Cree fiddlers), the Cree embrace of the Anglican faith, and Cree pride in military service (Figure 9).
In Moosonee, a newer town that grew with the arrival of the railroad, we visited the Revillon Frères Museum, which documents the fur trade and is named for a Parisian fur company that worked in the region in the twentieth century. We also checked out the all-terrain quad bikes at the neatly stocked Northern Store, where a community bulletin board announced lessons in Cree.
Figure 8. Freighter Canoes, Moose Factory, Ontario, 2019. Photograph by Robert W. Snyder.
Figure 9. Saint Thomas Anglican Church, Moose Factory, Ontario, 2019. Photograph by Robert W. Snyder.
In late afternoon we boarded the Polar Bear Express, which took us back south for one more night in Smooth Rock, followed by an early start on the long drive home. The next evening found us in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State, where I try to visit every summer and winter to get into some wild country. After five nights in northern Ontario, the Adirondacks felt almost suburban. By the middle of the next day, we were back in Manhattan.
Since then I’ve read up on the history of the Cree and Canada (I found the essays of Cecil Chabot very interesting), watched documentaries (Trick or Treaty was especially good) and interviewed people in Ontario. I’ve always thought of Canada as a remarkably decent country, free from many of the worst traits of the United States. But four days of paddling, followed by more days of reading, made me conclude that the United States and Canada have more in common than I thought when it comes to their native peoples. Canadian history may lack the wars and killing that define large parts of the historical struggles between the United States and Native Americans, but the dispossession, bad treaties, and cultural clashes found in the United States have many counterparts in Canada.
“Moosonee and Moose Factory embody the deepest complexities and ironies of a region where the indigenous peoples have suffered from land disputes, dispossession, and wrenching change, but have nevertheless endured with remarkable resilience, adaptability and cultural presence.”
Canada’s indigenous peoples have not been passive in the face of these assaults. Indeed, over recent decades, some of the most notable efforts to secure justice for Canada’s First Nations have taken place around James Bay. Many of these efforts involve developing a deeper sense of the Cree past, from the study of problematic treaties to an embrace of the land and ancestral bush skills. One website I found contained stories from the elders of Moose Factory, and on YouTube I listened to the drumming and singing of young Cree men, who themselves use YouTube to learn about their music.
In reading about Cree struggles and resiliency, I worked my way to the website of Camp Onakawana, where our guide Ben’s parents William and Pamela Tozer run programs that educate young and old of all ancestries in the ways of their region and the value of knowing and preserving its land and water. I learned from them something that I didn’t learn in canoeists’ reports on paddling the Moose: the Moose Cree have their own name, Mushkegowuk, for the region around the river.
Figure 10. Tipi and a house bearing the emblem of an NHL hockey team, the Ottawa Senators, 2019. Moose Factory, Ontario. Photograph by Robert W. Snyder.
I still have more questions than answers when it comes to Canada and its indigenous peoples, and I firmly believe that some lands deserve protection from development, but one thing seems clear to me. Calling the region we paddled through a wilderness is not useful: it hides the presence of people who have lived there for thousands of years, all the while evolving with changes around them. With all the history, complications, continuities and contradictions of life along the Moose River, it’s better to think of it as Cree Country—or, as the Moose Cree might say, Mushkegowuk (Figure 10).
Acknowledgments: The author thanks Richard Preston and John Turner for sharing their knowledge of the Cree and the Moose River Basin.
