“Down there,” she says, and quietly closes the door and walks back to her kitchen.
While setting up our two tents, we see a man paddling aione in a C2, a type of canoe normally paddled by two persons in marathon canoe races using bent-shaft paddles, and displaying excellent paddling technique as he slips quietly by. As an old “has-been” marathon canoe racer, I notice these details. A few hours later, we were inside the largest tepee, eating our supper of noodle soup and taking shelter from the rain. A Cree man walks down from the house on the hill to talk with us. He is the fellow who had been paddling the racing canoe, and we trade a few names of canoe racers and races we have in common.
“These teepees are for educating our young ones about our traditions,” he tells us, “how to skin and cook geese, fillet fish, story-telling — that kind of thing. You should see this place when we're cooking up a feast of country food. We make a fire just big enough to roast the geese. The geese are skewered on sharpened sticks and we hang them from strings, so they spin and cook just right — close enough to the fire to roast, but not too close to blacken.”
Jim and Don and I are salivating. In this teepee, many geese have been cooked and goose fat had dripped onto the spruce bows on the floor. We can still smell the aroma.
“How do you cook your bannock?” Jim asks, thinking of new tricks for the 70 pounds of bannock mix we have brought with us.
He smiles, obviously thinking of feasts past, “The kids…they like to cook it on pointed sticks. We just shove them into the ground around the fire, and turn the sticks to cook it evenly. Sometimes a dozen sticks going all at once.”
Our visitor then turns and walks back to the house. We don't even know his name. We feel a little deflated. Our boiled noodle supper, even though it's flavoured with Jim's famous Thai curry and powdered coconut mix, seems so inadequate.
The next morning, we take a drive around the town to find the float plane dock and rustle up some breakfast and coffee. Mistissini doesn't look much like it did when A.P. Low was here more than a century ago, when he reported that 25 families were living and trading at the Hudson's Bay Company post. The population today is over 3,000. It looks like any small community with gasoline stations, large modern schools, an arena, soccer fields, a community centre, convenience stores, video rentals, and the Denise Restaurant which serves very fine food. There are rows of neat bungalows with green lawns. Pickup trucks send up clouds of dust along the gravel roads. There is a noticeably large number of baby carriages being pushed along the roads.
Soon we're sipping coffee in the Denise Restaurant in the heart of the village. The chatter from the other customers is neither English nor French. They are speaking Cree. Dark eyes framed by handsome broad cheekbones and shiny straight black hair glance at us hairy guys. There's no doubt about it — we're in “Cree Country.” This is not only an A.P. Low canoe trip, not only a boreal forest canoe trip, but also a canoe trip through the land of the Cree. In fact, we wrote to Chief John Longchap of the Cree Nation of Mistissini asking for his concurrence for our travel through traditional Cree Nation lands.
The Cree of this region have lived here for perhaps 6,000 years, migrating into the area not long after the glaciers retreated. They have always lived close to the land, closer than we can imagine, and still do. The boreal forest and the Cree are interwoven so tightly that one cannot speak of one without speaking of the other. While this area is wilderness to us, to the Cree, it is “the bush,” where food and shelter are provided. It is as familiar to them as our backyard is to us. In fact, it is their backyard.
After our breakfast, we drive down to the dock to wait for our chartered aircraft to arrive. Staring out across the bay at the sharp-pointed spruce trees silhouetted against the bright summer sky, my mind spins back to what I would have seen here long ago. Every Canadian child knows that the bumps on the Canadian Shield are the billion-year-old eroded stumps of ancient mountains, once higher than the Rockies, the bones of our continent. To the east, hidden under the waters of vast Lake Mistassini, the granite and gneiss bedrock is overlain with dark blue limestone, formed from the bed of ancient seas. Back some 9,000 years ago, the vast continental ice sheets that covered most of what is now Canada east of the Rockies, were melting faster than they were being formed. The ice, which may have been up to three kilometres deep in places, squashed the land, pressing it down. The waters of the Atlantic rushed in, filling up what is now Hudson Bay. The shoreline was considerably inland of where it is today and old beaches are found many miles inland from James Bay, several hundred feet above today's sea level.
Not long after that, the ancestors of the Cree moved into the area. With the weight of the ice removed, the land “rebounded,” like a sponge expanding after being squeezed and released, and, by about 2,000 years ago, the shores of James Bay came to rest though they are actually still rebounding. Although the rate may be slowing down, elders can notice a difference along the shore of James Bay from their youth. Here, far from the sea, it's hard to notice the effects of the land rising to where they are today, and the lakes and rivers flowing approximately where they do today.
The Cree are a hunting people. To survive in a frigid land, they spread themselves throughout this vast territory, using a similar strategy for survival as the caribou — keep moving. In spring, they hunted geese along the coast, in summer, they gathered in large groups to fish in the lakes and rivers. In the fall, they would move inland to hunt caribou that migrated south in the winter, until spring brought the geese back again.
The cycle of the seasons, the circle of life, continued for several thousand years, until some short, hairy strangers came. The first mention of Lake Mistassini was recorded by Samuel de Champlain in 1603, when he recorded that groups of paddlers went north from the St. Lawrence up the Saguenay River to Lac Saint-Jean, and then to Lake Mistassini, most likely by the same route that Low himself took in 1892. From there, he was told that salt water (James Bay) could be reached by following the river draining the lake.10
The first Europeans arrived here in 1663. Three French fur traders from New France, were accompanied by forty-four canoes, and travelled to Lake Mistassini, then down the Rupert to Lake Nemiscau.11 Forty-four canoes! In our travels, we didn't see one other canoe until we had almost reached the coast. This story drives home the notion that the “wilderness” was a much busier place in times past, when people actually lived throughout the boreal forest. Mistassini seems to have been a focal point at that time, probably because of its abundant fish. I wonder what was here, where we are standing now, in those days when those first Europeans arrived.
With the appearance of the Europeans, the French coming north from the St. Lawrence, and the English sailing into James Bay, the cycle of life for the Cree would change fundamentally. As the trade for furs grew, a mutually dependent partnership developed between the Cree and the newcomers. Seasonal migrations now included long trips to trading posts on the coast or inland.
A trading post was built on this lake by the French in the 1670s. From this post, the coureurs de bois would intercept Cree heading to the coast to trade with the English at Rupert House, the post at the mouth of the Rupert River. The post probably was built of upright spruce logs with the bark on. It would not have been very large — maybe about fifteen feet long and twelve feet wide, with a low ceiling and a stone chimney. There have been many posts, in many different locations on Lake Mistassini, now all gone, reclaimed by the boreal forest.
This 1885 summer photo at the HBC post on Lake Mistassini shows the women and children left behind by the men who paddle the trade canoes to James Bay. Courtesy of Natural Resources Canada, Geological Survey of Canada, photo GSC755, A.P. Low
When New France came under English rule in 1763, the operation of fur trade posts became dominated by expatriate Scots, working out of Montreal. In 1818, the Hudson's Bay Company established a post a few miles north of where we are. In 1821, this post was relocated to where we are standing, and was operated continuously as a fur trading post until the mid-1970s. Under HBC central control, the