Hudson Bay Watershed: A Photographic Memoir of the Ojibway, Cree, and Oji-Cree

By John Macfie

At the midpoint of the twentieth century, the First Nations people of Ontario’s underdeveloped hinterland lived primarily from the land. They congregated in summer in defined communities but in early autumn dispersed to winter camps to hunt, fish, and trap. Increasingly, however, they found they had to adapt to a different way of life, one closer to the Canadian mainstream. While lifestyles and expectations were clearly changing, the native people’s desire to maintain their rich and distinctive cultural traditions remained strong.

John Macfie, then an employee with the Ontario Department of Lands and Forests, captured in photographs this turning-point in the lives of the Ojibway, Cre, and Oji-Cree, when their traditional culture still flourished but change was fast approaching.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Jan 1, 1991
• ISBN: 9781459713802

John Macfie

John Macfie, born in 1925 on a farm near Dunchurch, Ontario, spent many years in northern Ontario with the Fish and Wildlife Branch of the province's Department of Lands and Forests. During that time, he successfully combined his government work with a more personal interest, photography. Since his retirement, he has studied the history of Parry Sound District, publishing three books and writing a weekly newspaper column.

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Preface

This story in photographs is dedicated to northern Ontario’s first inhabitants, the Ojibway of the interior (who call themselves Anishinaubae), the Cree of the seacoast (who call themselves Anishini), and finally the Oji-Cree. Collectively, these peoples are referred to by ethnologists and anthropologists as the Algonquians, because the languages they speak fall into the Algonquian language group. Centuries ago, they accepted European explorers and entrepreneurs into their land, and much later they made it possible for me to experience the magnificent, and let it be hoped everlasting, wilderness making up the farther regions of the province.

My journey there began in the late winter of 1949 when I was helping my father cut sawlogs on Crown land at the rear of our farm in southern Ontario’s Parry Sound District. When the government log-scaler came to measure our winter’s cut of timber, I envied the easy day’s work he put in compared to mine toiling at one end of a two-man crosscut saw. I asked him how I could get a job like his, and his advice proved reliable; the following winter found me employed by the Ontario Department of Lands and Forests in the capacity of apprentice log-scaler, travelling a circuit of half a dozen logging camps situated on the western fringe of Algonquin Provincial Park.

That spring a friend in the department’s Fish and Wildlife Branch drew my attention to an advertised competition for the position of trapline management officer in the remotest quarter of the province, a job offering fulfilment of boyhood dreams of northern adventure inspired by the books of Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.D. Roberts. I was the successful applicant, and in midsummer of 1950 I arrived in the frontier town of Sioux Lookout to take up my duties. The air was thick with excitement and with the coming and going of floatplanes, for one of that region’s periodic gold rushes was in full swing. I could hardly wait for the field work that would take me into the real North lying beyond.

A little more than a year earlier the government of Canada, responsible for native affairs, and the government of Ontario, which regulated hunting and trapping in the province, entered into an agreement to work together in safeguarding the wild fur resources of the North in order, in the words of the agreement, that a better livelihood may be provided for the people in pursuit of their chosen occupations. The pact came into effect on April 1, 1950, at which time Ontario began appointing trapline management officers to implement it at the field level. I was one of those recruited for the vast Patricia District lying north of the transcontinental line of the Canadian National Railways (CNR).

When I arrived in Sioux Lookout, the groundwork had already been laid by Hugh Conn of the Indian Affairs Branch and Jack Grew representing Ontario, who three years earlier had travelled to all the northern settlements to meet with trappers of the region. Both men had backgrounds in the fur trade, Conn as a Hudson’s Bay Company trader and Grew as a Mackenzie River trapper. Working through interpreters, they outlined – as best they could on the often sketchy topographic maps of the day – units of land representing the winter hunting grounds of hundreds of family groups. At the village of Big Beaverhouse, they met a Hudson’s Bay Company fur-trader named Campbell Currie who was fairly fluent in the local native tongue. Grew was sufficiently impressed by Cam Currie to invite him to leave trading to work for the Department of Lands and Forests. When I came to Sioux Lookout, Currie was supervisor of trapline management for a region encompassing one-third of the province’s total land area. I was one of three engaged to work under him. The others were Earl Stone, like