Beyond the Beaten Path: 50 Years of Anthropology in Canada

By Edward Hedican

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be an anthropologist? There is a certain mystery about the profession, since anthropologists often travel to out-of-the-way parts of the world that might be considered exotic, dangerous, or otherwise mysterious to most people. Of course, there are many misconceptions, such as the view of the anthropologist in khaki-coloured shorts, wearing a pith hat and accompanied by a string of baggage carriers trailing behind him as depicted in a Far Side cartoon.

This book describes my own life in anthropology carried on over five decades. My career was not necessarily typical in terms of specific details, but it does involve extensive field research as well as various other activities, such as appearing as an expert witness in a Supreme Court land claims case, which were unique in certain ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Oct 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781685628918

Edward Hedican

Edward Hedican is a Professor Emeritus from the University of Guelph, Canada, whose primary field of study is cultural anthropology. For most of his career he has conducted research among the Indigenous peoples (Anishinaabe or Ojibway) of northern Ontario in the subarctic region around Lake Nipigon. He has also studied the history of Irish immigrants to Canada in the post-famine period which involved an in-depth analysis of various genealogical, census and demographic documents in both Ireland and Canada. The following book is primarily a summary of the various aspects of his anthropological career extending over a fifty-year period and the significant lessons that he learned during the course of his professional field of study.

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About the Author

Edward Hedican is a Professor Emeritus of anthropology at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Edward Hedican is a Professor Emeritus from the University of Guelph, Canada, whose primary field of study is cultural anthropology. For most of his career he has conducted research among the Indigenous peoples (Anishinaabe or Ojibway) of northern Ontario in the subarctic region around Lake Nipigon. He has also studied the history of Irish immigrants to Canada in the post-famine period which involved an in-depth analysis of various genealogical, census and demographic documents in both Ireland and Canada.

The following book is primarily a summary of the various aspects of his anthropological career extending over a fifty-year period and the significant lessons that he learned during the course of his professional field of study.

Dedication

Dedicated to Jud Epling, Richard Salisbury and Ken Dawson who inspired me to travel along the path less travelled in life.

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Edward Hedican 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

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Hedican, Edward

Beyond the Beaten Path

ISBN 9781685628895 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781685628901 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781685628918 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023913875

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First Published 2023

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Acknowledgment

For my son, Shaun Hedican, who resides on the Rocky Bay Anishinaabe Reserve in northern Ontario, I am grateful for his insights and perspectives on life in the Lake Nipigon area. Thanks to Karen Hurson who helped me with proof reading and generally lent her support for my various writing projects. My long-time friend and colleague of more than forty years, Stan Barrett, Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph, has always been very supportive of my research, often lending encouragement and advice, and to him I am very indebted. Also at the University of Guelph, Tad Mcllwraith has been very helpful sharing his ideas with me on current Indigenous issues.

Preface

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be an anthropologist? There is a certain mystery about the profession, since anthropologists often travel to out-of-the-way parts of the world that might be considered exotic, dangerous, or otherwise mysterious to most people. Of course, there are many misconceptions, such as the view of the anthropologist in khaki-colored shorts, wearing a pith hat and accompanied by a string of baggage carriers trailing behind him as depicted in a Far Side cartoon. This book describes my own life in anthropology carried on over five decades. My career was not necessarily typical in terms of specific details, but it does involve extensive field research as well as various other activities, such as appearing as an expert witness in a Supreme Court land claims case, that were unique in certain ways.

The photo on the cover of this book depicts several log cabins and a trail between them. The photo was taken in the mid-1970s when I was conducting a period of anthropological research in a small Anishinaabe community in northern Ontario situated north-west of Lake Nipigon. At that time, everyone lived in log cabins, and there were no cars, trucks, or electricity in the village. For the most part, the people lived then by hunting and fishing with occasional periods of wage work on the nearby railway. In the intervening years, amounting to about five decades, I have kept in touch with many people. Just a few days ago, in fact, I was discussing the present state of the village with the current chief on Messenger, who was just a baby girl when I first lived there. The old adage about the years flying by seems appropriate in describing my experience.

The image in the photo of the trail winding its way between the cabins in the village suggests to me the well-worn path of life. Another interpretation is that the path suggests a metaphor about research in anthropology, which is to say, that in order to create new ideas one is required to seek out new trails to follow ‘beyond the beaten path’. In anthropology, as in life itself, it is easiest to stick to the tried and true; to stick with what we already know and are familiar with. Yet, if one tries something new, to move beyond the beaten path, then our life holds the possibility of being even better. Of course, there are risks involved in traversing the new trail, but even then there are opportunities for new learning experiences. In any event, if we only stick to same-old, same-old, holding to what is already known, then that is all we will ever get out of life.

New discoveries require an adventurous spirit, one willing to move beyond the known ground, and from there you take your chances. As we learn new lessons, we are also presented with new opportunities for growth. This book, then, is about my attempts to move away from the beaten path of intellectual ideas and research, to embark on a road less travelled to use a familiar phrase. While this book is at least partly autobiographical, by the very nature of the subject matter and the time span involved, there are other goals that I consider more significant than a simple rendition of my life experiences. There are a number of important themes that provide a structure to this book.

Perhaps the most salient of these is a discussion of the manner in which field research in anthropology, called ethnography, is linked to larger theoretical issues. The particular details of everyday life during the course of our research may be interesting in themselves, but as a basis of scientific study they are relatively meaningless unless they can be tied in some way to the more encompassing general patterns that illuminate arrangements in social and cultural life.

A second theme is about the various people who have influences one’s research career in anthropology, both during the actual fieldwork, as well as our academic mentors who provided much need guidance through our research. It is important to acknowledge that we alone are not responsible for any success that we have in our intellectual careers, because what we are able to do is built upon the efforts and accomplishments of those who came before us, in a long stream of thought and action extending into the past.

Thirdly, this book covers five decades of anthropology in Canada, especially as this time period focuses on Indigenous issues that have evolved over this time period. The discussion begins with such important land marks as the Hawthorn Report of the mid-1960s, and then traces various episodes, such as Prime Minister Trudeau’s White Paper of 1969, the James Bay Cree and their involvement in the Quebec Hydro-electric Project of 1975, continuing to discussions of the Ipperwash Protest and the resulting Linden Inquiry of 2007, the so-called Oka Crisis and the establishment of Nunavut in the 1990s, followed by Prime Minister Harper’s apology of 2008, and then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s contemporary Indigenous policies.

Throughout this period, there were also various land claims taking place in the courts and several chapters discuss my own involvement as a so-called ‘expert witness’ in the Supreme Court in 2015, as well as my role as a land claims ‘facilitator’ for the Whitesand Band in northern Ontario in the 1980s. My attempt here is to portray the life of an anthropologist in Canada through various phases of one’s career. In addition, each of the chapters includes a section on ‘lessons learned’ as well as a summary in the Epilogue of ten of the most important of these.

Chapter One

Introduction

The title of this book, Beyond the Beaten Path, is meant to suggest that new knowledge is generated by pursing courses of action that have not been followed before. If you wish to find new ideas, then it is necessary to discover your own path, one that other people have not travelled on previously. It is for this reason that I chose for my research site an Indigenous community that existed outside the governmental structure of the Indian Affairs department because this type of community had not been studied beforehand. This chapter introduces the community where I took up residence, some of the research interests that I investigated, and the various persons who provided information that facilitated my research goals at the time.

As such, in my study of an Indigenous Anishinaabe community in northern Ontario, which is situated about 300 kilometers north of Thunder Bay, I usually began my day as many people do by making a cup of coffee. Then, weather permitting, I sat on a small bench in front of my cabin so that I could watch the comings and goings of the village population. In my direct line of vision, there is a small field with an old store, on my left near the railway tracks which bisects the community is a water pump and where several women were lining up, chatting, with small children running about. To the right is a trail down to a large lake. I see an elderly man dragging a wash tub, probably full of fish, from his canoe, and along the path small log cabins with people walking between them. Most of the people I’m sure do not give much notice to all this activity since it goes on in more or less the same manner on most days.

On one of these days, though, I began to wonder why I was waiting for the women to finish filling their water buckets before I went and filled mine. Then it dawned on me; perhaps I did not want to be seen mingling with the women; could there be some aspects of local mores and attitudes that I was missing? I wondered. For one thing, as a single man in the village, I was quite conscious of not raising suspicions or jealousies among the married men that I was at all interested in their women. Then I was also aware, when I finally came around to thinking about it, that the reason that only women went to the water pump was because there was a certain division of labor in the community that I had previously not given much thought to.

As a general rule, it was women who handled the household duties relating to cooking, child care and so on.¹ On the other hand, one might not expect to see a woman setting out on a hunting expedition, although this was entirely possible and probably happened more than I thought. The thought crossed my mind that there were relatively mundane everyday activities going on right under my nose that I had not previously given much attention to, but which probably were a key to understanding social processes in the village at a more widespread level. As it turned out these thoughts were just passing ones. I had more important matters to occupy my attention, or so I thought.

So this is one of the problems, I now realize, with field research in anthropology²—we do not give much attention to everyday affairs even though they can have deeper significance in our research. We tend to concentrate on the more noticeable, more salient events, those activities that people give special attention to and are considered significant in some way. Even in the wider sphere of theoretical orientations³, our attention might be to discuss our research in terms of the manner in which our results pertain to societal evolution, conflict theory, structural functionalism or postmodernism. Our gaze is seldom removed from the big picture, and so we miss out on the possible significance of the ephemeral, quotidian or common place aspects of everyday life.

The Ethnographic Narrative

The description portrayed above concerning my observations made from my cabin’s bench about people going about their everyday tasks could be seen as presenting an account of my ethnographic fieldwork in terms of a narrative format. My intention here is to explore aspects of ethnography that are not normally presented in a more formal, ‘scientific’⁴ version of anthropological descriptions of everyday life. Although such reflections are not rare in the anthropological literature, there is none that I am aware of for the boreal forest region of Canada’s north. In an historical sense, then, the anthropology of northeastern North America has not generally benefited from the short of ‘behind-the-scenes’ reports that other readers have available to them for other parts of the world.

As far as the ethnographic narrative is concerned, it has become an increasingly important part of social anthropology as fieldworkers explore new ways of presenting their experiences in diverse cultural settings. For whatever reason, such experiential accounts in the northeastern part of North America are either quite rare or virtually nonexistent. Simply on a pragmatic basis there is much that we can learn from such accounts, since they provide information that is not normally included in a more formal ethnographic version of a community study. We can learn, for example, about how ethnographers’ everyday experiences influence their intellectual perspectives, about how anthropologists interact with their informants in social settings, about the living problems that they encounter, and, in general, about the unique flavor of that particular ethnographic ‘present’.⁵ All in all, these accounts provide a useful backdrop to understanding how the more formal account was conceived and carried out, aside from the fact that such inter-cultural experiences tend to be interesting in their own right.

It is also important for me to point out that my life experiences described in these pages are based on factual events that occurred while conducting research among the Anishinaabe people living in an isolated region where they live in tents and log cabins (at the time of my fieldwork in the 1970s), do not possess cars or trucks, as there are no streets or roads here. At the time of my fieldwork, there was a limited access to seasonal wage work but for the most part they subsisted by hunting and fishing, as they have always done in the past, and rely little on store-bought foods. It is also important to add that these Indigenous peoples do not live a life untouched by modern society. They have some use for modern technology, such as snow machines and up to date hunting equipment, but they are still living a life in the bush when I conducted my research as their ancestor did.

Another important point is that this book is not only about the research results that I was able to uncover during the course of my fieldwork, but also about my reflections of my activities over the last several years. Such reflections have suggested to me that it has become increasingly evident that anthropologists should attempt to describe how the personal experiences of their fieldwork have effected them, not only as professionals but also as people who are immersed in the ebb and flow of everyday life. As much as anthropologists attempted to portray their situation in the past, they are not unattached from the settings of their work, they also influence the people around them and, in turn, are similarly affected by the people with whom they interact and by their research experiences. Therefore, the intent of this ethnographic narrative is to present what is probably an all too rare study of Indigenous fieldwork in terms of actual events, and then to examine these events and episodes in the context of the ethnographer’s experiences in fieldwork. It is a matter somewhat of how much we would like to shape events, and how much we are willing to let them shape us in turn. As in life itself, we do not know what will happen next, but we always hope that something happens (to paraphrase Margaret Mead) and must be prepared for it.

It is a basic fact of research that fieldworkers need particular events and situations, in order that these become studies and analyses which are then placed in a larger context. As Hortense Powdermaker (1966: 296) explained, anthropologists write out of their immersion and participation in a particular situation from which they have been able to detach themselves. But they write of the particular…the particular illuminates the human condition. One might also add that these ‘particulars’ sometimes come to us unannounced, on our door step, but mostly we have to go out and seek them, to reach out for the stuff and details of everyday life. In this sense, we can also appreciate what Clifford Geertz (1973: 24) meant when he talked about ethnography becoming ‘imprisoned in the immediacy of its own detail’.⁶

It is in the documentation of this detail, in the ‘writing of culture’, that some controversy has been generated in the discipline, especially as it comes to portraying the ‘other’ in an ethnographic narrative. For example, there are those who would see ethnography and fieldwork in the context of power relations. The issue here is what has been called a ‘crisis of representation’, which is to say, the explicit discourse that reflects on the doing and writing of ethnography (Marcus and Fischer 1986: 16). The challenge here is to all those views of reality in social thought which prematurely overlook or reduce cultural diversity for the sake of the capacity to generalize or to affirm universal values (ibid: 33). Furthermore, scholars such as Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) have been particularly critical of certain phases of anthropology for exaggerating uniqueness and ‘particularism’ (á la Franz Boas), of, in their opinion, overly emphasizing cultural differences, which translate into ‘inferiority’. It is essentially their viewpoint which is at the heart of certain ongoing criticisms in anthropology and elsewhere against the concept of ‘culture’.

Furthermore, if culture is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulder of those whom they properly belong (Geertz 1973: 452), then we can pretty well dispense with the idea that culture is a universal concept, belonging to all people, in all societies. In Geertz’s terms, the job of the anthropologist was to read and interpret this text that is written in ‘shaped behavior’. If cultures are like texts, then it follows that embedded in each culture is its own unique interpretation. Thus, our task in creating ethnographic narratives is to elucidate this ‘unique interpretation’, and in so doing transcend the commonplace, the everyday nature of human behavior.

It is therefore evident that the so-called post-modernist approach in anthropology is much more than an issue concerning literary style; it is about cultural portrayal and representation.⁷ It does question anthropological authority and calls for a ‘dialogic’ approach. And besides, it is clear that even post-modernist ethnography is controlled by some authority—the fieldworker. In the context of the present discussion, I would support the post-modernist argument that the construction of ethnography is largely a matter of organizing our reflexive understandings of the fieldwork experience. Thus, this process of constructive understanding becomes central to the problem of verification in fieldwork, given that quite different accounts of the same reality can be expected.

This issue of cultural portrayal has much to do with what we choose to write about, or not write about, and the ensuing ethnographic narrative that eventually unfolds from the stance or position that we decide to take. Writing involves a certain perspective, like an artist composing a painting—considerable thought is apt to go into the process. Barrett (1996: 232) suggests, for example, that a great deal of reflecting, planning and organization must precede writing. My own approach is not to write a word of the actual manuscript until I have worked out the entire thing in my head. Without sounding cynical about his approach, one could only hope to attain this level of competence and memory. In this sense, the writing process of a fieldworker is something akin to that of a novelist.

Yet, we are reminded that, The business of writing up fieldwork has always been a controversial part of anthropological research…And today, perhaps more than ever before, anthropologists pay close attention to how language shapes and influences their work (Chiseri-Strater and Sunstein 1997: 277–278). I bring these matters to the reader’s attention in the hope that one can begin to appreciate the inherent difficulties about describing just about anything pertaining to another culture, especially when one is using a language, terms, and concepts from a culture different from that which is being described in the first place. In other words, the intrinsic difficulties of cultural translation are manifold and inherently complex.

Anishinaabe Country

The area of northern Ontario that is the focus of this book is a rugged region consisting of some 800,000 square kilometers of glacially scoured Precambrian shield covered with coniferous forest and numerous lakes and streams. North of the Canadian National Railway (CNR) mainline through Ontario live about 50,000 people, almost exclusively Anishinaabe and Cree. Most of these northern Algonquians⁸ live in relatively isolated settlements of under two thousand people, which are usually situated on the larger lakes and rivers. Generally, the northern Anishinaabe live between the southern area of the Canadian Shield, just north of Lake Superior, up to the Albany River, where there is a gradual cultural merging with the Cree (Rogers and Taylor 1981: 231–243). Since most roads from the south end at the CNR line, the usual mode of transportation in the area is by boat, snowmobile, and bush plane. Today, access to the internet and other forms of electronic communications have tended to lessen the isolation which was prevalent for the last generation of residents. While there are many local schools, often high school age children attend school in the larger centers such as Thunder Bay.

For the most part, the Anishinaabe of northern Ontario have subsisted on fishing, trapping, and wild rice harvesting, but all of these activities do not have the income potential to adequately support the growing population. In addition, store-bought foods found in the local stores are much higher in cost than is the case in comparable areas farther south. As a general rule, at present there is an acute lack of jobs suited to the remote location, skills and life-styles of the Indigenous people of the area, causing many young people to seek their fortunes farther south. While there is some variation from place to place, welfare and social assistance, along with other forms of transfer payments, forms a substantial proportion of a community’s disposable income. The tourist industry, government sponsored community work projects, and commercial fishing provide the main sources of employment. Trapping, once the main stay of most Anishinaabe villages, and the major form of income, now has been mostly reduced to part time activities for more elderly residents as the fur industry has gone into decline because of competition with synthetic materials and various animal rights protest movements. While not readily evident in most government reports, almost every community nonetheless has a sizeable ‘hidden’ economy involving subsistence hunting and fishing, firewood collection and the manufacture of local products such as snowshoes, sleds, leather products, and various types of handicrafts.

The history of the northern Anishinaabe and the Cree over the last several centuries has been dominated largely by the fur trade, and their interaction with the Hudson’s Bay Company. This territory, previously known as Rupert’s Land, extends roughly from Lake Nipigon north to Hudson Bay. For almost 200 years, fur merchants were the only Europeans with which the northern Anishinaabe had to contend. However, after about 1850, an increasingly wider array of outsiders could be found traversing Anishinaabe territory. Government agents came to sign treaties and settle land claims, missionaries arrived to introduce new religious beliefs, and surveyors plotted the future course of railways, roads, and mineral development (Bell 1870). The Indigenous people who were living north of the Robinson-Superior treaty limits, signed in 1850, negotiated one of the largest land settlements in Canadian history when they signed the James Bay Treaty in 1905. During that same summer a survey crew for the Canadian Transcontinental Railway (now called the Canadian National) was mapping a 200-kilometer strip of land westward from Lake Nipigon, just north of Lake Superior (Collins 1906). And by 1910, an anthropologist, Alanson Skinner (1911), had arrived to document some preliminary aspects of social and economic change in the area.

Completion of the CNR in 1912 afforded an opportunity for independent fur traders to reenact a process that had occurred during the height of the Hudson’s Bay-Northwest Company rivalry. A hundred years after the amalgamation of the two companies in 1821, backwoods entrepreneurs once more attempted to circumvent trade, which in northern Ontario had previously gone to HBC posts on the Albany-Attawapiskat River systems (such as Fort Hope, Lansdowne, and Osnaburgh House), or to posts in the Lake Nipigon drainage area. Independent fur traders chose their positions with some foresight, locating on the shortest canoe routes from the Albany River to the CN rail line.⁹

The Genesis of Collins

Collins was the terminus for one of these routes, and as such was an ideal location for the establishment of a rail line trading post. For the Anishinaabe trappers in the area, competition among the operators of rail line posts, coupled with less expensive freight overhead because of the proximity to the railway, meant a lower cost of living. In addition, rail line trading posts could offer a more varied supply of trade goods, and higher fur prices, than their more northerly Hudson’s Bay Company competitors. It was factors such as these that contributed to the early success of rail line fur trading posts, and provided the economic incentives which drew large numbers of Anishinaabe trappers to various rail line locations.

1

Collins Store in 1967

Photo Courtesy of Anita Patience

Although the first trading post in Collins did not open for business until 1921, almost a decade after completion of the CN line, residents relate that permanent log structures were not constructed on Collins Lake until the end of the 1930s. The years before World War II were a period of resurgence in Anishinaabe geographical mobility in northern Ontario, a demographic pattern reflecting population increases and consequent pressure on the land and its resources. For most of the time during the five-year period from 1941 to 1945, a sizeable proportion of the Fort Hope (now called Eabametoong First Nation) population was absent from the home community for treaty payments (Baldwin 1957; Driben and Trudeau 1983). Of those absent from their home reserve, about 50 percent of these were stationed in the vicinity of Lansdowne House, an HBC outpost of Fort Hope some 60 kilometers to the north.

The remaining 25 percent were scattered throughout the territory, primarily at points along the Albany River or the rail line. By 1945, 31 Fort Hope families had settled at various rail line locations. Since that time 18 of these Fort Hope families remained to form the nucleus of the present (1970s) Collins community. For the most part, these families stayed at Collins only during the summer months living in tents, returning to their trap lines for the winter. It was only with the establishment of a school at Collins in 1960 that there was any widespread construction of more permanent log houses, and the year-round occupation of the village.

As such, Collins is an Anishinaabe community formed by the migration of northern Indigenous people, mostly from Fort Hope (Eabametoong), during the war years to the Canadian National Railway line. In general, the genesis of settlements such as Collins can be attributed to increases in the population densities of northern reserve communities, and the resulting competition for trapping territories and other diminishing resources, such as fish, game, and firewood. Migrants to the rail line sought to extricate themselves from the restrictions and uncertainties of a limited resource base by moving to areas where there was a greater opportunity to supplement subsistence production with income earned through wage labor. As such, the construction of the tourist lodge project at Whitewater Lake (described in Chapter 4) to the north of Collins could be seen as a culmination of this long term switch from subsistence hunting to increasing wage labor opportunities, although the local economy was nonetheless comprised of aspects of both sources of income when I conducted my fieldwork in the 1970s.

Economic Change

It is therefore important to note that the eventual movement away from a subsistence-trapping economy to an ever-increasing emphasis on wage labor was a relatively long term process. The first opportunities for wage employment in the area, aside from occasional trading post work, began with the CNR construction just after the turn of the twentieth century. There are no surviving records to indicate the extent to which Indigenous people were employed during the railway construction stage, but the number was probably small given the short duration of possible employment, and the fact that most people in the Lake Nipigon area at this time were still actively engaged in the annual subsistence cycle of summer fishing and winter trapping. One observer at the time noted that there were a number of Indigenous men working in the railway camps, but only for short periods of time: The bunkhouse itself in the Canadian hinterland signifies an intrusion upon his former domain. Camp activities of whatever kind mean ultimately a narrowing of privileges and customs that for so long have marked his mode of life (Bradwin 1928: 116).

After the construction stage of the railway, full-time maintenance jobs generally went to outsiders. Over the last generation or so, many outside workers have transferred to sections closer to the larger urban centers eschewing the isolation of the lonely northern railway camps, with Indigenous people tending to fill these vacancies. Aside from railway work, the trading post in Collins employed casual workers to cut firewood, to maintain and store fish in the icehouse, and to transfer furs and supplies back and forth from the rail line. The spasmodic nature of production and wage work cycles is illustrated by the following description of economic trends in Collins during the 1950s:

The trading-store owner bought a thousand dollars’ worth of fish from four families in 1954, no fish in 1955. Blueberries bring from $1.50 to $2.00 a basket, and the amount taken varies greatly from year to year. Ten guides were employed in 1954, six in 1955, at ten dollars a day, for about ten days each. The lumber mill at Fee Spur employed twenty in 1954, but only two in 1955 (Baldwin 1957: 92).

Decades later, railway maintenance and activities related to the construction of a tourist lodge at Whitewater Lake accounted for virtually all of the full-time employment for village residents. Railway work also accounts for most of the geographical mobility of the local labor force since men are employed at various locations on the ‘sections’ on the CN rail line from Nakina to Sioux Lookout.

By paying attention to the various types of occupations available for Anishinaabe workers through the years, general trends have become discernible in the development process. Casual or seasonal employment has become less prevalent as demand has increased for more regular, full-time employment. In conjunction with this new preference, such activities as hunting and fishing, while still important as an income producer in the local economy, benefited from labor-saving technology such as snowmobiles and more efficient water craft. This is especially true for the more affluent workers in the community who have the resources to most effectively exploit aquatic and faunal cycles, and thereby reduce their costs through country food production.

Other forms of casual employment which were quite prevalent a generation ago, such as berry picking, firefighting, and tree planting, now have little preference among Indigenous workers. In fact, Collins leaders have told government officials that they will not tolerate the conscription of young men in the community for summer firefighting because their removal from the local labor force is disruptive of ongoing construction projects and that these workers are crucial to the community’s long-term development goals. As such, these goals would tend to be compromised by the indiscriminate commandeering of local workers. Presumably the Ministry of Natural Resources now recruits fire fighters from the more isolated, less economical developed regions of the north where there still exists a demand for wage employment of this kind.

All in all, my research in Collins indicates that this is a northern community that is, in a certain sense, half-way into the Euro-Canadian economy, and the other half maintains contact with the people’s traditional social and economic roots. It is an accepted fact that wage work has become an ever-increasing facet of the local economy because of the necessity of purchasing modern goods of various sorts. In the small, relatively isolated Indigenous communities that are spread throughout northern Quebec and Ontario, and other regions of the boreal forest belt, there is not the same lack of proximity to a traditional economic life that was probably already forgotten by the grandparents of southern Indigenous people generations ago.¹⁰

This fact, I believe, has important implications for the formulation of governmental policy for northern areas. While economist and other government advisors who lack first-hand familiarity with Indigenous conditions in the north are apt to concentrate on the flow of money and the purchase of goods in the market place, anthropologists who have lived in northern Indigenous communities are more apt to be aware of all the various sorts of activities that engage people in the pursuit of the goods and services that support their way of life, regardless of the presence or absence of cash transactions, which is especially the case with the important role that the subsistence economy plays in maintaining a healthy life style for northern residents.

For those conducting research into the economic life of northern Indigenous settlements, the economist’s narrower perspective on economic change has an unfortunate aspect to it. Any attempts to simply duplicate an industrial wage economy in northern areas is apt to draw attention away from other important areas of concern, such as the benefits to be derived from an efficient use of local resources, and the contributions of traditional economic activity to the viability of northern Indigenous community life. From the economist’s perception, in a developing economy there is a trend toward full-time wage work and occupational specialization. It is no doubt true that over the long run, that is since the end of the twentieth century, this trend has been occurring in northern areas to a larger and larger extent. Yet it is also the case that in many northern settlements the pattern of economic diversity not only remains a strong one, but also remains a preferred situation because it tends to lessen dependence on the outside for food, fuel, and other renewable resources.¹¹

Northern Studies in Anthropology

From an anthropological perspective, the history of ethnographic research in northern Ontario has been rather sparse, at least compared to other areas of Canada (Rogers 1981: 19–29). This research has consisted mostly of various ethnological sketches and surveys in the early part of the twentieth century, and then shifting later on to more involved, problem-oriented research. Ruth Landes (1937), a student of Franz Boas, conducted fieldwork in the Kenora-Rainy River area in the 1930s, thus initiating a period of more intensive ethnographic work. This was followed in the 1940s by Irving Hallowell’s (1992) focus on the Anishinaabe of the Berens River area near the Manitoba border. Later ethnographic accounts of the northern Anishinaabe were produced on the basis of fieldwork carried out in the 1950s which focused on various community studies, such as a focus on social and economic change for the Pekangekum band (Dunning 1958, 1959) and Round Weagamow Lake (Rogers 1962, 1966, Rogers and Black 1976). At an earlier date, as mentioned previously, Alanson Skinner conducted a survey along Lac Seul and the Albany River.

Farther south, Baldwin (1957) conducted a study of social problems in the Collins community, northwest of Lake Nipigon. In more recent times, an ethnohistorical account was written concerning the Osnaburgh Band (Bishop 1974). For the most part, Rogers’s (1962: 2) comment that so little field work has been done in this area northern Ontario that comparison and generalization are impossible is still largely true today. It is no doubt unfortunate, but there has been little published on the contemporary Indigenous peoples of this area for nearly a generation after the work of Dunning and Rogers. A focus on emergent leadership among the Anishinaabe along the Canadian National Rail line continued a trend of more focused or problem-oriented work (Hedican 1986). There have fortunately also been several studies of more recent note, such as Driben and Trudeau’s account of the impact of government programs at Fort Hope (now called Eabametoong), Driben’s (1986) ethnography of Aroland, a community similar to Collins situated on the CN rail line, as well as my own continuing work in the area (Hedican 1990, 2001, 2008, 2017) which extended for three decades from the 1970s to the early 2000s.¹²

Current Economic Challenges

Northern Ontario in recent years has also been the subject of various resource development projects and future proposals, the most prominent of which is known collectively as the Ring of Fire.¹³ This region is near the Attawapiskat River in the Kenora District which extends about 70 kilometers east of the First Nation community of Webequie and due north of the Albany River, west of James Bay. There are three First Nations communities in this area that would be directly impacted by mineral exploration and development, namely Marten Falls, Webequie, and Neskantaga (Garrick 2010). All of these First Nations suffer from depressed economic conditions in one way or another, such as high unemployment, low per-capita incomes, and lack of employment possibilities. As Tony Clement, former Treasury Board president and FedNor minister, acknowledge in 2013, the Ring of Fire area is home to some of the ‘most socioeconomically disadvantaged communities in all of Canada’.

Mr. Clement also stated that "chronic housing shortages, low education outcomes and lack of access to clean drinking water jeopardizes the ability of