End-of-Earth People

The Arctic Sahtu Dene

Bern Will Brown

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781459722699
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A history of the "End-of-Earth" Native people of Canada's far-North Sahtu region. Bern Will Brown, noted northern author, artist, photographer, and respected community leader living in Colville Lake, Northwest Territories, provides new insights and perspectives on the Sahtu Dene, the people referred to as the "Hareskin" in Alexander Mackenzie's 1793 journal. Having lived among them for over sixty years and as a speaker of their dialect, Brown is well positioned to provide an adventure in history and culture rooted in the Hareskin traditional way of life. End-of-Earth People, his latest contribution and a valuable record of the North, is a portrait of a people Brown has come to know in ways that anthropologists and ethnologists can only envy.

Notes

Editorial Introduction and Reflection

1. Bern Will Brown, Arctic Journal: A Fifty Year Adventure in Canada’s North, combined ed. (Ottawa: Novalis, Saint Paul University, 2003), 17.

2. Brown, Arctic Journal, 496.

3. Ibid., 485, 490.

4. Ibid., 508.

5. Ibid., 509–10.

6. For more information on Bishop Piché, see: Rosa van Camp, “Bishop Paul Piché,” in Arctic Profiles (Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary, Arctic Institute of North America, 1989), 169.

7. “Laicization” is the term used for the change from clergy status to lay/laymen status. Within the Roman Catholic Church, at least at that time, the process was sometimes accompanied by the issuance of an “indult” from Rome that gave someone certain privileges. Bern explains further, “[Being] reduced to the ‘lay’ state … didn’t mean that I was no longer a priest, because the sacrament of holy orders, like baptism, is permanent and cannot be erased even by Rome. I still retained, too, my certificate as a registered clergyman for the Northwest Territories. In return for receiving the cancellation of my three religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and for permission to marry, however, I had to agree to certain conditions. One was to refrain from the celebration of Mass. Another was not to hear confessions, except in the case of someone in danger of death. The bishop turned over to me all the buildings I had built, with the exception of the church and the mission. He was quite willing, however, that I go on living in the mission and taking care of it and the church so that I could be host to any visiting clergy. I would be allowed to conduct a service in church without the Mass, but I could say a Mass if hosts needed to be consecrated for communion. Discussing the terms of my laicization took over two hours.” Arctic Journal, 526–27.

8. See “A Time of Change: Painting and Photographs by Bern Will Brown,” www.pwnhc.ca/exhibits/bwb/biography.html.

9. Ed Struzik, “Painter, Pilot, Dentist, Priest: How a Catholic Missionary Founded a Town, Became Its Postmaster, Tooth-filler and Most Famous Artist — and Found Love at the End-of-Earth” Up Here 18, no. 2 (March 2002): 30–34.

10. “Medevac” refers to the common practice in the North of flying a sick or injured person to an active treatment hospital in Yellowknife or in southern Canada.

Preface

1. Thomas R. Berger, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland: the Report of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1988). Justice Thomas R. Berger is probably best known for his work as royal commissioner of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry during the mid-seventies and the subsequent publication. This landmark report led to a moratorium on industrial development in the Mackenzie Valley and, in particular, blocking the construction of an oil pipeline from the Arctic coast to Alberta. Berger was a commonly sighted figure in the North as he met formally and informally with hundreds of Dene in camps and villages up and down the Mackenzie River valley.

Chapter One: What is Known of Sahtu Dene History

1. Cornelius Osgood, “The Ethnography of the Great Bear Lake Indians,” Canada, National Museum, no. 70 (Ottawa: The Museum, 1931): 31–98. Émile Petitot, Explorations de la région du Grand Lac des Ours (Paris: Tequi, 1893). Canadian scientist Lionel Johnson, who had been working in the Arctic for many years, claims, “The local inhabitants, having become to some extent dissociated from their parent tribes, naturally tended to form a new grouping of lake-centered people to which Osgood (1931) applied the term Satudene, derived from the words in Chippewyan meaning “bear water people.” See article by Lionel Johnson, “The Great Bear Lake: Its Place in History,” (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Freshwater Institute, Environment Canada), Arctic 28 (1975): 231–44. See http://arctic.synergiesprairies.ca/arctic/index/article/viewFile/2840/2817.

2. The ethnohistory of June Helm makes this distinction: “In the 1860s (1865) Petitot identified two regional bands of the Peaux de Lièvre who exploited the northern shores of Great Bear Lake. By the early decades of the twentieth century, these two regional groups were no longer identifiably Hare. They had become a part of the people self-identified as Sahtugot’ine or Sahtu Dene, Bearlake Dene. The Bearlake Dene are demonstrably a historical amalgamation of ‘Hare’ and ‘Dogrib’ peoples with some infusion of ‘Slavey’ and ‘Mountain’ Dene.’” June Helm, The People of Denendeh: Ethnohistory of the Indians of Canada’s Northwest Territories. (Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 15–16. Helm describes the interaction, influences, and sometimes absorption of one group by another and the emergence of new identities. Aside from questions as to the accuracy of this assessment or the extent to which this has occurred, the Hareskin clearly did not exist in isolation from other groups. To some extent, the Hareskin communities have maintained a unique identity within the larger Dene nation, but it is an identity that continues to evolve.

3. “They [the Hareskin] are divided into five bands or sub-tribes, namely: the Nni-o’tinné, or ‘People of the Moss,’ who rove along the outlet of Great Bear Lake; the Kra-tha-go’tinné, or ‘People among the Hares,’ who dwell on the same stream; the Kra-cho-go’tinné, ‘People of the Big Hares,’ whose hunting grounds are inland, between the Mackenzie [River] and the coast of the Arctic Ocean; the Sa-cho-thu-go’tinné, ‘People of Great Bear Lake,’ whose name betrays their location; and lastly, the Nne-lla-go’tinné, ‘People of the End of the World,’ whose district is coterminus with that of the Eskimos.” A.G. Morice, “Hare Indians” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton Co., 1910), 136–37.

4. See Shepard Krech, III, “Linguistic Affiliation” in Encyclopedia of World Cultures (1996). See also: www.encyclopedia.com/topic/hare.aspx.

5. Sahtu Dene and Métis Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement (Ottawa: Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1993). See also: www.aadnc-aandegc.ca/eng/1100100031207/1100100031212#chp1. On June 23, 1994, the Sahtu Dene and Métis Land Claim Settlement Act came into effect. The Act identifies these five communities as the principal settlements that constitute the Sahtu region.

6. Dene Nation leader and national chief of the Assembly of First Nations from 1985 to 1991, George Erasmus explains, “We were named ‘Indian,’ we were being called ‘non-status and status Indians or Métis.’ All of these names were imposed on us. We have always called ourselves ‘Dene.’ Simply translated, we define ourselves as ‘people,’ as different from the animals. With the coming of the Europeans, we developed the terms ‘Dene’ to mean not only ourselves as a people separate from the animals, but ourselves as separate from the Europeans.” George Erasmus, “We the Dene,” in Dene Nation: The Colony Within, Mel Watkins, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 177.

7. “The men” may also be understood in the more generic sense of “the people.” Thomas Berger notes, “All these Indians, with whatever dialectical variation in their languages, regard themselves as the people. To the Slavey they are the Dene, to the Navaho Dine; in Kutchin [Gwichen] the word is Dindjie; in Apache it is Hde. Today, in the North, the Indian people collectively call themselves the Dene.” Thomas R. Berger, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland: The Report of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, vol. 1 (Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1977), 6.

8. Literally, peaux (skins) de (of) lièvre (hare). “The names ‘Hare’ and ‘Peaux de Lièvre,’ which Europeans have used for over two hundred years, refer to the extreme dependence some Hare Indians placed on the varying hare Lepus americanus for food and clothing.” Shepard Krech, III, “Hare” in Encyclopedia of World Cultures (1996). See also: www.encyclopedia.com/topic/hare.aspx.aspx#1. As for the first recorded European encounter with these people, see Alexander Mackenzie’s note in his journal entry of Wednesday, July 8, 1789, where he remarks on the hare-skin clothing of these people: “At half past two in the morning we embarked, as steered a Westerly course, and soon after put ashore at two lodges of nine Indians. We made them a few trifling presents, but without disembarking, and had proceeded but a small distance from thence, when we observed several smokes beneath a hill, on the North shore, and on our approach we perceived the natives climbing the ascent to gain the woods. The Indians, however, in the two small canoes which were ahead of us, having assured them of our friendly intentions, they returned to their fires, and we disembarked. Several of them were clad in hare-skins, but in every other circumstance they resembled those whom we had already seen. We were, however, informed that they were of a different tribe, called the Hare Indians, as hares and fish are their principal support, from the scarcity of rein-deer and beaver, which are the only animals of the larger kind that frequent this part of the country.” Alexander Mackenzie, Voyages from Montreal on the River St. Lawrence through the Continent of North America to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans in the Years 1789 and 1793 (Edmonton, Alberta.: M.G. Hurtig Ltd., 1971), 43–44.

9. See Mackenzie’s journal entry for “Sunday, July 5, 1789” in Voyages from Montreal, 32–33.

10. R.S. MacNeish, “Two Archaeological Sites on Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories,” Canada, National Museum of Man, no. 136 (Ottawa: The Museum, 1955), 54–84. Richard MacNeish’s work appears in various publications including that most relevant to the present study,

11. Abdul-Ghani Kibbi, et al., “Congenital Dermal Melanocytosis (Mongolian Spot),” See: http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/ 1068732-overview.

12. A.G. Morice, “The Unity of Speech among the Northern and Souther[n] Deni,” American Anthropologist 9, no. 4 (October–December, 1907): 729–30.

13. MacNeish, “Two Archaeological Sites on Great Bear Lake,” 54–84.

14. See the map entitled, “Discoveries of the Expedition under the Command of Captain Franklin, R.N. Near the Mouth of the Mackenzie River and on...