The Cree

4 Key excerpts on "The Cree"

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  Decentring the Renaissance

  Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective 1500-1700

  • Carolyn Podruchny, Germaine Warkentin(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of Toronto Press

    (Publisher)

  Upon its creation in 1670, the Hudson's Bay Company began to establish fur trade posts in Cree territory, locating them at favoured Native meeting places. Today, The Cree are settled in nine villages on these same meeting sites. Before adopting village life, The Cree lived in small extended family groups, hunting, trapping, and fishing (Francis and Morantz 1983). It was within these family settings, around the campfire, that the elders would tell sto-ries that encompassed their knowledge of Cree cosmology, history, and values. Can this oral tradition be used to construct a unified history of the relations of these two groups? Will academic historians ever be able to write the history of the first encounters (or any other encounters) between The Cree and the new arrivals that conveys, in the telling of such events, the intent, substance, and lessons intrinsic to both The Cree and Euro-Canadians? Can there be a single history that reflects both perspectives? The one draws on a rich, ancient oral tradition, and the other on an equally rich, relatively ancient recorded one, but each is embedded in radically different cultural contexts. This paper explores whether there is enough common ground between the two to create a single narrative that adequately reflects the actions, judgments, feelings, convictions, values, and ideas of both sets of actors. History, we are told, 5O Toby Morantz has become more democratic, more challenging of single narratives, and more receptive to including diverse accounts (Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob 1994, 293). The interest of such historians in integrating oral text with the written stems from the expectation that histories and or ethno-histories produced today will call on all sources, with some privileging of the Native views of history (Trigger 1982, 7).

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  Eighteenth-Century Western Cree and Their Neighbours

  • Dale R. Russell(Author)
  • 1991(Publication Date)
  • University of Ottawa Press

    (Publisher)

  3. The Cree Migration 39 Although these works were written primarily for an American audience only peripherally interested in the Canadian west, their authors had sufficient prestige that their statements were more widely influential. Moreover, the same views are found in the more recent syntheses of Canadian Indians. For example, E. Palmer Patterson in a widely used text, summarizes Mandelbaum. He speaks of The Cree as being originally from east of Lake Winnipeg but armed with guns and seeking furs, they pushed out gradually into the Prairies, where they formed an alliance with their Assiniboine neighbours... (1972:91-92). One of the few attempts to review the published primary information was made by Walter Hlady, an avocational archaeologist from Manitoba, whose statements became influential among archaeologists of the northern plains. Hlady interpreted the archaeological data to indicate that The Cree had been in eastern and central Manitoba from prehistoric times. However, Hlady also saw The Cree as historic migrants into the farther west: With the acquisition of firearms, The Cree became much more expansive than the gradual westward movement of earlier centuries (1964:26). Although Hlady (p.24) considered the prehistoric movement to be triggered by a population buildup of a people who needed large areas of land on which to subsist, the motivation for the later movement is unstated, although it seems vaguely to have been associated with the fur trade. The most detailed assessment of both the published records and the HBC archives is Arthur J. Ray's (1974) study of the western Indians, primarily Cree and Assiniboin: Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role as Hunters. Trappers and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay.

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  Muskekowuck Athinuwick

  Original People of the Great Swampy Land

  • Victor P. Lytwyn(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • University of Manitoba Press

    (Publisher)

  2. The Lowland Cree before European Contact: Images and Reality The Image of an Unoccupied Land According to oral traditions, the Lowland Cree occupied the Hudson Bay lowlands long before the arrival of the Europeans. In 1985, James Wesley, a Lowland Cree elder from Moose Factory, told historian John Long about the way of life in the lowlands before the coming of the white man. Wesley explained, My grandfather said it was just Indian people living in this particular area, on the west shores of James and Hudson Bays. 1 Jesuit missionary records also state that the Lowland Cree were there at the time of the arrival of Europeans. In 1667, Jesuit missionaries interviewed an elderly Lowland Cree man who told them he had also seen a House which the Europeans had built on the mainland, out of boards and pieces of wood; and that they held Books in their hands, like the one he saw me holding when he told me this. 2 Unfortunately, Lowland Cree oral traditions have not been extensively published and, until recently, little weight has been assigned to their va-lidity as historical information.The Lowland Cree did not possess a liter-ate tradition, and the physical conditions in the lowlands quickly eroded many of the visible signs of past occupancy. Seasonal encampments in 28 CHAPTER Two river valleys were washed away annually by the scouring action of ice and water during spring breakup. Camps built on higher ground were exposed to the erosive action of wind, rain, and snow. The accounts of the early European exploring expeditions are also inconclusive about the nature of the Aboriginal occupation of the lowlands. Only in the past few decades have archaeological investigations uncovered artifacts confirming that Abo-riginal people lived in the lowlands for over 1000 years before European settlement in the region. Prior to these findings, historians depicted the Hudson Bay lowlands as a region devoid of humans before European fur-trade settlement.

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  The Plains Cree

  Trade, Diplomacy, and War, 1790 to 1870

  • John S. Milloy(Author)
  • 1990(Publication Date)
  • University of Manitoba Press

    (Publisher)

  THE C R E E AND THE M A N D A N -H I D A T S A T R A D E R S II Overleaf: Plains Cree driving buffalo into pound (Glenbow Archives, Calgary, NA-1406-101) Military Patterns on the Southeastern Plains, 1730 to 1805 4 The area of the southeastern plains has been portrayed as the homestead of the Selkirk settlers, the base camp of both the colourful Metis buffalo hunters and eager missionaries dreaming of rich harvests in native souls, the battleground of Canada's one successful rebellion, and the origin of the province of Manitoba. On the part of fur-trade historians, these preoccupations are understandable. Yet, in the shadows of the fur trade and struggling prairie settlement, significant events were occurring in the course of Indian history and, in particular, Cree history. The Mandan-Hidatsa trading centre and Cree participation in it are probably the most important factors in the history of the Plains Cree on the southeastern plains. This centre must represent a high point in plains economic organization. It was the home of a native trade system which was in existence prior to the European fur trade and then adapted well to the introduction of European goods. The Cree and their Assiniboine allies had an important role in its operation, both as traders sup-plying European goods and as military actors in the area. As in the Northwest with regard to The Cree-Blackfoot trade system, here again military, diplomatic and economic factors were linked from the early eighteenth century onward. The most western of Woodland Cree people, prior to the trade era, inhabited the banks of the Winnipeg River. There, some time in the seventeenth century, they welcomed the Assiniboine, originally of the Sioux nation. Jointly, The Cree and the Assiniboine entered the Hudson's Bay Company trade system and became familiar with the territory west of Lake Winnipeg.

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