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Article Excerpt
In March 1771, Matonabbee, an important leader among the Chipewyan Indians, found himself on the shores of Wholdaia Lake in what is now southeastern Northwest Territories. For the last four months, he had been escorting a young Englishman named Samuel Hearne, an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), across the barrens of Canada's northern interior, searching for a copper mine that native rumours placed along the banks of a northward flowing river. Hearne had made two prior attempts to seek out this "coppermine" river, and both had been utter failures. But crossing frozen Wholdaia Lake, Hearne found something besides the mineral wealth for which he sought. In this most unlikely spot, on the shores of a frozen lake among people who his own countrymen would most likely dismiss as backwards and uncivilized, Samuel Hearne found paradise.
Composing his journal a few years later, Hearne wrote of the Lake Wholdaia Chipewyan as living in a state of primitive plenty. The woodlands bordering the lake and nearby Dubawnt River teemed with such numbers of caribou that the Chipewyan hunters, using pounds constructed of bushy trees and snares made of rawhide, could easily provide enough meat for the entire community. Even the elderly in the community were well provided for and spared the deprivations that regularly faced other communities of the normally nomadic Chipewyan during their seasonal travels throughout what would later be northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
This vision of Eden upon the Dubawnt caused Hearne to become quite philosophical about the impact of European contact on Native Americans. At the same time that he celebrated the simple subsistence of the Lake Wholdaia Chipewyan, he lamented what he perceived as the harmful effects of European trade goods on native economies. It was those Indians who "never give themselves the trouble to acquire what they can do well enough without" that Hearne declared to be "the most happy." (1)
On the other hand, Hearne expressed pity for those among the Indians who spent their time acquiring furs to trade to the Europeans and regularly made the dangerous trip to the Hudson's Bay and back again, only to exchange their newly acquired European manufactures among their neighbours for more skins and then repeat the journey. In fact, he went so far as to describe them as little more than "slaves and carriers to the rest." The only explanation that Hearne could conceive for these "carriers" to behave in a manner so clearly against their own interest was the sense of pride that they felt at the elaborate shows of respect given them by their European trading partners. But Hearne seems to suggest that he personally viewed this as small compensation. (2)
It is unlikely that Matonabbee would have shared the sentiments of his English companion. In fact, he fit perfectly into that class of Indians who Hearne described as "carriers to the rest." But far from becoming a "slave" to those Indians in the interior to whom he provided European goods, Matonabbee had parlayed his role as middleman into a position of respect and authority not only among his own people, the Chipewyan, but also among several of the other native peoples with whom they had contact. While Hearne idealized the Wholdaia Lake Chipewyan as a perfect example of the simple and happy "noble savage," Matonabbee took as his goal another ideal. This ideal, that of the open-handed leader who earned respect through generosity, was rooted in traditional Chipewyan culture, but conditioned by the still relatively new opportunities of the fur trade.
It was exactly because Matonabbee was an experienced "carrier" to the Chipewyan and Copper Indians, through whose lands Hearne needed to pass, that he was so perfectly qualified as a guide for the Englishman's expedition. Because these peoples knew Matonabbee and respected him, Hearne was able to place himself under the protection of this "principal man," and avoid the harsh treatment that he had experienced at native hands on his two previous attempts to reach the Coppermine River. Matonabbee was not only not a "slave" to those native peoples with whom he had contact, but was in fact the true leader of Hearne's expedition and a respected figure throughout the lands to the west of Hudson's Bay. The expansion of the Atlantic commercial network into the Canadian interior had opened up new opportunities for the Native American communities that surrounded the Bay. Matonabbee, and other men like him, seized these opportunities to integrate themselves into the fur trade, make themselves indispensable to both their European trading partners and their Indian clients, and ultimately to build themselves lives of prestige and honour.
A stark contradiction existed between the simple lives of the Wholdaia Lake Indians, whose existence Hearne so idealized, and the path to commercial success that Matonabbee had taken to make himself a leading man among the Chipewyan. A seventeenth century Mi'kmaq hunter has gained lasting historical fame for having once remarked within earshot of a French missionary that "the beaver does everything to perfection ... he makes for us kettles, axes, swords, knives, and gives drink and food." (3) For Matonabbee living a century later, the fur trade brought not just access to these material goods, but also the opportunity to gain social prominence and the widespread respect of all the Indian peoples living to the west of Hudson's Bay. Throughout his life the opportunities offered by the fur trade, and the international commercial network of which it was a part, influenced the choices that Matonabbee made, and ultimately shaped the decision that led to his death. Presenting a metaphor for the fate of countless Native American communities throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Matonabbee's life and death show how the opportunities of the fur trade could all too easily turn to dependency. (4)
From its very inception (or conception), Matonabbee's life was intimately shaped by the commercial networks facilitated by the fur trade. Matonabbee's father was a Chipewyan hunter employed by Richard Norton, chief factor of Prince of Wales Fort in the mid-1730s, to provide meat for the Europeans working at the trading post. Matonabbee's mother was a slave of anonymous origin brought to Prince of Wales Fort by Cree traders and apparently sold either to Matonabbee's father or to Norton. Matonabbee was born at Prince of Wales Fort, at the nexus of the fur trade for the Hudson's Bay's west coast, in either 1736 or 1737. Matonabbee's father died shortly after the birth of his son, and his mother disappeared from the historical record. Still an infant, Matonabbee was adopted by Chief Factor Norton and his Cree wife (5)
Matonabbee spent the first five years of his life at Prince of Wales Fort, a multi-ethnic meeting place for Europeans and various bands of Indians. The son of a Chipewyan hunter, Matonabbee's first words would mostly likely have been Cree. Day to day he would have seen the HBC's British employees coming and going from the Fort to attend to their assigned tasks. Chipewyan and Crees from migratory bands would have visited the Fort regularly along with various strange Indians from bands for whom the Europeans as yet had no names.
When Richard Norton was replaced as governor at Prince of Wales Fort in 1741, Matonabbee was taken in by relatives of his father. For the next seventeen years Matonabbee lived among his Chipewyan relations, learning the Chipewyan language, their customs and traditions. He traveled with his band during their seasonal migrations, following their primary food source, the caribou. His winters would have been spent in the wooded areas surrounding lakes and streams, and his summers in the open region known as the Barren Grounds. Matonabbee may also have occasionally traveled with his relations to Prince of Wales Fort to trade.
As a grown man, Matonabbee chose to follow in his father's footsteps. In the fall of 1758, the chief factor of Prince of Wales Fort, Ferdinand Jacobs, recorded the addition of "two Northern Indians" (the term used by HBC employees for the Chipewyan) to the regular work force of the Fort. (6) For the most part, the two Chipewyan men served the Fort as hunters of geese, partridges and other game, but...
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