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Article Excerpt
Introduction
In 2003, The Nation--which is the Eastern James Bay Cree's main periodical--published the legend of 'The woman who turned cannibalistic' (Masty 2003). (1) It tells the story of a couple who lived on the land a long time ago 'when it was easy to catch beaver' (p. 59). One day the man notices that his wife does not eat much of the meat he brings home but seems satiated after a few bites. Spying, he observes her leaving their lodge with a cooking pot and walking over to a mound near the edge of a swamp. There he sees her sitting beside the mound and cutting something inside which she then transfers to the pot. Confronting her, he realizes that she has killed a bear and is cutting meat from it a little at a time. Outraged, 'the man dragged the partially butchered carcass out of the den and took it home' where he proceeds to 'properly' (p. 61) clean and butcher the bear.
This killing and consuming of the bear outside the traditional ritualistic procedures followed by male hunters has severe consequences. Gradually, the woman starts to exhibit strange behaviour. After skinning a beaver, she licks the blade of the flesher against the prohibition that beaver meat is not eaten raw. Worse, she tries to stab her husband when he mentions this rule to her. Fearing that she 'no longer had any sense of right from wrong' (p. 63) the man leaves their camp the following morning to fetch her parents who are hunting nearby. When they reach the camp, the crazed woman walks toward her parents, kills them, and later eats their corpses. From then on, it is clear that the woman has stopped being human: 'She was no longer the size of a human. She was becoming a giant cannibal. She was eating people now' (p. 65). Following in her father's trail, the cannibalistic woman walks back to the main camp where the rest of her clan is ready for her and a shaman kills her. The legend concludes that: 'The spirit of the bear was vengeful to those who showed disrespect. This was before there was religion. Nobody knew God'. Nevertheless, 'the man wasn't killed because he was very observant' (p. 65).
Interestingly, that issue of The Nation also contained an article, this time non-fictional, about a woman who was making a formal plea to the Cree Trappers' Association (CTA) in order to become lead hunter of her family trapline, a role now referred to as 'tallyman'. (2) The woman, who at the time was in her late sixties, was born on her family's land and spent her youth in the bush. She never went to school and always led a traditional lifestyle. Her father died when she was very young and her mother became the sole provider and teacher of the family. She remembers her mother as a role model: 'She patiently taught us everything about our traditional lifestyle, and the hunting, trapping and fishing skills. She worked as hard as any man at our family camp when my late brother was still small and unable to do heavy chores' (Valade 2003, 41). When her brother died in 2002, his last wish was to leave the trapline to his sister; as an elder and a respected member of her community, she was the best person to ensure that the land would be well taken care of, and that its wealth would continue to be shared. This simple plea, however, would put the CTA in a delicate situation for, in granting such a wish, it would have to go against the traditional patrilineal practice of transferring land from father to son. (3)
The juxtaposition of these two pieces only a few pages apart is an intriguing editorial commentary by The Nation on the dilemma facing the CTA, and Cree society as a whole. Indeed, it would constitute a surprising break from tradition if the CTA were to grant official responsibility of a trapline to a woman. Yet, in practice, men and women often accomplished many of the same tasks while out on the land. The extensive list of skills that traditionally had to be acquired by both men and women to maintain a successful hunting lifestyle attests that the division of labour between them was a matter of survival: living off the land meant that each gendered task was developed toward the goal of maximizing every effort, resource, or movement in space. Nevertheless, as oral history demonstrates, injury, death, resource scarcity or other calamities constantly forced men and women to cross gender barriers and do what is needed to be done in order to sustain themselves and their families. What then, in this context, constituted a 'traditional' division of labour between men and women? And, depending on the nature of this division, what kinds of social roles, or types of relationship to the land did it give rise to?
This is the question I explore in this review article, which also aims to present possible research avenues. I start from the premise that we cannot understand the historic and contemporary geographies of subsistence economies without more research about the roles that women played in them. Unfortunately, very little systematic research has been dedicated to this topic for the Crees of Quebec. It must be stated at the onset that my project here is not to 'uncover' the historical geographies of Eeyou women in Northern Quebec, for they themselves know their contribution to the landscape of Eeyou Istchee and to the history of their people on this land. (4) My goal, rather, is to identify possible research avenues on women's historical geographies in this region. Related to this goal is also a broader reflection on how geographies of the past are reconstructed by historical geographers, both from an epistemological and methodological point of view. As a discipline, historical geography has been chiefly dedicated to the study of the encounter of migrant Europeans with new world lands and societies, with the result that Aboriginal and women's geographies have commanded less attention. This, I suggest, leaves us with a gap in knowledge that should be addressed by emerging researchers.
As it relates to Quebec and to the body of research that pertains to the Cree subsistence economy, this question must also be replaced within a specific context: The beginning of hydroelectric development in James Bay following the announcement of the La Grande project by Robert Bourassa in 1971 caught the Crees and their allies by surprise. The fast pace at which events moved and the stubbornness of the government, which pressed on with the project even as negotiations were under way with the Crees, created a sense of urgency. A solid case had to be made that a lively, viable hunting culture existed--and indeed continues to exist--in James Bay, and that this culture would be irremediably altered, if not destroyed, without express policies designed to protect both its practitioners and their territory. During the court proceedings that led to the signing of the James Bay and Northern Quebec agreement, male Cree hunters addressed the judge, speaking of their land as best as they could within the constraints of the white judicial system that reviewed their case. (5) Anthropologists, many of them teaching or studying at McGill University (see Feit 1978; Tanner 1979; Scott 1983; Salisbury 1986), played an important part in analyzing the various aspects of Cree culture and territoriality that were key to the success of the negotiation. Within this highly politicized context, it is normal that some features of Cree culture...
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