Algonquin Erotic

Ask an Algonquin where home is and the answer is a river. The Kichi Sibi, the Ottawa River, drains a watershed that straddles the Quebec and Ontario border, and the Algonquin, who call themselves Omàmiwinini or more broadly Anicinàpe, have lived along it and its tributaries for as long as there have been people in that valley. The nation today is organized into ten federally recognized communities, nine in Quebec and one in Ontario, from Pikwakanagan near Golden Lake to Kitigan Zibi outside Maniwaki and the more remote settlements of Lac Simon, Kitcisakik and Barriere Lake. Canada's Parliament Buildings stand on land the Algonquin never signed away, which is why the Algonquins of Ontario land claim, covering most of the Ontario side of the watershed including the capital itself, remains one of the largest unresolved claims in the country.

The name causes constant confusion. Algonquian is a language family stretching from the Atlantic to the Rockies, Cree and Blackfoot and Mi'kmaq included, and it was named after this one people because French traders met them early. Their own language, Anicinàbemowin, is close enough to Ojibwe that linguists still argue over whether it is a dialect or a separate tongue. It is spoken most strongly in the Quebec communities and has thinned badly in Ontario, where English has taken over. Religion is layered rather than divided: Catholic missions arrived with the French in the seventeenth century and most Algonquins are at least nominally Catholic, but sweat lodges, drum ceremonies and traditional Anishinaabe teachings coexist with the church in the same families, often in the same person.

Two historical moments shaped everything since. In the early 1600s the Kichesipirini, the people of the great river based on Allumette Island, controlled the Ottawa route and charged tolls to canoes headed for the interior, which put them squarely in the fur trade wars with the Haudenosaunee and scattered them upriver. Then in the nineteenth century the square timber trade stripped the valley of its white pine and pushed the communities onto reserves. What survived is specific and unshowy: moose hunting on a seasonal round, birchbark canoe building that never fully died out, maple sugaring in spring, and a relationship with the bush that Barriere Lake's 1991 Trilateral Agreement tried to translate into law with only partial success. The Algonquin watched a national capital rise on their hunting grounds, and they are still, patiently and stubbornly, holding the government to account for it.