Sannox and the Abenaki Indians

Jim Henderson

In that first bitter winter of 1829, the Arran emigrants to Canada could not have survived without the help of the Abenaki Indians, who had a small encampment on the north shore of Lac Joseph. A larger camp of some 100 Indians was located near Lysander Falls approximately 15 miles further north, on the Becancour River.. The difficulty of communication must have been extreme, for the Indians spoke no language but Algonquian, but the Scots were in desperate straits and had nobody else to ask for advice.

The Abenaki (or Wabanaki), meaning People of the East, had been a widespread tribe of about 40,000 people, occupying New England, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine and New Brunswick, occupying their traditional lands for as much as 10,000 years. Their villages were always on agricultural land beside rivers that they could navigate in their bark canoes, and their livelihood depended on hunting, trapping, fishing, and gathering nuts and berries. Their communities shared maize, beans, corn and squash, ensuring that everyone had enough. During the winter period they moved around following the herds of game, returning to their villages by the rivers in the spring. But when the first Europeans arrived in the 16th century they brought with them diseases to which the Indians had no resistance. An epidemic of unknown illness in 1570 decimated their numbers, and typhus in 1586 followed by smallpox in the early 1600s reduced the tribe to about 5,000. Over the next 150 years they were almost wiped out by recurrent epidemics of influenza, diphtheria, measles and chicken pox. After the American Revolution [1775 – 1783] the total number of Abenaki was little over 1,000. In 1759 Major Robert Rogers and his rangers fought the French and Abenaki, a story told in the film Northwest Passage. It was almost the end for the Indians. Then the settlers themselves took a hand to improve things.

By 1830 a mission had been established on the Becancour River, later called the ‘Wolinak Reserve’. Many of the Abenaki spent their winters there, moving to Lac Joseph and Lac William to trade fish in the spring and summer period with the settlers. This may have been the reason why they were so helpful to the Arran settlers – for by then the Abenaki were losing their traditional lands to forestry and mining development, and their sustainable independence was becoming harder to maintain. Many of them left the land, but a few remained in the Inverness area, maintaining links with the Scots, becoming more inter- dependent on each other. One Indian called Peter Mountain was renowned for his knowledge as a herbalist and clarinet player. He became the Scottish families’ physician and was buried in the Boutelle cemetery located on the Dublin Road, Inverness. Today there is a population of approximately 12,000 Abenaki Indian people, spread over Canada and the United States of America.

Footnote:

From the late 18th century, European Canadians encouraged Aboriginals to assimilate into their own culture, and these attempts worsened into forced integration. As in Australia, the residential school system that removed Aboriginal children from their homes for placement in Christian-run schools has led to suggestions that Canada can be tried in the international court for genocide. In 2008 Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued an apology on behalf of the Canadian government and its citizens for the residential school system