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BARRIERE LAKE RESERVE, QUE. - Samuel de Champlain wrote fondly of his adventures with the Algonquins, the native allies who helped the founder of Quebec navigate the dangerous white-water rapids of the New World and fought at his side against the Iroquois.
“I wished to help them against their enemies,” the French explorer recalled in his journals of his 1609 encounter with more than 200 Algonquins as he explored the St. Lawrence River. “They had asked all the Indians I saw on the river's bank to come to meet us for the purpose of making an alliance with us. … And that they now besought me to return to our settlement, for them to see our houses, and that three days later we should all set off on the war-path together.”
On the war path they went, winning the first battle of the Iroquois Wars at what would come to be known as Lake Champlain. The explorer famously sketched the battle, depicting himself in the heroic lead defeating the Iroquois with the Algonquins – as well as Montagnais and Hurons – backing him up with bows and arrows.
This summer, Champlain has come to the fore again, as rock concerts, fireworks and foreign dignitaries toast the 400th anniversary of his founding of Quebec City. His Algonquin allies, however, are now even further in the background.
“They're celebrating, but what most of the [Algonquin] people are looking at … is 400 years of misery,” says Algonquin elder Hector Jerome, a long-time activist on the Barriere Lake reserve, three hours north of Ottawa.
Small dirt roads line Highway 117 in northwest Quebec, jutting off into the dense, green forest. There are no signs or mail boxes. But hidden just behind the trees are pockets of Algonquins living in hand-built shacks, lacking running water or electricity.
There is no room for them at nearby Barriere Lake, where mouldy houses with plastic-sheet windows and plywood floors often shelter as many as 16 people each.
Tillis Keyes, a 17-year-old with an interest in poetry, sits at his kitchen table on the reserve and points to the large, plastic-covered window frame behind him.
“It's been like that for four years,” he says.
While native groups across Canada face challenges, politics and history have left the Algonquins outside of the support system and legal status that most other tribes have gained. Their traditional territory covers a huge swath of land on both the Quebec and Ontario sides of the Ottawa river, but the Algonquins have never signed any treaties to trade land rights for structural support.
As a result, while their northern neighbours such as the Cree and the Inuit receive millions each year in natural-resources revenue, many Algonquins in this region live off the land – and welfare cheques from Indian Affairs.
Though the federal government is constitutionally responsible for status Indians such as the Algonquin, Pierre Nepton, a senior Indian Affairs official for the department's Quebec region, points a finger at the Quebec government when asked why the Algonquins do not have the same deals as the Cree and Inuit when it comes to forestry and hydro revenue.
“It's under provincial jurisdiction,” says Mr. Nepton. “It's clear in my view that the province should answer that question: Why?”
Conquered and divided
Quebec's official website for the 400th anniversary contains a biography of Champlain's accomplishments, but makes only passing reference to the native role. Huron leader Max Gros-Louis has been featured in official events, but there is little reference to the Algonquins, who are now scattered across western Quebec and Ontario's Ottawa Valley.
The French quickly abandoned Champlain's alliances in the early 1600s. Without the support of French firearms, many Algonquins were killed by Iroquois from the south.
Colonization then brought disease, and competition for game. The early forest industry flooded the rivers with logs flushed downstream. (The old $1 bill illustrated how the Ottawa River was once covered in logs floating downriver from Algonquin land.)
By the 20th century, Quebec's push into hydro power created massive reservoirs that swallowed up the smaller lakes the Algonquins once depended on for fishing.
