The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...
Independent, Connected, Historical, Present: Île-à-Crosse
Sometime in 1776, a montréal-based fur trader wrote down that Métis had founded a community at Île-à-la-Crosse, northeast of cold lake, on the long-established trade and travel route of what settlers like to call the churchill river system. It's french name comes from early fur traders, who named it for the lacrosse game they witnessed locals playing on nearby Big Island. Placed in a region where Dene and Cree peoples have long lived together, its name in Cree is Sakitawak, and in Dene, Kwoen. When the mainstream historians still tried to conflate the Northwest Métis nation and the people's existence as a whole with Louis Riel, they focussed on Île-à-la-Crosse for its Riel connections. Louis Riel Senior was born there, returning over his lifetime to visit family and mark important life passages. Subsequently Louis Riel Junior's sister Sara Riel would join the grey nuns and return to Île-à-la-Crosse as a missionary. Tragically she died young of the scourge of the nineteenth century, tuberculosis in 1883. By 1906, canadian officials were working their way through the region, seeking to make Treaty 10 with the people they deemed "Indians" and to hand out scrip to those they deemed "Halfbreeds." As usual, the officials were accompanied by a rabble of land speculators and traders eager to scoop up scrip and treaty money. Regardless of the impact of the new mission and the treaty, Île-à-Crosse has remained a Northwest Métis majority place, and to this day remains one of the leaders in retention of the Cree and Michif languages. In short, Île-à-Crosse is a deeply significant and storied place to at least three major Indigenous nations, among them the Northwest Métis whose political and cultural cohesion the canadian federal government insisted on treating as a threat.
In her 2021 article The School in Sakitawak, Samantha Nock recounts the history of european-style education there, explaining that while the montréal-based traders of the northwest company (NWC) set up a post there in 1776, the hudson's bay company (HBC) set up another post there in 1799. It was common practice in this time period for HBC officers to arrange schooling for their children at the post, and they made little to no concerted effort to interfere with Indigenous educational practices. Missionaries set up the first european-style residential school in 1847, an unusual institution in that it never received federal funding. In time it would receive provincial funding, and encouragement it is "civilizing" work. But as Nock explains, the children boarding there firmly refused to stop speaking Cree, and the instructors tried to cut off contact with their families. However, Île-à-Crosse was different precisely because of it being a majority Indigenous community not readily accessible by large-scale paramilitary expeditions by the northwest mounted police. It was not going to be so easy for the missionaries to have things their own way, though they became as infamous for their cruelty as the people working in any other residential or day school run by the churches in canada.
By 1973, the people of Île-à-Crosse had had more than enough, and the year before the national indian brotherhood (since renamed the assembly of first nations) released the key early policy paper, Indian Control of Indian Education. The people took over the community school, determined to end the abuses and reform it into a respectful, healthy place providing a culturally grounded, relevant education. They were successful, and the grim history of the church-run version of the school is included in the voluminous documentation collected by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Nevertheless, the survivors of the church-run era were excluded from the subsequent indian residential school settlement (IRSS) because it was not federally funded. Neither they nor their families gave up on their quest for justice, leading to the filming and production of a documentary that won Best History Short Film at the toronto documentary film festival in 2024. The major non-church funding party, the province of saskatchewan, finally issued an apology and signed a multimillion dollar settlement in 2025. As CKOM news staff reported, the federal government is also contributing "up to $27 million to former Île-à-Crosse students and $10 million to projects that address healing, education, language and culture, following a lawsuit launched by the school's former students." Like their relatives whose legal actions resulted in the IRSS and TRC, the people of Île-à-Crosse had to engage in lengthy and expensive litigation and negotiations to win justice for the survivors and their families.
Meanwhile, the Northwest Métis have been busy restructuring their economy as the times change as well. Following traditional practice, the Île-à-Crosse economy is a mixed one, and people familiar with other historical Northwest Métis communities will recognize the mix of trapping, trade, farming, and freighting from its earliest years. A similar mix still holds to the present, although of course the fur trade is much reduced, and now climate change is causing further difficulties. All too aware and affected by wildfires, flooding, and invasive plants and insects, the people of Île-à-Crosse remain continued to stay home and care for their land. Their vision includes creating the Sakitawak protected area as a not only a means to preserve critical forest habitat and Northwest Métis ways of living with the land, but also a major and badly needed carbon sink and healthy fire break. Work towards this goal began long before an important article on the project by Drew Anderson appeared in the canadian news magazine The Narwhal. Unfortunately, the saskatchewan provincial government remains recalcitrant and unhelpful, obsessed with pursuing a resource exploitation to exhaustion economy serving big business, seemingly with an at best minimal view to longer term prosperity, health and safety for the whole province, not just a few corporate-connected people in the cities.
Nevertheless, the people of Île-à-Crosse continue their work, maintaining connection with their community's storied past and continuing future. To this day, Île-à-Crosse is officially a northern village, its population is about two thousand people. They continue to bring together Indigenous knowledge with additional forms of observation grounded in european-style sciences and incorporating appropriate techinologies, from computers to tree cores. They continue to play a major role in development of Michif language teaching and retention resources, including important partnerships with the Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies and Applied Research. Elders took part in an important historical study with Northwest Métis scholar Brenda MacDougall, One of the Family: Metis Culture in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Saskatchewan. With the province having designated Île-à-Crosse a tourism destination, and the government of canada contributing by trying to appropriate the village as their historic site instead, the people have continued their deep tradition of hospitality to visitors. Technically the community of Île-à-Crosse may be small in terms of numbers of people, but it is mighty.
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