Algonquin people

The Algonquin, who call themselves Omàmiwininiwak or more broadly Anicinàpek, are a First Nations people of the Ottawa River valley and the forests of western Quebec and eastern Ontario. Their language is closely related to Ojibwe, and they count the Odawa, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Mississauga and Nipissing as kin within the wider Anishinaabe family. They are a distinct nation from the vast Algonquian language family, which was named after them.

In Anishinaabe oral history, the ancestors of the Algonquin travelled inland from the Atlantic coast, halting at a "First Stopping Place" near Montreal. While other groups pressed on westward, the Algonquin made their home along Kitcisìpi, the Ottawa River, a highway for trade and travel. Scholars combining oral tradition, archaeology and linguistics place the separation of a distinct Algonquin identity roughly 2,000 years ago. On Morrison Island near Pembroke, archaeologists have found copper tools and weapons from a culture about 1,000 years old, alongside much older copper artefacts.

Algonquin life was built on hunting, fishing and mobility. Families travelled in birch-bark canoes sealed with spruce resin and bear grease, used toboggans and snowshoes in winter, and carried infants on cradleboards. Some groups also grew crops, and Eastern Algonquins took up maize around 800 CE. The Kitcisìpiriniwak, the "people of the great river", stood out: settled year-round on their fortified island, they grew corn and levied tolls on canoe brigades travelling the river route that linked the Great Lakes with the St Lawrence. Spiritual life centred on the Midewiwin and on the manitòk, the spirits of the natural world. Each band had its own chief, guided by clan leaders.

Samuel de Champlain met an Algonquin party at Tadoussac in 1603, and from then on many Algonquin bands allied with New France, gaining access to firearms and becoming major players in the fur trade. The alliance set them against the Haudenosaunee, who were armed by Dutch and later English traders. Haudenosaunee raids in the 1640s, including a heavy attack near Trois-Rivières in 1647, drove many Algonquin from their lands, and epidemics struck mission communities such as Sillery. French missionaries converted many to Catholicism. Algonquin delegates signed the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701 and fought for France until the British conquest in 1760 during the Seven Years' War.

The Algonquin then made alliance with the British under the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Treaty of Niagara of 1764, and fought for the Crown in the American Revolutionary War. From the 1820s Loyalist settlers and the lumber industry pushed up the Ottawa valley. Grand Chief Constant Pinesi petitioned repeatedly for recognition of Algonquin territory without success, and from the 1830s Algonquins were confined to a string of small reserves, while many who stayed on the land were left without Indian status.

About 17,000 people belong to the nine recognised Algonquin First Nations in Quebec and one in Ontario, among them Kitigan Zibi near Maniwaki, Lac Simon, Timiskaming and Pikwàkanagàn. The 2016 census counted about 3,330 speakers of the language, which remains in daily use in several communities. In Ontario an Algonquin land claim covering much of the south-east of the province, including Ottawa and Algonquin Provincial Park, has been under negotiation since 1983; an agreement-in-principle was reached in 2015, though many Algonquins dispute it.

Our 1500 map draws an approximate Algonquin territory along the Ottawa and upper St Lawrence. It borders the Wyandot, labelled Huron, the Iroquois and Mi'kma'ki, homeland of the Mi'kmaq, with the peoples of the subarctic forest to the north.