Land Tenure of the Rainy Lake Chippewa at the Beginning of the 19th Century

Abstract

The land tenure of northeastern Algonkians has been the subject of discussion and controversy over the past 50 years, since Speck first began describing family hunting territory systems among Algonquin and Chippewa of the Ottowa River valley (1914-15; 1915 a; 1915 b). The issue has boiled down to whether division of land among families or heads of families maintaining them in more or less permanent usufruct, and involving sanctions against trespass, was an aboriginal or postcontact form. I believe consensus now would hold that tenure based on small patrilocal family usufruct (the classic, but by no means universal form) is postcontact (cf. Driver, 1961, pp. 249-250), but the precise form of tenure in aboriginal times would be a matter of doubt. Leacock (1954) quite conclusively demonstrated that family holdings came into existence as a result in subarctic cultures of emphasis on trapping fur for the European fur trade. Such emphasis, in brief, led to the husbanding of beaver and other sedentary game on an individual basis, replacing old communal large-game hunting patterns.<br/>The controversy over the aboriginality of the family tenure system relates to questions concerning the organization of primitives generally, and particularly to the question of the universality of primitive communism. This was recognized quite early in the discussion (Lowie, 1920, p. 211; Speck, 1922, pp. 83-84), and has been a tacit and at times explicit part of it ever since. I have discussed this at length in a review article (Hickerson, 1967).<br/>More recently, Rogers has argued that the question of land tenure should be separated from that of the constitution of social units (1963, pp. 77 ff.). On the basis of his assessment of ecological and socioreligious factors operating among the Mistassini Montagnais and other eastern subarctic peoples he has observed, Rogers suggests that a "hunting group" unit consisting of five or so linked biological families comprised the basic social unit for the area. The fur trade had the effect of tying such units to specific territories due to such factors as the need to conserve fur and fuel, ensure a game supply in a region of limited transportation facilities, provide mutual assistance in times of need, have available the counsel of respected elders, etc. Territorial stability for such units developed from the reliance on fur game, the supply of which had to be regulated and conserved by trapper-proprietors. If I understand Rogers correctly, in pretrade times when fur was not the chief object of the chase, the hunting groups were free to utilize range over which they held no exclusive rights. Without an allotment system, the bands were nevertheless restricted to roughly defined areas without set boundaries.