Food Production in the Wabigoon Basin: The First Nine Thousand Years

Abstract

This local history of the Wabigoon Basin surveys food security in the region over the longue durée: from the retreat of the glaciers until the imposition of the Indian Act and industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Synthesizing local history and ethnohistory with recent archaeological and anthropological readings of landscapes managed by Indigenous peoples as anthropogenic spaces, we aim to critique traditional nineteenth-century historiography that saw Canadian landscapes (especially the Canadian Shield) as untouched wilderness before Euro-Canadian agriculture. Here, we use colonization in the 1890s not as a beginning point for history but, rather, as an end point for nine thousand years of Indigenous peoples’ food sovereignty, unhindered by bureaucracy and third-party management. We also discuss the conceptual gap between the reality of Indigenous (specifically Ojibwe/Anishinaabeg) farming food production and farming in the Dryden-Wabigoon and Boundary Waters region, within their long history of innovation and adaptation versus Euro-Canadian fantasies of Indigenous stasis and unpopulated wilderness used to justify late-19th-century colonization.