Wikipedia Deep Dive

Naskapi

12 min read

In 1956, an entire people walked four hundred miles through the subarctic wilderness to reach a town that didn't want them. When the Naskapi finally stumbled into Schefferville, Quebec—exhausted, starving, many of them sick—they found no homes waiting, no preparations made. The government officials who may have encouraged the journey hadn't bothered to warn anyone they were coming. The Naskapi built shacks from scavenged materials on the edge of a lake, and within a year, municipal authorities moved them again, claiming the water was contaminated.

This was not an anomaly in Naskapi history. It was the pattern.

The People Beyond the Horizon

The word "Naskapi" first appeared in European records around 1643, when a Jesuit priest named André Richard mentioned the "Ounackkapiouek"—one of many "small nations" somewhere north of Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay River. The name itself carries a kind of poetry: it means "people beyond the horizon."

They earned that name by living in the places that seemed unreachable to everyone else.

The Naskapi are Indigenous people of the subarctic, inhabiting what they call St'aschinuw—"our land"—in what is now northern Quebec, near the region known as Nunavik. They're closely related to the Innu people, though the relationship is complicated by history and geography. European colonizers, particularly the French, divided the Innu into categories: those living along the Gulf of Saint Lawrence became known as Montagnais, while the Naskapi were those living farther north, near Ungava Bay and in the vast interior between Hudson's Bay and the Torngat Mountains.

The Innu themselves recognize distinctions that don't map neatly onto European categories—the Mushuau Innuat, the Maskuanu Innut, the Uashau Innuat—based on regional affiliations and dialect differences. One linguistic marker separates Naskapi from Montagnais speech: where Montagnais uses "n," Naskapi uses "y." The Montagnais say "Innu." The Naskapi say "Iiyuu."

That single sound encodes centuries of separate development in one of the harshest environments on Earth.

Nomads in a Land of Extremes

The subarctic of northern Quebec is not forgiving terrain. Winter temperatures plunge to forty below. Summer brings clouds of biting insects so dense they can drive caribou mad. The land is a mosaic of boreal forest, tundra, and countless lakes and rivers carved by ancient glaciers.

The Naskapi adapted to this world by moving through it. Unlike the more territorial Montagnais to the south, the Naskapi were traditionally nomadic, following the caribou herds that were central to their survival. The George River caribou herd, in particular, shaped Naskapi life—providing food, clothing, shelter materials, and tools.

This nomadic existence meant the Naskapi developed a different relationship with the land than peoples who stayed in one place. They knew the country intimately across vast distances. They understood when and where to find food in different seasons. Their culture evolved around movement rather than settlement.

When Europeans arrived with their trading posts and missionary ambitions, they didn't understand—or didn't care—that asking the Naskapi to stay in one place was asking them to become different people entirely.

The Hudson's Bay Company Years

Regular contact between the Naskapi and Western society began in 1831, when the Hudson's Bay Company established a trading post at Old Fort Chimo. What followed was a century and a quarter of exploitation dressed up as commerce.

The relationship was troubled from the start. The Company wanted furs, particularly marten pelts, which brought the best prices in European markets. They expected the Naskapi to become diligent trappers, delivering regular harvests of valuable skins.

But there was a fundamental problem. Marten live in different places than the animals the Naskapi hunted for food. To trap marten in winter meant neglecting the hunting that kept their families alive. The Naskapi couldn't integrate commercial trapping into their seasonal round of subsistence activities without risking starvation.

The Company's traders attributed this reluctance to laziness or stubbornness. They responded with punishment.

Documentation from this period records multiple instances where Hudson's Bay Company managers, frustrated with what they perceived as inadequate trapping effort, withheld ammunition from the Naskapi. This wasn't merely withholding trade goods. In a land where hunting was survival, denying ammunition was a death sentence. People starved.

Moved Like Inventory

Between 1831 and 1956, the Naskapi were relocated repeatedly—not for their benefit, but for the convenience of their exploiters. The major moves tell their own story:

1842: Fort Chimo to Fort Nascopie
1870: Fort Nascopie back to Fort Chimo
1915: Fort Chimo to Fort McKenzie
1948: Fort McKenzie back to Fort Chimo
1956: Fort Chimo to Schefferville

Each relocation followed the same pattern. The Hudson's Bay Company would decide to open, close, or move a trading post based on commercial calculations—fur prices in London, competition from rival traders, transportation costs. The Naskapi, who had organized their lives around access to the post, would be expected to follow.

Nobody asked whether the new location offered adequate hunting and fishing. Nobody considered whether families could feed themselves in the changed circumstances. The Naskapi were treated like inventory to be shifted between warehouses.

The Crisis of the Late 1940s

By the end of the 1940s, the cumulative damage had brought the Naskapi to the edge of extinction.

The fur trade had disrupted traditional subsistence patterns for over a century. European diseases—tuberculosis was particularly devastating—had killed many and weakened more. And perhaps most critically, the George River caribou herd had virtually disappeared.

A Canadian biologist who visited Fort Chimo in 1948 to study duck populations left this observation: the Naskapi numbered only about twenty-five tents. The men, he noted dismissively, "spend their time lying around the post." The women and children picked berries within a three-mile radius.

What the biologist saw as idleness was desperation. The Naskapi had been reduced to scavenging.

The federal government had provided occasional relief since the end of the nineteenth century, but systematic contact began only in 1949, when officials from Ottawa visited Fort Chimo and began issuing regular welfare payments. By then, the Naskapi could no longer survive independently—their population was perhaps a few hundred people, down from numbers that had sustained them across a territory the size of a European country.

The Walk to Schefferville

In 1956, for reasons historians still debate, the Naskapi decided to leave Fort Chimo and walk to Schefferville, a mining town that had sprung up around iron ore deposits to the south.

One interpretation holds that government officials pressured or ordered them to move. Another suggests the Naskapi themselves chose to go, hoping to find jobs, housing, medical care, and schools for their children near the new industrial development. Both explanations may contain truth—the Naskapi may have been encouraged to leave a place where they could no longer survive, toward promises of a better life that no one intended to keep.

What's not disputed is what happened next.

The Naskapi set out on foot to cover four hundred miles of subarctic wilderness. By the time they reached Wakuach Lake, seventy miles from their destination, most were in desperate condition—exhausted, sick, starving. A rescue operation brought them the rest of the way.

Schefferville was not ready for them. Despite the fact that government officials knew about the migration, no one had prepared housing or services. No one had even warned the mining company or the municipality that hundreds of Indigenous people were about to arrive.

The Naskapi built shacks from scavenged lumber on the edge of Pearce Lake, near the railroad station. A year later, citing water contamination, the town moved them to a site near John Lake, four miles away. There they lived without running water, without sewage facilities, without electricity. There was no school for their children, no medical clinic—none of the things they had walked four hundred miles to find.

Sharing Exile with Strangers

At John Lake, the Naskapi found themselves living alongside another displaced people: Montagnais who had moved from Sept-Îles when the railroad reached Schefferville. Despite their linguistic and cultural connections, the two groups had distinct histories and traditions. They had been pushed together by circumstance, not choice.

By 1962, Indian and Northern Affairs had built thirty small houses for the Naskapi at John Lake, with four more under construction. Each house cost five thousand dollars—a measure of how little the government was willing to invest in Indigenous housing.

In 1969, the government acquired a thirty-nine-acre site from a reluctant municipality and began planning a new settlement. For the first time in their long history of forced relocations, the Naskapi were consulted about their future.

The consultation became a lesson in broken promises.

Row Houses and Barren Landscapes

The government sent officials to explain the new community plans. Brochures were published. Models were built. Progress reports were issued. The Naskapi engaged seriously with the process, particularly interested in what kind of housing they would receive.

They wanted detached single-family homes. The government wanted them to accept row houses, which were cheaper to build. A compromise was reached: the Naskapi council agreed to row housing on the condition that the units be properly soundproofed.

The soundproofing was inadequate. Families could hear everything their neighbors did.

The brochures had shown a landscaped community with trees and bushes. When the Naskapi moved to the new site, called Matimekosh, in 1972, they found bare ground. No landscaping had been done. No trees or bushes were ever planted.

To outsiders, these might seem like minor complaints. But to a people who had been moved, deceived, and exploited for a century and a half—who had watched their relatives starve because traders withheld ammunition, who had walked four hundred miles toward false promises—these broken commitments confirmed everything they had learned to expect from institutions that claimed to be helping them.

The memory of those broken promises remains vivid today.

A Chance at Self-Determination

The turning point came in 1975, when two Indigenous leaders made separate visits to Schefferville.

Billy Diamond, Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees, and Charlie Watt, President of the Northern Quebec Inuit Association, were negotiating the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement—a massive land claims settlement that would fundamentally reshape Indigenous rights in the region. They invited the Naskapi to participate.

The Naskapi initially worked through the Inuit association, which provided legal advice and logistical support to a small team of Naskapi negotiators based in Montreal. The arrangement didn't work well—the Inuit had their own complex interests to represent, and the Naskapi concerns kept getting lost.

When the James Bay Agreement was signed in November 1975, the Naskapi were not included. The agreement actually extinguished their Aboriginal rights in the territory without providing them any compensation.

But everyone involved knew this was unjust. The Naskapi had legitimate claims, and unlike some other First Nations in Quebec at the time, they were willing to negotiate. Within two years, the parties reached an agreement-in-principle for a separate settlement.

The Northeastern Quebec Agreement was signed on January 31, 1978.

Building Kawawachikamach

Section 20 of the Northeastern Quebec Agreement offered the Naskapi something unprecedented: the opportunity to relocate from Matimekosh to a new site of their choosing and to have a real voice in planning their community.

Technical and socioeconomic studies were conducted. Multiple potential sites were evaluated. On January 31, 1980—exactly two years after signing the agreement—the Naskapi voted overwhelmingly to relocate to a site that would become Kawawachikamach.

This time was different. The Naskapi themselves did much of the construction work between 1980 and 1983. The project provided training in administration, construction, and maintenance trades. For the first time, the Naskapi were building their own future rather than having it imposed on them.

The planning process continued to pay dividends. Between 1981 and 1984, Canada negotiated the self-government legislation promised in the agreement. The Cree-Naskapi (of Quebec) Act, passed by Parliament in June 1984, made the Naskapi Nation of Kawawachikamach largely self-governing—one of the first Indigenous communities in Canada to achieve this status.

The Long View

The Naskapi story is not over. The community at Kawawachikamach continues to navigate the challenges of maintaining traditional culture while engaging with the modern world. The population has grown from the desperate few hundred of the 1940s to a more sustainable community, though still small by most standards.

Some Naskapi families maintain close connections with Cree relatives in Whapmagoostui, on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay—a reminder that Indigenous relationships and territories don't follow the boundaries that European colonizers drew on maps.

The Naskapi language survives, though like many Indigenous languages it faces pressures from the dominant English-speaking culture. (The Naskapi, influenced by Protestant missionaries rather than French Catholic ones, speak English as their second language, in contrast to the French-speaking Montagnais.) Cultural practices continue to evolve.

What makes the Naskapi story worth knowing is not that it ended happily—the wounds of centuries don't heal so easily—but that it continues at all. A people dismissed as lazy by traders who wanted their labor without caring about their survival; a people whose population crashed to near-extinction levels; a people moved repeatedly against their will across some of the harshest terrain on Earth; a people who walked four hundred miles toward promises that were broken before they arrived—that people built themselves a community and negotiated recognition of their right to govern themselves.

They are still the people beyond the horizon. They just chose where that horizon would be.

Connections to Mina Hubbard's Expedition

The same landscape that tested the Naskapi for centuries drew a remarkable woman named Mina Hubbard in 1905. Her expedition to map the interior of Labrador—the journey that made her the first Euro-American woman to cross the region—passed through territory the Naskapi knew intimately.

Hubbard's expedition relied on Indigenous knowledge. Her guides understood the land in ways that European explorers, despite their instruments and training, could not match. The waterways she mapped, the portages she recorded, the caribou she observed—all of these had been part of Naskapi and Innu life for thousands of years.

When we read accounts of "wilderness" exploration, it's worth remembering that the wilderness was someone's home. The "unknown" interior of Labrador was unknown only to Europeans. The Naskapi—the people beyond the horizon—had been living there all along, developing the knowledge that would later guide people like Mina Hubbard through a landscape they experienced as alien but that was, to its Indigenous inhabitants, simply home.