"For America to Live, Europe Must Die"

Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is "proof that the system works" to Europeans.

It takes a strong effort on the part of each American Indian not to become Europeanized. The strength for this effort can only come from the traditional ways, the traditional values that our elders retain. It must come from the hoop, the four directions, the relations: it cannot come from the pages of a book or a thousand books. No European can ever teach a Lakota to be Lakota, a Hopi to be Hopi. A master's degree in "Indian Studies" or in "education" or in anything else cannot make a person into a human being or provide knowledge into the traditional ways. It can only make you into a mental European, an outsider.

  Russell Means, July 1980

Between 1760 and 1923, the British Crown signed 56 land treaties with Aboriginal Peoples in Canada.

Not all treaties where signed on equal terms. Reports of the negotiations, recorded in the treaty commissioners’ diaries, would suggest not. The oral tradition, maintained by aboriginal elders, also shows discrepancies between the treaty texts and the verbal content of negotiations. Quite simply, the surrender of land rights was based on the concept of private property — an incomprehensible notion in our culture.

The Supreme Court of Canada has recognized the need to interpret the treaties in light of what was said before they were signed. “The treaties, as written documents, recorded an agreement that had already been reached orally and they did not always record the full extent of the oral agreement.” 

Weli Nuelewumg aq Pisu' Puna'ne

LONECLOUD, JERRY Guide, logger, showman, herbalist, Mi’gmaq sub-chief, and folklorist. 

Jerry Lonecloud or (Germain Bartlett Alexis) was born in 1854 into a Mi’gmaq family of herbalists who traveled through North America making and selling remedies. His family canoed the Great Lakes when he was a child, and once took the Erie Canal to New York City, where they camped in an alder swamp at the site of the future Brooklyn Bridge. When the Civil War began, Lonecloud’s father joined the Union army. As one of the volunteers who tracked and captured John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, he went to New York in 1866 to collect his share of the reward money, and he was murdered there. Lonecloud’s mother died shortly afterwards, in Vermont, leaving him to care for his sister and two younger brothers.

Jerry made a living guiding and lumbering in Nova Scotia until a talent scout for Healy and Bigelow’s Wild West Show recruited him to return to the United States early in the 1880s. He was then living at Bear River. As a so-called medicine man with Healy and Bigelow, he was given the name “Dr. Lone Cloud.” He performed as a sharpshooter, helped prepare the Kickapoo Indian Sagwa patent remedy, and peddled it as far away as South America. Eventually he left to perform with Buffalo Bill Cody’s show, but quit when Cody prepared to visit England. Highlights from this part of his life, in 1885, were a visit to Niagara Falls and the funeral of President Ulysses S. Grant in New York.

After another spell with Healy and Bigelow’s outfit, Lonecloud formed his own company, the Kiowa Medicine Show, which played little towns throughout New England. It failed, but he later put together a show in Maritime Canada, giving dramatizations of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas and similar “Indian” entertainments. He married his 17-year-old co-star, Elizabeth Paul, a young Maliseet who had joined the show. “I liked her ways,” he explained. “There was no more to it.” Lonecloud would continue to lecture and perform sporadically in Nova Scotia for much of the rest of his life, often assisted by his family. “I was a showman,” he would relate with pride.

In 1890 Lonecloud took Elizabeth and their children to Liscomb Mills, N.S., where he worked as a prospector, herbalist, logger, and guide to sportsmen. He came to have a comprehensive knowledge of the province, hunting all over it during the next 20 years. In 1910 an affair with a married woman in the Liscomb neighbourhood became public when she bore him a son. Separating from his wife, he moved to Halifax. There he acted as an advocate for the Mi’gmaq, writing endless letters to Indian agents in Nova Scotia and Ottawa on property rights and other matters. He was elected captain and then sub-chief for Halifax County, and became, possibly through self-appointment, “Chief Medicine Man” for the county and later for all of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

While living in Halifax, he initiated the two greatest contributions of his life, both in the preservation of Mi’gmaq culture. In 1910 he met Harry Piers, curator of the provincial museum, and began passing on oral histories, folk tales, and over 200 cultural and natural history specimens, including photographs, traditional clothing, birds, and plants. In addition, he made replicas of unobtainable Mi’gmaq items and building on the work of Silas Rand, Father Pacifique, and other early ethnologists, he contributed to a wider knowledge of his language by teaching Piers Mi’gmaq place-names and vocabulary. Piers, who had many Mi’gmaq informants, frequently commented in his notes on Lonecloud’s broad intelligence, how he was “possessed of a fund of information. I always found him frank, loyal, and he had a razor-keen sense of humour. He was familiar with every brook, river and lake from Windsor to Canso.”

At some point before 1917 Lonecloud’s wife and family rejoined him. They lived in a Mi’gmaq shantytown at Tufts Cove, northwest of Dartmouth across the harbour from Halifax. Tragedy struck on 6 December of that year, when the ammunition ship Mont Blanc exploded, destroying much of Halifax-Dartmouth and killing Lonecloud’s daughters Rosie and Hannah. His possessions gone and blind in one eye, Lonecloud was hard put to support his family. He made baskets, snowshoes, moose calls, and caps for sale, and until 1929 he continued to travel the province collecting items to sell to the museum. In April 1930 he became ill and died; he was buried in St Peter’s Roman Catholic Cemetery in Dartmouth.