From the sugar shack in the spring to the corn roast at the end of the summer, including meetings around hockey games of winter, the Quebec identity comes in many symbols. But what part of these activities is in fact inherited from the Aboriginal peoples who welcomed the first settlers here? Our series of texts “Quebec Métis” delves into the question.
In the Anishinaabe community of Kitigan Zibi, in the Outaouais, elders remember harvesting maple sap the old-fashioned way — in containers made of birch bark — when they lived in the forest, says former chief Gilbert Whiteduck, now councillor. Now his community manages a sugar bush with 17,000 taps, all connected in a modern way. Its syrup, which bears the name Awazibi (“sweet water” in the Anishinaabe language), is sold on site, but also in cooperatives across Quebec.
“It’s definitely always been part of our way of surviving,” says Whiteduck. Even before the arrival of Europeans and their metal cauldrons, the Anishinabés boiled maple sap with hot stones to extract sugar, he says.
This is also what André Michel, the founder of the Maison amérindienne, in Mont-Saint-Hilaire, who precisely celebrates in his permanent exhibition the harvesting of maple syrup by the First Nations. The native Frenchman has been passionate about native cultures for several years, to which he has dedicated several museums.
Like Gilbert Whiteduck, he says that the First Nations of Quebec used to collect maple sap in birch bark containers. Some of the sugar was then set aside, continues Mr. Whiteduck. Especially since maple sap, like many other forest products, has medicinal properties that were known to the elders of the community. Virtues also demonstrated in recent years by scientific studies.
Oral history and written history
In Quebec, it is mainly through the spoken word that the cultures and history of the First Nations are transmitted from one generation to the next; the written traces of life in New France therefore often begin with colonization. The fight for the origins of maple sugar is thus fought on rather unequal grounds, especially since Aboriginal legends about maple sap abound and vary from nation to nation.
There are reports in particular of a chef who planted his tomahawk in a tree near his tent and whose wife used the sugar water flowing from the tree to cook a meal. Or that dogs would have rushed to lick the broken branch of a maple, which would have given the idea to humans to taste it. A legend says that in the past the syrup flowed directly from the trees, but it was a young prankster named Manabush, grandson of Nokomish, who made the men have to work hard to collect it. Finally, another story has it that a man observed a squirrel climbing a maple tree to bite a branch and drink the sap.
History of a “controversy”
In their Curious stories of Canadian plants, Alain Asselin, Jacques Cayouette and Jacques Mathieu thus present the “controversy” about the production of maple sugar. “On the one hand, historians maintain that the Native Americans did not have the knowledge to transform the sap into sugar. Conversely, others claim that they have had this technique for a long time. »
“Unfortunately, they continue, the oldest texts appear at the time of European mastery of this technique. It is therefore interpreted that the Europeans improved the Amerindian knowledge to allow the production of sugar. European cauldrons would therefore have influenced the control of the efficient transformation of syrup into sugar. »
According to Gilbert Whiteduck, clay containers acquired by his people from the Iroquoian, Mohawk and Wendat nations, who made it, probably made it possible to obtain the sweet syrup more quickly.
In the second volume of the same Curious Plant Stories from Canada, the authors quote the Swedish scientist Pehr Kalm, who wrote, on his return from America in 1751, about maple sugar: “Native Americans made this sugar long before the arrival of Europeans. »
According to the account given by André Thévet — who wrote about New France in 1557, but who never set foot there, contrary to what he claims — Jacques Cartier made between 1536 and 1542 a bumper harvest of maple sap by cutting down a tree he thought was a walnut tree. An Aboriginal would then have explained to him that this tree was called “couton”.
According to the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, the first sugar shacks appeared in 1850. And it was in 1868, a few years later, that the first “sugar parties” were organized.
In the Kitigan Zibi sugar bush, however, the spring harvest is accompanied by a more spiritual ceremony. “In February-March, before it starts to flow, we come to thank the trees that give us this product to feed our families. We do it with the elders and the sacred fire, and often with the children of the school. It’s a question of respect for the environment”, explains Gilbert Whiteduck.
Same country, different customs.