Ancient artifacts have been found peppered around sites held sacred by Ojibway people of Pikangikum.

Arrowheads, pottery and animal bones, remnants of items once used in daily living, have been unearthed at ancient campgrounds and summer gathering places throughout the 1.3 million hectares of land known as the Whitefeather Forest, north of Red Lake.

“No matter where you go on our land, you will find our people have been there,” says Pikangikum Elder Charlie Peters of the immediate area around his community.

The scientific work is being done in partnership between Pikangikum First Nation and a team of Lakehead University archaeologists.

Evidence of Aboriginal people subsisting on the land pre-European contact has been found after following simple instructions passed from local elders to the archaeologists.

“We, the Native people, have shaped and molded this land to our use,” Peters says.

Pikangikum’s ancestors planted the rice beds and potato fields that exist in the wild today, moved rocks in creeks to trap fish to eat, cut channels through rapids to avoid having to portage and burned marshy areas periodically to stimulate new growth when needed, explains Peters.

“We did it in such a way as to not interrupt the rhythm and the flow of the local animal life,” he adds.

“It wasn’t until recently that we started sharing our traditional knowledge of the land with scientists.”

Some of the archaeological evidence found within the area dates back as far as 8,000-10,000 years ago when the polar ice caps receded at the end of the last ice age.

“What we are looking at are little time capsules of what life was like in the Berens River area over different periods of time,” says archaeologist Scott Hamilton, a burly, jovial man with flaming red hair who has spent summers scouring the Ojibway peoples’ land with his digging trowel in hand. Hamilton, along with fellow archaeologist Jill Taylor-Hollings, local guides and elders, has come across plenty of sites over the last three summers while criss-crossing the land.

“Because of this work, we have been given a different sense of how the local Ojibway people have been living over time,” Hamilton says.

The landscape, for example, was very different at the end of the last ice age.

“The environment was harsh to live in and would have been characterized as being wet and cold and would have been dominated by grasslands with small stands of trees dotting the landscape,” he says.

A little more recently, about 5,000 years ago, the world changed yet again and was considerably drier, Hamilton says.

“This means there would have been more fires and lots of grass in an open meadow environment and less trees. Each of those climates would naturally have affected what type of local vegetation and animals would have been in the area. A large part of our work is spent reconstructing those climates and environments to see how the people were living at those times.”

The “archaeological record,” as Taylor-Hollings refers to the sites she has dug, has revealed interesting insights and glimpses of what people were doing to stay alive in their habitat.

“A good indicator of different time periods is in the pottery being produced because the people would have satisfied their wants and needs by using local materials and resources that were available in their environment,” she says. “Of course our interpretations can become complicated by trade between peoples and by individuals who were moving from one community to another and picking up or integrating other traditions with their own. These types of changes make for interesting results.”

Archaeologists have been excavating in Canada for the last 100 years. Over that time they’ve found some sites are good for interpretation, while others don’t reveal as much.
Unfortunately, the soils in the Pikangikum area are highly acidic, making the preservation of materials difficult.

“The more acid in the soil, the faster it promotes the decomposition of organic materials,” Taylor-Hollings explains.

Much of the acid in the Pikangikum area’s soil comes from needles that fall to the forest floor from pine trees.

Fortunately, wood ash used in fire pits neutralizes the acids in the soil, which allows for preservation to take place, says Taylor-Hollings.

“A site that was heavily used can allow for preservation to happen as well,” she says.
Because organic materials have basic chemical properties, an area such as a spring fishery where fish were gutted and cleaned on a large scale would allow preservation.

“We see lots of examples where a moose, caribou and other animals like muskrat, beavers, duck, hare and geese were eaten around fire pits,” Taylor-Hollings says. “That is also typically where we would find arrowheads and pottery shards.”

Whitehead Moose, Pikangikum’s oldest resident at 93, says his people have been in the area since before there were trees.

And much of the stories told in the oral tradition by Moose and other Ojibway elders are also accepted as archaeological fact.

“They tell all kinds of stories, some of which include large wooly animals that used to roam the earth,” Hamilton says. “We know from the archaeological records that mastodons and ancient bison used to live in the Kenora area.

“It is truly amazing what was passed down through to the later generations. It makes our work much more interesting for our students who are learning the oral history and culture from the elders while we are out doing fieldwork.”

The archaeologists exploring the Whitefeather Forest have integrated scientific methods and the First Nation-oriented vision of the past, relying on Pikangikum elders for their historical knowledge.

“We have found sites that the elders didn’t mention as well,” Hamilton says. “Was it an oversight? Perhaps part of their stories have been lost or forgotten? What it does demonstrate is that the work we are doing is indeed a partnership and that we can learn from each other.”

Pikangikum elders have a vision for a teaching centre that will combine the knowledge they passed to archaeologists with supporting scientific research and documentation by the archaeologists.

Work is ongoing.