This week, I’ve put together some reflections on the power of myth to help us understand the settlement of the north and the development of the huge resource-extraction industries.
You may think myth is an odd way to analyze an industry based on tonnage, engineering, and the bottom line. But the mining sector has always been driven by myths and lore: stories of hidden wealth, heroic prospectors, untamed wilderness, and the promise of striking it rich.
What has received far less attention are the myths that explain the Indigenous views on the impact of these industries.
Let me share with you the story of Rabbit and Lynx.
Here’s something they never taught us in school: silver from the rich mines of Cobalt, Ontario, has been found at archaeological digs across Eastern North America.
Ceremonial panpipes have been found in burial mounds in Ohio, Georgia, and Mississippi. Archaeologists have uncovered silver jewellery in New York State. Nuggets of pure Cobalt silver were carefully placed in burial sites in Michigan.
Silver is also associated with massive earthwork structures built across North America. In scale and construction, some rival the great pyramids of Egypt.
Who built these structures? How did the silver get there? Nobody knows.
The sites are known as Hopewell structures, a name taken from the Hopewell farm in Ohio, where the first was discovered.
The silver trade dates back at least 2,000 years.
Yet White historians date the discovery of silver and gold in the north to 1903, when railway blacksmith Fred Larose came across immense canyons of pure silver along the shores of what became Cobalt Lake.
The Larose discovery became part of the fundamental lore of the settlement of northern Canada.
The story goes that Fredrick Larose was working at his blacksmith forge when he was interrupted by a pesky fox. The frustrated Larose threw his hammer at the creature. It missed but broke off a chunk of pure silver, and that accidental discovery launched one of North America’s greatest mineral rushes.
It’s a great story.
But it isn’t true.
There was no fox, and the discovery wasn’t accidental.
Larose found silver because he was a dedicated amateur prospector who spent his off hours carefully studying the rocks along the rail line. Larose attempted to tell journalists what really happened, but no one was interested.
The story of the hammer and fox quickly became the preferred version because the folk tale was an easier, more compelling way to sell the image of a land so rich that a person could become a millionaire by accident.
But what do these settler myths say about the Indigenous people who were already here?
The myth of the hammer and fox reinforces a much more troubling myth of settlement — that of terra nullius.
Colonial claims in the Americas, Australia, and Africa were based on the dubious principle that the taking of Indigenous land was justified, not because the land was actually empty but because the original people were failing to “use” it according to European laws and culture.
Colonial narratives presented the Indigenous people as drifters, or in the case of Cobalt, unable to find wealth that was so obvious that a railway worker could stumble over it by throwing a hammer.
Incoming settlers had little interest in what Indigenous people knew about wealth that had been part of an extensive pre-contact trading network.
When white fur traders first came north in the 1600s, they met the Indigenous people at a place called Obadjiwan (meeting place) at the narrows of Lake Temiskaming. There, they established a fur-trading fort and a Roman Catholic mission.
Fort Temiscamingue lay in the shadow of the rich silver fields of what was to become the mining town of Silver Centre at the edge of the Cobalt silver region. However, neither the white traders nor the clergy had any knowledge of the enormous silver wealth in the overlooking hills.
The Hudson’s Bay Company maintained a pre-capitalist barter economy, often paying Indigenous fur trappers in alcohol and keeping strict accounts of their purchases of flour, pots, and fabric.
When the fort overcharged the Indigenous hunters for guns and bullets, the hunters simply went into the bush and fashioned bullets from pure silver. They never told the fort factor about the rich silver deposits in the nearby hills.
So why this silence?
Anson Gard, who chronicled the Cobalt silver rush, writes that the Indigenous people were well aware of the presence of the silver veins, but believed great misfortune would befall them if the white men found out.
We find a similar code of silence in place among the Ojibwa who mined copper and silver along the northern Great Lakes.
The Ojibwa story of Nanabijou served as a cautionary tale against sharing secrets of mineral wealth. Nanabijou was a giant who protected the Indigenous people of the northern boreal forest. Nanabijou revealed the secrets of a rich silver mine to the Ojibwa people but warned them never to share the information.
Despite the best efforts of the Indigenous people, the white men learned of the location of the mine at Silver Islet on Lake Superior. They came with their dynamite and shaft-sinking machines, and Nanabijou was turned to stone, becoming the famous Sleeping Giant in the harbour of Thunder Bay.
The Ojibwa lost their guardian and were left exposed to the influx of the white men.
A year after the Silver Islet Mine was established in 1868, the Hudson’s Bay Company relinquished control of their vast trading territories across northern Canada in a deed of surrender to the newly established country of Canada.
This opened the region to a flood of railway workers, trappers, and prospectors, who brought with them the exploitation, alcohol and disease that devastated the traditional economies and cultures of the northern First Nations people.
Those diseases — diphtheria, typhoid, influenza, and tuberculosis — decimated the hunting bands of the north.
Around Cobalt, the demise of the Hudson’s Bay Company led to increasing pressure on two Indigenous nations. At the head of Lake Temiskaming, the Saugeen Anishnabeg (Algonquins of Timiskaming First Nation) were being pressured to give up their reserve lands by lumber crews and Oblate missionaries looking to take their lands for farming families.
Adam Burwash was a squatter who built his farm on the Saugeen Anishnabeg reserve despite the deep opposition of the local chief.
But he was well connected with the regional Liberal establishment.
When Sir Wilfrid Laurier was elected prime minister, Burwash the squatter became Indian Agent, which gave him state-sanctioned control over the community’s affairs. He immediately began selling off large sections of land to incoming settlers.
Burwash invested the money from these sales in a local silver mine and became enormously rich. He justified his actions on the premise that the Indigenous people were on the verge of becoming “extinct.”
South of Cobalt, in the land known as n’Daki Menan (Temagami), the pressure on the Teme-Augama Anishnabai (Temagami First Nation) was even more relentless. Their territory had not been designated a reserve by treaty, so they were seen as squatters by the government.
In the 1870s, Chief Tonene attempted to negotiate with Ottawa for a land base for his people. He warned that
“The white men were coming closer and closer every year, and the deer and furs were becoming scarcer and scarcer . . . so that in a few more years Indians could not survive by hunting alone.”
At this time, few were interested in the opinions of a people who were thought to be disappearing before the so-called march of progress. American anthropologist Frank Speck was an exception.
During his fieldwork with the Temagami and Timiskaming people in the summer of 1913, Speck recorded the story of Rabbit and Lynx.
I came across this myth while studying Speck’s research, and it captures the bind that the Indigenous people had been put in while trying to negotiate a future for their people:
“Can you talk English?” said Lynx.
“Yes,” answered Rabbit.
“Well, can’t you talk white?”
“Yes,” answered Rabbit.
“Well, if you don’t talk white, I’ll kill you.”
So Rabbit had to talk white.
“What do you call ‘fire’ in English?”
“Waya’kabi’te (people sitting around a fire),” answered Rabbit.
“How do they say ‘axe’ there?”
“Me matowes ing (noise of chopping).”
“What do you call knife?” asked Lynx.
“Taya tacki wegis e (sliced meat),” answered Rabbit.
“You are a liar,” said Lynx.
“Ki ningwa zem (you are a liar).”
And then Lynx killed Rabbit.1
What does this story tell us?
When Lynx asks Rabbit if he can speak English, Rabbit responds affirmatively, but then Lynx presses further, demanding that Rabbit speak “white.”
Thus Lynx’s deceptively simple questions reveal the fundamental divide in all negotiations between Indigenous people and settlers — the clash of worldviews when it comes to understanding their place in the environment.
The word Rabbit uses for fire is an Ojibwa description of the role fire plays in creating community and safety. Rabbit’s language emphasizes the interrelationship between subject, object, and environment, a holistic perspective that is fundamental to the Indigenous worldview.
To white people, however, these items — fire, knife, axe — are merely tools to be exploited for individual gain. A view that extends to the earth’s natural resources.
The story indicates that it isn’t enough for Rabbit to speak the language of the dominant society; Rabbit must perceive the world through a white lens.
He needed to understand that resource exploitation was driven by the theory of abstract values. Rabbit’s rejection of Lynx’s predatory approach to both relationships and the environment leads to Rabbit’s death.
Which brings us back to Chief Tonene.
Realizing that farming wouldn’t be sufficient to protect the land interests at Temagami from the government and the encroachment of settlers, Tonene moved his family farther north to keep ahead of the prospectors.
But in time, the white prospecting crews moved steadily towards his new hunting grounds along the shores of Larder Lake (150 kilometres north of Temagami). Tonene knew the land well and had identified where the gold traces could be found, so he obtained a prospector’s license and staked the very first claim in the region.
The Canadian Mining Journal credited Tonene with launching the 1906 Larder Lake gold rush:
“It is said that gold has long been known to occur at Larder Lake by an Indian Tonene in whose hunting ground the lake lies and that when prospectors began to approach his territory, he located the first claim, thereby attracting their attention to this as a gold district …. Something like 4,000 claims were recorded.”
What the Canadian Mining Journal didn’t mention was that white prospectors jumped Tonene’s claims.
He tried to establish his rights through the courts, but under Section 141 of the Indian Act, it was illegal for Tonene to hire a lawyer.
Tonene’s stolen claims eventually led to the founding of the Kerr-Addison Gold Mine, one of the richest gold mines in Canadian history. Tonene received nothing from the rush.
He died in 1916, and the land where he was buried was later turned into a gravel pit and then a community dump. So even when Rabbit spoke “white,” Rabbit died.
However, the Rabbit and Lynx story has an additional interpretation.
The Temagami people agreed to share their knowledge and land-use patterns with the anthropologist Frank Speck because they recognized the need to document their claims to the land in the language of white officials.
Chief Aleck Paul was blunt when he told Speck about their struggle to stay on the land:
“They [white settlers] are after the money. After white man kills all the game in one place, he can take the train and go three hundred miles or more to another and do the same there. But the Indian cannot do that. He must stay on his own section all the time and support his family on what it produces.”
Speck had come north on what he thought was a cultural “salvage expedition.” But his Indigenous guides had no intention of disappearing from the land.
In the decades to come, Speck’s documentation and mapping of the traditional hunting territories became crucial legal evidence both the Temagami and Timiskaming First Nations used to assert their rights to their lands.
The reality was that Rabbit never died. He couldn’t be killed because no matter how brutal the efforts to erase his territorial presence, Rabbit would not leave his territory. He was perennial to the land.
The powerful connection between Indigenous people and their particular territories is a lesson settler society is only beginning to understand.
Rabbit and Lynx are familiar characters in Indigenous traditional teachings as symbols of scarcity and abundance.
Snowshoe hare populations follow a ten-year boom-bust cycle, which leads to a similar cycle in their natural predator, the Lynx. Settler society has historically paid little attention to these longstanding natural cycles. Instead, they focus on the boom-bust cycle in the metals market.
But for Indigenous people, knowledge and comprehension of the boom and bust of the natural environment is fundamental to surviving in the northern boreal forest.
A century ago, silver-rush writer Anson Gard assumed Indigenous people would simply disappear from the land of silver. A century later, their descendants sit at the negotiating table when the mining companies come in looking to open new deposits.
Lynx has finally been forced to sit down with Rabbit. This century belongs to Rabbit.
Our survival as a species may depend on Rabbit’s wisdom.
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Speck, F. G. Family Hunting Territories and Social Life of Various Algonkian Bands of the Ottawa Valley. Department of Mines. Geological Survey. No. 8. Anthropological Series. Government Printing Bureau. Ottawa. 1915. pg. 69.
Thank you for this Charlie, an excellent historical essay on the history of the indigenous people of the North. Us Irish relate very strongly to the history of the indigenous as the mistreatment and theft of our land and resources by the British impoverished and demeaned us. The connections are strong. Scholarships for indigenous peoples in Irish universities and a huge monument of gratitude in Co. Cork commemorating the assistance the indigenous North Americans sent to Ireland during the famine/Great Hunger/extermination. Ireland never forgot. I have been included in ceremonies in Ontario which have moved me to tears. The mistreatment of our fellow humans is intolerable.
Thanks Charlie for sharing the Fox & Rabbit story. There are so many Canadians (the majority), who have no clue about the indigenous people's story of how their lands were taken by the government, callous businessmen and ignorant white settlers. Canada's education curriculum across this nation must be changed, to reflect the true story of indigenous history. Once this is achieved, people will understand how Canada was actually founded and the price the indigenous people have paid for generations. Charlie, keep up the great work you are doing.