Forest Prairie Edge

by Merle Massie

  Department of the Interior annual reports between 1925 and 1930 reiterated the need for accessibility for motor traffic and the new trend to motor tourism. “While the national parks movement has its root in the instinct for beauty and love of wild places ... the economic importance which outstanding scenery has come to possess as a result of the remarkable development of tourist travel is very great and constitutes a potential source of wealth which has as yet been barely touched.”68 With the logic of accessibility, the forest reserve and the larger Lakeland area became the “playground of the prairie.” The subdivision at Waskesiu, reported C. MacFadyen, district forest inspector for Saskatchewan, suited “residents of the prairie districts ... more than ever casting about for summering places within the province,” places different from the already established resorts on prairie lakes such as Vidal’s Point (Katepwa).69 Building on the rising popularity of car tourism, local success at Round Lake, and emerging possibilities of Emma and Christopher Lakes, Prince Albert boosters had strong bargaining power.

  It might have been more convenient to deny the national park and continue with the burgeoning recreational use of the forest reserve or merely to convey national “recreational status” rather than national park status to Waskesiu. In the end, however, Prince Albert interests prevailed. National park status allowed both lakeshore activities and protection for regional flora, fish, and game.70 Conservation of natural areas was of growing international and national political importance. The general suggestion was that each province should have a national park set aside within its borders. Prince Albert advocates fought hard to have the province’s first full national park not within the prairie area but within the invisible boreal forest. It was, in many ways, a political statement: Saskatchewan is beautiful.

  The Department of the Interior and the national parks commissioner relented. Prince Albert National Park was created by Order-in-Council 524 on 24 March 1927. Justification for the park was formally stated: the park was desirable “to provide recreational areas for the prairies.”71 If the north Prince Albert landscape was not “sufficiently beautiful” in and of itself, it certainly was when viewed in contrast to the open plains. Prince Albert National Park was created to provide a “playground” for prairie residents, exploiting the physical and cultural contrasts between the north and the south of the province. It was accessible enough, and wild enough, to draw tourists.

  Expansion, Arrested Development, and First Nations

  The new national park included the original Sturgeon River Forest Reserve as well as adjoining areas east and north, for a total of 1,377 square miles. The dominion actually set aside even more land for investigation. Potential homestead land north of Paddockwood in the Forest Gate district was removed from settlement for more than a year, pending investigation of the region as an addition to the park. This reserved area stretched past Candle Lake to the Whiteswan Lakes region. The land was assessed and released back to the Crown for homestead purposes in 1928. Even so, the park borders continued to expand north. A major addition in 1929 of several townships north of Waskesiu added another 400 square miles.72

  One part of the new park, east of the third meridian toward the First Nations community at Montreal Lake, was never part of the original Sturgeon River Forest Reserve. The area, which encompassed Bittern, McPhee, and Clearsand Lakes, was the nearby hunting domain of the Montreal Lake Cree community. Montreal Lake itself, and the Montreal Lake Reserve land, were excluded, but the larger territory became park. It was a strange decision. These small lakes were only indirectly connected to the “chain of lakes” at Waskesiu, not easily accessible by canoe, and hazardous in a dry season. The lack of connected water routes, as well as poor trail conditions, reduced the tourism potential of this eastward extension of the park. The primary purpose of this section appeared to be as a large game preserve, though fishing was good at Bittern Lake.

  Despite its limited tourism potential, the eastern extension might have been added in the hope of a proposed railway extension from Paddockwood. The track had indeed been surveyed, and partly graded, to several miles north of the village. The projected line probably would have gone up the east side of Bittern and Montreal Lakes to La Ronge. Local promoters had high hopes that the rail line would be extended. Prince Albert was the first national park not to have railway access. The rise of auto tourism for the most part offset the lack of a railway, but it seems probable that park designers might have had rail links in mind. The eastern extension, though it was recovering from damage from the 1919 fire, might have been made in part on the hope of facilitating a future link by rail. History enthusiast James Harris argued that both the CPR and the CNR were battling to control northern Saskatchewan. The CNR, planning to build a railway to Lac La Ronge and a luxury hotel at Waskesiu, built a golf course at Waskesiu in an effort to compete with the luxury courses in Jasper and Banff.73

  During the First World War, freighters and surveyors cut a second “new” Montreal Lake Trail straight north from the burgeoning farm district around Paddockwood. By the end of the 1920s, following formal creation of the national park, there was a drive to transform this trail into a highway, both to increase homestead traffic and to provide a second road into the national park. Ultimately, the road would connect to Waskesiu via Montreal Lake, providing a “loop” drive through the park. “There is a possibility that the much talked of road from Waskesiu to Montreal Lake and then south to Bittern Lake and Paddockwood and Prince Albert, will be started this year as a relief measure,” the Prince Albert Daily Herald declared in 1931. “The provincial government is ready to go ahead with the provincial portion from the park boundary to Paddockwood, and link up with the existing park highway. Both governments would undertake the project as a relief measure, and it is felt this would create considerable employment,” the staff writer enthused. “The deputy minister … visualizes the proposed road as serving a double purpose. The first would create a loop highway making it possible for park visitors to have the choice of two routes into the park, both of them being scenic. The other viewpoint is from the utility angle. The present land settlement movement is verging into the north via Paddockwood to a considerable extent and future settlement as well as the present would justify a road as proposed.” Despite the enthusiasm, the road was never completed.74

  Prince Albert National Park might have been meant as the playground of prairie residents, but a signed Order-in-Council could not change thousands of years of First Nations history. Nearby First Nations had already struggled with legislative restrictions on land and its use. Game and bird laws, open and closed seasons, and other ordinances imposed by both the territorial assembly and the provincial administration after 1905 created previously unknown restrictions on First Nations communities. Little Red River Reserve was particularly hampered by the creation of the Sturgeon River Forest Reserve in 1914, which restricted hunting, trapping, and gathering activities. By 1920, hunting and trapping licences had been imposed. Lydia Cook of Little Red, interviewed in 1997, claimed that

  The hunting and trapping went on for many years, people were free to hunt and trap where they always had, until one day, resources put a restriction on hunting and trapping and gathering. The people couldn’t trap or hunt just anywhere anymore, they were told to move away from their usual trapping areas, but they refused to move. The resources then went around snapping the traps, so that trappers wouldn’t catch anything. Eventually, the poor trappers were forced to leave their trapping areas. As a result of this invasion many of our people suffered from hunger, some were near starvation, and some became very sick, and died. ... This was no doubt a conspiracy to weaken the Indians, but it only brought the people closer together and made us a stronger nation.75

  Cook’s words provide a chilling and poignant reminder of the power of government regulations to disconnect humans from landscapes, with tragic results. For the inhabitants of Little Red, creating the Sturgeon River Forest Reserve and regulating t
rapping, hunting, fishing, and gathering (including birds’ eggs, outlawed in 1914) led to hardship. Such hardship was particularly noticeable, and growing, after the great fire of 1919 and the loss of the lumber industry in the north Prince Albert region. Jobs in nearby lumber camps disappeared. Throughout the 1920s, some inhabitants of Little Red turned to freighting and farming on an increased scale, but forest resources of fur and game remained important to the family economy.

  The formation of Prince Albert National Park in 1928 was devastating for those who relied on the products of the land. What was restricted by the forest reserve became outlawed. No hunting or trapping, even within season, was allowed within park boundaries. With increased agricultural use of the landscape around the reserve to the east, west, and south, and a national park to the north, Little Red River Reserve was surrounded and cut off from its traditional forest edge resource base. Those who continued to hunt and trap on their traditional lands, as Cook noted, could be caught and fined or even jailed for poaching.76 The new park, in effect, placed hundreds of square miles of traditional territory beyond the reach of its original inhabitants. Many were forced to move out, abandoning holdings that they had spent years building up, with gardens and farm plots, homes and cemeteries.

  Map 14. Prince Albert National Park, 1935. Montreal Lake Indian Reserve 106 is on the southwest side of Montreal Lake, encompassed by the eastern portion of the park. Little Red Reserve is south of the southern boundary.

  Source: Waiser, Saskatchewan’s Playground, 53. Used with permission.

  The Department of Indian Affairs, along with George Exton Lloyd, the Anglican bishop of Saskatchewan, immediately tried to leverage special consideration for the First Nations people affected by park borders.77 Hunting of any kind was prohibited within national parks, which operated as national game preserves. Fishing was limited to recreational permits and limits, which were of no use to the First Nations communities that had derived considerable dietary subsistence from netting and smoking or freezing fish in large quantities. In a letter to Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott, Bishop Lloyd asked, “what about the Indians who were there before the National Park and surely are entitled to the right to live”? It was one thing to make a recreational site at Waskesiu, Lloyd maintained, but quite another to create a national park of nearly 1,400 square miles. At the least, Lloyd suggested, the band at Montreal Lake should be allowed to fish on alternative years on Bittern Lake and Trout Lake but would leave Red Deer Lake “entirely free for the summer tourists, which is the object of the National Park.”78

  National Park Commissioner J.B. Harkin flatly refused to consider Lloyd’s reasonable request. After all, he noted, the Indians could still fish, within regulations, “as this is a privilege extended to all.” As for game hunting, creation of the park would, in effect, strengthen game stocks in the region. The animals protected within the game preserve would provide a “constant overflow” to the surrounding area, he argued.79 Harkin’s haughty and condescending opinion did not fit reality on the ground: the majority of the band’s sustenance was derived from whitefish, taken in large quantities by net, and not game fish such as jack (northern pike) or pickerel (walleye). The national park granted a short-term reprieve to the bands to continue their normal practice of fishing as long as they did not take game fish. Regardless of restrictions, however, isolation and lack of roads meant that Montreal Lake inhabitants operated much as usual for both hunting and fishing. Game wardens found themselves on constant watch for poaching, and band members devised strategies of stealth and misdirection.

  Creation of the park reignited treaty land entitlement issues in the north Prince Albert region. It was believed that the future of these northern First Nations bands lay not in their traditional hunting and fishing grounds but in the already established farming reserve at Little Red. In many ways, creation of the park re-created the “north” in the mind of the southern white public as a place of recreation and relaxation, not a place to live permanently. It added strength to the continued push to move the northern bands to Little Red to engage in farming. Indian Affairs began to push for additional lands to be attached to Little Red for the La Ronge band, in lieu of lands in the north that had still not been surveyed. The band at Little Red wanted the new land added in a bloc to the west side of the original reserve. Even though soil quality was marginal, it was “as satisfactory for farming purposes as any other that could be obtained in the vicinity.”80 Settlers were reaching the end of good homestead land in the Paddockwood region, and interest was shifting west, so Indian Affairs believed that there was urgency to secure the land before it was designated as homestead land.

  Adding more farmland to Little Red was easier said than done. The new park boundaries encroached on the reserve to the west and north. Negotiations between Indian Affairs and National Parks ensued, which Commissioner Harkin misunderstood. He thought that the Montreal Lake band was willing to give up its Montreal Lake Reserve in return for an addition to Little Red and possibly a reserve at Candle Lake. Such an exchange of land would facilitate both a southern exodus of reserve residents to the farming reserve and an extension of national park boundaries to include all of Montreal Lake and eliminate the main boreal reserve. Indian Affairs was quick to present the terms more clearly, pointing out that the extension of Little Red was not in fact a negotiated exchange with Montreal Lake but a simple proposal to finally bring the La Ronge band up to its treaty land entitlement. Harkin was upset. Montreal Lake Reserve residents, living and using the landscape as they always had, quickly became framed as a problem for park staff. Band members rightly unwilling and unable to change their subsistence and hunting activities within their traditional territory put excessive pressure on game wardens, forced to arrest reserve residents for “poaching.” A proposal to extend the park to include all of Montreal Lake would engulf the reserve there, exacerbating the poaching problem. Harkin considered such a move, without elimination of the reserve, “entirely objectionable.”81

  Montreal Lake never became part of the national park. No exchange was negotiated, nor did the idea of a new First Nations reserve at Candle Lake come to fruition. The borders of Little Red were revised and extended over time, but the reserve at Montreal Lake remained. By 1947, in response to years of debate and lobbying by wardens and the park commissioner, Prince Albert National Park was downsized. The area east of the third meridian—the trapping and hunting area most used by Montreal Lake residents—was declassified as a national park.82 After twenty years of “poaching,” Montreal Lake residents no doubt drew a quiet breath of relief.

  Although the creation of Prince Albert National Park and the growth of tourism developments at the new Lakeland region had adverse impacts on traditional resource use of the local landscape, they also offered new opportunities. First Nations residents along the forest edge and at the Montreal Lake Reserve participated in the tourist economy, as provisioners, employees, and tourists themselves, culturally shaping the boreal forest as a First Nations inheritance. First Nations cultural stories of the region, particularly the legend of the Hanging Heart Lakes and stories of forest denizen Wisk-ee-chack featured prominently in the Prince Albert Daily Herald park commemorative edition and found their way into Department of the Interior promotional brochures. Montreal Lake residents made publicized annual visits to Waskesiu, usually in conjunction with the annual regatta, where band members handily won canoe races. They often participated in ceremonies, speeches, and pow-wow dances throughout the 1930s.83

  In 1931, the national parks branch of the Department of the Interior created Modern Voyageurs, a short silent film to advertise the new Prince Albert National Park. The main characters in the film were white tourists, but colour and life came from the First Nations men hired by the tourists to take them on a canoe journey through the park. Film viewers were encouraged to come and “circumnavigate the park under the protection of the Indian guides skilled in the use of r
od, paddle and frying pan.” It seemed idyllic for non-Native audiences—the Indian guides were shown carrying and loading all the gear and doing all the paddling while the tourists put their feet up and read books in the middle of the lake. Other duties included putting up tents, cooking (and fish cleaning), and serving tea. Even the most laborious tasks were trivialized: “The Indians carry the big canoes as if they were steamer trunks on the shady portage to Crean Lake.”84 Although it is unknown how many First Nations people capitalized on tourist opportunities, it was a way to use traditional outdoor skills for a new audience and become part of the new tourist economy, extending to a new clientele the local knowledge and services that Christina Henry used in 1919. Some of the members of Little Red and Montreal Lake spent their summers working at Waskesiu, either for businesses as cooks or general workers or for the park as guides.85

  The connection between First Nations and the outdoors was exploited by the owners of the “Teepee Tea Room” (built in the shape of a traditional teepee) near Emma Lake and Little Red River Reserve on the highway leading to Waskesiu. It offered meals and confectionery items, an auto camp, supervised guides, cottages and boats for rent, camping and fishing, and souvenirs made from antlers and wood.86 Women from Little Red, Fish Lake (a nearby Métis community), and Montreal Lake participated in the tourist economy by making moccasins and other handicrafts such as purses and shopping bags. Some were sold at the Teepee Tea Room, more at Waskesiu and a specially built store on the roadside between Waskesiu and Montreal Lake. Despite the economic depression during the 1930s, there was strong demand for the products. One Waskesiu business owner claimed that he could have sold over $1,000 worth of Indian crafts one summer but lacked a sure supply.