Up the Gatineau! Article
This article was first published in Up the Gatineau! Volume 16.
Teresa Meness of the Maniwaki Algonquins
Gunda Lambton
On March 28, 1990 Teresa Meness of Maniwaki was ninety-five years old. Her portrait, in native costume, has a place of honour in the school of the Algonquins, which they themselves call ”Kitiganisipi" — river of the little fields (or gardens), after a river the logging companies called "Desert River". Teresa herself made the beautifully beaded moose hide costume she is wearing. Among her many abilities is that of a gifted needlewomen. She made the ceremonial costumes for her husband, Frank Meness, and the Tuscarora chief Clinton Rickard (Niagara, N.Y.) was buried in the costume she made for him.
I met Teresa Meness about ten years ago after asking Mary and William Commanda (the then Chief) whether they knew any old residents who would remember early life in Maniwaki. I had become interested in the history of the Algonquin families after studying the notes made by the ethnographer Frank Speck for the Geological Survey of Canada in 19151. Speck made a precise map showing the hunting territories of each Algonquin family between the Dumoine River to the west and the Lievre River to the east. In an article in Indian Notes2 in 1929 he wrote that the families still remembered the exact location of their hunting territories. These hunting areas, he believed, had remained practically unchanged since the time of first contact with the French. The River Desert area had been the summer hunting ground of specific Algonquin families now settled south of the bands of Grand Lake Victoria and Barriere Lake. As the fur trade developed, the Algonquins began taking their pelts to a winter settlement at Oka on the Lake of Two Mountains, where a mission had been established, but they continued to hunt in the traditional family hunting grounds Speck had mapped.
I found Teresa Meness sitting on her porch which overlooks Highway 105 south of Maniwaki. She was reading the paper but did not wear glasses. She told me that she also did all her sewing without glasses. I wanted to know about her ancestors, her background.
The name Meness, that of her husband Frank, was originally spelt Mina or Minas. Minas is the Algonquin word for hawberries; it had been the name of one of the chiefs at Oka.
By the mid 1850s, the Algonquin felt threatened by ruthless logging and applied to the government of the United Provinces of Canada for assistance. On August 9, 1854 they were granted about 44,537 acres of land as their own reservation in the River Desert area, which is now know as Maniwaki ("Mary's Land” according to some Algonquins, “Land of the Spirit” according to others)3. Chief Pakinawatik brought most of the Algonquins to this reservation, but it was Frank Meness’ great-grandmother, Mrs. Amikonini, who went all the way back to Oka by canoe for the wampum belts, which later would play such an important role in the relationship of the Algonquins with the Tuscarora chief Clinton Rickard.
Some of the Algonquin families from Oka settled at that time near Golden Lake, Ontario. Names like Tenasco or Commanda are common in both communities. Teresa's name at birth (in 1895) was Tenasco. She was born at Golden Lake but her parents came to Maniwaki when she was three months old. Her first memories are of the long hunting trips on which she accompanied the band.
As she gave me this information, I could not help remarking how much she resembled a German aunt of mine: the same agility, the same wry humour, the same twinkling blue eyes. "My mother", she said, "was half-German. Her name was Mary Peifer”. Then I remembered that there was a German settlement near Golden Lake.
At the age of twenty, Teresa Tenasco married Frank Meness. Her first daughter, born in I917, died of TB at the age of seventeen. Out of thirteen children, Teresa lost seven to TB, an illness for which there was no cure until the youngest boys, born in 1938 and 1939, were saved when sent to the sanatorium in Hull. However, Teresa Meness has twenty-four grandchildren and the number of great-grandchildren has increased considerably since I first visited her.
In the mid 1920s, the Algonquins of Maniwaki became involved in the long struggle to keep open the border at Niagara for Indians from both sides, a struggle started in 1925 by the Tuscarora chief Clinton Rickard. New immigration legislation in the U.S.A. had ignored Article 3 of the lay Treaty of 1794 and Article 9 of the Treaty of Ghent of 1814. Rickard, well informed about old treaties, started a campaign of writing to congressmen and government officials. It took nearly three years (1928) before Indians were allowed to cross freely at Niagara. This victory is celebrated each year on the third Saturday in July. Teresa Meness, now the only surviving member of the first group to cross the Whirlpool Bridge from Canada to the USA, walks across this bridge as she has done for sixty—one years of her life.
On visits to the Tuscarora Reservation some of the Maniwaki Algonquins had admired its school. In the 1930s, Rickard took two of Teresa Meness’ daughters to stay with his family so that they could go to high school. Both of them eventually married Iroquois husbands. One of the girls, Ann (now Mrs. Printup) learned the ancient Iroquois way of making com husk dolls and then taught her mother.
In one of his articles, Speck had written, about the Iroquois customs the Algonquins had adopted while in Oka4; I had always assumed that making corn husk dolls was one of them. Now I learned that this Iroquois craft had not come from the Mohawks at Oka but from the Tuscarora, the last band to join the Six Nations Federation.
In addition to making all her children's clothes for school, and sewing, often late into the night, for other people as well, Teresa Meness now made corn husk dolls for tourists. The dolls were in great demand and some were acquired for the (then) National Museum of Man. All are beautifully dressed in clothes made of deer hide and carefully beaded. Several of these dolls may be seen at Moosehead Lodge, south-west of Maniwaki. On her 95th birthday, I found Teresa making a few more because her grandchildren and great-grandchildren also want them.
Among the Iroquois customs adopted by the Algonquins were the wampum belts for which Frank Meness' great grandmother had returned to Oka. To quote Rickard: “In 1926, the Algonquins made me their wampum keeper so that the Indian agent or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would not seize the belts, as has been done on the Six Nations Reserve at Grand River... Frank Meness and his wife Teresa were the ones who brought these two belts across the border to me”5. Clinton Rickard and Frank Meness both died in 1971. "The wampum belts", Teresa said, “came into my charge and I passed them on to William Commanda”. Mr. Commanda once told me that Rickard was offered a large sum by a German museum for the wampum belts but that he had had a dream that told him to give the belts to an Indian chief. So this part of an essentially Iroquois tradition was passed back to the Algonquins of Kitiganisipi.
Teresa still travels to the border crossing ceremonies each year. In 1985 she was presented to the Pope at Quebec City. Sometimes, when I visit her, she is hundreds of miles away visiting a granddaughter in Sudbury, a daughter in Niagara. The ability to travel, developed during her childhood, has never left her, any more than her ability to adapt, to create, and, one of her greatest abilities, to laugh at the folly of the world.
References
- Frank G. Speck, "Family Hunting Territories and Social Life of Various Algonquin Bands of the Ottawa Valley,“ Geological Survey of Canada, Dept. of Mines, Mem. 70, Ottawa, 1915.
- Frank G. Speck, "Boundaries and Hunting Groups of the River Desert Algonquin." Indian Notes (Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, New York, N.Y.} Vol. VI, No. 2, April 1929, p. 100.
- Anastase Roy, Maniwaki et la Vallée de la Gatineau. Ottawa, Ont. Imprimerie du Droit, 1933, p. 15.
- Frank G. Speck, "River Desert Indians of Quebec". Indian Notes Vol. IV, No. 3, July 1927, p. 241.
- Barbara Graymond ed. Fighting Tuscarora, The Autobiography of Chief Clinton Rickard. Syracuse, N.Y. Syracuse University Press, 1973. p. 73.