Priceless Cree Beaded Hood
Comes Home to Eeyou Istchee

A 170-year-old intricately adorned woman’s ceremonial hood has been officially repatriated to the Cree Nation of Eeyou Istchee by the City of Montreal’s Lachine Museum.

Made of wool and cotton, and intricately designed with hundreds of glass beads, the hood was created around 1850 for Jane Gunner, the wife of the chief of Mistissini. In traditional James Bay Cree culture, women wore ceremonial hoods for special occasions like weddings or the return of band members from a hunt. The hood had been part of the Lachine Museum’s collection since 1948.

“The return of the Gunner hood to Eeyou Istchee is important because it has enormous cultural, heritage, and spiritual value. Now the hood can be studied and shared widely by the Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute, helping to increase our knowledge of the traditional ways of our people,” said Abel Bosum, Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees (Eeyou Istchee). “We thank the City of Montreal for this highly significant gesture, as it heralds a new willingness of southern institutions and communities to work with First Nations communities in the return of artefacts that have great cultural importance.”

Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante stressed the significance of the repatriation: “Today’s signature and the return of the traditional hood are strong actions that reflect the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as well as the City of Montreal’s Strategy for Reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. We are proud to take another step in strengthening our relationship with the Cree nation.”

Located in Oujé-Bougoumou, the Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute is recognized as one of Canada’s leading aboriginal cultural institutions. The beaded hood will cared for by the ACCI’s collections staff, and will be used as an important element of educational programming relating to Cree traditions and customs.

ACCI has a well-equipped lab, where opportunities for collaboration with specialists in museology, conservation, education, etc., take place. In this context the archaeological collections coming from Eeyou Istchee (last 20 years) are stored and conserved in the ACCI lab for greater accessibility to Cree people.

• Archeology in Eeyou Istchee begins during the 60s with the explorations of Rogers and other explorers. During the construction of the James Bay road, some interventions were carried out along the road, but it is only with the signing of the James Bay Agreement that the participation of the cree people is really active. This is when community archeology projects begin in the context of the construction of hydroelectric dams. Currently, we count around 5000 archaeological sites in the Cree territory documenting, at the same time, 5000 years of history.
• Since 2003, with the collaboration of the Mistissini, Eastmain, Nemaska and Waskaganish communities, the Archaeology unit carried out a large project in the lands affected by the Esatmain-1 Hydroelectric project and the Rupert river diversion. During this period, we discovered,
  dug and analyzed over than 150 archaeological sites.

Today, our work comprises work in:

• Waskaganish, where we have worked in two different sections of Smokey Hill site, Sanders Pond, Charlton Island, Charles Fort, and other sites.
• Ouje-Bougoumou, where an intervention has been carried out in the Assinika area in Bosum’s family land and also in the area of Uupimskaau Paaushtikuu. There we discovered nine archaeological sites. Two of them were dug during the 2017, 2018 and 2019 summers.
• Wemindji: We were asked to research the impact of a proposed new road in this area. This project permitted us to discover, with the help of Elders and Cree collaborators, five new archaeological sites between 2017 and 2019. One of them has been dug.
• Other interventions have been carried out in the last years in some of the former trading posts of the Hudson Bay Company, in particular in Charles Fort, Fort George, Neoskweskaw, and Pike Lake.