Beaver and The People
Amiskwog kah Nemisilianuwog
Editor’s Note: The first time I met Nohham Cachat-Schilling, they brought me into the hills above the Connecticut Valley to share insights into the different Indigenous names and uses of this varying landscape. Intrigued, I requested permission to reprint their article on this subject Éli Luweyok Kìkayunkahke—So Said the Departed Elders: Northeastern Algonquian Land Zoning Traditions in the first issue of From the Ground Up. Here, Nohham returns to the Connecticut Valley to explore further the history of the land and the importance of beaver to its evolution, ecological function, and dynamics. – David R. Foster
Today, forest management policy across Turtle Island (i.e., North America) focuses on frequent and large-scale disruption paradigms. The siting and scale of forest disruption practices in the Algonquian Northeast do not match millennia of Indigenous stewardship. Agencies and forestry employees devote great effort to promoting narratives that call for disruption of forests at various scales and stages across landforms. Agency and social media claims about Northeastern Indigenous stewardship of precolonial forests conflict with traditional narratives, with documentary and archaeological evidence on Indigenous culture, and with geological evidence such as soil sediment pollen records.
In Algonquian homelands from Mahikanhituk (Hudson River, New York) to Pskehtekwis (Piscataqua River, New Hampshire and Maine), several lines of evidence show that fire and other forest clearing were not widespread or landscape-changing activities across most of the region through many millennia. From a key research paper on this topic: “Pollen data indicate closed forests from 8,000 yr BP to the onset of European deforestation.” Though Algonquian roots in cultivation of foods like sunflowers, gourds, sumpweed, and goosefoot reach back several millennia, ancient plots were too small to significantly alter the landscape. Regional studies of Indigenous impacts on living communities show evidence for small-scale fire on kuttinakish (horticultural plots) close to the main utan/otan/odan (Lenape, Nipmuk, Abenaki historic and current term for “village, town”; ex: Odanak, Quebec).
When we look for processes that create cycles of succession and promote biodiversity, our thoughts should center on beaver. People and beaver have deep connection in Kwenitekwuk—the Connecticut Valley including its tributaries. In the Late Pleistocene days of the People living on this land, now-extinct giant beaver (Castoroides ohioensis) more than two meters long and 100 kilos in weight dwelt in abundant post-glacial wetlands amid dense taiga forest. Traditional narratives of central Kwenitekwut remember giant beaver and vast floods.
Mohgamiskw (Giant Beaver) is said to have blocked the Connecticut River at Amiskwatamak (“beaver dams,” between Poquonock and Enfield, Connecticut) and to have terrorized the People, but Hobomok manitou battled Giant Beaver and released the waters. Like many formative histories, this narrative also ties landscape features to those events: Moghamiskw remains as Sugarloaf’s two mounts extending to the longer Pocumtuck Ridge (South Deerfield and Deerfield, Massachusetts), and the fight formed three islands nearby in the river (Mattamacket, Allinakuk, Taughkannakukwis, now known as First, Second, and Third Islands).
Wobanaki and Mi’kmaq share similar narratives about battles with a giant beaver and a hero or manito breaking the dam. As I heard it, Saukiing Anishnabekiing and other Ojibwe hero Nanabozhoo and Grandmother Nokomis have a conflict with giant Waub-Ameekw, whom they had been tracking across the great lakes, and discover a giant dam at a narrows, which is linked to the formation of islands.
Amiskwonoag (South Sugarloaf - head, North Sugarloaf - body, and Pocumtuck Ridge), not including the tail. The red arkite monolith is seen as the body of slain Mohgamiskw (Giant Beaver), lying alongside its battle site with Hobomok Manitou. Photo © Nohham Cachat-Schilling
Amiskwatamak lies upstream from the dam and glacial lake at Rocky Hill, Connecticut. Once Hobomok defeated Mohgamiskw, Wittum manitou sent clear water from the cascades of Kunn’kwaciw (“tallest mountain,” Mt. Toby Massif, Sunderland, Massachusetts) into the valley, and the relationship between the People and Beaver was forever changed. Like some other giant beasts in Algonquian traditions (such as squirrels), the once giant and predatory beaver became smaller relatives who provide food themselves to humans.
Tamakw (male adult amiskw) escorting the author at Pauchaug. Note the high head, lower back, and still lower tail profile in water that resemble the three mounts at Amiskwonoag. Beaver, especially tamakwak, will engage boaters in territorial behaviors; perhaps giant beavers were dangerous to boating ancestors. Photo © Nohham Cachat-Schilling
From the formative story of the Connecticut Valley, there came to be three major land types—miskeketash, nunnabohke, tauohkomuk—each holding several types of living and working spaces. Beaver live in miskeketash, freshwater wetlands, defined in early negotiations with colonists for the area as “muckeosquittaj.” The People lived on land described by the term nunnabohke, or “drained/good land.” Nunnabohke is where we find otanak (villages), kuttinakish (planted lands), and fishing places and hunting bases (camps). Upland forests were recognized in the term tauohkomuk, “open, unallotted area,” which are also the location for stone prayers and rock shelters. Tauohkomuk are lands where spirituality, hunting, and collecting take place within traditional ceremonial restrictions such that the footprint of Indigenous people through millennia is difficult to detect. Because animals and plants are considered relatives to humans, and taking them is considered an act involving spiritual helpers and prayer, all of these lands are basically ritual and spiritual in character.
“When we look for processes that create cycles of succession and promote biodiversity, our thoughts should center on beaver.”
By damming streams and clearing nearby woody plants for varying periods of time, beaver drive ecosystem dynamics and succession at small scale. Cyclic abandonment of beaver ponds, coupled with human hunting, provided abundant small-scale successional habitat at an eating pace, without the shock of modern management tactics. Beaver dams and ponds across riparian zones trapped nutrients, thus likely aiding the development of localized mesic soils and overall enrichment, while controlling eutrophy, reducing siltation, and increasing biodiversity. Beaver leave the land richer than they find it.
New beaver dam in a Goshen, Massachusetts, roadside helps trap road silt and pollutants, while also mitigating impacts of a residence just upstream and creating a shrub break in otherwise dense elevated forest dominated by black spruce. Photo © Nohham Cachat-Schilling
As demonstrated by the lucrative beaver pelt trade in early colonial times, beaver were abundant compared to today. The Northeast holds numberless small valleys and impoundable streams. Beaver likely surpassed people in terms of small-scale temporal impacts on habitat and on adaptive behaviors of dependent species. Beaver are central to land stewardship models that focus on the continuity of deep legacy in ecology.
Hunted by martens, wolves, humans, raptors, and sometimes otters, the interactive dynamics between beaver and their animal relatives must be considered. Beaver meat and pelts have always held great value; their remains are frequent at early Native places in the Connecticut Valley. From the Naskapi of Matsheuiatsh in the Lac St. Jean region of Quebec, I heard narratives often featuring beaver hunts, such as Mamilteheu (Has a Hairy Heart), and Metsheu (Talks to Oneself), in which a variety of hunting methods are described. Traditional hunting of beaver necessarily influenced prey abundance and behavior, making for a dynamic of cycles with many variables. Millennia of Indigenous caretaking of this relationship made possible the Colonial beaver pelt trade and the extracted wealth of the region in general.
Today, all is changed greatly on this land. Estimates by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals place the Massachusetts beaver population as stable at about 70,000. Even this large number is greatly short of historical population estimates and the numbers of beaver needed to reestablish those processes that created the rich precolonial landscape. Meanwhile, management of beaver sometimes frustrates habitat restoration. In Massachusetts, problem beavers cannot, by law, be relocated, despite the great need for them elsewhere to restore and maintain habitat that includes endangered species. Kunn’kwaciw (Mount Toby massif, Sunderland and Leverett, Massachusetts), the sacred home of Wittum manito, is a good example of a location where beaver are needed to support rare species. Here, on a small, perched muskeg that historically supported beaver, several rare or uncommon plants—the state’s last showy lady’s slippers (Cypripedium reginae), a group of threatened large-leaved orchid (Platanthera macrophylla), a population of eyelash fringed orchid (Platanthera blephariglottis) and suppressed Turk’s cap lily (Lilium superbum)—are shaded by overhanging trees. Nearby, dwindling away, are the last ram’s head lady’s slippers (Cypripedium arietinum) in Massachusetts. Due to the lack of wooded stream corridors to the mountain, beaver have not yet recolonized the area.
Perched sweet-water swamp on Kunn’kwaciw. The spring-fed old beaver pond holds rare plants encroached upon by tree cover, with soils too sensitive for logging machines. Photo © Nohham Cachat-Schilling
Government agencies publicly claim that trapping is needed “to control beaver,” amplified by sensationalist fictions like “The Beavers That Ate Massachusetts,” a wild exaggeration in Sports Afield. Beaver reproduction responds effectively to changing conditions and population size, with females conceiving at a younger age when the population is culled. Agencies and hunter groups blame animal cruelty restrictions and low “social carrying capacity” for “beaver woes,” which arise largely due to suburban sprawl. Animal cruelty organizations complain that leghold traps are inherently cruel, while trappers complain that humane traps are expensive. Having witnessed how an otter can attack a leg-held beaver overnight, I can attest to the incredible suffering and extended cruelty of that fate.
“Tauohkomuk are lands where spirituality, hunting, and collecting take place within traditional ceremonial restrictions such that the footprint of Indigenous people through millennia is difficult to detect.”
Indigenous hunting methods include snares, but also several other, less cruel methods, such as those described in the traditional narratives above and in the living memory archives of nations like Iiyiyuu (Eastern Cree). A traditional method I saw is winter hunting, where beaver are chased into their lodge, then the entrance is blocked, and the beaver are trapped inside; the lodge is opened from the top and beaver can be humanely dispatched. Another method was to collect the anal gland fluid from a caught male beaver and scent mark heavily on shore near the targeted beaver, then dispatching the animal when it comes to investigate. Agencies have not sought better methods from Indigenous knowledge keepers; published arguments on policy do not explore methods other than leghold traps (cruel) and cage traps (expensive and less effective).
Efficiency and responsiveness of both Indigenous people and beaver achieved balance with their relatives and their environment. Algonquian nation housing is sustainable: heat-efficient dome-roofed wikwams, densely inhabited and small—interestingly like beaver lodges. The house consisted of only seven main saplings and usually fewer than a dozen smaller saplings, fiber ties, and either mat covers or bark—locally renewable by allowing saplings to grow over the site between rebuilds. Compare a wikwam to the wood needed to build one European-style house. Indigenous people also stayed only part of the year at each place, reducing negative impacts and creating positive impacts. Our impacts were light and restricted to particular terrain under traditions that harmonize with the ways of beaver tending their land. Indigenous stewardship maintained a level where Indigenous lifeways continued deep evolutionary history. Absent drivers like profit and empire-building, the skill and insight of our lifeways preserved abundance.
Beavers alter their living spaces slowly, selectively, with preference for the best sites, leaving other lands unaltered. Their stewardship is embedded in their lifeways and local to their homes. Beaver, fish, various land fowl, waterfowl, and small mammals competed with deer for prominence in the precolonial diet, yet these do not receive proportional focus in land management plans. Land management needs to reduce the area of human disturbance while restoring beaver to our streams. Management staff committed to disturbance regimes can be retrained to trap and relocate beaver to their former homes away from suburbs. A more detailed and more localized image of Indigenous lifeways is the necessary basis for successful conservation and ecological management policy. Those details are available through Indigenous narrative, archaeology, soil studies, and comparative botanical evolution studies, where amiskw —beaver—is a lead figure.
Nohham Cachat-Schilling is Medicine Elder, Bridge in the Sky Medicine Circle; Chair of the Massachusetts Ethical Archaeology Society; and a Researcher at the Oso:ah Foundation. They are also a contributing author in Our Hidden Landscapes: Indigenous Stone Ceremonial Sites in Eastern North America, part of the Native Peoples of the Americas series from the University of Arizona Press (Dr. Lucianne Lavin and Elaine Thomas, editors). They live in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts.