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Coordinates: Whapmagoostui ("place of the beluga" in Cree) is the northernmost Cree village in Quebec, located at the mouth of the Great Whale River (Grande Rivière de la Baleine) on the coast of Hudson Bay in Nunavik, Quebec, Canada. It has a population of 778 people.1 About 500 people, mostly Inuit,2 live in the neighbouring northern village of Kuujjuarapik. The community is only accessible by air (Kuujjuarapik Airport) and, in late summer, by boat. Whapmagoostui is about 250 kilometres north of the nearest Cree village, Chisasibi.
Although the permanent cohabitation of Inuit and Crees at the mouth of the Great Whale River only goes back to the year 1950, the two nations were rubbing shoulders in this area for a very long time; Inuit close to the coast and the Crees more in the interior lands.
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History
While the Cree have hunted and fished along the Hudson Bay coast long before the arrival of Europeans, it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century when a Hudson's Bay Company trading post was built here called Fort Richmond. This was the beginning of a settlement also known as Poste-de-la-Baleine or Great Whale River. A protestant mission settled there in the 1880s. Yet the Cree would not settle here permanently and only used it as a summer encampment.
The American army opened a military base at the mouth of the Great Whale River during the Second World War, using Inuit and Cree workers. And in 1955 a Mid-Canada Line radar station was built at this place. Though the radar station was not operational for long and closed in 1965, it established the village permanently.
References
Further reading
- Adelson, Naomi. Practices and Perceptions of Health of the James Bay Cree of Whapmagoostui, Quebec Final Report. Montréal: McGill University], 1991.
- Lussier, Catherine, Carole Lévesque, and Ginette Lajoie. Northern Ecosystem Initiative A Preliminary Community Perspective on Environmental Priorities, Whapmagoostui and Chisasibi. Montréal: INRS Culture et société, 2000.
External links
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- This page was last modified on 25 November 2008, at 22:59.
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