Three Mi'kmaq Women, New Brunswick

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Image Gallery

Three Mi'kmaq Women, New Brunswick
(watercolor on paper)
Charles Hervey
1825-1875, 19th century
© McCord Museum, Montreal
Accession no. M978.83.3

Not all artists who undertook to record Aboriginal culture were particularly gifted. Charles Hervey, a captain in the 34th Regiment, painted several pictures that document nineteenth-century Mi’kmaq and Maliseet life. His watercolors, though lacking in artistic merit, provide valuable insight into the day-to-day lives of New Brunswick's Aboriginal people. In this painting, three Mi’kmaw women are carrying goods to trade with Europeans. In the nineteenth century many Aboriginal women earned a proportion of their families’ incomes by manufacturing and selling baskets, brooms, and decorated purses and pouches to Europeans, many of whom collected these beautifully-crafted items of material culture.

Biographies

Read biographies of several individuals who featured prominently in the land debate in New Brunswick.

Gabriel Acquin

Considered to be the founder of the St. Mary’s First Nation, Gabriel Acquin travelled to England several times forming friendships with royalty, but continued to serve as a hunter, guide, and interpreter in New Brunswick.

Jared Tozer, Jr.

Born into an influential family in 1798, Jared Tozer Jr. was a lumber contractor and public figure on the Miramichi. His father, Jared Tozer Sr., was a native of Connecticut, who had fought as a Patriot in the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) before being drawn to New Brunswick in 1789 by the economic opportunities of the new province.

John Julian

John Julian and his family successfully petitioned the colonial government to continue living on their traditional homeland along New Brunswick’s Miramichi River.

Moses Perley

As Commissioner of Indian Affairs for New Brunswick in the 1840s Moses Perley advanced the cause of Aboriginal rights in the province.

Noel Bear

Like all members of the Wabanaki Confederacy, Noel Bear inherited a vast hunting range, stretching from New Brunswick southward to Maine and westward to the St. Lawrence River. By the time of his death, his inheritance had shrunk to a few acres of land.

Noel John (Gohn)

Noel John, chief of the Buctouche-Richibucto Mi’kmaq, petitioned the New Brunswick government to maintain his people’s land. He later sold some of that land to non-Aboriginal settlers.