Digging to the roots of his family tree started Cole Bosum on a fascinating journey that led to the creation of the Eeyou Istchee Genealogical Society. Last fall, he incorporated the project as a non-profit organization and launched a website to collect, preserve and share the Cree Nation’s ancestral heritage.
“I’d like to see something that really lasts and grows,” said Bosum. “This will succeed based on people volunteering and sharing their histories and documents. I’d like to offer people a book of life where everything about their family history is available.”
Being a child of a mixed race couple, Bosum knew his father had French Canadian roots but had difficulty finding information about his mother’s Cree ancestry beyond Ouje-Bougoumou. Exploring resources like community graveyards, church records and the Hudson Bay Company’s archives, he eventually traced her ancestry back to the 1700s.
“One ancestor I have is German, a soldier who came with the British when the American revolution started, emigrated north to Canada and married this French woman,” Bosum revealed. “Their child ended up working at the HBC post in Eastmain. It’s interesting to know we may have cousins on the other side of the ocean.”
While the genealogical society is still in its early stages, its Facebook page has already amassed over 500 likes. Bosum has been posting transcribed censuses dating back nearly a century in the off-hours of his dayjob as a journalist with the CBC. He has plans to study at Concordia University this fall with an interest in eventually attending medical school.
“The census is like a snapshot,” Bosum explained. “Sometimes they can tell a story of where people moved throughout the years. People were more nomadic back then so not everybody is included.”
Although the digitization of archives in recent years has simplified searches, research still involves combing through old certificates, academic journals and personal records – there’s an extensive privacy policy. Bosum hopes to collect all the publicly available information to categorize and digitize, becoming a centralized resource for Cree people curious about their family trees.
“I’d like to offer members the digitized records of all the collections,” said Bosum. “It might help people regain their Indian status or be helpful with (researching) genetic diseases – I think there will be a lot of benefit. I’ve yet to develop membership classes. I’m hoping people will volunteer as well.”
Bosum cited the extensive work of Janie Pachano from Chisasibi, whose investigation into her extended family’s genealogy traced a hereditary disease now known as Cree leukoencephalopathy (CLE) all the way back to Hudson’s Bay Company workers from Scotland’s Orkney Islands in the 1700s.
Affecting the brain development of infants, CLE causes the nervous system’s white matter to vanish. Looking healthy at birth, the first signs start after three to nine months, typically after a fever or virus, and they usually die within a few weeks or months. There is no cure. It’s now known there’s only a risk of CLE when both parents carry the defective gene, which can be diagnosed through a blood test.
Pachano’s family alone has lost over a dozen babies to this disease, a number so high she determined it must be genetically related. She began researching her family tree, finding some branches reaching to Mistissini and Whapmagoostui.
After volunteering to expand her work to other families affected, Pachano was contacted by Dr. Deborah Black in Vermont, who had been researching the disease since working in Chisasibi in the 1980s and sent her the names of all documented cases since the 1970s. After successfully tracking these family histories, Pachano received a memorable call from Dr. Black.
“The researchers in England said you saved them 20 years of research,” Pachano recalled hearing. “I thought there’s probably other genetic diseases around so why not do family trees for all the Cree communities. I’ve been doing that in my spare time. I think I covered all the surnames in Eeyou Istchee.”
After over 30 years of research, Pachano has completed a book of about 700 pages called “Aayanschaa: Family Trees of Eeyou Istchee,” which will soon be sent to a publisher for layout and design work. The book will include interesting stories about certain families and the etymology of Cree surnames that Pachano discovered during the process.
While Pachano knew everyone by their Cree name when she was growing up on Fort George Island, after returning from two years of high school in 1958 she was disoriented to find that everyone except the Elders were now known by their English names. This change was associated with belonging to a church, whose missionaries would regularly change surnames.
The Chisasibi family name House is an interesting example. The first to be given that name had supposedly loved tagging along on visits to the Hudson Bay trading post, wanting to visit the manager’s house. They started calling him Waskahigan (House).
“The son of the original House married my grandfather’s grandmother,” said Pachano. “His first children were baptized with the Cree name Waskahigan but the others were anglicized with the name House so that’s the one used today.”
Her husband’s Pachano name derives from the Matthias family, whose married sons used their Cree name as their surname. The Cox family name is connected to Peter Cock from the Orkneys but a missionary preferred the spelling change. Names like Masty and Kawapit have been shortened. Robert Kanatewat had his name changed to Robert Kay in school, which he later changed back.
“My great-grandfather’s Cree name was a nickname, ‘to leave out,’” said Pachano. “I’m told he was a lousy storyteller who always left out the important parts and the punchline. In residential school, I always said my last name was ‘leftovers’, then it was Matthew because his first name was Matthew.”
Fort George records go back to 1852 while Moose Factory’s extend to 1840, when Cree people started getting baptized. Some archives only recorded male relations and some only listed the Cree names. While Pachano consulted ancestry.com, church records and censuses, many family trees were pieced together from interviews.
“Elders have good memories and kept track of their relations,” Pachano said. “I’ve heard of two cases married legally who had the same father and different mothers. One couple who had a child didn’t know they were brother and sister because of all the changes in names.”
After publishing the comprehensive history Chisasibi and Its People in 2020, Pachano published a guide to Eeyou Istchee’s berries earlier this year and has just finished a new book that explains the significance of traditional rites of passage like the walking out ceremony.
“I’m reaching the end of my life so I have to keep busy to complete everything I’ve decided to do,” Pachano reflected. “It was a big chunk of my life and I did it all for free. I feel I can go quietly and happily into the next world.”