Ignace Tonené

Around 1868, Tonené was elected to succeed his father as the anike ogima (English: deputy-chief) and he became the head chief in 1878. As the anike ogima, Tonené raised the issue of his community's exclusion from the 1850 Robinson Treaty between European settlers and Ojibwa nations around Lake Huron.[1] Tonené, with two associates, met Charles Skene, a federal Indian agent to explain their concerns about arriving lumberjacks and that while their land was not ceded, they sought an annuity and a reserve.[1][2] During a 1st Jan 1879 speech, Tonené warned his community: “the white men were coming closer and closer every year and the deer and furs were becoming scarcer and scarcer...so that in a few years more Indians could not live by hunting alone.”[1]

He continued to pressure for federal financial support and the creation of a reserve through a series of meetings and letters in both English and Anishinaabe, which resulted in acknowledgement from Lawrence Vankoughnet in 1880 that the ~2,700 square miles of Temagami land was indeed unceded. Canadian Prime Minister John A. Macdonald deferred the matter to the Ontario Premier as land claims were provincial, rather than a federal issue, although in 1883 the Department of Indian Affairs agreed to an annual payment to the nation, the value comparable to others nations included in the Robinson-Huron Treaty.[1]

In 1884, Tonené convened a tribal council on Bear Island to discuss the location for the reserve, which he proposed to be about 100 square miles around Cross Lake and the south end of Lake Temagami. The community agreed.[1] The federal government agreed to the proposal, but the Ontario premier Oliver Mowat who was notoriously hostile to Indigenous treaty rights, blocked the land transfer.[1][3]

In 1888, in the context of Oliver Mowat's refusal to create the reserve, Tonené moved his family to land between Lake Opasatica and Lake Dasserat near Abitibi, Quebec.[1] In 1889, he travelled to Bear Island to ask the Indian agent for agricultural supplies for his community, while hunting and trapping along the journey, but also, motivated by the discovery of silver at Cobalt, Ontario, prospecting.[1]

Tonené's prospecting became so good that the Canadian Mining Journal credited him with instigating the Larder Lake gold rush of 1906.[1] He discovered the ore body that became the Kerr Addison gold mine at McGarry, but his claim was stolen from him.[1][3] The Indian Act of 1876 prevented Tonené from hiring a lawyer.[3]

As the head chief, Tonené was succeeded by John Paul and he went back to hunting and trapping in Abitibi country.[1] When John Paul died in 1893, Tonené reverted back into the head chief role and from 1910 he was the honorary or life chief and the primary advisor to the new head chief, his younger brother Frank White Bear.[1]