The Mistassini Cree are a sub-Arctic people living in northern Quebec who attempt to carry on a lifestyle and culture that was traditionally built around hunting and trapping. The Cree have made some partial compromises with Canadian society by spending the summers at government outposts, but in the winters they live much as they did more than three hundred years ago, when Europeans first entered the area.
Particularly during the winter, the Cree are most interested in divinatory dreams as they relate to the hunt. Such divinatory dreams are not straightforward, in the sense that they most often require interpretation. For example, one of the most common rules of interpretation is that meeting a stranger of the opposite sex in a dream indicates a game animal. Events in the dream then serve as metaphors for what will happen during the hunt. For instance, in a study of the Mistassini Cree, Adrian Tanner includes the account of a man who dreamed he met an Eskimo woman who invited him to live with her. The man refused the invitation and later while hunting sighted a caribou, which he shot at but missed, and it got away.
The Cree also regard dreams as sources of creative inspiration and spiritual guidance. Tanner observes, for instance, that “power. is sometimes thought to arrive in dreams, in the form of formulae for songs, or shamanistic techniques, or ideas for the decoration of clothing or other objects” (p. 126—see Sources).
Thus, according to Tanner, dreams serve to connect ordinary daily activities with a spirit realm, giving one’s life a larger significance in the cosmic view of things.
one of the Algonquian-speaking Indian tribes of North America.
In the 17th century they lived in the western part of the Labrador Peninsula; in the early 19th century they settled in the vast forest-plains territory of Canada. The Cree consisted of two culturally and historically different groups—the Plains Cree, who were mounted buffalo hunters, and the Forest Cree, who were hunting and fishing peoples. The Plains Cree were placed on reservations in the late 19th century, whereas the Forest Cree remained hunters and gradually changed to a settled way of life. Many of the modern Cree are employed as hired laborers. The Cree are formally Christians (Catholics), although they preserve elements of their ancient totemistic beliefs. The Cree population totaled more than 60,000 in 1967.