The Indians of the Algonkian linguistic stock known in literature as
the Montagnais, inhabit the vast region north of the St. Lawrence river
from the coast of Labrador on the Atlantic, westward through to the St.
Maurice river near Quebec, and northward to the height of land dividing
the Arctic watershed from that of the St. Lawrence. They number not far
from 3,000 souls widely scattered in small bands comprising certain
dialectic and ethnical groupings. Within certain limits they are
nomadic, subsisting entirely by hunting and fishing, never warlike
except in their resistance to the Iroquois, docile and orderly. They
were visited early in the 17th century by Jesuit missionaries who have
left us the only specific literature dealing with their mode of life.
Their culture is characterized by extreme simplicity, almost barren in
its social, political and ceremonial aspects though rich in the field
of activity concerned with hunting, fishing and traveling. Roughly
speaking, the Montagnais group lends itself to a threefold division,
the ethnological and dialectic peculiarities following somewhat the
same limits: those of the coast, the typical so-called Montagnais;
those of the interior of the northwestern part of the Labrador
peninsula, and those of the northeastern interior. The latter have come
to be known as the eastern Naskapi. The whole group is closely related
to the Cree of Hudson’s Bay, outside of which area its next closest
affinities lie with the Wabanaki group of the region south of the St.
Lawrence, from New Hampshire to Newfoundland.