Iyiyiyu

The Iyiyiyu are the northern coastal branch of the East Cree, whose self-name Iiyiyuu, like other Cree autonyms, derives from the word for human being. Their camps and villages dotted the eastern James Bay and adjacent Hudson Bay coast, including Chisasibi, within the Cree homeland of Eeyou Istchee in northern Quebec.

They speak the northern coastal East Cree dialect of the Algonquian Cree continuum and lived as nomadic subarctic hunter-gatherers in bands, taking caribou, geese and seals, fishing rivers and returning to coastal rendezvous.

Hudson's Bay Company trade reached them in 1803, when it founded Fort George at the mouth of the La Grande River, whose Cree name Great River gives Chisasibi its name; the post moved to an island at the river mouth in 1837. Around the forts they traded furs and provisions, gradually shifting from seasonal rounds to settled life.