Kitcisakik

Kitcisakik occupied a peninsula where the Ottawa River widens into Grand Lake Victoria. Before the arrival of European-Canadian establishments, Anishinaabe families already used it as a summer meeting place. Groups dispersed across their hunting territories for much of the year, then returned to exchange food and news and celebrate marriages. They left again for winter hunting, linking the peninsula to a much larger country of family territories and water routes.

A permanent fur-trading establishment entered this Algonquin region in the late eighteenth century. During the nineteenth century, summer gatherings around trading posts became longer, changing the rhythm of meetings without ending the return to winter grounds. The site combined commercial exchange with older social purposes. Its importance rested on assembling people normally spread across the watershed, making news, kinship and marriage as significant as the pelts passing through the trade.