Wemotaci

Wemotaci stands on the upper Saint-Maurice, near the mouth of the Manouane River. Its Atikamekw name means “the mountain from which one observes”. Forest, lakes and rivers make up the surrounding hunting country, part of the Atikamekw homeland of Nitaskinan. Light birchbark canoes carried families along the waterways, while portages linked routes around rapids and between lakes.

By the seventeenth century the Atikamekw occupied the Saint-Maurice watershed, travelling between the interior and the French post founded at Trois-Rivières in 1634. A trading post at Wemotaci is securely recorded in 1806, when Jean-Baptiste Perrault built facilities for the fur trade. The Hudson's Bay Company took it over in 1821. The post brought merchants into a country already known to Atikamekw hunters and their families.