Mascoutensi
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| Subdivision of: | The North American League |
| Cities: | |
| Capital: | |
| Largest: | {{{largest}}} |
| Other: | Marquette, Sault Ste. Marie, St. Ignace |
| Languages: | |
| Official: | Ojibwe |
| Others: | Algonquian, English, Finnish, Francien, German, Gaeilg, Kerno, Menominee, Odawa, Winnebago/Ho-Chunk |
| Governor: | ????? |
| Area: | |
| Population: | ??? millions |
| Established: | 1883, Solemn League Covenant |
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- There is a University of Mascoutensi
- Land that one time made up the whole Native confederacy called "Three Fires" (*here* and *there*) stretches across Les Plaines, Ontario and Mascoutensi.
- The name is taken from a local tribe name. The Mascoutens lived to the west of southern L. Michigan. https://web.archive.org/web/20160312062949/http://www.mascoutens.org/ and https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09768b.htm and Wikipedia:Mascouten have more information.
History
Europeans first explored and settled in the 17th century. The first French to reach what later became Mascoutensi were Étienne Brûlé's expedition in 1622. The first European settlement was made in 1641 on the site where Father (or Père, in French) Jacques Marquette established Sault Sainte-Marie in 1668. Saint-Ignace was founded in 1671, and Marquette in 1675. Together with Sault Sainte-Marie, they are the three oldest cities in the region. "The Soo" (Sault Ste. Marie) has the distinction of being the oldest city in both Mascountensi and Ontario. Officially, Sault Sainte-Marie is still one city caught between two provinces, but administratively the two halves function rather independently of each other and are each responsible to the local governments of Mascoutrnsi and Ontario respectively. In 1679, Lord La Salle of France directed the construction of the Griffin, the first European sailing vessel on the upper Great Lakes. That same year, La Salle built Fort Miami at present-day St. Joseph.
Overview
"Mascoutensi Mascoutensi has to be by far the least populated and most Native province in the NAL-SLC. It is one of very few provinces where an American language is the main language of administration and a co-official Indo European language is the more dominant of the two. The main language of administration is Ojibwe (ᐊᓂᐦᔑᓈᐯᒧᐎᓐ/ Anishinaabemowin), an Anishinaabe (ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᒃ) language within the greater Algonquian language-family. The other co-official language is French as the two largest groups after Native Americans are the Hautpaysois and Métis people, the former self-identifying as a wholly European ethnic group while the latter celebrates being an equal mix of European and Native American. Mascoutensi’s history is not very different from our own world’s Wisconsin and Upper Peninsula of Michigan until the mid-18th Century.
The War of 1755 changed the fate of the region but it did not definitively decide it. The victory achieved by the English in 1763 did not determine whether France or the pan-Brythonic alliance possessed the Highlands (modern day Les Plaines, Mascoutensi, Ouisconsin, and Utawia). For the several decades between the end of the 1755 War and the end of the 1828 War, the Highlands (Pays-d'en-Haut) was a totally anarchic place that was claimed by all sides but administered by none. The French had more forts in the area than the English, but their rule was virtually non-existent. Neither Paris nor victorious London had any power projecting abilities so far away on the frontier. Not even the Council of Three Fires (Niswi-mishkodewinan) could control the coureurs de bois and their political machinations in the region as they pitted warring bands of natives against each other and flooded the area with guns and both African and indigenous American slaves from other regions as gifts to chiefs in exchange for rights to resource extraction. Previously, it was only Jesuit missionaries from France who were in charge of proselytizing the unreached peoples of the Upper Country. The English state sent in Dominicans (who had royal favor at the time) in after 1763 to preach to the many remaining Native peoples of the Highlands who had not yet heard the good news. Relations between the two monastic orders were cordial and indeed both groups aided the other by sharing material resources and each mutually benefited from the other, but each group represented their respective royal benefactors just as much as they did the Latin Church. In the first century of exploration, mostly only French and Kerno (Brehonecq or perhaps even some Aemyladaeth) trappers along with their African slaves courers de bois were the only non-natives in the region. This changed after the 1755 War emboldened the English and Brithenig to venture further west over the Appalachians. Post-1763, the trickle of illegal poaching by English fur trappers became a steady stream.
Only with the 1828 victory of the newly-formed NAL-SLC did the legal question of who had a right to les Pays-d’en-Haut reach a resolution. Les Pays-d’en-Haut were awarded in their entirety to the NAL and the rather large, ambiguously defined region was incorporated as the Northwest Territory, which was later broken up into several administrative regions, of which Mascoutensi was one. New Englanders from all walks of life, both Catholic and Protestant, rushed in to take advantage of new job opportunities and make it rich. The most reviled were the land- speculators who made fortunes off buying large quantities of land in the Northwest Territory for as cheaply as possible, speculating when the price of the land would rise enough to make a profit, and then selling that land for much more than they bought it for. As places like Mascoutensi and Ouisconsin were not Crown lands owned by England and the NAL-SLC was such a new supranational organization, there was no mechanism to stop the Native, Métis, and Hautpysois dispossession of land by the entrepreneurial and often aggressive Anglo-American. It was the Catholic Church and the Council of Three Fires working in conjunction with one another and appeals to the new government in Philadelphia, and the heads of state of England, Kemr, and the Papal States that ultimately brought in help and stemmed the tide of the displacement of the Natives & the French. What would become Mascoutensi was considered the least desirable place to settle in the Northwest Territory by Anglo-Americans. Les Plaines had the best farmland thanks to the Mississippi River and Ouisconsin’s burgeoning settlement of Checagou had the promise of becoming a great urban center due to its central location on the Great Lakes and Chicago river tributary. It was in Mascoutensi that the Natives resisted the fiercest and kept political power firmly in their hands, sharing it as little as necessary with their French and Métis allies. It was during this era that joining the Catholic Church became an avenue for empowerment for the Native Americans of the Northwest Territory. Some families in Mascoutensi had already been Christian for two centuries by the time the Church worked together with the Council of Three Fires to save their land from opportunistic Anglos. The papacy had given a special dispensation two centuries prior to missionaries to translate the liturgical texts into the many Amerindian languages of their charges and celebrate liturgy in those languages over the mandatory Latin. This special dispensation was usually called “the Algonquian Use” or “Indian Mass” in common terms. Whereas before the annexation of the Highlands there were few indigenous who became Catholic priests or monks, there was an explosion of the percentage of clergy amongst the natives. As many as 2% of Native Americans in the Pays-d’en-Haut in the 19th Century and into the mid-20th were monastics and some 8% were somehow related to the clergy in some way. Monasteries flourished in the cold forests of Mascoutensi and monastic ownership of vast swathes of land became the most effective way of scaring off wouldbe speculators. Almost all Native Americans in the Northwest Territory are Catholic and almost all non-Catholic Americans in the lands of the former Northwest Territory are the result of conversion for marriage or recent conversions in the latter half of the 20th and the 21st Centuries. More Finndians are probably Lutheran than not as religious adherence is usually passed down from father to child in the Old World, although no doubt many are Catholic due to the influences of their prayerful, Ojibwe mothers.
https://www.liturgicalartsjournal.com/2018/03/the-indian-mass-in-modern-parish-part.html?m=1
Linguists have documented 156 words of Kerno and Armorican origin in the Hautpaysois dialect of French and the Métis creole of this part of French-speaking North America. Certainly, speakers of the Metropolitan standard from L'Île-de-France perceive Hautpaysois as having a harsh, Celtic lilt to it, making it seem alien and almost not French at all to 21st Century European listeners. Words of Ojibwe and Ho-Chunk origin greatly outnumber words of Celtic origin that pop up in the common parlance of these frontier Francophones.
Most likely, the newest ethnogenesis in the NAL or indeed on the North American continent is of Les Findiens—or ‘the Finndians’ (‘Fintiaanit’ or ‘Suonishinaabe’ from ‘Suomi’+ ‘Anishinaabe’).
Irish-speaking islands: Sugar Island, Neebish, Drummond (call it dromainn, from the word for a high point/ridge), Mackinac, Gull Island (no longer inhabited; only a fisherman’s encampment). Beaver Island was Irish speakers before Mormon but they got chased off."
Economy
Urban Centers
Demographics
Languages
Mascoutensi's eastern area near the Great Lakes is a curious place not just because of its melding of Old World & New World cultures, but because it's the only place other than small pockets of Nya Swerige where a non Indo-European language from Europe proliferated—Finnish. While the cities might be a plurality or even a slim majority Francophone, the inland regions are not. Mascoutensi is a Native province, so Algonquian and Siouan languages predominate, but the language of commerce and trade has been for well over two hundred years. The iron and copper mines brought immigrants from around the world to toil in them, making Native American landowners rich. The largest singular ethnic group to move Mascoutensi to enter the mining industry was the Finns. Plenty of Kerno-speakers from Kemr and Gaeilg-speakers from Cambrian-occupied Ireland, Germans, and smaller amounts of Italians, English, and even some Lebanese found work in this sector as well. English won out amongst the immigrant groups who came to the province over French because their jobs in the mining industry were tied to English-speaking industrial areas like Chicago. Only the Kerno speakers of Dûnein/Dumnonia, as fellow Romance-speakers, and the Lebanese, who've had interactions with the French on and off since the First Crusade, opted to learn French over English.
The Finnish language has touched just about every language spoken in the province save for the Francien spoken by the Hautpaysois who resented economic competition from the waves of immigrants in the late 19th to mid 20th Centuries. The Finns above all European groups save for the French again were the most willing and even eager to integrate into the Algonquian-speaking populace. Intermarriage between the indigenous and newcomer Finns became a phenomenon almost immediately. The Finnish-speakers had no natural advantage to learning an Indo-European language like English or French, so they more often than not learned Ojibwa/Ojibwe first before English. English was reserved for those whose positions at their mining companies required them to interact with middlemen trying to get the iron and copper ore to refineries in Ouisconsin, Ontario, or Utawia. Up to a quarter of the population claims at least one Finnish ancestor in the eastern third of the province. Every aspect of the Ojibwa spoken in this part of Mascoutensi has been permanently altered by Finnish: syntax, loanwords, grammar, even the orthography of the language in the Latin alphabet. Assimilation cut both ways. In these ethnically-mixed families, sometimes the Native spouses learned Finnish and their children grew up speaking on that language (rare, but not undocumented). English too did not come out untouched. The speech of the rural people who bothered to learn English of area is nearly unintelligible to the rest of the NAL, although it stops short of being classified as a new language. The Gaeilg (more numerous) and Kerno (much less numerous) spoken here have taken in plenty of loanwords from Finnish, the German speakers either assimilated into the Finnish core as both groups by and large shared the Lutheran faith or switched to speaking English since Germans were one group that didn't go solely into mining. It's not impossible to find German speakers in the province, nor is it difficult in any NALian province, really.
