d. 1795
Muquinna (more commonly transliterated as Maquinna), which means “possessor of pebbles”,
was the name of at least two successive leaders of the Mowachaht First Nations from
Nootka Sound. Muquinna took over as leader of the Mowachaht First Nation (known today as the Mowachaht/Muchalat
people of the Nuu-chah-nulth confederacy) after his father died in 1778, and was able
to gain power and prestige as a mediator and regulator of the maritime fur trade during
a period of competition between England and Spain.
According to the
Canadian Dictionary of Biography Online, Muquinna may have been the leader mentioned by
Cook—not mentioned by name, however—who engaged in negotiations with
Cook, who he welcomed to the Mowachaht summer home of
Yuquot (“Friendly Cove”) in 1778. In 1792, during the Nootka Conventions, Muquinna established a rapport with Spanish
captain
Don Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, and proved to be an apt diplomat, as Muquinna hosted emissaries from both the Spanish
and the British at the Mowachaht winter village of Tahsis.
It is difficult to determine which Muquinna carried out certain acts, as chronologies
of deaths and accessions of leadership are unclear. An account from Charles Bishop,
a fur trader in
Nootka Sound in 1795, claims that one Muquinna, possibly the elder, died in 1795; however, an
earlier account by Alexander Walker, who was on
Strange's trade expedition, states that by 1786 the elder Muquinna had become
blind with age
and the younger Muquinna had already taken over leadership.
In 2018, Ray Williams (Ghoo-Noom-Tuuk-Tomlth), the last Mowachaht man living in
Yuquot with his family, expressed that
the stories that are written about our people are totally wrong. It was never ever
told in our version, our way of telling the story.
Williams expressed his discontent with how local, Indigenous efforts to tell Maquinna's
story have been overshadowed by the “more popular” account of Mowachaht life as told
by John Jewitt, an Englishman who spent 28 months captive under Maquinna until 1805.
- 1. Robin A. Fisher, Muquinna (Macuina, Maquilla, Maquinna), Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online.
- 2. Ibid.
- 3. Ibid.
- 4. Robin A. Fisher, Muquinna (Macuina, Maquilla, Maquinna), Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online.
- 5. Ray Williams in Joel Ballard, Meet the last Indigenous man living in area of B.C. where Europeans first landed, CBC News.