JULIAN, PETER NICHOLAS (1854-1938)

JULIAN, PETER NICHOLAS, Micmac Indian chief; b. Miramichi, Aug 1854, s/o John N. Julian; m. 1st, 1875, Mary Ann Gurnabil, and 2nd, 1887, Mary Charlotte Ward; d. Eel Ground, 25 Feb 1938.

Peter N. Julian grew up at Eel Ground where he became a successful lumberman and farmer. He commanded respect at home and had friends and admirers in the non-Indian community as well. He was a devoted Catholic who did not use tobacco or alcohol.

Julian entered reserve politics in 1894 when a faction at Eel Ground was making a determined effort to have the first elected chief, Thomas Barnaby, removed from office. In a personal submission to the Department of Indian Affairs he charged that "detestable tactics" were being used against Barnaby, and that while he had no desire to interfere with the term of "the present acting chief," he himself was the "proper person" to be chief of the Eel Ground reserve. The principal qualification which he cited was that he was "a lineal descendant of the Julian family." When the department advised him that election was the method of appointment to the chiefship currently "in vogue," he ran for office and won.

Peter Julian was chief at Eel Ground from 1894 to 1903 and from 1906 to 1909. In his first years as chief he set out to expand the influence and control of the Eel Ground band at the expense of the smaller and more vulnerable band at Red Bank. In his defense it might be noted that he believed in the hereditary right of the Julians to all the Indian lands on the Northwest, but since his mandate as chief came only from the electorate at Eel Ground, certain of the actions which he took in 1894 and 1895, in concert with the Department of Indian Affairs, can only be seen as aggrandizing and manipulative. He did not annex the Red Bank reserve as he seemed to wish to do, but he sowed seeds of suspicion and discord which helped poison relations between the two neighboring bands for the rest of the 19th century and much of the 20th.

At Eel Ground, Julian was a hard-liner on law and order whose loyal supporters and sworn enemies were almost evenly divided. A huge amount of his time was consumed by internecine warfare. This was most intense in the 1890s when his political nemesis, Lemuel Renou, who had previously tried to unseat Thomas Barnaby, created the "Renou opposition." Renou, who set principle aside whenever it was expedient to do so, was eventually brought to heel by federal authorities, after it was discovered, through a lengthy and costly investigation, that charges which he had filed against Julian in Ottawa were fraudulent.

When he died in 1938 the political phase of Julian's life was long past, and he was viewed in the larger Miramichi community as a handsome, charming man of aristocratic bearing who was upright in his personal life and had the aura of the Julian 'kings' about him. An obituary in the North Shore Leader observed nostalgically that he was "the last surviving member of his family and the last of the Julian tribe." He and his first wife had at least four children, but none of them would appear to have lived to maturity. His marriage to Mary Charlotte Ward was without issue.