Albert Dumont changed himself and Ottawa, too
He’s giving back to city’s indigenous population
Albert Dumont hitchhiked down the valley from Quyon to Ottawa in the summer of 1973.
He was 23, with a Grade 7 education, but he knew how to lay bricks. Two valley Irish guys, a Keon and a Coughlin, had taught him the bricks, and more besides. He moved in with his older brother Allan in a small apartment on the corner of Metcalfe and Slater, got a job bricklaying after taking up an advertisement in the Citizen, and fairly soon moved in with a woman in a small place in the Glebe on First Avenue at O’Connor. After work he found himself as often as not in the Alexandra tavern, “in full rebel mode. I didn’t have a chip on my shoulder, I had the whole pulp mill.”
The Anishinabeg community of Kitigan Zibi is about 140 kilometres north of Ottawa, with the Gatineau River on its east side, and Maniwaki sitting just north of it. In 1949 the community had a major flood, and a year later Albert was born there, to a mother who would bear 13 children, 11 of whom would survive, and a fullblood father who was a respected lumberjack and guide.
Albert was of the Commonda clan, but his father had taken the more French-sounding family name of Dumont. When he was six, his father got a job driving truck in the Pontiac, and they moved to Quyon, where the Dumont kids were the only indigenous pupils at the school. Albert was relieved to be kicked out when he was 12, and five years later he went down the road to the big city, the city he was OK with from the start, now the city he’s perfectly OK
The Justice, sensing something in him, was lenient, practising ‘rachmones’, mercy
admitting that he loves.
However, being a young, two-fisted Algonquin man in Ottawa in the ’70s was a full-time job, and Albert eventually found himself up on a third drunk-driving charge before Justice Jack Nadelle, known to the bad boys as the “hanging judge” of drunk drivers.
Also up in court that day was a man who had killed a young woman while drunk. Albert heeded the signs, and the Justice, sensing something in him, was lenient, practising “rachmones,” mercy, a virtue Albert now passes on. (The very well-respected, long-serving Justice Nadelle, who will soon retire, is himself a valley boy, from Fort Coulonge. who came to Ottawa aged nine with his mother.) That was 28 years ago, and Albert has not taken a drink since.
Two years later, although he had not fallen off the wagon, Albert did fall off the roof of Watson’s Mill in Manotick while working on it. (The mill, built in 1860, is both a museum and a working grist mill.) That ended his construction career, but the building trade’s loss was the city’s gain. In the course of reconstructing himself and becoming a man of apparently infinite calm, Albert has become very involved, very, very involved, with the pursuit of harmony within Ottawa’s indigenous population; hosting circles, assisting in the city’s various ecological battles (including over on the islands in the Zibi, reminding the non-indigenous Ottawans that they are on unceded territory, appearing at opening ceremonies and protests, leading self-harmony sessions at Millhaven maximum security.) He’s one busy Anishinabe.
Albert lives now in Vanier, a 12-minute walk from the Wabano Centre, where he is often to be found.
He calls Vanier the “the best part of Ottawa” and likes the neighbourhood for its particular frequency of grassroots energy.
He keeps a cabin up at his birthplace, Kitigan Zibi, where he renews his relationship with the Creator, and where the odd poem, often one about trees, emerges. As for the city he hitchhiked into 42 years ago, he’s glad he came. “For every negative thing you might say about Ottawa, there are a hundred good things that can be said.”