The Kiamika River (''in French: rivière Kiamika'') is a watercourse in the Antoine-Labelle Regional County Municipality, in the administrative region of

Laurentides The Laurentides () is a region of Quebec. While it is often called the Laurentians in English, the region includes only part of the Laurentian mountains. It has a total land area of and its population was 589,400 inhabitants as of the 2016 Cens ...

, in

Quebec Quebec ( ; )According to the Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is one of the thirtee ...

, in Canada. Several dams have been erected in order to regulate the flow of the river, in particular on Lake Kiamika. This body of water eventually became a reservoir of in area, with a maximum depth of . This reservoir has several large islands, some of which were contiguous lands before the submersion.

History

In the 19th century, the first surveyors to cross the region noted in their reports that the waters of this river were relatively canoeable and warm. They underlined the perceived milder microclimate of this valley and referred to the good potential for agriculture and logging. The first logging initiatives in the valley were carried out by the MacLaren Company. From the end of the 19th century, several pioneers from the south settled in the lower part of the Kiamika valley, looking for new lands. Thanks to these many settlers and their families, the agro-forestry communities of

Chute-Saint-Philippe Chute-Saint-Philippe is a municipality in the Laurentides region of Quebec, Canada, part of the Antoine-Labelle Regional County Municipality. The village is located in a fairly flat valley surrounded by a mountainous area of the Laurentian Hills ...

, Lac-des-Écorces, Val-Barrette and Kiamika were erected in Catholic parishes and in municipalities before setting up their respective school boards.

Toponymy

In the

Algonquin language Algonquin (also spelled Algonkin; in Algonquin: or ) is either a distinct Algonquian language closely related to the Ojibwe language or a particularly divergent Ojibwe dialect. It is spoken, alongside French and to some extent English, by th ...

, the term "Kiamika" means: "steep or cut below the water". In his notes of 1863, Stanislas Drapeau, affirms that the township of Kiamica derives its name from the river, which had probably been so designated for a long time. On the 1891 township map, Petit lac Kiamika was designated Petit lac à l'Écorce. The oldest cartographic spelling of the toponym R. Kiamika appears on a map by Eugène Taché dated 1870.Source: ''Names and places of Quebec'', work of the Commission de toponymie du Québec, published in 1994 and 1996 in the form of a printed illustrated dictionary, and in that of a CD-ROM produced by the company Micro-Intel, in 1997, from this dictionary. The toponym Kiamika River was made official on 5 December 1968 at the Place Names Bank of the

Commission de toponymie du Québec The Commission de toponymie du Québec (English: ''Toponymy Commission of Québec'') is the Government of Québec's public body responsible for cataloging, preserving, making official and publicize Québec's place names and their origins according ...

.Commission de toponymie du Québec - Rivière Kiamika
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References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kiamika, river Rivers of Laurentides Antoine-Labelle Regional County Municipality

History

Toponymy

Further reading

See also

References

External links