Pinehouse sits on the western shore of Pinehouse Lake in Saskatchewan's northern boreal forest. Its Woods Cree name, minahiko-wâskahikanihk, means "at pine house." The community was originally called Snake Lake (kinêpiko-sâkahikan in Cree), and in 1786 a North West Company post and a rival post stood near the mouth of the Tippo River at a place called Lac des Serpents. The Hudson's Bay Company later ran the Souris River Post at the north end of the lake from 1875 to 1939. Its settlement numbered about 100 people in the 1920s and 1930s, and most of its residents eventually moved to Pinehouse.
Missionaries first visited the Dene people of Pinehouse Lake in 1899. A smallpox epidemic in 1900-1901 killed around half the area's population, and some survivors moved up the Churchill River toward Patuanak or downriver to Stanley Mission. The 1906 census listed a community called Serpent Lake on the Churchill with about 11 people, including the family of Samuel and Veronique Misponass.
A townsite was established in the 1940s. St. Dominic Roman Catholic church was built in 1944, followed by a store and, in 1948, a school. The community was renamed Pinehouse Lake in 1954. Eighty houses went up between 1967 and 1980, the first road, from Highway 2, arrived in 1977, and the power grid reached the village in 1984, replacing a diesel generator that had been set up around 1970.
Today Pinehouse is a predominantly Cree northern village with a health clinic, an RCMP detachment, an airport, an arena with an artificial ice plant, and two schools, Minahik Waskahigan Elementary and High School.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Pinehouse” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.