SEMINAR: Anthropology Seminar

The Atikamekw are an Algonquian group, now living in three communities in the Upper St- Maurice region (Québec, Canada) and number around 6,000 people. While they have been “invited”, all through the colonial period, to gradually exclude themselves from Nitaskinan, their ancestral lands, they maintain to this day intimate relationships with their territory. In order to regain and affirm their autonomy, the Atikamekw are engaged at three interrelated levels: at the national political level, in arduous land claims negotiations with the federal and provincial governments; at the regional technical level, in their attempts to conclude co-management agreements with non-Indigenous groups of interests, like the forestry industry; and at the level of the communities/settlements, on a more social and cultural basis. The Atikamekw are concerned with the maintenance and the reproduction of their customary land tenure system, based on family territories, while constantly adapting it to new constraints, namely Quebec’s administrative delimitations and non-Indigenous activities on Nitaskinan. The Atikamekw family territories, as postcolonial spaces, have thus become the grounds of complex co-existence and entanglement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous regimes of values, land tenure systems, forms of governance, and conceptions of the forestland and its non-human inhabitants. The Atikamekw are also concerned about the transmission of knowledge, values and ethos pertaining to hunting and gathering to the younger generations and explore novel avenues to meet that objective. These different forms and levels of engagement will be discussed in my paper. Sylvie Poirier is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Université Laval (Quebec, Canada). She has done research among Aboriginal people in the Australian Western Desert since 1980 and among the Atikamekw, a First Nation in north-central Quebec, since 1990. She is the author of A World of Relationships: Itineraries, Dreams, and Events in the Australian Western Desert (2005) and coeditor (with John Clammer and Eric Schwimmer) of Figured Worlds: Ontological Obstacles in Intercultural Relations (2004). Since 2006, she is working, closely with the Council of the Atikamekw Nation, on the documentation and valorization of their traditional knowledge, and exploring avenues to make it more available to the younger generations.