Post-Colonial Indigenous Territorialities, Cultural Transmission, and Autonomy: the Atikamekw Nation and the Forest World

The Atikamekw have been encouraged to disconnect themselves from their ancestral lands of Nitaskinan, Quebec. They have pursued means of affirming their autonomy at various levels, namely national political, regional technical, and community levels. Through their interactions with Quebec’s administrative delimitations on their land, the Atikamekw’s territories become sites of entanglement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous values, land tenure systems, forms of governance, and conceptions of the forestland and its non-human inhabitants. This project explores the transmission of knowledge and values pertaining to hunting and gathering as avenues for maintaining customary land tenure while simultaneously adapting it to new constraints.

Project leader: Sylvie Poirier

Associated Research Themes: Life Projects; Customary Tenure