1. The Essipiunnuat, the Salmon War and cultural oblivion

Obsessive preoccupation with bygone triumphs or tragedies substitutes fables of glory or victimization for the chequered pasts we actually inherit. Yet we remain accountable for the whole of our collective pasts. […] The psychic cost of repressing traumatic memory can be as crippling for nations as for individuals. History is often hard to digest. But it must be swallowed whole to undeceive the present and inform the future.

David Lowenthal, New York Review of Books, 14 January 2016

The Innu has always said that he will never cede his rights on the land, he will never go to the government and say ‘I don’t need the land’. No, the Innu will never say this. There are kids here, they will need it. And later, they will ask questions to the government about the domain of their ancestors.

Elder François Penashue Aster

Cultural oblivion as a phenomenon is fascinating in its scope, its impacts and its complexity. By its very nature it is awkward to investigate. As for ignorance, it is constantly slipping from our fingers and fleeing yet further; it must be looked at through the shadows, in forgotten traces, through whisperings and silences. The researcher disturbs its producers, their secrets, the deeds and past experiences that they believed had fallen into nothingness. Researching oblivion involves digging up skeletons and trying to learn from them. It is not always convenient. But no matter how deeply the truth has been buried, and what was known and felt, it tends to leak into the present. There are always reasons, generally painful ones, why people hide things and strive to make others forget. Abuse and trauma are important, together with fear, guilt, shame and the variety of interests they entail. The colonial authorities (including the Catholic Church) and powers-that-be are impressively gifted at erasing their deeds and rewriting a self-legitimising story that makes the abused responsible for their condition.

Cultural oblivion, particularly that produced in a colonial context that is characterised by internal erasure and rewriting, deserves closer attention. The reserve, as part and parcel of a genocidal project of elimination, is one of the most efficient laboratories for forgetting. The impacts of 150 years of an over-reaching Canadian command to forget remain underestimated. For that reason, Essipiunnuat’s relationship with the past can hardly be investigated without considering some of the broader sociohistorical background. From the killing of Essipiunnuat families¹ in the early 19th century, to our displacement in order to create the reserve, to the contemporary absorption of a Euroquébécois selective memory by our own leaders, the Essipiunnuat experience of forgetting haunts our minds and needs to be told.

After revealing some assumptions about cultural oblivion and tracing back some key social and historical information about the Essipiunnuat, I will introduce the Salmon War, which will lay the ground for a discussion in the subsequent chapters of the mnemonic practices of the contemporary Essipiunnuat.

The study of cultural oblivion

The overall result sought by colonial rule was to convince the natives that colonisation would lighten their darkness.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Cultural memory and oblivion

The term ‘mnemohistory’ is generally used by researchers who are concerned ‘not with the past as such, but only with the-past-as-it-is-remembered’ (Assmann, 1997). When presented as ‘the ongoing work of reconstructive imagination’, history revalorises the role of cultural transmission in the production of collective identities. Reception theory applied to history can, then, lead to an increase in sociological relevance; outlooks on and interpretations of the past can reveal the changing set of norms, values and social contexts from which they flourish (Olick et al., 2011, p. 45).

Collective connections with and representations of the past are motivated primarily by the fear of deviating from a set model and by the desire to repeat elements of the past. Cultural memory is defined as ‘all knowledge that directs behaviour and experience in the interactive framework of a society’ (Assmann and Hölscher, 1988), and becomes transgenerational through ‘repeated societal practices and initiation’, making a group visible in the present. Based on the group consciousness of unity and specificity, from which it derives its formative and normative impulses, cultural memory offers a ground for the reproduction of its cultural identity. The past in that cultural heritage, and the values that are narrated in its identificatory appropriation, manifest the constitution and customs of a society (ibid., 1988).

The growing field of the historical sociology of mnemonic practices and, in particular, the evocative power of the ways in which groups represent their past in their current condition, deserves close attention (Olick and Robbins, 1998). The need for identity remains the pivot for collective references to the past and the search for cultural referents; narrating the past produces norms,² sanctifies identity and therefore ensures that the group maintains a wholeness and cultural continuity (Mol, 1979). Narrating the past is essentially an act of self-identification. The making of history thus consists of producing identity through relating ‘what supposedly occurred in the past and the present state of affairs, building meaningful stories for a defined subject, with its own motivations and social circumstances’ (Friedman, 1992, pp. 837, 856). This posture validates the power of subjectivity and the importance of considering carefully the production of myth through stories as they reflect ‘an imprinting of the present onto the past’ (Olick, 2007). Thomas King would say that, ultimately, we are the stories that we tell ourselves (2015).

Forgetting and power

The role of authorities in determining what must be remembered or forgotten is key. The political value created by established authority figures in exercising domination over the production of representations of the past and over interpretations remains weighty. The influence of those exercising power, their command to forget, is decisive:

Selective memory or selective amnesia remains inherent in imperialism and hegemonic practices.³ As Garde-Hansen and Worcman remind us in their revolutionary work Social Memory Technology (2016), if we do not remain vigilant, the risk is great of being affected by the powerful forces that have an interest in forming group memory: ‘Without this control and power over narrating the past, communities can become hijacked or coopted for collective memory projects, in which national identity and homogenising discourses smooth over the complexities of multidirectional stories’ (2016, p. 191).

The production of the past, the appropriation of cultural referents and the actualisation of ‘past’ images are classical modes of legitimation, which all act in the interests of those in charge. The same event has different values even within groups, and the malleability of cultural identity is often to the advantage of the dominant group (autocrats in particular), especially under colonial rule. The place of wars as founding events in the design of collective self-stories must be carefully considered:

The promise of amnesiology

Oblivion has not been considered for its true value as a manifestation of agency and as a production. Forgetfulness tends to be overlooked, despite its significance in people’s lives and its uses for different social purposes. Forgetfulness is as evocative of the normative foundations of a society as remembering; they are both mnemonic practices (Connerton, 2008).⁴ Building on the rich history of research on memory, Plate suggests the term ‘amnesiology’ for those interested in the study of the production of cultural oblivion and the exploration of ‘forgetting and forgetfulness not as a failure of memory but as a made condition, produced and reproduced’ (Plate, 2016).⁵

This is the approach that I will take here. Cultural oblivion can be revealed in ‘disconnections … failures to transmit what is known and … refusal to mark [elements of the past] as memorable’ (Plate, 2016). The study of forgetting is concerned with collective traumatic events and strategies for dealing with memories associated with the dual desire to forget and to make forget; or, the struggle around the articulation of truth. It includes institutional and informal forgetting and repression, transgenerational transmission of information about traumatic events and forms of erasure and rewriting of the past in accordance with a chronology geared around conquerors’ actions. The modalities of intergenerational transmissions of cultural memory, and the intricacies of collective memory and cultural transmission remain of great interest to this book.

The matter of memory loss following traumatic events and experiences – such as, for example, sexual abuse or war – has a central place in clinical sociology and social psychology. In particular, selective memory and self-deception appear to be treated most widely in these fields. In the case of mass violence, as Stanley Cohen describes in States of Denial, perceptions of the past tend to be distorted to meet the agenda of the present; personal memory is contaminated by the passing of political time, and authorities play a major role in enforcing the sense of temporal continuity needed for public order and social control (2001, p. 240).

For individuals and communities with traumatic memories (whether as perpetrators or bystanders), selective memory is often used to escape the past and to forget the suffering that is so closely related to shame and hatred. Those ‘recalling’, including researchers, often experience degrees of marginalisation and oppression from local authorities. Searching for truth remains a direct threat to the wilful ignorance that is inherent in bureaucratic rationality. As Mcgoey (2012; 2014) argues, the ‘cultivation of strategic unknowns’ is a great resource for those in positions of power and for colonial institutions.

In the contemporary context of the reserve, social research produces uncertainty due to the very nature of its inquisitive quest into what was not supposed to exist; this unknown object of knowledge is from time to time perceived as a threat to the certainty desired by those who govern and their followers. This is also relevant regarding corporate interests in resource development and extraction (often related to local leaders), investment that naturally requires certainty when it comes to title to the land. In fact, exposing mass silence and oblivion may result in jeopardising the interests of its most ardent producers. Studies of forgetfulness in the context of advanced psychological colonialism, however, have major implications for the indigenous researcher. These include dealing with mostly well-buried factors, and with the reasons they were concealed in the first place. Such frontal stance against the troubled past of our often wounded communities necessarily implies sporadic, unexpected and surely uncomfortable encounters that will, however, be the raw material for developing a more fundamental critical reflection on the relationship First Peoples have today with the past and the land – truth and life, in other words.

First Peoples, colonialism and cultural oblivion

The long tradition of studies on colonialism and the historical practices of collective domination remain relevant for a deeper understanding of First Peoples’ contemporary condition and mnemonic practices. Early studies of the psychological aspects of colonialism shed light on the role of cultural amnesia in colonial attempts, through the falsification of memory, the rewriting of historical texts and the extinguishment of what is remembered, to secure supremacy over colonised entities by transforming people and lands into objects. Such scholarly work along these lines remains more valuable than ever in the contemporary Canadian context, where, in spite of symbolic discourse on reconciliation, a constitutional regime genocidal, deeply racist in spirit and imposed on First Peoples remains untouched.

Memmi (1957) used the term ‘cultural amnesia’ to highlight the links between the apparatus of colonial domination and the debilitating phenomenon of intergenerational disconnections and the identity anaemia that plagues the same groups on which they are operationalised. Dominated, forced into submission, and deeply humiliated, the colonised tend to conform to and mimic the images the colonial society has of them; but assimilation remains a mirage since mainstream society refuses integration. The colonised are therefore confronted, day after day, with the heartbreaking dilemma of remembering and revolt or forgetting and self-annihilation.

The psychological mechanisms of colonial domination, including, at its heart, the distortion, disfigurement and annihilation of the dominated group’s cultural memory, have been superbly theorised by Frantz Fanon.⁶ As he proposes, the central scheme of colonisation is not only to hold the population under the control of the dominant group, but, by the perversion of its logic, to turn colonised people against themselves:

The dominant group then ensures its sustained pre-eminence by generating the internalisation of a hierarchy of value between two ‘essences’ of people. The implacable logic of colonialism, its depersonalisation, its collective amnesia, and its production of racialised memory, generates intense psychic crises in colonised groups, which Fanon explains is escapable through a willingness to restore one’s dignity and regain one’s identity by all means necessary. Yet, the absorption of an essentialist self-conception generates an intense internal contradiction for the colonised; a war based on a racialised concept of the self that contradicts his or her own quest for humanity.

Colonial rule and its types of subjugation push the colonised into the corner again and again; violent insurrections against the colonisers then become almost inescapable. The revisitation of one’s past is the most fundamental step in the process of decolonisation, which comes right before entering into the struggle for liberation. This movement towards remembrance is part of a general revalorisation and actualisation of a person’s culture⁷ symbolised by its songs, poems and old stories.⁸

As elucidated by Maori scholar Moana Jackson (2004), the deep-seated psychological dimension of colonialism affecting First Peoples must be considered in the light of its material basis and the wider historical project of appropriation and exploitation. Colonisation comes with a myth-making process and the reshaping of memory, through the colonisers’ production of ‘myths’ and their strained absorption by the dominated groups. Colonialism, which aims primarily to ensure the pursuit of material benefit and access to resources, needs to legitimise the seizure and guarantee the maintenance of political and economic power of one group over another. Myths thus serve to mask the reality, to justify the status quo and to conceal the tragic extent of dispossession that has shaped indigenous peoples’ present and their past. Jackson suggests myth-making as rewriting ultimately absolves the coloniser and secures the basis for the ongoing denial of the rights and obligations of the colonised and the exploitation of ancestral territories.

Studies of colonialism in Canada, conducted by intellectuals from First Peoples, have an increasingly high profile together with speeches on the subject given in universities and the public space and reported on in the media. A new generation no longer accepts that non-indigenous people define them and speak on their behalf equally as much as in literary, art and cinema circles from which a profusion of indigenous perspectives emerge. My goal here is not to expose these fascinating schools of thought, even though their crucial importance is recognised, but rather to contextualise as far as possible the condition of the Essipiunnuat, within the wider framework of Canadian and Québécois colonialism, including in their legal and academic forms.

Canadian colonialism, and its historical accountability for the current condition of First Peoples, is characterised by the production of a deep crisis of identity, political fatigue, multiple dependencies, social disorganisation and economic slump, as Taiaiake Alfred (2004) eloquently reports. According to Alfred, the current human condition in Canada can better be appreciated in the light of a disastrous succession of events, including Christianisation, forced sedentarisation, ethnocide, the systematic usurpation of traditional modes of governance, dispossession, displacements, residential schools and the abduction and rape and murder of children, and the subsequent intergenerational ruptures and their tremendous effects to-date. Alfred’s project – which may have influenced, perhaps more than any other indigenous intellectual, the new generation – involves unearthing the intellectual basis of the state’s control over First Peoples, a domination based on the notion of the monopoly of state power and the negation of ancestral freedom and responsibility to the land. Indigenous evaluations of contemporary colonial institutions necessarily lead to the conclusion that the colonial state cannot legitimately determine their futures. Ancestral epistemologies and dynamics of indigenisation produce ‘uncertainty’ that threaten the authority, monopoly and sovereignty of the state itself, including therefore forms of colonial counter-will and revived desires to erase and bury indigenous referents. We can better appreciate, in the light of this history of deep and lasting oppression exposed by Alfred, to what extent indigenous research and independent investigations in Canada on the issue at stake become a strategic tool and an advanced form of activism, especially when it opens up secure spaces for truth-telling and Indigenous critical postures.

For the Kanien’kehá:ka scholar Alfred, a deeper understanding of the condition of the indigenous peoples in Canada requires wholly recognising the philosophical gap and existing antinomies between the conceptions of Crown sovereignty, as imposed on indigenous groups, its prevailing capitalist ideology and historical project, and the ancestral values of First Peoples. The nature of Canadian colonialism can thus be comprehended by considering its objectives of deterritorialisation, uprooting and disconnection, in order to ensure total conquest and absolute legitimacy, and prevent endogenous resurgence. Continuous control over First Peoples is mainly done through breaking cultural foundations or roots, so that there is ‘no memory to store or intellectual base upon which to build a challenge to the empire’. It resulted in a ‘spiritual disconnection’, a crisis of identity or the impossibility ‘[of finding] the spirit of ancestors living inside of you’. Ongoing subjection to exogenous norms and their internalisation generates an epistemological collapse preventing the intergenerational flow of knowledge (Alfred, 1999; 2004; 2005, pp. 57,162). The way is then paved for the effective production of cultural oblivion, on a large-scale, through the establishment of solid and permanent dams between First Peoples and their cultural memory and, to use the salmon metaphor, preventing them from returning to their place of birth to reproduce in a symbolical sense and ensure continuity.

The command to forget everything pertaining to one’s ancestral domain, cultural memory and self-identity is the powerful tool by which sui nullius and the idea of one’s own absence can be generated – the absorption of the myth that you have no history and that you are condemned to play yourself in the theatre of your own absence (‘a way of life that does not exist’, to use Samson’s expression). This colonial erasure was translated, among other things, into mass starvation, the creation of reservations, the abduction of children through the residential schools, theft and trade of babies, forced evangelisation (and the sexual violence and mistreatment by priests that often went along with that), the removal of indigenous women’s status and the long-standing manufacture of consent to treaties of extinction and forced cession of ancestral domains. From old stories (atanukan) and oral history (tipatshimun) to musicians, writers of novels, poets and screenwriters (of documentaries, in particular), and now a new generation of academics, the Innu have consistently denounced colonialism and the fate reserved for their people and Assi (‘the Earth’) by states, churches and corporations. An exceptionally long history of Innu resistance therefore dates back to first contacts. This can be better understood in the light of forces that have sought to erase it and extirpate it from the very heart of the Innu over the centuries.

Song has been an important vehicle for Innu language, speech and thought from ancient times to the present. One has only to think of Philippe Mackenzie, whose music has influenced a generation of musicians, including members of the group Kashtin. Because they have experienced, often since childhood, the worst of violence at the hands of colonial institutions, the work of these singers eloquently testifies to the deep marks left by erasure policies but also to the role of art in fostering resistance, resilience and reversibility.

As the Innu singer Florent Vollant states, a command to forget, imposed on children in residential schools, signified that ‘we were forced to forget who we were’ (quoted in Lévesque, 2015).⁹ This is the very spirit of Canadian apartheid erected by John A. Macdonald – an absence of memory following genocide and erasure that is echoed beautifully by the acclaimed Innu poet Joséphine Bacon:

Then, she asserts, in a prophetic tone, her ‘dream of a single story, which could dictate without failing, a whole lifetime lived’ (Acquelin and Bacon, 2011).

It is probably the work of the late Elder An Antane Kapesh (1926–94), an early critic of Canadian and Euroquébécois colonialism, who reveals the extent of oppression and dispossession experienced by the Innu. After writing an autobiographical novel in 1976 called I am a Damn Savage, praising Innu culture in contrast with the forces seeking its erasure, she wrote the anti-colonial novel What have you done to my country? (1979). In it she exposes, with brio and symbolism, the different stages of the history of Innu dispossession. In particular, she uses the metaphor of the Punchinello to personify the colonisers. With great insight, she warns Innu about the risks involved in simulation and playing the settlers’ game too much over time:

Various attempts have been made to document Innu cultural memory and historical experience. The late Innu historian and ethnologist Jean-Louis Fontaine made a remarkable contribution to contemporary reflection on Innu spirituality and rituals. In his book, Beliefs and Rituals Among the Innu, he succeeded with genius in extirpating treasures of ancient Innu spiritual traditions, from writings (Relations des Jésuites) known to have marked the greatest wave of oppression and repression of culture. Among these, it is worth mentioning the critical work of Zacharie Bellefleur, Evelyne St-Onge, Céline Bellefleur and Eddy Malenfant, which remains one of the most important contributions to the documentation, produced by the Innu themselves, of their science, language, oral tradition, cultural practices, ways of life, and historical experiences and interpretations.¹⁰ Through Manitu Productions, they have made more than 40 documentaries for television and educational purposes over the last 30 years.¹¹ Other significant artists include Innu poet Rita Mestokosho, who has a strong and influential voice overseas, and new figures who take an uncompromising look at the Innu condition such as the excellent novelist Naomi Fontaine, who reports on life in her community (and whose novel Kuessipan has just been filmed), and the popular actress, poet and activist Natasha Kanapé-Fontaine. The latter is perhaps the one who best embodies these strong voices calling for remembering, as a prerequisite to decolonisation, and emphasising the imperatives of overcoming the intergenerational effects of colonial violence and erasure:

What remains most undocumented in the realm of the social sciences, however, is the internalisation of colonialism, the forms of abuse and the wounds within the community as a result of colonialism, and the inner phenomenon of suffering and transgressions favouring intergenerational ruptures, erasure and oblivion. With the exception of the excellent work of Radio-Canada journalist Anne Panasuk (2018), who exposed the extent of priests’ abuse in communities as well as the phenomenon of sexual violence perpetrated within communities today, little research is available that gives voice to the Innu themselves in connection with their realities, and with forms of internal oppression in relation to the past.

It is worth mentioning, however, the excellent novel Kitchike, by the Wendat novelist Louis-Karl Picard-Soui, who exposes with intelligence and perspicacity the power relations within the First Peoples communities situated in the south of the province of Québec. His novel exposes with humour but great realism the forms of internal tyrannies, incarnated by an all-powerful leader with an autocratic style of ruling, including inflicting humiliation.

Figure 3. Innu family on the edge of the St Lawrence River, near a village today called La Malbaie, dated 1863 (Alexander Henderson/Library and Archives Canada / PA-149709).

Some of the research in this area has striven to echo Innu perceptions of their current condition and the phenomenon of cultural oblivion among them. For the sociologist Colin Samson, mnemonic practices among the Innu must be considered in the light of the Canadian state’s wider programmed extinguishment of the Innu. The tragic and traumatic consequences of this are best illustrated by the daily lives of the people of the Natuashish and Sheshatshiu communities. The tragedy experienced by the Innu, including intergenerational ruptures in transmission and forms of cultural oblivion, are widely produced by a regime of power that is destined to eliminate the Innu systematically. The clear relations between the historical regime of power destined for the First Peoples and their current condition, as a historical production, are widely kept silent and denied by both the Canadian and Euroquébécois colonial societies (Samson, 2001; 2003; 2006; 2008; 2010).

The anthropologist Rémi Savard has provided valuable insights into Euroquébécois’ complexes and their own cultural representations and perceptions of the Innu over time, characterised as they have been by ignorance and a disregard for indigenous culture and worldview for more than four hundred years. Witnessing the government’s historical attempts to assimilate, erase and annihilate Innu cultural memory, Savard (2004, p. 112) concludes that for the Innu, the consideration of their history and remembrance of their old stories (atanukan) form the backbone of cultural continuity. This reactivates ‘the sources of rules and practices which have enabled the group to reproduce in a colonial environment that has long dreamt of seeing it disappear’. Recalling these stories today is an assertion of sovereignty and its actualisation in ancestral terms.

Both Savard and Samson have demonstrated how the current transgressions experienced by the Innu are directly linked to Canada’s historical genocidal policies and attempts to extinguish these groups and usurp their ancestral sovereignty, above all in order to secure corporate interests (Savard 1971; 2002; 2004, p. 68). These wide-ranging, direct encounters echo some key Innu perspectives and conceptions about the relationship between their past and current situations.¹²

The Ordeal of Truth

Literature on cultural memory and oblivion is concerned with the role, power and value of heritage and remembrance for groups, and their continuity. Concerns with the past are generally presented as a collective demand for memory, a willingness to access the truth about history or a dynamic of cultural assertion. Delving into stories of yesteryear can generate the normative power of past stories and past selves and their potential actualisation, enabling people to create their own culture of relatedness. Gazing into the past allows for differentiation with respect to the present, and for reassessment and reevaluation of the current cultural condition and social order. One way or another, remembrance signifies eruptions of the past and its leaking into the present; a ‘terrorism of veracity’ well exposed in Nietzsche’s work.¹³ Yet, a posture of truth in relation to the past remains a prerequisite for transgenerational transmission and increased collective agency.¹⁴ As an Essipiunnu Elder states:

Memory, amnesia and remembrance remain a central theme in art, especially in contemporary cinema. These productions tend to resonate with the quotation from the beginning of Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman’s animated Waltz with Bashir (2008): ‘We may forget the past, but the past won’t forget us’. Either as victims or oppressors, coloniser or colonised, protester or statesman, individuals and groups remain connected with the social circumstances that led them to seek oblivion. Directed amnesia, with its preferred medium of silence, and produced oblivion are fragile and not absolute, to the chagrin of all those who struggle to forget and to make others forget.

It is certainly perilous to resort to ‘history’, ‘archaeology’ and ‘anthropology’ in research focusing mainly on mnemohistory, amnesiology and how Essipiunnuat stories report the group’s relationship to its own past and present. This is especially true when such an exercise requires that we rely on the same colonial and written sources, while trying to question the validity of erasing Innu epistemology and memory in favour of pleasing Euroquébécois. Likewise, there is a tension when we self-censor to protect settlers’ fragility. It seemed useful to refer briefly to existing documents, especially taking into consideration the small number of references to Essipiunnuat that are available. These sources are particularly helpful when it comes to documenting and deconstructing the colonisation processes and its effects, from first contacts until today.

The aim of this section is therefore to summarise existing data on Essipiunnuat and their ancestral domain, and to use all the available written material pertaining to Essipiunnuat, irrespective of the discipline, in order to support and complement people’s knowledge and stories. While some sources are weaker and more questionable than others, the crossover of disciplines, data and stories certainly helps towards better comprehension of the context and circumstances of the eruption of the Salmon War in the 1980s.

This research was conducted, from beginning to end with, by and for Essipiunnuat themselves and it was engineered with and governed by the explicit goal of ‘assisting in cultural maintenance’, to produce a more inclusive and therefore more complex form of knowledge’. By making Essipiunnuat’s stories and knowledge its first source and facilitating the articulation of Essipiunnuat epistemologies, this research thus tends to subscribe to the indigenous standpoint theory (Foley, 2006; Nakata, 2007).

The Essipiunnuat: contexts and circumstances

We were told that before the reserve, we had no history¹⁶

Elder Elise Ross

But the night of oblivion will not come.

Tahar Djaout

A significant amount of information exists that pertains to human occupation of the area which corresponds to what present-day Essipiunnuat consider to be Nitassinan (‘our homeland’ or Innu ancestral domain in Innu-aimun).¹⁷ Archaeological literature reveals human occupation of the hydrographical basin and banks of the Esh Shipu river, where Essipit is located today, dating back approximately 8,000 years (Plourde, 1993, quoted in Charest, 2009).

There is also evidence that small seasonal groups, who used stone tools, came to the area to benefit from the abundant resources provided by the sea. (Chevrier, 1996, p. 103; Frenette, 1996, p. 9). An analysis of the last two thousand years of occupation in the high northern shore region demonstrates the continuous presence of small local groups occupying the interior, as well as the upper areas of different hydrological basins and the coastal littoral, according to seasonal migration (Chevrier, 1996, pp. 107, 114).

A rich Innu oral tradition preceding the period of contact with Europeans in the mid 16th century, but testifying to these encounters, has been transmitted from generation to generation. Consequently, the seasonal migrations of the Innu, which led them to the shores of the Esh Shipu, preceded the imperatives of the fur trade. Summer gatherings were important times for decision-making, diplomacy and trade as well as ceremonies. Until forced sedentarisation, Innu had an ancient way of life based on a cycle of subsistence conditioned by seasonal rhythms. People shared their time from autumn until spring in small familial units in the interior, coming down to the coast along ancient paths in the summer in order to gather together in multi-familial units on the banks of the salmon rivers: ‘the smallest and best articulated units … constituted of less than one hundred individuals closely related to each other, and each of these groups would occupy the mouth of a different river, for which they were generally named’.¹⁸

Transgenerational transmission of Innu oral tradition takes three main forms: old stories known as atanukan (what must be transmitted), mishta-aiatshumun (historical events) and tipatshimun (events that have occurred in one’s life). Old stories take the form of epic stories that reveal fundamental components of Innu cultural memory, ranging from science (innu-aitun), ontology and cosmogony, to philosophy of law and governance, botany and zoology. This ancient oral tradition – containing insights into first contact with Europeans, about political alliances, conflicts and perceptions of the European endeavours on their lands – is remembered and has been partly written down.¹⁹ The innovative work which has compared, for example, archaeological finds and archives with contemporary Innu oral accounts on the founding of Québec City demonstrates the acuity of Innu ancestral memory, especially when compared with documentation from the early 17th century, which was often falsified and rewritten by the authorities (Chrétien et al., 2009).

In addition to oral history and tradition, contacts between the Essipiunnuat and explorers, merchants, priests, bureaucrats, and more recently researchers, over the last 400 years have left important written and oral evidence behind. For example, early colonisation of the Innu ancestral domain, in particular the foundation of Québec, is vividly depicted in Innu oral tradition. The perspectives this contains differ, however, from the French interpretation. If for the French, their arrival foresaw the establishment of a New France, it sounded more like a catastrophe for the Innu. It appears that relations between the Innu and the French began in trade and mutual curiosity, but they rapidly transformed into power struggles, war and conflict and a lack of respect for Innu consent, reflecting the French cover-up of their imperial intentions (Chrétien et al., 2009). This original bewilderment is well demonstrated in new analyses of the ‘alliance’ of 1603 that occurred in Tadoussac (on contemporary Essipiunnuat ancestral domains) – one that was agreed between the French and a wider grouping of people of the Algonquian family, including the Innu. The alliance was allegedly based on trade and defence agreements already negotiated between traders and the Innu (Trigger, 1981).²⁰ Innu oral tradition recounting what happened next demonstrates the insincerity of the French and the lies they told (Chrétien et al., 2009), and confirms a Jesuit intention which translates as a ‘cross … erected on these lands in order to take possession of it’ (Fontaine, 2005). It must also be said that the arrival of French settlers, followed by the English, marked the beginning of human trafficking of which the Innu women were the first victims. In the light of 400 years of history, Champlain’s affirmation that ‘our boys will marry your daughters, and we will make only one people’, used over time to embellish Euroquébécois colonialism, has sinister resonances today.

The first documented contacts with Basque fishermen date from the 16th century (Turgeon, 1986). In his Des Sauvages, published in 1615, the explorer Samuel de Champlain is one of the first Europeans to describe the Esh Shipu river and the people he met in the area, including the utshemau or great captain, Anadabijou (1993 [1615]). The Jesuits meticulously documented their first contacts with the Innu in Relations. These documents offer insights into the Innu way of life, including their spirituality, despite the strong ‘cultural filters’ and intentions of the priests. More importantly, they reveal that the Europeans were greatly motivated to take over the continent. They also report the Jesuits’ eagerness to obtain, at all costs, the conversion of First Peoples, which resulted in repeated attacks on Innu ancient rituals and ceremonies as well as the progressive inculcation of a culture of family violence and the imposition of patriarchy. The Jesuits were teaching the parents to physically punish their children and husbands to beat their wives (Hamidi and Kanapé-Fontaine, 2008, p. 14). In Relations the Jesuits described their early efforts at evangelisation between 1632 and 1672. These writings broadly reflect European intentions and cultural representations of the local populations. Contemporary Innu interpretations of their actions sustain that the long-lasting and intense efforts to indoctrinate local groups provoked ‘the alteration, even the gradual disappearance of a whole cultural world. Slowly but surely, ‘the new religion wormed its way up to substitute itself entirely to the old one, inserted to become the only truth’ (Fontaine, 2005).

The archives of trading posts are informative about the comings and goings of the Essipiunnuat over a long period, and of the types of businesses and relations they undertook with the traders. Trading posts were established in the region from 1670 onwards (Dufour, 1996, p. 17), and the presence of First Peoples on the Esh Shipu river in the late 17th century is well documented (Nouvel, 1664; Bélanger, 1946). The increased interest of the French in seal and salmon at the beginning of the 18th century also led them to develop further their contact with the Unipek Innuat, the ‘Humans of the sea’, referring to members of these groups who spent winter by the sea in order to hunt seal (Dufour, 1996).

French interest in dealing with the local population resulted in the establishment of a permanent religious mission in 1720, with a chapel at the local group’s winter camp, Pipunapi (Bélanger, 1946, p. 14), to be followed five years later by a trading post. This post generated more than six hundred sealskins and more than 90 barrels of oil annually (Parent, 1985, p. 824). The diminution of animals in the region increased Innu interest in seal hunting and their presence at Pipunapi, a site that was abundant with seal (Parent, 1985, pp. 753–4).

Traders’ attempts to impose a monopoly on local groups led competing agents to undertake stratagems destined to significantly weaken the local population. For example, a violent incident occurred in 1760–1 when Tomas, the son of Miskout and Gertrude Tchiskoué, was reportedly murdered in the area of the Esh Shipu river by the captain of an English schooner (Bélanger, 1946, p. 15). In the words of the old Innu patriarch, Paul Ross Sr, interviewed by Speck, traders allegedly introduced ‘tea and bread into which one had put the small-pox’ so that ‘the poor Indians all fell down dead in a short time’ (Speck, 1927). Indeed, the notorious General Amherst’s policies in the 18th century of using bioterrorism against First Peoples and to ‘try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race’ (Amherst, 1763) remains central to contextualising that historical period for First Peoples.²¹ Canada has a long history of mass violence towards First Peoples.

The controversial transfer of the French titles in ‘New France’ to the British Crown – an infringement of Innu consent – and its effects on Innu tipenitamun (Innu ancestral sovereignty), are intrinsic to the question of the legal value of the Great Alliance of 1603 in international law. If Innu tipenitamun has been translated as ‘sovereignty’ within the context of contemporary language, the referential in which the concept takes root is far from the European conceptualisation of land and power (Savard, 1981; Gendreau and Lefèvre, 2016). In fact, abstract words such as ‘property’ or the legal concept of ‘fee simple’, do not exist as such in Innu-aimun (Mailhot and Vincent, 1979). Tipenitamun carries the meaning of responsibility, management or control over something, and kanauentamun means guardianship over something (Ross-Tremblay, Motard et Vincent, 2015). Tipenitamun refers to an intergenerational approach to relating to Assi, and must be understood outside a bureaucratic conception of land title (CAM, 1993). Because of the indivisibility between being ‘Innu’ and ‘Assi’, identifying with the idea of consenting to the extinguishment of Innu tipenitamun would ultimately mean self-annihilation. Tipenitamun is used to refer to

Figure 4. Les Escoumins township c.1912 (from family archives).

Innu tipenitamun thus refers primarily to the old legal order and philosophy of law reflected in the old stories.²² Therefore, talking of Tshakapesh constitutes, ‘a solemn affirmation of sovereignty since it is a reactivation of the very sources of the rules and practices that have allowed the group to reproduce in a colonial context having always dreamt of its disappearance’ (Savard, 2004, p. 168).²³

With the transfer of French possessions to the English Crown in 1763 came an uncertainty about the status of these lands and the dynamics of their appropriation. The description ‘Indian territory’ even appeared in the royal proclamation, and state appropriation of these same territories thereafter tends to demonstrate that the conquest (as remembered in Euroquébécois historiography) includes French possessions going far beyond the tiny strip of land along the St Laurence River where they applied their law and exercised their sovereignty (Lacasse 1996; Morin, 1997). As subsequent history shows, these were the first steps of a systematic attempt to invalidate Innu tipenitamun and to put into operation a transfer of responsibility over the Innu ancestral domain. Yet, Innu legal tradition pertaining to the land has continued to the present day, in spite of state attempts to domesticate indigenous rights (Schulte-Tenckhoff, 1998) and to obtain consent for the relinquishing of ancestral sovereignty.

The northern shore of the St Laurence River, which the French king gave to his ‘best’ subjects, was transferred to English merchants who took over the trading posts that were rich in fur, wood, seals and salmon, and led to a tremendous impact on Innu tipenitamun. From the mid 19th century, the Hudson Bay Company (HBC), operating from the old King’s Post at Tadoussac, exercised a monopoly on the activities surrounding indigenous territories (Panasuk and Proulx, 1979, p. 4).

Until 1842, lands beyond Tadoussac were open to trade and the establishment of trading posts, but they were closed to settlers and land speculation and were still exclusively occupied by Essipiunnuat. The collapse of the fur trade and a growing interest in timber in the early 19th century resulted in the fierce appropriation and capitalisation of these lands, with catastrophic effects for the Essipiunnuat. This moment marks the beginning of their marginalisation and the collapse of their economic self-reliance, which would culminate in them being confined to a 0.5 km² reservation near the mouth of the Esh Shipu in 1892. The HBC pronouncement that it was the sole tenant of all fur trading posts within the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean and Côte-Nord regions, without considering the Innu ancestral occupation of these lands, or Innu tipenitamun and consent, was the company’s most gloomy forecast (Mailhot, 1996). From the Act of Union of 1840 onward, there is evidence that the Canadian government engaged in a vast programme of reduction of First Peoples and the extinguishment of their sovereignty in order to establish the supremacy of the Crown (Savard, 2002, pp. 26, 30). The reserve system, constitutionalised in 1867, was to become a privileged device to monitor the indigenous population and to create, in the words of prime minister John A. Macdonald, a British North America ‘purified from Mongrel races’.²⁴

Figure 5. Old Paul Ross Senior (from family archives).

In the 1820s, the HBC intensified its commercial salmon fishing activities on the Esh Shipu, which was still a favourite summer gathering place. At that time, many families chose the Esh Shipu as a place to settle each summer because of its rich wildlife and abundant salmon (Mailhot, 1996). The first representative from the HBC, who was to become a settler, was sent in 1825. With the end of the King’s Post in 1842, the official colonisation of the Essipiunnuat ancestral domain began, operationalised through coordinated actions by the state, the Church and the traders. The resistance of the Essipiunnuat to colonisation is well documented in successive petitions that were sent to the Crown, in which the tragic consequences of violating Innu consent, Innu tipenitamun and the Essipiunnuat way of life, cultural practices and economy are explained. The destruction of ancestral hunting grounds had a particularly negative impact, as it made the Innu way of life impracticable (Laforest, 1983, p. 31).

One hypothesis, based on conversations with community members and previous research, is that the HBC employee and French settler Joseph Moreau sold ‘his new property’ in the area to which he had been sent – it surrounded the Bay of Les Escoumins which had been the oldest continuous gathering place for Essipiunnuat for thousands of years – to a François Boucher, who was then able to construct a lumber sawmill with the Têtu family (Frenette, 1997). Moreau had married an Innu woman²⁵ and is likely to have signed the surrender of the land. Even though he was a settler, he became ‘chief ’ of the band in 1834, a practice favourable to land speculators and timber companies, and that was encouraged by the Crown to shape indigenous surrender of their ancestral domain at that time. In the mid 1840s, the Boucher & Têtu Corporation built a dam on the river and a mill factory on its banks and organised the establishment of the town of Les Escoumins. Two years later, the town had 286 inhabitants (ibid.). Despite pressure from local authorities, Essipiunnuat continued to occupy their ancient gathering sites in the bay of the newly established village, until the authorities forcibly displaced them.

Control increased over the Essipiunnuat as the Crown put into operation the Gradual Civilization Act, which aimed explicitly to ‘civilise the savages and manage their goods in order for the country to continue its maximum development’ (Pennefather, 1856). Meanwhile, lumber activities and land speculation on ancestral hunting grounds severely reduced Innu self-subsistence, with terrible consequences for their self-determination. Pennefather concludes by mooting the possibility that the ‘Indian problem’ could be solved in less than ten years, in order to avoid further costs for the government over time, and, in parallel, allow optimal exploitation and revenues from First peoples’ ancestral domains. His report recommended the repatriation of Indian affairs to the colonial government in order to favour local property developers, to force all Indians to cede their lands to the Crown without their consent, and to promote the eradication of indigenous languages, the abolition of their political institutions and the annihilation of their right to self-determination.

In 1857, through diverse legal procedures, Canada formalised the incapacity of ‘Indians’ and the abolition of their self-determination (uetshit takuaimatishun).²⁶ State actions also provided the priests with new tools to operationalise their project of completing Christianisation through sedentarisation. Added to the pressure of migration, forestry activities were significantly reducing the presence of animals, the possibilities for hunting and fishing, and transactions over indigenous ancestral domains were reducing even further access to territory and the capacity for auto-subsistence.

The road was paved for transferring the Essipiunnuat to a reserve – preferably, for the Crown, in the newly created reserve of Pessamit, planned to be the ‘Indian capital’. In the early 1860s, the canton of Les Escoumins was officially created (Létourneau, 1985, p. 43), as was the Betsiamites reserve (now called Pessamit). The church authorities were of the opinion that civilisation was harmful for the Indians and that they must be prevented from any contact with ‘white’ people (Frenette, 1995, p. 26). As ‘Indian and lands reserved for the Indians’ came under federal jurisdiction in accordance with article 91 (24) of the new constitution, the ‘creation of Canada’ in 1867 officialised the usurpation of the Innu ancestral domain as conceived by them as an obligation towards Assi and future generations (Morin, 1997; Savard, 2002; Ross-Tremblay, 2016). The Indian Act (‘An Act respecting Indians’) was created with the assumption that ‘the Indians’ would all soon disappear in accordance with an effective operationalisation of newly created state devices (Savard, 1992). In order to prevent any rebellion resulting from the settlers’ invasion of ancestral domains, the federal government put into action stratagems for the replacement of traditional political institutions by structures modelled on colonial local authorities.²⁷ The government also used treaties elsewhere in the country to concretise the ‘usurpation of Indigenous sovereignty’ (Morin, 1997).

A road was opened between Tadoussac and Les Escoumins and speculators became very active in the area. Local officials requested that the Crown buy the lands occupied by the ‘savages’, who were ‘not improving them’. Although little information exists pertaining to the condition of the Essipiunnuat between 1870 and 1890, the negotiations involving speculators, local officials and federal bureaucrats that contributed to the creation of the ‘Indian Reserve of Les Escoumins’ in 1892 are partially documented. In the summer of 1892, a contract was signed for the purchase of lands to establish the reserve: $162.75 for 97 acres, of which $62.75 went towards interest incurred from 1881 onwards (Frenette, 1995, p. 31).²⁸

Official archives are silent about the displacement of the Essipiunnuat from the site of Les Escoumins to the actual reserve. The only evidence found, in a private council file, says that from 1899, the ‘Indians of Les Escoumins’ were henceforth allowed to receive direct monetary assistance from the Department of Indian Affairs, but that this would be distributed at the hands of Charles E. Bélanger, the main industrialist in the region who had established himself in the Bay of Les Escoumins, and who possessed forestry concessions in the Esh Shipu hydrographical basin as well as the sawmill in the village (Private Council, 1927).

If information about the Essipiunnuat following the establishment of the reserve is limited, accounts by the American anthropologist Frank G. Speck pertaining to Essipiunnuat culture and way of life, gathered during his successive journeys among them in the early 20th century, remain a rich testimony to Essipiunnuat cultural vitality at that period. His accounts of the Ecsi’biuci’bziwilnlits’ (river of clam brooks peoples) or the Ecsi’pi’w~ilnuts’ (the clam river peoples) ancestral domain, their familial hunting grounds and their usurpation, published in Anthropos in the 1920s, was used for the contemporary Essipiunnuat land claim.²⁹

In 1927, the American review Anthropos published the results and analyses of Speck’s investigation into the familial territories of various groups, including those of the Essipit region, or people he refers to as the Tadoussac-Escoumains Band. He revealed data gathered in the Essipit area in 1915 on the geographical limits of the group, and ethnographic and topographic information on the region. In his report, he mentions that the band of Tadoussac and Escoumins merged to form one entity, despite the presence of two Innu families in Tadoussac in 1915. The Tadoussac band held the name of Waca-t’cèkwilnuts (people of the gulf ’) and the Saguenay River had the almost identical name of Wacatscékoci-bu (river of the gulf ) (Speck, 1927, p. 11) According to Speck, this band identified itself at the time as Ecsi’biuci’bziwilnlits’ or (river of clam brooks people) or Ecsi’pi’w~ilnuts (clam river people). In his view, the people of what he called the ‘Escoumains Band’ are the successors of ancient bands that occupied the high northern shore region (from Tadoussac to Québec) but who left in the last three centuries; their ‘errant families being traced to … the Escoumains bands’, the only operating band of this region. Interestingly, he attributed the absence of a band in Tadoussac to the penetration of settlers into the interior and to the presence of various private hunting and fishing clubs (ibid.).

The names of the families occupying parts of the Innu ancestral domain located by the High and Low Saguenay river are by a large majority associated with the Essipiunnuat; some information concerning the origins of the hunters of the Tadoussac band was added and provides some clues concerning the displacement of the families. In the case, for example, of the St Onge family, Speck maintains that Paul St Onge was the chief of the ancient band of Tadoussac. However, in the mid 19th century, Paul St Onge is established one kilometre east of the Esh Shipu. Census data from Duberger from 1844 identify him as willing to become a farmer, which corresponds to the figure of the ‘good Indian’ highly valued by the colonial institutions of the time. Duberger believed, according to his report, that ‘the other Montagnais will do the same [as St Onge] and follow the example of the numerous English, Irish and Canadian settlers who are to join them’. Contrary to the Bacon and Dominique families, who we know settled on the Pessamit reserve, the St Onge family is not mentioned any further in the subsequent 20th century census data on Essipit and the high northern shore regions. But what about the Anglée, Napentie, Nicolas and Denis families, who were all at a certain period clearly identified as having close links with the Essipiunnuat?³⁰ According to the anthropologist Jean-Pierre Garneau (2015), migration to Pessamit and other communities, as well as natural mortality, would be the main determinant for the reduction of the community to the two main Ross and Moreau families. Garneau’s report for the Land Claims Tribunal in the case involving Essipiunnuat – despite its shortcomings – offers one of the most exhaustive descriptions of Essipiunnuat families history to date.

Speck’s recording of Essipiunnuat linguistics, kinship, cosmogony, rituals and beliefs, for example, and of the ethical attributes of the group, provides some rich evidence of Essipiunnuat connection with Innu ancestral culture and referents of the wider Algonquian family (Speck, 1918; 1921; 1927). Speck’s archive, available at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, include fieldnotes of interviews with Paun Rus Sr (or Paul Ross, quoted earlier), ‘another patriarch of the Escoumains band’, that contains information on ancestral medicine, botanic knowledge, art and oral tradition. It includes interviews with other Essipiunnuat who reported a unique version of the atanukan (the epic story about Tshakapesh) thousands of years old. As mentioned previously, the old man also informed the anthropologist of a possible mass killing of Essipiunnuat in the middle of the century before, allegedly at the hands of traders trying to impose their monopoly. The patriarch locates this occurrence at ‘Whitefish Points’ (known to the French as Pointe Sauvage) (Speck, 1932). Eleanor Leacock (1997) criticises Speck’s research and discourse pertaining to Innu conception of land tenure, and his underestimation of the transformative effects of colonialism. In particular, she mentions that Speck ‘did not consider the loss of political independence or the greatly reduced access to lands’ in this analysis (p. 153). Indeed, Speck and other anthropologists ‘tried to do by fiat what the Jesuits had tried and failed to do in the 17th century: transform the Montagnais from a people who honoured collective rights to lands into individualized property-holding families’ (ibid.).

Demographic and industrial statistics reveal the scope of the upheaval experienced by the Essipiunnuat in the 1920s. The region faced a demographic boom, fast-paced industrialisation and a society that was increasingly modelled on capitalism. Changes in the group’s way of life were noticeable during the 1920s (Conseil des Montagnais des Escoumins, 1994.) Firstly, migration occurred; in 1924, only 28 people were living on the reserve, a number that was to drop to 21 in 1934 (Boudreault, 1994, p. 29; Charest, 2003, p. 91; Indian Affairs, 1883–1917). Official documents report hostility towards the Essipiunnuat from Les Escoumins township. One letter illustrates, for example, attempts to get rid of the group, and other documents demonstrate Escoumins officials’ misappropriation of funds destined for the building of an Innu school, which was a plan they had opposed.³¹

The burden of whiteness, civilisation and progress

The spread of the lumber industry’s activities over the Essipiunnuat ancestral lands and hunting territories, and the tremendous impact this had on the group, remains the most significant occurrence of the period examined above. The disastrous impacts of the destruction of the ancestral lands was partly documented in some research commonly known as the Great Research, which was commissioned in the late 1970s by the Conseil Attikamekw-Montagnais (CAM), which brought all the Innu and Attikamekw communities together and was responsible for undertaking negotiations with Canada and Québec in respect of the Innu self-determination and ancestral domain.

Figure 6. Ushashamek or Atlantic salmon moving up the river of their birth to breed.

The report on the Essipiunnuat conducted by Laforest in 1983, and included in the Great Research, summed up the existing information on the issue of land occupation, and enriched and gave context to the 30 interviews he conducted with hunters and trappers, giving priority to the older generation. The report provided evidence of the deep ruptures in the natural and cultural balances formerly in place caused by lumber exploitation, the construction of forestry camps, the great influx of workers, the migration of animals further north, as well as racist attacks in the forest:

The report shows how the majority of Essipiunnuat who had not worked in the lumber industry during the hunting season before 1920–30 had been systematically forced to do so, subsequently becoming dispossessed, deterritorialised and disconnected from their lands and the remaining precious elements of their ancestral way of life (ibid.). Meanwhile, an intensification of Canada’s policy of assimilation and extinguishment of indigenous cultures and sovereignties during and after World War Two was also observed. In the same area there was an emergent resistance movement personified by, among others, Jules Sioui (wendat) and William Commanda (anishinaabe), who organised and mobilised people to counter the ongoing policies of genocide imposed upon First Peoples (Shewell, 1999). Notably, Sioui was in touch with the Essipiunnuat families’ headman, who allegedly supported his initiatives.

Figure 7. Sawmill and dam built on the Esh Shipu river (from a postcard, family archives).

Archives, local newspapers and the few interviews conducted with Essipiunnuat about the post-World War Two period commonly report, between the 1940s and 1970s, the tragic consequences of more than a century of marginalisation. These are economic uncertainties, high rates of unemployment, almost complete dependency on big corporations and Euroquébécois society to earn a living, the long-term exile of heads of families, with catastrophic consequences on transgenerational transmission, and a harsh life on the reserve. During this period the local language, innu-aimun, was partly erased and hidden from the community and when reportedly there arose in the group feelings of self-hatred and of shame at being Essipiunnuat. As an Elder remembers, ‘When we were young [in the 1950s] nobody wanted to be an Indian. Certain people among us were so ashamed that they were willing to ask for emancipation’ (Essipit, 2007).³²

Memories of that time are hazy; in my conversations with some interviewees there are notable mentions of mistreatment, alcoholism and sexual abuse. The latter – also related (but not only) to some Catholic priests living sporadically nearby – remains a taboo in the small community. These psychological wounds from childhood experienced by some Essipiunnuat impact upon the group’s view of the past. Concerns were raised by one individual I spoke to that research in the community might unearth secrets pertaining to transgressions and abuses, but this person would not tell me about that period.³³ Information on the 1970s suggests a severe collective economic dependence and a widespread psychological phenomenon of surplus-powerlessness.

Figure 8. Essipiunnu Marcel Ross raising a net during the Salmon War.

In the late 1970s, the main lumber company left the village of Les Escoumins and the village experienced a decline in population after many years of growth. Unemployment among the Essipiunnuat reached 30 per cent (20 per cent in the Québec northern shore region), leading to a general collective disempowerment that was directly related to a century-long process of marginalisation (Mailhot, 1996). As for many other First Peoples, the late 1970s and early 1980s appears as a time of revival for the Essipiunnuat, coupled with some contentious politics. It is in this context that an Essipiunnuat radical movement emerged in the early 1980s, led by a cell of newly graduated university students. The process of decentralisation, requested by the CAM and finally accepted by the Crown, gave a boost to the actions of their movement as they were finding new opportunities for creating jobs, were mobilising members and dynamising a process of autonomisation and collective self-empowerment with significant elements of cultural reinvigoration.

An accurate portrait of their heritage remains to be painted, however. If various studies have at times approached the material aspects of Essipiunnuat colonialism, the absence of documentation on the psychological and cultural dimension of colonialism’s impact on the group, its historical consciousness, its self-image and collective identity (conveyed particularly through its oral history and people’s stories) is glaring. Despite this silence, existing material includes data pertaining to the context of the group’s ideology, the new society it wanted to create and how they enabled it.

The recent retirement from public life of these leaders, and the generational shift it entails, paves the way for more critical research on their governance that is currently absent from the literature. As for representations of the group itself, the depiction of the leaders and of their heritage is unidirectional and without any critical perspective. A special edition of the community journal dedicated entirely to ‘the great man’ (this is how Georges is described by Serge Bouchard in the community journal) best illustrates this glorification of the ‘leader’ (Première Nation des Innus Essipit, 2016–17). This new generation of leaders, who have exercised control over the political and economic life of the group for more than three decades, were also affected by the intergenerational traumas inherent in the colonial experience, and their actions need to be contextualised.

At another level, their lives and actions, which have profoundly marked the group condition, were also tinted by their own experience, which, in some cases, revealed a profound ambivalence to Innu cultural heritage. Therefore, it is imperative that the new movement they initiated and the regime that followed must be reflected upon in the light of a number of factors. These include the sociohistorical background of its emergence, the heavy psychological colonial heritage and the cultural disconnection that the group has experienced over a long period. These include profound traumas, marginalisation and disempowerment, as well as forms of surplus-powerlessness not foreign to radical cultural and memorial discontinuities, and the internalisation of colonial referentials impacting directly on collective self-image.

In the light of what is now known, can we stick to the narrative that the community had no history before the 1980s, and that in the chronology of action the establishment of a new regime was the foundation of the group’s very existence? People’s stories are much more subtle and complex than that, and this book aims to contribute to a critical approach able to give voice to multiple social interpretations.

The Salmon War

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Innu and other Algonquian groups (such as Abenaki, Anishinaabeg, Atikamekw, Eeyou, Malecite and Mi’gmaq) of the Québec–Labrador peninsula began to meet more frequently and strategise in order to assert self-determination and ancestral sovereignty, for which they received increased international support. The rise of indigenous nationalism during this period resulted in expressions of discontent, intolerance to colonial oppression, and a general radicalisation on the issue of territorial rights and the reappropriation of ancestral lands taken earlier in the century. Development on these lands without their consent was contested and denounced as illegitimate, and there was a reconsideration of their relations with the Canada and Québec states, and with mainstream Québec society as well as intergenerational shifts within communities. Times were volatile, therefore, and with great potential for conflict.

All over Nitassinan (the Québec–Labrador peninsula), indigenous assertiveness destabilised state–indigenous power relations. Innu claims to sovereignty and the recognition of their ancient legal order touched the Euroquébécois ontologically; it was the very legitimacy of their settlement on the continent that was being questioned. In general, the Euroquébécois, and particularly the nationalists, were widely reproving of Canada’s colonial policy towards them and had developed, over time, a consciousness of being an oppressed and colonised people. The emergence in the public sphere of an indigenous discourse from groups inside of the province, in which francophone Euroquébécois were now represented as settlers and oppressors, was hard to receive and to bear. Québec nationalism had been on the rise since the late 1960s and was at its height in the early 1980s. The Parti Québécois was in power, and a referendum on Québec independence from Canada was organised on 20 May 1980 but was lost, and as a result many Euroquébécois were disappointed and bitter.

Indeed, Québec was implementing a vast industrial strategy of occupation of its ‘national’ territory, including mega-dam projects in large northern areas indigenous groups claimed were theirs. Innu claims of sovereignty were generating a shadow of ‘uncertainty’ over Québec’s intentions. The CAM was uncompromising; the Innu would never accept the extinguishment of their rights accepted by the Naskapi, Cree and Inuit groups through the James Bay Agreement. It was sacred and non-negotiable. In Québec, if muzzling the ‘Indian’ resistance was increasingly a tough option, negotiating Innu sovereignty was an achievement that was far from being ‘trendy’ in public opinion.

The Salmon War occurred in this complex context. The issue at stake supersedes the mere theme of ancestral salmon fishing and encompasses the very question of the Innu condition and the Essipiunnuat in particular. It involves issues of sovereignty and rebellion against the authorities and the laws perceived as not applicable to Innu people. To generalise, the Salmon War corresponds to a series of violent episodes, centred on the issue of salmon fisheries, that occurred between indigenous groups and the Québec state, but also involving Euroquébécois villagers. It reached intense peaks during the summer fishing seasons of 1980 and 1981. The feuds left a heavy scar on the small community of Essipit and those involved refer to the episode as the ‘most significant moment of their lives’. Perceived as a cathartic time for the group, the conflict is apparently now identified by its members as the main source of the community’s subsequent revival and increased self-reliance. As with other Innu communities who live by a salmon river, the war looms large in Essipiunnuat political memory. This current research, however, focuses entirely on the Essipit community.

Figure 9. Québec Police force intervening in Listuguj, June 1981 (Obomsawin, Alanis, Incident at Restigouche, National Film Board, 1984)

Ushâshamek (salmon) has an important cultural significance for the Innu, and particularly for the Essipiunnuat (Mailhot, 1996; Chevrier, 1996; Charest, 2012). Salmon has been vital for subsistence from the beginning of human occupation of the hydrographical basins of the Esh Shipu river (Charest, 2012, p. 36). For more than four thousand years, groups that spent most of their time in the interior have frequented the coastal regions. Their subsistence during those stays was predominantly based upon the availability of aquatic animals, seals, birds and fish, with salmon being one of the main food sources (Plourde, 1993; Chevrier, 1996; Richard, 2006). In Innu classification, Atlantic salmon are aquatic animals, Namesha’, and are answerable to an animal master named Mishtinâk (Clément, 1995).

The abundance of salmon in the Esh Shipu has been identified as a major explanation for a significant indigenous summer presence on the shore of the river. Smoked salmon was also used during long journeys within the interior to reduce the need for hunting and fishing (Mailhot, 1996). Salmon fishing is perhaps the most ancient activity practised on the coast (they are harpooned at night by the light of a flame-lit torch; Mailhot, 1996). This practice has been inherited by every generation because a vast amount of data about salmon is held in ancestral knowledge, its external and internal anatomy, its locomotion, environment, seasonal phenomena, and its reproductive activities (Clément, 1995).

Ancestral salmon fishing in the Esh Shipu was drastically impacted by the construction of a permanent dam from 1846. Charest’s research shows that the consequent destruction of the river over time increasingly blocked salmon access to it such that the fish had completely disappeared by the 1920s. Charest summarises information produced by archaeologists, explorers, visitors, priests, fisherman and other academics since the period of contact up to now. The processes that led to the disappearance of the salmon are therefore well known, but they also led to the Innu being excluded from practising their most important ancient activity and mode of subsistence.

Charest’s research demonstrates the long process of the Innu being dispossessed of their ancestral rivers and the steps that led to communal action being taken to combat this, since all Innu on the coast were facing similar situations. Research by Anne Panasuk and Jean-René Proulx, in particular, contextualises the Salmon War well (1979, pp. 203–17).³⁴ The taking away of the salmon over centuries, by corporations and authorities, symbolises the wider disregard for indigenous sovereignty in this part of the world, as well as the location of its reassertion. Although Québec had been implementing a policy of suppressing private fishing clubs since 1969, rivers with a salmon population were often excluded. In 1977, outfitters³⁵ and sports clubs, often owned by rich business people, were still in control of the best rivers, which were often guarded by armed men. Even if some Innu groups had signed agreements with the government in relation to their fishing activities, many conflicts and restrictions remained. The government was trying to evade the wider question of Innu tipenitamun over Nitassinan (Panasuk and Proulx, 1979).

In 1978, without any known consultation having taken place with the Essipiunnuat, the Québec government created the ZEC (zone d’exploitation controlée) Nordique des Escoumins. This new administrative device served to decentralise the management of a large part of the group’s ancestral lands into the hands of local Escoumins people, therefore reinforcing the state of Québec’s authority. The goal of the ZEC was also to increase public access to Québec’s tourist, fishing and hunting activities. This project, in an underhand way, directly increased the presence of sport hunters and fishermen on the land, but the new state policy was being put into operation without consulting the indigenous people.

Local Escoumins leaders and some local residents were radically opposed to any Essipiunnuat participation in the initiative. The new indigenist movement perceived the situation to be the conclusion of a long process of having their sovereignty buried. It was also a final chance to reassert their historical rights. Québec’s increased structuration of Innu ancestral territories culminated with the announcement that the Esh Shipu and its remaining salmon were to be managed exclusively by the provincial government, and implemented by agents in collaboration with a local committee composed of Escoumins citizens. For the Essipiunnuat, this was the last stage in a long sequence of being pushed back.

In the media reports of the time, the Salmon War was analysed by considering a series of elements: the disappearance of the river’s salmon population due to the polluting practices of the Consolidated Bathurst Company; the Essipiunnuat actions pressuring the government to recognise their ancestral rights through the symbolic spreading in 1980 and 1981 of a net east and west of the dock near the Bay of Les Escoumins; the non-recognition of indigenous ancestral rights by local Euroquébécois, on the basis that the group should be ‘integrated into the dominant society’ and had no rights outside of the reserve borders (Radio-Canada, 1981); and the metamorphosis of their crusade into a movement of Innu and wider indigenous affirmation of tipenitamun. The event is predominantly presented as a scientific debate over the management of a river and its salmon population – yet the dispute is also associated with an ‘ethnic’ fight between ‘whites’ and ‘Indians’. This conflict is presented as having been revived by Innu non-compliance with Québec legislation, and, more significantly, in terms of an emerging indigenous national movement of decolonisation more widely contesting the Québec state.

According to these sources and documents from the time, the Salmon War in Essipit of 1980–1 began with the installation of a community net by the Essipiunnuat on 12 June 1980. It was placed at the mouth of the Esh Shipu river, near the Escoumins dock, provoking anger from those who lived in that village. They began to pressurise the government to prevent the Essipiunnuat from fishing. This jeopardised local authorities’ efforts since 1977 to restore the river’s salmon population. A group of villagers and their representatives denounced the indigenous activities as illegal and called for the state to get involved in saving the river, and to stifle any indigenous resurgence. The newspapers informed the public about these interactions between the Essipiunnuat, other Innu communities, the state of Québec (as represented by the wildlife agents, bureaucrats and the provincial police) and local Euroquébécois. In conjunction with a background of disputes around authority over the land, this resulted in various government interventions and the erection of blockades, leading to negotiations but also violent clashes between June 1980 and July 1981. This all culminated in direct confrontation between the two groups and a hostile intervention of approximately two hundred local ‘white’ people.

The community fishing net was first seized by Québec wildlife agents on 14 June 1980. Some Essipiunnuat then decided to erect a barricade in order to pressure the government, an action which resulted in the interruption of the Escoumins–Trois Pistoles ferry (15 June 1980). A police militia arrived at Les Escoumins and the township adopted a resolution to construct a road to contour the barricade, with negotiations beginning between the Essipit band council and Québec government representatives (15 June). Talks led to an oral agreement, although one article remained unresolved³⁶ (19 June 1980). The Essipiunnuat resumed their fishing activities, reaffirming their ancestral rights on the river and communicating their intention to the media (26 June 1980). Québec³⁷ seized the net a second time; the device was then recovered by a group of Essipiunnuat who intercepted the wildlife agents on the road. The wildlife agents’ director requested help from the provincial police (10 July 1980). The Essipiunnuat again spread their nets and erected another barricade on 12 July. They received support for their actions from the Algonquin (anicinabe) chief Richard Kistabish and his people, who were located further west of Nitassinan (17 July 1980).³⁸ The wildlife agents and the provincial police thereafter jointly launched an air, land and sea initiative. Violent confrontations with the Essipiunnuat occurred and firearms sounded; the Québec agents pushed back and the community ended its fishing season (19 July 1980).

The next year the Essipiunnuat affirmed their rights in the media (5 May 1981). Once again, they spread two nets, in the presence of Innu and Attikamek supporters. The mayor of Les Escoumins publicly denounced the action on 1 June 1981. The Québec police force then intervened in Restigouche³⁹ to repress Mi’gmaq salmon fishing (11 and 20 June 1981).⁴⁰ The CAM again warned the government of further insurrections if indigenous groups were not allowed to fish salmon (22 June 1981). Québec assured the Mi’gmaq that they would not suffer another intervention (25 June 1981). The Québec minister responsible for the issue at stake then publicly denied the Innu’s ancestral rights and legitimised police brutality towards First Peoples (3 July 1981). The Essipiunnuat spread their nets again. On 7 July 1981, between two and four hundred Euroquébécois from Les Escoumins township and surrounding villages mobilised to seize the nets, and there were violent confrontations with Essipiunnuat on the Les Escoumins dock.

Surprisingly, there is little contemporary research on the Salmon War and its place in the memory of Innu groups, despite its significance and the impact it had.⁴¹ The Essipiunnuat, for their part, have been the object of some investigations over the last decades, but nothing of note has been done to assess the psychological and social dimension of their condition. As a result, the complex relationship the Essipiunnuat have with the past, their cultural memory and self-representation, as well as their current condition, has never been investigated. Previous research has rarely focused on the issue, or on the problems articulated by the local people. It has tended, instead, to record elements of the group only through the eyes of the leaders, leaving other critical data in the shadows. This unidirectional narrative and its sources, the internal representations of the Essipiunnuat, and the mode of social control, are central to my study. As these experiences and views can be rich, valid and credible, such a one-dimensional presentation of this group, with an evident focus on the economic issues, obscures important details of how other ‘non-influential’ members live, feel and perceive their Innu heritage and the community and its needs.

Conclusion

Despite the omnipresence of discourses on reconciliation in the public space, it is still ‘taboo’ to speak of colonialism, genocide and the historical mistreatment of First Peoples in Canada, and in particular in Québec. Canadian and Euroquébécois nationalists often perceive themselves as belonging to a superior civilisation, and the suggestion that an apartheid system is surfacing at the very heart of their constitution sounds odd and disrespectful. In order to keep a positive self-image, maintaining the invisibility of First Peoples remains more comfortable – a sanitary cordon to protect their fragile representation of themselves from radical cultural criticism coming from within. This is particularly true in Québec, where the francophone majority has a deep and complex relationship with First Peoples’ heritage, and with the representations of ‘Indians’ or ‘savages’ and their historical role that have been around for a long time. Euroquébécois’ representations of ‘Indians’ and their lands and sovereignty remain awkward and, to use Burelle’s words (2014), are characterised by a constant ‘settler’s moves to innocence’. This is ‘in order to obscure its own ongoing settler colonial relationship ... to First Nations whose sovereignty pre-dates that of Québec and threatens the coherence of its national narrative’.

To question the relationship between the Québec national self and local First Peoples is destabilising and can often lead to strong resistance, since it questions the very legitimacy of their own state and the ethnocentricity on which it is based, and is a threat to the foundation of Euroquébécois self-conceptions. These unique circumstances of profound cultural hegemony towards the Innu, and the overall denial of such oppression, added to the discomfort of radical Innu criticism, have major consequences for research. Such an environment of overwhelming epistemic violences can paralyse the body, anaesthetise the mind and make every moment weigh on the act of speaking due to imminent punishment being anticipated. More than a threat, the Innu research object-turned-researcher allows the reemergence of an episteme that threatens to ‘pulverise’ a culture erected against ‘savagery’ and celebrating with persistence its own ‘whiteness’. Such a society is overwhelmed by a cultural scorbus which makes it desire the symbolic vitamins of millennial cultures that, paradoxically, it cannot help but invisibilise. The society imposed on Innu people has not only a strong propensity to forget, but a reprehensible drive to erase what preceded it in order to perceive itself as ‘sovereign’. Yet, the small mirror explorers gave in exchange for a territory that cannot be ‘owned’ would come to haunt their descendants. Simulated blindness and deafness have their limits. Self-ignorance and denial do not, in fact, change the nature of the relationship between the Innu and the settler population of Québec. The location of Québec’s nationalists as a colonised people has weak foundations.

Although the focus of this research is not the French descendants, it is necessary to consider their condition because of their long-term interaction with the Essipiunnuat and the cultural hegemony that has led the Innu to absorb their conceptions, representations, myths and fictions. Looking at Essipit from the inside allows an observation of key dimensions of Québec society and its interaction with Innu referents; an archaeology of Essipiunnuat’s own internal conflicts are revealing of wider cultural undercurrents and blind spots.

Historically, research involving First Peoples in Canada has overwhelmingly been used for assimilation purposes and increased domination. State control over research pertaining to ‘Indians’ has been exercised through funding and the determination of research problems. Among Innu, it has often led to a perception of research being commodified and a stratagem guided by existing authorities that is destined to reinforce and legitimise colonial institutions (when not simply serving the pecuniary or intellectual interests of academics). Today, it is easy to talk about indigenous research as having become an economic activity. These views are far from exaggerated, since research is often for purposes other than giving a voice to any major social concerns such as those experienced by First Peoples.

This may explain why the links between colonialism and the current psychological and cultural condition of the Innu are widely absent in any research, even if locally demanded and socially needed. The present research is interested in my family and community’s (deeply intertwined) relationship with its past, voiced locally as a crucial concern affecting people in their daily lives, especially the younger generation. It is an investigation attempting to foster remembering in order to better comprehend the phenomenon of collective oblivion and its tremendous psychological effects and legal implications for consent – a rare topic in this area of study.

The Salmon War, as the Essipiunnuat remembered it, was not documented and there was a fascinating silence about it on all sides. The memory of those who took part in the event, and the dynamic of its intergenerational transmission, was therefore a good starting point for tackling the collective memory blank, from a mnemohistorical stance, and within the wider context of its social and historical production. This contribution is on a micro-scale, yet has the potential to reveal a underlying dimensions of a continent apparently obsessed with analogous equations such as those the Essipiunnuat are facing, cornered as they are between a growing gap of memory, forgetfulness and a complex relationship with truth, forged and constantly scrambled by obscure and complex external and internal forces. These prevent them from seeing or hearing, while favouring, often despite themselves, erasure and rewriting.

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1 In his conversation with Frank Speck (1927), p. 397, Paul Ross Sr mentioned the fact that Innu families were allegedly killed when merchants who gave them tea contaminated with smallpox.

2 Cancían defines ‘norms’ as ‘beliefs about what individuals ought to do that become part of a person’s motivation through socialization; people come to act in conformity with the norms of their society precisely because they want to conform. However …norms are perceptions of what actions will lead others to validate an identity (rather than personal beliefs), so that people are thought to conform to norms in order to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are a particular kind of person’ (1975).

3 Among others, see Dessi (2008); Chu et al. (1999); Pennebaker et al. (1997); Baumeister and Hastings (1997); Marques et al. (1997), p. 254.

4 Connerton (2008) identifies seven types of forgetting, corresponding to multiple agents: repressive erasure, prescriptive forgetting, forgetting as constitutive in the formation of a new identity, structural amnesia, forgetting as annulment, forgetting as planned obsolescence and forgetting as humiliated silence..

5 See also, Herzog (2009).

6 See: Black Skin, White Mask (1952) [1967 translation by Charles Lam Markmann]; A Dying Colonialism (1959) [1965 translation by Haakon Chevalier]; The Wretched of the Earth (1961) [1963 translation by Constance Farrington]; Toward the African Revolution (1964) [1969 translation by Haakon Chevalier].

7 Lotman defined culture as ‘the totality of non-hereditary information acquired, preserved and transmitted’ (quoted in Cobley and Jansz 1997). This definition is complementary to Jimmie Durham’s as ‘what we know about ourselves and what we want to become’. Durham, in Lippard (1993).

8 The power of remembrance for dominated micro-groups is also one of Sartre’s favourite themes, as in his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: ‘Bringing [old stories] alive and introduc[ing] into them modifications which are increasingly fundamental [contributes] to bring conflicts up to date and to modernise the kinds of struggle which the stories evoke, together with the names of heroes and the types of weapons ... The formula “this all happened long ago” [has to be] substituted by that of “what we are going to speak of happened somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today, and it might happen tomorrow”’ (1961).

9 Audet, V. (2012); Bacon-Hervieux, K (2017).

10 Their work, ‘dedicated to the Innu nation in which Elders pass on their skills and knowledge to younger generations’ is available on the website, ‘Nametau Innu: memory and knowledge of Nitassinan’ at http://www.nametauinnu.ca/en/culture/nation/detail/64/72 (consulted 26 Jan. 2017). Its short videos include one on the history of the community featuring interviews with members and the former chief, Denis Ross, and another portraying Levis Ross, a captain who has developed a whale-watching business as part of the tourist industry.

11 For more information, see Les Éditions Manitu: http://www.productionmanitu.com/accueil.html.

12 Among others, see the linguistic, anthropological, ethnological and oral history of scholars such as Mailhot (1996), Vincent (1994), Bouchard (2004) and Charest (2003). The colossal and respectful work devoted to the Innu word, left by the filmmaker Arthur Lamotte, should also not be forgotten, including important archives containing hundreds of interviews.

13 The expression is a subtitle in the book Vie et vérité : textes choisis (Nietzsche, 2001).

14 See Ramos (2010); Iniguez et al., (1997, pp. 238–9); Dessi (2008); Nietzsche (2001).

15 Personal communication, Innu Elder, Sep. 2009.

16 From an interview with the late Elder Elise Ross (Laforest, 1983).

17 During interviews, some older Essipiunnuat contested the way the term ‘Nitassinan’ is used in the context of modern treaty negotiation by lawyers and band administrators. This approach would not correspond to ancestral Innu vision and would come too close to the Eurocanadian concept of property and frontiers between Innu groups, which includes the possibility of cession and alienation of the land. In their view, the Innu homeland could not be divided and given over exclusively to a few Innu, who would wrongly award themselves the power to alienate the land contradicting First Peoples’ collective and shared obligation to ‘Assi’ (the Earth) and future generations.

18 See also Savard (2004).

19 The immense documentation of the Innu oral tradition carried out by Rémi Savard, José Mailhot and Sylvie Vincent should not be ignored. They and others, who were concerned with not reproducing colonialism in ways of doing research, were important ‘transmitters’ of Innu cultural memory, at a time of great turmoil and intergenerational ruptures. Having made a significant contribution to the cultural continuity of the Innu, they tend to be highly respected in communities.

20 See also Frank Christopher’s film Dead Reckoning: Champlain in America (2009).

21 For more information on Amherst’s bioterrorism, see also D’Errico (n.d.).

22 On the topic of Indigenous philosophies of law see Savard (2004), Friedland and Napoleon (2016), Borrows (2016; 2019).

23 Tshakapesh is a hero in Innu oral tradition and in the oral traditions of other members of the Algonquian linguistic family of Turtle Island or North America. See Bellefleur (n.d.). For more information on contemporary conversation around the Innu conception of sovereignty, see Lefevre and Gendreau (2016).

24 See the report of Royal Commission on Indigenous Peoples (1996) and the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2016). On John A. Macdonald’s supremacist views and the project destined to annihilate First Peoples and their cultures in Canada, see Stanley (2014).

25 Marie Vollant (1813–38).

26 Act to encourage the gradual civilization of Indian tribes in this province, and to amend the laws relating to Indians, 20 Victoria, c. 26, sanctioned 10 Jun. 1857, quoted in Savard (1992).

27 Act for the gradual enfranchisement of Indians, the better management of Indian affairs, and to extend the provisions of the Act thirty-first Victoria, chapter 42, 32–3 Victoria., c. 6.

28 The creation of the reserve in 1892 was the object of a particular land claim. For more information, see Innu First Nation of Essipit v. Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada (2017), consulted on https://decisia.lexum.com/sct/rod/en/item/230117/index.do. Essipit won its claim in 2017 in the court decision Innu First Nation of Essipit v. Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada, 2017 SCTC 1.

29 For a critique of the coloniality of Speck’s work, see Leacock (1997).

30 A list of these families was documented but unpublished in the research conducted by Laforest in 1983. Despite the great value of Mr Garneau’s work and his contribution to the documentation of Essipiunnuat family histories, we tend to question his interpretation on two particular points. The first concerns Old Paul Ross’s mother, baptised and renamed ‘Marie Sauvage’ by a priest in Tadoussac. Unfortunately, this interpretation was reproduced in Serge Bouchard’s book, which was widely distributed in Québec, entitled ‘the laughing people’. Garneau questions Frank G. Speck’s assertion, based on his interviews with Old Paul Ross, that Paul’s mother was a Cree of Moose Factory in northern Ontario, where his father, Simon Ross, had stayed. It seems that Paul Ross Sr’s words are too easily disqualified in favour of the priest’s version in Tadoussac who erased, for reasons unknown, the name of Paul’s mother. This information is vital to the Ross family’s search for their ‘missing’ grandmother. Paul’s mother was renamed ‘Marie Sauvage’ at her baptism in Tadoussac and no other information about her exists, other than Paul’s story about his mother, as reported by Speck. The fact that he and his mother were adopted by the Essipiunnuat in no way justifies mutilating their ties with the Eeyou who are deeply bound in different ways to the Innu. As with Paul, the Ross family’s memory gives value to the integrity of their family history and defends their interpretation of it.

The second element in question is how Joseph Moreau, a former HBC employee who settled on the shores of the Esh Shipu river around the 1820s, appears as someone exceptional, a model of a French-Canadian descendant now entirely integrated into the Innu world. This interpretation tends to erase his role as a settler, while making him stand as an example of a ‘good marriage’ between an Innu woman and French-Canadian man. Nothing proves that his actions were so exceptional, especially since he was allegedly to take advantage of his family ties with the Innu to become ‘chief ’ of the band and then to ‘sell’ Essipiunnuat’s ancestral domain to the lumber companies. It resulted in accelerating colonisation and the village of Les Escoumins being established.

31 A letter from citizens of Les Escoumins was sent to the mayor asking for the displacement of ‘Indians’. There is also proof of a case being opened which concerned money having been allocated for the construction of a school in the community that was diverted for the benefit of the village.

32 See also: Conseil Des Montagnais Des Escoumins (1994) and Anderson (1999).

33 Personal conversation with Anon., Apr. 2010.

34 Panasuk and Proulx (1981) also produced an MA thesis at the University of Montréal about Innu fishing rights on Québec northern shore rivers.

35 In Canada, an outfitter is ‘an enterprise that provides recreational services and infrastructure in exchange for remuneration for recreational purposes related to the practice of hunting, fishing or trapping. These companies also often provide a service of accommodation, equipment rental and guide. By extension, the term outfitting is used to designate the land occupied by the establishment’ (Gouvernement du Québec, n.d.).

36 The two sides reached an agreement in principle. Only one element remained in dispute (no. 8) pertaining to surveillance of the nets and verification of catches. The contentious element of the agreement stipulates that the Essipiunnuat government would designate an individual who would be mandated to first inspect communitarian nets spread on the delimited territory and, in a second phase, verify the number of catches and transmit a statement of the daily catch to the departments. The core issue at stake is the fact that the department wanted one of its agents to conduct these tasks, but the Essipiunnuat government didn’t want to cede on this element that implied a lack of trust in them.

37 The use of the term ‘Québec’ here refers to the Québec provincial government and its representatives.

38 On 17 Jul. 1980, the Essipiunnuat received the support of 3,000 Algonquin through the voice of their representative, Chief Richard Kistabish. The chief declared his people entirely in support of the Innu struggles that, in his view, were taking place in the wider context of indigenous peoples’ struggles for respect and decolonisation: ‘The governments of Québec and Canada will have to agree to consider the whole issue of aboriginal rights in the country ... For 300 years or more, we have allowed white people (‘les Blancs’) to do as they please. They dispossessed us of our territories and all that was precious to us. Today, there is a turnaround. We want to bequeath to our children something other than poverty, social and racial injustice. We want our people to survive, and this survival must come from respecting indigenous rights in this country’ (my translation). Quoted in ‘Les Montagnais des Escoumins ont l’appui de 3,000 Algonquins’, in Le Soleil, 17 Jul. 1980.

39 Restigouche or Listuguj refers to one of the two reserves composed of Mi’gmaq people located in the south eastern part of the province of Québec.

40 See Obomsawin (1984).

41 See McKenzie and Vincent (2010), pp. 103–11.