Stories of colonial violence on native populations and re -appropriation of data in Canada
Pekuakami is the Innu name of Lake Saint Jean, in Québec, in the Saguanay region. But if I ask Google Maps to show me where it is, I don’t get answers. If I tell friends who live in Canada who went to look for where the Peribonka river pours right into the banks of Pekuakami, they will say that they have never heard of it, unless they are careful connoisseurs of native cultures, or having read the best seller Kukum, a novel in which the journalist Michel Jean (translated in Italy by Marcos y Marcos) tells the story of his grandmother, who at 15 years old, In love with Thomas, an innu of Pointe-Boys (today correctly called Mashteuiatsh) and follows him by joining his family. There he discovers that women live in a condition of greater equality than the community of French settlers where he grew up, that the deep knowledge of the woods, snow and rivers allows you to live a dignified and healthy life, that hunting to eat means not to waste and not kill for abundance but out of need, but above all it becomes a witness of the cancellation of a culture and a population starting from the arrival of the “progress” industries, Never look back, only “ahead”, with all the consequences that this entails.
The issue of names is central in this cancellation process.
From the voice of Almanda: […] “Malek had been the first to bring the surname Siméon. Until then the family had called himself atum. But the priests did not like those words that incomprehensible for them and had forced the innu to use French patronymicals. So, the ATUK clan had become the Siméon family.
When the missionaries converted the natives attributed his surname or that of other priests: Bacon, Fontaine, Mollen or Jourdain. The Cri, our neighbors, who lived with the British from the time of the first emporiums of the Bay of Hudson, had become Blacksmith, Bossum or Coon. And so it had been for all native populations.
And lakes, rivers and cities:
They polluted the water, made the fish disappear. They also go through it to swim, they gave him the name of a saint. Do not respect its size. Still, it is the only Nitassinan lake that the gaze cannot cross.
We had already talked about it by observing the Map of Canada created by the geographer and writer Margaret Pierce, who spent 15 months collecting names of indigenous places from the Populations First Nations, Métis and Inuit:
Whose data are? Data Capitalism vs Data Sovereigty
Whose data are? Data Capitalism vs Data Sovereigty
The map is not reproducible in natural size or with the zoom on the locations because the names are part of the history of an already exploited people: to use those names for tourist reasons, for example, would be a new form of exploitation.
I asked the talented Marta Soligo, Italian sociologist and university professor at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas where he also deals with projects with indigenous communities, how this short circuit is managed. He wrote to me:
Last year, the theme of the Annual Conference of Aianta (American Indian Alaska Native Tourism Association) was: “Cultural Tourism: Changing the Narrative”. As I participated in the event, I understood more and more because native populations highlight the need to review the narratives on tourism in their territories, as it is told and organized. Too many times their stories have been told by tour operators not belonging to these communities, through a white look and colonizer. Too many times tourists have found themselves looking for confirmations of stereotypes seen on TV or cinema, instead of trying to truly understand the stories and cultures of these people. Too many times, sacred objects have been bought to make it some living room souvenirs. And above all, too many times the behaviors of travelers have failed to respect a complex collective memory, marked by trauma deriving from a prolonged genocide and a social inequality still present today. There is a theme that continues to emerge from my field research between different native communities in the USA, and isThe fact that tourism must be based on a key principle: make sure that the indigenous populations guide, control and benefit from tourist activities within their territories
. This also entails the recovery of historical narratives and the linguistic-cultural preservation. In other words, members of the native communities want to tell their history in the ways and times they decided. And for this they are mobilizing, carrying out really interesting initiatives, ranging from museum collections to workshops for those who work in tourism. In all this, however, it is essential that tourists understand the importance of adopting respectful forms of travel and have genuine interest in supporting these communities.
#IndigenousVoicesMatter
In Mashteuiatsh is the type of tourist welcome that is carried out by the Inu communities: I was lucky enough to participate in a guided tour of the small garden / forest of the Inu museum, where a guide helped us to recognize the differences between needles and bark of the different types of fir trees (just as Almanda had to do by following its Thomas), berries and fruits, and of the use of each for nourishment. For example, the guide told that the missionaries claimed that the women innu gave birth to without suffering: they saw them enter the tents to give birth and go out with the newborn, without cries. No: they knew which herbs to use to produce anesthesia capable of helping them with the pain of contractions.
The knowledge of Inu – and in general of the native populations – is swept away together with the names when governments decide for the forced schooling of children: for over a century, more than 150 thousand children of the First Nations, Inuit and Métis have been torn from their families and forced to attend residential schools, where original language, culture and names were banned. A Christian name was imposed on many children, if they had not already cut, and inflicted corporal punishment if they used their language or their traditional name. The schools were far from families, the children spent the whole year away from their parents and often returned sick or, in the worst cases, they did not return at all, as happens to a grandson of the Kukum of the journalist Michel Jean.
What does all this have to do with statistics and data? It is quite easy to understand it.
But let’s go back to the voice of Almanda, who tells us this:
My daughter Jeannette fell in love with a man who had worked on the construction of the railway. The illegitimate son of an Indian had white status and, marrying with him, my daughter was deprived of his Indian status. A further stratagem to make us disappear. She was forced to leave the reserve.
Remove the status means removing the rights recognized to native populations, recognized precisely by virtue of the exploitation of their lands and resources. But not only that: less indigenous people there are fewer resources invested in the preservation of their culture and in their rights, in fact.
In 1985 with the Bill C-31 law, many women and their children are finally allowed to re-teenage the legal status of “Indians” (I maintain this wording as from official documents), contributing to a strong growth that emerges from the demographic investigations (source).
In 2021, in response to the requests of justice of the indigenous communities and to discover hundreds of unnamed tombs in the sites of the former residential colleges, the Canadian government announced a new policy that finally allows indigenous people to restore their traditional names in official documents.
Why this difference? The Our Health Counts project, led by the researcher Sara Wolfe, adopted an alternative methodology: the detection was conducted throughrespondent-driven sampling
or a network system based on members of the community who invite other indigenous people to participate. This approach generated more reliable and “organic” data, as it is built by the community itself.
The traditional census is instead based on a sample detection of private homes, excluding those who live in conditions of housing precariousness or is homeless, using the concept of “habitual residence”, which can exclude those who are temporarily in the city (because it maintains links with its rural community). In addition, the indigenous identification in the census is based on the car-car, which can be influenced by insecurity or diffidence towards the institutions, so many people from the First Nations they hesitate to identify themselves in official documents. If we reread the testimony of Almanda and what I have told above we can only believe it and validate this type of attitude.
The participatory approach, on the other hand, involved 20 members of the indigenous community, which were identified as “seeds”: each has received five coupons coded to be distributed to other indigenous people in their social network, and the process has been repeated organically, creating a more faithful map of the real community.
(*) raccolto da qui - grazie a Roberta Cavaglià e Donata Columbro
Enrico Semprini
