Mike Paul Kuekuatsheu, Innu musician

Text & Photos : Ninka North

Musician and Environnemental activist

Mike, whose Innu nickname “Kuekuatsheu” means wolverine, is a singer-songwriter from Mashteuiatsh¹, an Innu community on the shores of Lake St. Jean² Passionate about his culture, he has been singing and beating his drum on national and international stages to carry the echoes of his people, their fears and their hopes for twenty-six years.

An artist and environmental activist – an obvious choice for these nomadic hunter-gatherers who have always had a

deep respect for Mother Earth – he sings to promote his culture in the rock-folk style in Innu, french and english. He has been nominated for the Indigenous Music Awards in 2019, and the Canadian folk music Awards in 2020.

He is also a tireless speaker and storyteller, offering urban escapes to share the traditions of his people.

In 2019, I had the chance to meet him in Montreal twice. I attended one of his lectures, and then a few days later the concert he was giving at l’Escalier, a cultural bar in Saint Catherine.

At both of these events, Mike banged his drum, freezing the space with the first beats. Like many natives³, he carries with him the energy of the great outdoors…

I’ve often heard ceremonial drumming during powwows, but this time, in this enclosed space, the echo had increased tenfold like the sound of thunder. It was at this moment that the bar was filled with natives. Songs accompanied by rock and folk rhythms followed. For more than an hour, Mike took us to the distant shores of the dream, singing in his language with enthusiasm. I listened to the rivers, I heard the creaking of the wood and the singing of the birds, I was there on this wave that spread around us like an invitation to travel…

After the concert, we sat down at a table and while sipping our coffees, we were able to exchange a few words. Mike is Innu⁴ and Atikamekw⁵ on his father’s side, Waban-aki⁶on his mother’s side, and his clear blue eyes reveal his Quebec

ancestry from a grandfather. Like many natives, he is a product of distant interbreeding, a practice already familiar to their ancestors to avoid consanguinity. He also carries within him the genes of former Civil War soldiers⁷.

In the course of the conversation, I learn that Lac St. Jean, as well as Tadoussac⁸ on the north coast, were once crossroads where several nomadic peoples of different nations met. Turning my eyes, I discover new faces. The bar is crowded, mainly with natives, recognized by their voices, french or anglo-saxon with their respective nuances and their bursts of laughter.

Laughter is strength, and a lot of it was needed in view of the genocide that went unmentioned for several centuries.

Mike’s life has always been steeped in music. A maternal grandmother and an Abenaki uncle who played guitar as a child introduced him to this passion, which allowed him to flourish despite the wave of intergenerational trauma caused by residential schools and systemic racism. A silence passed, one of those silences so heavy with truth that they seem to freeze the atmosphere…

If music was an escape, it was also medicine and healing. Mike started with western music and was introduced to the Innu instrument, teweikan, in the circle in elementary school. Mike listened to Jimi Hendrix, rock music.

– In fact, Link Wray, one of the pioneers of this movement, was a Shawnee⁹guitarist; all these influences gave him the motivation to start making music, and then to compose songs… He now plays more folk music, with a few touches of rock, but the drum is there of course. And for good reason ! the drum is an essential element of the native tradition…

Mike tells me anecdotes about his past.
– A teweikan player of Cree and Innu origin used to pass by the schoolyard every week.
He pauses for a moment, puts down his coffee cup and murmurs,
– His name was Johnnie Wason. He would explain this connection to the drum, talking about the importance of keeping the circle strong.
Mike paused for a few seconds, to welcome an Eeyou artist from James Bay.

– The teueikan, he continued in a deep voice,
– Was a sacred instrument, but also an essential survival tool, with a direct connection to the world of dreams and spirits.

It was taken out during extreme famines or very harsh winters, when the game did not come out, in those difficult moments when we sometimes had to resort to the trembling tent¹⁰.

He explains that, unlike the hand-drum, this caribou-skin-covered drum is sacred.

The caribou is a crucial element of the Innu culture because it provides them with the skin for clothing, the snowshoes, the drum and the needles. In certain rituals, the bones of its fetuses are used because they represent life. The circle of life is painted red to capture good spirits, because blood is the symbol. The symbolism is always very present, it is the link between the visible and invisible worlds.

«Nutshimiu-Aimun», the language of the territory

In the course of the conversation, Mike tells me about the original name of his people and their history. “Ilnu” in Nehlueun, his language, means “man, human being”.

When they landed on their land, the colonizer had called them “Montagnais” and numbered them on an Indian statute. The blackened pages of history were being lifted one after the other. No one could ignore the fact that the reserves had been the driving force of colonization, making them move brutally from a nomadic to a sedentary life model.

These nomadic hunters that the Vikings called “Skræling”¹¹in the sagas of Erik the Red¹²and Groeland, are the descendants of paleo-Amerindians who arrived after the melting of the glaciers in the eastern part of the Quebec peninsula, some 8000 years ago. They were the first to cross paths with European explorers and trade furs. Divided into two distinct groups, the Montagnais of the Saguenay and the North Shore, and the Naskapi¹³of the tip of the North Shore and northern Labrador, their initial name of Innu was not returned to them until 1990. They still occupy today an ancestral territory that has never been ceded, “our land” nicknamed Nitassinan in the Innu-Aimun dialect.

– «Innu», Mike continued, “evokes the fact of being human in the territory where we grew up.

The term expresses this relationship of affiliation, this intimacy with the territory. He explained that nomadism had led to a great number of linguistic transformations at the written level.

Originally, the phonemes used indicated the name of the place where the families lived. One could find “Eyou, Elnou or Irniu”. Mike gives me the example of the term “uiatshouaniulnu”, in which “uiatshuan” represents the name of the place of birth of an individual, Ilnu meaning “human being”.

– Each family belonged to the territory, was its guardian.
I look at the natives who are walking around us in the electric atmosphere of the bar, laughter is flying.
What is “being Innu” in today’s world? I asked suddenly.
Mike smiled.
– Always staying true to your identity, “inuanion” in the language, you contain your identity, your way of being. It involves holding the living words, keeping the memory and maintaining the sacred relationship with the land. It is the foundation of our identity and it must remain so…

Mike knows his subject perfectly. Passionate, he is also a passer of knowledge who learned from the elders.

– Originally, “animated words” were ancient words. They were the living expression of their tradition and could only be acquired by living on the territory. Then came colonization…” he says, lowering his voice.
– The policy of assimilation led to a considerable loss of this cultural heritage, specifically oral. The entry in the residential schools and the urbanization mark a rupture with irreversible effects in the transmission, which involves the extinction of the Innu dialect. But despite the genocidal role of the Indian Act¹⁴, there have always been guardians of ancestral knowledge, language and traditions…

This concept of animated words fascinated me. I wanted to know more and asked him what they represented in everyday life.

– Living words are the words of the land. They represent the purest language. Our tools, our clothes are alive, because they are made of caribou skin, of organic material. We can’t use the word “animate” when referring to the city or a car, because that doesn’t fit into the concept of the Living. They are transformed, inert things.

Mike named his third album “Ashuapmushuan”, in reference to the river that runs through St Félicien¹⁵.

– The Innu term, an animated word, refers to the canoe on the river where one watches for moose : “ashuap” for waiting, “mush” for moose, “shuan” for river stream, he says.

If much information on the Innu had sprung up, it raised other much darker ones. While the media was gradually releasing bits and pieces of this colonial past so often denied by history, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was acting as a real cultural genocide. It was known that the residential schools had been used as a tool of assimilation, but the thousands of anonymous graves of children from the Kamloops¹⁶ residential school in British Columbia and the James Bay residential school in northern Quebec had not yet been discovered, as they would be two years later, in the midst of the Covid pandemic. The barbaric practices that had plagued the country were finally recognized, pointing to the responsibility of the

system. I did not have to start the conversation, because since the beginning of the reconciliation process put in place by Canada, tongues were loosening and testimonies were coming in.
– My grandparents, nomads, free people,” says Mike, “were sent to residential schools by force. The residential school was the shame of not being able to speak in language, you were beaten, you had to hide, you had to “break the Indian in the child”…
It was, according to him, the consecrated expression of a policy, the propaganda tool of the government. The tribes were mixed in the residential schools, which promoted divisions and the loss of cultural identity.

– There was a lot of mixing of native races. There were Innu, but also Cree, Atikamekw, all assimilated with deep wounds on their identity.

The residential schools have remained an open wound, all the more vivid because it was kept quiet during a period that seems far removed from the genocide perpetrated at the beginning of colonization, because we have to face the fact that the mistreatment is still going on today. Added to this grim picture are the revelations of the murders and disappearances of thousands of women in Quebec and on the “Highway of Tears”¹⁷ in British Columbia, not to mention the “starlight tour”¹⁸ and the systemic racism that still exists. In the fall of 2020, the death of Joyce Echaquan¹⁹,a young Atikamekw woman who died in unacceptable conditions in a hospital, triggered a wave of protests in Quebec.