Escape to Innu Territory

After leaving Montreal, my partner and I took the road to Trois Rivières in the early afternoon, before turning onto the 155 that runs through the Mauricie National Park¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mauricie_National_Park and along the Matawin River. A short stopover in La Tuque allowed us to refuel before crossing impressive coniferous forests bordered by lakes. On this road, which cuts through wide open spaces, there is little traffic except for logging trucks with their massive loads of wood, large machines with planetary axles similar to those used by the mining industry. Past Chambord, we take Highway 169, the road that crosses the Laurentian Wildlife Reserve²https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentides_Wildlife_Reserve.

We reached the Mashteuiatsh reserve five hours later. The sun sets in a blaze of tawny colors on the water as we leave the highway. We still have about forty kilometers to go to reach our meeting point with Mike Paul, in the heart of the forest. We drive down the forest road along the north shore of Lac Belle Rivière, looking for a satellite signal to reach Mike at his traditional camp.

But a few seconds later, we see him appear in the middle of the trail, near a white 90’s pickup truck where Dany Paul, his godfather, is standing, as I would learn in conversation. We follow them through the woods to the cabin.

The damp earth exhales humus scents in the middle of which I distinguish smells of ferns, mushrooms and moss. The cracks of our soles cross the space of small cracklings, the trees rustle under the wind.

I can see the lake below.
The stars twinkle in an inky sky overhead, and long, spectral clouds glide across the water behind the foliage of the fir trees. I stop to take a deep breath. I am finally – where I want to be – in the heart of the elements…

It is always the same perception that invades me when I leave the cities, this tangible perception of being part of life, of being finally rooted to this extraordinary matrix, to this earth, our earth. Perhaps this is the feeling that the Atikamekws and the Innus have for Nitassinan³https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitassinan, this impregnation of the wood, of the “animated world”⁴designates the living among the Innu who distinguish what is animated and comes from the earth, and what is not… that surrounds them daily…

Nitassinan map

The cottage, which Mike built with his own hands, slopes up the hill to face the lake.
Although it was built on the family camp, Mike tells me that he had to certify to the band council that his ancestors had occupied this site before, with archival photos and cadastral evidence to safeguard this right.
– “My legacy,” he says.
Mike leads me up the stairs. As I open the door of

the cottage, I am seized by the pleasant warmth diffused by a cast iron wood stove.

The chalet is without water or sanitary facilities, as is often the case in these remote places of civilization. A light bulb powered by photovoltaic panels illuminates a single room topped by a small mezzanine. There is a table and three chairs in the kitchen, a cot facing the window.

I distinguish the silhouette of a man on a rocking chair in the half-light. He comes to meet me smiling and introduces himself.

Benoît Thisselmagan is Innu and it is obvious. He has a tanned complexion, slightly slanted eyes, and jet black hair cut short. We sit around the table and get to know each other. The laughter comes. In this period of Covid, we savor these moments of sharing which have become so rare and we start to talk with enthusiasm.

Mike hands me a cup of traditional herbal tea. As I bring it to my lips, I recognize the distinctive smell of pine sap. In the course of our conversation, I learn that he is preparing a “shapituan”, a traditional rectangular-shaped dwelling thirty feet long by twenty feet wide, and plans to build three more for his relatives. But today, nothing is easy, as

he states. The federal band council⁵The Band Council is a federal entity that is not a model of Innu governance has been registering the camps since the 1990s in a very administrative and procedural manner.

– I saw this change there, he declared in an excited tone.

He and his family built a family camp before being regulated. The land is now managed by the federal government. Aboriginal people living on reserve are highly controlled and cannot own land. When harassed by the band council, Mike took action and called the department, citing the intergenerational trauma he and his family had suffered. He won his case after providing photos of land occupation and records showing a pre-dating of 1867, the date of Canada’s constitution.

– There is no sovereignty, no self-determination,” he says jokingly. Even though it’s not their traditional way of doing things, most people do what the band council tells them. They’d rather keep quiet.

Pressure, privileges, intimidation, employment benefits – he sees band councils as a tribal power set up by the federal government, far removed from the expectations of spiritual leaders and their territorial concerns. Mike calls it a law of omerta because by opposing this system, you lose your credibility and more… According to him, the traditionalists, about three hundred people, are the only ones who follow the tradition and protect their ancestral rights. A jurisprudence won in 1982, the constitutional article 35 at the federal level, has however recognized the ancestral rights of the natives and the freedom to live fully their ceremonies, which implies the right to establish their camps and to feed themselves without fear of

reprisals from the government.

I ask him if they have sovereignty over their hunting territories, a term with an uncertain outline that raises many tensions and claims…

– The bands have started to put up draws in the Laurentian Wildlife Reserve. Even if this leads to management, we have full authority in the territory, because we live there, we cannot be ignored, we monitor poaching.
He stops talking, his eyes thoughtful,
– It is not good for the perennity of the animals, he murmurs after a time….

The single bulb of the country cottage gleams in the half-light, surrounding Benoît and Dany of a light halo. Both of them nod silently, their faces serious. Benoît gets up and brings back the kettle on the table.

Mike sighs.
– Every trail, every piece of land has a name, a story… If you go on the Kapatakan⁶trail portage which is on the Peridonca River, you will find several rapids above. There is also Manitu Kapatagan which means Spirit Portage and which was flooded by Hydro Quebec.

Not surprisingly, the impact of the dam on the environment was severe. It raised the water level and its mercury content, permanently affecting wildlife⁷Disappearance of protected or endemic species and flooded a camp in the process. But Mike still has hope. Dany gets up to put some logs in the cast iron stove. I look at her ravaged face by expression wrinkles, sculpted by the elements that he faces

during his long hours of tracking. As I drink my herbal tea, I see the rifle sitting against the wall. A large caliber with a scope, a 30 mm.

Mike, Dany and Benoît are all traditional hunters, an ancestral activity of the nomadic peoples who once roamed freely throughout these vast wildlife territories.

– Before colonization, says Mike, no nation was at war with each other. The tribes lived in harmony and Mashteuiatsh, because of its location on Lake St. John, represented an important place of passage, meeting and barter.

«Wars came with the fur trade introduced by the whites. Our nations were instrumentalized and opposed to each other, the circle was broken…»

Dany, who had remained silent until then, went further. Dany Paul is a descendant of the Nepton⁸ https://www.academia.edu/28224637Famille_Nepton_au_Qu%C3%A9bec_%C3%80_Mashteuiatsh, a family of Abenaki nation brought by the Oblate missionary for the construction of Mashteuiatsh, later identified as Montagnais. The photos of his ancestor printed on mugs speak for themselves. Same features and profiles…

– He was a renowned guide for descending the rapids on the Péribonka River⁹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peribonka_River, he recounts with passion. “Nepton” is a name that the colonists gave him because he could not write, a reference to the god Neptune because he navigated the waters…

– Today things have changed, Dany tells. The band councils do annual draws… while trapping and hunting are traditional activities that we’ve been doing for thousands of years. Mike and Benoît nod in agreement. Hunting is like the woods, like the land, it is an inalienable part of their identity. These are their mother-roots, those that the people of the cities have sacrificed in the name of progress.
– The complexes given by the dominant culture, that time when Amerindians were afraid to speak their native language is not far away, says Dany.
– A lot of stereotypes have stuck, but things are changing,” outbids Mike.
Dany is proud of his culture, proud of the legacy of his ancestors, of the wilderness that these nomadic hunters roamed throughout the year. I can feel his nervousness in the tone of his voice, and understand why the next minute,

when he moves the rifle from the wall where it was placed.
– It can kill an elephant,” he says, handling it carefully. And the return of impact is violent…

He and Mike planned to go hunting at dawn, to track a moose they had seen the day before. Their eyes glow in the darkness. The excitement of the hunt is there, as is the adrenaline in the blood.

– Because here, Mike explains, a moose can charge. When you consider that the animal is three meters long and weighs almost a ton, with a head encircled by a plume spanning a meter and a half and weighing some thirty kilos, it’s easy to see how the slightest misstep could prove fatal…

– How was game killed when there were no firearms?
Benoît turns to me and tells me,
– In the past, hunters used to kill it in winter with a harpoon blow to the withers when it sank into the snow while it was weakened by its weight.

The men went to bed but I continued to listen to the crackling of the logs in the stove.

I was exhausted but the fever of the great outdoors was nagging me. Eventually I got up to go hang out outside.

I stayed on the top of the stairs, listening to the sounds of the night under the sky where I could make out the milky way, and I finally heard the bellowing of a moose in the distance on the edge of the lake…

They got up at the crack of dawn, at the stroke of four, and set off with rifles at the ready, returning around noon with partridges. But they had spotted the footprints of the moose that had been hanging around that night, less than five hundred meters from the cabin, on the forest trail. Both were planning to return the next day.
I lingered in the kitchen over my cup of tea, gazing out the window at the light emerging in the fir trees, then went outside.

There’s a big tree in front of the cottage, a totem tree – “the tree of respect”, as the Innu call it – on which Mike has hung the skulls of the animals he and Dany have killed.
It’s an ancestral ritual. The spirits of the moose and bear skulls watch over the tree, a striking image of origins set against a brilliant azure backdrop in this Indian summer, which lasts only a fortnight and marks the last hunt before the long winter.

Walking around the cottage, I came face to face with the head of a moose butchered a few days earlier. It’s a macabre sight, but it’s part of the cycle of life.
It’s one of those scenes that contemporary man has relegated to industrial slaughter lines, with no respect for the animal. The skin and legs have been removed, and

the bones cleaned to make tools.
– Here,” he teaches me, we fight by the rules, we respect the animal. And animal corpses don’t rot by the roadside after being stripped of their antlers or plumes, as is unfortunately the case with trophy hunters.

While Dany and Benoît are out looking for water, he tells me about his family escapades on the shores of Lac du Cran with the family.
– To reach the grandmother’s camp, they had to cross an Innu territory in the Ashuapmushuan Wildlife Reserve¹²https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashuapmushuan_Wildlife_Reserve, near the great St Félicien river, he says before pausing.
– I was listening to the elders talk. Words from the land, he breathed. We often met at the edge of the lake, telling stories about a rock buried in three feet of water. In front of the lake, there was this monolith, they said that it was a giant who had brought it here…

I remained silent, listening to these words that go through time because they remain attached to the living, to this experience that escapes us a little more each day…

– In the reserve, I quickly felt that the energies were not the same as in the city. I realized that I had to go to the woods, that’s where I felt good,” Mike mutters with a smile.

– I used to go hunting alone with my 22 rifle,” he says passionately, “I walked all day. It allowed me to understand the elements around me, and to interact with the animals, to become one with the environment, but also to be better equipped to deal with it.

I listen to Mike talk about the forest, about his fascination with it as a native. The forest is a living entity in its own right, because this space is charged with a spiritual power that is not present in an urban environment. I see a glimmer in his eyes as he describes this connivance with nature, this indissoluble link.

– No big speech, no hunting technique, just “Listen, look, observe, live alone these experiences, be one with the universe”. It is this music that appeals to me, this plenitude. The western model goes against the current, and if you go against the current, you break a rock…

And the next second, he adds,

– There is a whole spirituality, with stones, flowers and even rocks. It is in nature that we feel this particular connection, this interdependence.
Mike explains to me that he received the precepts of Innu culture from his biological father, while his paternal grandfather taught him to row and pole.
– He spent the whole year in the woods, roaming the territory. He would go upstream between July and August. It would take him six to eight weeks,” he says.

Even today, hunting plays an important role in oral transmission. Among the natives, the initiation is

always on the move, in walking in the woods, or canoeing on the lakes. And most of the teachings are given during walks in the forest.

– You should never refuse an Innu who comes to set up camp. There are no borders for any of us, because we are one family,” an elder told him.

Mutual aid and sharing are principles deeply rooted in Innu culture, even if the Indian Act induced by colonization and band councils have altered this traditional system. To illustrate this teaching, Mike told me the story of the Wolverine, “Kuekuatsheu atalukan”.

Mike concludes his story with these words,
– This is why the wolverine is considered the most dangerous animal in our forests. The moral of the story, because there is one, is respect…

After a silence, he resumes,
– We must never steal. It is necessary to share, it is the principle of interdependence that our tradition inculcates in us, an essential notion for the survival of the group.

In this perception of the sensitive world that the Innu have, it goes without saying that the idea of the territory, of this space that we occupy and with which we maintain a continuous relationship, represents an inalienable asset.

– Do you consider your territories “sacred”? I suddenly asked.
– The ancients believed that land is the most precious thing and cannot be sold. Neither the air, nor the land, nor the water of the rivers belong to us, because we belong to Tshikaninu Assit…

This native way of thinking had been exemplified by Chief Seattle¹⁴“How can you buy or sell the sky, the heat of the earth? The idea seems strange to us. If we don’t have the freshness of the air and the shimmer of the water, how can you buy them? words spoken in “lushootseed”, a Salish dialect, in his words to Governor Isaac Stevens in 1854, when the government wanted to buy their land.
– There is of course a whole history of relationship with the territory that persists through the stories oral

creation handed down by grandmothers, grandfathers, Mike resumes. This is the core of our ancestral legal laws.

– The teachings are part of it, he explains. They are at the heart of codes of life, of respectful relationships with the environment.
– We are instilled with this notion from childhood. It may be called innate common sense, but it is a legacy that has been passed down through oral tradition for thousands of years.

I learn that the Innu have never ceded their land. Three communities have come together to negotiate a treaty with the federal and provincial governments, but negotiations have stalled. According to Mike, the negotiation tables with the North Coast and the Labrador Innu are still very divided.

– We were subject to the James Bay Agreement, the western territory, but you have to know that the northern territory of the Naskapi was also included in the James Bay Agreement. All the land used in these areas was ceded. From Mashteuiatsh to Lake St-Jean, it goes up to Labrador, it’s almost half of Quebec without a treaty…

To the question of treaties, which raise crucial questions for the Aboriginal nations, are added enormous political issues, not to mention questions of ethics and environmental preservation, ancestral values marked by the “sacred”…

Because today, as in the past, their spirituality recognizes the sovereign power of Mother Earth. The vulnerability of the Aboriginal people is there, I thought, in this absence of a treaty; a concern identical to that of their ancestors… But does this change the situation in the face of powerful

lobbies whose greed knows no bounds?

This is a question to ask, because many treaties have been interpreted according to Western principles that are always based on profit, and not on the principles of the indigenous people, which are first and foremost sacred. The indigenous people think about sustainability, about the transmission to future generations, it is a vision anchored in their tradition, a sacred inviolable principle.

Claiming their ancestral rights, the Innu First Nations of Mashteuiatsh, Pessamit and Essipit opposed the construction of a 750 km gas pipeline, the Énergie Saguenay project of GNL Québec last July, and won their case. For these people, whose representation of the world stipulates that “everything is linked”, what affects the climate or the environment in a particular place on the globe is not isolated but systemic.

– How do you define your relationship with the environment compared to the Western world’s relationship with the environment, which is based on the exploitation of natural resources?
– We don’t have the same approach! Our ancestors were peaceful people, living without disturbance. When the boat of colonization arrives, diseases, logging, dams, reserves, loss of biodiversity occur… he said with a silence.
– But all those things we’ve been through haven’t changed our way of thinking.

Mike explains to me that a tree is not a resource in their eyes, but a living being in its own right that will feed and shelter them.

– Look, he says! As he approaches a pine tree.
Using a wooden stick, Mike pricks the trunk, extracts a small translucent marble and hands it to me. As I put it to my lips, I can taste the wild taste of the sap.
– A natural antibiotic,” he says. Today, we cut the sap that rises in the tree, this is not an innate value! If you overexploit, nature will respond…

Like most natives, Mike is aware of the catastrophic impact of human actions on the ecosystem. I listen to him, wondering if it is still possible to curb this dynamic, when all the climate emergency indicators are in the red.
The system of overexploitation does not slow down, the governments continue their “work in the dark”, deaf and

blind to the imminent chaos announced.

– The Northern territories are the lungs of the planet¹⁵One of the “lungs of the Earth”, as the Amazon was called, has just been stripped of this title after the disastrous deforestation policy of the Brazilian government. The boreal forest is in danger, climate change threatens the territories. Our elders have seen the changes that have taken place around us at full speed. All these plagues are the consequences of this system. For us, indigenous people, the Earth is sacred. It is our matrix, the one that provides for all our needs…

I nodded my head. Every day that passed, we were getting closer and closer to the entropy that the scientists had announced with great fanfare. Nothing could be done about it. If the populations of the rich countries continued to live their passion of exoticism and “entertainment”, others, more vulnerable, noticed the changes which were taking place with more lucidity. Even in the midst of the Covid pandemic, tourists flocked to airports to satisfy their energy-hungry appetites, while unprecedented migratory flows were organized in total indifference.

What was obvious was this: the first peoples were much more sensitive and eco-responsible than the whole planet was. Was this to be attributed to their deep connection with the Living, to the famous spirituality that the Jesuits’ indoctrination had fought against with great force? I tried to understand and directed our conversation to animism.

«Our people have a long tradition of living with animals, and respecting the lives sacrificed to feed us,” says Mike. We are a nomadic people, we have always lived among them. We don’t kill for pleasure, we kill to survive, and even today, the catching of game is an important part of our livelihood.»

– Could you describe briefly your beliefs?
– To offer food to the spirits, fire, water, air… For us, the Spirit is the All, the great positive energy. Manitou, the great spirit is Tshishe Manitu and Milu Manitu represents the spirit of good things. For every animal there is a great spirit. There is the Great Spirit of water, that of the hares, the fish, the turtle, which is called “mishta manitu massinak” in dialect. There is also “masishik, the Great Spirit of the Air, which is the eagle, and “Mishta Manitu Matishuen”, the one who flies the highest and transmits prayers to the Creator.

I learn that each spirit plays a role, including the deer flies, intermediaries between the aquatic and terrestrial worlds. Among the natives, there is no border between the visible and invisible worlds. All living things are sacred, born of a vital principle that animates the entire universe. The circle is not just a simple geometric figure, it is the sacred circle of life, both in actions and thoughts.

– Putting your hands on the tree is medicine, it is also thanking nature for keeping the circle alive.

Mike tells us that after hanging a caribou head on the tree, the teueikan player would thank the spirit of the animal.

Beating the drum is part of the ritual to ask for favors, obtain visions of hunting, medicine, survival. By beating the drum, the player addresses the Great Man, the mediator connected with the world of dreams, who will address the master of the animals and transmit visions. There are also specific objects of divination such as bones, like scapulomancy.

– Ut nikan meshkanu” (the path of the shoulder blade) literally means those who burn caribou or moose shoulder blades. The striations that appear on the burned bones are supposed to suggest specific locations on maps…

As night fell, the moose was heard again… Everyone fell silent. Mike gently opened the door and rubbed the shoulder blades of a specimen of the same species against the fence, imitating the sound of plumes on the trees in the forest.

This is an ancient hunting technique, as is the “moose caller”, a call made of birch bark rolled up to make a bullhorn and imitate the sound of bulls. The whole team is on the alert, we are careful not to make any more noise in the cabin… In a few hours, Mike and Dany will leave and there is no question of being spotted.

We go to bed quickly. Like the first night, Mike and Benoît took turns getting up to put logs back in the stove. Lulled by the crackling of the fire, I was dozing, watching the first light of the day through the window.

Dany and Mike went hunting again at dawn… In the early morning, I heard the wolf packs in the distance and ventured into the woods by the lake. The information Mike had given me was correct. The logging roads the last of the deer herds.

While researching on the net,I’d read reports here and there stating that logging doesn’t cause deforestation – an erroneous assertion, given that clear-cutting continues at breakneck speed.

The truth? As I write these lines, everything is methodically swept away under the passage of industrial felling machines and the new shoots are no longer the mother trees of the forest but malignant clones replanted in a hurry…

They came back at the stroke of ten o’clock, partridges in hand.

– Are there still caribou in Nitassinan?
– There are only a few thousand left in Quebec…

Listed as a threatened species in 2002, woodland caribou have seen their habitat disappear in favour of the exploitation of their natural resources: forests and fossil fuels. In March 2020, the last seven Val-d’Or caribou were captured and placed in enclosures… There has been no plan to protect the herd or the habitat of the woodland caribou, but there has been a significant advance in the expansion of logging in the name of economic expansion. But in 2023, Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbault¹⁶https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/guilbeault-calls-for-decree-to-protect-caribou-in-quebec-1.6262150 has recommended that his government introduce a decree to better protect caribou in Quebec¹⁷https://globalnews.ca/news/9076466/quebec-caribou-population-endangered/. Remember that the Charlevoix (16 animals), Val-d’Or

(7 animals) and Gaspé (35 animals) herds are on the edge of extinction…

The objectives of governments and their representatives, aficionados of “Economic Development” – an old slogan inherited from the industrial revolution – have not changed despite all the recommendations of environmental and climate specialists.

In spite of the “siren song”, we risk, like all species threatened with extinction, to be part of the list… At the COP26, a hundred world leaders announced their “desire” to stop deforestation in 2030, by which time our world will literally be dead.

When I asked Mike what message he wanted to send to the planet, Mike’s smile tightened. He let a few seconds pass before letting go,

– The caribou are dying because of climate change, it affects our people a lot because they are attached to this particular animal. This is a sign that we cannot miss. The Amazon and the great north with the boreal forest, are being suffocated by the great fires and massive exploitation. The fires in California and British Columbia have brought smog to New York and it has been felt in Montreal…

I was nodding my head. That day, the sky was hazy, the sun had a sort of sinister halo. The air was unbreathable, the temperatures extreme… No one could deny the effects of global warming and its impact on our environment.

– We are caught in a very critical climate crisis, we will have to learn to survive, Mike replied.

– Let’s observe, let’s watch, let’s see how things evolve… We have to act quickly, make islands of greenery, organic, adapt to the indoor culture.
Then after a while, he murmured,
– We’re going to do local permaculture, we’re going to put it on an island.
He paused for a few seconds before telling the story,
– I’ve seen fires a kilometer wide reach an island and spread with the gusts of wind… We need to create barriers to control forest fires, specialized teams, and above all stop massive exploitation.

These were the last words of our interview. They sounded like a stern warning, coming from a thousand years of ancestral experience.

The news was full of events that proved him right. The report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was pessimistic. This past summer in 2021, heat waves set off fires across the globe. The thawing of the tundra has released greenhouse gases, northern Siberia is in flames, fires have ravaged the Mediterranean, the United States, Canada… The smoke has darkened the sky, causing the earth’s surface to cool1.
Floods, storms, tornadoes intensified by deforestation and fires, this is what our future was made of…
– But we are used to survive. It’s in our genes. In winter, in the forest, in the Saguenay, we have the valley of the ghosts, up to six feet of snow… If you fall in a ski-doo, you die, buried, by great cold.

I nod with my eyes. I keep dreaming that a change will take place, that the tree cutters will become guardians of the forest, as the natives were, are and always will be – despite the forced instrumentalization of many communities in forestry.

An unlikely wish during a Covid pandemic that, let’s remember, comes after the burning of wastelands by Amazon farmers encouraged by Jair Bolsonaro. As for the oil majors1 based in Canada, their objective continues to be devoid of any realism: a 30% increase in production by 2030, without any detailed plan for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions,

as noted at the climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland…
Of course, the detractors will continue their disinformation and greenwashing, but whatever happens, the permafrost will release super-resistant bacteria such as anthrax1, which resides under the pockets of methane that it shelters…
And no one will be able to survive it.

I look at the sky, contemplate the stars, look for the satellites, this thread that weaves itself above our heads like a spider’s web, to transmit planetary information to us at full speed, wondering about its utility.

With the advancement of technology, our knowledge has doubled. This is not the case of our intelligence quotient. It even seems that our brains have shrunk¹⁸Référence du psychiatre Iain Mc Gilchrist https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/neuroscientist-argues-the-left-side-of-our-brains-have-taken-over-our-minds-1.6219688, and that we are using our left brain excessively, at the expense of an almost inactive right brain hemisphere.

The fact is that we had lost our imagination, our clairvoyance, our empathy to become as mechanical and efficient as a colony of cassava ants. In Guadeloupe, during a previous report, I remembered having seen them carrying the forest on their backs, dragging even the smallest leaf in their underground galleries, without leaving anything on their way. This species was called “invasive species”.

Since this article was written, mining claims have sprung up like mushrooms in Quebec, and major fires have multiplied in Quebec and British Columbia. Mike’s fears about climate change have unfortunately been confirmed, as the heat and drought of May have made it easier for fires to start…

The impact of forest fires prompted Mashk Assi20, and the Atikamekw collective Ekoni Aci, to organize two blockades to stop logging on their traditional territory.

At the end of May 2023, they blocked access to forestry machinery and vehicles on a road at kilometer 216 of Route 175, campaigning to stop logging north of Réserve faunique des Laurentides and in the Lac Kénogami watershed. They demanded their departure from an unceded ancestral territory and called for a moratorium on logging and mining on Nitassinan.

The Collectif Mashk Assi denounced the destruction of Nitassinan and the Petapan treaty negotiated between Ottawa, Quebec and three band councils.21, denouncing the Quebec government’s mercenary involvement, without consulting the territory’s guardians, and its responsibility for the forest fires.

A few figures:
226,988 forestry workers
nationally in 2019.
4.8 billion dollars, 1,700 companies, 6,000 workers¹⁹figures put forward by Jean-François Samray, CEO of the Conseil de l’industrie forestière in 2020.