“The People of bark”
The Atikamekw are an aboriginal people of Quebec, living in the heart of the Mauricie and Lanaudière regions. Their name, literally “lake whitefish”, this fish caught in the Great Lakes region, but the French colonists nicknamed them “Têtes-de-Boules”, a reference to the bonnet that tightened around the skulls of newborn babies.
The Atikamekw nation extends over three bands, three reserves – Manawan, Obedjiwan and Wemotaci – where Atikamekw, a language of the Algonquian family, and French are spoken.
Before the arrival of Europeans, they lived as semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, moving through Nitaskinan1literally “Our land”, their ancestral territory located in the forested regions of Quebec; a territory of 80,000 km2.
The Atikamekw have a sacred bond with the forest, and are known to have been the first to harvest sap from the trunks of maple trees.
Initially, each family occupied a specific territory in Nitaskinan, where they could carry out the hunting, trapping, fishing and gathering activities necessary for their subsistence.
The first contacts with the French took place in the 17th century, in the heart of the boreal forest of the upper Mauricie. Trade relations with the Europeans began with the fur trade, in particular the exchange of beaver pelts for European products. There were four trading posts on the territory in the XIXth century.
When missionaries arrived on the territory, they evangelized them and banished their traditional culture, while acting as intermediaries with the government in the establishment of reserves, sedentarizing them to protect them from the logging operations that were invading the region. The following years saw the introduction of forced
assimilation policies3 1932 sending children to native boarding schools. The ethnocide commited during this period broke the perpetuation of traditional knowledge, shattering the elders’ unbroken chain of knowledge. Their spirituality and cultural identity were replaced by Western values. The result will be irreversible amnesia for generations to come.
In 1970s, the Atikamekw began to assert their rights. After years of lobbying to protect their territorial rights and the management of the resources of their ancestral territory, they are now deeply involved in the recognition of their territorial sovereignty and ancestral rights.
Promoting their ancestral culture through tourism activities, they take part in the management and sustainable development of their region, and oppose the massive deforestation of their territory through concrete actions in the field.