Place and Belonging

My interest in the urban dimension of Indigenous society has drawn my attention to the diversity of Indigenous experiences in world cities and, for the most part, how they rework many of the common assumptions associated with autochthony and, therefore, the human experience of place, Indigeneity and belonging. In my ANTH444 course International Indigenism class I push this interest further through introducing students to the provocative literature on different historical and political forms of ‘autochthonous belonging’ from Africa to frame discussion of settler claims to Indigenous or Aboriginal status in Siberia, Scotland, Japan, New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere.

Hunting: On Ritual, Memory and Subsistence: As a case study, I am using the idea and debate over autochthony to frame on-going ethnographic fieldwork with a well-known (non-Aboriginal) traditional bowhunter in northern Quebec (in and around Matagami/James Bay). I currently spend one month of the year (May/June) with this hunter, hunting black bear. To begin this research, I have had to learn, over the last five years, as an apprentice, how to hunt myself. Beyond the challenges associated with learning to live in the bush for extended periods and coping with the physical demands of hunting bear at very close quarters, I have also had to take and pass my firearms and hunting exams. Currently, I am taking courses on how to shoot a traditional bow in order to gain my bowhunting license. In terms of research, while I find myself asking some of the more obvious questions of modern day hunting practices such as human-animal interactions, hunter-landscape relations and the social relationships that a hunter negotiates in terms of meat-sharing practices with friends and relations in their home community, I am also struck by the phenomenology of hunting and how its experiential qualities open up quite seamlessly into questions of place and belonging. Further I am intrigued by the role that memory, ritual and subsistence plays in the biography of this particular hunter and how these facets of his experience continually retreat back into deeper conversations about the historical complexity of social and political relationships in northern Quebec. I believe my ambition with this project lies in the area of oral history and a book project that would address some of the principal tensions which pervade James Bay Cree – Settler relations, especially in how this hunter embodies, in provocative and unexpected ways, the confrontation between life lived on the land and the imagined geography of the North reproduced in popular Quebecois narratives.