The Potential for Culturally–Embedded Environmental Preservation Through Ecotourist

Home , Atikamekw, Manawan, Nitaskinan

The Potential for Culturally–Embedded Environmental Preservation through Ecotourist

Interfaces in Manawan, Quebec

Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the

Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Benjamin Paul Mertus, B.A.

Graduate Program in Anthropology

The Ohio State University

2020

Thesis Committee:

Anna Willow, Advisor

Sean Downey

Nick Kawa

Benjamin Paul Mertus

2020

Abstract

The dynamic cultural state of many First Nations communities in the face of heavily assimilationist historical relationships with Canada often engenders an environment of cultural and environmental uncertainty among members of those communities. This paper explores the potential of ecotourism and affiliated cultural transmission practices towards cultural and environmental self-determination. Through participant observation in the

First Nations community of Manawan, Quebec, considered from four positionalities in addition to tourist survey administration and the collection of semi-structured interview data, this article suggests that the continuation of ecotourism in Manawan supports cultural and environmental preservation as long as it continues to operate on a self– determined basis.

Dedication

Dedicated to the community of Manawan and all of the people I had the privilege of meeting during my fieldwork.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my Advisor, Anna Willow, for her continued support and guidance as well as my committee members, Nick Kawa and Sean Downey, for their time and comments on the initial draft of this manuscript. Thank you to my department of anthropology at OSU for funding my fieldwork through the Larsen Travel Award and helping me prepare through classwork and thoughtful discussion. Thank you to my family (Mom, Sam, and

Kate) and to my fiancé, Bekah for their constant support. And finally, thank you to Patrick, and every other community member and tourist I met at Manawan for their hospitality, help, and perspectives over the summer.

Vita

2014...... Corning East High School

2018...... B. A. Anthropology, SUNY Brockport

2018 – Present...... GTA, Department of Anthropology, Ohio State

Fields of Study

Major Field: Anthropology

Table of Contents

Abstract...... ii

Dedication...... iii

Acknowledgements...... iv

Vita...... vii

Introduction...... 1

Section 1: Ontological Divergences...... 4

Section 2: The Assimilation of First Nations by the Canadian State...... 12

Section 3: Manawan through my eyes and through the eyes of those who call it “home”....26

Section 4: Methods and Results...... 36

Section 5: Discussion...... 59

References...... 66

Appendix: Survey Questions...... 71

List of Figures

Figure 1: Atikamekw forest...... 27

Figure 2: My tent dwarfed by one of the smaller tipis...... 29

Figure 3: Lake from Matakan in the morning (left) and evening (right) ...... 30

Figure 4: The author and a rez dog...... 32

Figure 5: Matakan fire pit...... 38

Figure 6: Fish (mostly walleye) caught by the guides and tourists...... 48

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Introduction

During the summer of 2019, I traveled to the Atikamekw Community of Manawan,

Quebec, in order to collect data relating to the cross-cultural effects of ecotourism on environmental perception. I was interested in doing work at Manawan because of the presence of the burgeoning ecotourism programs developed by the Tourisme Manawan organization in addition to the cross-cultural differences between Manawan’s residents and tourists frequenting the community (generally from Quebec and French-speaking

European nations). However, conditional uncertainty in my field setting caused by IRB restrictions allowed me to collect data directly from only six tourists during my time at

Manawan using my initial research design. Because of this, the research focus of this project shifted significantly from what was expected at the outset, a common occurrence in ethnographic undertakings (Agar 2004, 2006). The combination of the cancellation of a week of tourism programs to make time for “Projet Matakan” (more on this below), a lack of adult tourists participating in the program during my time there, and a shortage of time to complete research on my part resulted in difficult conditions for carrying out my initial research. Nonetheless, the data collected from these tourists will be recounted and explored in section six.

What initially appeared to be a project-ending lack of data, though, opened another door for ethnographic investigation. Instead of spending my time in the field chiefly with tourists, much of my time ended up being spent with Atikamekw members of Manawan, especially children aged 11 – 17 and elders over 50. This was because my first week of fieldwork was spent at a camp for Atikamekw youths, “Projet Matakan”, aimed at cultural transmission from elders to these youths. This camp took place at Matakan, the usual site of

ecotourist engagement, and was run by the Tourisme Manawan organization, the ecotourism group I collaborated with to collect my research data. While this event made my initial research question more difficult to answer, it presented a novel opportunity for new research questions related to cultural and environmental preservation to be explored.

Most prominently, spending time with Atikamekw elders and youth made me wonder about intergenerational cultural shifts within the community in the face of a quickly changing, continuously globalizing world. One quote by an associate of Tourisme Manawan highlights the situation clearly; “the children these days don’t grow up in the same way that we used to. That is why we have to have this camp – to get them exposed to our culture.”

With this dynamic cultural state at the forefront of the investigation, I raise the question: “can ecotourism lead to cultural preservation in a dynamic, postcolonial context such as Canada?” And, in the same vein as my previous research question, I ask “might this cultural preservation through ecotourism lead to environmental preservation in a local context?” Instead of focusing mainly on the cross-cultural environmental implications of ecotourism as I initially planned, this research considers how ecotourism, alongside other cultural transmission mechanisms, leads to reinforced cultural identities among the

Atikamekw and, by extension, environmental preservation as a phenomenon nested within cultural preservation. Several of these terms are loaded in that they have different meanings in different contexts (even among seemingly culturally homogenous groups), namely “environment” and “cultural preservation” which are often conceived of differently among First Nations peoples and Canadian stakeholders. These conceptual differences get at the heart of why ecotourism has such a high potential for eco-cultural good as long as it is carried out through largely self-determined means at the local level. The specificities of

these culturally specific terminologies and their historical and future collisions will be made more clear in the body of this work. Finally and importantly, this paper should be seen as transitory, as my time in Manawan generated far more questions than it did answers. Further research in the form of a doctoral dissertation will be needed to more clearly understand the cross cultural implications of ecotourism in addition to the inter– scalar environmental applications of such cultural transmission practices.

Section one of this paper outlines divergences between Atikamekw (and subarctic

First Nations in general) understandings of the natural environment and Western understandings of it. Understanding how “environment” is conceived of in different cultural contexts is a cornerstone to understanding how humans in these contexts interact with other–than–human beings. Section two recounts an abridged history of the relationships between First Nations groups and the Canadian state. This background is important for establishing the context of the Atikamekw in the modern era in the face of a long, assimilationist relationship with Canada, impacting First Nations in a variety of ways.

Section three introduces Manawan as a research setting in more detail through the eyes of this outsider (and several other etic and emic voices) Section four presents the methods I used to collect my field data and section five will outline my results from the positionalities

I had the privilege of briefly experiencing. In closing, I present a discussion of my findings, weighing the effects of ecotourism and other cultural transmission methods towards cultural and environmental preservation. I will also highlight potential research futures generated from the gaps in this study.

Section 1: Ontological Divergences

Considering that the ultimate goal of this research is to discover novel ways of living responsibly in the Anthropocene, a comprehension of the theoretical background of this project is essential in order to understand what links this project to wider conservation efforts. Coexisting with other living nonhumans in a sustainable way using the framework of the Anthropocene is a currently an important topic in anthropology (Fuentes 2019,

Haraway 2016, Kawa 2016, Tsing 2015). This topic is broad and has given rise to many avenues of research. This work attempts to add to this burgeoning field of research on the whole while filling the more specific niche of ecotourism as a driver of sustainability in our new epoch.

With this assertion on the table, though, several questions may arise in the reader’s mind. What is so important about First Nations groups in relation to the environment? Why go to the community of Manawan for research? Why study ecotourism? Answers to all of these questions are couched in the differences between Canadian subarctic indigenous peoples’ understandings of their place in the natural environment and those of dominant

Canadian society. As an important disclaimer to this section, theoretical statements are often sweeping, without allowing much space for divergence. Because of the heterogeneity of cultural groups, there will always be individuals who refuse to fit sections of theoretical molds thrust upon them. Every person is different, and this diversity should be kept at the forefront of the reader’s mind while perusing this manuscript (Abu – Lughod 1991). As a friend in Manawan told me, “I am just a meme of my culture.” Every person embodies his or her culture in a slightly different way.

Environmentalism in the Western, Canadian context is different from environmentalism among First Nations groups. In fact, the construction of “the environment” as an entity separate from humanity is a Western concept that can be traced back to classical antiquity. Plato theorized that all natural living and nonliving beings were in various degrees of “completeness”, later introducing a hierarchy, “scala naturae”, in accordance with his perception of the complexity of their souls (Holy–Luczaj 2015).

Humans were, of course, at the top of this hierarchy until medieval philosophers placed the heavenly host and Christian god above humanity, but this anthropocentric schema influenced Western thought for generations (Lovejoy 1936). Even though the idea of scala naturae contrasts the Darwinian understanding of non – progressionist evolution that the vast majority of scientists accept today, the underpinnings of the Great Chain of Being continue to crop up in a staggeringly large number of peer – reviewed articles (Rigato and

Minelli 2013). Specifically, Rigato and Minelli (2013) used a database to search for what they termed “scale naturae language” (language referring to “higher” and “lower” or “more complex” and “less complex” organisms) in scientific journals and found that 1,287 of

67,413 articles used such terminology. In terms of percentage of total frequency, this number seems low (1.9%), but when one considers the readership of these articles, the impact is considerably higher than at first glance. It is easy to imagine, then, that an anthropocentric understanding of the relationship between humans and nonhumans continuously manifests itself in Western contexts.

Beyond the Great Chain of Being, the origins of capitalism as a global behemoth and its interactions with state entities hugely influenced the relationship between humans and nonhumans. With the rise of capitalism came the conception of “fictitious commodities”

(Polanyi 1945) – things like land and labor that were initially embedded in society, but became separate entities that could be traded and altered at will in accordance with the rules of the market. Without the protection of the state to regulate the supply and demand of the market, people and the environment were left vulnerable to transformation into various forms of capital (Polanyi 1945). However, the free market liberalism that dictates many Western nations does not allow the state to intervene significantly with the structures of the global market. Even among the states with more stringent laws to protect people and the environment against capitalism, the paradigm of the state towards simplification for ease of policy implementation transforms how humans understand nonhuman beings (Scott 1998). From an early time in European colonial contact with the

Americas (Cronon 2003) strands of forest, riverine systems, sandy shores, and complex webs of beings living in all of these habitats become classified under terms that refer to their commoditization such as, “timber”, “beachfront”, “livestock”, and “resource” in general (Crist 2013). Because of the pervasiveness of market structures in our lives in addition to a Western intellectual lineage privileging humans over other forms of life, many people in the West maintain an anthropocentric understanding of their relationship with the rest of the world.

Historical and contemporary factors have caused First Nations communities to have a different conceptual relationship with the environment than humans brought up in a

Western context. This is not to say that many of the same geopolitical factors (particularly global capitalism) have impacted First Nations communities, however, these impacts have not detracted from an ontological understanding of human – environmental relations that diverges from the West. First Nations peoples, and many indigenous groups in general,

conceptualize the environment in an entirely different way from the anthropocentric, hierarchical notions of the west. Instead of viewing a world of human– made structures where humans have dominion over other living and nonliving environmental components, many indigenous peoples see themselves as a component of the web of life where other beings are “selves” of equal importance to humans (Descola 2013)(Hallowell 1975). It is because of the egalitarian nature of the relationship between Canadian subarctic First

Nations peoples and all of the plants, animals, and abiotic features in their environmental context that I use the term “other-than-human” to describe these other selves – beings that are not human but see the world similarly to how a human sees the world.

This relationship is particularly prevalent in the hunting activities of First Nations peoples. While hunting, indigenous peoples of the Canadian subarctic conceptualize the animals being hunted as conscious entities at the same level of being as humans

(Brightman 1993). Nadasdy (2007) argues that, because of this, hunting relationships between indigenous peoples and other animals should be considered to be social relationships in the same way that humans interacting with other humans are thought of as social in Western ontology. The different ontology that many First Nations peoples have at the foundation of their lived experience is, then, quite different from many dominant

Western modes of being and relating to others. Because this ontology is one that bestows humanlike agency on other animals (and nonliving environmental features in many contexts), it impacts the ways that First Nations peoples interact with other beings, creating a setting of general environmental respect.

Importantly, “environmental respect” as it is conceived in First Nations communities is also different from the environmental respect of many Western conservation groups. For

several decades, conservation efforts in the United States, for example, have operated under the assumption that the natural landscapes worth preserving represent “untouched” environments that should be kept as pristine as possible for as long as possible to avoid destabilization (Folke 2006). This paradigm has historically resulted in mixed conservation results and removal of indigenous communities from areas of conservation efforts (Stevens

2014). While such environmental preservation efforts are being revised in favor of a resilience paradigm that acknowledges the role of humans in social–ecological system stability (Folke 2006), the idea that humans are uniquely separate from nature persists in the Western conservation mindset. Differences in environmental respect do not correlate with a deficiency of environmental responsibility among indigenous groups, however. In fact, local communities are often more concerned with using resources sustainably in addition to having a better understanding of ecological relations in their communities compared to the monolithic entities generally employed to do these things in Western, bureaucratic contexts (Brosius et al 1998).

These different understandings of the environment are relevant to ecotourism because indigenous peoples are often unfairly essentialized as “natural” beings on the side of nature in the human-nature divide (De La Cadena 2010) or painted as “ecologically noble savages” that are untouched by dominant society and use traditional practices to live off the land (Hames 2007) (Smithers 2015). It is important to understand that these caricatures of First Nations peoples are not only a contemporary projection of colonial domination through the process of crafting the “other” (Abu-Lughod 1991), but are dangerous to self-determination when paying tourists expect to see the exotic and disappointed when they do not. Because of the power of capital, ecotourism actually has

the potential to alter cultural practices rather than preserving the host’s agency of self- determination. Ecotourism, then, can become another tool of cultural domination if tourist exoticism becomes rampant.

Nevertheless, many of the environmental relationships that I observed among residents of Manawan were construed differently than ideal relationships under the

Western conservation paradigm. After speaking with several people, it seemed to me that understandings of the environment in Manawan were inexorably wrapped up in the cultural identity of being Atikamekw. One of the major catalysts of this environmental understanding and a foil to the separation of humans and nature in the West is the

Atikamekw language, which is still commonly spoken among the majority of the population. One informant told me that an elder told her, “if you ever feel like you don’t know your culture, look to your language because we put everything in there.” Atikamekw as a language is largely iconically descriptive (Kohn 2013), linking words for objects with specific characteristics defining those objects or with other concepts that are importantly linked to them. In an example of this, otehimin, strawberry in English, is literally translated to “heart shaped fruit”. In a more metaphorically complex example, the term, notimek, is the

Atikamekw word for forest, and it is literally translated as “where my blood runs from”. In my Western mind, the word “forest” evokes a large patch of trees meeting one another to create a green landscape, but the Atikamekw meaning of the word is deeper in that it refers to the forest and everything else in it. Notimek, then, does refer to the trees, but it also refers to all of the rocks, water, mammals, birds, fish, and community of Manawan within the realm of the forest. The holism of the term allows the speaker to link the concepts of

“home” and “forest” with one another, solidifying the ideological unity of nature and culture.

In addition to this, the relationship between the people of Manawan and the land itself diverges from Western notions of land ownership and understanding. Part of the reason for this is that the descriptive elements of the Atikamekw language extend to their naming of places, tying historical events to these places. For instance, on one of my days off, some of the guides took me on a motorboat to Iroquois Island, a small island in the middle of Lac

Manouane covered in trees that was named for the Iroquois warriors who were tied up there and left to die. On the way back to Manawan during this trip, one of my companions for the day pointed towards a group of foothills at the edge of the lake and asked me what I thought they looked like. I told him that I thought it looked like a woman lying on her back, and he confirmed that the name in Atikamekw for this landscape feature, indeed, translated literally to what I saw on the horizon. Later that day, we passed through a small channel between two lakes where we stopped to admire a strand of trees where one of the guides spotted a massive moose last winter, but failed to shoot it. Much like Basso (1996) found during his fieldwork with the Western Apache, places for the Atikamekw are understood to have personal and historical meanings that are often wrapped up in place names. The link between place knowledge and an understanding of collective and personal history is by no means a uniquely subarctic First Nations trait, but I was struck by the differences between the names I saw on the map for geographical features and the Atikamekw names for those features. For instance, a common occurrence in the Western tradition is to name features after individuals, which is something I noticed quite frequently (Lac Kempt, Lac Champlain,

Lac Napoleon). This contrasts significantly with the Atikamekw names for such features,

which were more often related to historical events that happened at those places or the physical appearance of the landscape.

This difference is significant because the names for these places are not just identities, they are important cultural ties linking people across generations and encouraging community cohesion. One day, after breakfast on Matakan, I noticed that one of my friends from Manawan was poring over a map of Nitaskinan with an elder. I asked her what they were doing, and she told me that she was talking with the elder to try to figure out if he knew any names for places that had otherwise been forgotten among the community. She told me that this was important, because having names for places in the territory would help the Atikamekw nation to argue for its sovereignty over the land in the continuous fight for independence from the Quebecois state. In this way, not only are place names collective markers of cultural identity in a community surrounded on all sides by people with different names for those places (or no names at all), they are indicators of intergenerational memory and proof of residency that goes back for numerous generations.

Knowing the names of places attributes unique identities to those places, setting up a defense against the homogenization of the land by state agencies and resource extraction companies that just see natural resources.

Section 2: The Assimilation of First Nations by the Canadian State

In order to more fully understand the situation of the Atikamekw (as well as other

First Nations societies in Canada with the cultural and environmental resources necessary to implement ecotourist programs) it is necessary to understand some of the history between the state and its indigenous residents. This is a history of separation, assimilation, and gradual cultural genocide, which the government officially apologized for in 2008, though; the aftershocks of irresponsible and outright immoral legislation continue to exist solidly today (Reimer 2010).

Canada’s historical dealings with First Nations groups are understood here through the lens of identity alteration of subalterns by the dominant structures of society, namely, the socio–political body of the state and the commodity–fetishizing market. This is particularly important to the topic at hand of ecotourism as a cultural, economic, and environmental preserver because it provides a scalar foil for what ecotourism might be for certain communities. While the market and the state encourage action from the top down

(either because of market interests or state solidarity) ecotourism encourages community cultural independence because it is this cultural uniqueness that attracts tourists to programs. Of course, when this cultural uniqueness becomes a prerequisite for tourist engagement, there is always the danger of host cultural embellishment for the sake of the tourists as described above (Boswell 2005) (Stronza 2008). However, ecotourism when established on a self-determined basis and strengthened by other cultural mechanisms stands a better chance of combating exoticism. Regardless, the scope of indigenous-

Canadian relations will be laid out to provide a historical context through which to

understand the dynamics between First Nations groups and Western outsiders that are ever-present whether or not ecotourism is directly involved.

Pre European Contact:

“We, Atikamekw Nehirowisiw, maintain our sovereignty over Nitaskinan, territory bequeathed by our ancestors since time immemorial” (The Atikamekw Nation 2014). Such is the opening statement of the Atikamekw Nation’s declaration of sovereignty over their ancestral land in the face of a Quebecois government unready to acknowledge it. The

Atikamekw creation story tells of how Muskrat dove into the water, bringing up a single piece of earth for the rest of the animals and sacrificing his life in the process. As the Great

Hare expanded that piece of earth, many animals ventured out to find their territories in the new land, ultimately dying. It is from the corpses of these animals that the Great Hare raised humans, giving them to different clans (Tourisme Manawan 2020). Because the

Atikamekw Nation has inhabited sections of their ancestral land from time immemorial, it is difficult to provide a history of the significant happenings to the nation pre-European contact. There is, however, an understanding of what life was like for the early Atikamekw in addition to other indigenous groups inhabiting what is now Quebec. The Atikamekw primarily hunted, trapped, and fished for their food, using the hides of animals and wood from the forest to craft various cultural materials. In addition to this, Atikamekw people pioneered the transformation of maple sap into maple syrup, and would commonly tap maple trees to manufacture syrup during the spring (Petiquay 2009). These ancestral, land

- based activities have been important for the people for many generations, and are many of the same practices that are currently carried out in the communities of the Atikamekw nation today, despite attempts at assimilation by the Canadian state (Tourisme Manawan

2020).

Post Contact: The Numbered Treaties (1871 – 1921)

While this point in Canadian – Indigenous history is not first chronologically, it does represent the first deed of Canadian land solidification at the expense of Indigenous sovereignty after the Crown Lands Protection Act of 1839 gave the Canadian government control of all lands once watched over by the British (AANDC 2013). Just four years after

Canadian dependence, the Canadian state sought to solidify its territories, establishing

Canadian sovereignty and opening up lands for settlement and exploitation of natural resources. This goal resulted in a series of 11 new treaties during the fifty-year period from

1871 – 1921, which saw massive land cessions by First Nations groups in exchange for payment by the state. The government land cessions had two objectives: to widely settle the southern lands of Canada directly north of the CA-USA border, and to extract natural resources that were plentiful in the north of the new nation (AANDC 2013). Inherent in the treaties were clauses that ensured continual use of the land by indigenous groups for hunting, fishing, and gathering as well as annual monetary and material reparations, however, these reparations came with several important drawbacks. For instance, these reparations included the construction of new schools and hiring of teachers to educate children on reserves as well as farming equipment with the goal of pushing nomadic

groups towards a sedentary lifestyle of agriculture and Western education (AANDC 2013).

It was during this fifty-year period, then, that Canada (as a sovereign nation, at least) first saw the systematic governmental relegation of First Nations groups from their ancestral lands to much smaller reserves.

Even though the Atikamekw never officially signed a treaty with the government, the numbered treaties are still significant for understanding the history of Canadian cultural genocide of the First Nations peoples because they represent a paradox that creeps up over and over again in the dealings between the two groups. This paradox is the simultaneous othering/assimilation of Indigenous peoples that keeps their vast majority in a legal no-man’s land, falsely promising them a better life if they go along with state mandates. In the case of the numbered treaties, this paradox occurs because it encourages

Indigenous groups to adopt Western practices like sedentarism, agriculture, and

Christianity while making sure that any rights associated with the treaties in favor of

Indigenous people are reserved solely for legally registered Indians. This practice created the myth of the “treaty Indian” in Canada, wherein First Nation membership and Canadian citizenry were seen as mutually exclusive and only the former received treaty rights

(Starblanket 2019). This falsely sharp dichotomy between “Indian and non-Indian” became a problem, especially when an increased number of children born to parents of each category had to choose their designation, eschewing the rights of the other group. The numbered treaties, then, provide the first of many examples of a state body with specific goals that violate the needs of First Nations people as culturally unique individuals, goals with actions impacting the Atikamekw nation for decades, despite their avoidance of those treaties.

The Indian Act (1876)

While the numbered treaties are more symbolically significant to the rights of the

Atikamekw as an example of state dominance, the Indian Act represents a historical piece of legislation that directly impacted the aboriginal group. One of the more infamous pieces of legislation passed by the Canadian government regarding indigenous assimilation; The

Indian Act solidified many of the previous indigenous regulations into a single body, granting the state more explicit power in their control of First Nations affairs. The Act allowed the Canadian state to make sweeping decisions on internal issues faced by indigenous communities in addition to controlling the flow of natural resources and goods

(AANDC 2013). The Indian Act was enacted under the pretense that the Canadian state saw itself as the “guardian” of First Nations groups; watching over them and creating policies that would encourage their transition from “primitive” lifestyles to modern Canadian ones.

It is from this assimilationist rhetoric that the majority of laws passed related to indigenous

–Canadian relations over the past 150 years were drawn.

The Indian Act itself was amended scores of times between its enactment and the middle of the 20th century with this rhetoric at its heart, allowing the state to gradually tighten its control over indigenous affairs (AANDC 2013). Examples of amendments that led to heightened governmental control included the implementation of a bureaucratic system of band councils that governed individual communities with the final and most important vote on any decision coming from the state-issued Indian agent. The legal term

“enfranchisement” was also introduced under the Indian Act, referring to the government issued right of Canadian citizenship and the ability to vote to indigenous individuals. As

mentioned above, it was inconceivable to the Canadian state that members of First Nations communities could hold Indigenous-Canadian hybrid identities, so the act of enfranchisement represented the abolishment of any rights associated with legal Indian status in lieu of Canadian rights. Enfranchisement often happened against the will of the individual, as an 1880 amendment caused every First Nations member to obtain a college degree to become automatically enfranchised (AANDC 2013). These amendments as well as numerous other Indian Act laws further threatened the cultural sovereignty of First

Nations peoples.

It was under the Indian Act that First Nations peoples, including the Atikamekw, were settled onto reservation communities (Flammand 2013). This specific action by the state is thought of especially negatively among members of Manawan that I spoke with.

Flammand (2013) called the Indian Act “an act of injustice” in his film. Moreover, one elder that I interviewed considered reservation living to be one of the primary antagonists against the continuation of the Atikamekw way of life because of the related land minimization. When I asked him about changes in environmental respect among younger generations in Manawan, he expressed to me that he thought it was more difficult to respect the environment while constrained to a small amount of land. Many of the longstanding practices of the Atikamekw nation require large tracts of land to accomplish successfully, which become increasingly difficult when reservation living is combined with land loss due to industry that is largely out of the control of the people in Manawan.

Considering this, it is easy to understand how cultural change is more prevalent when cultural transmission is restricted by a state – induced lack of agency.

Indian Residential Schools (1883 – 1996)

Beyond enacting legislation towards indigenous assimilation, the Canadian government took direct action towards the “civilization” of First Nations groups in a century and a half long crusade of cultural genocide. Beginning in the mid 1880’s and lasting more than a century, the Indian Residential School (IRS) system was put in place to reeducate First Nations youth across the Canadian territory with the goal of “killing the

Indian to save the man” (original quote by American Indian residential school founder

Richard H. Pratt, 1892)(Zalcman 2016). This killing was done symbolically, as First nations youths were forcibly taken from their homes and inserted into residential schools settings where they were made to be ashamed of their ancestral cultures and encouraged to adopt more common Canadian societal ways of life. After relocation, however, the trauma was only at its beginning, as children in residential schools were commonly beaten, deprived of food, and verbally and sexually abused by those in charge of the education process.

According to Miller (2004), “disease and death were ever present dangers” in the IRS system.

Besides acculturation and academic studies, the IRS education process involved the conveyance of gender – based trade knowledge such as carpentry and blacksmithing for boys and cooking and sewing for girls (MacDonald and Hudson 2012). These learned trades were all typical of servants and service workers; thus, not only were scores of thousands of First Nations children forcibly acculturated, they were installed into Canadian society as citizens of the lowest class. This trajectory from being robbed of one’s culture to entering dominant society as an underclass citizen provides more evidence for the

paradoxical assimilationist actions of the Canadian state– assimilating indigenous groups by force while othering them within a Canadian framework.

Before arriving at the community, I was unprepared to ask the residents questions relating directly to their colonial history with Canada, but the recent impacts of these relationships, particularly relating to the Indian Residential School system, bled through during multiple interactions I had with people. During a conversation I had with one man about intergenerational change, he brought up the residential school system as a recent cultural antagonist for the community, stating it as a primary reason for Manawan’s cultural transmission initiatives. Likewise, I met a woman from the community of Oka who cited the residential school system as the reason for her abusive mother and, in turn, the substance abuse problems with her siblings. Independently made videos from amateur

Atikamekw such as (Newashish 2007) (Ottawa 2009) and (Petiquay 2010) also capture the negative community sentiment toward the residential schools, portraying them as harbingers of cultural genocide.

The White Paper and Birth of the Indigenous Rights Movement(1969)

The assimilationist agenda of the Canadian government regarding First Nations inhabitants reached an extreme point in 1969 with the declaration of the White Paper. This policy put forward by the Canadian government aimed at fully abolishing the special status of indigenous peoples living in Canadian territory under the Indian Act, which the government viewed as paternalistic and unfair. The resulting action would legally transform all First Nations peoples into Canadian citizens with “equal” status to the rest of

Canadian society (AANDC 2013). This policy resulted in general frustration among

indigenous groups, as the White Paper was put forth without any consultation with First

Nations leaders at all. Nickel (2019) points out that this legal assimilation at the widest scale imaginable sowed unrest among indigenous groups because of the uncertainty of what it would entail, but provided palpable benefits for the state, which would ultimately be morally free of any responsibility to previously state-designated Indian citizens. The

Indian Act was, of course, viewed negatively by many because of the absence of self – determination for those it impacted, but abolishing Indian status completely represented a divergent response that similarly denied aboriginal agency. The White Paper was retracted quickly after it was put forward, but the impact of it resonated among indigenous groups in

Canada and even internationally, ushering forth a new wave of indigenous pride (Nickel

2019). Even though the White Paper did not have any lasting policy impacts, then, it represents an important milestone in the relationship between First Nations and the

Canadian state.

Perhaps more important than the immediate policy impacts of the White Paper, though, was its role in the birth of indigenous activists at the international level. Backlash in response to the paternalistic tone of the policy spread well beyond First Nations communities in Canada to the indigenous communities facing similar problems all around the world (Nickel 2019). While the White Paper was not solely responsible for the birth of the modern indigenous rights movement, it is seen by many as the catalyst that solidified the movement in a unified way, paving the way for indigenous organizations to effectively move into the political sphere (Miller 1989, Weaver 1981).

St. James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (1975)

Fueled in part by the nationalism sparked by the White Paper protests, a series of indigenous land claims arose during the 1970’s. The first of these was a land claim by the

St. James Bay Cree nation that resulted in a signed treaty between the government of

Quebec and the Cree (AANDC 2013). The Cree land claim was directly in response to a hydroelectric project being constructed in one of their traditional hunting areas that had not been legally ceded to the government. The Cree took the matter to court under the precedent that the Quebecois government had not consulted with the First Nation before opening the land up to development, causing the government to negotiate a treaty with the

Cree due to a governmental fear of legal cancellation of future hydroelectric development

(Peters 1992). The resulting agreement between the provincial government and the Cree resulted in the First Nation giving up nearly a million square kilometers of land for development in return for 225 million dollars of reparations over 20 years with the caveat of exclusive hunting and trapping rights on some of the land (AANDC 2013). The treaty also included an environmental regime for monitored preservation of the land alongside governmental development (Peters 1992).

In many ways, the St. James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement represented a victory for the First Nations of Canada, as the Cree nation was recognized for their land tenure and actually compensated for their cessation of land rights. However, the agreement represents many of the lingering problems related to the power dynamic between First

Nations and the Canadian government. Even though the Cree were compensated, the state still secured its rights to develop the region, and much of the language outlined in the environmental regime was obscure enough that environmental destruction of Cree land

became a problem that the Cree continuously fight against. Even though the treaty put protections in place to sustain Cree land for traditional uses, then, they have been largely ignored by Quebec and Canada if they interfere with developmental projects (Peters 1992).

While the St. James Bay agreement did represent a step forward in the interfacing between indigenous groups and the Canadian state, many of these agreements were found to be hollow when tested against the government’s capitalistic tendencies.

Bill C – 31 and the Official Governmental Apology (1985 – 2008)

After decades of criticism, the Canadian government began to attempt reparations for its many years of discrimination towards aboriginal groups. In 1985 (following a score of court challenges), the Canadian parliament passed Bill C–31, discarding several sections of the long-in-place Indian Act that were widely regarded to be unfair towards First

Nations (AANDC 2013). Chief among these were laws that caused women to lose their

“Indian” status if they married men who did not have this status in addition to laws that allowed the government to rigidly determine who could be defined as a First Nations person. Bill C–31 effectively nullified these sections of the Indian Act, allowing around

60,000 indigenous women to regain their legal status in addition to allowing First Nations communities to determine their band rosters (AANDC 2013).

In addition to this law (as well as several other governmental attempts to right their past injustices such as the implementation of National Aboriginal Day in 1996), the

Canadian state acknowledged its role in the IRS system in 1998. While schools in First

Nations communities began to undergo more extensive change in the 1970’s with a focus on culturally preservative indigenous education, the final residential school was not closed

until 1996, and the impacts of the IRS system continue to linger through today (AANDC

2013). As increasing numbers of people began to speak out about their abuses within the residential school system, the Canadian government and the churches involved in the system apologized for the damages they caused. It was not until 2007, however, that actual monetary reparations materialized from the government after a lengthy decade of negotiations between the groups. Nearly 2 billion dollars were distributed to individuals affected by the IRS over the past several decades in addition to the creation of the Indian

Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission to provide an interface for former students to share their experiences in the system (AANDC 2013) (Reimer 2010).

Staggeringly, the official apology did not come until the following year in 2008 when the government asked the injured parties for forgiveness on behalf of its historical damages.

Atikamekw Declaration of Sovereignty (2014) and Lawsuit (2019)

Following a landmark decision by the Canadian Supreme Court to grant over 1700 square kilometers of land in British Columbia to the Tsilhqot’in First Nation, the

Atikamekw nation made the decision in 2014 to declare sovereignty over their land,

Nitaskinan (CBC News 2014). The declaration states that the Atikamekw have a right to their land that has been passed down intergenerationally since time immemorial and intends to “exercise its territorial governance over the whole of Nitaskinan” both economically and politically (The Atikamekw Nation 2014). This declaration is significant because it represents a divergence from the continuous cycle of assimilation and othering that the Canadian state continues to employ towards its interactions with First Nations peoples. Perhaps most importantly, a declaration of sovereignty would give the Atikamekw

Nation rights over the extraction of their natural resources on their own terms rather than the Canadian state’s.

Beyond combating resource extraction, this sovereignty is important because, in part, there are marked differences between conceptions of land ownership and environmental relations between First Nations peoples and Canadian dominant society. Once again stemming from Platonic philosophy (Garnsey 2007), land is understood in terms of private property in most Western cultural systems, with individuals, corporations, or governmental institutions owning the rights to do what they want with the territory they legally own. Contrasting this, land ownership among the Atikamekw is historically conceived of in a more communal way, with social collectives managing certain tracts of land without any individual owning complete rights to do whatever they want with significantly sized land tracts. In one interview, an Atikamekw individual told me, “we don’t own the land, the land owns us” to refer to their relationships with their ancestral territory.

This disjuncture between the conceptions of land ownership by the state and historical land relations between the Atikamekw and Nitaskinan is characteristic of a common cross-cultural problem between First Nations peoples and the governing body of

Canada – the problem of bureaucracy and state language. According to Nadasdy (2003) the rising opportunities for First Nations to work together with Canadian institutions on a

“nation-to-nation” basis has required First Nations to utilize Western bureaucratic language to reach their goals. Inherent in this language, though, is a pattern of thinking that goes against the grain of many First Nations’ understandings of their relationships with both human and othe-than-human community members, putting them at a co-management disadvantage (Nadasdy 2003). Moreover, participating in bureaucratic relationships, while

collegial on the surface, are seen by many to solidify historical inequalities between subalterened First Nations groups and the Canadian state (Schmidt 2018) (Hall

2016)(Nadasdy 2003). By agreeing to “play by the rules of the game”, as Nadasdy (2003) puts it, First Nations communities are subconsciously taking for granted the unequal power structures that disadvantaged their communities for over a century and a half. While there are positive outcomes that can arise from working with the state on the state’s terms

(Berkes 1994), the extent to which participation with state legislature should be pursued in the future remains contentious.

Perhaps this reluctance to play by the rules of the state’s game is what caused the

Atikamekw Nation to sue Ottawa over its land claim. Most recently, in January of 2019, the

Atikamekw Nation abandoned negotiations with the government after what amounted to over 40 years of talks regarding land claims in order to wage the battle for their sovereignty in Canada’s court system (Curtis 2019). The change in tactics was born from a collective desire to stem off the increasingly rapid transformation of Nitaskinan through climate change and extractive industry invasion. Subsisting off the land is becoming increasingly difficult because of these changes, and establishing sovereignty over the land would allow Atikamekw leaders to initiate a development schema that privileges environmental conservation while benefitting the community. Moreover, gaining sovereignty over Nitaskinan would allow the Atikamekw nation to exist under its own cultural jurisdiction rather than necessitating the use of state-generated bureaucracy to govern their own people. While currently an uphill battle, the fight for sovereignty among the Atikamekw may prove to be an important step towards self–determination and self– sustainability, both goals that articulate well with ecotourism (see discussion).

Section 3: Manawan through my eyes and through the eyes of those who call it

“home”

The following section represents a collection of personal impressions from my fieldwork in Manawan in addition to some perspective from the people who live and grew up there. These impressions are meant to give the reader a sense of my experience in the community on the whole, illustrating features that I find to be important and supplementing those impressions with the impressions of those who know the community much more intimately than myself. Throughout my fieldwork, I have assumed the roles of summer camper, ecotourism volunteer, tourist, and researcher, but this section should be read as the account of an ethnographer experiencing a richly meaningful location for the first time. Recounting these perspectives also serves the purpose of highlighting personal biases to the reader in order for them to deeply consider my perspective as an imperfect conveyer of knowledge and experience. Finally, this section provides important context for understanding the setting of my data collection and the conditions under which my methods were carried out.

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On a Sunday afternoon in late July, I found myself turning onto Chemin de Manawan

(Manawan path) in my decade-old Toyota Corolla. I knew from the website of Tourisme

Manawan as well as Google Earth that the majority of the road was dirt, and I was afraid of either ruining my car or driving off the road and being stuck in a ditch (a scary prospect considering my wanting knowledge of French and lack of cell service). Nevertheless, I

drove onward onto a path that, initially, was very nicely groomed. I spent at least 15 minutes in a state of relief, thinking that all my worrying was misplaced until the pavement turned into dirt and the dirt turned into rocky sand. The appearance of several large rocks in the road made me grit my teeth as I drove on and heard the sound of gravel pelting the undercarriage of my poor vehicle. All the while, I was passed every five minutes or so by a much-more-courageous-than-I pilot of a large truck or an ATV. I even witnessed a couple of minivans speed by me, leaving a trail of dust in their wake as I tried my best to stay close to the right side of the narrow road. The official length of this road is 91 kilometers from the nearest town of St. Michel des Saints, but it felt much longer behind the wheel of car that was born and raised in a highly urban area.

Figure 1: Atikamekw forest.

Beyond the road itself, there was dense forest on either side of my periphery, interrupted rarely by cabins, pathways to lakes, and small, open areas likely deforested by the logging industry. These areas only frequently crept up alongside the road, though, leaving the majority of my field of vision blocked by mixed, deciduous forest, concealing most of the flora and fauna beyond it. After about two hours of sandy switchbacks through a green world, I finally reached the reserve of Manawan. I crested a small hill at the end of the road and the community immediately appeared out of the forest as if it had manifested out of thin air. What initially struck me about the community was its simultaneous proximity to the nearly hundred kilometers of forest I just drove through and its resemblance to any other small town I have ever visited. There were rows of small houses positioned next to one another connected by a lattice of roads, a church, a police station, a hotel, and a grocery store all nestled between a hilly expanse of forest and a large lake. At first glance, the community of Manawan was very similar many of the small, upstate NY communities I would generally drive through as I grew up.

As I spent more time on the reserve, though, some differences began to make themselves more obvious to me, especially after interacting with several of the community members. One of the major differences between my home community and Manawan was inherent in the ways that the people interacted with one another in a social context. From an etic, white, urban, American perspective, the residents of Manawan lived in much more tightly – knit social networks than what I generally experience as I go about my life in

Columbus, the capital city of Ohio. The intimacy through which people interacted with one another surprised me, as it seemed like everybody knew everyone else and would never

hesitate to walk or drive to a friend’s house to ask for a favor or just talk for hours. One of my new contacts joked about the concept of “Indian time” when I asked him how long it would be until we took some boats to the Matakan island site, responding that we would probably leave at three, four, or five PM. Moreover, privacy as understood in my Western social context was absent in Manawan, and interactions between people manifested fluidly whenever two friends saw one another by chance or started impromptu gatherings on the porch of a house that would last long into the summer night. There were several instances throughout my fieldwork where I had gone to sleep just to be woken up a few hours later by a community member who wanted to tell me a story or convey some news. The sociality of the community was pervasive, and everyone I met was very welcoming to me despite my

American, Anglophone background. Those who knew English spoke to me in English, and those who spoke Atikamekw and French taught me a little of both languages, maintaining a surprising amount of patience when I just could not understand what they were saying.

Every person I met was outrageously kind to me, ultimately making my field experience so much more personally enjoyable.

Figure 2: My tent dwarfed by one of the smaller tipis.

The land itself along with its array of living creatures made an impression on me as well. Although the community itself was not unlike other small, rural communities one might visit in the United States, it was situated within a green-blue landscape of mixed deciduous woodland dotted with lakes, rivers, and countless tiny islands. Much of the forested ground was covered in thick layers of moss, which often crept into the lower braches of the trees, hanging down and threatening to rub against unwitting passers-by.

Walk through a strand of trees in any direction and you were likely to come upon some body of water ranging in size from a small creek to a sizeable lake. The water was an absolutely essential component of the community of Manawan; I think I spent more time boating, swimming, and cliff jumping than I had collectively in my entire life. We cast nets out onto the lake and caught dozens of walleye that were later cooked by the camp chef into various, delicious dishes. After spending any amount of time at Manawan, it is easy to understand why the word for lake is sakihikan, translated as “something you give love to”.

Figure 3: Lake from Matakan in the morning (left) and the evening (right).

Beyond descriptions of the landscape (which pale in comparison to lived experiences of it), my encounters with other – than – human creatures were far and beyond anything regularly experienced in the urban setting of Columbus, OH. Almost immediately after arriving at Manawan, I got out of my car and spent some time waiting outside the door of the Tourisme Manawan office to meet my contact. While waiting, I was surprised by the sheer number of dogs that walked across my field of vision, trotting along the side of the road and going about whatever business they had to attend to before the day was over.

One of the dogs even came up to me and put its head on my lap before running off to chase a truck as if to welcoming me to the community. I learned later that these dogs (colloquially referred to as “rez dogs”) were hugely common in Manawan and were allowed to walk around alongside the community, generally doing as they pleased. Community opinions of these dogs seemed to vary from viewing them as pests to welcome coinhabitants, and I was told that the elders believed that the dogs watched over and protected the children of

Manawan as they played outside. Regardless of the role of these dogs, they made for a unique co-species community on the reservation of Manawan itself.

Figure 4: The author and a rez dog.

While I will not recount every encounter I had with other-than-human life forms during my fieldwork, I will briefly outline the most meaningful ones to me. While canoeing with some youths near the Matakan site one morning, I saw three different bald eagles flying overhead and subsequently perching in the trees across the small inlet. The strand of trees across the inlet from Matakan was a well-known nesting area for eagles, and we continuously carried our leftover fish in a bucket across the lake to leave them snacks. Over the course of my fieldwork, I would end up seeing eagles several more times, generally viewing them flying overhead during the many trips I took between Manawan and Matakan via motorboat. I also interacted with moose, both dead and alive, as I consumed moose multiple times, helped prepare a moose hide, and heard the call of a moose at night while

huddled in a tipi, listening to one of the elders tell a story to the youth in Atikamekw. As a visitor to Nitaskinan, I was blown away by my experiences with the other-than-human residents of region. From an outsider’s perspective, my time at Manawan was transformative because of the people I met, the life forms I saw, and the activities I participated in that wove the two groups of beings together. If nothing else, Manawan certainly represents a territory rich with resources for a burgeoning ecotourist regime.

While important for establishing my point of view as a researcher, to experience

Manawan from the eyes of an outsider is to miss the critical perspectives of the people who actually live there. Moreover, to take into consideration solely my etic perspective would be to miss the other seasonal backdrops through which people and tourists in the

Atikamekw nation interact with the diverse array of other-than-humans in their territory, as I was only able to experience Nipin (summer) in Manawan. The Atikamekw divide their year into six seasons rather than four, which are determined by the activities generally carried out at certain times of the year (Tourisme Manawan 2020). Nipin, for example, is the season when birch bark is usually harvested for crafting, small game hunted, berries collected (specifically blueberries and strawberries), and net fishing carried out. During my experience as a tourist, I was able to participate in all of these activities besides hunting small game (although the blueberries were sparse, as I unfortunately arrived at the end of their season). Contrasting this, Pitcipipon (or pre – winter) lasts through the months of

November and December, and is generally the time of whitefish catching and animal trapping, as the animals have the best coats at this time (Tourisme Manawan 2020).

Considering the seasonality of my fieldwork is important, as it makes clear that my

experiences in Manawan only cover a single facet of what is actually a wide spectrum of human-nonhuman relationships.

These relationships seem to color what it means to be an Atikamekw person living in Manawan. After asking one of my interviewees about what a typical year might look like for her (currently a political science major in Quebec her mid – 20’s), she told me that she might go trapping for rabbits with her grandmother in the spring or picking strawberries and blueberries in July and August respectively. She also told me that she was also looking forward to hunting moose with her father later in the fall, which was a new development for her, as women were not traditionally allowed to hunt game. Due to changes in the community regarding gender roles, though, my interviewee was given permission by her father to hunt with him during the upcoming moose season. As in many subarctic first nations groups (Nadasdy 2007) hunting seemed to be a widespread activity in the autumn and winter months of Manawan, with stories being regularly told about memorable encounters with various creatures as we boated past previously hunted land.

Although I was not in Manawan during the traditional hunting season, reminders of previously hunted game were everywhere from the moose hide that the youths helped an elder prepare through stretching and scraping and moose meat that was prepared in various ways at Matakan.

Sustenance patterns in Manawan, though, seem to be changing rapidly with the addition of new amenities to the community. Recently, a new supermarket has opened up on the reserve, allowing for easy access to a wide variety of foods and other generally desired goods that were not otherwise available without travelling over an hour to the nearest town of St. Michel des Saints. The opening of this market provides great

conveniences to the community, allowing people to more easily access prepared food and household items, however, easier access to goods represents a change in the community compared to the Manawan once known by the elders. One elder I spoke with told me a story about how he would always go fishing with his parents after church, and once they caught some fish, they would immediately stop fishing because they had all they needed to eat. Likewise, another elder I spoke with told me “the forest (notimek) is so important because it is our medicine cabinet and our food pantry”. This raises the question: does this medicine cabinet and food pantry become less important when it is no longer needed in order to survive? Hunting, fishing, and gathering from the land are all still essential activities for those living in Manawan, but they are now intertwined with the capitalistic system that dominates the rest of Canada and much of the world.

To give another example, blueberry collection is still a common activity in Manawan during August, but is often carried out with the benefits of economic capital in mind. One person I spoke with told me that he could make hundreds of dollars over the span of a few days because of the sheer number of blueberries that might be picked. Harvesting, then, still occurs, but it occurs in front of the backdrop of a market that values blueberry collection and is willing to pay those who can source it. Integration into this market, though, is essential for many, as access to economic capital determines access to various important resources, such as transportation to and from Manawan and basic household items. The world around Manawan is changing and Manawan is changing with it. It is this cultural system in continuous flux that represents the spatial and temporal context of my fieldwork in Manawan.

Section 4: Methods and results:

Even though my field experience required a shift in research focus, my methodology remained viable and unchanged. My data collection was heavily derived from participant observation through which I participated as a summer camper at a cultural transmission summer camp, a pseudo – employee of Tourisme Manawan, a tourist engaging in their ecotourism program, and a general visitor of the community during their annual Powwow.

This fluid position was difficult to navigate at times (more on this later) but ultimately provided me with the privilege of observing intercultural and intergenerational interactions as an outsider looking in. As Hoel (2013) argues, “an [ethnographic] researcher is never fully an insider or outsider.”

In addition to participant observation, I carried out and recorded interviews with six people – three members of the Atikamekw nation, one member of the Lakota nation

(visiting for the powwow), and two tourists with a history of visiting Manawan several times. I also printed out and administered four surveys to consenting, adult tourists who were participating in the “Traditional Site Matakan” tourist package for the first time.

Although my survey and interview data come from a small number of people, the data I did collect was richly detailed and representative of people from both tourist and host groups.

Supplementing this data with the experiential data I collected and recorded through my participant observation allows me to paint a picture of Manawan as a culturally dynamic location, highlighting the potential efficacies of various cultural transmission mechanisms and commenting about their environmental preservation implications. Regarding analysis,

I took notes reflecting on my participant observation experiences as soon as I was able in order for later reference. In addition, my interviews and surveys were transcribed and

scoured for statements with relevance to the themes explored at hand.

Below, I outline my experiences in participant observation at Manawan and briefly recount my survey and interview data before venturing into a discussion of this data and finally the need for further research. My participant observation experiences as results are split into three sections based on my fluid positionality during my fieldwork. My days in

Manawan were anything but homogenous, and this variety of activities that I participated in allowed me to interact with different groups of people over uninterrupted periods of time. While there were certain individuals that I spent more time with than others

(specifically the guides), reporting my participant observation results based on the people I interacted with rather than the activities I did aims to highlight their importance, getting at both my and their experiences in symbolically situated places.

My time as a summer camper at Matakan:

Unbeknownst to me before arriving at Manawan, my entire first week in the community would be spent with a group of 11 – 17 year old Atikamekw children participating in Projet Matakan, a summer camp put on in part by Tourisme Manawan and supported by the greater community of Manawan in addition to the University of Quebec.

Because I indicated in my IRB report that I would not be performing interviews with minors, I was unable to extract physical interview data from any of the campers. While this was not originally planned, my ability to observe and participate in camp activities along with the children ended up being invaluable as an outsider, as I was able to learn about

Atikamekw culture from the perspective of the younger members of Manawan while learning the ins and outs of Tourisme Manawan’s operation at the Matakan site.

“Matakan” in Atikamekw refers to a location of temporary settlement, generally lived at for a few days at a time while hunting or fishing in the bush. The Matakan site used by Tourisme Manawan for both their summer camp and their usual summer tourist program did, indeed, fit the bill of temporary encampment in terms of amenities, but made up for this in its natural beauty, which could easily stick in the minds of tourists and hosts for years after a short tenure there. Matakan was on a small islet on Lac Kempt with a short bridge connecting the islet to a larger body of land. The islet was wooded with a number of semi – permanent lodges, tipis, and a small cabin across the bridge with running water from the lake and an oven and stove for cooking all powered by the sun. This site was the main location of Projet Matakan’s cultural transmission camp in addition to the majority of tourist activities coordinated by the ecotourist organization, so it became the locus of my fieldwork at Manawan as the location where I spent the greatest amount of my time.

Figure 5: Matakan fire pit.

My first week at Matakan was filled with interactions with summer campers, elders, and employees of Tourisme Manawan who worked “behind the scenes” to bring the camp together. As an Anglophone researcher in a largely Francophone region, I felt constantly out of place in in a setting where interactions were in Quebecois, Atikamekw, or (most frequently) a combination of both. This unsettling feeling of never knowing exactly what to do was largely a blessing, though, as it allowed me to split my time between different social groups at different times. I spent hours swimming and cliff jumping with the children and hours helping the employees of Tourisme Manawan with different activities such as building a picnic table and setting up a tipi. Most importantly, I was put in a setting where I could learn about Atikamekw culture alongside the youths attending the camp. Not only did cultural transmission occur through presentations from eminent members of the community (elders, leaders, craftspeople, etc…), it occurred through shared activities. The children and I wove baskets from birch bark, made cords from white pine trees, went net fishing, prepared a moose hide, listened to stories, and generally spent time outside.

Gaskins and Paradise (2010) suggest that cultural transmission can take place when the inexperienced young are able to observe more experienced older members of their social group carrying out activities. Such activities were widespread during Projet Matakan, as the elders and community leaders participated in the same activities that the youths did, teaching them all the while. The experience seemed largely positive for everyone involved, from the elders who volunteered their time to teach the youths to the youths who had a great amount of fun.

My position as an Anglophone outsider was also beneficial because it gave me a window into the intergenerational changes the community is currently facing. After

interacting with individuals from different generational categories, I noticed some obvious differences. Firstly, individuals differed linguistically between generations in their interactions with me. While the elders spoke essentially no English, many of the youth knew a number of English words that they used to communicate with me. Between their knowledge of English and my knowledge of French, we were able to put together mixed – language conversations, even if they were simple ones. From my conversations with these campers, it seemed as if the majority of the people knew English words from mixed media – songs they had listened to or movies, shows, and film clips that they had been exposed to on Netflix or Youtube. For further evidence, the camp offered Netflix gift cards to the winners of camp competitions and I was routinely hunted down and given the Snapchat usernames of several of the campers in order to keep in contact with them after leaving the community.

Such linguistic changes based on technological influence may seem obvious, but they are significant as an indicator of exterior influence on the community. The Atikamekw school system is a bilingual one, with the children learning in Atikamekw during their first three years of primary school and French from their fourth year on with regular classes in

Atikamekw. The community, then, is largely bilingual with English speakers learning the language from sources outside of the community.

This Western influence is not inherently negative (at least two community members

I met had favorite bands that were American, for example), but there are certain elements of this influence that were explicitly spoken out against during the camp presentations. For instance, one of the presentations given by a community leader was about the qualities of indigenous leadership in the modern world. The presentation was given in the main cabin

after breakfast, beginning with a video titled “Onickakw!” or “Wake up!”, an original video filmed in and around Manawan with the goal of bringing attention to some of the recent problems in the community. The video highlights the importance of the land that Mother

Nature lent to the Atikamekw nation and chastises the people for disrespectful actions. The following statement from the video shows this clearly, “Waste. Is this really what we want to show our Mother Earth to tell her we love her? What respect! The consumers we have become are dependent on the Western society. Yet our ancestors did not live this way.”

(Flammand 2013). The video goes on to paint a picture of the historical injustices of Canada towards the community, calling the Atikamekw nation to “wake up” and live by their own laws and traditions.

This video and presentation represented the crux of the Projet Matakan camp to me as a researcher and honorary summer camper. Things are changing in the community as younger generations are continuously exposed to new phenomena. These things are not always for the betterment of the community, as the Atikamekw nation is sucked into a lifestyle dependent on the consumption – heavy world of the West in the shadows of the historical injustices wrought by the Canadian state. As life changes (through the permeation of media, the introduction of supermarkets, clearer channels to wider society, etc…) many of the activities that previously characterized an Atikamekw identity are not practiced as often or in the same ways. No longer do community members of Manawan have to go out to the lake to catch fish for dinner after church, as one elder told me, as food becomes available in different forms. These changes are not always negative, and several

Atikamekw individuals I spoke with are not against development as long as it is on their own terms (more on this later), but what it means to be Atikamekw is constantly changing

in a world that is also constantly changing. It seems that what the Atikamekw most clearly desire is a forum for self – determination so that they have the agency to choose their own identity. Projet Matakan is a powerful tool for this so that cultural transmission occurs in a

Manawan that is different from the past, but clearly looking towards the future.

My time as a pseudo – employee of Tourisme Manawan

As described above, much of my time during Projet Matakan and thereafter involved me helping the Tourisme Manawan agency in whichever ways I could provide aid. This help generally took the form of manual labor, but through working and observing, I learned how to do many things that I had never done before, forming relationships with agency employees and tourists as well. Of course, I was unable to participate in any of the educational practices carried out by the guides in reaction to tourist presence, but this allowed me to fluidly transition to becoming a knowledge-seeking tourist at these times.

Nevertheless, the following section is mainly an account of my interactions with other members of Tourisme Manawan with my interactions with tourists being reserved for a latter section.

Of my experiences with the employees of Tourisme Manawan, one of the most relevant as evidence supporting the link between ecotourism and environmentalism was the reaction of the guides to something unexpected rather than something planned. Late in the night on the second day of Projet Matakan, one of the tipis where the children were sleeping caught fire because the fire (located in the middle of Atikamekw–style tipis) grew too strong, greedily spreading to the canvas of the large tent. The tipi went up quickly, engulfing the tent and many of the sleeping bags and articles of clothing inside, but

fortunately, nobody was injured by the flame. After the guides put the blazing tipi out, the children were relocated to a different location where they could sleep, salvaging whatever hours were left of the night. While I was briefly woken up by some of the children walking by my tent, I did not realize what had happened until getting up the next morning and being informed by those previous residents of the tipi that their shelter met an untimely doom.

It was not the immediate reaction of the guides to the tipi fire that struck me as interesting (though, it was commendable that they moved quickly enough to save all of the campers from being injured). What is most relevant to the argument at hand was the cleanup by the guides after the tipi was reduced to ashes. After breakfast the next morning,

I followed the guides over to the site of the burnt tent to help them clean the remnants of the tipi. This process took about an hour and a half while one guide used a chainsaw to separate the large, ashen tipi support beams into more manageable chunks that were subsequently gathered by myself and some of the other guides who placed them in a motorboat nearby. After placing the beams and burnt materials in the boat, the guides and I moved the remains to another site several miles away, across the lake, where they would safely biodegrade. Upon discarding the materials, we boated back to Matakan and swept the ashes into the underbrush, creating a platform for a new tipi that we built later that afternoon.

This event is so significant because it is reflective of the environmental responsibility statement laid out on the website of Tourisme Manawan; “Tourisme

Manawan and local partners, despite the remoteness of the community, use different measures to ease the environmental traces caused by the stay of our visitors”. The website

then lists these measures, which include the use of solar panels at Matakan, composing, maximizing the use of local materials, and repartioning resources taken from the community (particularly food) (Tourisme Manawan 2020). This statement clearly has teeth, as there is a particular respect given to the Matakan site by the guides that can be clearly seen by visitors to the community. Instead of throwing the burnt materials into the underbrush around Matakan, as I had expected, extra work was put into depositing these remains several miles away. Keeping Matakan clean and respecting the land was a prerogative of the guides that manifested itself in other activities as well, from boating out trash and recycling to making the youth campers clean their campsites at the end of the week and feeding the leftover fish to a group of eagles who lived across the bay. The guides treated the small island strikingly like a housekeeper might treat a house, ensuring its cleanliness in the face of a series of waste-generating activities.

Whether this behavior was the cause of a learned “respect” for the environment, a need to keep the site presentable for tourists, or a combination of the two is impossible to know for sure with the data I collected. However, I expect that ecotourism does play a role in these activities. Contrasting the Matakan site, several areas of the community of

Manawan itself were visibly covered with litter. The litter was no more pervasive than most other rural communities I have visited in the United States, but it was present and noted by a number of the tourists I spoke with informally or recorded in my survey data.

Even the video by Flammand (2013) shown to the youth during Projet Matakan shows several clips of litter in the community, stating, “Our Mother Earth is being massacred and we contribute to the destruction.” This is not in line with what Flammand (2013) and other community leaders I spoke with want for the community, as they want to preserve a

territory where the next generation of Atikamekw are able to live alongside what “Mother

Earth lent to them”. The implementation of ecotourism to the community provides

Manawan with an interface where environmentally friendly behaviors in line with their goals are not only encouraged, but also necessary for a successful ecotourist program.

Moreover, the behavior on Matakan is not isolated to the site itself, as the youth who go to

Projet Matakan see the guides taking care of the site and are taught to respect it both directly through presentations and activities and indirectly by watching their teachers interact with the environment. To use Bourdieu’s (1977) habitus, I expect that the more that the youth of Manawan have social interactions with their elders in the context of transmission activities like Projet Matakan, the more their habitus will resemble the lessons of environmental respect conveyed by those elders. These lessons are essential in a world where the day-to-day activities of the youth diverge significantly from those of their elders during their childhoods.

As a final note of importance, there were behaviors associated with environmental consciousness that show evidence of significance for the guides outside of the ecotourist sphere. During both the Projet Matakan camp and later during the “Traditional Site

Matakan” package, the fish remains that were left over from cleaning the walleye net– caught from the lake were not disposed of in the garbage or in the water. Rather, one of the guides (or older campers in the case of Projet Matakan) would take the fish guts in a bucket from one side of the inlet to the other via motorboat or canoe where a group of eagles were nesting, tossing the guts ashore for the eagles to consume. This activity is in line with the traditional ecological knowledge tenet of reciprocity among indigenous peoples of North

America, wherein everything that is taken from the earth is acknowledged as a gift and

reciprocally matched (LaDuke 1994) (Smithers 2015). These reciprocal relations with other-than-human-beings result in an increased mindfulness of their daily treatment, which is readily observable among the activities of the guides even outside of the ecotourist context of the “Traditional Matakan Package”.

My time as a tourist in Manawan

My time as a tourist in the community is split here between my experiences with the

“Traditional Site Matakan” package for three days with eight other tourists and the Annual

Manawan Pow Wow with hundreds of them. The Traditional Matakan package lent me an intimate view of what the majority of tourists visiting Manawan through the Tourisme

Manawan organization during the summer get to experience. The Powwow, on the other hand, is only organized by the community once a year, and while many more tourists visit the community at a single time for this event, the Manawan Powwow is considered to be much smaller than many other First Nations Powwows commencing during the summer and autumn months. The results presented here, then, represent my account of my experiences with other tourists in both of the formats outlined above, including their impressions of the community, their opinions on environmental sustainability, and their perceptions on the impact of their visit to the community on both their personal lives and those of the community members. This section is bolstered by survey data collected during the Traditional Site Matakan experience and interview data collected during the Powwow and at the very end of my fieldwork.

My time with the other tourists in the Traditional Site Matakan experience lasted three days during the second week of my fieldwork. Besides the guides and myself there

were eight other tourists from two different families participating in the experience. More specifically, the families consisted of two male/female couples, each with two children of ages varying from 7 to 15. The couples were both European – one French residing in

Normandy and the other Swiss, residing in an Alpine village. None of these tourists had ever been to Manawan before and they seemed excited to undergo the experience.

Over the course of the three day package, the families, guides, and I cast nets on the lake to capture fish (which we later cleaned), went swimming, listened to drum music showcased by members of the drum troupe “Black Bear”, visited various islands around

Matakan, took an educational plant hike around the island, listened to stories told by the guides, and ate Traditional Atikamekw food such as banik, moose, walleye, and berry compote. The tourists were all eager participants in every component of the experience, refusing to shy away from learning how to skin and gut fish and asking the guides plenty of questions during the plant hike. Besides the plant hike, many of the activities completed by the tourists during the experience were quite similar to the activities completed by the youth during Projet Matakan, supporting the relevance of the experiences to one another.

Each experience represented a process of cultural transmission, but the former was concerned with emic – emic transmission and the later with emic – etic transmission. The different outcomes of these divergent cultural transmissions as they relate to cultural and environmental sustainability are discussed below.

Figure 6: Fish (mostly walleye) caught by the guides and tourists.

Tourist perception of various things was gauged by the administration of surveys at the end of their experience with the Traditional Matakan Site Package. Tourists were administered the paper surveys and allowed to fill them out in either French or English according to their native languages. Although only four surveys were usable data because four people were consenting adults, there were salient patterns in the surveys with relevance to the implications of ecotourism both for the community of Manawan and abroad. An example of the survey can be seen in the appendix.

First, each person surveyed expressed an understanding of the anthropocentric nature of climate change and shared a common desire to combat it. There were divergences between the survey answers, though, that may have been based on the geographic location of the surveyees’ homes. This is impossible to discern for certain because of the small size of the data sample, and more data should be collected in order to make such a statement with any certainty. Regardless, the couple surveyed that lived in the

Swiss Alps region expressed that they spend a significant amount of time in natural areas and try daily to practice an environmentally friendly lifestyle. The couple from Normandy, on the other hand, stated that they lived in an urban area and that their time in Manawan represented their first experience in such a large natural area. They both stated that they thought they could do better to implement environmentally friendly practices in their lives and stated that the experience made them more devoted to making these changes in their lives (specifically, through better water use and creating less garbage). Contrasting this once again, the couple from the Alps stated that their understanding of the environment did not change because they thought they had a good understanding of human- environment relations beforehand.

Second, every survey collected mentioned the desire to learn about Atikamekw culture in the context of an environmental setting as a reason for participating in the experience. Every person participated because they were looking forward to being “out in nature”, so to speak, expressing this by using language like desiring “disconnection”, “calm”,

“no noise”, or the sensation of “being the only person in the world”. I initially interpreted this as a desire for isolation, but each survey also expressed a wish to learn about the

Atikamekw by meeting them directly, and because each pair surveyed were parents, there

was also an explicit desire to spend time with family. Instead of participating in the experience for isolation, then, it seems like the tourists wanted disconnection from their lives back in Europe, which included congress with culturally “other” people.

Third, it is significant to consider what tourists wrote when asked, “what surprised them” about their experiences. As stated above, multiple tourists expressed surprise either verbally or through the survey about the litter that surrounded the community and sections of the forest that were visible on the trip to the Matakan site. One survey states that this surprise may represent a “wealthy white person” opinion, but it is significant that the tourists expected the community and surrounding area to be pristinely clean. Along these lines, another answer to this question took the form of surprise at the mosaic of traditional and modern elements viewed in the community. Specifically, they point out the juxtaposition between the presence of the sweat lodge at Matakan and the collection of

Pepsi bottles in the bottom of the boat.

These patterns suggest that the tourists were drawn to Manawan because they wanted to experience activities unlike those they have access to at home in an environmental and cultural setting different from their own. This may seem obvious on the face of it, as tourists tend to travel to other locations to experience different things (why leave home otherwise?) but there are implications here for the community of Manawan and other ecotourist hosts.

The desire for tourists to experience something “other” may be beneficial for a community who seeks to preserve elements of their culture that are different than those of their incoming tourists, but, with this desire comes pressure on the hosts to appear

“exotic”. The tourists were surprised at cultural elements that were similar to those in their

own lives such as the prevalence of litter and the tendency of some of the guides to enjoy commodities like Pepsi alongside some of the more outwardly indigenous elements of their lives. This surprise is nowhere near equivalent to distaste at inauthenticity, as there were no such sentiments outwardly expressed by the tourists participating in the Traditional

Site Matakan Package, but the tourist desire for a false exoticism is a danger to any self- determined cultural transmission generated as a result of ecotourism.

Along these lines, I met two other tourists from France who had arrived in the community to photograph the indigenous dancers appearing later at the powwow. These tourists surprised me with their views of the community, stating that the exoticism of First

Nations and Native American groups was what got them into indigenous photography initially. Moreover, they stated that their primary goal was to reproduce the work of

Edward Curtis, a somewhat controversial American photographer who would only photograph Native Americans in a “noble savage” sort of light. Likewise, these tourists were only interested in photographing members of the community either in their regalia or doing outwardly “native” things. Such tourist sentiments are a danger to the independence of First Nations groups who are grappling with identities that represent a combination of indigineity and other cultural influence. People in Manawan do not fit the noble savage persona cast upon them by outsiders to the community. They watch globally popular movies and flicks, listen to American music like Guns and Roses and John Denver

(especially Take me Home, Country Roads, which I heard at least two dozen times), and drink American beer. Ecotourism can be a catalyst for cultural preservation in communities where their culture is under pressure from exterior influence, but should be a tool of self – determination first and foremost. If communities like Manawan are required to fit a

Western –generated noble savage persona in order to attract tourists, ecotourism becomes another tool of Western domination.

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Later in the week was the official beginning of the powwow, which lasted three days and stretched into the weekend. Being in Manawan for the powwow was a fortunate experience for data collection, as it allowed me to interact with a number of tourists who had visited Manawan previously or would not have been in the community otherwise.

Significantly, while most of the tourists participating in the Traditional Matakan package were European, many of the powwow visitors were either Canadian, American, or from other First Nation and Native American communities around the country, generating a more diverse tourist sample to draw data from. Like the activities at Matakan, powwows represent experiences of cultural transmission and identity reinforcement (Lerch and

Bullers 1996)(Schweigman et al 2013), allowing North American aboriginal groups to come together and celebrate their indigineity while providing an opportunity for the non – indigenous to learn about aspects of indigenous culture. The outcomes of powwows resemble, in large part, the goals of ecotourism (as per Donohoe and Lu 2008), such as cultural preservation, community economic benefits, and the implementation of high quality tourism experiences. Moreover, powwows like the one in Manawan are environmentally low – impact with visitors encouraged to stay in tents at the parade grounds and eat locally prepared food. Because of these reasons, I argue that, while not geared toward tourists, powwows articulate well with the stated ecoculturally preservative

goals of ecotourism and should be thought of as a natural expansion of ecotourism in this context.

The Manawan powwow represented a celebration of culture and an opportunity for members of multiple First Nations groups to come together, solidifying and sharing their identities through song and dance. The central activities of the powwow were carried out on a parade ground surrounded by temporary bleachers in the middle of the community.

On this parade ground, people from Manawan and visitors from elsewhere donned their regalia and performed various dances like the grass dance, jingle dress dance, and traditional dances split between age and gender. Most of the dances were performed by different demographics and each dance had a purpose. The all-female jingle dress dancers, for instance, performed their dance for healing reasons, and each dancer, from the youngest to the oldest, danced for a specific person in need of restoration. There were also several intertribal dances, such as a round dance at the end of the weekend, where outsiders to the community (including myself) were allowed to participate. All the while, the dancers were supported by four different drum troupes; “Black Bear” from Manawan, and three others from other First Nations communities across Canada. The drum troupes took turns singing songs for the dancers of their own composition, creating a spectacle that drew nearly as many people over to the drum tent as were watching the dancers from the bleachers.

As stated above, my visit to the powwow allowed me to interact with other kinds of tourists who were visiting Manawan for the event rather than for the Traditional Matakan

Package. This allowed me to ask other people informally what compelled them to go to the powwow. Some of the people I met were outsiders to the community, but had met other

people living in Manawan previously and were using the powwow as an opportunity to catch up with old friends. Others were staunch followers of the powwow trail, travelling hundreds of miles across Canada and the United States in order to dance in as many powwows as possible. One Lakota man, specifically, travelled all the way from the Dakotas to be at Manawan. Importantly, one university student from Quebec I spoke with made the point that they probably would not have gone to the powwow if they had not been invited by someone who had contacts in the community. When I asked why this was, they expressed concern over the impact of Western tourists coming to the community and expecting exotic performances. They noted that they did not think it fair for outsiders to come into the community expecting cultural performances that were out of line with what indigenous communities like Manawan were like in reality. They also told me that they expected that increasing numbers of tourists entering the community would cause the residents of Manawan to forcibly change to fit the outsiders’ expectations. This student’s viewpoint provides a counterpoint to the stated exoticism that drew tourists like the photographers to Manawan. Perhaps some tourists are actually drawn away from ecotourism activities in subalterned communities because of their understanding of the power dynamics between their home culture and the host culture. This was not a viewpoint that I ran into frequently, but it is crucial to note here.

Ultimately, though, powwows like the one at Manawan provide interfaces for aboriginal groups across multiple nations to solidify their cultural identities and form links, both within their groups and beyond them. To use a habitus (Bourdieu 1977) frame of reference, again, participation in powwows is a crucial activity for cross – generational cultural transmission, much like the work done at Projet Matakan. In order for youth to

participate in powwow activities, they must participate in pre-powwow activities as well, including crafting regalia, learning how to dance, and learning how to drum and sing powwow songs. These processes provide a hands – on opportunity for those well – versed in their culture to teach the younger generation about the importance of such activities, fostering in them a fascination and ultimate love for a central component of Atikamekw identity. This is something I experienced directly at both Matakan and during the powwow, as several of the older boys learned how to drum and sing, practicing with members of

Black Bear during Projet Matakan and later performing during the powwow. As long as powwows continue to be an important part of Manawan’s annual cycle, there will be an opportunity for the younger generation to learn about important elements of Atikamekw culture, embracing them in the face of a continuously changing world.

My Time as an Ethnographer

Above all other positionalities, I went to Manawan as an ethnographer in a new place for the first time. While I do describe many of my ethnographic impressions in section

3, my list of positionalities would be incomplete without addressing the most obvious role I played during my fieldwork. This might be the most obvious positionality on the surface, however, it is also the most difficult to describe qualitatively, as an ethnographer’s positionality in a critical ethnography aims to generate a discourse between researcher and

“the other” (Manning 2018). A discourse implies conversation both ways, and it is the image of myself as an ethnographer through the eyes of the people I worked with that I attempt to capture some semblance of in this section. As Charles Cooley (1964) once wrote,

“I am not what I think I am. I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.”

While my position as an ethnographer in Manawan never really changed, there were times when I felt more like a researcher than others. I was always asking questions about words that I heard and did not understand or activities that the guides and camp leaders led the tourists and campers through. The starkest moments of researcher/informant contrast came when I had to ask some of the people I was working with to sit down for an interview. It seemed like there was never a good enough time to interview people who were actively working to engage tourists or watch the campers, and taking informants away from their daily tasks felt invasive. Moreover, any semblance of informal friendly relationship I had built prior to interview time evaporated as soon as I took my phone out and asked for consent to record the conversation. Considering the different conversational subjects and vocal tonalities between recorded interviews and informal conservations, it is easy to understand why semi-structured interviews and participant observation are both cornerstones of ethnography.

Even when my status as a researcher was not overtly noticeable, however, there was still a power dynamic at work that should be identified. For example, I continuously felt thankful at the kindness of the Tourisme Manawan employees during my tenure in the community, but simultaneously wonder if I received preferential treatment due to my researcher status. There were several nights where I had nowhere to stay explicitly and a member of Tourisme Manawan offered to pay to put me up in a guest cabin or invite me into his own home. Without acts like this, I would be sleeping in a tent on the side of the road, but these deeds also shed light on the researcher-informant relationship that undoubtedly bleeds into the daily interactions between members of both groups in more subtle ways. This continuous strand of power between the people of Manawan and my

status as an American researcher should be kept into consideration when thinking about the results of this study.

Summary of Results:

To summarize my results here, ecotourism via the Tourisme Manawan organization alongside affiliated activities such as cultural transmission camps and the powwow provide an avenue for cultural preservation and cultural transmission in Manawan, a community wracked by a colonial history and a continuous fight for sovereignty. Each set of activities that I participated in represented either an exhibition of Atikamekw cultural activities for youth or for Western and other First Nations outsiders to the community. Further, each group receiving this transmission had a different positionality related to those individuals in charge of transmission, affecting the transmission goals, but, significantly, the modes of transmission remained quite similar in different contexts.

To put it simply, Projet Matakan aimed to give the youth of Manawan an Atikamekw experience in order to strengthen their cultural ties with the community, while the

Traditional Matakan Package aimed to provide tourists with an Atikamekw experience in order to receive monetary compensation, but the modes of transmission were extremely similar. There were some minor differences between the two experiences, such as an air of formality when interacting with the tourists compared to the children, but the formula was essentially the same. Both groups had the opportunity to listen to powwow music performed by members of Black Bear, go net fishing, eat traditional Atikamekw food, and learn about elements of Atikamekw material culture. Moreover, in both instances of transmission, the guides took great care to treat the Matakan site with respect through

environmentally conscious practices. This is so important because it provides evidence that

Tourisme Manawan is not succumbing to Western calls for exoticism or expectations of the cultural other. In the face of historical and modern assimilation practices by the Canadian state and dangers of cultural loss through the encroachment of capitalism, ecotourism provides the community with a multi-tool for cultural self–determination.

Section 5: Discussion

Based on my embodied experiences as a participant of Projet Matakan, the

Traditional Matakan Package, and the Manawan Powwow in addition to other encounters I had around the community, activities promoting cultural transmission are in high local demand, and ecotourism has the potential to provide a wellspring of these activities. One of the primary obstacles between ecotourism and cultural transmission in the community comes in the form of access. Who truly benefits from ecotourism if there are only a few guides directly involved? I argue that the benefits of ecotourism, here, go beyond those immediate to the community members at the forefront of the ecotourist organization and have the potential to grow as Tourisme Manawan continues to grow.

First, ecotourism (and the tourism industry in general) can create economic benefits for indigenous host communities (Bunten 2010)(Lara Morales 2017). Communities like

Manawan provide few opportunities for job seekers because of their size and relative distance away from most other settlements. This was less of a problem when hunting, trapping, and gathering were the primary modes of subsistence, but money is becoming increasingly important on the reservation due to the encroachment of Western culture.

Flammand (2013) states “money is now required to live, and even survive. It is choking us:

Canada’s contribution is to annihilate us”. It may seem counterintuitive, then, to turn to capitalism and capital generation as a way to solve the problems initially wrought by capitalism, but eschewing the dominant economic mode is just less viable for a community that is already dependent on that mode for survival. Ecotourism, then, provides temporary employment for a set number of people during the peak tourist season, but also helps other community members who are responsible for other services such as restaurants,

convenience stores, and the new “Auberge Manawan” hotel, as tourists use these services when visiting the community. These capital generating entities, while relatively new, are all now part of the makeup of the Manawan, supporting the lifestyles of their employees.

Increasing the number of outsiders to the community through ecotourism benefits this burgeoning service industry in a place where money is now essential for life.

Second, ecotourism as practiced by Tourisme Manawan provides a model for other cultural transmission activities such as Projet Matakan. Because many of the same cultural showcasing activities are shared between the two experiences and because the resources of Tourisme Manawan are essential for Projet Matakan’s undertaking, the benefits of ecotourism for cultural preservation bleed into other demographics in the community at

Manawan (beyond the guides and their families). When considered singularly, Tourisme

Manawan as an organization is relatively small, but its impact in the community should be considered beyond itself. Combined with other community-wide culturally – based activities like the powwow (another tourist activity) ecotourism is an important support in a community grappling with finding and maintaining a self-generated identity.

Third, ecotourism via Tourisme Manawan repels the notions of identity change due to an expectation of exoticism that was expressed by the tourists to varying degrees. The activities carried out during the Traditional Matakan Package for tourists were much the same as those organized for Atikamekw youth during Projet Matakan. Moreover, activities like the powwow, which are only loosely marketed toward Westerners in the context of

Manawan provide a learning opportunity for those outsiders who do come to the community. The powwow of Manawan is a meeting of First Nations and a celebration of their culture first and foremost, and therefore does not have to pay lip service to external

tourists. The environment of the powwow is quite welcoming to outsiders, though, and those who do go to the community for the event are likely to learn a great deal about certain First Nations practices and beliefs. As of now, at least, the tourists activities that are available in Manawan are culturally preservative rather than culturally transformative and do not follow the results of Stronza’s (2008) study.

Finally, ecotourism in Manawan provides a high potential for environmental preservation, both through cultural transmission as well as through the mechanical requirements of ecotourism. As seen in the results, the Matakan site provides a context where the guides are not only encouraged to treat the island sustainably, but are ultimately required to in order to get the highest returns from tourist engagement. The tourists expressed in their interviews that they were interested in coming to Manawan in order to experience a new culture (Manawan), a new location (Matakan), and a new relationship between the two.

It is true that research by Hill et al (2016) and Stinson (2013) suggests that ecotourism and the extractive industries are not dichotomous, but often complementary to, and even indistinguishable from one another. The environmentally preservative goals of ecotourism can be overshadowed by the market and the state if those institutions have enough power (which they often do) and a desire to continue their extractive work, especially if resource extraction provides greater economic benefits to a local community than ecotourism does. I argue that, while this may be true in scenarios like the whale watching organization described by Hill et al (2016), the integrity of ecotourism is buffered if the activities carried out in an ecotourist regime are important to the community beyond economic gain. While ecotourism in Manawan is not likely to stop the allure of activities

such as logging or commercial berry collecting for some, its importance as an organization for the continuation of the cultural traditions of the community helps it stay independent from industry.

Regarding cultural transmission to the youth on an ontological level, the exposure by the guides, elders, and community leaders to activities entrenched in the environment as well as rationales behind those activities that are markedly Atikamekw supports a continuous positive relationship between the Atikamekw and their territory for the next generation. This causal relationship can only be truly proven with diachronic data, but apparent positive reception of the campers to the teachings of the camp leaders supports the existence of such a relationship. At a grander scale, ecotourism and its affiliated activities will provide aid to an Atikamekw nation fighting for sovereignty and in need of economic dependence. The desire of this sovereignty as a way to control their territory and mitigate the extractive activities of outsiders articulates well with an economic activity that requires the preservation of these natural resources in order to be successful.

Call for Future Research and Conclusion:

While there are some conclusions that can be made from this data, much more information should be collected before conclusions are made on a wider scale. One of the strengths of this project is that it clearly highlights areas of research that are needed in order to answer compelling questions about the relationships between ecotourism, cultural survival, and environmental preservation. For instance, the data provided supports the strength of ecotourism-supported activities as modes of cultural preservation and economic independence in Manawan, a location with a history of assimilationist relations

with Canada and a modern status of cultural change. It is also possible to infer that this cultural preservation will lead to environmental preservation because of previous research on successful local conservation practices (cite Brosius et al) and knowledge of an

Atikamekw cosmology that places the wellbeing of Mother Earth as an essential community goal. The link between cultural and environmental preservation is mainly theoretical, though, and would benefit from empirical support.

In order to attain this support, future research may involve data collection on explicit community policies put out by Manawan’s Band Council that aim to strike a balance between development and environmental preservation in a future Manawan with sovereignty from the Canadian state. Regarding cultural transmission and intergenerational opinions on environmental policies and relationships between people, their culture, and the environment, it will be necessary to collect interview and survey data from community members of different generations. Elders, adults, and youth should all be interviewed in as much detail as possible in order to gauge similarities and differences between their views of what it means to be Atikamekw in the 21st century and how this relates to environmental preservation. Finally, it will be beneficial to create a participant observation routine where I follow community members of different generations as they carry out their typical days, showing me what they generally do and why they do such things. This data will be useful to have when comparing intergenerational habitus within the community, which is far from culturally homogenous. This research path focuses on ecotourism less explicitly, as a more holistic perspective of what it means to be Atikamekw at different ages is sought here, though; ecotourist activities are still expected to be a component of life in the community.

The other main perspective that still needs to be translated more fully is that of the tourists entering and leaving the community. This data was initially sought after in this project, but only four surveys were collected due to time constraints and unexpected field conditions. The data collected thus far supports the relevance of cultural transmission at a local scale, but lacks more concrete data of such transmission at a transnational scale. This data would be concerned with tourism impacts over time both within the community and among prior visitors to the community in order to better gauge cultural change over time.

This wider scale data is an important component for understanding how ecotourism has impacted the community since its origination (have local participants felt exoticized? Has ecotourism led to environmental preservation objectively rather than in theory?) in addition to its long term impacts on tourists (have their lifestyles changed as a result of environmental perception change? Have the gone back to the community? Why or why not?). Realistically, this data would also take the form of interviews and surveys, but would focus on capturing a larger quantity of information from tourists who either visited the community once or multiple times in addition to interviewing not only those involved with

Tourisme Manawan, but those involved in other affiliated tourism organizations (such as the hotel, Auberge Manawan, and the powwow planning committee). This wider breadth of data in addition to the intergenerational data sought after above is both essential for increasing the scope of this research geographically and temporally.

What is supported by the data on hand, however, is that ecotourism in Manawan, along with affiliated cultural transmission activities, are important components of cultural preservation in a postcolonial First Nations community facing cultural change. Moreover, it is expected that the transmission of Atikamekw culture from elders to youth supports a

worldview that privileges the health of the nonhuman environment alongside the human community. Ecotourism not only supports this cultural and environmental preservation, it provides economic benefits for Manawan that are essential in a time when they face a fight for sovereignty from Canada. As long as the ecotourist system in Manawan continues to be carried out in a manner conducive to self – determination rather than facing pressure to

“put on a show” for paying, western tourists, it will be an integral component for community growth and development in a feasible, markedly Atikamekw way.

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Appendix: Tourist Survey Questions

Tourist Questions (Before ecotourist experience) 1. What made you decide to partake in this experience? 2. Would you say you live in a rural or urban environment? Explain if needed. 3. How often do you get to experience immersion in the natural world (i.e. in a nature preserve, city park, national park, large backyard, etc…) Explain. 4. To what extent do you as an individual feel connected to the nonhuman environment? Explain your answer to the best of your ability. 5. Do you believe that humans are affecting the climate of the earth at a global scale? 6. Do you believe that humans have a role to play in environmental preservation? 7. Do you believe that you do a sufficient amount to preserve the environment in your daily life? 8. What part of this experience are you most looking forward to?

Tourist Questions (After ecotourist experience) 1. What was your favorite thing about the experience? Your least favorite thing? 2. Has your opinion about the connectedness between humans and the environment changed as a result of your experience? If so, explain how your opinion has changed and what triggered your change in opinion? 3. Did you learn anything about either the lifestyle of the Atikamekw or the Quebecois wilderness that surprised you? 4. Do you think that your language impacts how you perceive the natural environment? 5. Do you think that this is an experience that other Canadians (or members of your nation) might benefit from? 6. Do you plan on changing any of your daily practices as a result of your experience to become more “environmentally friendly”? 7. Is there anything else that you would like to add?