I am a young ethnobotanist working in a First Nation community in Northeastern Canada. I am working closely with Innu people of Mashteuiatsh in Quebec province to collect, document and help preserve their culture, knowledge about environment and medicinal plants, as well as to connect traditional knowledge and contemporary science and develop tools to support sustainable development in the community, to encourage and sustain activities of the people who still lives from and dwell in the ancestral territory, Nitassinan.
In 2007, as a MA student in Ethnology1, I designed a participatory project to address problems faced by the First Nations of Northeastern America in sustaining and transmitting their cultural tangible and intangible heritage to future generation. Focusing on ethnobotanical data, I collected and documented the uses of medicinal plants, as well as the traditional knowledge about the environment and its associated language.
This has led us to begin, in June 2010, a wider research, the Inventory of the Pekuakamiulnuatshʼs2 Traditional Knowledge of Medicinal Plants (ISCPPM), now ongoing its second phase (2011-2012). Supported by the Lac-Saint-Jean Model Forest (FMLSJ), the project is conducted on the behalf of the community by the Association du Parc Sacré (Kanatakuliuetsh Uapikun), an Indigenous non-profit organization whoʼs mission is to promote traditional healing and to transmit knowledge on bush medicine. The main objectives of the inventory is to index, list, collect, record and document the traditional ecological knowledge regarding to the uses of indigenous plants by the Ilnus and related groups, and by considering both the oral tradition and the written documentation. Until now, existing ethnobotanical data concerning 82 plant species was gathered and regrouped into a database.
In its second phase, an ecological inventory was added to our research program in order to draw a portrait of the vegetation as well as to map and quantify the occurrence of selected plants on the hunting territories of Mashteuiatshʼs land users. Combining traditional knowledge, botanical and environmental data taken from the literature, this section integrates resource mapping and ecological information into the database. We are also working with the community members and the Band Council to find solutions to protect traditional knowledge without privatizing it, to make sure Indigenous communities get benefits from its development but also to encourage cultural and environmental respect.
Beside this ethnobotanical project, I also work with museums, as curator, researcher, artist and documentary filmmaker. Between 2010 and 2011 in Mashteuiatsh, I have directed Nʼteishkan (Tranche de glace), a 33 minutes documentary film which purpose is to illustrate transmission of knowledge through a traditional beaver hand-hunting technique (without trap) performed during winter. I also have organized and exhibition Nuhtshimiu Nituhkulin, presenting some of the uses of medicinal plants, both projects produced for the community museum, the Musée de Mashteuiatsh.
1 Laurendeau, G. (2011) Usages des plantes par les Pekuakamiulnuatsh. Étude sur la transmission des savoirs dans la communauté ilnu de Mashteuiatsh, MA Thesis, Ethnologie des francophones en Amérique du Nord, Université Laval, 154 p. 2 Pekuakamiulnuatsh are the Innus from the Pekuakami (the “flat lake”), name given to the Lake St. John (Lac-Saint-Jean).
