Mi’Kmaq:  Cooperation or Competition

 

Mi’kmaq are among the many First Nations that inhabited the Atlantic region in Canada, and inhabited the coastal areas of the Maritime Provinces including Gaspé and most of the land east of the Saint John River. This traditional territory is known as Mi’gma’gi  (Mi’kma’ki).  Mi’kmaq people have occupied their traditional territory, Mi’gma’gi or , since time immemorial (at least 10,000 years) and continue to occupy much of this land including Newfoundland as well as parts of Northern New England as far as Boson.

It would be nice if Canadians and Americans could get rid of their supremacist attitudes. Too often they think they have a monopoly of spiritual and economic insight. If we did that, we could have a true pluralist country, where all types, or races, or cultures were welcomed.  By that I mean a society in which many states, or groups, and principles coexist. For example, including religious pluralists where not one group benefits from claiming it is the fount of all wisdom. That would be a tolerant society. Then we could all benefit from each other’s knowledge and would not feel threatened by it. We would not concern ourselves with delusions of supremacy that we all have. These are delusions which we must learn to avoid.

According to Quenton Condo, speaking on the CBC Gem show, Telling Our Stories,  the treaty of 1752 negotiated by the Mi’Kmaq and the British Crown was according to the Mi’Kmaq intended to make sure that no one would interfere with the Mi’Kmaq way of life. The problem is, according to the Mi’Kmaq, that the non-indigenous people were not taught about the treaties in Canada and now react in anger and hate when they learn what it means. This is a failure of the Canadian educational system, he says.

After all, how much did any of us learn about treaties in school? Frankly, in my case, even in Law School, I learned almost nothing. And treaties are fundamental to learning about Canada. If we know nothing about treaties, we know nothing about Canada!

Although, that is their interpretation, it has the ring of truth as far as I am concerned. Those treaties did not give them the right to hunt. They already had those rights which they inherited from their ancestors. That of course, follows from them being part of the land, which is a fundamental principle to most indigenous peoples in North America and elsewhere.

The Innu territory and Naskapi overlapped as well as Inuit and Cree. As one Innu woman said,

“At the time of our ancestors there were no borders. Our ancestors did not use measuring tapes to say, ‘This is yours,’ and ‘this is mine.’ The territory was shared amongst all the nations. And we shared it well.

 

She also said that at one time there were plenty of caribou in their territory. Some said there were so many “it moved the mountain.” That would be a lot of caribou.

An unidentified woman on the CBC show said “Nations were intertwined in all aspect of our lives and in our approaches to sharing. This insured the survivals of our peoples.”

I don’t want to suggest that indigenous people of the region were perfect. No one and no people are perfect. Yet stories like this show the truth of those who say, people who live in places where survival is very difficult, like the Canadian north, have found that sharing works best for survival. This is what the traditional knowledge of the people of the region tells us. I can’t argue with this.

As one Anishinaabe man, Andrew “Stitch” Manitowabi, said about his people, “As an Anishinaabe people we don’t go by boundaries. We use the language of speaking Anishinaabe which extends into the United States in the Quebec area and northern Ontario.” This is a very different approach to determining territory.

The Anishinaabe, like most Indigenous people used the language of sharing, not the language of boundaries.

 

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