Navigating empowerment and co-optation: reflections from Eeyou Istchee Crees of Quebec

Perhaps typical in liberal state contexts, the power generated by James Bay Crees over the past half century has been leveraged against state and corporate developers’ desire to extract resources from Indigenous territories.

Cree opposition to the impact of resource extractive projects on environmental relationships, lifeways and livelihoods on their territory, in a state constitutional context of aboriginal and treaty rights that Cree struggles helped to shape, was negotiated through a series of nation-to-nation agreements whereby Crees gained substantial increments in the formal recognition of governmental and proprietary rights throughout their traditional territory, including greatly enhanced shares of revenue from resource extraction.

The power gained through political and economic partnerships with state governments and corporate developers, however, has led to a popular desire on the part of Crees to participate in several aspects of modernity and its material accoutrements. This has in some ways divided political priorities within the Cree nation between agendas for environmental protection and agendas for unsustainable economic growth.

In this respect, while Crees have evolved a distinctly collectivist approach to participation in the Quebec/Canadian neoliberal regime, Cree society is now immersed in and grappling with the same dilemmas facing larger state and global citizenries. It is worth considering some of the institutional and ideological processes involved in negotiating these dilemmas, and the extent to which allegiance to Indigenous conceptions of socio-ecological relationalities/ reciprocities remain generative of significantly healthier human-to-land relationships.

Peter Kitelo Chongeywo of the Ogiek of Chepkitale, Mt Elgon, Kenya, will then highlight the similarities and differences between this situation and that of the Ogiek:
https://www.forestpeoples.org/en/topics/customary-sustainable-use/news/2013/11/chepkitale-ogiek-community-document-their-customary-by

Colin Scott researches respect, reciprocity and communication among hunting, fishing and gathering peoples. Through this he seeks to understand the ways indigenous cosmologies shape their livelihoods and practices, and are reciprocally shaped by this lived experience. Colin has sought to understand how their land and sea tenure and resource management arrangements are both the context for, and the product of, ecological knowledge.  Working with the coastal James Bay Cree of northern Quebec since 1976, and Torres Strait Islanders in northern Queensland since 1996, he tracks the evolution of indigenous land and sea rights, as state governments, metropolitan developers and indigenous peoples come into conflict through different ownership claims and different ways of understanding rights, differences that - in part - result from conflicting notions of cultural identity, tradition, continuity and change.

Please sign up on the blue button above or the tiny link below in order to receive the joining information. 
You will receive an email the day before and one a few minutes before the event starts

Find out more about Reworlding in our website:  https://reworlding.earth
Or check our other offerings in our calendar.