Colonial moves in Canada’s (non-) recognition of Indigenous spiritual connection to land: the Innu’s Nitassinan

The Innu people have been present on nitassinan, their ancestral territory, since time immemorial, in the provinces of Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador. Their unceded territory has been the subject of numerous land claims over the past several decades, with little success to date. A cursory review of land claim negotiations and litigation between Indigenous peoples and provincial and federal governments over the past several decades reveals that the focus is often narrowed to the economic and political aspects of land sharing, rooted in the realpolitik of the Canadian state. In my view, the advancement of the Canadian state’s agenda of Indigenous land dispossession has been facilitated by the relegation of the spiritual aspect of the relationship of Indigenous peoples to the land to the background, which has allowed the state, among other things, to secure and assert its control over ancestral territories and their resources. Particularly interested in the strategies pursued by the Innu of the province of Quebec in the protection of their ancestral territory, I maintain that for a true nation-to-nation relationship to exist between them and the provincial and federal governments, it is necessary to make room for their spiritual link with nitassinan. To do so, we must first acknowledge that “land” and “nitassinan” come from two different “worldings”, that is, the combined material and semiotic phenomena, co-created by humans and non-humans, that go to make up a lived world. Thus, to confuse them amounts to ignoring and silencing the laws and philosophies that contribute to the worlding of the Innu nation. In this regard, I have identified three avenues available to the Innu people in their land claims today and the room they have made to Innu’s spiritual tie to nitassinan: the ‘conventional avenue’ under section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, the ‘parallel avenue’ that has developed in ecological law with the rights of nature and Indigenous Protected and Conserved areas, and the ‘alternative avenue’ under religious freedom in section 2(a) of the Constitution Act, 1982. For each of these avenues, I argue that the Canadian legal system has tended to perform colonial moves, that is, proprietary, anthropocentric, and Christian biases that presume the existence of only one lifeworld within Canadian territory – essentially a liberal and Western (European) one –, thereby silencing Indigenous lifeworlds. In so doing, the Canadian state has prioritized its economic and political objectives over Innu land claims, ignoring the spiritual dimension of the Innu connection to the land and reinforcing its sovereignty over so-called "Crown lands." Thus, the legal mechanisms offered to the Innu in the recognition of their land claims, while providing spaces for convergence and exchange likely to be conducive to the expression of Indigenous peoples’ understanding of their lifeworlds and their relationship with other lifeworlds they have encountered, have tended to obliterate the normative significance of Innu’s spiritual relationship to nitassinan, which underpins their economic, social, political, identity and cultural interests in their ancestral territory. Finally, I contend that it is impossible for the Canadian state to engage in a meaningful conversation about Innu land claims, or in a genuine process of reconciliation, unless it makes room for the Innu’s worlding and the spiritual aspect of their land claims, a powerful lever against the predominant Canadian discourse on the land that focuses on economic and political concerns, and recognizes that land is a lived space, shaped by the people who inhabit it

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