On the Tracks to Translating Indigenous Knowledge

OUTSIDERS PREPARE TO VISIT INSIDERS

Next year, a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers will travel 27 hours by train from Toronto, Canada, to Lac Seul First Nation in the northwestern part of Ontario to engage with Knowledge Keepers. For two years, they have been meeting over Zoom as part of a seven-member Teaching Circle.

Imagine joining the team as they journey from Toronto’s Union Station. They will leave behind a vast urban world of more than 6 million people as they savor the last stretches of the lush Carolinian forest.

The mission of the Teaching Circle, envisioned by Lac Seul First Nation co-author George Kenny, is to articulate a worldview held by Indigenous cultural Insiders. Insiders are people like George who practice the worldview called Ahnishinahbayeshshikaywin (pronounced Ah-nish-in-ah-bay-esh-shi-kay-win), which Outsiders—such as many anthropologists—tend to define as “animism.” The term Ahnishinahbayeshshikaywin encompasses practices that establish a relationship between places and people; these reflect a belief in souls, spirits, and the existence of human souls through eternity. Since mountains, rivers, land, plants, and trees are animate, all of these have souls.

In traveling, team members will not only cross physical landscapes. They will also achieve a deeper understanding of that parallel world inherent in the knowledge Lac Seul Elders hold. This knowledge has survived and been adapted amid settler-colonial efforts to manage Indigenous communities and create a viable Canadian state out of a patchwork quilt of settler communities and Indigenous peoples.

But first, team members will go within to prepare for their destination.

The team’s Outsiders will engage with Ahnishinahbayeshshikaywin on its own terms. Through direct experience, Outsiders will come to see the relevance and significance of what Lac Seul community members have to share. As part of this journey, the circle will consider how Insider worldviews can be translated for Outsiders, listening in a way few Outsiders have done.

ASKING “THE GODDAMN INDIAN”

In March 2021, I (co-author Alicia) met with George and his son, Mike, over Zoom. George told me he’d chosen me to work with since I’d trained as a field archaeologist with the late C.S. “Paddy” Reid, formerly the Ontario Regional Archaeologist in Kenora, northwestern Ontario, and as an archaeologist and ethnohistorian with the late Bruce G. Trigger at McGill University.

George said he liked the way Paddy and Bruce explained complex ideas clearly, were rigorous, and demonstrated strong ethical codes of conduct in working with Insiders. Bruce had worked with the Huron-Wendat and Paddy with Algonquian-speaking peoples (Cree, Ojibwa, and Oji-Cree). George wanted me to help him explain his ideas to Outsiders.

Most Outsiders never bothered to “ask the goddamn Indian,” he said. He wanted Insiders to be heard on their own terms.

To do so George subsequently enlarged his Teaching Circle to include other Outsider members. He invited them to come to Lac Seul to understand the worldview that frames, structures, and communicates knowledge.

The Teaching Circle is cast wide. It includes a biologist, medic, intellectual historian, and experts in Indigenous literature, sports studies, and jurisprudence. Members will embark on a train ride next year for Lac Seul. Zoom will be replaced by in-person conversations.

PRESERVING TRADITIONS AMID COLONIALISM

The team’s destination, Obishikokaang (Lac Seul), known as the place “where the white pines grow,” is the territory of the Anishinaabeg (called Ojibway by Outsiders who often label them as “hunter-gatherers”). With an on-reserve population of 934, people manage their wild rice, berry-pick, harvest plant medicines, and hunt local game. Some families originate from farther north, where Cree and Ojibway languages comingle. They speak a dialect of Oji-Cree.

Fur trade declined, and Outsiders dominated. Armed by a sense of inevitable “progress,” Outsiders brandished formidable legal and cultural weapons: Their interpretation of the Indian Act of 1876 delegitimized First Nations by depriving them of a sense of self-worth. Many spiritual ceremonies were banned. Nevertheless, my (George’s) father, an apprentice shaman, told me that ceremonies such as the Vision Quest and the Feast of the Dead continued to be practiced through the 1870s and into the early 1930s.

John Kenny Keesic, my father, was an apprentice shaman to Allen “Amoo” Angeconeb, one of many medicine people (Anishinaabeg Mushkikiewak) who were teachers (Kekinoamaged). (“Shaman” is an Outsider imposition.) My father taught me aspects of Ahnishinahbayeshshishikaywin from my birth until close to the time of his passing in 1980.

From the 1870s into the ensuing decades, White settler-colonial supremacy inspired the Indian residential school system, land planning, the registered trapline systems for Indigenous trappers, and the Scoop (trafficking of Indigenous children). By the 1920s, the country celebrated First Nations’ hinterlands as Canadian “wilderness” in landscape paintings of the Group of Seven artists. Though these legal and cultural efforts relentlessly chiseled away at the dignity and sovereignty of people in Obishikokaang, the community continued to preserve traditions and speak for themselves alone.

JOURNEYING TO LAC SEUL FIRST NATION

VIA Rail’s Number 1, the “Canadian,” running between Toronto and Vancouver, British Columbia, is touted as “a great way to see the country.” When the team boards, they will notice how Toronto’s imposing Union Station screams “Empire.” It sits squarely on the Toronto Purchase of 1787, lands obtained by Outsiders from the Mississauga Insiders.

On its northwestern route, the Number 1 crosses a landscape of rivers, lakes, and swamps, with oceans of pine, poplar, and birch forests. Often referred to as “cottage country,” that Anglophone settler-Canadian term for small wooden cabins on “pristine” lakes erases millennia of Indigenous history. The team will find itself reflecting on this obliteration while whirring past wooden docks with red-painted canoes, the ever-present loon, and people fishing, canoeing, and hanging out in small boats.

Though laws prohibited medicine people from practicing Ahnishinahbayeshshikaywin and missionaries endeavored to convert Anishinaabeg people, John had participated in a meaningful transfer of knowledge from Amoo, which in turn, was shared with George. Amoo and other medicine people had hidden their equipment away.

For me (George), the pictographs are neither “art” nor “rock art,” for such categories do not exist in Ahnishinahbayeshshikaywin. Nor are they “symbols,” as everything is interconnected—nothing is separate (individual). Though variations in practices exist among the 77 Northern Ontario First Nations, the world is seen as a single system.

I taught the Teaching Circle my father’s recipe used for pictograph creation and provided the instructions on how to make it. Despite the 1876 Indian Act, our community’s medicine people have preserved their knowledge: It is themselves.

I was born in April 1952. Around the age of 5 or 6, I was apprehended and sent to faraway Shingwauk Indian Residential School near Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. I escaped and ran away, riding the rails. At age 11, labeled “a flight risk,” I was sent to Pelican Lake IRS near Sioux Lookout.