Grants:Impact/Cultural Heritage/Atikamekw

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Atikamekw Nehirowisiw & Wikimedia Canada

Language:  This case study is also available in french

Location:  Canada

Grantee:  Wikimedia Canada

Grant information

• Program: Project & Event Grants, Simple Annual Plan Grants, Rapid Grants
• Fiscal year: 2015 to present

“ In all houses, we speak Atikamekw. ” — Therese Ottawa, Atikamekw Nehirowisiw

Heritage in its simplest definition is something handed down from the past. As such, heritage is also a process of selection: what traditions, values, or words will “survive” and be passed on, and which ones will not? Every society engages in this process, but for some communities, political, economic, and social dynamics have usurped, interrupted, or inhibited this process of selection.

As with many indigenous communities, this is the case for the Canadian First Nations.

“ [The residential schools system] created a breach in the local processes of handing down knowledge, skills, and practices to younger generations. ” — Sylvie Poirier

Years of colonization - along with the aftermath of colonization policies - have placed Canadian First Nations at the margins of society, creating conditions in which the transmission of intergenerational knowledge has been stunted. One reason for this was the Canadian residential school system: from the 1960s to the 1980s, the Canadian government sent a generation of children to residential schools far away from their home, where cultural practices were forbidden, such as speaking in their native language.

“ I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone… Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department, that is the whole object of this Bill. ” — Duncan Campbell Scott CMG, deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs in Canada from 1913 to 1932

One of the communities affected is the Atikamekw Nehirowisiw, located in central Quebec. Unlike other communities, about 95% of the Atikamekw still speaks their language today despite the structural barriers created by colonization. But preservation and transmission of their heritage has been challenging in the rapidly changing age of information, where priority is given to speaking French or English, and to the written word. For a community who has an oral tradition of knowledge, our rapidly changing world isn’t inclusive of their community or their knowledge. This is especially true when it comes to working online, where the option to search or read in Atikamekw is practically non-existent.

Capteur de rêve

“ For young people, the way of life has changed. With new technologies, they do not want to go into the woods anymore and culture is lost. There are generational conflicts. They no longer listen to parents' parents. The old and the young do not understand each other anymore. ” — Therese Ottawa, Atikamekw Nehirowisiw

One way the Atikamekw have sought to bridge the generational divide is through a collaboration with Wikimedia Canada. Launched in 2013 (and later funded in 2016 by Wikimedia Foundation), this program has brought Elders and young people together to document their heritage. They have been taking pictures, making audio recordings (through Lingua Libre), and writing down their knowledge.

In 2017, this work culminated in the launch of their own Wikipedia: Atikamekw Wikipedia.

Throughout this program, the Atikamekw Elders have been empowered to make decisions about their culture and language. For instance, Elders had to create new, meaningful words for concepts like “category” or “upload” that are common across Wikipedia and other websites, but didn’t exist in Atikamekw. Jeannette Coocoo, an Elder from the Wemontaci village, spent countless hours on this creative process and now, from this work, there is the word "Natcipata masinahikan" or “upload”.

À la rencontre de deux générations

The Elders have also been empowered to decide what knowledge would be freely shared with the outside world, and what would be kept sacred. This was an incredibly important element in the program, and a dramatic shift away from a history where indigenous knowledge has been forcefully taken away, exploited, denied, or shamed.

By respecting the Elders decision, the community has been able to retain their “collective intimacy” with certain knowledge. Some knowledge is “common knowledge” and can be shared widely, but some things are “sacred” or “specific”, and should be known only to a certain family or community (e.g. crafts, medicinal properties of plants, spirituality, and rituals). In empowering the Elders to make these decisions, this program - and thus Atikamekw Wikipedia - has fostered a respectful, indigenous-centered kind of knowledge sharing.

“ Creating their own encyclopedia gave them the power to adapt the tool to their own system of knowledge. They had the power to create the rules. ” — Jean-Philippe Béland, Wikimedia Canada

All of this work is ultimately in service of the Atikamekw Manawan Council’s strategic priorities for 2020. Work on Wikipedia and with Wikimedia Canada is just one piece of the Council’s larger efforts toward goals such as the “consolidation of pride: positive image reinforcement, within and outside the community; promotion of Atikamekw identity, language and culture.”

But barriers still exist. Most information online about the Atikamekw is not written or curated by the Atikamekw. Tourists take photos of garbage, and that’s the image the world sees of the community. The spectre of the residential school system remains: schools have not been a historically safe place to learn, connect with, and pass on cultural heritage.

“ The Atikamekw were marked by the history of residential schools, where rituals of culture were forbidden or forms of culture performance were forbidden. In the community there is a real challenge of reconnecting the past with modernity. For this reason, [the relationship between] the Atikamekw and the schools, the school being an institution of knowledge, is very delicate, because of what has happened historically. So a project that can bring young people and elders togethers is an opportunity and also can help to restore pride, cultural pride, community pride for the youth. ” — Nathalie Casemajor, National Institute of Scientific Research

Gagnants de la chasse photographique, École Otapi, Manawan, Nitaskinan

Despite these barriers, through the education program at Manawan's Otapi High School, there are early signs of a restoration of pride in the Atikamekw youth. Overseen by Luc Patin (User:Bilbo40, the computer science teacher) and Jean-Paul Echaquan (language keeper of the community), students have been learning to add information to Atikamekw Wikipedia in Atikamekw. The very act of writing online in their language, writing about their community, and adding to their community’s encyclopedia have all been baby steps to a restoration of pride.

“ Before this project, Atikamekw youth felt like speaking Atikamekw wasn’t relevant. The youth would type in French or English to search information online, not in Atikamekw. The Atikamekw youth felt like to speak Atikamekw was kitsch, because there was no future in their language. [Through this project] youth can find their own words now, there is pride and modernity in the project. ” — Jean-Philippe Béland, Wikimedia Canada

The journey to the “sum of all human knowledge” will not be one size fits all. It will take the time to build trust with marginalized communities, acknowledging historical oppression and its far reaching effects. It will take respecting and honoring their ways of sharing knowledge. And it will take sustained effort. The collaboration between Wikimedia Canada and the Atikamekw Nehirowisiw is progress, but more needs to be done globally in order for Wikimedia to achieve its vision.

“ This project is important in order to keep the language and culture. The language of the territory. ” — Therese Ottawa, Atikamekw Nehirowisiw

Now that you've read this case study, consider...

Wikimedia is founded on the vision of “the “sum of all human knowledge”. How will Wikimedia reconcile with communities who hold some knowledge “sacred”, or “not to be shared”?