Anicinabe Aki—Invisible No More: Indigenous Urban History in the Abitibi Region

Abstract

This article explores the Indigenous historiography of the town of Senneterre and the Abitibi region in Quebec. As the centre of ancestral and contemporary social and spatial organization of three Indigenous nations—Anicinabe, Iiyiuu/Iinuu (Cree), and Atikamekw Nehirowisiw—the specificity of Senneterre allows for a more nuanced analysis that centres Indigenous epistemological traditions of kinship, responsibility, and care. We thus focus on the ways in which the Senneterre Native Friendship Centre (and, more broadly, the national and provincial friendship centre movement), through a politics of care, has consistently delinked from settler-colonial tenets to build and embody a vision of making home and weave a sense of belonging for the Indigenous families that have been excluded from the town’s imaginary. The authors show how the Friendship Centre and its members have contributed to the reexamination of analytical and conceptual underpinnings of Indigenous urbanization, from a process of acculturation, cultural and territorial dispossession, and assimilation to that of strengthening contemporary Indigenous identities and the flourishing of a civic society in a place where urban space cannot be disassociated from a complex and overlapping Indigenous sovereign presence.