Just a moment ago, children were born in the NutshimitBefore they could walk, they climbed mountains, crossed rivers, and walked frozen lakes on their mothers’ backs.
Naomi Fontaine, Shuni
I had risen with the sun. I had been rowing for several hours, against the wind. As soon as I left the vast expanse of water on the western side of Lake Ashuanipi to enter the pass of the same name, the wind died down, the trees lining the pass now blocking it. I was catching my breath. This passage dotted with islands, located in Labrador/Nitassinan, allows you to reach Sept-Îles by water. This superb channel also leads to a site that is unique in the world.
I looked around for him, not knowing what to expect.
When I saw it, in the distance, between two peninsulas, my canoe was gliding gently on the water, a very light breeze made the trees murmur and clouds hid the too bright flashes of the sun, as if to warn me that the moment had something solemn about it.
On the tip of an island, a cross. It was there. The Innu cemetery of Ashuanipi.
This cross is the only sign of human presence for miles around. As the crow flies, we are more than 250 kilometers north of Sept-Îles, in the middle of the boreal forest.
A cemetery at the end of the world?
On the island itself, a small white fence marks the boundary of the most recent part of the cemetery. Thirty-six people are buried there. A survey of families in the Innu communities estimated that nearly 200 people were buried throughout the island. In his journal, on September 22, 1868, Oblate Father Louis Babel claims to have passed by and blessed “a few graves1 ” The year of birth of the cemetery is therefore lost in the mists of time.
The last deceased to be buried there were members of the same family, the family of Athanase Vollant, who died not far from there, in the fall of 1944. A few decades later, some of the bodies of this same family were repatriated to the cemetery of Mani-utenam, an Innu community near Sept-Îles.
I had been asked to take pictures of the crosses, the fence, and the surroundings of the cemetery to assess the state of the place and to send a team to do maintenance work if necessary. I had told myself that I would explore the island to see traces of the oldest graves. I didn’t dare. The forest said no. The island belongs to the privacy of the Innu. The island is a temple.
We don’t bury our loved ones in a place we never go. We bury them at home. Where we know we can go, from time to time, to pay our respects. In this respect, the position of the cemetery is strategic.
On what could awkwardly be called the Innu highway, the traditional main road that took them to their hunting grounds each year, many absolutely had to pass through this place.
This cemetery is therefore not “at the end of the world”, it is “in” a world. A world that is partly gone, but only partly. The Innu no longer stop there every year, but they maintain the cemetery. Young people sometimes go to the territory in search of themselves. Families will spend part of the winter there, others will hunt there, some businesses prosper there, Tshiuetin, their train, passes there every week.
And the dead, too, occupy the territory.
At the dedication of the Gettysburg Military Cemetery, a terrible battle of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, President and leader of the Northern armies, gave a famous speech that included the following sentences: “We cannot consecrate, we cannot dedicate, we cannot hallow this ground. All the heroes, living and dead, who have fought here have so highly consecrated it that we have no power to add to it, nor to take away from it.”2. »
There is something of that in the Ashuanipi cemetery. Its mere presence is a testimony. As if the dead reminded us that this land will be inhabited forever because they rest there. That it will be inhabited forever by the memory of life before. That it will be inhabited forever by stories necessary for the construction of a rooted, sustainable, happy future. In the Ashuanipi cemetery, the dead speak to us.
1. Louis Babel’s Travel Journalresearch and transcription by Huguette Tremblay, Presses de l’Université du Québec.
2. French version of the US State Department, by André Maurois, French writer and military interpreter. For the record, the main speech of the day was given by Edward Everett, one of the greatest orators of his time. He spoke for two hours and uttered 13,607 words, all but forgotten today. Lincoln uttered 10 sentences, 271 words, which have gone down in history. Food for thought!
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Read on Sunday in the Context section: Tshiuetin, a train towards the future.