A coffee with… Constant Awashish | The constancy of the Grand Chef

Almost all Atikamekw remember what they were doing on September 28, 2020, when they saw the video. It’s their 9/11. Their apocalypse. They remember the shock. Of anguish. Of the feeling of helplessness.

Isabelle Hachey
The Press

For hours, Constant Awashish was unaware of the tragedy that was playing out at the Joliette hospital. That day, the Grand Chief of the Council of the Atikamekw Nation was in a community in Haute-Mauricie, a territory deprived of cellular coverage.

Cut off from the rest of the world. And its horrors.

“When we got to where there was a signal, my team and I, it was around 5 p.m. It started to come in. Lots of messages. It was confusing, we didn’t quite understand what was going on…”

He ended up coming across Joyce Echaquan’s video. What this Atikamekw had picked up on her cell phone before she died was difficult to see and, above all, to hear. “Heille, you’re thick in calisse… Well better for stuffing than other things, that… It’s the rest of us who pay for that…”

It was horrible. But, for an Atikamekw, not so surprising. Never had we had such striking proof of the racism that Aboriginal people in Quebec can face. Brutal proof. Unequivocal. “I said to myself: there is a whole battle ahead,” recalls Constant Awashish.

This fight is always the same, against ignorance, denial, prejudice. Two years later, despite the magnitude of the shock, despite the strength of the evidence, it is still far from over.

I met Constant Awashish on October 3, provincial election day, at the café of a large hotel in Montreal. The night before, Joyce Echaquan’s spouse, Carol Dubé, had been invited to the set of Everybody talks about it. The Grand Chief had made a point of accompanying him to support him.

Constant Awashish refused to tell me if he had exercised his duty as a citizen. As if voting was some kind of shameful secret. In fact, for some it is a bit. “It’s frowned upon among Aboriginal people,” he laments.

“I had discussions about it with [l’ancien chef mohawk] Joe Norton, whom I respected enormously. Said to him: “It’s not our system, we don’t vote.” Me, I said: “You have to participate to change things from the inside.” »

He is convinced of one thing: Aboriginal people must make their place.

Above all, he adds, we do not wish them any harm. On the contrary. “The Atikamekw Nation needs a strong Quebec. The reverse is also true: Quebec needs strong First Nations. We are all interconnected. We are in an ecosystem. »

We must take care of everyone if we want to keep this ecosystem healthy. The Grand Chef cultivates this speech of openness and collaboration with the constancy of the gardener.

He learned very early on the virtues of patience and perseverance. His mother had returned from boarding school “a little in bad shape”, he slips modestly. She had “drinking problems”.

So, Constant Awashish spent a good part of his childhood with his maternal grandparents, on the Opitciwan reserve.

“I went to school in La Tuque, but I was always sent to the woods. I took a night train, I arrived in the corner of Clova around 2, 3 am. My grandfather was waiting for me at the station. We picked up my luggage, we walked a bit, to the lake. His canoe was there. We put my things in the canoe and we left for his camp. We went to visit the elders all over the territory. We slept in tents, summer and winter. »

Constant Awashish smiles as he recounts his memories. He measures his luck. Its language is one of the best preserved in North America. Its culture, too.

He is only 41 years old and lived an Aboriginal childhood like very few of his contemporaries had the opportunity to experience.

The Grand Chief is well aware that racism is not a problem that can be solved in two strokes of the spoon, as Prime Minister François Legault would have liked to believe during the election campaign.

This problem, rooted in mentalities, takes time to resolve. And cooperation. The recent promises of Mr. Legault do not impress him.

Too often, elected officials only hear about Aboriginal people through the media. “The Oka crisis, the recent rail crisis, the road blockages from time to time… that’s what we see on TV. So when an Aboriginal file lands on their desks, these elected officials “see it as a problem that must be circumvented, denied, eluded. That’s their reaction. Always on the defensive.

Constant Awashish would like Quebecers to see Aboriginal people not as a bundle of problems, but as an “added value” for society and for the economy. “We’re talking about a lack of manpower, business succession. It could be that, too, the Aboriginals. »

“Yes, it’s true that we have social difficulties in the communities, but it’s not by chance,” he adds. We can be the next generation, but our members have to be able to feel better. It’s been 150 years since we’ve been told that we’re not of the world…”

To rebuild bridges, we must make gestures, even symbolic ones, believes the Grand Chief. Declare September 30 as a public holiday, for example, to properly mark Truth and Reconciliation Day. “It would be a mark of respect for the Aboriginal people. »

But François Legault has decided: it’s no. A new holiday, he claimed, would cause an immeasurable loss of productivity for Quebec…

Similarly, the Prime Minister refuses to adopt Joyce’s Principle, which aims to ensure that all Aboriginal people have access to health and social services without discrimination.

In the long run, all these refusals undermine trust.

It weakens the ecosystem.

“We have to give ourselves small victories, sometimes, pleads Constant Awashish. If we are given small victories, confidence will settle, we will have the impression that no, finally, the politicians are not that bad, they do not want to crush us that much, things change. »