Their strength is silence. To enter their world, you have to look to learn, and you also have to know how to be silent. In this at least, Aboriginal culture differs radically from that of the rest of the Western world. This is what we also learn by visiting the exhibition Eeyou Istchee: an invitation to experience the territoryoffered by the Musée de la civilization de Québec.
Through this exhibition, the museum invites its public to enter the hunting territory of a Cree family from Waswanipi, in Nord-du-Québec, and to participate in the celebrations and meetings surrounding the Goose Breakstay devoted annually to hunting bustards, just after the last melting of the ice.
This family is that of Ian Saganash, a young Cree from Waswanipi, who took part in this project launched by the Boîte Rouge VIF. “The organization wanted to produce an interactive immersive film project. They wanted to do technological exploration […]. It was also intended to be a learning program for everyone,” says Anne-Josée Lacombe, educational project manager in the programming department of the Musée de la civilisation. This technology was also intended to allow young Aboriginal people to document their culture, and to record the elders while there was still time.
The organization wanted to produce an interactive immersive film project. They wanted to do some techno-logical exploration […]. It was also meant to be a learning program for everyone.
Armed with a camera and two large batteries, Ian Saganash undertook to film, for a week, the activities of his family around the Goose Break. We therefore find ourselves with them, at dawn, tracking down the bustards attracted by decoys, in a boat camouflaged under the branches, then gathering around a fire to make them turn by winding a string, before observe the kukum (grandmother) Maggie preparing her bannock.
“He planted his camera in the middle of what was happening and he shot,” continues Anne-Josée Lacombe.
Understand without speaking
And we are surprised precisely to understand what is happening without the need for explanations. As if we had simply lost the habit of observing, forgotten the experience of silence.
“Traditionally, the youngest, we listen to the kukum and the older ones, that’s how you learn,” says Éliane Grant, a Cree biologist who helped the museum set up this project. They impart learning when they feel one is ready to receive it. That’s how I wanted it presented, and the museum rose to the challenge. Often, non-Aboriginal people come to the communities and they are very curious. They ask a lot of questions, and it’s not well received culturally. »
After doing the route without a guide, you can get a tablet from the museum where certain information about the Goose Break, this two-week period, when the majority of regular activities in the communities — schools, businesses, etc. — are suspended to allow families to travel to the territory to hunt geese. As the families are reunited there, it is also an opportunity to celebrate the first steps of the children, as we see in a video, when a very small girl, dressed in traditional costume, carries a bundle of wood.
However, the expression Goose Break does not exist in Cree, and this concept of “vacation” was also absent from Aboriginal tradition. This period is rather referred to as goose season.
six seasons
Moreover, the Crees do not have four seasons, but six. Added to those that we know, the seasons of thaw, in the spring, and that of the onset of frost, in the fall, when moose are hunted in particular.
It is therefore when the ground thaws that the family goes hunting for geese, since they can then land on the water. To ensure that the hunt will be good, we will place an offering of tobacco on the last layer of ice that covers the lake.
This season is not fixed on a specific date, explains Éliane Grant, since it varies according to the date of the melting of the ice. “This year, the Goose Break is scheduled for the first two weeks of May, but if it’s later, we’ll extend it,” she said.
Our journalist was a guest at the Musée de la civilisation.