Emergence
The article is based on a one-year ethnographic fieldwork with the members of the Washaw Sibi Eeyou Association, an incorporated community organization counting about 600 members scattered in Northern Quebec and Ontario and currently affiliated with different aboriginal bands. The body of the text highlights the main periods of the history of the group and shows how the contemporary situation of the group is due to members’ semi-nomadic practices, a specific experience of colonialism, recent changes in the national context of aboriginal and state relations, and members’ actions to mobilize into a single collectivity. I will approach social change with a focus on the concept of emergence, which undermines the assumptions of coherence and predictability, and emphasizes the mechanisms, problems, and triggers that contributed to both the fragmentation and cohesion of the group.