To Bring Back the Summer
The Innu have a history in the Québec-Labrador peninsula which reaches back at least 8000 years as testified by Innu atanukana (“legends”) and archaeology. Though muffled by millennia, the stories people tell, such as Kautuasukuaniskuanast (the boy who brought back the summer and who was transformed into the White-Crowned Sparrow), are parables of Innu history that document the arrival of Innu ancestors in the periglacial world of Nitassinan. More recent history has been appropriated by colonial institutions presenting the past (like the present and the future) as belonging to the newly arrived French (mishtikushuat) and English (akaneshauat). Other than as part of the backdrop to a heroic tableau involving intrepid French and English “explorers” and adventurers, the Innu are thoroughly absent. Archaeology has the potential to help “bring back the summer” and possibly give voice to an unwritten Innu history by recognizing and disrupting the unequal power dynamic between Western and Indigenous versions of the past.