Loring, Stephen, Arbour, Chelsee, Ashini, Napes, and Jenkinson, Anthony. 2018. "Pour ramener l’été: À la recherché d’une concordance entre l’histoire innue et l’archéologie." Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec, XLVIII, (3) 41–54.
The Innu have a history in the Québec-Labrador peninsula which reaches back at least 9000 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 peri-glacial world of Nitassinan. More recent history has been appropriated by colonial institutions presenting the past as belonging (like the present and future) to the newly arrived French (Mastukushut) and English (Akaneshaut). 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.
