Sydney Ideas

Professor Sylvie Poirier reflects on her trajectory of engagement and collaborative research with the Atikamekw First Nation (north-central Quebec, Canada). In 1990, when the Council of the Atikamekw Nation first approached Professor Poirier to conduct research work on land rights issues, they agreed that her anthropological expertise would serve their life projects. Since then, Professor Poirier’s engagement with them has been manifold. Early on, as an “expert” anthropologist within the arduous process of land claims negotiations, she documented the “anthropological proof” of their ancestral relationships to the land claimed. In the early 2000s, her anthropological expertise and research funds were further utilised for exploring contemporary ways to document, valorise and transmit their knowledge systems to younger generations. In this Sydney Ideas lecture she discusses collaborative research as an ongoing process of learning, exchange, and decolonization for the anthropologist and the Indigenous people.