Do Berries Listen? Berries as Indicators, Ancestors, and Agents in Canada's Oil Sands Region

ABSTRACT

In this paper I discuss how being a student of Northern Bush Cree traditions has revealed some possibilities for understanding how berries listen, and respond to, living in, and on, the edge of areas of extreme extraction. Members of Fort McKay First Nation and Bigstone Cree Nations tend to their relationships with the sentient landscape and its entirety of living beings through respectful speech, behaviour, and harvesting practices. The agency of those living beings is expressed through their decisions as to whether or not humans can encounter, harvest, and share in their substance. By examining relationships of reciprocity between the human and other-than-human animal world from a post-humanist perspective, this paper seeks to expand upon traditional indicators of contamination resulting from the large-scale industrial development of the Athabasca oil sands in First Nations’ traditional territories, and to value and share some observations and knowledge of Cree Elders and knowledge holders.

KEYWORDS:

• Northern bush Crees
• Athabasca oil sands
• post-humanism
• berries
• other-than-humans

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We surveyed 80 community members to determine their top 20 preferred wild food items to have tested, and selected the top 10 items, sampling 10 of each category for a total of 100 samples. We then accepted 50 random samples that community members brought in, as selected by community-based monitors while in the field.

2 Here I am referring more broadly to the Cree Nations spread across Canada. With over 200,000 members it is one of the largest First Nations groups in North America.

3 Wild berries or fruit in sakaw nehiyawewin (Waugh 1998: 93).

4 The Cree culture hero and the object of many legends and tales (Waugh 1998: 231).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by McGill Northern Scientific Training Program Fieldwork Award; International Society of Ethnobiology Darrell Posey PhD Fellowship; First Nations Environmental Contaminants Program Grant; Sir James Lougheed Award of Distinction; McGill Institute for the Study of Canada Warren Fellowship; Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship; Canadian Northern Studies Trust Scholarship; Canada-Alberta Joint Oil Sands Agreement; Canadian Federation of University Women Canadian Home Economics Association Fellowship.