Jan Borm will give a key-note during the 2025 Atlantic Symposium of the Canadian Association on Water Quality (CAWQ), PEOPLE 2025 Challenges and Opportunities in Environmental Sustainability under Climate Change in St. John’s, Canada, on July 24, 2025, 13:30-15:00.
Indigenous territories are at the core of numerous contemporary issues, be they political, judicial or environmental, Daniel Chartier and Jan Borm note in the introduction to a forthcoming collective volume about comparative Indigeneity in the Americas (Presses de l’université du Québec à Montréal): Inuit, Innu, Atikamekw and Mapuche. These first nations have a vision of their territory that transcends conventional notions of ownership or stewardship of natural resources, conceiving of the links of culture, language and the environment as inseparable. As the Atikamekw playwright and academic Véronique Basile Hébert points out in the same volume, “Atikamekw culture and language are constructed by the territory and express the cosmogony of my people by its experience with the territory considered like the source of our cultural specificity, the source of our indigeneity, of our atikamekwicity”. This holistic view entails that any deteriorated environment is a cause of suffering and a threat to the indigeneity attached to it. Deterioration of environmental conditions means a lower quality of life, thereby threatening cultural continuity, a key-factor for Indigenous societies to affirm their identity, to continue to recover from the many dramatics impacts of colonialism, and to develop new perspectives of personal and collective satisfaction as well as prosperity. This contribution will look at some recent Indigenous texts published both in French and English to illustrate the congenial link between nature and culture in Indigenous societies of the North, an absolutely essential aspect of their identity that law courts are slowly taking into consideration when it comes to territorial conflicts and Indigenous rights, as one notable example from Argentina goes to show.
