Wild Cuisine and Canadianness: Creeping Rootstalks and Subterranean Struggle

Canada is commonly depicted as a rugged wilderness. Defining the characteristics of its food as wild is a contributing factor in this narrative. While there may be some truth to this image, there are also overlooked implications in perpetuating links between the notion of Canada as a nation, and the trope of wilderness as its defining feature. In this article, I draw on visual analysis as well as theory from sensory studies to complicate the concept of “wild” food at the root of discourse on Canadian cuisine. The focus of this analysis is a case study of wild berries on the northeastern coast of Québec, Canada. Throughout the article I quote from interviews that I conducted with Anglophone, Francophone, and Innu locals of Québec's Lower North Shore. The intimate experiences of residents with the foods that grow in their home do not connect smoothly with representations of wilderness in promotional materials for wild berry products and tourism in the region. In fact, personal accounts of picking, preparing, and eating wild berries complicate master narratives of wild Canadian cuisine, thus enriching this country's national food culture through complexity. These stories show that wilderness is not a state of purity but a fiction that obscures the multifaceted natural-cultural negotiations among humans, plants, animals, climate, and more in the making of what we call “wild.”

Archaeology of the Inuit of Southern Labrador and the Quebec Lower North Shore

Early European accounts document the presence of Labrador Inuit in northern Newfoundland, the Strait of Belle Isle, and the northeastern Gulf of St. Lawrence in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Controversy over the interpretation of the historical record and the extent and nature of Southern Inuit presence has been clarified by recent archaeological research on the Quebec Lower North shore, which demonstrates a series of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century winter sod-house villages in every major region from Brador to Petit Mécatina. House types are similar to those found on the Central Labrador coast, and all contain much Basque and other European material culture, indicating extensive trade contacts rather than the spoils of sporadic raids. The Hare Harbor Inuit settlement at Petit Mécatina is found at a Basque/European whaling and fishing station and appears to have been a European-Inuit enterprise facilitated by the Little Ice Age expansion of Arctic marine mammals.

The Inuit archaeology of the Quebec Lower North Shore

This paper summarizes a decade of archaeological research demonstrating evidence for periods of year-round Inuit occupation of the Quebec Lower North Shore in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Excavations at several winter villages replicate settlement patterns at sod house sites in central Labrador, including continuation of a traditional Inuit subsistence and domestic economy while incorporating European materials and artifacts. Finds at the Hare Harbour site on Petit Mécatina Island suggest active Inuit collaboration with a European (probably Basque) whaling and fishing station. The Hare Harbour site is a unique early instance of Inuit-European economic and social enterprise. In the early 1700s the Inuit occupation of the Quebec Lower North Shore came to an abrupt end due to economic competition and hostilities with European and Indian groups that forced Inuit to abandon the coast and retreat north to the core area of Inuit settlement on the central Labrador coast.

“They have gone back to their country”: French landscapes and Inuit encounters in 18th century southern Labrador

Although French and Basque fishing and whaling crews had been coming to southern Labrador since the early sixteenth century, colonization in a more permanent form would not begin until the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Emerging as an outgrowth of similar colonial efforts along Quebec’s Lower North Shore, colonization of Labrador was driven by Canadian interests and administered by colonial officials in Québec. However, the simple possession of Labrador landscapes was not equivalent to their successful exploitation. Detailed study of one land grant in Red Bay-St. Modet demonstrates how tenuous the possession of lands in Labrador could be, whether challenges came from French rivals or from Inuit raids. This article uses historical, cartographic, and archaeological evidence to discuss how the French established, contested, and used Labrador land concessions, and explores how Inuit reacted to the increasing encroachments of the French.

QUEBEC REGION'S SHORELINE SEGMENTATION IN THE ST. LAWRENCE RIVER: RESPONSE TOOL FOR OIL SPILL

ABSTRACT The Quebec Region's shoreline description of the St. Lawrence River began in 1985 with the first shoreline interpretation by Environment Canada. This description was available as a paper version and was no longer adequate for oil spill response. An update was required in order to split the shoreline into segments and to digitize the information. A partnership was developed between Environment Canada, Eastern Canada Response Corporation and the Canadian Coast Guard to conduct the aerial survey and to do the segmentation. The cartography of segmentation covers the fluvial part of the St. Lawrence River (Montreal Region) up to the Gulf (including the Lower-North Shore and the St. Lawrence Islands). The database, developed specifically for that project, is oil spill-oriented. It includes geomorphologic information, from the supratidal to the lower intertidal zone, some statistical information and other requirements for the cleanup operation. For this operational database, useful for the response operation, links were developed with other databases and specialized oil spill software. The first system is GENIE Web, which is a Georeference Environmental Network for Information Exchange on the Web. The second system, ShoreAssess©, is a managing tool for SCAT teams in the field. Finally, a partnership with the Geography Department at the Université du Québec in Rimouski (UQAR) will help us to keep the St. Lawrence River coastal evolution up to date.