Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the ways in which members of one Anishinaabeg community have engaged with state impositions of artificial boundaries that constrain movement, identity, and bodies.

Paper long abstract:

Anishinaabeg people inhabit a world in flux, full of beings, spirits, stories, memories, waterways and trails that traverse multiple dimensions. This fluidity of lived places has been constrained by colonial impositions of boundedness as people and landscapes have been subjected to various forms of overt state control, and more recently, subversive forms of managerialism. The conceptualization of Anishinaabeg communities as circumscribed spaces has served as a means to alienate people from their territories and responsibilities to human and other-than-human kin, while simultaneously overlooking the various ways in which activities imposed outside of Anishinaabeg communities contribute to environmental degradation and change within them. Drawing on three years of research with Dokis First Nation in Northern Ontario, this paper examines the ways in which members of one Anishinaabeg community have negotiated state impositions of artificial boundaries that constrain movement, identity, and bodies. This paper asks: what role can Anthropologists play in contesting the construction of Anishinaabeg territorial use and relationality? How might we differently consider connectedness between human and other-than human components of our land and waterscapes that flow through constructed geo-political boundaries? And, what moves -methodologically and epistemologically - must anthropologists make in order to avoid re-impositions of the ways in which lived land and waterscapes are understood?