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Paper Short Abstract:

Exploration of the particularities and challenges of an emerging French-speaking Quebec anthropology concerned with Indigenous peoples, in the context of the national affirmation movement of the 1960s-1970s, and the implementation of major infrastructure projects, particularly in northern Quebec.

Paper Abstract:

French-speaking anthropology in Quebec was institutionalized and developed at the same time as what is known as the "Quiet Revolution", a period of major social change, opening up to the world, modernization and major infrastructure projects, as French-Canadians asserted themselves as Québécois. Both within and outside universities, one of the most important fields of research in this nascent anthropology was Indigenous studies. We will explore the particularities of this field of research, in the Quebec of the 1960s and 1970s. It was marked by Marxist and structuralist approaches, and saw the creation of two important journals, Recherches amérindiennes au Québec (1971, renamed Revue d'études autochtones in 2022) and Études Inuit Studies (1977), which are still in existence. Despite their willingness, through learning Indigenous languages, research and collaboration with Indigenous students, translators-interpreters and "writer-informants" to help give Indigenous people "the tools they needed to liberate themselves", their public statements denouncing the lack or inadequate recognition of Indigenous peoples in the national independence movement, and their denunciation of a "colonizing" anthropology, French-speaking anthropologists faced a number of challenges in their relations with Indigenous people. They were in a peculiar position, as members of a people seeking to emancipate themselves from Canadian control, but at the same time participating in the maintenance of the colonial situation of First Peoples in the territory of Quebec.