Media Release - For Immediate Release

November 17 2010

Dr. Trudy Sable Helps Innu Youth

Through film production training, Saint Mary’s University Professor, Trudy Sable, is helping Northern Labrador’s Innu youth learn to document their ancestral presence within the ancient landscape of Labrador.

Dr. Sable, Director of the Office of Aboriginal and Northern Research at the Gorsebrook Research Institute for Atlantic Canada Studies, spent 12 days in June for the second round of training five young Innu in the art of filming and documenting more than 7,500 years of Innu history at remote Kamestastin on the west end of Mistastin Lake in the tundra of northeastern Labrador. Seven youth participated in an earlier filming project.

Dr. Sable was joined in the project by climatologist, Dr. John Jacobs, forest biologist, Andrew Trant of Memorial University, and Dr. Stephen Loring, an archaeologist with the Smithsonian Institute’s Museum of Natural History’s Arctic Studies Centre in Washington.

She said, “Environment Canada approached the Gorsebrook Institute in 1998 seeking assistance in developing a more holistic approach to documenting Nitassinan, the Innu ancestral lands, from both the Innu and Western scientific perspectives.”

Three years later, Dr. Sable said this evolved into the Environmental Guardians Program, a series of educational modules to work with the Innu to develop capacity to monitor and sustainably develop their ancestral lands.

The Guardians are a group of Innu who have been working for the Innu Nation Environmental Office along with a number of federal and provincial agencies such as the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Sustainable Forestry, and Hydro Quebec on projects impacting Innu lands.

She said the Innu Guardians have done about a dozen modules dealing with such issues as climate change, caribou management, fisheries, archaeology, migratory birds, forestry, and water quality. In recent years, they have also set up Innu Permanent Sample Plots to begin monitoring climate change in Labrador.

Dr. Sable said that the International Polar Year and Social Science and Humanities Research Grants were critical in creating the Innu Youth Film Project.

As a result, “we, along with Pine Grove Productions, have been able to do a film making training program with four wonderful youth.” Dr. Sable labels them at-risk youth because they live in an area prone to high rates of unemployment, incarceration, alcoholism, suicides and limited educational opportunities. “The youth have been really excellent in putting it together,” she went on to say.

“We’re sitting on a very powerful place that has over 7,000 years of Innu history right here,” Dr. Sable said of the Kamestastin video project. “We’re documenting all the stories of this land that we’re hoping to tell in this video production. (behayes@accesswave.ca)

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For More Information:

Steve Proctor
External Affairs
Saint Mary's University
(902) 420.5513
E-mail: steve.proctor@smu.ca
www.smu.ca

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