Canadian Innu Aborigines

The Labrador-Quebec Peninsula, known to the indigenous Innu as Nitassinan, is a land rich in resources. This was once a blessing for the aborigines there, who have until recently thrived on trading these precious resources by canoe and hunting beaver, bear and their sacred caribou.

Today it is a curse. The Canadian government has forced the Innu from their land into small, sedentary communities, handing out vast tracts of their land to mining companies and flooding more for hydro-electric dam schemes.

Disconnection from the land and traditional nomadic lifestyles has resulted in the usual colonial scourges of disease, boredom, violence, suicide and drug abuse. Petrol sniffing among young aboriginal people there has become an epidemic.

Calls from the United Nations to end this genocidal abuse and recognise aboriginal native title have fallen upon deaf ears in the Canadian government, and the dispossession of the Innu continues.

The Innu are not to be confused with the Innuit, or Eskimos, whose traditional lands lie further to the north.