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I pray for the grandchildren. I hope the kids are able to someday come back here and talk about me, and how we fought to save this land from being destroyed by the companies. I hope they come here and talk about what I taught them, about important places and plants and animals.2
This quotation came from my fieldwork with the Métis community of Conklin in northeastern Alberta in 2019. It was gathered at the annual community culture camp, where Elders gather to pass long-held community traditions to younger members. This camp took place on land for which Secure Energy had applied to build an industrial landfill, approximately five kilometres from the community. At the camp, the community knowledge keepers shared deeply and fully about the community they called home, and how projects like the one proposed by Secure Energy were making their homeland unrecognizable. Community members were keen to share stories about how Conklin came to be, and how much of that place was now a distant memory. As conversations continued late into the night, it became clear that the remembered place was one where the community maintained a reciprocal relationship with the land, plants, animals, and each other; a place where those relationships were the animating force that made Conklin "home". For many, the conversations-though filled with laughter and tears- felt rushed, as though they were in a race against time to share before the little that remained was destroyed; for them, the home they were describing was under real and continued threat. As the days passed, community members explained to me that the "home" they were describing is perhaps better understood as their wahkotowin, a term which encompasses all relationships in the community, including those with family, extended family, and "mother earth".3 As I began to understand Conklin's wahkotowin, I came to understand Conklin's history. Suddenly, the stories I had been listening to and reading about in archives for years came into focus, as the concerns described in the opening quotation are only the most recent manifestation of the community's long-term struggle to protect their wahkotowin for the generations past, present, and future.
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As outlined by Brenda Macdougall, "wahkootowin" is key to understanding ethnogenesis of the Métis community...