Joséphine Bacon

It was around 1968, in Montreal.

A young Innu woman was arriving in the city. She was looking for work. She was struggling to find any.

Her name was Joséphine Bacon.

She was born on April 23, 1947, in Pessamit, on Quebec's North Shore.

She spent her first five years on the land, with her family. In Nutshimit, the inland country, following the traditional Innu way of life.

At five, she was sent to the Indian residential school near Sept-Îles. She stayed fourteen years.

There, she met Innu from all over the region. But she did not learn her people's stories there. Those stories she would learn only later, thanks to anthropologists.

When she left, she went to Quebec City. She wanted to become a secretary. She studied for six months in Ottawa.

Then came Montreal. And a job.

Anthropologists were studying the Innu. They were interviewing elders, in Quebec and Labrador. They needed someone to translate and transcribe. Joséphine became that person.

She worked with the anthropologist Sylvie Vincent. With her, she travelled to Natashquan.

There, the elders helped her rediscover the traditional stories. She found again a part of her Innu identity.

She relearned the language of Nutshimit. The one that does not sound the same on the land as on the reserve.

For forty years, she was a translator, an interpreter, and a teacher of Innu-aimun. From the 1970s, she worked alongside researchers in Innu communities.

She also learned filmmaking, at the National Film Board. Her first documentary told of a meeting between Innu elders and clan mothers from Kahnawake. That film is now lost.

One day, she began to scribble. Words that were within her. Her friend, the poet Laure Morali, led her toward poetry.

Then came Bâtons à message, Tshissinuatshitakana. A book written in two languages, Innu-aimun and French, published by Mémoire d'encrier. Other collections followed: Un thé dans la toundra, Uiesh, Nin auass, Kau Minuat.

Her poems honour the elders, Nutshimit, and her fifty years in Montreal.

She taught Innu-aimun at the Kiuna Institution, in Odanak. She was elder in residence at UQAM.

In 2020, the filmmaker Kim O'Bomsawin made a documentary about her: Je m'appelle humain. Because in Innu-aimun, "innu" means "human."

Her way of living among her people, receiving from the elders in order to pass on in turn, echoes Ubuntu, without being the same thing. She belongs to the Innu tradition, to its language, to its land.

Honours came. In 2016, Université Laval gave her an honorary doctorate in anthropology. In 2022, she became an Officer of the Ordre national du Québec. In 2023, an Officer of the Order of Canada.

A young woman listening to elders in Natashquan. And, years later, books where Innu-aimun and French stand side by side, page after page.