Unsettling Mobility

Ever since European contact, the British Crown and the Catholic Church have tried to absorb Indigenous peoples, and in doing so have labeled them as distinct from the settler majority. Michelle A. Lelièvre looks at how movement has both undercut and, at times, sustained this central tension in the settler colonial enterprise.

Lelièvre's research draws on archaeological, ethnographic and archival fieldwork with the Pictou Landing First Nation, one of thirteen Mi'kmaw communities in Nova Scotia. She contends that movement was essential to the British Crown and the Catholic Church, both for populating the colony and for governing and converting the Mi'kmaq. For the Mi'kmaq, continued mobility has been a way of asserting sovereignty over their ancestral lands and waters in the face of European encroachment.

The book calls for an anthropological theory of mobility that looks beyond physical travel from one place to another to include the values attached to movement and the sensory experiences of those who move. Lelièvre argues that anthropologists, Indigenous scholars and policymakers should rethink settlement as something other than sedentary life. Mobile and stationary practices, the stories told about them, and the embodied experience of both all shape how people make places and settle them. The book appears at a time when Indigenous communities across North America are using movement as protest, asserting political identity and reshaping what that identity means.