4
Environmental and Health Benefits of
Hunting Lifestyles and Diets for the Innu
of Labrador
Colin Samson and Jules Pretty
Background to the Sedentarization of the Innu
The Innu are Algonquian-speaking people of the Labrador-Quebec peninsula. For
some 8000 years, they and their ancestors were permanent nomadic hunters rang-
ing over an area the size of France. In the boreal forests and tundra of the interior
of the peninsula they hunted caribou, including the vast George River herd, as well
as bear, marten, lynx, fox, beaver, otter, muskrat, partridges, ptarmigan, ducks,
geese, several species of fish and occasionally seals in the coastal bays. Archaeologi-
cal evidence suggests that the ancestors of the Innu also had a maritime element in
their economy and that the ancestors of the Innu moved inland to concentrate on
caribou hunting following Inuit expansion to the Labrador coast around 1300
(Loring, 1997, 1998; Loring and Ashini, 2000; Loring et al, 2002).
But from the 1600s onwards, the Innu way of life was gradually reshaped follow-
ing contact with European colonists and by subsequent pressures placed upon it by
missionaries, fur traders and the Canadian state (Leacock, 1954, 1995; Henriksen,
1973; Samson, 2003a). In the mid 20th century, the Indian Act was implemented in
Quebec and those Innu coming to trade at the various posts, which eventually
became villages, were registered and officially regarded as domiciled there. In Labra-
dor, the focus of this study, the provincial authorities initiated an aggressive assimila-
tion campaign soon after Newfoundland joined the Canadian confederation in
- This resulted in the sedentarization of Innu hunting families in the late 1950s
in the village of Sheshatshiu, on the opposite shore to the North West River trading
post on Lake Melville in Central Labrador, and in Davis Inlet (or Utshimassits) on
Iluikoyak Island, across from the old Davis Inlet trading post on the north Labrador
Reprinted from Food Policy, Vol 30, No 1, Samson and Pretty, Environmental and health benefits of
hunting lifestyles and diets for the Innu of Labrador, pp1–20, Copyright (2006), with permission from
Elsevier.