Encounters: An Anthropological History of Southern Labrador by John Kennedy (review)

John Kennedy’s first foray into the anthropological history of southeastern Labrador came in 1995 with the publication of his book People of the Bays and Headlands (University of Toronto Press, 1995). Peoples, as Kennedy calls it in the preface to Encounters: An Anthropological History of Southeastern Labrador, was one of the first, if not the first, detailed historical overviews of the region between West Bay and Chateau Bay, Labrador. In the ten years between the publication of Peoples and Encounters, southeastern Labrador experienced considerable change. Arguably, the most substantial of these changes came about as a result of the cod fishery collapse and subsequent moratorium in 1992, the centralization of the region’s population–which continues to this day–and the politicization of southern Inuit, or Inuit-metis (Kennedy’s term) identity. With Peoples as a foundation, Kennedy was free to delve more deeply into the social and economic history of the region in Encounters. As a result, he offers a community-centred assessment of the historical contingencies that steered the transformations that occurred over the intervening decade and earlier. As was the case with Peoples, Encounters is a welcome contribution to the study of Labrador history.

As the title suggests, mobility and interaction are the two primary themes within Encounters, as is the history of the Quebec-Labrador peninsula and Newfoundland more generally. In Kennedy’s anthropological gaze, mobility relates to the movements of people east and west–between their summer and winter homes, the coast and the interior, and Europe and North America–and north and south–between northern and southern Labrador, Labrador and the eastern Arctic, and Labrador, Newfoundland, and the United States. Interaction relates to the relationships between people–fishers, settlers, raiders, residents, employers, priests, and doctors–between people and recourses–fish, seals, whales, caribou, fur, forests, minerals, Inuit, French, English, Americans, and Canadians–between people and organizations–merchants, governments, agencies, companies, and the church–and between people and places–archaeological sites, summer and winter communities, trap lines, and resettled and modern communities. A third and underlying theme in Encounters stems from Kennedy’s role as a research collaborator within a multidisciplinary study–Understanding the Past to Build the Future (http://www.mun.ca/labmetis (accessed 29 January 2017)–to further understand and explain the Inuit occupation of southeastern Labrador, and, therefore, Inuit-metis history, society, and culture, through the combination of archaeological, archival, ethnographic, and genealogical research.

This combination of academic and community efforts, and the focus on mobility, interaction, and Inuit-metis culture and society, provides a level of detail that was absent from Peoples. This upgrading is most evident in two areas. First, the analysis and discussion of the merchant and trading history in Encounters is likely the most thorough ever published for southeastern Labrador. Throughout the discussion of merchants such as Nicholas Darby, Jeremiah Coghlan, John Noble, and Andrew Pinson, the Hudson Bay Company, and even the American fisherman who also participated in the local economy, it is evident that self-interest was the flavour of the day and that there were significant negative impacts on the inhabitants of southeastern Labrador, such as language loss, resettlement, indentureship, marginalization, and dispossession. Second, and related, is the focus on “internal colonialism” (6), which Kennedy maintains throughout the book. From the impacts of the merchants, through to the closure of the cod fishery, and the relocation of communities that had existed for long periods of time, the population of southeastern Labrador, and Labrador more generally, was under the thumb of Newfoundland. As a resident of Labrador, and as a witness to local citizens’ attempts to block forced resource development and continued environmental degradation, I find it impossible to ignore the weaving of this thread in current struggles.

Thinking further about the relationship of Encounters to present-day Labrador, and the steadfastness of Kennedy’s focus on the Inuit-Metis and their north-south interactions with Nunatsiavut Inuit, one...