C/AM Speaker Series “People and Cultures of Canada” Presents: Aboriginal Identity and Nation-Building in the Mi’kmaw

This talk focuses on contemporary identity and nation-building dynamics among the Mi’kmaw First Nation people of Eastern Canada. After providing geographic and historical context, the talk will illustrate some of the elements that have characterized Mi’kmaw identity and its construction in recent times, including recent aspects of Indigenous nationhood, or First nationhood, and nation-building in the Mi’kmaw communities of Nova Scotia. The eclectic nature – cultural, political, economic, and territorial – of First national discourse among the Mi’kmaq makes nation building a promising path toward providing better services to Mi’kmaw families and communities and, at the same time, elevates it to the status of strategic asset for reclaiming treaty and aboriginal rights to self-determination.