Geological Eye. – Marie Perrault

Entitled Œil géologue. Dégager la chair du mort terrain, (Geological eye. Uncovering the flesh of the overburden) this auto-fictional essay explores my family history, focusing on the human aspects of mining in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, where my father grew up, and in the hinterland of the Côte-Nord, where he worked as a prospector in the early 1950s.

Inspired by his father figure, I borrow from the methods of exploration and prospecting to draw out memories and anecdotes from our respective lives, which I place in a historical context. My text develops in the form of fragments, like so many mining core samples, around chosen moments and places, from which emerge in filigree a lived experience and an imaginary world. My approach is based on a family quest, but it also allows me to explore social issues that are particularly acute today in the context of the search for alternatives to fossil fuels.

The work will be divided into three parts. The first, entitled “Île d’innocence”, brings together my childhood and youth memories. It focuses on the intimacy and complicity shared with my father. It also describes the historical context and testifies to the relative ignorance – by the financial, expertise or consumer centers – of the difficulties that mining activity generates for those affected by its nebulous nature. Focusing on the Abitibi region, called Kitakinan by the Anichinabe, the second part is based on anecdotes from my father’s youth and his family history. It highlights the omnipotence of the companies over the local community, its social, sporting and cultural organization, and the exploitation of the land. Finally, a section on the Côte-Nord region, known to the Innu as Nitassinan, allows me to examine the seizure of native lands for mining purposes, based on the testimonies of those who lived through it.

This creative project converges my experience as an essayist with more personal subjects. In fact, I’m a character in the quest that drives me, as are my loved ones and the other people in my story. My father, my sisters and I in my childhood, my grandfather, my grandmother and their friends, my aunts and uncles in Abitibi and my father and his colleagues, the Innu and Naskapi of the Côte-Nord: Ann Antane Kapesh, Mathieu Mestepaneu André and Jérome St-Onge.