For the third and final instalment of In the Postcolony, a three-year thematic series facilitated through the CCA Master?s Students Program, we undertook a collaborative research project with community members of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake First Nation and Shiri Pasternak, ally of Barriere Lake and a faculty member in Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University. The research responds to the community?s current initiative to build a multipurpose healing centre on their territory. The community lives on a fifty-nine-acre reserve roughly three hours north of Ottawa, in what is now known as the Outaouais region of Quebec, though their traditional territories extend for seventeen thousand square kilometres.
We engaged in background research about the Barriere Lake community, traditional land-based healing practices, and outreach including site visits to several established healing centres. The project culminated with a visit to the site of Barriere Lake?s future healing centre and a meeting with community members involved in its construction and programming. During our visit, we collected footage for a short film intended to document the current state of the healing centre and the conditions of the land on which it will exist. The film resides within an open-access Google Drive created to archive research about the healing centre project and to help structure the community?s future funding applications. Image 1 Film still from Keekagin, a short film produced by the CCA M...