In terms of reclaiming our ways, our spirituality and our practices, repatriation is really important to us.
I spoke about the woman's hood that we found in a museum in Montreal. Those hoods are similar to hoods used by other Algonquian nations, like the M'ikmaq, and they are a very important part of spiritual practice and our ceremonial lives. The hoods have not been seen in our communities since the 1800s, and the knowledge of them is very quickly dying out.
The ability to repatriate those types of items has a lot to do with community healing, our spiritual health and renewing our ceremonial lives. As a nation that has been dealing with European incursion into our territories since the mid-1600s, with the early missionary work and the residential school experiences and all the fallout from all that history, before we lose this generation of elders, we are trying desperately to reclaim those types of knowledge and that type of ceremonial knowledge and the ability to truly come into ourselves and our identity in a very deep and spiritual way.
These types of objects are key to that. The ability to do research within our communities with these objects is the most important way we have found of reviving those traditions and that ceremonial life.