Guardians of the Land : The Struggle of an Atikamekw Family Against Bill 97 and Deforestation
Quebec, Canada (2025)
As part of my ongoing documentary project, initiated in French Guiana and Peru, on the social and environmental impacts of extractivism on Indigenous communities across the Americas (film to be released in 2026), I spent two weeks sharing the daily life of an Atikamekw family resisting deforestation on their ancestral territory. The family fears that Bill 97 will accelerate logging activities in the absence of proper consultation. Introduced by the Quebec government in April 2025, this reform of the province’s forest management system has also been challenged by environmental organizations, legal experts, and segments of civil society. To assert their sovereignty and protect the forest, members of the Echaquan family established a resistance camp five hours north of Montreal. A living space that brings together awareness-raising actions, intergenerational knowledge transmission, solidarity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, and the revitalization of ancestral cultural practices.
A sign of the mobilization’s effectiveness, Quebec finally announced the withdrawal of its controversial bill on September 25, 2025. First Nations welcomed the decision: one battle has been won, but vigilance remains essential. The fight against deforestation goes far beyond opposing Bill 97 alone—logging is nothing new, and neither is Indigenous resistance. “As long as we live, we will stay here to defend the forest,” says Jean-Paul Echaquan. “If the bill is abandoned, we hope the government will work on a new reform that takes into account our presence and our knowledge for the preservation of the forest.” For the Echaquan family and other guardians of the land, it is crucial that the provincial government move beyond superficial changes and fundamentally rethink the foundations of a reform that has so far been seen as yet another expression of short-term economic logic, environmental destruction, and disregard for Indigenous rights.
Translation into English in progress; for now, the full story is only available in French.
