Public meeting with Yann Datessen
Conference on the Innu People: Territory, Culture, Resurgence
Café Aman, in partnership with La Laiterie
Writing workshop by Les Chemins d'Écritures
Arts and Sciences Evening: What is it like to be a native in the city?
An exhibition carried by Stimultania photography center in Strasbourg. In collaboration with the Innu museum in Mashteuiatsh where the project archives are kept. With the support of the Quebec Government Office in Paris and the French Institute in Paris.
In Canada, This documentary was supported and supervised by The Mashteuiatsh Museum is one of the main Innu institutions. It is also co-financed by the consulates of France and Canada and winner of the “France-Quebec cooperation” program.
The exhibition will be presented from November 5, 2026 to January 25, 2027 at the National Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon as part of the PIDA program of the French Institute.
EDITORIAL
THE SONG they rise / they chant / their story / Nitassinan our land / the caribou / the furs / the hunger / the residential schools / our father who art in heaven / they never had horses they say / there are twenty thousand of them what do we do now
THE MISSING IMAGE he ties his ponytail with four colored elastics, puts on his pearl bracelets / she doesn't care, the photographer can do what he wants, her hair and vest gape over her hoodie / he keeps his boots and lumberjack gloves on his knees / looks at the camera / without smiling / he picks up his drum and stands up / carrying his plaid shirt / or a caribou's antlers / she agrees but she'll come with a wolf's skin / or a lion's / he wants a feather
THE PHOTOGRAPHER Yann Datessen is the photographer of Arthur Rimbaud / of the Ardennes and Ethiopia / the one who casts bottles into the sea, a poet and a chess player / he says “[…] if only one thing were to remain, it would surely be this [the suns that would prevent silence], this and walking, walking in the shade, because walking is not sitting, not sitting is essential.” / one day Yann came to create images with the inhabitants of a boarding house / later / he went along the St. Lawrence River / the inhabitants of the Innu reserves in his mind why / the mutations the transmission / it was the time of national reconciliation / the time when colonizing peoples and First Nations peoples check in on each other / they think we're starting from scratch but
THE INDICATIVE IMAGE Yann wants narrative sovereignty / how to escape theatricality since / what I want to be / what I believe myself to be / what the photographer believes I am / so everyone decides how / too bad if / Pocahontas / the Apaches / new clues / the photographer listens to the silence and the Innu people
– Céline Duval
Untitled, Nutashkuan, September 2024 © Yann Datessen / ADAGP
Preamble by Yann Datessen
"For about ten years, part of my work has questioned the principles
of self-management and micro-communities: how these organize themselves, survive,
sometimes decline, how they distribute power among their members, how
They resist, or not, the temptations of conformist societies. Utopian village,
Gypsy camp, libertarian squat, boarding house, whatever the format and location,
the notion of "reserve" fit into this logic, particularly in terms of what it had to offer.
fundamentally strange, even shocking for a European. In our country, on the
The First Nations of North America, though of the Old World, are very poorly understood.
statuses, organizations, issues – beyond the clichés conveyed by cinema – do not
are not really part of the scenery. In conducting the preliminary travels for this project, I have
was surprised to find that, while Europeans are ignorant, Americans themselves
are unaware of the presence of First Nations peoples in the territory. In Canada, this is not
truly, it was only with the announcement of the official apology from the federal government in 2008
(following the truth and reconciliation commission related to the residential school scandal)
natives), that the non-native population was becoming aware of a coexistence
marred by numerous erasures…
NitassinanA photographic project led by Yann Datessen from 2022 to 2025, this project offers a documentary exploration of seven Innu reserves located in Quebec and Labrador. The term "Nitassinan," meaning "our land" in the Innu language, refers to an ancestral territory inhabited for over 10000 years. Yann Datessen adopts a posture of prolonged immersion within the communities. His approach, based on listening and a long-term perspective, aims to produce a visual corpus that documents social changes, cultural continuities, and the challenges of transmission. Conceived in collaboration with the Innu Museum of Mashteuiatsh—where the project archives will be housed— Nitassinan participates in a reflection on the forms of representation of indigenous peoples and on the conditions of a shared visual memory, between history, identity and narrative sovereignty.
Nitassinan, Eva, Uashat, December 2023 © Yann Datessen / ADAGP
Nitassinan (our land) is the name given by the Innu to a territory that stretches from the banks of the St. Lawrence River to the confines of the boreal regions of eastern Canada. For at least 10,000 years they have lived there, not without difficulty: dependent on the migratory movements of caribou, nomadic life in the taiga, the contingencies of the Arctic cold, Dantesque fires, and sometimes bloody feuds with their regional cousins. They themselves say it, this territory is harsh and fierce, it can be a green hell in summer and a white hell in winter. Yet Nitassinan is rich, rich in game, wood, minerals. It is a paradise for animals, men and spirits, so much so that literally everyone has desired this territory, for at least 10,000 years, and still to this day.
The Innu were one of the first North American nations to encounter white travelers: first the Vikings, then the Portuguese, later the French, and finally the British. By welcoming these newcomers, more or less equitable exchanges were created; there was room for everyone, it was thought, on Nitassinan, and then the Europeans love furs, pay dearly for them. Quite quickly, the Innu move from the fundamental freedom of the hunter to the narrow constraints of the trapper. Spaces are shrinking. Increasingly, the effects of this excessive hunting push the Innu to the coast of the Saint Lawrence, in contact with the trading posts. Missionaries and traders take advantage of this, multiply the scams, the evangelizations, and, when the forestry industry adds to their exiles, Nitassinan is now nothing more than a shagreen. In barely 300 years, Innu society was considerably disoriented. In the 19th century, everything accelerated: the end of wars between colonial empires and the decline of the fur trade made cooperation with the natives less necessary. The Innu, former allies of the French, were considered by the British authorities as savages, animals to be civilized. In 1876, the Indian Act was passed: the aim, through a deeply paternalistic text, was to "encourage" the natives to become Canadian citizens. To this end, they were forbidden their traditional ceremonies, their costumes, even the practice of their own language: the acculturation already underway for centuries became dizzying. In the same spirit, the Innu were encouraged to gather in prefabricated villages. Often isolated, always controlled and, above all, poorly funded, these reserves quickly accumulated alcoholism, suicide and malnutrition. Finally, at the height of this assimilationist policy, a residential school program was launched, forcing all young indigenous people aged 7 to 15 to attend a Catholic school, often hundreds of kilometers from their community, whose avowed goal was to cut them off as much as possible from their roots. The living conditions there were terrible: in addition to the lack of food, there was the transmission of diseases, excessive work, brutality, and rape; many would recount the humiliations, names replaced by numbers: it is estimated that around 6,000 children died (out of 150,000 placed) in these establishments until the 1990s.
Forty years after this final trauma, what about those we call the laughing people*? When asked, the reaction is one and the same: "We are still here." Indeed, and it is obvious, the Innu are resisting, developing, and seeking self-determination. Everywhere its members are multiplying political, economic, and cultural initiatives; everywhere they are seeking to regain an identity that they were led to believe was extinct. Yes, it is obvious: people are still dancing and singing to Nitassinan... It is to document this renewal, but also to bear witness to the path that undoubtedly remains to be traveled, that between 2022 and 2025 I regularly visited 7 of the 11 communities of the Innu nation, portraying in turn, and according to different seasons, its members, its living conditions, and the state of the surrounding territory.
These communities are (from west to east): Mashteuiatsh (Pointe-Bleue), Essipit (les Escoumins), Pessamit (Betsiamites), Uashat mak mani-utenam (Sept-Îles), Matimekush (Schefferville), Nutashkuan (Natashquan), Unamen-Shipu (La Romaine).
*The expression is from the Quebec anthropologist Serge Bouchard
Stella and Ussiniun, Matimekush, April 2025 / Nitassinan, Sébastien, Unamen-Shipu, February 2024 © Yann Datessen / ADAGP
“Nitassinan” exhibition © Yann Datessen
Born in 1977 in Saint-Étienne, Yann Datessen has lived and worked in Paris for twenty years. Consumed since childhood by the need to create images, he produced drawings, paintings, photos, and videos for a long time in his own corner; he learned the profession of photographer late in life, as an autodidact, and only showed his series later in life.
In 2012, by chance, Paris-Sorbonne University asked him to set up a photography workshop for its students; he took the opportunity to launch an online media dedicated to emerging photography, called “Cleptafire”. For the past ten years, he has divided his time between creation, curation and teaching. He currently teaches at the universities of Paris 1, Paris 3, Paris 4, as well as Sciences Po Paris.
Rather a visual artist, his practice is oriented towards reflections related to the format of the image. He attempts to develop a grammar centered on the polyptych. Feeling close to the approach of the “Land Artists”, he also develops most of his projects with the ambition of presenting them outdoors and ephemerally.
Thus, in 2015, he installed his series “Le Léthé” all along the Canal de l'Ourcq in Paris: the images are arranged on the locks, bridges, and banks. In 2020, he hand-published 100 copies of his series “L'Achéron”. The waterproofed book is thrown into the largest European rivers to let the current engulf them or cause them to run aground at random on the banks and during encounters.
Alongside these visual experiments, he has also produced documentaries whose subjects explore various marginalized figures. In 2014, for example, he spent five months in the free city of Christiania in Copenhagen and portrayed its libertarian community. From 2016 to 2020, he traveled the world in the footsteps of Arthur Rimbaud (AR; Arthur Rimbaud, ed. Loco, 2022). Since 2022, he has been working on Nitassinan, an ambitious immersive reportage in the Innu communities of Quebec and Labrador.