Language tells another story: when tobacco is cistemaw and the Cree are nêhiyaw

Abstract

Indigenous peoples’ trade in so-called ‘contraband’ tobacco, as a spate of recent cases in Alberta has shown, causes conflict between Indigenous peoples’ culture, history and sovereignty and federal and provincial laws. And as long as tobacco is defined solely as ‘tobacco’, the illegal trade will remain a criminal matter. But if we ask how First Peoples have named the plant and how such naming connects the plant to their lives and identities, today and in the past, we can locate a new way of thinking that allows the telling of a different story, one that pushes back against the settler state’s encroachments, arrests and indictments, to enable a new view of a present-day practice situated within the continuity of centuries of custom and practice.