Foreign Rights

At the beginning of Summer 2015, Emmanuelle Walter travelled across James Bay, in Quebec, with her local guide, the aboriginal leader Romeo Saganash: negotiator for the UN Declaration on the rights of Indigenous Peoples and MP of a district the size of a continent.With country music in the background, he told his story and the story of his homeland, in a pickup truck with stop-overs in a dozen towns and communities. This road story depicts a vast and essential yet widely unknown part of Quebec, a land defaced by extractivism and global warming, but actively co-governed and managed by Canada’s first Cree and white Francophone municipality. Thanks to her guide, the author discovers a changing landscape, an unsuspected political laboratory and surprising characters : those who find creative and complex ways of living together on the Canadian Shield bedrock.

Canada has only recently been rocked by the brutal violence against young Aboriginal women. An official report revealed that since 1980, at least 1,200 Canadian Aboriginal women have been murdered or have gone missing. This alarming official figure reveals a national tragedy and the systemic failure of law enforcement and of all levels of government to address the issue. Journalist Emmanuelle Walter spent two years investigating this crisis and has crafted a moving representative account of the disappearance of two young women, Maisy Odjick and Shannon Alexander, teenagers who have been missing since September 2008. Through personal testimonies, interviews, press clippings and official documents, Walter pieces together the disappearance and loss of these two young lives, revealing these young women through the voices of family members and witnesses.