Michelle A. Lelièvre’s aptly titled Unsettling Mobility characterizes human movement as far more than simply relocating from one place to another. Instead movement can emplace people on the lands across which they move and mediate social, political, and economic relations among diverse users of a landscape. This new take on mobility is developed here around a detailed study of the Mi’kmaw people, an indigenous group occupying the northeast shore of mainland Nova Scotia (Pictou Landing First Nation) and their peripatetic use of Maligomish, a small island just off the coast. Occupation of the island may extend back 1,500 years and today the Mi’kmaw consider it sacred. It contains ancient burial grounds, a cemetery with historic and recent burials, and the nineteenth-century Saint Anne’s mission church where Mi’kmaw gather annually to celebrate Saint Anne’s day.
Lelièvre uses ethnographic, archaeological, and historical data to explore the Mi’kmaw engagement with their ancestral lands...
