Abstract
For many generations, the seasonal mobility pattern over the territory has been an important factor defining family relations and land-use systems for the northern Anishinabeg in Canada. Using the case study of Slate Falls First Nation, this article, going beyond ecologically and economic-driven explanatory models, integrates history and indigenous perceptions of the environment as powerful instruments to record the people’s knowledge of the land and to assert self-determination. The emphasis is placed on people’s daily itineraries and cyclical practices with their ancestral territory, by using their year-round activities as the guiding temporal framework to connect their current lives with the old process of creating and maintaining a region that became their homeland.
