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  • WHERE I WORK

How I use science to protect my people’s birthright

Jean-Luc Kanapé combines the ancestral knowledge of his Indigenous Canadian community, the Innu, with technology to protect the region’s caribou from predators and environmental damage.
By
  1. Patricia Maia Noronha

    1. Patricia Maia Noronha is a freelance writer in Lisbon, Portugal.

Innu caribou researcher Jean-Luc Kanapé steers his boat through a waterway in the Canadian boreal forest in the Québec Province.

Jean-Luc Kanapé is Guardian of the Pipmuakan forest in Quebec, Canada. Credit: Ed Jones/AFP via Getty

I’m Guardian of the Pipmuakan forest in the Nitassinan territory of Quebec, Canada. I act as the eyes and ears of my people, the Innu, so that we can protect the caribou (atik in the Innu language). The caribou, or reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), is sacred to the Innu. For centuries, it provided us with food, clothes and tools.

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Nature 618, 640 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01941-x

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