Manouchka Otis

For her Secondary III students, Manouchka Otis designed and implemented the Uapush Project, a pedagogical approach rooted in Innu knowledge, perspective and lived realities, offering a culturally relevant teaching experience. This project creates a meeting place between historical thinking and Innu thinking, based on memory, intergenerational transmission, and relationship to the territory. Through a holistic approach, these two worldviews meet and enrich each other, allowing young Innu to experience history as something that carries continuity, meaning and identity.

Established in the heart of Nitassinan, the Uapush Project invites young people to experience history through practices such as tracking, setting snares, butchering, cooking on a wood stove and the sharing of stories and knowledge under the shaputuan. Through observation, imitation and intergenerational dialogue, history becomes a relational experience, rooted in the land and collective memory.

This holistic, decolonizing and Indigenizing approach draws on multiple disciplines and promotes intergenerational transmission within the Uashat mak Mani-Utenam community. By experiencing history in the heart of the territory — the ancestral territory — young people strengthen pride in their identity and their sense of belonging.

Through this relationship between experiential, cultural and pedagogical knowledge, Manouchka Otis makes the teaching of history a space of continuity and dialogue between generations, where young people become bearers of culture, aware of the vitality and value of their heritage.