Re-Imagining Aboriginality: An Indigenous Peoples’Response to Social Suffering

In this ethnographic study of the Cree, a Canadian indigenous people, I explore the ‘pain of being Aboriginal’ as a particular form of social suffering. I then describe a particular event, a Native Gathering, which serves, in part, as a form of response to social suffering. For the people of Whapmagoostui, Quebec (Canada), the annual summer Gathering has become a time and a place to examine what it means to be Cree, a conscious and imaginative process that is constituted and enacted within the broader social and political reality.