The Beaver Poutine Effect: The Power of Cultural and Spiritual Supports

Guest Writer: Michel Duval

Michel Duval is a pediatric hematologist-oncologist, researcher in immunotherapy and partnerships with patients and families at CHU Sainte-Justine. Michel is a Co-Lead of the Knowledge Mobilization Group and a member of the Senior Leadership Committee at ACCESS.

 

I am spending the spring break vacation week in Manawan, an Atikamekw community, four hours drive north of Montreal, to explore the hopes and needs of children and youth with cancer. Our research team – half Atikamekw, half non-Atikamekw – has defined this week our Participatory Action Research goals. An amazing story I will tell you about a bit later.

Meanwhile, I’ve been walking in the Nitaskinan (the territory to which belong the Atikamekw people, rather than the other way around like in Westerners’ worldview) guided by my dog’s new friends, playing Bingo hosted by the community radio, sharing laughter around moose stew or Breton crêpes, gazing at the blood moon eclipse through my old telescope with the children next door; all the while wondering where vacation ends and work begins. Eventually I let go of that question. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned from my Atikamekw friends is the practice of letting go of concepts and of the words that label them, for while concepts can be useful, they can also trap us in the boxes they create.

Despite the long hours required to travel from one of the four Atikamekw communities to another – three of which lack cell phone coverage – news travel quickly among the Atikamekw nation through what I call the Atikamekw Informal Information System (AIIS). Unlike Westerners’ information networks, AIIS spreads good news as quickly and as far as bad news. Even better, you do not have to tune to it. It tunes to you and gives you, at the right moment, the exact information you need to make sense of your world.

AIIS told me that day that one of the Sainte-Justine pediatric oncology patients from another Atikamekw community successfully underwent a cell collection for subsequent CAR-T cell manufacturing. The goal was 10,000, the harvest was 25,000, AIIS reported. As the medical director of Sainte-Justine cell therapy lab, I can confirm that, when measuring in millions of cells, these figures are perfectly exact.

What I didn’t know – but learned from AIIS – was that to help him through the process and secure a good harvest, his Kokom (grandmother in the Atikamekw language) had prepared him a beaver poutine. Walking in the snowy, peaceful and dangerous Nitaskinan, I realized the strength and the depth of the cultural and spiritual support from the territory and the community embodied in these complex and powerful gestures of love: a beaver poutine, a cup of medicinal herbal tea… supports essential to get through our stressful, painful and seemingly endless procedures, most of the time without us even knowing.

I now call for myself this underestimated spiritual and cultural support the “Beaver Poutine Effect”. I know I will remember it during my clinical rounds: even if I am unaware of it, I now understand it is always there, for all our patients, Indigenous or not.

 

Additional Reading:

Kukum by Michel Jean (2022).

The book Kukum (grandmother in Innu) is an indispensable book by Michel Jean, describing the life of the Innu people, neighbours to the Atikamekw, until the 60s. More than 300,000 copies sold: a strong bridge between our cultures.