A community of Indigenous characters occupies the imagination in translation of Tiohtiá:ke

By Shari Narine, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Windspeaker.com Balance in his novel Ninan: Tiohtiá:ke, Montreal is important, says author Michel Jean, but it has little to do with being a former journalist or news anchor. It has to do with being Innu. “I see both sides of the fence, and I wanted to tell the story from both sides of the fence. Being a journalist helped me doing the research. But when I write a book, I don’t feel compelled to, or an obligation to, balance the story as we do in a report,” said Jean, whose roots are in Mashteuiatsh in the Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec. “For me, I don’t exaggerate things. So if something happens in my book…my characters aren’t going to do things that normally in real…

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