ABSTRACT
Okikendawt Island is the home of the Indigenous Anishinaabeg inhabitants of Dokis First Nation reserve on what is called the French River waterway, located in northern Ontario, Canada. The word Okikendawt means “a sacred place of cauldrons” which are also referred to as the sacred kettles or buckets. The cauldrons are formed naturally over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The stories, teachings, and traditions connected to these sites form the cultural heritage and identity for the Anishinaabeg. Along with exploring the traditional cultural sacred folklores of the Anishinaabeg cauldrons, this chapter will explore why ancestral and modern Anishinaabeg continue to visit the cauldrons, along with promoting tourism of the cauldrons by other Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous peoples as a way to construct a decolonised narrative for visitors about traditional ecological knowledge, customs, and territories. Further, this chapter will reveal an Indigenised approach to modern participation in tourism as a pathway towards reconciliation between Canadians as settler-colonisers, the land, and the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island (North America).
