The name itself tells part of the story. "Kushapetsheken" was not chosen by a marketing department but won through a community contest, suggested by an early collaborator named Ben Sylvestre McKenzie. That grassroots origin runs through everything about CKAU-FM, the community station that has broadcast to the Innu communities of Uashat and Mani-Utenam, near Sept-Îles on Quebec's North Shore, for more than three decades.
Built by the Community It Serves
CKAU-FM traces back to 1981, when the Corporation de Radio Kushapetsheken Apetuamiss Uashat, a non-profit formed specifically for this purpose, set out to build a station that could provide culturally relevant programming for the local Innu population. It took over a decade for the effort to reach the air under full licence, receiving CRTC approval in 1992. When the founding organizers found themselves stretched too thin, leadership passed to Paul-Arthur McKenzie, supported by collaborators like Dominique Gill, who installed the station's first equipment and trained a generation of first-time broadcasters from scratch. That kind of hands-on, self-taught infrastructure building is common in Indigenous community radio across Canada, where a station is often as much a piece of civic infrastructure as it is a media outlet.
Broadcasting Mostly in Innu-aimun
From launch, CKAU-FM committed to airing well over 100 hours of programming a week, with the overwhelming majority delivered in Innu-aimun and only a small share in French, supplemented by network content from the Société de communication Atikamekw-Montagnais. That ratio was a deliberate choice. The community CKAU serves, Uashat and Mani-Utenam together, has one of the highest rates of Indigenous-language retention in Quebec, with a large majority of residents speaking Innu-aimun as a first language and using it at home. A radio station broadcasting primarily in that language is not a symbolic gesture, it is one of the main public venues where the language is spoken and heard every single day.
News, Talk and Community Life
Today the station's schedule includes call-in and talk programs hosted by local voices like Michel Vollant and Michel Aster, along with the midday storytelling and news segment "Tipatshimun le midi" and the country-leaning music program "Country Centre-Ville." Beyond broadcasting, CKAU runs regular community bingo nights as a fundraising mechanism, and it holds annual general assemblies to elect its administration, keeping the station directly accountable to the community it represents rather than to an outside owner.
A Signal Worth Tuning Into
CKAU-FM broadcasts on 104.5 in Maliotenam and rebroadcasts on 90.1 in Sept-Îles, but its real reach goes well beyond those frequencies now that the stream is available online. For listeners anywhere, it offers something rare: a direct, unfiltered line into Innu language, news, and daily life on Quebec's North Shore, run by the same community it has served since the early 1980s.