Journeys of Wellness, Walks of the Heart
Adapted for the final chapter of Home Is The Hunter: The James Bay Cree and Their Land, University of British Columbia Press, 2008
It’s the middle of March and I’m standing this morning just about midway between fifty-three-and fifty-four-degrees north latitude, outside of the town of Radisson in northern Québec. It’s snowing now and the wind is cutting, though it was sunny and calm at dawn. My vantage point is the top of the spillway of the Robert Bourassa Dam – part of the world’s largest hydro-electric facility – above the so-called Giant’s Stairway.
Named back in the 1970s by Hydro-Québec construction workers, these eight steps, all of them the width of three football fields and thirty or forty feet high, cut into the living granite of the Canadian Shield, are the safety valve for the vast reservoir behind them. The gates below me are used only during extreme spring flooding – an estimated seventy-five-year interval – so most of the time the stairs stand dry, a monument more than a functional piece of engineering. Their image is prominent on local signs and in Hydro-Québec literature, not because they are the most impressive thing about this hydro-electric facility, but because they symbolize something. As engineering marvels, the phalanxes of high-tension towers pushing power as far away as Pennsylvania, the sixteen mammoth turbines spinning under the dam producing 5600 megawatts of power, the 26,000 square miles of reservoir that feed the half dozen dams of the La Grande River facility, all are more impressive than the stairway. But the scope of these other things is hard to capture in an image, or even in the imagination I now realize, and so like all symbols the stairway has become a graspable token of something ungraspable – both the state-run Hydro-Québec corporation and the stairway mean progress to Québec.
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If I look off the other side of the spillway, I see the frozen surface of the reservoir receding into a gray expanse of snow squalls that are pushing through, ebbing and flowing like a tide. The snow is fine and powdery and under the hand of the wind it recreates a wavy surface, the mask of a manmade lake that hides the hunting lands seventy or eighty feet below. Overhead a superstructure of steel girders will carry the massive weight of the floodgates when they are needed; they rise maybe a hundred feet in the air and were visible this morning from my hotel room, seven miles away across this low land. In the gray light of dawn, they looked like some pillared ruin, an ancient and abandoned temple on the skyline, and I studied their strangeness in this remote place as the sky turned orange and then umber with the coming snow. The sun rose behind their hard angles, and it was like the opening of a fiery eye, the waking of some local deity, obviously still very much in residence in his temple. From my warm room, with the morning news going on the TV behind me, it was hard to remember that a generation ago only Cree hunters moved across this landscape in the late-winter dawn.
I’ve come here from Vermont to look at this dam because, though I’ve spent a fair amount of time in this region, I’ve never seen La Grande. I came to see it now because this summer Hydro-Québec will begin the damming of the Rupert River a couple of hundred miles to the south and its waters will be pushed north to Bourassa using a series of massive levies. This complex, despite being fed by all the La Grande, ninety percent of the Eastmain, and thirty percent of the Caniapiscau rivers does not run at full capacity and that is counted as a waste in a world hungry for electricity. It was this hunger also that brought me north because the northeastern U.S. is a part of the appetite for electricity which makes the damming of Rupert a viable economic option for Hydro-Québec. My home is connected to this landscape by the umbilical of those 750,000-volt transmission lines and it’s our growing need that in part will reshape this land further. I wanted to see this for myself.
I came finally because fifteen years ago when the Cree fought to stop the last big expansion, the development of the Great Whale River to the north of here, many in Vermont and the rest of the northeast stood with them and successfully lobbied legislatures to cancel the contracts that comprised Hydro-Québec’s profit margin. Those projects were stopped because the Cree asked that we not participate in the environmental and social disruption that had come with the La Grande dams – the flooding of hunting lands, mercury contamination in fish populations, the forced relocation of the whole community of Fort George – and enough people listened to move governments on both sides of the border. It seemed a great victory, though recently Great Whale has been mentioned by several Québec politicians. And the world has changed since then, we need electricity in ever-increasing amounts now, and our memories of James Bay and the Cree have faded in those intervening years, I think.
It’s the consequences of our need for electricity that I am troubled by here in James Bay because this region is like so many others around the world in its connection to our unconsidered demands. So many places now are like James Bay and are being changed, damaged, by our desire for resources. All have local populations whose lives are being radically and negatively disrupted by resource development and these are people who in great part see none of the benefits of development. Damming the Rupert is in part about stilling one of the last, great wild rivers in North America, but in the end, it is also about cultural challenges for the James Bay Cree. It’s impossible to separate people – either the Cree or myself – from this environment in a situation like this. As I stand here listening to the empty wind, I hear in my mind the crackling and buzzing of those high-tension wires back near Radisson, and far away I hear the fan in my computer running when I sit to write about this place and its people. They’re all connected: economically in a simple way, ethically in a way that is staggeringly complex.
We are facing the end results now of our two-hundred-year obsession with carbon-based fuels – caught between our love of power and our maturing understanding of what that power has cost us on a global scale. Hydro-Québec tells us that their power is a cleaner alternative, and it seems a logical choice at first blush. La Grande’s reservoirs do produce 500-700 fewer tons of CO2 per Gigawatt of power than fossil-fuel plants, but they also produce a substantial amount of Methane – a greenhouse gas far more potent than CO2 – and the numbers for that are not in the data released by Hydro-Québec. The metric is not as easy as it first seems and even if it were, do we have the right to ask the Cree to give up more land so that we can try to avoid the worst of what we have created? They like other northern people will face some of the worst effects of global climate change whether we take their land or not – should theirs be a double sacrifice? There are no easy answers to this.
For me, James Bay has become a way of looking outward and seeing back to myself and the meaning of my own actions. In twenty-five years of traveling James Bay, in learning about Cree culture and the historical events that shaped this region, I have created an image in my mind and like the reflection in the glass of a framed picture, I have also seen myself as part of that scene – a ghostly image superimposed there. The image and the reflection bring home the hard answers – it’s us who are ultimately responsible here, all of us individually. That’s hard to admit, but in a democracy, citizens can change policy; more importantly, in the marketplace consumers can reshape the landscape of demand rather than the landscape of the Rupert or Great Whale watersheds.
Our responsibility began thirty-seven years ago when Québec Premier Robert Bourassa announced the construction of La Grande, financed with Wall-street loans, and justified economically by the sale of power to the northeast. The Cree were nearly unanimous in their opposition and five years of court battle and treaty negotiation led to the 1975 James Bay and Northern Québec Agreement; it remains both a landmark native treaty and a source of controversy. Despite its provisions, the Cree feel the treaty was a forced compromise, neither do they feel that Québec and Canada have lived up to their parts of the unwanted bargain, and so Cree leadership has continued to be embroiled in Canadian and international politics. Part of the controversy is also that while they knew they were surrendering the land that was to be flooded, as a people they were not fully prepared for all the other changes that would come – nobody was. The dams and their infrastructure have meant massive social as well as environmental change – change at an ever-increasing rate – and though the Cree are doing a remarkable job in trying to maintain control, it’s very hard.
When it comes to damming the Rupert, the issues are more complex because, in 2002, the Grand Council of the Cree and the Québec government signed a new agreement – The Peace of the Brave it was called. It’s a multi-billion dollar, thirty-five-year treaty which allows for the Rupert diversion but gives the Cree a stake in the economic development and its employment opportunities. The Cree are still deeply involved with their traditional life, but because of all the changes there are many who need work now and there are other pressures besides dams to consider. During the 1990s, clear-cutting in the region left a great deal of their hunting land unusable – our building boom reached deep into Cree country along with our demands for power – and the agreement introduced a new pattern of mosaic cutting meant to alleviate those problems. It stipulates the percentage of an individual hunter’s land that can be cut, and this has helped, though at the expense of moving the cutting frontier faster and farther. Everybody seems to know that the cutting is happening too fast and won’t be sustainable in the end, but nobody can tell what will happen next – the reintroduction of Great Whale as a possibility, despite the apparent spirit of the Peace of the Brave, may offer a clue though.
Unlike the James Bay Agreement, despite the money and the cutting regime, the Peace is not universally popular within the Cree communities. It was negotiated largely in secret by both Québec and the Grand Council, and the communities were only given a few weeks to consider the plan before a referendum was held. Eight of the nine communities passed it, but none with great unanimity. This afternoon after touring the dam, we will drive to Chisasibi, the one community to vote against the Peace and one of three who have more recently passed referenda calling for a halt to the Rupert project. Chisasibi has felt the brunt of the La Grande project and there is a deep sense of wariness over what the added volume of Rupert water coming down from the dams will mean for the bay and the lands around it. The people of Waskaganish and Nemiska have reconsidered their votes on the Peace now that the Rupert diversion is a certainty because Waskaganish will lose its river and Nemiska lands will be flooded with the diversion. There are no simple answers, and the land has become politicized in a way it never was before.
The morning squalls have turned to a steadier snowfall by the time we get to Chisasibi in the middle of the afternoon, just as school is letting out and people are driving to pick up their kids. All the four-way stops are backed up six or seven cars deep – rush hour at quite literally the end of the road – and we are struck by the size of the place. It’s the biggest of the nine Cree communities and it’s a creation of the projects. In 1980, Fort George Island was in the path of the increased flow of the La Grande and fear of erosion moved the government to relocate people in this new place along the south shore of the river. It was one of those forced moves by government fiat all too familiar in the Canadian north and among the older generation there is still a great deal of sadness and bad feelings over it. For the Cree who lived through it there is a sense of dislocation that will likely never go away and for the younger generation there is a break with the past that those elders can tell them about – a dislocation in their history as well as their geography. The past is now another place and while they can visit the island and tell stories about their lives there, it’s somehow never going to be a truly living place again.
We go to the band offices to introduce ourselves, to ask some questions about the dams and how the land is doing now – we got a full dose of the Hydro-Québec version of things this morning. I want to hear the other side of the story, but I am met with a real wariness. The people I know here in town are away and so it’s unfair to just drop in like this I know. Perhaps I’m coming off as having an agenda, maybe I’m not clear in my own mind exactly why I’m asking questions and they can read this in me – perhaps it’s something else too. For a few minutes there are a half dozen of us standing in the hallway and a couple of people begin to express their unhappiness with the new project, saying that they want it stopped. When I say that I’d like to stop it too, but that the Grand Council has told us down south to stay out of it this time, I’m reminded by one young man that there’s still free speech in the world – “for a little while longer anyway.” He tells me that he still uses the word “if” in speaking about the Rupert diversion, but I see that there is some tension here. Starting another fight like the one in the 1990s I think is not universally popular. In the end I’m left with the feeling that I have failed in this meeting. We drive back to Radisson in the strengthening storm, and I spend the time thinking about cultural wariness, free speech, and the politics of land.
The next morning is bright and clear and we are heading south to the village of Waskaganish, retracing the path we took two days ago, and it takes almost a hundred miles of driving to be out of the view of the high-tension towers south of Radisson. Before this they dominate the view in this land of low trees and with the road, they are a constant reminder of the regional scope of this project; the flooded lands are vast, but the land occupied by La Grande is far bigger. Off this main road, logging roads branch off here and there, not as many as to the south where the trees are bigger, and there are “borrow” pits – a wonderful euphemism – places where fill was taken to build the road. There are occasional Cree hunting camps too, as a reminder of their continued use, but perhaps the road’s most poignant feature is the amount of roadkill. We noticed driving up that animals just don’t know to get out of the way here the way they do down south – ptarmigan, foxes, caribou, they haven’t gotten used to all this change yet either. The bloodied remains by the roadside are powerfully symbolic.
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When we leave the power-line corridor and reach high ground we again get a sense of the immensity of the Precambrian Shield, a land scoured by glaciers and left with broken hills and abundant water. The region is also part of the taiga forest, the transition zone between the mixed forest to the south and the true tundra to the north, and as we travel today, we will get into thicker stands of the black spruce that dominate this ecosystem. There are large, burned areas in places where fires have ravaged, particularly between the Eastmain and Rupert Rivers where a huge fire burned for much of the summer of 2002. Fire is a natural and beneficial part of the ecosystem here; the visible effects last for years and give these areas a stark and lonely aspect to my eye, though I suppose if I were hunting for my living, these areas where young growth brings moose to graze would look much more pleasing.
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Along the way we re-cross the Rupert River at the bridge at Oatmeal Falls. The river flows from here another fifty or sixty miles to Waskaganish and at a different time of year we could canoe down if we were willing to make a few long portages. These falls are long and powerful as are many places on this major waterway. Once again, I am left to wonder at the balance between their cultural power and the electricity that is latent in them – clearly from the graffiti on the bridge others are troubled too. “Why Kill Me?” is painted prominently on one of the suspension towers – “I gave you life,” “Love, from Rupert River.” Two days ago, we spent time walking through the snow to get a closer look and we do it again today for the pleasure of hearing the falling water and watching the sunlight in the rime ice in the trees. This was an important travel route for Cree hunters moving back and forth to their lands and it’s still an important part of their lives. The last rapids on the Rupert are a place where the people of Waskaganish gather as they have for millennia to catch fish in the fall. Today this gathering is an important place for that transmission of traditional knowledge and culture from generation to generation – how to clean the fish, how to cook the fish, the meaning for a people of that food given by the land – it’s hard to say what it will mean when the water is reduced. I’ve been told by Hydro-Québec people that the river will only be reduced by fifty percent, but I have serious doubts. Even if it’s true, nobody really knows what will happen to the fish and the fishing when the dams are closed.
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It’s getting downright warm as we drive to Waskaganish, leaving the icy, snowy road for some mud and potholes, and even the wind off the frozen bay isn’t too bad. Waskaganish only received power from the hydro grid in the last few years – a mind-boggling irony to me – it was also the last of the Cree communities to be connected by road, and so it has a smaller feeling as we enter town and make our way down to the water where we are going to stay in the local lodge. When we get there, we find that the power went out an hour or so ago so we can’t check in for a while – I don’t know if anyone else in Chisasibi found the traffic jam ironic, but everybody here is laughing about this and making Hydro-Québec jokes. The lodge is rather quiet right now, but it will become clear by the end of the day that the restaurant here is a part of the community and the place where people gather for food and to visit. All the generations will be here during our first dinner, from the elders to the newborn being shown off to the community, and it’s still a very Cree place despite how much it looks like a lodge in New England or Colorado. We take the opportunity of the warmish afternoon to walk around town and look at the bay. We didn’t get to see James Bay at Chisasibi because of the storm, so this view of Rupert Bay will be as close as we get.
Rupert Bay is where it all began, or at least where it all began in the northern fur country of what has become Canada. In 1608, Henry Hudson sailed to the mouth of the Rupert, somewhere around where I am standing, and traded a few furs with the hunters he met on shore. Europeans didn’t make it back to this coast with the intent of staying and trading until 1670 when the Hudson’s Bay Company was founded. Fort Charles was built here then, on the land where the Anglican church now stands, I’m told. The place became Rupert’s House, named for the company’s principal stockholder Prince Rupert, and was renamed Waskaganish only in the 1990s. It’s not hard to imagine the small blockhouse of Fort Charles sitting on the bluff over the water and a few isolated warehouses down where the lodge now stands by the shore.
It would have been a lonely outpost for those few traders who came to stay. For while Rupert’s House was an important post in this eastern region, but for the company this soon became something of a backwater, even as the fur trade became something of an economic backwater itself. As the HBC was getting started here, Europeans had already reshaped much of the eastern seaboard and the St. Lawrence Valley. By the time the HBC gave up its monopoly and sold its lands to the recently created Dominion of Canada, in 1870, most of the continent had been reshaped, first by agriculture, and increasingly by an urban/industrial economy. Regional forests had been cleared, the prairies had been plowed, and people were making the final push out onto the Great Plains on both sides of the 49th parallel. But the HBC was still just trading furs with native hunters here at the mouth of the Rupert. It’s one of the wonders of eastern James Bay that it stayed outside of this transformation for so long. We walk up the hill looking at the new band office along the way. There are lots of houses that look nearly new too. Things are changing fast in all the communities, their populations are growing, and the transformation is now in progress.
When I contrast James Bay prior to 1970 to the transformation of the rest of North America, I don’t mean that the Cree had remained in some primeval stasis before the hydro projects. The hunters of 1870, when their land was transferred to Canada, were very different from those who had first traded with the HBC two centuries earlier. The hunters who went to court in the 1970s were dramatically different from those of 1870. It’s important for me that the Cree were a twentieth-century people when they were faced with the dams, they understood a great deal about the world to the south, but they still defined themselves from within their own hunting traditions. They were still relatively unaffected by our decisions and that’s the transformation that’s happened and is still happening today – our redefining of the Cree world around them.
As we are walking, the weather changes rapidly, the wind picks up from off the ice, and by the time we get back to the lodge the sun is gone and there’s a squall coming in off the bay. By dark it’s a real gale blowing, though the snow doesn’t appear to be too heavy.
The next morning it’s sunny again, but much colder, and the wind is still blowing hard. I head up to the band office, but the tourism coordinator Raymond Blackned who I want to meet isn’t in yet, so I go out for another walk around town. If I stay out of the wind it’s bearable and I want to see if I can find the name James Watt anywhere on a building or a sign. I’m looking for this one HBC trader’s name because another important innovation happened here that helps to explain what I mean when I say that Cree hunting, in 1970, was a twentieth-century traditional practice.
In 1932, Watt and his wife Maude helped begin a system of beaver reserves as a cooperative effort between the HBC, the federal and provincial governments, and Cree hunters. There was a memorial hall dedicated to him here in town, I’m sure it’s gone now, but I’m wondering if his name remains. These reserves were so successful that, by 1950, most of what is now the Municipality of James Bay was under this system, over 100,000 square miles of land set aside exclusively for Cree hunting and trapping. Each individual hunter, or tallyman as they are still known, was responsible for the organization of his land and was given a quota of beaver that he could take. The quota was derived from the number of beavers he reported on his land, so he was in reality responsible for setting his own quota, and it was largely left to these hunters to organize their territories. This was the system of land use that was in place when the hydro projects were begun in 1970 and it had been created largely to help the Cree who, by 1930, were in very poor straights.
The end of the HBC monopoly, in 1870, had meant that others could trade for Cree furs and the closeness of the railroad made it easier for them and other trappers from the south to move into the region and begin to pressure the Cree on their lands. It’s difficult to know how many there were, but they were well equipped and brought increasingly rapid change to the land. Quickly, outsiders who extracted fur with little need for stewardship stripped the land clean – some used strychnine to increase their yield. The fur market boomed into the 1920s, fur paid well, and the land was cleaned both by white hunters and by Cree who felt they had to get something before it was all taken – their food came from the land as well as fur. The effects were devastating and, by the time of the Great Depression, the land and the people in James Bay were poor and starving. Industrial, capitalist trapping had skinned the land here just as industrial agriculture on the Great Plains had reaped the Dustbowl.
The reserves were a twentieth-century version of Cree hunting, a modern hunt that was studied thoroughly by anthropologists because it was still so traditional – defined almost exclusively within Cree culture. Before the dams a large majority of Cree still spent most of the year on their land, government sanction protected their hunting, and the system was highly successful. It’s worth pointing out that these reserves may be unique in North American history. Here in James Bay was, for a while anyway, a whole region set aside for Cree cultural use and they were given wide leeway to organize it as they saw fit. There were bureaucrats to deal with as the Canadian state structure expanded, particularly after World War II, but on the land the Cree were left to define how their world would change and how it would stay the same. This was the relationship and the agreement that both governments abrogated when Québec decided to build the dams. When Québec and Ottawa took back the promise to protect the lands of James Bay in 1970, they forced the Cree into a new position, their actions all the more troubling because in the fur trade and the beaver reserves the Cree had worked so successfully to adapt their way of life to meet a new outside reality.
I haven’t found Watt’s name and I’m getting too cold to look any more so I head back to the office and have a nice visit with Raymond and some others. They are actively working on several projects both to increase economic opportunity and to maintain their cultural presence here on their land. They have a great deal of interest in tourism, getting people to come north to see the land, but there is also a very justified interest in making sure that this will help bolster Cree culture and not exploit the land or the people here. The adaptations are still going on and the Cree are now a twenty-first century people trying to create a new way of occupying their lands and culture within the new realities of the hydro development. Raymond and I spend a lot of time talking about traveling on the land and about moose hunting. We also talk about what cutting off Rupert’s water will mean for this community and looking at his collection of pictures of the community gatherings at the first rapids. They are working very hard to stay connected to the land and the river is central to that effort, but nobody knows what the loss will mean. He gives me a lift back down to the lodge at the end of the afternoon and I’m asleep early – that wind really took it out of me today.
Our two days in Waskaganish have gone very quickly as we head up the road on our way inland to Mistissini. We cross back over the Rupert and get one last look at Oatmeal Falls and then begin the day’s travel that will take us not only inland, but a bit south and higher in elevation. Eastern James Bay rises from west to east and north to south and these elevation changes happen at distinct fault lines – these fault lines added to the volume of water in the area are what make it such a magnificent place for hydro-electric development. It’s another perfect travel day and we again get a good vantage on the land from the high points on the road. Down by Waskaganish you get a sense of being on the huge coastal flats that are fifty or sixty miles wide, but as you travel inland, the landscape is more scattered with small hills and lakes. The 2002 fires did some of their worst along this stretch of country and the evidence is still clear in many places. Some areas seem to have been logged after the fact to salvage the timber.
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About halfway to Mistissini we pick up the power lines that we left behind the day before yesterday and the road follows them for a hundred miles or so again. The one thing they offer is the chance of seeing some caribou grazing in the clearings, other than that they are ugly and not a little menacing as they buzz and crackle – 750,000 volts at the speed of light. The truck traffic is heavier on this road and it’s clear that Hydro-Québec is getting the workforce and equipment assembled to begin the new diversion as soon as the weather permits. We cross the Rupert again about one hundred and fifty miles east of Oatmeal Falls at a gorge where the water rushes through low walls of rock under a powerline. There’s a map on a placard here that shows an older proposed project – the Peace of the Brave shelved this potential project at the expense of making the smaller Rupert diversion a near certainty. I look at the map but can’t figure out how the present diversion will change things.
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The map wouldn’t show the important things anyway, those will have to be experienced and dealt with as they come. Nobody planning La Grande anticipated the mercury that would leach from the rotting vegetation under the reservoirs or how it would find its way up the food chain to poison the Cree who depended on fish. Nobody anticipated how the change in diet away from “country food” as they call it – caused in part by a growing distrust of fish and other traditional foods – would cause such a dramatic rise in diabetes among the Cree either. In our own culture an increasingly sedentary lifestyle and a diet full of sugars has caused the diabetes rate to rise dramatically over the last twenty-five years and this has risen to epidemic rates for the Cree. Many now need dialysis and mothers routinely go to Montreal for childbirth because of the dangers associated with the disease during late pregnancy. Nobody could see this coming in 1970.
The road continues southeast and at some point along the way we leave the powerlines again and head to Mistassini Lake. The community of Mistissini sits at the south end of the lake, which is about 150 miles long and thirty miles wide, at a place called Abatagush Bay. We enter town in the middle of the afternoon, and I’m almost immediately lost – I haven’t been here for about seven years, and it’s grown so much that I have to work to get my bearings. There are so many new houses on the edge of town, new stores, a new community center going up. Until I see the Cree Trapper’s Association office, I’m not fully oriented. But once I get over the initial shock, the town looks pretty good. Certainly, it’s better than I remember from my first visit when even Mistissini, hundreds of miles from the dams, was feeling the negative effects of development and the James Bay Agreement.
The treaty gave the Cree hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the dams and it gave them a great deal of control over their villages – Cree school boards, police forces, a board of health – what it did not specify was how the money was going to be disbursed, or when for that matter. It took nearly three years to get the agreement ratified in the Québec Assembly and years more to get even some of the promised money. Agencies within the provincial government either had to take responsibility for these huge new amounts of money, or new agencies had to be created, and nothing happened quickly. Meanwhile the federal government, satisfied that the Cree could now take over Ottawa’s responsibilities, stepped back. Sadly, the transition from one structure of government and finance to another was anything but seamless and, in the summer of 1980, as the Fort George Cree were being moved, the unfinished sewers in James Bay began to breed disease and children began to fall prey to diarrhea and dehydration – the scourges of the developing world. By the end, three were dead of gastroenteritis and still it took two more years of lobbying and lawsuits to get sixty-two million dollars released to finish the sewers. By that time the La Grande project was completed and even while the Cree were fighting for their money, the power began to flow south.
When I first came here in 1982 things were disturbed and changing. There were good reasons for the way things looked, even if I didn’t understand them or go beyond my initial impressions at the time. My desire to see “Indians” in an untouched wilderness missed the connection between land and community that is the heart things here. I also missed the recent reorganization under the James Bay Agreement by which the lands of James Bay were no longer under the reserves system, but had been split into three categories: Category I lands surround the communities and are exclusively for the use of the Cree; Category II lands, comprising 25,130 square miles shared by all the communities, are where they still hold exclusive rights to hunt and fish, but where Québec can develop resources without penalty; Category III lands, the vast majority of the lands once reserved for Cree use only, are open to use by all parties and are controlled by the province. The Cree are not excluded from using Category III lands, but neither are non-natives. The chief issue here is that most of the traplines still held by the Cree tallymen, and once protected under the reserve system, are on Category II and III lands. What I really did not see in 1982 was how I and so many others were implicated in all these changes.
After thirty-two years of the James Bay Agreement, things are looking good here in the town of Mistissini, but out on the land things are troubling. Logging has been as disruptive as the hydro development and the Cree are feeling pressure from all sides. That was my sense of all the communities that we visited over the last week. The Cree have been very successful in using the agreement to make their communities healthier and better places to live and educate their children, but they have also had to maintain a constant watch on what was happening on the land and try to regain some of the cultural control that they lost in the agreement. The Category II and III lands remain vitally important to the life of Cree culture, even as they become increasingly central to our way of life.
The next morning the sky is gray and cold, snow squalls come and go, and the disc of the sun is visible through the clouds from time to time. After we walk around a bit, we notice that people are gathering on the top of the hill behind the police station and there are several lodge-sized tents set up and fires going outside. It turns out that “walkers” are coming in sometime around noon and there’s going to be a feast and a celebration. It’s still only mid-morning and not many people are around yet, but when we get back around noon the crowd is quite big. There’s moose meat and caribou for people to cook on spits over the fires and the air is full of the smells of cooking. People are having a good time standing around talking and laughing and though I feel like a bit of an intruder, dropping in at this very opportune moment to get a free meal, people are very welcoming.
The walkers are community members who’ve been out in the bush for two or three weeks – some to maintain their traditions, some to heal themselves, some to pass along what they know to their children – and their return is an important moment. Like in the past, they are using their lands to reaffirm their identity as a people and to maintain a connection with their place in the world. This is a powerful idea that has taken hold in many of the communities, the idea that healing people and communities means getting back to the land and to the ceremony of living in the bush. It started here in Mistissini, in 1999, when Jimmy Gunner organized a walk to raise money for kidney dialysis equipment so that people wouldn’t have to be away from their families while getting treatment. Since then, these walks have become more an expression of continuing Cree culture and the people who complete them find a source of pride and healing – the same kind of pride the Cree have always taken from being able to find nutritional and spiritual sustenance from the land. When we leave Mistissini, in fact, we are going down to Ouje Bougoumou to join with their walkers and I’m excited that we’ve arrived here in time to see this gathering.
About one o’clock the walkers arrive, coming in off the lake and up the hill to where the tents are set up. This is a very emotional experience for many of them – completing this journey, finding something within themselves that resonates with the bush and the traditions of their people. There’s a lot of laughter and tears as they make their way up the hill. I don’t want to romanticize this, this is not a re-enactment of something out of the past. It’s a new articulation of what it is to be Cree and to live in this region where they came from as a people. This is a political act too – that’s my perception of it anyway. They have been walking on Category II and III lands for the weeks prior to this moment and they have been re-occupying it in a sense, taking back symbolically those lands that were taken under the James Bay agreement.
When I head back down to the lodge, I know I’ve seen something here today that changes my perceptions about the conditions in the region, something that gives me a lot of hope. Something is happening here at the grassroots level, something equally as powerful as their leader’s negotiations.
I feel good about things as we head south to Ouje Bougoumou the next morning. We are only going to spend a little time in the village of Ouje Bougoumou, our real purpose is to go out in the bush, but I haven’t ever been there and I’m curious to see it. It’s the newest of the Cree communities, only established in 1992, and they’ve been honored by the United Nations and other groups as a model community. The story of how these people reconstituted themselves after being dispossessed of their land for more than a generation is one of the other hopeful aspects of recent James Bay history.
Unlike most Cree territory, Ouje Bougoumou land was further south, around what is now the town of Chibougamou, and when copper was discovered there just prior to World War II these Cree people lost their land. Four separate times between the 1930s and 1970s the Ouje Bougoumou Cree were told to move from where they had congregated and by the time the James Bay Agreement was negotiated, they had been largely disbursed. Some had left the area, and many were living in shacks by the side of the road outside of town – their cohesion as a community was nearly gone and they were not made part of the agreement because they were not recognized. They had written earlier to the government, asking for land, but were ignored and when the agreement went into effect there were only eight communities recognized as James Bay Cree.
In the early 1980s they began a renewed effort to gain recognition and with the help of the new Cree government they were able to negotiate their own agreement that gave them recognition and a land base on which to build a community. The village today sits by Lake Opemisca, a small village that radiates out from a central pavilion along streets that curve around to form a semi-circle. It’s very quiet this Sunday morning and we get gas and go to have some lunch in the lodge down by the lake. In some senses it too feels like a nice little lake community anywhere, the history and the people here are what make it so strikingly different. After lunch a neighbor of Dave and Anna Bosum, our hosts for this visit, takes us out to the trailhead so we can begin our walk. Dave is supposed to meet us around three with the skidoo and take us into camp, but since we are a couple of hours early, we decide to snowshoe in until he finds us. The sun is out, though the wind is blowing hard and it’s good to get in the trees.
It’s good to be walking after so many days on the road too – I’m feeling stiff at first and concentrate on keeping my feet apart, so the shoes don’t trip me up. The snow is beautiful powder and it’s piled deep in the dark green spruce. This is the boreal forest, spire-like spruce with a few birches here and there. The spruce are bearded with stringy moss which gives them a slightly shaggy quality, but that moss is valuable when it comes time to light a fire. It’s dry, as are the twigs it grows on, and a ball of that stuff will burn in all but the wettest conditions. As we crest and descend a small rise, we head out over an open area that I think is probably swampy in the warm weather. You only get to walk like this in the winter around here, in the summer this is canoe country and walking becomes next to impossible in most areas.
The wind is cold, but we are warming to the task. Before we are aware of it, we’ve been walking for about two and a half hours. There’s a brief conversation when we realize that Dave should have found us by now, but the trail is clear enough and we keep walking. In a while when we reach the shelter of trees we stop. There is such an overwhelming quiet in this land, it surrounds you in a way that is nearly gone to the south. There isn’t the sound of anything but the wind in the trees, not a car or a plane – anything. It’s one of the things that I have found most compelling about James Bay since I first visited. There is a barren beauty here that has to be experienced. And now I hear a skidoo. I was just starting to think about when we might turn back.
It’s a cold ride to camp, I was comfortably warm on foot, but my hands are numb when we get to where the group is set up. There are five canvas tents, each with a stove, and there is hot tea for us inside. Hot tea out here at any time of year is one of the great luxuries that the HBC brought to the region and which the Cree adopted wholeheartedly – tea loaded with sugar. It can bring you back to life. We spend the afternoon getting acquainted with the group, looking at the map of their journey, and eating a dinner of walleye and moose meat. By the time we get into our tent I’m ready for sleep and the temperature is well below zero and dropping. All night long I hear the trees outside popping in the cold and I’m glad for the heavy sleeping bag and the bearskin underneath when the temperature inside begins to sink. Keeping the fire going all night would mean not sleeping essentially, so though it will be a painful few minutes getting the stove going again tomorrow morning, we let it go out.
At sunrise, after I get the fire going, I go outside and walk into the woods for a while. The sun behind the spruce trees is bright red this morning and the ice crystals on the dark green needles are tinged with a rose color that makes them glow. I’m guessing it was in the twenties below zero last night and my breath is a steady flow of steam as I walk. Behind me are the tents in a row with smoke coming out of all the chimneys – everyone is awake, and the light is growing fast now in mid-March. Today is about the walk.
We eat breakfast together and then the group gathers for a circle in the communal tent. The group is made up mostly of teens who have been encouraged to go to the bush to have time to think about some of the problems they are facing in their lives. There’s not too much formal talking, but the walkers are reminded that it would be good if they used their time during the day to think about the trip and about what they would like to get out of it – how they would like it to change their lives when they get back to family and community. These are all good kids, but they have had some problems and they need to get in touch with something out here to heal themselves. They need some time to think and I’m looking forward to the chance to do some thinking about this place too. After we have joined in a prayer, we go outside for a group picture taken on somebody’s cellphone – a twenty-first century people as I said – and then we begin the day’s journey. The snow under foot is firmer today and we are on a packed trail, so some are carrying their snowshoes. I’m just a little too heavy to get away with that, though after yesterday I’d like to. Snowshoeing is hard work and I’m clearly out of shape.
This is a time to spend looking both outward and inward. I spend my time this morning taking in the beauty of this forest and thinking about all the years between now and my first visit here. I spend time thinking about the people I am with – thinking about the strength it takes to put a people back together as a community and to keep them together. I’m thinking again too of the latest development on the Rupert and what that will mean, about the Great Whale and how it will alter the process I see here and that I’ve seen in the other villages.
The early 1990s was the last time that Hydro-Québec began a new project up here – that was the same time that Ouje Bougoumou was bringing itself back into existence. The fight to stop the Great Whale River project was the last time that this region and its people were in the public consciousness in the United States. When Hydro-Québec put the plans on the shelf in 1994 it was a great victory for the Cree and for those in the States who participated, but I think like all victories there were seeds of complacency within it. We forgot, but Hydro-Québec did not. Neither did they stop producing power; over the years they have once again become a vital source of our electricity. The electrical market, like all energy markets these days, is booming and because La Grande and other hydro facilities can be taken off and brought online within a matter of minutes they give Québec a powerful tool to use in that market. We produce most of our power with plants that take hours, even days to get up to speed and so we don’t like to turn them off, even if that means the price of power falls when demand is low. At those times Québec turns off their facilities and buys cheap power from outside – they keep their water for when the price is high, in the winter and summer, selling back to us for an exponential profit. It’s an enviable business model and they watch the energy market the way day-traders watch the Dow.
This integrated energy market is part of the landscape of James Bay, and we are citizens of that geography now as we sit at home in Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, or Maine. As I walk, I am thinking about how easy it is to forget that fact – how easy it is to think that one battle is an entire war and then to become complacent. I guess I am thinking too about how we are controlled by this geography of power. Oil right now is the most problematic source, at least from a geopolitical and climatological perspective, but all our sources are problematic in a larger sense. I’d like us to think about the Rupert and Great Whale projects in those terms. I talked earlier about individual responsibility, I see that as vital, but because of the nature of the energy market there are policy issues that also must be addressed. The way we produce power at home clearly affects the way it is produced elsewhere and has implications beyond just greenhouse gasses in the air. Whether or not these rivers are dammed, if we do not change, then it will be another of the rivers up here or somewhere else and another sacrifice for the Cree or some other people’s landscape. What I have seen up here in the last twenty-five years is an amazing ability to adapt and meet new challenges, but that takes time. If the changes come too fast, even strong people reach a point where they cannot keep up.
I come back to these walks in the bush and the re-connection with the land that the Cree continue to make as their culture moves like river water to find a path around the rocks. They adapt and yet remain whole, but if you put enough rocks in a river you make a dam, and the river is stilled and the life is gone from it. This is not just a natural fact, but a cultural fact as well. I have heard these walks referred to by several names – journeys of recovery, journeys of wellness, walks of the heart – and think all these names have a dual meaning. They refer to the recovery of a person in some ways, but they mean also the wellness of the land that a person walks on and the strengthening of the heart of a community that relies on the land. To make a landscape sacred is to sacrifice something to it rather than sacrificing it to some other perceived need. It means to give as much as you receive from it to create a community with the land. This is an idea that underpins not just the specifics of this one moment in James Bay, but which speaks to the wide-ranging problems that face our global environment and all the communities of people that must live within it. As I think about these issues and walk through the forest of the north now, I’m also thinking of a mountain back home. I’ve been walking on it since I was a child and have known it in all its seasons since just about the time that the dams were being started. I would be heartbroken if anything were to happen to Moosalamoo or if I could no longer walk there. I would be diminished, changed, and I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone.
