Strangers Still, and the Land Nearly Devoured
Originally Published in Yellow Medicine Review – Spring 2014
“This island was never our home, it was only where we gathered in the summer months to visit each other and rest. At the end of the summer, when we said “we are going home,” we meant we were going back to the land to hunt for the winter. Now we still go to the land, but when we say “we are going home,” we mean we are going to the village over there across the river. This is what’s changed.” – Stewart Rupert
Tahkutaanich (On the island)
I’m lying on a mat of black spruce boughs that covers the teepee floor, listening to the rain falling, and watching the fire burn in the central circle of stones. It’s cold outside, and every now and then a gust of wind swirls and pushes its way in under the door flap and makes the fire flare a little. The rustling canvas makes the structure feel alive, like we’re sheltering inside some animal with bones of wood, quickened by the wind off of Hudson’s Bay. Disturbed weather is typical here in northern Quebec, especially in summer when arctic high and low pressure systems jostle for position continuously. It was sunny and warmer this morning, that too is a typical July day at fifty-three degrees north, and no one is surprised by either, or by rapid change. Weather is part of living in this place, and most people on the island have settled into their camps for the afternoon. We have done the same.
We are camped in our friends Margaret and William Cromarty’s backyard, and this is their teepee that we are using. They have a small cabin that Margaret’s father built decades ago, and they spend most of their time here during the summer, as Margaret’s family has done for time out of mind. The next couple of weeks on Fort George Island are Mamoweedow (Let’s Get Together), and many others will be here too. The locals are from the James Bay Cree village of Chisasibi, but outsiders are welcome, and we will all be gathering to eat traditional food, visit, and enjoy ourselves. Importantly, too, we will be continuing a tradition of summer gathering at this place that goes back centuries at least, and probably far longer.
The island is a few miles downstream from the village, at the mouth of the La Grande River. Chisasibi itself lies fifty miles downstream from the French town of Radisson, the headquarters for Hydro-Quebec’s La Grand Hydroelectric Complex, built in the 1970s, but still one of the world’s biggest. It’s a monument to Québécois modernity – or so the Hydro-Quebec tour guides will tell you – but monument or not, everybody’s lives up here have been shaped by it, just as the land around them has been transformed. Margaret was born and raised on her father’s hunting lands which are now largely under water, so the life she expected to live out there – as a Cree hunter on the land – did not come to pass. She was a young mother when the hydro development began to flood the life she knew, only a few years out of school.
Ft George was a busy place before the dams. There were Catholic and Anglican missions, both started in the nineteenth century and each with a residential school; the Hudson’s Bay post still bought furs, from hunters like Margaret’s father, when families came to the island in spring. They would rest, visit, and trade for the supplies that they would need for the next season, then in late August or early September they would depart again for “the bush” to stay the winter. This island was not their permanent home, but it was central to their yearly round of subsistence, and the history here is deep for those who remember. We had a tour this morning from a man named Stewart Rupert, whose family hunting lands are north of the river. He was a young man during the heyday of activity here, before everything closed, in 1981, and people were moved to Chisasibi by government fiat.
He painted a vivid picture for us, showing us the few HBC buildings that are still left standing, along with what’s left of the Anglican church. When things were in full operation the island was largely cleared, but trees are growing quickly now where there used to be dormitories, barns, and fields. Nothing remains of the Catholic mission except for a little graveyard with iron crosses marking the resting places of those children who didn’t make it home from school. Like so many other places, in Canada and the US, these residential schools operated to remake Native children into something they were not. Many did not survive, but memory is strong like the river, both good and bad.
There are generations of Native people who suffered in residential schools, losing their connections with language, place, and culture, but never really finding a home outside. William is Ojibwa, from western Ontario, and was sent hundreds of miles away from his reserve. He saw little or nothing of his home and family for years. He will also tell you that he was abused in school, though he made out alright in the end. After World War II the government had made a place for itself here on the island, running postal service and a nursing station, and when he left school William took a job with the Ft George post office. Here he met Margaret, and this has been his home ever since.
Margaret will tell you that being in residential school here on the island was better than what most Native children experienced, though it was not good. She will also say that school gave her one teacher who shared both a personal library and a love of writing with her and that this affected the rest of her life. When the world she knew began to be transformed, she began to write. She wrote about the land and about the way her people lived in this northern place; she wrote about how land and people are one and how both were being hurt. She has published three books of poems and essays of which she is rightly proud. [1] They are as powerful as the dams in their way – monuments to living in place – profound expressions of a Cree sense of modernity.
Siipii (Rivers)
The nine communities of Cree who live in James Bay call the region Eeyou Istchee, the People’s Land. Its lakes, rivers, and forests have provided food for them for four thousand years, but it was this same post-glacial geography and hydrology – the massive west-flowing rivers – that made the region perfect for damming. Quebec began La Grande, in 1970, for both domestic energy needs and for export, and it was quickly dubbed the “Project of the Century” and “Quebec’s Pyramids,” by boosters who reveled in the newfound nationalism of the period. This pride still runs deep, and, over the last forty years the affected area has grown to be larger than the state of Pennsylvania – eleven power stations, dozens of spillways and control structures, and hundreds of miles of diversion dykes. Three rivers – the Caniapiscau, the Eastmain, and the Rupert – have now been diverted to flow into the La Grande watershed and all of this generates 8.5 terawatts of power annually; this is delivered to the St Lawrence Valley and northeastern US via a massive system of 750,000-volt high tension lines.
The Cree initially tried to stop the project in court, but after years of struggle decided instead to accept an offer to negotiate. The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement was signed, in 1975, and this gave them some money and some political control over small portions of their traditional lands. It also allowed the project to continue with only minor changes and all this has had dramatic impact on the people who gather here on Fort George Island. This is not only because many of their hunting territories were permanently flooded, but because all Cree people have lived within this new treaty framework ever since. This has reshaped lives as the lands of Eeyou Istchee have become an increasingly politicized and developed landscape, and the Cree have had to sign subsequent agreements, over issues of governance, forestry, and further damming.
Hunters did not abandon their land when damming started. The scope of development and the treaties did result, however, in moving people to settle in permanent villages – the places where the Cree were given real political control. These communities are near or at similar gathering places to this island, and they, like Chisasibi, have become their homes in a way that the gathering places never were. Many people still go to the land to hunt and trap, many still find a significant portion of their subsistence on the land too, but this is land where outsiders now have rights. It is contested ground and the villages are now the Cree’s bases of operation in this politicized landscape. Towns like Chisasibi are “home” for the Cree and, as Stewart Rupert said this morning, “this is what’s changed.”
He also meant that Chisasibi was not a Cree decision. It was built where it was because four rivers now enter the bay here, not just La Grande, and the engineers thought that the island would erode away. They forced the Ft George Cree to build their village where it was deemed safe and people took part of their lives to a new place, even while the past remained here on the land. This disruption in local cultural continuity mirrors the environmental disruption caused by flooding and, in Chisasibi, children have grown up there have done so in a place their elders did not want to go. This is why people continue to return to this island to gather. This is the place where their community exists, so Ft George, too, is political ground in that respect.
Wemishtikushiiu (Whitemen)
Forty years ago, as this whole process was beginning, journalist Boyce Richardson documented the Cree reaction to the hydro projects, in a book titled Strangers Devour the Land [2], as they tried to comprehend the scale of what was being proposed. An elder from this island, a hunter named Job Bearskin, not only told him that the land was being devoured, but it was “like his garden” was being flooded by the outside world. Job Bearskin was a profound thinker and he spoke directly to these issues of culture and memory because he did not simply mean that the land provided food like a garden. He meant that the Cree tended their relationship with the hunted animals and their lands for a much larger purpose. Cree tradition – Cree culture – grows here, along with the animals, and the two aspects of the garden are not separable. He feared the disruption of this vital relationship between people and land far more than the rising water. He feared the money too, for it could never replace the land.
On this island and other gathering places, families met each other and stewards of individual hunting lands (Kaanoowapmaakin), like Job Bearskin and Stewart Rupert, talked and decided which families would travel together the next winter and whose lands would lay fallow. They planned their use of the land and the young apprenticed with their elders; the tradition of stewardship thus grew in its own way and this annual cycle of tending and reaping was the heart of Cree culture. It was the engagement with place which made the land their home and this tradition continues, though it is much harder now. In all of the new communities the distractions of modern life – phones, TV, internet, jobs – make it harder for the old ways to find space. Seemingly, the social isolation and atomization of modern life transfers itself in the very architecture and suburban planning of these new communities, but it’s more than that too.
It’s important to remember that the Cree were not unfamiliar with outsiders before all this started. They had been some of the first Native people in Canada to be involved in the global fur trade, beginning in 1670, and for centuries they imported useful tools and useful ideas as they saw fit. After World War II, many of them had been sent off to various schools and learned about the Wemishtikushiiu world that way too. They were very much involved in the twentieth century when the damming started, but it was the dams and treaties that reshaped everything. Since then they have had to involve themselves in radically different ways than before; not only have they negotiated treaties, but they have kept a presence at the UN, since the 1980s, traveled en masse to demonstrate against what has happened on their land. They have engaged constantly with both Canadian and US politicians over a variety of issues and they have become expert in the Wemishtikushiiu world in order to make the best of their situation.
The outside world has reciprocated very little. Southern society’s demands for electricity – timber and minerals too – have changed the Cree’s world, yet most of us are ignorant of the scope of recent changes, or the historical events that led to them. James Bay has been like so many places around the world today – distant, outside of our understanding, and exploited – and this was Job Bearskin’s full meaning when he spoke of “strangers.” He did not understand the Wemishtikushiiu as most Cree do now, but he was not naïve. Those devouring the land were not strangers because the Cree did not know them, they were strangers because they did not know the Cree and their relationship with their land. The global economy has ruined much of Job Bearskin’s garden, but we have done more still by never engaging with the Cree and their land in any meaningful way. We might call this an “environmental social justice issue,” but that’s a rather bootless expression given how much strangers have actually devoured.
Twice only has the South turned an eye toward Eeyou Istchee and issues of development. The original court case and treaty negotiations were well known in Canada – less so in the US – but the story faded after the treaty was signed. It wasn’t until fifteen years later, with the planned diversion of the Great Whale River two hundred miles north of the La Grande, when the Cree really became an international cause célèbre. A large part of the justification for the new project was selling power to the northeastern US, so when the announcement came, the Cree actively engaged people in New York and New England.
The launch of this campaign was the journey of Odeyak, a boat built in Whapmagoostui at the mouth of Great Whale, which then traveled to Earth Day celebrations in Manhattan, in April 1990. There the Cree spoke about what they faced and Grand Chief Matthew Coon Come and others put the case in no uncertain terms to Americans. The project was “a terrible and vast reduction” of the Cree world – not just the flooding of land, but of Cree culture too. “The land is our memory, that is why it is important to us,” Coon Come wrote later in the campaign, echoing Job Bearskin. These were affective arguments and the expansion was stopped, in large part because U.S. states cancelled contracts with Hydro-Quebec, but it’s important to see what a double-edged victory this was.
The cancellation of Great Whale opened a rift between most people’s understanding of Eeyou Istchee and the ongoing process of change that was happening on the ground. While there had been a great deal of well-researched and well-considered reporting about the land, people, and issues during the Great Whale fight, the dominant theme of this work had been the destruction of “untouched wilderness” and “traditional Cree culture.” This wasn’t entirely wrong, but it missed the many ways that land and people had worked to adapt to the situation as it existed in the 1990s. In the minds of most people who fought the dams, and who lived far away, a great environmental battle had been won; the presumption was that the Cree could go back “to the way they had always been.” On the ground this was not the case.
Margaret and William were involved in the Great Whale struggle, and they visited our home state of Vermont long before we ever came to Ft George Island. They also exemplify the outward engagement needed in the modern context here in Eeyou Istchee. The Cromartys are a simple, older couple, living in the most unassuming way, in a remote and seemingly anonymous spot on the globe; they are tied to this place and its people, to the rhythms of weather and seasons, the lives of plants and animals. They also think globally – from the other side of globalization – because they see every day how connected this island is to international markets and world issues. In this they are the same as most Cree people I know, and this is what we missed in the momentary glance that our politics and media gave them back in the 1990s.
The Great Whale was only one river and halting its diversion did not slow the province’s development plans or our demand for resources. In addition to adding generating capacity along the Eastmain, a river already ninety percent diverted, Quebec began to increase logging in dramatic and devastating ways during the 1990s. Forestry operations that had been slowly expanding grew exponentially in a matter of a few years. Southern Cree communities that had been relatively unaffected by the direct impact of hydro projects soon saw massive clear-cutting become the mirror image of the flooding to the north. The Cree had Quebec in court over this issue for much of the 1990s, because forestry had not been addressed in the 1975 agreement, but meanwhile millions of board feet of softwood were taken each year. Something approaching ninety-five percent of this wood went to the United States and this is what fed our building boom – the bubble that has only recently burst.
Mishtikw (Trees)
Allan Saganash pulls forestry maps from his bank of file cabinets like an organist pulling stops. We have traveled the 500 miles south, to the village of Waswanipi, to talk to him about logging, and he is passionate about showing us what is happening. He is the community’s forestry administrator, and this is the issue that has shaped his life. He too was raised on the land and was sent off to residential school and he has told me before that he would have preferred to live his life in the bush as a hunter. This did not come to pass for him either because, when Allan came back from school in the late 1970s, he had skills that Waswanipi needed. Even then logging was beginning to change this most southern part of Eeyou Istchee and Waswanipi was hit hardest when the boom came in the 1990s.
Allan’s family lands are still relatively untouched by either logging or flooding – his brother Wally and his wife Emma were out there much of the time before Wally lost a battle with lung cancer – but Allan has spent much of his life in offices and in meeting rooms, rather than hunting. When the pressure started building in the late 1980s, Waswanipi approached individual logging companies and, through a combination of confrontation and negotiation, worked out local compromises that established a system of cutting that was more sensitive to Waswanipi hunter’s needs. It involved bargaining for smaller cut areas, disbursed over a wider range – so-called mosaic cutting – but most importantly it involved consultations with the Kaanoowapmaakin (stewards) whose territories were being cut. They were given some control over where the cutting happened.
The community also created the Waswanipi Model Forest on its own lands to try and demonstrate better forestry practices so, when the Cree Regional Authority began to negotiate with the province over cutting, Waswanipi was the model from which negotiators worked. In 2002, the Cree and Quebec signed the Paix du brave (the Peace of the Brave), in which the province reshaped its forestry regime to try and lesson its impact on the Cree way of life; for this the Cree allowed the Rupert River to be diverted into La Grande. Few celebrated the damming, but there was a great deal of hope for this process of engagement.
Today a great deal of Allan’s job is organizing and coordinating consultation meetings, but they have become deeply one-sided affairs. The Kaanoowapmaakin can at best blunt the bad effects of logging and road building, and this involves a fascinating mix of cordiality, resignation, and confrontation. The older Cree men tend to be more accommodating and quiet. Sharing the land is deeply embedded in Cree culture, and they find it hard to refuse anything if asked. They are also resigned to strangers who don’t ask. The younger men tend to be more resistant and I have witnessed several pointed lectures on how logging is destroying the land. They are not wrong, and some of the non-natives involved are sympathetic to this, in a noncommittal way; others go through the motions in a way that borders on cynicism. And no matter the intentions of anyone directly involved, there are forces at work which they are not in a position to change. Quebec’s revenue needs and the profit margins of the forestry companies drive the numbers.[3]
Kaanoowapmaakin (Stewards of the Land)
Paul Dixon’s hunting lands are on the southern edge of Waswanipi territory and were some of the first to be affected, back in the 1980s. Because of this, he is more radical in his opinions than many Cree. It’s an issue of Native rights for him. This is Cree land and companies are taking what is not theirs and wrecking land for which he is responsible. They are taking his way of life and it’s analogous to killing buffalo in the old west, he says. They are destroying the foundations of his tradition. Several years ago he and I sat in the cab of his pickup, looking at a clearcut and discussing what it meant; he told me something his father had told him years earlier. He wanted Paul to understand that a clearcut was very bad for the Cree, but to remember that the trees were all holding hands under the ground. It was a terrible tragedy for them and this was the full weight of responsibility he had as Kaanoowapmaakin: to think about the whole community of the land.
We spend a couple of days with Paul, driving the dozens of roads that bisect his 400 square-mile territory and looking at the ways things have been altered. The mosaic cuts are smaller, but they are hundreds of acres still. The work is done by huge feller-bunchers that cut trees 24 hours a day under lights to maximize yield. The logs are then trucked to regional mills where they are processed, mostly into small dimensional lumber. Many trees here are old-growth, but a very big black spruce in the North is ten to twelve inches at the butt and most are much smaller. This is not sustainable forestry, even if you consider nothing but the market, and the resource is disappearing as quickly as land beneath a growing reservoir.
When I first traveled in this territory, back in the early 1980s, the logging frontier was just making its way over the southern watershed onto Cree land. Today in some places it is reaching hundreds of miles north of that line, to the limits of marketable forest. We see this with another Kaanoowapmaakin named Isaac Shecapio, traveling to his camp one afternoon. Isaac is a generation younger than Paul; he was only four or five, just learning from his father, when I came here first, but at thirty-five he has been responsible for this land for twenty years. His father died suddenly when he was a teenager and, with the help of his family, he took over. His father taught him this land by snowshoe and canoe, and he has not forgotten those lessons, but today he must know the geography of roads and cuts as well.
It’s a struggle to reconcile what I see today with my memory of this forest; my reaction is visceral, so I can only imagine how it looks to Isaac. Still, he tells us we have to go further east, outside of the area covered by the Paix des braves, to see the worst. So we drive about twenty-five miles down the Mistassini River, coming to a place that looks like the moors of Scotland. There is no forest anymore – nothing. One will grow back, eventually, but it’s unclear how long it will take or, given the level of extraction, what it will look like. The forest back home in Vermont was once clearcut like this. Through some ecological luck a new forest has re-grown, but it is very different from what used to be. It would likely be unrecognizable to the Native hunters who once made their living there and likely less useable too. Isaac is a young man, this is where he hopes to live his life, where he wants to work and support his family, but it is getting harder and harder to make something of this land.
In an interview with an older Kaanoowapmaakin named Stewart Ottereyes, we ask him about how he thinks his son will use his land after him. He expresses sadness at the whole situation and says he feels like his son is “chasing the hunter’s life.” He means more than simply that his land has been heavily cut, because even the places that have not been cut have been disturbed. For Stewart Otteryes, “development” is just the Wemishtikushiiu way of saying that the land will be destroyed. Strangers are “playing God,” he says, and it will have consequences. He means consequences for the Cree, but he also means the world as a whole. “The Whiteman has to live,” he concludes, “but we will all see hard times eventually; we will all be poor one day,” if something does not change. And that may be the next chapter in this ongoing story.
Ninaapaaupiyihuu (Walking Proudly)
The sky is uncertain this morning and the wind is making the growing number of flags and banners flap and dance; numerous other First Nations have come to show support for the Cree walkers who will be arriving this morning. It’s March 25, so like last summer on Fort George, this weather is not unexpected here on Victoria Island, in the middle of the Ottawa River. We are standing in the lee of the First Nations center, and the ruins of the old Ottawa Electric Railway Company Steam Plant, in small circles, filling the time with small talk. The Canadian Parliament sits just across the river on the bluffs, its gothic towers and green roofs climbing into the sky, the red and white maple-leaf snapping in this wind. The Niishiyuu Walkers have come 1600 kilometers to make their presence known here in the capital, and we are waiting to go the last couple of kilometers with them. There have been breaks of blue from time to time, but then the wind has moved the clouds back in carrying a cold drizzle. We are all hoping that it will improve for the final leg of their journey, but they have been walking for two months, through conditions far worse than this, so they are likely not paying much attention to a little rain.
The Journey of Niishiyuu left the village of Whapmagoostui, at the mouth of the Great Whale River, on January 16, 2013. At the start there were seven young men on snowshoes, and it was minus forty degrees on the frozen bay. The goal was to walk in solidarity with the Idle No More environmental and indigenous rights movement which arose in reaction to dramatic changes in Canadian Native and environmental policy. In December 2012, the Canadian Senate passes Bill C-45, reorganizing a number of environmental laws and increasing government power in significant ways. The Navigable Waters Protection Act was reworked as the Navigation Protection Act, and significant changes were made to the Fisheries Act; the overall effect is to remove protection from millions of lakes and rivers. The criteria for environmental impact statements have been reduced, as have the requirements for mitigating damage caused by development, and this is the continuation of larger policy shifts in Canada driven by extraction.
While the development of the tar sands and the XL pipeline are the specific reasons for C-45, exploiting the resources across the entire North has become the central pillar of Canadian economic policy since 2000. In addition to forestry and petroleum, there is a new boom coming in mineral resources too – gold, copper, and rare earths. Everywhere we traveled this last summer prospectors had been at work looking for mineral deposits of all kinds and there is a controversial uranium mine being proposed, just north of the Cree village of Mistissini. The Cree are fighting this mine, as other First Nations are fighting the tar sands, but concurrent to bill C-45, the government also put forward bill C-428 reorganizing the Indian Act. These changes make it easier for Ottawa to lease Native lands to companies for development.
The youths from Whapmagoostui wanted to demonstrate that they are still strong and still care about the lands of their ancestors. In the same way that their parents and grandparents fought the Great Whale expansion in the 1990s, there are hundreds of walkers now, including an eleven year old girl from Chisasibi who convinced her reluctant mother that this was important enough that she should be allowed to go. Twenty-three years ago, it was Odeyak that began its journey to Earth Day from Whapmagoostui, but back then it was one river in the balance. Today, as former Grand Chief Matthew Mukash wrote after visiting the walkers on the trail, “this sacred journey is ultimately about human survival. As such, it is the responsibility of every human being to reflect upon what this means for each one of us, our families, our communities, our nation and ultimately the whole of humanity.” Like Margaret’s poems and Job Bearskin’s words to Boyce Richardson forty years ago, like Isaac Shecapio’s hope for the future, ultimately these youths are reaching out with a message that speaks directly to Stewart Ottereye’s fears of impoverishment for all of us – that Idle No More might mean strangers no more.
Endnotes
Margaret Sam-Cromarty, James Bay Memoirs (Waapoone, 1993); Indian Legends and Poems (D'ici et d'ailleurs, 1997); Cree Poems and Stories (Lettresplus, 2000).
Boyce Richardson, Strangers Devour the Land (Whiter River Junction, VT: Chelsea Grean, 2008).
My colleague Naomi C. Heindel has written in more detail about the Paix des braves forestry regime in: “The Cree and the Crown: Management Stories from North America’s Northern Woodlands,” http://northernwoodlands.org/articles/article/cree-crown-management-stories-north-america
