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A
huge front page headline in this morning’s Le Devoir declaring that the Cree of
Waswanapi were about to blockade a major highway in defence of their traditional boreal
forests in which they have always lived, has directed me back to the subject of
yesterday’s Chronicle, namely, the question of “consultations” between
governments and the indigenous people, and their long-standing, unsatisfactory
relationships.
Waswanipi is the southernmost of Cree
settlements in Northern Quebec that lies along that long, lonely 250-mile road
between Val d’Or and Chibougamau. At the time of the signing of the 1975 James
Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (JBNQA) between the indigenous people of
northern Quebec and the Quebec government,
the Waswanipi people had been dispersed
along the road and across the territory, following the closure years
before of the Hudson’s Bay post, but the monies provided under the Agreement
enabled them to build a new village not far from a big bridge across one of
those numberless streams that connect the countless lakes of northern Quebec.
When I first visited the region in 1969 long before the new village was
created, the only inhabitants were a couple of old Gull brothers, living there
with their families, one of whom was an
Anglican priest. He showed me the parish book recording births, deaths and marriages:
it was a melancholy tale of desperation, for many of the deaths that had been
recorded over the years, both of children and their parents, were explained in
the record by the abrupt, pitiless word: “starves.”. One of the elderly
brothers had lost the lower part of a leg which they told me they had
themselves cut off to save the brother from death by gangrene poisoning. Yet these
people were hanging on there, living in tents down by the river, if only to
establish their rights in their traditional lands. It was in one of their large
tents that I first experienced the traditional Indian warmth of a multi-generational family living together
in one huge room, the great-grandchildren learning their life lessons from
their elders.
Being the southernmost of the Cree,
when the Europeans arrived among them with the serious intention of logging their traditional forests, it was the
Waswanipi who were first subjected to
watching their beloved forests decimated by clear-cut logging machines. This
was at a time, well into and even beyond the 1970s, when a municipal government land
use survey of the whole area did not even mention the existence of the Cree.
So much for consulting them about development.
But as time went on, the government
admitted certain Cree rights to a say in the traditional use of their traditional
lands. This extended only to the smallish reserves, the so-called Category I
lands, and the second Category of lands
in which they were granted certain limited
powers, provided for them by the Agreement. But as they settled to try
to enforce these rights laid out for them in the Agreement, they had the very
devil of a job getting either the Quebec or the federal governments to
implement the promises made to them, even though they were now recognized as
the law of the land.
Year after year, the Cree returned to court
to try to get these rights applied: for
example, in the disposition of the moose, on whose meat the Cree had always
relied for food, southern hunters were accustomed to taking the largest share,
but the Agreement set their needs against the more urgent needs of the Cree. The Cree lawyers found it necessary to go to
court dozens of times in an effort to impose their rights as written into law
by the Agreement, and they usually won these cases. But the effort was immense,
the expense high, and the resulting situation, always subject to change,
unsatisfactory, and it was this situation that led to the so-called Paix des
Braves, in 2002.
The reductio ad absurdum of this roundelay of court cases came over the
question of forestry, and the increasing logging of the traplines of Cree
hunters. Quebec had a system of plans covering the whole forest area of the
province, but eventually a judge, confronted with the Cree argument that these
plans were destroying their traplines and traditionally sacred uses of the
forest, ordered the government to suspend implementation of its sector plans,
and return to court after six months with a plan that was to take into account
the needs of the Cree as legally laid
out in the Agreement.
This confronted the government with a
dilemma: could this ragged band of newcomers into the legal scene (albeit
newcomers with the longest provenence, stretching back countless generations to
before Europeans even arrived in Canada), be allowed to upset the careful plans
for governance of their own Quebec province?
They soon stumbled upon a perfect solution: the government decided to
change the judge, recusing the man who made the decision for the Cree, and
replacing him with a man who could be depended on to find in the government’s
favour.
Thus, wondrously, work the laws of
democracy in this nation that prides itself so much on democracy.
Enter the Paix des Braves: at its core
was the desire of the Quebec government
and its agency Hydro-Quebec, to bring under control as part of their extended
hydro-electric installation across the Cree lands, the very heartland river of
the Crees, the Rupert, a river the Cree had so strenuously defended for quarter
of a century. In exchange, they took the
money, under a programme that would
amount to some billions of dollars over 50 years. In the environmental battle
for the future, bowing to the immense pressure of decades of "consultations", the Cree had changed sides.
Sixteen years later, Don Saganash, a Waswanipi
trapline tallyman told Le Devoir
today that "We want to send a message to the world. We are not against a
law or a company in particular, we just want to protect our territory from
[industrial] exploitation. We've been fighting for over a decade and we've seen
the negative impact it has had in the south with clearcuts. "
He noted that recent publications of the
relevant Quebec ministry do not provide for permanent protection of the
Broadback Forest area, called Mishigamish, which the Cree of Waswanipi
absolutely want to protect. This represents the last 10% of intact boreal
forest in their ancestral territory. "We do not ask much, it's just a
small space, but part of our way of life," says the trapper, who grew up
on this land. "Foresters have already taken 90%, so we want to save
what's left for the next generation. "
The article in Le Devoir is like an illustration of my Chronicle of yesterday,
outlining as it does years of frustration, of promises made and not kept, and
even of failure by the major governing indigenous body, the Grand Council of the
Cree, to adequately represent its grassroots members trying to defend their
trapline and their last remaining patch of forest.
So much for “consultation.”
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