I
was into my fifth decade of life when I first came in contact with a group of
people living in northern Quebec who were subsistence hunters and trappers. I
was poorly equipped for the events that followed, having only the one
qualification, that I had grown up with a kneejerk sympathy for the underdog
and the oppressed, as these people certainly were. I have often wondered how I
came by this sympathy for the underdog; perhaps it had something to do with
being the youngest in a family of macho males, and as a child observing the
brutal insensitivity with which my father treated wandering bushworkers who, after
a weekend of carousing in the city, would turn up at our family home hoping my
dad would stake them to the return trip to the distant sawmill where they
worked and of which he was the owner. It might also have begun to develop
earlier, when I was in elementary school, and one member of our class, who was
generally called Pisspants Critchfield,
a poor, smelly kid from a neglectful home, was always the first picked on by
the teachers to be given the strap day after day. However it originated, this
tendency to sympathize with the underdog was very much reinforced by my
experience as a reporter working for newspapers. Because I discovered that
every newspaper I worked for had in common that they used the poor and
disadvantaged as the subject of occasional articles, but thereafter never
showed the slightest interest in improving their condition.
In the (almost) five decades that
have passed since I made that first contact, I have often tried to argue with
friends that if we had been a really humane nation, as our leaders liked to
suppose we were, we would have cherished these hunters and trappers with their
remarkable gifts, knowledge and insights, and so arranged our economy as to
keep their lives viable, an economy based on their particular skills that would
have carried them painlessly into the modern world. I have found it a hard argument to make, because
the general assumption, even of people who are not hostile to the indigenous
people, is that they have been by-passed by the modern world of technology and
industry, simply cast into the role of victims. A population unable to compete
in the modern world, always foundering before the “balance of advantage”
argument, the advantage always being judged in terms of money, of which the
indigenous people have none, and in which they normally take little interest. To
paraphrase a currently fashionable concept, they have usually been found to be “too
small to succeed,” just as the banks have been found too big to fail.
I suppose one would have to say that
the bald facts discourage any romantic argument in their favour: a tiny
population of 5000-6000 Cree people occupied a territory that in total is almost
as large as Western Europe. The justice or injustice of the way they were
treated really didn't enter into the calculations of those making the decisions.
Whenever anyone arrived among the indigenous peoples with the intention of
sinking a mine, for example, or cutting timber, that person or company was given prior use of the land, and the inhabitants
who had lived there for millenia were simply pushed out. In 1968 I visited
hundreds of them living in tents, always on the edge of irreversible poverty. This
was the normal operation of colonialism, alive and well in modern Canada.
I am not intending to argue this case
here; I mention it only because yesterday I came across some interesting reflections
on nomads in a book I am reading by the British writer Bruce Chatwin. The
hunting people who were established in Canada when Europeans arrived to settle
in their lands fitted the definition of nomads, although most of them occupied
specific, huge areas of land across which they had always roamed. Under European influence, most of these
peoples were gathered into small villages, where they could be administered the
minimal attributes of a modern life, like education, health services and the
like. This very act of sedentarization in
itself was enough to destroy the vitality of
these peoples. For example, the Naskapi, as they were then called, had
built their lives around the winter chase of the caribou over the treeless
tundra of northern Quebec. I first heard of them when I met a young Norwegian
anthropologist, Georg Henriksen, who had studied them, and so admired them that
he made it his life’s work to write in their defence. Years later a young CBC
reporter in Newfoundland, Marie Wadden who had suddenly discovered the existence
of these people in her province, and was appalled by how they were being treated,
got in touch with me to ask how she should go about writing a book on them. (I
gave her Bernard Shaw’s advice: “keep the seat of your pants on the chair”). She
did write an admirable work Nitassinan, which
to my mind is one of the best accounts of the operations of old-style
colonialism deep in the heart of modern Canada.
In the 1960s, these two peoples, the
Cree of northern Quebec, and the Naskapi of Labrador, had managed to retain
their semi-nomadic traditional hunting culture to a remarkable extent. The Cree
with whom I came into contact had managed to do this by an accident of history,
namely, that the Scotsmen of the Hudson’s Bay Company who arrived in the 1600s
had eve since serviced their trading
posts exclusively through Hudson Bay, arriving
in the spring, and leaving with their furs before the freeze up in the early
autumn. Some of these company factors
lived for years in Canada and never went south into populated Canada. Thus, before coming under the
pressure of the industrializing technology of Canada, the Crees were able to
adapt their remarkable skills in the bush to add trapping the beaver for fur to
their repertoire of activities. Whereas further south many indigenous peoples were
already well on the way to losing their
languages, because of the pressures brought on them by an industrializing Canada, I found the Cree
communities were totally functioning in Cree, and in 1968 only a handful of
young men were comfortable in English. Eventually I discovered that their elders, who had never been to school and
knew neither English nor French and had never, most of them, been anywhere but
up and down their great rivers, were really remarkable people, calm and dispassionate
as hunters and trappers, careful in the management of the animal resources on
which they depended for life, profound in
their deep understanding of the human relationship
to the Earth, and far-sighted in their concern for coming generations. It was
difficult to avoid the conclusion that modern Canada was in need of these very
qualities. But the melancholy fact was that modern Canada had treated these people
with contempt, and was in the process of destroying them just as we needed their
insights the most.
But back to Bruce Chatwin. He is one
of those English writers, extravagantly admired by many people, to whom I have
never been able to warm. The fault for that could lie within me, a rude colonial
boy who grew up with resolutely anti-colonial attitudes, that have prevented me
from accepting the British way of life, although I lived in Britain for eleven
years.
I was not surprised when I read the
account of Chatwin’s life to learn that many doubts had been raised as to the
veracity of much of his reporting, The
book I have recently been reading did
leave me with doubts about this: his observations and descriptions of
encounters he has had with many remote people are so loaded with the most minute
detail (for example, one I remember is his detailed description of the history and
meaning of some items attached to the back of a woman’s dress that I seriously
doubted he could have known about in the suggested time-frame.
I did, however, come across some interesting
comments on nomads, that sent me off on this piece. (I have since found to my surprise that
nomadism, the question of what it is that urges people not to stay still, was the
major preoccupation of Chatwin as a writer and sort of anthropologist.) Although the Crees when I first met
them could no longer be described as nomads, nevertheless there was something
of the nomad in their historical habit of wandering across the land, always moving
to catch the fluctuating populations of the animals they needed.
Here are some extracts from Chatwin’s
observations:
“The suicidal march of the
Scandinavian lemmings to the sea is thought by some to shed light on the tragic
refugee problems of our day, and a global situation of wandering refugees is predicted.” (He wrote
this in 1972, and we are surely seeing what he prophesies in our day.)
“Nomads never roam aimlessly from
place to place, as one dictionary would have it. A nomadic migration is a guided tour of animals around a predictable sequence of pastures. It has the
same inflexible character as the migrations of wild game, since the same
ecological factors determine it.” (In reference to that, one is reminded of the
problem certain indigenous groups in Canada have had in proving to the satisfaction
of various judges that they have always been in possession of the lands they
claim as their own, virtually an impossible thing for a semi-migratory species
to prove.)
I remember attending a meeting in
1975 about Human Ecology, so-called, when I heard a Tanzanian official describing
the great plans for settlement of the peasants in his country. I told him his
presentation reminded me of what was said so often about indigenous people in Canada,
who had already been herded into settlements as he was proposing to do, with
deleterious results. I asked him what provisions his government intended to
make for the nomads who wandered back and forth over the national borders. His respond was blunt: they would have to accept
the plans, just like other people.
It happened that when I was thinking
of writing something about this I came across an item in a newspaper describing
the alarm among the Masaai nomadic people who are once again being hassled by the
Tanzanian government because of their irreverence toward the national borders.
So while it may be true that Canada
has treated its semi-nomadic populations of hunters with notable lack of
sensitivity or understanding, it is equally true that we are not alone in having
done this. People whose beliefs and outlook do not fit the national template,
as most certainly those of the Cree and Naskapi do not, are being simply bundled
aside out of the way almost everywhere.
And as the fate of the Naskapi, now
called Innu, shows, the national authority prefers to have them drinking and
sniffing glue in villages than to have them occupying lands that increasingly
the dominant society has other uses for.
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