My Log 644 Sept 11 2018: Chronicles from the Tenth Decade: 80 A time when I turned things on their head: ignoring the names of white experts, and recognizing the names of the previously disregarded indigenous

I noticed in the public prints in the last couple of days an article about an exhibition of historical, archival photographs which stated that all the white people in the photos were named, but none of the indigenous people who had been photographed appeared to have a name.

This took me back with a bump to the tragic-comic occasion on which I made my first film. This was in 1971, not long after the announcement of the James Bay hydro-electric project, and as I embarked on this unfamiliar job --- a complete novice who didn’t know one end of a camera from another ----  I had only one clear objective in mind. I was three years into my contacts with native people across the country and his was one striking thing I had noticed, that in every mixed group, it was the whites who would be in the centre doing all the talking, while the natives stood silently listening. It is perhaps hard to believe now, but at that time, in most photos, videos, TV or whatever exposed to public view, even when they were the subject of the piece, the indigenous people were usually standing  in a disconsolate-looking group on the edge of the picture while some white expert --- usually an anthropologist --- would be holding forth telling the audience what the native people would be thinking and feeling, and, presumably, saying, if only they had been given the chance to say anything.

Even more striking was the fact that of the 600 native communities in Canada, almost none were ever to be found on a Canadian map. It was almost as if the dominant society, in a colossal act of indifference, had virtually eliminated the original inhabitants by the simple act of pretending they didn’t exist.

So, when I set out to make my own film, I made a kind of foolish, but understandable, decision. I decided I would turn this tradition on its head. I would identify, and allow to speak, every native person in the film; but of the white men working around them, mostly already engaged on building the hydro-project, whether as pilots, cooks, labourers,  supervisors, engineers, I would hear them speak, record what they had to say, but never, ever identify them by name.

Thus in the next few days I ran across some doozers: a young helicopter pilot, an American, as it happened, fresh from shooting up people in Cambodia, who had been flying around the James Bay wilderness for Hydro-Quebec for two years, told me: “This area is one of the most barren in the world today. It was scraped clean by glaciers long ago, and virtually nothing has grown since.”  We heard him say it clearly in the movie, but as to who he was: zilch.

In contrast, an elderly Cree hunter who had never been anywhere in the world except up and down the La Grande river, year after year, of which he knew every rock and hidden danger, every swirling rapid, every becalmed  fishing place, every burial spot for his people, always placed in death facing the rising sun, just as they had awakened to each day in life, this man told me that the region “is just like a garden, where  everything, people, trees, birds, animals, the rivers, lakes and rocks, is born, lives out its  life, and then when all is done  returns to become part of the continuing life.”  This man was Job Bearskin, and we called the film, Job’s Garden. Later, when they built a stadium in his village, it was named Job’s Place. And I would bet that if you mention the name Job to any of his people, even today, 40 years later, the man who would spring to their minds immediately would be that same Job Bearskin, whose quiet, burning indignation at what was being done to the land he had always loved became the centrepiece of our film.

I made quite a number of films to do with the Cree people, but of all of them, I know why Job’s Garden, for all its ludicrous technical deficiencies, held a special place in the regard of the people in the villages: it was because of a scene in which Job, having been up-river to examine what was being done to the land by the developers, returned to gather some of his old friends around a fire in his teepee that stood beside his house in Fort George,  a scene in which each of them in turn --- Samson Nahacappo, David Cox, Johnny Bearskin, Thomas Pachano, William Rat --- remarkable-looking men with the experience of their lifetimes spent in the bush written in their faces --- expressed their bewilderment at what the white man was proposing to do, and how deeply they opposed it all.  In that tent, that day, sat this repository of the collected wisdom of the Cree people, wisdom that the invading whites with their giant machines at first completely disregarded, until very gradually, but oh so slowly!, they seem at last to have come to take it into account.

 Just twenty years later, a young Cree stopped me while I was walking through the village, and said to me, as if talking about something that had happened only yesterday,  “I think we are only beginning to understand what those old men were telling us.”

The old men are gone now, but the knowledge they had of the land and animals, at least the equal of any scientific knowledge, I hope still lives on in the hearts and minds of the younger people, the succeeding generations, who were always at the centre of the old people’s hopes.

Their names remain with me still:

Johnny Wapachee

Solomon Voyageur

Sam Blacksmith

Ronnie Jolly

Willie Rupert

Stephen Tapiatic

George Shem

Matthew Shanush

Philip Petawabano

Joseph Pepabano…..

And so it goes on…a catalogue of the admirable men I met on my trips to Cree country, the land call Eeyou Istchee.

My Log 643 Sept 10 2018: Chronicles from the Tenth Decade: 79 Waswanipi Crees in a last-ditch effort to save their beloved boreal forest from the bulldozer; a longer perspective on a sad, frustrating story

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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.”

 

My Log 642 Sept 9 2018: Chronicles from the Tenth Decade: 78 The recent court judgment about the TransMountain pipeline is correct: the federal government has never taken seriously their obligation to “consult” with native peoples, and it is time for that to change

To anyone with even a slight knowledge of the federal state’s relationship with indigenous people in Canada, the recent unanimous decision by the Federal Court of Appeal that the government’s ”consultation” process with the indigenous in relation to the Trans Mountain oil pipeline was totally inadequate must have rung a familiar bell.

The Court wrote, wonder of wonders, that a ”consultation” had to mean more than a civil servant just scribbling notes, and then going away to make the decision they would have made before the “consultation.”

Because in my half century of experience in dealing with this subject, that is exactly the impression I always had of the federal government’s attitude towards their trusteeship for Indian affairs, as they were once called: they would, if their noses were pressed to the grindstone by some external force, turn up, listen, scribble notes, and go away.

I began to take in interest in this subject early in 1968, a time at which the 34-year-old Jean Chrétien had just been appointed to a ministerial post in which he quickly began to make waves. Part of his responsibility was overseeing National Parks, and in the four years of his stewardship he created more new parks than had been created in the previous 50 years. Similarly in relation to the native people he was a man in a hurry, taking his cue from his leader, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who believed that one part of society could not have a treaty with another part. In other words Trudeau was ready to consign the many treaties concluded over the centuries with the native people to the dustbin, their totally inadequate  reserved lands along with them, and Chretien went along with this radical, and grossly mistaken approach.

In fulfilment of this, Chrétien had dispatched his under-minister, Robert Andras, formerly a car salesman in Thunder Bay, around the country to “consult” the native tribes as to their wishes. Andras was a man of goodwill towards the Indians, and after meeting him, native leaders had some hopes for a change that might begin to set them on a new path.

Embarking on my examination of a group of Ojibwa reportedly living in perilous conditions in a small town called Armstrong, north-west of Lake Superior, a town accessible only by rail, I was directed by a friend who worked for Andras to drop in on him en passant. He suggested it would be helpful if I reported as positively as possible on the native people.  When I returned from Armstrong I reported that the Indians I had just met were living in conditions that reminded me of the Lower Depths of the Russian novelist Maxim Gorki. Later, when I turned up at the Indian Affairs Office in Ottawa, they showed me a big pile of exercise-style books with red covers in which were contained reports of the many consultations that had  been done around the country. I asked if I might have a copy of them: they gave me an armful of the 30 or 40 studies that contained the collected desires of the native people of Canada.

The civil servants told me later they never expected me to read them, but I did read them. And what they showed was that in not a single meeting of the dozens they had held did any native person suggest any of the policies that a few months later were proposed in the white Paper issued under the names of Trudeau and Chretien:

·      Elimination of Indian status as its own distinct legal status within Canada.

·       all special programs available to indigenous peoples because of their Indian status be removed as no citizen of Canada should receive special or individualized treatment based on ethnicity

·      abolition of the Department of Indian Affairs within five years

·      abolition of the reserve system

·       converting reserve land into private, sellable property owned by the band or Aboriginal landholders

·      a commissioner to investigate outstanding land claims and terminate treaties

·      Transfer of jurisdiction for Aboriginal affairs from the federal government to the provinces

·      Cutting  specialized programs  created specifically for indigenous peoples in order to cut  costs, and ensure equality amongst peoples.

I really don’t know if Andras went along with these proposals or not. He was transferred to other jobs within government --- became for a short time Minister for Urban Affairs, a newly-created post that quickly ran into jurisdictional problems with other ministers. His occupancy of this ministry was also marked by revolutionary new thinking: a huge study of Urban Canada was undertaken by various academics, which was published eventually and then totally ignored. I had been writing a lot about urban problems across the country, and the new ministry asked me to go to Ottawa to talk with them about these problems: I remember it solely because it was the first time in my life I had ever been paid the extravagant sum of $200 for a day’s work.  I couldn’t believe they got their money’s worth out of me, since my knowledge was rather sketchy. Andras spent only two years in that job before moving on to others within the government during the following ten years.

I had plenty of other experiences which showed how fleeting were “consultations” the federal (and other government) officials held with community, indigenous and other lowly groups.  When the James Bay Hydro project was announced in 1971, for example, the Feds were determined not to do anything that would upset the government of Quebec, which had not long before gone through the political crisis caused by the violent actions of the Front de Libération du Québec. Associated with the National Film Board at that time, I worked with some other people to convince a studio there to train a team of native people in the use of the newly-invented video cameras, to enable them to  travel from one Cree village to another so that the people could compare their opinions and attitudes about what lay before them.  A couple of weeks later I returned to inquire how the scheme was coming along: oh, I was told, we have had to cancel that one. On orders from Ottawa. To me, this represented  the real level of consultation that the federal government was willing to embark on when tribal groups were threatened with possibly life-threatening challenges: in other words, no consultation at all.  

Eventually as the Cree people whose lives would be affected by the Hydro project began to get themselves together, they at last embarked on a legal challenge to the Quebec government’s action in planning this project in their hunting grounds.

When the  lawyers for the Quebec government entered the courtroom, they were convinced they had no case to answer, that the whole concept of aboriginal rights was so nebulous, so ill-defined and so ambiguous that it could not possibly amount to a right. But the Crees, with their dogged, meticulous, stubborn lawyer James O’Reilly conducting their case, fought through a nearly six-month hearing to a triumphant victory in the judgment of Mr Justice Malouf that the Quebec government should stop trespassing on the land of the native people.  This was a judgment unheard of before in Canadian law, whose normal purpose is, generally speaking, to defend private property rights, But the judgment made it impossible for the federal and Quebec governments to continue to ignore the dilemma of the Cree people, as they had been so studiously doing.  Under pressure of the Malouf judgment, the Feds financed a long negotiation with the tribal group that the Crees had formed during this process, the Grand Council of the Crees, and with a similar group formed by the Inuit of northern Quebec.  This laborious negotiation, at the time probably the most unequal in the history of Canada, in which a group of young men and women in their twenties, with minimal education, confronted a $16 billion corporation established by Quebec to build the project, eventually led to the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, in which certain rights in land were given to the native people, along with some sums of money.  But this was by no means a fair and equal negotiation, but was an Agreement forced on the native groups because already the James Bay Project was being built around their ears. They either signed or they got nothing.  

This is how it has always been in Canada in relation to “consulting” the native people. It is not before time that the Courts have finally come up with a stern admonition that this “scribbling notes, and leaving” form of consultation does not represent  even a step towards that clear and unambiguous process of indigenous peoples having the right to “free, prior and informed consent” to any developmental work undertaken in their traditional territories that is envisaged in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, that has slowly, and rather reluctantly been fully accepted by the Canadian government.  

The meaning of this provision is still a matter for debate. It is unlikely to mean that the indigenous peoples will have a veto over any work proposed in their lands --- and there will always be debate of what is meant by “their lands” ---, but it is also, as the recent court judgment says, much more than the customary position in which a parcel of indifferent officials turn up for a “consultation”, scribble some notes, and leave.