Chapter 2

The Innu left to their fate in Schefferville

When the Schefferville mine closed, the federal government, according to one informant,1 first considered and then rejected the idea of moving the Innu sedentarised in Sheshatshiu into Schefferville town.2 Subsequently, the Iron Ore Company and the Quebec government sought to close down the town. Jil Silberstein suggests that this was to be an incentive for the Innu to move back to Maliotenam and Uashat on the North Shore. He describes the town as ‘a sinister town, almost a ghost town surrounded by a mutilated landscape, immense craters reddened by the abundance of iron, abandoned hangars, rusty machinery. Hideous. And then there are the Innu, shocked and stricken after having been humiliated.’3

The vast majority of the non-Innu moved south again, but the Innu wanted to stay. The hunters went back to living off the land, but they had a fight on their hands to keep the facilities which had been provided for the white workers. At the Tshakapesh Institute (formerly ICEM) in Uashat, there is a file of letters and reports pleading the case for keeping the town open – but the bulldozers moved in and the hospital and sports facilities were demolished, after which they began to bulldoze housing which was urgently needed for Innu families.

Negotiations for the survival of Schefferville

The closure of the town itself was announced in June 1986, and Bill-67 was passed by the Quebec government to facilitate this. The Innu saw the closure of the town as an opportunity both to move from their cramped reserve into the white workers’ houses, and for their own economic development. At first the Ministry of Indian Affairs was encouraging but, with the departure of a key figure who stepped down from the ministry, the governments pressed for compulsory purchase of the Schefferville houses and Ottawa delegated to Quebec the task of visiting Schefferville to inform the Innu that they would not after all be allowed to buy the houses of the miners. Instead the Matimekush reserve would be enlarged. The Band Council organised a petition signed by the Innu population which expressed clearly that they wanted to move into Schefferville.

On 9 February 1988, there was a meeting between the Innu and the Naskapi with the Ministers of Mines and Indian Affairs at which it was decided that everything was negotiable, whereupon the Band Council expressed its willingness to negotiate and handed the file to the Conseil Attikamekw-Montagnais (CAM), the body which was negotiating on behalf of the Innu to recover their lost James Bay lands. While the Quebec government accepted, the federal government refused to negotiate on the grounds that:

• it did not want a negotiated solution which would open the door to other Indian groups who wanted to negotiate the enlargement of their reserves;

• Quebec was using the Innu request as a pretext to preserve the urban environment and thus keep the town open, but hiding this behind the Innu demands;

• the request was a political move for the enlargement of the reserve and not a desire for relocation; and

• there was no money for such a project.

Instead, the federal government proposed a working party to find solutions for the enlargement of the reserve. A public meeting was held in Schefferville on 5 April 1988, at which the Innu approved the strategy of the Band Council to force the two governments to sit down at the negotiating table. The government of Quebec agreed to the negotiation. A meeting was arranged in Ottawa but neither government attended. At a meeting with representatives of the Prime Minister’s office, the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND) agreed to work with the Innu and a further meeting was arranged to take place in Schefferville, followed by a tripartite negotiation which was held on 26 and 27 April 1988 and at which a working plan was presented.

This plan set out the process for the closure of Schefferville and the transfer of the town by the governments to the Matimekush Lac John Band Council. It encompassed issues including the boundaries of the new territory acquired; the maintenance of essential services; the rehousing of the Innu in the town and the provision of education, health and leisure facilities; and the development of employment creation schemes.

It was made clear that the Quebec government had no intention to keep the town open. There were further discussions between the Quebec and federal (Ottawa) governments, following which the Quebec representative let it be known that Quebec had no further objection to Innu settlement in the town and would engage in serious negotiations with the Band Council. The federal government made no such commitment. Thus the Innu became well versed in the government’s tactics of prevarication and procrastination intended to wear down their resolve.

With no further employment in the mine and having abandoned the practice of walking the land for ten months of the year, hunting became prohibitively expensive because of the need for fuel for vehicles and seaplanes. Life on reserve degenerated into a cycle of dependency on benefits, empty days and a loss of the ethic of sharing and mutual support. This is in sharp contrast to the life of purpose and action out on the land. Only short and brief expeditions were possible. Jil Silberstein4 remarks that very few Innu had jobs and thus they ‘vegetate thanks to public assistance which arrives in the form of a monthly cheque’. He describes the system as ‘humiliating, depressing … especially as 60% of the Innu are under 25. Corollaries to this forced idleness are family violence, delinquency, suicide and addiction. Quarrels between clans make the atmosphere tense, sometimes fed by the métissage5 of the population.’6

Living off the land

One interviewee described how, following the closure of the mine, she and her husband went on to set up an outfitter’s business which would maintain their connection to the land:

When we wanted to build our project to have an outfitter’s licence for our family hunting grounds, we thought we would not have much difficulty in obtaining this licence – we invested ten thousand dollars travelling back and forth to Ottawa, Quebec City, Schefferville, to try to convince the government that we should have a licence to operate as outfitters. Nevertheless, we learned the sad news that we couldn’t do it because of the Naskapi Agreement. We couldn’t operate on our family hunting ground offering these facilities without the consent of the Naskapi.

We wanted to do something to realise a project that all of us would be proud of, you know, a modern facility to keep our connection to the land, and that government person tells us we have to ask permission from the Naskapi and we reply, ‘I would be a fool to ask the Naskapi permission to be on our own hunting grounds’.

We hear all kinds of sayings or labelling, we hear about people labelling the Indians as being drunks, always having a case of beer, that’s all we hear – that they are drunk, they are lazy, they don’t do anything. But we tried to be the opposite. We had all our evidence, all our papers, everything, travelling to Ottawa, Quebec and back to Schefferville with our own money and we tried to see the Minister … and he said he wouldn’t have time for us. I said, ‘Well, I can come back here tomorrow with reporters, the movie film-makers and I will tell them about the treatment you are giving to the Indian people here if we don’t see the Minister, if we don’t see anything, any concrete result about our request for a licence.

The next day, someone knocked at the door saying that a fax would be sent shortly and there it was – a letter confirming that we would have a licence and permit. We could operate our outfitting facilities on our family hunting ground.

By getting our permit or licence, we thought that this is another closed file and then we started another round of battles against the government. They would send their game wardens flying over, landing next to our cabin, asking us to pay a licence and some other fees attached to the licence. We asked, ‘Why would we have to pay that? We are the rightful owners.’ And then he said, ‘Well, if you don’t pay, guys, your clients might be sent to jail because you don’t pay those fees.’ So, in order not to cause harm to our clients, well, we finally agreed to pay the licence fee but then, again they would come and harass us, come after us, chasing our clients, being very annoying to us. I finally got upset with this and said to the game wardens, ‘Next time you come, bring the Minister.’ I wanted to talk to this guy because he didn’t know about the history of this land: we are the rightful owners, the rightful occupants of these hunting grounds.

Well, at the very end we saw the game wardens coming again. I said ‘You guys, just arrest us and imprison us because there is nothing more that we could ask than to be in prison because we want to defend our land and maintain our relationship to the land. We are doing nothing wrong. We are doing no harm. We just want to get a decent livelihood from our family hunting grounds. So, have us arrested and then I’ll be very proud of the grounds upon which you would arrest us. I’d be very proud to say to the world that we want to lead a decent life and live in peace on our land.’7

The business is now well established and is still running successfully 35 years on.8

When the mine closed in 1982, some of the hunters once again put food on the table by going back to hunting full-time. However, the landscape was changing. The mine itself has scarred the mountains above Matimekush, slicing through the hillsides and leaving deep and dangerous holes. The area around Schefferville is still littered with old machinery and the site is dangerous. The Iron Ore Company failed to decommission the site satisfactorily. Bears which once fed on the berries which grow on the site of the old mine now feast across the road at the garbage dump. Though they were once revered by Innu hunters, I was shown the bears as a kind of tourist attraction.9

There have been many summonses issued when Matimekush Innu have been found hunting on their traditional lands which have now been allocated to other peoples under the James Bay, North Eastern Quebec and New Dawn Agreements. The firearms are confiscated. There are many stories of confrontations with game wardens, some resulting in imprisonment for the hunters. One elder described the effect of such harassment on his own life:

I try to be a good father to my children. I try to give the best to my children. I try to give them good traditional food, but I see by the actions of the government the total lack of respect for our people. The government doesn’t think that by taking our food off the table, that the hunter, the father, will have to go back on the land to replace that food. The government doesn’t think about the hardship it creates for the Innu. So, I am trying to be a good father but at the same time I see the Crown ruining the future of our children. Basically, they have ruined our children.10

The Innu are being driven off their lands to make way for sports hunters from the United States, Canada and Europe, mainly Germany. Gérard Simeon, an elder from Mashteuiatsh, Lac St Jean, told Jil Silberstein11 that, from the moment that white sporting clubs were opened in that region, the restrictions imposed by the game wardens had become extremely severe ‘in order to protect the game’. No such restrictions applied to the sports hunters, however. In Matimekush they observe that, while it is permissible to hunt for sport, it is forbidden to the owners of the land to hunt to provide themselves with food. At the same time, the vast majority of the community lives on benefits in run-down housing and with nothing to do all day. It is hardly surprising that bingo is the highlight of their week.

The food provided by the hunters and the gatherers who are seen picking the blueberries and cranberries on the hillside is exactly the sort of food which workers at the health centre would like to see in the diet of Matimekush families. When I was gathering interviews in March 2009, there was nearly always a rich aroma of partridge or other small game being cooked on the stove – but I was listening to a small group of Innu who had managed to keep their culture strong.

Caribou has become a much rarer source of food. The schoolmaster to whom I spoke at the conference in Tromsø could not find words to describe the vastness of the George River herd of caribou which came to Matimekush each autumn in the years before the Iron Ore Company mine closed. According to government statistics, the George River herd numbered 800,000 in 1990. By 2012, there were only 27,000.12 When Jil Silberstein stayed in Matimekush in 1998, the caribou could be found a 15-minute truck ride away.13 In 2009, the Matimekush Innu had to travel 80 miles to find them, and in that year and the subsequent years to 2012, there were few caribou to be found anywhere. Even the small game has been driven away by the opening of new mines, over-killing by sports hunters and by climate change.

There are now plans to build dams on every major river of the Quebec-Labrador Peninsula, which will have a devastating effect on the hunting territories and on the ecology of the region generally. Because of these disturbances, the great George River herd of caribou has ceased to come to Schefferville on its annual migration.

In the face of the governments’ opposition to the Innu refusal to be moved on once more from their northern village, the Innu remain faithful to their core beliefs. In the next chapter we shall examine their day-to-day lives as wards of the Crown.