Chapter 10

The James Bay project: ‘The Plot to Drown the Northern Woods’1

Indigenous culture in North Eastern Quebec

Originally, before the Quebec provincial government and its commercial corporations required the land for resource extraction, the Innu shared the whole of the Ungava Peninsula with the Cree and the Inuit and other indigenous peoples. The Cree and the Innu spoke different dialects of the same language, intermarried, and respected each other’s rights to hunt, trap and fish on the shared land.

When in 1668 the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) established its first trading post on James Bay, the relationship between indigenous peoples and settlers was one in which the settlers were dependent on the indigenous people for food and local knowledge as well as for the supply of furs and, as a consequence, the indigenous people were left to lead a virtually autonomous life.

Boyce Richardson and Harvey Feit, a journalist and anthropologist respectively who worked with the Cree in the time immediately before their land was taken for the James Bay hydro-electricity project, both describe the Cree’s use of the land they had shared for millennia with the Innu as the tending of a garden.

Boyce Richardson’s film, Job’s Garden, made in 1972 just before its Cree subject, Job Bearskin, gave evidence before Judge Albert Malouf, follows Job onto his land. There he traps beaver and demonstrates before the camera the traditional skills of the hunting way of life which enable him to provide for his family from the land.

Harvey Feit2 expands on the garden analogy, quoting an unidentified Cree speaker in the negotiations for the James Bay settlement: ‘Land is like a garden to the Indians, everything grows, life [is] sustained from the garden. Dam the river, and the land is destroyed. No one has a right to destroy land except for the Creator.’3

Feit explains that the purpose of this metaphor is to show the similarities with and differences from the white man’s relationship to and perceptions of ownership of the land, and that the metaphor refers not only to possession of the land ‘but also to its productiveness, to Cree inheritance of the land and to the care that goes into protecting and using the land’. According to Feit, this signifies ‘that for the Cree, hunting, like gardening, not only cares for but restores the land and renews its productivity’.4 Feit goes on to say that this metaphor runs counter to the media coverage and the propaganda of Hydro-Québec to the effect that Northern Quebec was an uninhabited wilderness.

The ‘garden’ which is the subject of the film is the territory around Lake Caniapiscau, which was also the hunting land of the Aster family and other Innu now settled in Matimekush Lac John. Brother and sister François and Mani Aster, in extreme old age, described for me an attachment to the land as deep as Job Bearskin’s.5 They remember travelling the 750-mile round trip from the Gulf of St Lawrence to Lake Caniapiscau where François learned to hunt and Mani the women’s skills of the traditional life. Both were life-long campaigners to recover their lost land.

Louis-Edmond Hamelin describes the Innu’s use of the whole of the Ungava Peninsula as follows: ‘Within the peninsula and over the centuries the North Shore Innu-Montagnais have shown a mega-territorial awareness by hunting caribou up to Ungava Bay and by using the “great portage” which leads to the Mistassini and on to James Bay.’6

The James Bay project

In 1970, Robert Bourassa, premier of Quebec, had decided to put Quebec on the map as a thriving progressive, potentially independent nation. He aimed to achieve this with the construction of a series of hydro-electric dams on the four major rivers which feed into the James Bay arm of Hudson’s Bay. When he announced his proposed scheme, Bourassa claimed that the Quebecois lacked control of their economy, which resulted in poverty and underdevelopment.7 His stated aim at the time was to escape from Quebec’s state of economic inferiority.8

The scheme would entail the flooding of the traditional hunting grounds shared by the Cree, the Inuit, and the 11 communities,9 two in Labrador and nine in Quebec, which then made up the Innu Nation. The Innu had used lands in the territories to be affected by the dams since time immemorial10 up to the time of the flooding of their land. Initially, all the indigenous peoples affected by Bourassa’s proposals met them with incredulity, strong in their core belief that land was given for all humankind to share and was not a commodity which could be bought or sold or owned. Working with the Indians of Quebec Association,11 the Cree and Inuit went to court seeking an injunction to stop the initial works of construction together with a declaration establishing their rights to the land affected. In contrast to the Cree ‘garden’ analogy, Bourassa’s approach to the development of the James Bay region lacked care for the land and its people.

In James Bay: The Plot to Drown the Northern Woods, Boyce Richardson notes that there was no press conference and no background material available to the press, as is normal after such an announcement. His assessment is that this was a ‘nakedly political move’12 on Bourassa’s part. Bourassa had made an election pledge to create 100,000 jobs and he saw the James Bay project as one way of fulfilling this promise. Bourassa announced that the project would cost C$2 billion. Immediately following the announcement, Hydro-Québec, the provincial electricity corporation, started to undertake feasibility studies. Next, two engineers were commissioned to ascertain the best way of achieving the project and to find ways of improving the employment figures with preliminary projects building roads and infrastructure. They had less than four months in which to complete their reports. Within six weeks of delivery, Bourassa announced to his cabinet that the project would proceed.13 Richardson goes on to note a distinct lack of preparation for the project,14 with no adequate mapping of the region and no attempt to involve the indigenous peoples whose land it was. A sudden decision was made to start the project on the La Grande River rather than on the Nottaway, Rupert and Broadback Rivers as first intended. It emerged that Bourassa’s intention had been to exclude Hydro-Québec from the project altogether and hand it over to private companies, but in the event it transpired that financial backing for the project would only be forthcoming if it was led by Hydro-Québec.

Most importantly, Richardson claims, the developers had no knowledge of the ecology of man-made lakes.15 There were no preliminary environmental impact studies, merely the work of an inexperienced task force after the decision to proceed had already been taken. The task force admitted it knew very little about the area around the La Grande River. The potential effects on the weather arising from the creation of such huge expanses of water were not considered, nor was the possibility that the sheer weight of the impounded water might, as elsewhere, cause earthquakes. The environmental impact assessment finally produced referred only to the impact of the dams, not of the lakes.16 By March 1972, the predicted cost of the project had escalated from C$2 billion to C$6–10 billion. Richardson concludes: ‘It is bitterly ironical that so irrational a decision was made in so precipitate a way by the first Cabinet ever to have been highly educated in the ways of the modern, technological world.’17

On the question of job creation, Bourassa claimed that the initial stages of the project would provide 125,000 jobs. This proved to be an unattainable target, but a year later he nevertheless boasted that in all 55,000 jobs had been created of the initially promised 100,000. In fact, the figure was nearer 23,000.18 Of the 56,000 jobs promised for the La Grande project, only 12,000 materialised. No comparative cost analysis was made to ascertain whether the electricity to be supplied from James Bay was competitive with that from the nuclear projects in Ontario and elsewhere.

Four young Cree, led by Robert Kanatewat, instructed lawyer James O’Reilly to seek an injunction on behalf of the Cree and Inuit to bring a halt to the devastation of their land. As we shall see in the next chapter, the injunction was granted by Judge Albert Malouf but quickly suppressed by the Quebec Court of Appeal.