Chapter 3

Matimekush Lac John today

Health issues

The senior health worker in the Matimekush Lac John health centre told me of the cycle of alcoholism in the area. Alcoholics appear in the clinic with the shakes or hallucinations. The staff take care of them and dry them out. They go home and are lonely. Then they go out to see their friends and the drinking begins again. Yet, many elders here and elsewhere have spoken of the disappearance of alcohol dependency without any intervention when the Innu go back to the land.

The health worker also spoke of the poor diet of the people in Matimekush, mainly because the prices at the store are double what they are in Sept-Iles on account of the town’s poor transport links. As in many aboriginal communities, one of the main health problems is diabetes. When the Innu are not working:

Money is used for all sorts of marginal things – smoking, alcohol, gaming, drugs. If both the man and the woman smoke a packet of cigarettes a day each, that’s $500 a month. Two or three beers a day – $30–50 per month. All you hear on the radio is bingo – if they play two or three times a week that’s $500 a month. So, in this way $1,000 a month goes on marginal activities.

If you take the money for things like that, there is very little money left for eating fruit and vegetables or proteins, to make a choice for your children. They don’t make a life choice. They eat to survive. So, the food that is prepared at home is not so good and they don’t have time to prepare it so they think it is better to get it outside the home because they don’t have time to make a good meal at home. And so they have malnutrition – not undernourishment but malnutrition. There is obesity here.

The amount they smoke is another cause of diabetes – I would say that 80% of people smoke in this town. The secondary students at the school, they all smoke – 100% of the children. Some of the primary children also smoke. So, there is cancer and pulmonary disease, coronary disease – we are moving towards a generation who hypothetically will destroy their health. Because of their way of life. Because of the food, the smoking and there is also alcoholism. It’s a vicious circle.1

Nevertheless, he did say that nowadays levels of domestic violence were low and that there had only been two suicides in the community in the past five years.

As Colin Samson notes:

Illness to the Innu is not simply a biological malfunction. It follows from community life. For them, the severing of a permanent link with the land, which is the flip side to their confinement to villages, has had a huge bearing on their well-being. The collective loss of autonomy occasioned by these processes acts as a sort of benchmark against which they situate illness and healing.2

Writing in 2013, he observes the descent of the Innu into the world of fast food and plasma televisions, which the non-Innu residents in the two Labrador villages claim is a ‘necessary evil of advancement and a temporary dip in the upward movement of progress’.3 That ‘temporary dip’ has, so far, lasted more than 60 years and, despite the attempts at land deals and resource extraction, there are no signs of improvement in the everyday life of those Innu not tied up in the business deals. Samson further points out that: ‘Cable TV and satellite dishes arrived for the people of Davis Inlet about a decade before toilets and running water.’4

Education

Donat Jean-Pierre, Principal of Schefferville School, and the first Innu to hold that post, spoke of his dilemmas in funding.5 Unlike the Naskapi school in Kawawachikamach, where the North Eastern Quebec Agreement handed responsibility for the reserve’s education budget to the provincial government, the federal funding for his school is much lower. Moreover, with only 144 students, the per capita grant is inadequate for the improvements he would like to make to the curriculum. He cannot join forces with the Kawawachikamach school because that school is anglophone and the Schefferville school is francophone.

Two Canadian teachers, who clearly had respect for the students they taught, spoke of the lack of parental interest in education. I asked whether that might be because of the parents’ own education and they agreed that this was a factor.

Jil Silberstein speaks of the ‘vampirisation’6 of Innu youth by the introduction of western culture. On my earlier visit to Matimekush, one young mother had said:

It is hard to break that cycle [of resistance to education], because what I see is that the problems here are with cocaine and gambling. For example, the parents are playing bingo. They spend money on X-boxes and video games, bingo. Small kids have motor bikes. Just material things and I don’t think that’s what the children need. They give the things to the kid just to get rid of the kid and in the meantime the parents play card games and bingo.7

Colin Samson observes that, ‘Many people believe that television influences young people to believe that the values of North American society, including violent retribution, greed for money and material possessions, and the ideals of romantic love, are normal and preferable to the values that Innu people have for sharing, generosity, and an outdoor hunting lifestyle.’8

I was surprised and impressed by the level of response from a group of 14–16-year-olds who, in a history lesson at school, responded to my questions about hunting and living on the land with a lively interest. They enthusiastically noted down the URL of Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, where they could find the history of their own people. I am not used to such a response in English schools from students of the same age. When I saw them in the corridor after the session, they were equally responsive and polite when their teachers were not there.

Yet, even if the students stay the course and finish school, their certificates do not have the same recognition as those from a provincial school because they must retake a year if they fail it. An interviewee who runs the café where many of the children go for their lunch told me that she never asks the children their age or grade for fear of embarrassing them in front of their peers.9 Earlier that week I had seen a girl of 12 or 13 years of age in the café alongside her classmates who could not have been more than nine years old. Sometimes they retake the year three or four times. They are labelled as failures even before they step out into the adult world. Yet they are trying their best. I spoke to a young Metis man who was determined to finish his schooling and go on to an accountancy training. He was 23 and his hopes were high: ‘Unfortunately, my education has been very prolonged – I am twenty-three and I am still trying to pass my exams so that I can work in accountancy. I am very determined and I keep trying. I have had some periods when I have given up but I’ve gone back again and hope to finish in the next year or so.’10

The parents I spoke to were also concerned about the standard of education provided by federal schools. Two young women were thinking of moving away when their children reached secondary level:

I am afraid. If I stay here I am afraid for myself or my baby because the fact that there is always bingo affects the mindset of the people. It’s like being brainwashed and all they have in mind throughout the day is bingo. At some point it gets into the kids as well. That’s all they hear – life is bingo. If I stay here, I hope that my kids will have a good education but I don’t think that will happen. You are given a diploma or certificate. But once you leave this community it is not good enough. You always miss a couple of credits so you can’t get success – you always have to do more to catch up.11

This mother had made the effort to finish her own education in Sept-Iles and had travelled through Canada in order to learn English. She had also travelled in Peru. She returned to live in Matimekush because she wanted to learn the traditional skills.

A 31-year-old mother told me how, when she was at school, there were programmes on how to sew in the Innu way and how to clean caribou. She would welcome a return of these programmes.12

The social worker, health worker, school principal, teachers and parents all remarked on the way they felt the young people of Matimekush Lac John were let down by the governments’ aboriginal policies. There is very little teaching at the school on Innu culture and tradition – perhaps two short courses each lasting a week. However, there were classes in Innu-Aimun to keep the language alive. The children speak Innu-Aimun at home and are taught in French at school, unlike their cousins on the North Shore of the St Lawrence who have almost lost their language. This gives the North Shore Innu an advantage in the job market because their French is much stronger and this impacts on education and interviews for work.13

An Innu teacher to whom I spoke on a previous visit, who has since left the school, told me she felt the young people had no heroes, no role models. She was trained in theatre studies and had a teaching qualification. She wanted to introduce the students to the characters from their Innu history and legends through drama education. She had come to Matimekush because she had spent happy summers with her grandparents there and she wanted to give something back but, before I returned, she had gone back to Quebec City for family reasons.14

The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples described education as follows: ‘Education is the transmission of cultural DNA from one generation to the next. It shapes the language and pathways of thinking, the contours of the character and values, the social skills and creative potential of the individual. It determines the productive skills and creative potential of a people.’15

This is an area in which the elders and the Band Council in Matimekush could and should intervene, to create an environment in which success in the classroom in both Canadian and indigenous skills is valued and recognised. The Canadian provincial and federal governments cannot afford to continue to starve indigenous communities of good education when the Canadian demographic of a rapidly ageing population urgently needs the human resources which a well-educated indigenous youth could provide. Perhaps the standard of education in Matimekush will improve with the influx of non-indigenous families to take jobs in the mines. Then education will no longer be segregated.

Employment

For the years between 1982 and 2010, the main sources of employment within Matimekush Lac John were controlled by the Band Council. As well as an office administration, they have a team of workers who maintain the housing stock and carry out decoration and repairs. There are jobs at the school and the health centre, and at the airport and the Northern Stores, but there are not nearly enough jobs to go round. The Innu Band Council manager who was responsible in 2009 for employment and job creation schemes explained the situation:

I said I wanted to help the community and I started to work for the Band Council. I work to implement projects. I meet people from the community who are in difficulties. They come to my office and talk about their life and maybe I help some people. They want a job and I have to say, ‘I have no jobs’. I have no money to help create jobs and after the person has explained their problem, I change my role and become a psychologist to help the person go home stronger. Another person with the same problem says to me, ‘I have no food.’ I say, ‘I am sorry, I have no money or job [for you]. Maybe in two months when the Band Council gets money.’ I have seen 400 people like this. I think I started to take drugs to freeze my emotions when people couldn’t get jobs. I get very tired. I don’t think I shall be working here long because I have a dream to set up a company, to work for myself. They all have problems. They tell me their problems. They bring their problems here.16

The projects are job creation schemes providing temporary work in construction and maintenance for a few weeks each year. If administered successfully so that the work is shared out, the projects enable participants to claim benefits for the rest of the year. Someone who previously held this administrative position noted that, even though the participants in the projects had more money in their pockets while working, they had less need to drink while they had an occupation.17

Two Innu women to whom I spoke had tried to qualify as professionals in order to return to work with the Innu, one as a librarian and the other as a nurse.18 Both had passed their respective examinations comfortably but, when it came to the work experience part of their course, were marked down and have so far not received the qualifications to which they are patently entitled. The nurse told me that she failed her practical assessment because she spoke to her Innu patients in Innu-Aimun and the other medical staff could not understand what she was saying. The nurse is about to make her third attempt to qualify, this time in Quebec City where she hopes that, in a more cosmopolitan environment, she will not meet with the racial prejudice she has encountered so far.

The opening of the new mines in 2010 has provided 100 new jobs. When I asked the school students what they wanted to do when leaving school, they said they hoped for jobs at the mine. Now that the mines are open, some are quitting school to take menial jobs. Others who complete their secondary education are offered training for the skilled jobs. No one on drugs can be offered employment at the mine because of the dangers of operating machinery. This has a significant effect on the numbers who are eligible to take the few jobs available.

The couple with whom I stayed in 2011 both took up jobs with the newly opened mines in Schefferville, one as an office worker and the other as a machine operator. Both expressed their ambivalence at taking wages from an organisation which would destroy the land they revered and loved.

In August 2016, Tata Steel announced a new scheme for its Schefferville mine under which it would employ more Innu and give them better training for more senior jobs. This project was endorsed by the federal minister responsible for aboriginal affairs.

The future lies with young Innu

There were three things upon which everyone I spoke to agreed: that they had a prior and superior title to their traditional land, that things could not go on like this within the community for much longer, and that the key to the future lay with the community’s young people.

If the young people, say those under 40 years of age, are to take this community forward, they must not be denied their Innu identity. This was the opinion of everyone I spoke to, young or old. They point out that the Innu values and principles have been swept away with the attempts at assimilation and nothing has been put in their place – so the children and young people are left to their own devices, watching TV all day or playing on X-box, and the only values they have now are the values of consumerism. Yet, having been told that the young were losing their culture, when I asked the students at the school whether they all had seen a caribou, they looked at me as though I was mad – of course they had, and eaten caribou too, they said enthusiastically. ‘Would you like to learn the skills of the old hunters?’ I asked. Yes, they said. The idea of teaching the school children and their parents the traditional ways, and by doing so introducing the values of caring for the land, caring for each other and sharing, and of being proud of their Innu heritage, seemed to both elders and young people to be the way forward.

One young woman told me of her longing to learn the traditional skills. She had been a voluntary youth worker in the community and she could see the need for the young people to be taught the values handed down to her by her mother and grandparents:

I saw my mother as a hard-working woman, never giving up, and I saw that and from that experience I learned and it gave me some values. I was very closely connected to my grandparents; they knew a lot about the traditional way of life. I had a lot of connections [to the land] through meeting them, talking to them, visiting them. I recall that I was frustrated by the fact that my younger brother was the one who was privileged in terms of the teaching of the traditional way of life. Of course, I knew the legends, stories, the language and our history but not all the skills needed for an Innu woman to sustain and support her traditional way of life. My younger brother was always the one sent to live off the land with the grandparents. I was sent to school. I was very upset about this situation because I lacked the skills. I know now the reasons why my younger brother was chosen to learn those skills – because now he can support us, he can give us food and share all the game that he hunts – provide us with food.19

A young man whose family was strong in its hunting tradition told me:

The land is, it is like life. In the land, you have your food, person, harmony and it is the Innu identity. You can’t imagine destroying the land. The land is all. For a long time, we have respected the land. I remember going on my land. I am Innu. If you go onto the land you become another person. When I come back to my land, I am not the same person, I am alone and I feel a different person. I feel free and I think there is no danger. On the land, you have good energy, nobody stresses you, there is harmony. Our brothers in Labrador, they will make treaties in Labrador over my father’s land for another dam. For water to flood the land. If I don’t hunt, I will lose my land. It’s my grandfather’s land and it’s flooded and we can do nothing about it. Some morning I will wake up and I will lose my identity because there will be no land for my children. It’s not good. It is very like I have a duty.20

The Band Council

In nearly all the interviews, comparisons were made between conditions in Kawawachikamach, the Naskapi village, and in Matimekush. Whereas, on the closure of the Schefferville mine in 1982, the Iron Ore Company bulldozed the swimming pool and sports facilities in Matimekush, by contrast the Naskapi, with the lump sum received on the signing of the North Eastern Quebec Agreement in 1979, were put in charge of their own budget. The town has excellent modern facilities including an Olympic-sized swimming pool. It also has a development corporation which uses the lump sum for new enterprises and which bids for government contracts denied to the Innu in Matimekush unless and until they sign away their rights.

By contrast, the Band Council in Matimekush has no control over its budget, which until recently ran at a considerable deficit. The Band Council has few powers as the Matimekush Innu remain wards of the Crown and their affairs are controlled by the Department of Indigenous Affairs. As the health worker explained to me:

The Band Council is there just for implementing white policy. They have no power and I have the impression that no one can change anything. Families think the Band Council should provide food and clothing for them, that they [the Band Council] should pay. They don’t control their budget. All the money comes from outside and the Band Council can’t implement an aboriginal programme. The power lies with the Director General [of Aboriginal Affairs] who oversees all the Band Councils. We need another system of management before anything will improve.21

As things stand, unless and until there is an agreement in place extinguishing Innu ancient rights to the land, the Innu will never have autonomy; and the impression of those who manage the community’s essential services is that the federal government, which has a fiduciary duty to all its aboriginal peoples, never gives enough funding to get to the root of the problems they face.

Both the health centre and the school have excellent new buildings but they have no funding for programmes to strike at the heart of the reserve’s problems of drug and alcohol abuse, smoking, poor diet and childcare due to poverty and to the legacy from family members who were taken away to Indian Residential Schools. One interviewee also mentioned lack of care for elders, something which would have been unthinkable even 20 years ago.22 Much of the housing is in a depressing state of dilapidation and very little has been done to the roads since the mine closed in 1982. The dusty open spaces are littered with broken glass.

So far as housing is concerned, the Band Council has done its best on its very limited (and often negative) budget, and it took on an expensive task when it improved the houses in Schefferville to rehouse those who had been living on the old Matimekush reserve in homes of an unacceptable standard. But as a former chief explained:

When I was chief, I said to Indian Affairs ‘Just give us the $2 million extra necessary for the next 15 years and we will do a pretty good job.’ Through the last 50 years, we were told what to do, what was good for us, as if we were incapable of managing our own affairs. With that extra $2 million we could repair and give some form of redress to our society and we could probably do something good. But of course, we didn’t get that. And even the chiefs … when I met the chiefs they were always talking about the future and all the future was aimed at educating the young people. But how can you educate them with their loss of culture? They can’t get a decent education when they don’t know who they are.23

He was asking for capital funding to attempt a long-term solution to the town’s social problems, but capital funding seems only to be available to the communities which sign away their rights. He also complained of the stifling bureaucracy and the constant visits of auditors. Calvin Helin points out that24 ‘the search for a real solution must begin outside the current dependency mindset’, in the hands of the indigenous peoples acting for themselves, independently of the federal government. This is precisely what the former chief was seeking to achieve. The settlements with the mining companies, which at present do not compromise the land rights of the Innu, have provided a small fund. To date, the Innu have been required to eliminate the deficit in the Band Council’s budget and, such was the trauma of the bulldozing of the town’s facilities with the closure of the mine, they initially gave priority to the building of a sports facility and swimming pool for the reserve to match that in Kawawachikamach, rather than on new enterprises to boost the economic independence of the reserve. However, many of the people I spoke to recognised the need for better sports facilities: they saw that the principal reason for drinking and gambling was that there was nothing else to do. The provision of sports facilities, especially indoor ones when winter is nine months long, lies at the heart of any preventative programme, whether for health, addiction, diet or dysfunctional families. Eventually, the mining companies contributed to this provision.

There is mistrust of the way in which the Band Council handles its finances within the community too. Several people gave examples of nepotism when it came to allocating jobs and houses, for example. People spoke of the system of job allocation, which supports family members and keeps bright young minds from the key jobs in the community, stifling the innovation on which the reserve depends for its renewal.25 There was also talk of the expensive trips taken by Band Council members to negotiations. These were accusations which dismayed the two former chiefs I spoke to and they were at pains to explain that they felt caught between the demands of their constituents and the pressures from the governments.26

The reasons for this mistrust of the Band Council are well founded. The system of local government through chiefs and Band Councils is a federal government construct, introduced to replace the Indian Agents. Innu self-governance depended traditionally on a leader being selected only for the task in hand – typically the annual journey north or a major hunting expedition. Decision-making was consensual within the group of families travelling together and no one put themselves forward to lead the others. The idea of elections of chiefs and councillors is no part of Innu culture, particularly as these officials take precedence over the elders.27 At the same time, the Band Council has no proper power of its own to make the decisions which the community requires of it – everything is controlled by the Department of Indigenous Affairs until the Innu buy their freedom by selling their land. The Band Councils are an arm of the state. As Colin Samson observes: ‘the band councils … are now integral to the political nexus of the state and find themselves reacting to Canadian policies that assume sovereignty over their lands and dictate the terms upon which they are able to respond.’28

Renée Dupuis29 claims that the replacement of traditional governance had a destabilising effect on indigenous communities, and Pamela Palmater goes further:

One of the most devastating impacts to our nations has been the impact on our traditional governance structures. Successive ministers of Indian Affairs, under the authority of the Indian Act, imposed multiple election-based systems in many communities within our larger nations – not only dividing us geographically but politically as well. Our large powerful nations were divided into smaller communities, often relocated at great distances from one another and on less valuable land. Our people were exchanged for government-controlled bureaucracies that were forced to account only to the Minister of Indian Affairs.30

Clans

Père Gérard, then priest in charge at Schefferville, told Jil Silberstein of his surprise on arriving in Matimekush at the strength and aggression of each clan to towards the others, suggesting that this started with the dispute over the move from Lac John.31 One sociological study32 concludes that:

the main problem is that lack of productive employment has undermined traditional role and status relationships, especially for male members, most of whom have lost their important role as food providers for their family or kin group. They are denied an opportunity to validate their self-worth by contributing to the survival and well-being of their family and community through work. The idleness of unemployment has devastated morale and undermined Indian cultures. This in turn has bred extraordinary levels of social pathologies.

José Mailhot traces the origins of the powerful McKenzie family in her genealogical work on Sheshatshiu, Labrador.33 She identifies four separate groups of Innu who settled in Sheshatshiu, the first three of which are the Uashaunnuat (people from Sept-Iles), Mashkuanunnuat (people from Musquaro to the south of Sheshatshiu) and Mushuaunnuat (the people of the tundra, also later known as the Naskapi). There was a further sub-group of the Uashaunnuat, the McKenzie. A hierarchy developed among these groups with the McKenzie at the top and the Mushuaunnuat at the bottom.34 She was told of bullying of Mushuaunnuat by the children of the McKenzie clan because their speech was difficult to understand.35 Maillot attributes the premier ranking of the McKenzie firstly to the fact that they were the descendants of the Metis Alexandre McKenzie and secondly to the benefits they enjoyed from the patronage from Père Arnaud, one of the influential Jesuit priests who worked with the Innu in Sept-Iles.36 Alexandre and Gaston McKenzie of Matimekush Lac John are the descendants of the explorer Alexander Mackenzie.

By contrast the Mushuau Innu (Naskapi), living away from contact with settlers, hunting caribou instead of trapping for the fur trade, were on the lowest rung of the social structure in Sheshatshiu. They were dark-skinned woodsmen. Relations between the two divisions at the top and bottom of this structure were already troubled even before the Naskapi were forcibly settled into the Lac John Innu community in the 1950s.

José Mailhot comments that the McKenzies and the other Sept-Iles Innu settled in Sheshatshiu enjoyed a higher status, thanks to their more frequent contact with Europeans, and that there was a ‘flagrant’ inequality between the two groups in the 1970s.37 This relationship seems to have been similar in Lac John – but the situation was soon to be reversed on the signing of the North Eastern Quebec Agreement by the Naskapi.

In 2009, the family-based factions in Matimekush Lac John were still apparent, surfacing again over tensions arising as Chief Réal McKenzie closed negotiations over the lost James Bay Agreement lands and opened negotiations for a share of the profits and jobs with Labrador Iron Mines. From the interviews given to me in 2009, it is apparent that there are five identifiable factions in Matimekush, three of them among the descendants of the five McKenzie brothers who effectively ruled the reserve in the early days. Calvin Helin calls this ‘lateral violence’: unable to strike at those who control their lives, people trapped in the depths of society internalise their frustration and lash out at their peers.38 The reserve had turned on itself in what Calvin Helin describes as ‘grieving mode’,39 locked in its dysfunction, unable to identify the pragmatic steps which would give its residents the ability to reconstruct their lives. There is some evidence that the Innu who live in Matimekush Lac John are now emerging from this dysfunction, in the lower domestic violence and suicide rates. The choice of a sports hall and swimming pool as the first purchases with funding which came to the reserve is an example of this, since the choice reflects the rivalry between the Matimekush Lac John Innu and the Naskapi which has existed since the signing of the North Eastern Quebec Agreement in 1979.40 The then chief negotiator for the Strategic Alliance (himself a controversial member of one of the Matimekush clans) observed that there was much in the way of infrastructure which could have been demanded instead of or as well as a cash settlement. For example, with the construction vehicles on site, the chief could have asked the mining companies to build them tracks through the country to give them better access to their hunting cabins. The reserve which this negotiator represented had, in a recent negotiation with Hydro-Québec, been offered C$300,000 in infrastructure, including much-needed housing.41 Significantly, that community voted against the settlement; many of them saying that, in view of past dealings, they would never enter into a deal with the predatory hydro company.42

Gerald M. Sider sees the emergence of an elite within Innu society which tends to become the ally of the dominant group when its members are offered the rewards which resource development brings in its wake.43 There also seems to be an emerging career path for those who negotiate on behalf of their individual Band Councils and are then invited to oversee negotiations for another, larger group.

Resilience

Speaking to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in Montreal in 1993, Innu Chief Jean-Charles Pietacho of Uashat summed up the predicament of the Innu:

Collective despair, or collective lack of hope, will lead us to collective suicide. This type of suicide can take many forms, foreshadowed by many possible signs: identity crisis, loss of pride, every kind of dependence, denial of our customs and traditions, degradation of our environment, weakening of our language, abandonment of our struggle for our aboriginal rights, our autonomy and our culture, uncaring acceptance of violence, passive acknowledgement of lack of work and unemployment, corruption of our morals, tolerance of drugs and idleness, parental surrendering of responsibilities, lack of respect for elders, envy of those who try to keep their heads up and who might succeed, and so on.44

The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples points to the negative effects of maintaining the indigenous status quo: the human cost of the inability of indigenous people to obtain jobs with reasonable incomes, and the burden on the taxpayer to provide the remedial services such as they are45 to help indigenous people cope with their history of domination and discrimination. Calvin Helin points out that, with its ageing population, Canada cannot afford to exclude its indigenous young people from the workforce at a time when it is having to bring in workers from China, and when the indigenous population of working age is increasing three to five times as fast as the mainstream population in the same age group.46

One elder thought that Innu tradition could help the children with their schooling too:

We should have more Innu-Aitun presented in the school. For example, I went to a school in Saskatchewan and when the young people want to get out of school they have a choice either to drop out or to go to 12 elders of their community at the school, so that’s an option that they have – they can get out of school or go to see the elders; and they would spend time with the elders or discuss with the elders and finally end up going back into the school system. That’s a way of doing things. I believe that Indian culture should be more present in school.47

This approach has the dual advantage of giving aboriginal value to the teachings of the school, and of letting the students know that there is a disciplinary procedure for truancy which operates independently of the school. At least in this way children begin to get the message that school is important. This is also a measure that need not cost anything, although there are stories of elders asking to be paid for their knowledge – something which makes sense in the world they live in today, but something that would never happen in their traditional way of doing things, which imposes a duty to impart knowledge.48

One Innu initiative is seeking to put new generations in touch with traditional Innu values. Tshakapesh, the giant child of Innu legend, and of the legends of many other indigenous nations stretching as far as Montana and Siberia, is walking the land again. Anne-Marie André’s brother, Jean St Onge, has constructed a giant puppet with which she introduces the legends to new generations.49 The stories of Tshakapesh are the creation stories of the Innu and other peoples. Anne-Marie André believes they tell of Cro-Magnon times and date back to the Ice Age.50 They are stories to instruct listeners in their origins and culture.51 Denis Clément has noted the accuracy of the anatomical information contained in the stories.52

The giant puppet has been taken to schools in aboriginal communities and also to Montreal. In Montreal, Tshakapesh was used in a suicide prevention programme for children. The children are first told of a little boy who went to Mushuau Nipi (a traditional meeting place of aboriginal peoples on the George River). He had suicidal thoughts and a spirit came to him. The spirit was his grandfather. He told the grandfather about his troubles and he felt calmer. Then the children are invited to tell of their own suicidal thoughts and in return they are given the stories of Tshakapesh.

One health worker spoke of the effects of the Truth & Reconciliation Process on Residential Schools, in which former students of the residential schools are called on to give testimony on their treatment at the hands of the staff. For the first time, as adults, Innu men in their forties discovered that their friends and neighbours had suffered the same abuse. They had lived together in a small community (not Matimekush Lac John) for years and had never known that the others had also been victims.53 The health worker arranged a series of meetings with them and then a camp by the Moisie River to begin to reconnect them with each other and with their lost culture. She has taken groups of recovering alcoholics and drug addicts up the trails of the Moisie taken by their ancestors for hundreds of years (and once by Henry Youle Hind).54 She makes them undertake the portages and carry the heavy bundles just as their ancestors did. In this way, they begin to understand their heritage and to recover their identity.55

Identity seems to be the key to so many of the problems which beset Matimekush Lac John, and Innu identity is rooted in the land. There is a need for everyone to maintain contact with the land if they are to recover their sense of self. None of the people I spoke to were urging a return to the life of even 70 years ago – they have welcomed the technology which has made life easier and safer for them. Nor do they wish to turn non-Innu off their land; but they do ask for peaceful enjoyment of their lands for themselves, their families and their guests without harassment from game wardens and police.

Innu beliefs

When I talked to those who had lived on the land in earlier times, not only elders but their children and grandchildren, many of them broke down in tears over the loss of the freedom to move on their own land. I could hear the deep sadness in the voices of others. Often Innu religious belief was dismissed by missionaries as animistic.56 Yet Innu beliefs are not based on the spirits of the animals, rocks, rivers and lakes – they are based on the land itself, which is held in trust for future generations. Respect for the animals and other aspects of the land is only one part of a much wider concept. The deep sense of loss experienced by these recent generations stems from the fact that they have been forced to break the trust vested in them by letting go of the land.

Rémi Savard57 believes that the European antipathy to aboriginal hunting is derived from the fact that at the time of first contact, in Europe, particlularly in England, hunting was an occupation reserved for the aristocracy, and anyone else who took animals from the land was severely punished. Savard’s work is principally concerned with analysis of the Innu myths and legends, which the missionaries cited as examples of heathen practices, or dismissed as wicked, blasphemous nonsense. Savard calls on non-indigenous people to examine the place of their own myths in their own culture before denigrating the Innu for theirs, and refers in particular to the resurgence of German identity when the brothers Grimm started to collect and examine their fairy tales. However, this comparison only leads to further confusion between oral history based in truth, and myths and fairy tales which are symbolic.

Through the work of Père Babel and Père Arnaud, the elders have adopted the Catholic faith as part of their identity and have mingled it with their traditional beliefs58 but, although the parishioners conduct their own services, there is no longer either a priest or nuns working in the Matimekush Lac John community. I asked one 78-year-old what happened when the community needed the priest: ‘The only way is when he comes for a few days, but there should be one here permanently. It’s hard when someone dies. What happens to a child who is not baptised? Two people died and there was no priest to help.’59

For a community beset by so much sadness and so many problems, many of them caused by the missionaries and the nuns who ran the residential schools, it is extraordinary that the church can only send a priest for a few days every few months. One person I spoke to saw the lack of a priest to guide the young as another factor in their lack of discipline, saying that the priest’s was another adult voice which could encourage children and their parents to improve school attendance and behaviour outside school. An active church is also a rich source of activity in a community.60

One of the strong influences in the community is adherence to Indian Spirituality. This is a movement which has come to Canada from the United States. Indian Spirituality has encouraged aboriginal people of many nations to return to ancestral practices – although not necessarily the practices of their own ancestors – and to return to the values of their culture. This has enabled many to turn away from addiction and rediscover a form of their Innu identity. They have returned to the sweat lodge and use prayerful ceremonies. At the beginning of one interview, sage and tobacco were burned and a prayer was offered for the success of the work we were doing together. At the end of another I was given an eagle feather which generated the tingling feeling of the passing of chi. It sits on my desk as I write.

One interviewee told me that those who came from the US to propagate the new spirituality were particularly interested in the Innu because their hunting tradition remained so strong and there was much to be learned from it.61 One adherent of Indian Spirituality summed up religious practice in Matimekush Lac John, Christian and traditional:

I am afraid that somehow the government or the Crown has managed to make us like white people. But we will go back to our traditions and our spirituality and in this way try to regain some sense of who we are and some force. They almost succeeded in making sure that we would not go back to our traditional spirituality but somehow we managed to hang on to our connection to the land, our sacred pipe ceremony, sweat lodge and so on because [speaking of Catholicism] the way people pray here today, they pray in [Innu-Aimun] but it is just a translation of another person’s spirituality. It is not our traditional teachings so we managed just about to lose the spirituality but we have been able to salvage it and other elements of our culture.62

Due to the resilience of the community, there is ample evidence that the Innu culture, language and tradition are alive; but at present they are not flourishing.

There is a great deal which the community must do for themselves to repair the damage of the last 70 years, and there are influential figures in the community – young and old – who are ready to take on that challenge. If the Innu in Matimekush were free of the reins of the Department of Indigenous Affairs and were given the capital funding necessary to enable them to give their young people a future, and if aboriginal education were put on the same footing as non-aboriginal education, the will to change is there, ready to move the community to a brighter future. However, without a change of outlook on the part of the federal and provincial governments, these remain faint hopes and all Canada suffers because the courage, tenacity and intelligence of indigenous communities like Matimekush Lac John are going to waste. Moreover, in a matter of decades, land which has been protected by their good stewardship for countless generations is being destroyed. The other big lesson to be learned from the contact between our peoples is that progress is not the only principle on which a balanced life should be based. In the next chapter, we will attempt to unlock the depth of the suffering inflicted on this resilient people and their comrades across Canada.