Chapter 1

Innu/Canadian relations in their social context

Although one travels on a train named for the wind, Tshiuetin in Innu-Aimun, the journey north on the Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway is a slow one. Passengers arrive very early in the morning at the railway station in Sept-Iles with luggage unimaginable for a more southerly North American train journey – canoes, fridges, cartons of provisions, insulated containers, blankets and sleeping bags for the long journey – much like the old expeditions the Innu used to make to their northern lands with heavy loads and long portages. Now the train whisks them to their destination 350 miles away in a mere 12 hours. For most Innu, the train is the only connection between the northern and southern communities. There are no roads and air travel is prohibitively expensive.

When I travelled on the train between 2008 and 2011, it was very much a family train, linking the Innu who had moved north to their villages around Schefferville with their cousins who continued to live along the North Shore of the St Lawrence. It is a friendly train. Children moved along the carriages with confidence, greeting friends, relatives and strangers alike. My friend Danielle Descent prepared me a picnic for my journey – bannock and partridge. When I opened my lunch, which had been packed in the Innu way into a clean white cloth bag, the contents drew appreciative murmurs and I made new friends over morsels of partridge and bannock, a friendship sealed when they saw I was reading An Antane Kapesh’s account of their grandparents’ generation and how they settled in Matimekush and Lac John.1 These encounters served me well when I began my series of interviews to try to convey to future generations of Innu how present-day Innu had fought to retain their land and to protect it from the incursions of the governments and corporations who were destroying it for the sake of a few years’ resource extraction.

This train is a symbol of the lived experience of the Innu of Matimekush Lac John. It was built to enable iron ore from the Iron Ore Company mines to be transported from Schefferville to the port at Sept-Iles. It was an instrument of the devastation of their lands and of their lives as nomadic subsistence hunters.

The purpose of my work in Matimekush Lac John was to try to reach a clearer understanding of the consequences of denying the rights of indigenous peoples who have walked the land for millennia. I have tried to be as true as possible to the accounts I was given in the Band Council offices and around the kitchen tables of homes in the two villages. I intend that the information given in these chapters should be given the same weight as a proof of evidence.

‘Suffering’ is a term which has entered the academic debate on land claims and indigenous rights.2 However, the term is rarely used at the negotiating table, certainly not by government and company negotiators. These chapters are an attempt to bring home to those sitting round the land settlement negotiation tables the true cost of what they demand of the Innu and other indigenous peoples – in exchange for the sale of their land at a gross undervalue together with a very few employment opportunities for their children.

The Innu

The Innu are an indigenous people related to the Cree and speaking an Algonquin language, Innu-Aimun. For the Innu, Quebec and Labrador are alien concepts. The land of the Ungava Peninsula is Nitassinan – ‘the peoples’ land’ – the homeland shared by all indigenous peoples of the area, but with sovereignty over certain areas of territory acknowledged to be held by individual groups such as the Innu. This land is described in Innu-Aimun as nutshimit – land which encompasses a whole way of life – religion, nourishment, moral values – in which people live in harmony with their surroundings, and are not regarded as a superior species but have a responsibility to maintain the balance of nature.

The Innu identify themselves as hunter gatherers who, until the middle of the 20th century, lived in the interior and only journeyed to the coast in the two summer months when the flies drove both humans and caribou away. The Innu who have contributed their stories for this text made the annual 750-mile round trip on foot, by canoe and with difficult portages, returning to Uashat and Maliotenam on the North Shore in the two summer months. They found everything they needed for survival through hunting, fishing and gathering, although conditions could be very hard in times when the animals did not come.

Until 1975, Nitassinan had never been ceded or conquered and the Innu and other peoples who shared the peninsula were able to retain much of their traditional way of life, albeit adapted in order to provide high-quality skins for the fur trade. In any event, apart from land along the North Shore of the Gulf of St Lawrence, initially their territory was inhospitable to the non-indigenous peoples coming from Europe.

The Innu claim to the land is that they walked the land, etching deep trails into the rocks with their footsteps, travelling the whole of the Quebec-Labrador Peninsula, meeting up by the coast in the two summer months. Families travelled 750 miles a year on a round trip from Uashat to the Caniapiscau region over the ten months of hunting. One man talked of being taken by his father from Matimekush to Sheshatshiu on the Labrador coast without the aid of a map. His father knew the Innu name of every lake on a Canadian map of the Quebec-Labrador Peninsula.3 Out with his father in the bush many years ago, another elder discovered a birch bark canoe from generations ago.4 Some of the hunting camps used by today’s Innu are situated in the clearings made by their ancestors. The stone hearths are preserved as archaeological sites and as memorials to hunters long gone.  

The Innu way of life was threatened, however, with the discovery of iron ore in Nitassinan which was exploited after World War II. When the Iron Ore Company opened its mine in Schefferville, Innu from Uashat and Maliotenam were persuaded to come north to settle on the new reserves at Matimekush Lac John. They were attracted by this move not only because of the offer of jobs and housing but also because the new reserve was on their traditional hunting grounds and this would save them much of their annual travel. A railway was built along their ancient trail to the north. However, when they got to Schefferville, there was little or no housing for the Innu, there were not enough jobs and the open-cast mine workings destroyed the landscape and drove the caribou away.

All the hunters speak of a feeling of peace and safety out on the land. Now the hills nearest to Matimekush have become a place of danger. The land will never recover from the top-slicing of the earth for the open-cast mines. Recently, the reserve has been the subject of a film, Une Tente Sur Mars,5 which shows the effect of the mining operation on the community and what it means to have the land for which the Innu are responsible ravaged in the Canadian rush to exploit its resources. Thirty years after it opened, the mine closed in 1982 and the Matimekush Lac John Innu were abandoned on their spoiled land. The Iron Ore Company was not even required to make the land safe when it left. Now new mines have opened, but the Matimekush Lac John Innu will be the last in the queue to benefit. The 11 Innu communities on either side of the Quebec–Labrador border, who have stood together to fight encroachment on Innu land wherever it occurs, are divided. The Innu who live in Labrador are on the brink of signing the New Dawn Final Agreement, but the governments and their commercial partners have already constructed the dam they need to exploit the waters of the Lower Churchill Falls without the Final Agreement in place. Further, new iron ore mines have opened on the Labrador side of the border at Schefferville.

The move to Schefferville

After World War II, with the preparations for the opening of the Schefferville mine, the Quebec government and the Iron Ore Company encouraged the Innu to move from their summer home on the coastal reserves of Maliotenam and Uashat and to settle permanently on a new reserve on the outskirts of Schefferville. First, labour was needed for the building of the railway and a hydroelectric dam on the Menehek Lake, together with a camp for the prospectors. An elder explained: ‘With all the construction going on in Schefferville, hunters started to stay here and to become more and more sedentary, abandoning the nomadic way of life in the sense that nobody was buying fur from the trading posts so people somehow had to rely on some form of revenue from working at the mine. They abandoned the traditional way of life.’6

An Antane Kapesh, one of the Innu who came to Matimekush on the promise of better access to land and a more secure future, in her book Je Suis Une Maudite Sauvagesse speaks of the hardships which the Innu faced when they first settled in Schefferville, for example having to live in tents despite the promise of new modern housing. She recounts how, when no permanent housing was provided after several months, the Innu bought up the temporary buildings, now abandoned by the Iron Ore Company, for greatly inflated prices.7 When her family could afford to buy a building, all they could get was the toilet block, which was nevertheless sold to them at an exorbitant price.

Once the Innu settled into the housing, which they had had to provide for themselves, the mine officials decided that they should be moved away from the town to Lac John because, they claimed, the Innu were polluting the water supplies. In fact, the Innu were moved on to Lac John because the land they occupied was designated for the new airport.8

In 1956, the federal government removed a northerly Mushuau Innu group (known by Europeans as Naskapi9), from Fort Chimo in the far north of the Quebec-Labrador Peninsula, to settle in Lac John with the Innu. There was no consultation with either the Naskapi or the existing community.10 Like the Innu, the Naskapi came with nothing and, at this time, they were altogether poorer than the Innu. Jules d’Astous, regional supervisor of Indian Agencies in Quebec, wrote at the time that the group transferred to Schefferville were ‘sick, totally destitute and now living almost solely on relief’.11 There was considerable resentment between the two indigenous groups, particularly as the government provided housing for the newcomers, whereas it had failed to do so for those already there despite its initial promise.12 A former non-Innu schoolmaster who taught at Schefferville School in the 1980s suggested that the Naskapi were moved south following an exchange at the United Nations when Canada challenged human rights practices in the Soviet Union and the Russians replied that the Canadians housed their northern peoples in dustbins (probably unused containers from the local air base near Fort Chimo).13

There came a time when it was no longer cost-effective to provide services to the community at Lac John and pressure was put on the people who lived there to move nearer to Schefferville. The authorities met with considerable resistance from the Innu families, who were now settled in Lac John, and the community was divided. While some families moved into new accommodation on the new Matimekush reserve on the other side of Lake Pearce from Schefferville, others chose to stay. At this time, the affairs of the reserve were overseen by an Indian Agent whose power over the community was seen as malevolent.14 According to one interviewee, the Indian Agent was deeply insulting to her because of her leadership of the group who wished to stay in Lac John. She spoke of the pressure that was put on the families who wished to stay:

They even proposed to me that the government would build me a big fancy house and furnish it just to bribe us because we were at the head of the committee against relocation. They thought we would convince other families that it was acceptable now to move. They thought probably that by bribing the head of the movement that somehow the group would follow. But they didn’t understand that it was the group that gave us the strength.15

Speaking to Jil Silberstein, the same interviewee described what was left of the Lac John community as a ghost town, with only six families remaining.16

Before World War II, the Innu were able to maintain their seasonal round and their traditional ways of living off the land with relatively little interference. José Mailhot describes how the land of the Ungava Peninsula was shared by all Innu. Hunting parties were usually made up of related families travelling together. She describes how they had access to lands occupied by the wider family, which included in-laws.17

In 2009, a 45-year-old hunter told me about that life, a life which he still pursues today:

When you live off the land you live according to the rhythm of the seasons and the rhythm of the animals. There are certain seasons of the year when it is good to live off the land. I try as much as possible to share whenever I have a good kill. I try to share as well with other people the knowledge that I have.

When you live off the land you see your day, you see your life. Your life is filled with very positive things. You work a lot. When you burn the fat [to sear the skin of the geese before cooking], all the bad things that you had when you were on the reserve are burnt in that process and you do a lot of physical activities. You start your day when the sun rises and you see your day filled with activities, hard work; you are a free man. You want to go on the lake and see a good place where you can lay a net or gather some fish – you can do it. You are filled with happiness because your whole body exudes happiness when you live on the land.

I was among elders when I learned those skills and there was not a single time when I was bored. There is a lot of peace and pleasure and happiness when I think of that life.18

This man is one of the few today who spend most of their time hunting. The traditional way of life and culture of the Innu – Innu-Aitun – is significantly diminished, the knowledge of living the seasonal round out on the land resting in the hands of a few elders, now well advanced in years. However, fortunately there are plenty of young people eager for a chance to learn these skills.

The Innu agreed to be settled in Schefferville because they were promised that they would have greater access to their hunting land as well as modern living conditions and a proper education for their children. When they got there, there was no housing, and no sooner were they settled in one place than they were moved on. Having been promised easier access, they were systematically driven off their land. Further, as discussed below, even today the education on a reserve where its inhabitants are wards of the Crown is inferior and a hindrance to the development of young Innu.

Life settled near a town exposed the Innu to alcohol and drugs for the first time. Alcohol formed no part of their life in the country. An Antane Kapesh speaks of the devastation caused by drink, bringing about the ruin of many young Innu.19 She also tells of the discrimination and brutality of the police in dealing with the resulting problems.

In his 1983 film Mémoire Battante,20 Arthur Lamothe follows the family of Matthieu André out onto the land and records the caribou hunt. When no caribou appear, the old man puts the scapular bone of a caribou onto the fire and reads the whereabouts of the caribou from the marks which appear on the bone, a practice recorded by Frank Speck as scapulamancy. Lamothe records all the hunting skills passed down from generation to generation of Innu. Other footage records the transition which was taking place in Matimekush family events, which owe more to western culture.21 Lamothe remarks on the consistent racism towards the Innu which he encountered among settler Canadians living in Schefferville.

Writing of the Innu who live in the two Labrador villages of Utshimassits (Davis Inlet) and Sheshatshiu, whose treatment at the time was similar to that of their relatives across the Quebec–Labrador border, Colin Samson observes that:

… it was important that the first generation to live in the villages on a permanent basis be educated to accept the various assumptions on which Euro-Canadian society was beginning to develop on the Labrador–Quebec peninsula, particularly the need to economically exploit the resources of the area. If they were to function in the society of those who were about to bring such drastic changes to them, the socialization of children could not be left up to Innu parents, the hunters who were deemed to have only a fragile grip on the skills, attitudes and knowledge which the Euro-Canadian world demanded.22

As will be seen, this forced transition to a settled life within a cash economy resulted in a loss of identity which could not be fixed by an underfinanced education system.

Work at the Iron Ore Company mine

In 1982, after less than 30 years of exploitation, the mine closed – the market price for iron ore having fallen, making it uneconomic to continue the operation at that time. The mine and the services which supported it had provided jobs for the Innu and made most of them as dependent on wage labour as they were on hunting. François Aster, 99 years of age, a respected hunter and staunch defender of Innu land rights, was one of several interviewees who spoke of working at the mine: ‘I got a certificate for working with dynamite. It was only Indian people who were allowed to carry dynamite. It was harder working [in the mine] because you had to work with time rather than with the daylight. Even in weather like this you had to be there.’ (The outside temperature was –39 degrees at the time of the interview).

Another hunter said that when the Innu mineworkers had worked five years they got a vacation for three months, which was the only time when they could go hunting. Very few Innu workers had sufficient education to get the skilled jobs in the mine.

Nevertheless, as we shall see in the following chapter, when the mine closed the resilience of the Innu enabled them to fight successfully to remain in their town despite the efforts of the governments to move them south again.