Chapter 12

Negotiating the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement

The governments and their commercial partners came to the negotiating table with a fixed agenda, including a clause in the agreement which would extinguish all indigenous rights in the land affected with the exception of those specifically ‘granted’ in the agreement itself. The land given up by the Cree, the Inuit and later the Naskapi stretched as far as the Labrador border. The Innu, their leaders adhering to the belief that indigenous rights also brought responsibilities for the land, left the negotiating table. If they gave up their land in this way, they were giving up their identity and culture.

Armand Mackenzie, former chief negotiator for the Strategic Alliance, spoke of his uncles’ leadership of the initial James Bay negotiations on behalf of the Innu:

In 1975 I heard it from my Uncles Alexandre and Gaston McKenzie, [that] they were asked to sign the treaty but they said no, they would prefer to act as a group with the other Innu and, moreover, they didn’t agree with the extinguishment provisions. So therefore they said no and [the Cree and Inuit] have always the chance to say no and for me the argument that they were always acting under duress … well, it’s a legal argument I guess. But down the road when you look at it we were under the same critical situation and we had to make a choice and we said no.1

By leaving the negotiating table, the Innu were written out of this troubled history and there is little reference in the literature on the James Bay Agreement to either their involvement or to their lost rights.

In his biography of Grand Chief Billy Diamond, Roy MacGregor2 describes how the task of negotiation on behalf of the Cree was taken up by three young Cree leaders in their twenties. Billy Diamond, Philip Awashish and Ted Moses, who had been educated together at residential school, worked with the older and more experienced Chief Robert Kanatewat. There is no similar record of the negotiations on behalf of the Inuit. MacGregor draws a contrast between the negotiators and their elders, who spent ten months of the year hunting out on the land and on whose wisdom and knowledge of the land the young men relied. Boyce Richardson describes the elders, who were flown back from their hunting camps by the governments when their consent was needed in order for the negotiations to proceed:

Weather-beaten and ragged from their months of hard work in the bush, the hunters gathered in the school auditorium, and when they got to their feet they spoke of only one thing, their land. They spoke with the passion, feeling and perception of poets. They talked about the purpose that the Creator had when he created the earth and put the animals on it and gave them to the Indians to survive on. They talked of how they had worked and suffered for the land, and of how the animals and the land had helped them to survive. They talked about the white man, and his thoughtless ways, his failure to ask their permission before he invaded their lands, the things they had silently observed him do over the last two decades. Over and over again they reported their affection for the land and the knowledge that its destruction meant their destruction.3

Nevertheless, the Cree soon discovered that only minimal recognition was given to their desire to continue their traditional way of life. Richardson notes that: ‘the young Crees who had mobilized their people for the fight now had to confront the complex task of giving flesh to the intricate and bewildering agreement they had negotiated. To say that they found the federal and provincial governments slippery as they tried to pin them down to the letter and spirit of what had been agreed would be an understatement.’4

The government and the James Bay Development Corporation presented the Cree, Inuit and Innu negotiators with a set agenda. Initially, the governments offered compensation of C$100 million and 2,000 square miles of land (one square mile per family of five).

The young Cree negotiators, bound by the indigenous tradition that the elders made major decisions on behalf of the group, delayed their response to the governments’ terms until their elders could be consulted on their return from the land where they still practised migratory hunting. They were ill-prepared to present their own long-term claims because they had spent the previous years building up sufficient political cohesion to argue their case before the court. Although Toby Morantz points out that in the time immediately before they signed agreements with the governments the Cree and Naskapi were experiencing extreme poverty,5 Richardson observes that the Cree had no interest in monetary compensation. All that they were concerned with was what was to happen to their land. Tired of waiting for the elders to return, the governments paid for them to be flown back.

As Harvey Feit explains,6 the state and its commercial partners set the means of communication in such negotiations in a way which precluded the Cree and Inuit from asserting their cultural practices. Their needs could only be expressed in images of the dominant Canadian culture. Further, Feit endorses James C. Scott’s observation that the governments’ claimed duty to serve the common good erodes any minority’s attempt to further its rights and protect diversity.

Work on the project was proceeding, and the Cree felt they had no alternative but to accept the governments’ final offer of C$225 million7 and exclusive rights to 14,000 sq km of land (Category I Lands). They retained limited rights to hunt and fish over a further 150,000 sq km (Category II & III Lands) but ceded all rights in 908,000 sq km of ancestral land. The Cree and Inuit also received a measure of self-determination which gave them control over education, health and social services. They ran a programme which paid hunters and trappers to hunt and trap for the whole community. As Chief Billy Diamond explained at the time: ‘The Cree people all understand that the province must be allowed to build the hydro-electric project in the James Bay area … We realize that many of the friends we have made during our opposition to the project will label us as sellouts … I hope you can all understand our feelings, that it has been a tough fight, and our people are still very much opposed to the project, but they realize that they must share the resources.’8

This does not sound as though the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (JBNQA) was signed under duress, but Boyce Richardson claims: ‘One has to remember that the original Agreement was signed under heavy duress. With the dams already being built, the Crees had either to sign, and get some money and some breathing space to prepare for the full weight of what the industrial world was proposing to dump on them – its wealth, technology, and insatiable appetite for energy – or hold out, and be completely swallowed.’9

By the time of the signing, the Innu were long gone from the negotiating table, their rights extinguished by the indigenous signatories and the governments alike.

The JBNQA was the first of the so-called ‘modern treaties’. Unlike the numbered treaties, its provisions were set out in detail in 480 pages and the Cree and Inuit had lawyers and consultants to advise them.10 J.R. Miller suggests that an additional pressure on the Cree and Inuit to reach a relatively speedy settlement was the possibility that the federal government might refuse to make further loans to cover the legal costs of the negotiations if they held out for all that they hoped to achieve through the land claims settlement.11

The Naskapi sign

To the dismay of the Innu of Matimekush Lac John, in 1979 the Mushuau Innu, relocated from the area around Fort Chimo, signed a separate agreement and became the Naskapi Nation. They too received a share in the James Bay revenues. They were allocated land on which to build their own village, Kawawachikamach, 15 kilometres from Matimekush Lac John. On the signing of their agreement, the Naskapi received C$75 million. The land they were given under the agreement was traditional hunting territory of the Matimekush Lac John Innu, just as some of the land assigned to the Cree and the Inuit in the earlier agreement was Innu land. The Matimekush Innu were deeply offended by the way in which the agreement was signed – they believed by stealth, and without consulting them or taking into account their rights. At the time, the Matimekush Lac John Band Council was sharing premises on the old Matimekush reserve with the Naskapi Band Council. Yet the latter said nothing to the Innu about the deal they had struck.12 A female Innu elder who worked at the joint Band Council offices at the time recalled:

I can remember when I started working for the Band Council, the Naskapis and the Montagnais were together in the same building. That was about the time when they signed. I didn’t really understand what was happening but suddenly they had more money. They would show us cheques. I asked them why. I didn’t understand why [the Innu] called them the people who sold their land. That’s when I began to see Naskapi with cheques and things written on the backs [of their jackets].

After they signed, about two years later, the offices were still together, I was working with Ruby from the Naskapi. Boxes came in marked ‘Conseil de Bande Naskapi’ and they had offices in Montreal. The boxes came from there. The boxes were full of office equipment. Their office in Montreal had closed down because they had signed and when they opened the box it was all expensive office equipment and we were all laughing about it because we didn’t really understand what was happening.

Later on, we started seeing that Innu land was affected too. We didn’t know that our land was affected when they signed but later on we figured out that our land was sold too. Then there was a community meeting and that’s what we were talking about and then I began to understand what was happening.13

Another elder said: ‘With the stroke of a pen, within four hours, they killed thousands of years of Innu occupation on this land – and it took only four hours. The ceremony takes four hours to sign away the rights of the people who were historically here. They killed the culture, the way of life of that people.’14

Having been displaced from the northern parts of the Ungava Peninsula, the Naskapi living in what is now Kawawachikamach were easy targets for Canada’s policy of divide and rule because they had already lost their traditional lands in the north. When the Naskapi signed the North Eastern Quebec Agreement in 1979, they were allotted lands with which they had little or no former connection.

The lands stretching from Schefferville west to Hudson’s Bay, but especially around the now inundated lands of Lake Caniapiscau, were much loved hunting and travelling routes for Innu travelling north from Sept-Iles up the rivers draining into the St Lawrence. When the Cree, Naskapi and Inuit signed up to the JBNQA, in the eyes of the governments and of Hydro-Québec they also extinguished the rights of the Innu to those lands, making them subjects of de jure unilateral extinguishment. The people of Matimekush and Lac John now have only small reserves and no recognised claim to lands extinguished by this agreement. The Cree Naskapi Act of 1984 gave the Cree and Naskapi Band Councils greater local powers of administration over the Category 1A lands, the lands over which they had limited powers under the Indian Act. Renée Dupuis suggests that the Act ‘almost completely displaced the Indian Act’.15