Chapter 15

‘All that is left to us is the terms of our surrender’:
negotiations to recover lost Innu lands

In 2009, at the time of the interviews conducted by this study in Matimekush Lac John, when the Innu elders looked back on the building of the James Bay dams they spoke of the lost lands in much the same way as Cree elders had spoken to Boyce Richardson: ‘The earth is respectful. My mother walked through the land. We didn’t take more than we needed from it. It’s our life they are taking away from us. We are destroying the land. It is alive but we don’t respect it. I see the old people crying – but the earth still has a lot to give. It is tired now. The land is sad. I go to the country to pray and talk to the plants. When the wind blows, it is as if they are talking to you too.’1

They spoke of their frustration that their rights were ignored:

So the Crown takes decisions or decides about the land as if we were non-existent, invisible on the land, and so government takes decisions and then governments decide about the use of the land, the occupancy of the land without the consent of the Innu, without the Innu being informed, as if the Innu were non-existent and where our family hunting grounds are. The Inuit are having jurisdiction on our land as if we were no longer there, non-existent, so … it is very, very disturbing. I am not upset towards the Eskimos, I’m much more upset with the government because of the way they handle this situation, the way they use the restriction, because it is a form of manipulation.2

The Innu families in Matimekush Lac John spoke of their lost lands. Since they were no longer involved in the negotiation process, they had received no notice of the flooding of their lands around Lake Caniapiscau and arrived one year to find that not only was the land flooded but also the graves of their ancestors. For them this was indeed a catastrophe:

My family, our uncles, our great-uncles were … their burial sites were desecrated … they were exhumed and we had to perform another ceremony back in Sept-Iles. They kept the human remains for a while in Montreal to study the bones. I don’t believe that you do that to a people, and we were affected as a family at the Caniapiscau reservoir that was their hunting grounds that were flooded. There was no compensation whatsoever – any form of consideration – no – and I think this issue has still to be addressed …3

A former chief said:

I always thought at least, from our grandfather or my father, that they were insulting our people in some way because it’s not their land – or, if they have joint rights on that land, if you don’t have exclusive rights to that land, at least they should have considered our views and be respectful or asked the government if we wanted to surrender our lands, because at least we should have had choices as a society about that. But they don’t insert any provisions in those treaties that affect the rights of the Innu. But they were careless.4

And an elder told me:

I know there is a lot of food there and a lot of money but if they kill everything what am I supposed to do? The land – that’s how I used to live, how I used to eat. There is wildlife, there’s fish and now it’s all becoming one lake because of all the dams. All that was different lakes [but] because of the dams it’s all one now. My land didn’t change but other people’s land got washed out in the flood. It used to be someone’s land but now it’s under the water. There are trees you can see in the water. They are all breaking the land and killing the trees. The trees are really dirtying the water too. When the trees get wet, they stink and now the fish won’t eat from the water. You must know how the trees smell. Where they cut the trees they stink and they are not getting cut. They are just there under the water and they stink more. It’s really bad that the land is going that way. It’s all breaking up. I guess the government wants us to be like them, like Canadians.5

A hunter said:

It’s theft. It’s stealing the land and violating our identity to the land. My family, the Grégoires, they were affected by those transactions on the land in the sense that all the water was diverted to our hunting grounds and they flooded everything. All the Innu hunting grounds. So we are affected by the creation of those reservoirs on our homeland. All the good places for caribou hunting, for fishing, were flooded. It’s ruining our traditional way of life. It’s ruining the animals. The fish are ill, like from the mercury poison. It is killing our way of life and so we can’t bring it back to the way it was before. We can’t repair the damage done. You just can’t do it.6

The background to the Innu comprehensive land claim to James Bay lands

When the Cree, Naskapi and Inuit signed away their indigenous rights, 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. When the Naskapi were invited to the negotiating table to make their own settlement, the Innu of Matimekush Lac John received the same invitation. The Innu insisted that they would not negotiate without the inclusion of Innu from all the other Quebec and Labrador villages and, when this was refused, they chose solidarity with their Innu relatives over a place at the negotiating table for their sole benefit.7

Thus, the people of Matimekush and Lac John now have only a small reserve, which is government-owned, and no recognised claim to lands taken from them by the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (JBNQA) or to their other lands in Labrador. There have been repeated, but unsuccessful, attempts to gain recognition of Innu aboriginal title to some of the lands signed away by the Cree and Inuit, with the governments eventually telling the Innu that they must negotiate directly with the Cree and Inuit for the return of their lands.8 Forty years of negotiations have achieved nothing, because the government insists that rights not expressly provided for in any agreement are extinguished; but, until comparatively recently, all Innu communities have categorically refused to agree to such an extinguishment, either over the JBNQA lands or their territories in Labrador.

In the records held at the Tshakapesh Institute in Uashat, there are files recording the meticulous correspondence between the Conseil Attikamekw-Montagnais (CAM) and the federal Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND), as well as with the governments of Quebec and Labrador on the progress (or lack of it) of negotiations on three issues: recovery of the James Bay lands, the closure of the town of Schefferville after the mine had ceased to function, and the rights of the Innu who live in Quebec to continue to hunt and trap on their traditional lands over the border in Labrador. The CAM files are incomplete because, following CAM’s division into smaller negotiating units in 1992, the correspondence was divided and held by the individual villages to which individual documents referred.9

For most of the time between the loss of the James Bay lands and the break-up of the CAM, Gaston McKenzie from Matimekush was the chief negotiator for CAM and Alexandre McKenzie, his brother, the Chief at Schefferville.10 CAM represented the nine Innu bands who lived in the Lac St Jean region and along the St Lawrence North Shore as well as at Matemekush Lac John, and three Attikamekw bands in the St Maurice region of Quebec. For the first 25 years of the negotiations, Innu from either side of the Quebec–Labrador border were united with the Attikamekw at the negotiation table. Like most organisations representing indigenous peoples in Canada – such as the Assembly of First Nations and its predecessors, the Innu Nation in Labrador and Mamit Innuat in western Quebec – CAM was funded by the Canadian government.11 Although ostensibly a benefit, this has adverse repercussions on the nature of representation and the freedom of representatives to negotiate truly independently.

CAM prepared a claim submission for DIAND which was presented in April 1979, but of which only a summary remains on file.12 The document pointed out that the Innu and Attikamekw were forced to couch their claim in the terms of the dominant society, that the governments were well aware of the nature and validity of their claims, and that their situation might worsen now that the provincial governments were taking their land.

The summary document continues:

It seems strange that while the rights of the Attikamekw and Montagnais have been continually eroded through the interests and activities of the dominant society, the native people are nevertheless obliged to bear the burden of proof of the existence of these rights, and the extent of the damages to their culture and their territories.

The Attikamekw and Montagnais do not understand why jurisprudence takes into account only European written law, ignoring the principles of the unwritten law of the native people; nor why the European notion of private property must take precedence over the concept of collective or communal ownership on which native societies are based.13

The claim is based on occupation of the land since time immemorial,14 as upheld in 1966 by the Dorion Commission on the integrity of the land claims of the Quebec government, in 1974 by the Malouf judgment, in 1975 by the JBNQA, and in testimony before the DIAND Standing Committee on Bill-C9. The Innu claim approximately 200,000 square miles of land, 25 per cent of which is over the provincial border in Labrador,15 which has been used by themselves and their ancestors. They also seek the right to self-determination. They do not accept the option of assimilation. Twenty per cent of the James Bay lands were claimed to belong to the Attikamekw and Innu. CAM was prepared to accept that other lands were subject to overlapping claims, noting that Clause 2.14 of the JBNQA provides for ‘… negotiations with other Indians or Inuit who are not entitled to participate in the compensation and benefits of the present agreement, in respect to any claims which such Indians or Inuit may have with respect to the Territory’.

CAM refers to archaeological evidence that the land has been occupied by its ancestors for 8,000 years, and also points to the records of Jesuit missionaries which indicate the presence of Attikamekw and Innu in the territory on their arrival. For evidence of recent use and occupancy, CAM refers to the maps and lists of hunting territories provided by Frank G. Speck.

The Innu claim that native territorial rights should include subsurface rights, as found by Judge Thomas Berger in relation to the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, and on this basis claim the right to all the resources on their lands. They reject the governments’ claim that these rights should be restricted to the usufructuary rights of hunting, gathering and trapping. Further, they say that their rights have been continuously eroded since first contact: firstly through the fur trade, forestry and agriculture, and since the 1920s through large-scale hydro-electric development which has taken more than 1,000 square miles of native land. The summary points out that, at the time of submission, these incursions were continuing with well-advanced plans for hydro-electric projects on the five rivers along the North Shore. It noted that the Attikamekw and Innu had never authorised the exploitation of the iron ore found near Schefferville, all of which fell within their territory and which has had a serious social impact on the environment and the native communities affected. Sports hunting, private fishing clubs and outfitting organisations have also had a detrimental effect on wildlife and on native hunting. They note that the Quebec provincial government refuses to recognise any native rights to the land and has permitted its exploitation without their consent.

CAM summarised its arguments by putting forward the following 11 demands:

• In view of the cultural autonomy before arrival of Europeans, desire for recognition as peoples having the right to self-determination

• As descendants of the first inhabitants of the lands in question, a request for recognition of sovereignty rights on these lands

• Refusal to accept definitive extinguishment as a precondition of any agreement

• Request for compensation for all past and present violations of territorial rights

• Opposition to any proposed development of resources on Attikamekw-Montagnais lands until Attikamekw-Montagnais rights are recognised

• Desire for control of any future development of their lands and resources

• Wish to give priority to development of renewable resources, over that of non-renewable resources

• Desire to see the economic benefits resulting from control of development on their lands ensure the economic, social and cultural well-being of future generations

• Desire to assume control of all aspects of their own development, so that this control will no longer be exercised by the dominant society

• Wish to orient their development in accordance with the traditions and values inherited from their ancestors

• Wish to deal in the future as equals with the governments of the dominant society, and not to be considered any longer as inferior peoples.

The summary concludes with CAM’s stated intention to commission two comprehensive surveys on 1) the nature of their traditional rights and the past and present use of their lands by both native and non-native peoples, and 2) a proposal for a programme of socio-economic development which would further Attikamekw-Montagnais autonomy in economic, social and educational matters.

Evidence in support of the CAM claim

The first of these surveys, on land occupation and use, of which there is a summary in the Tshakapesh Institute files, was carried out by Richard Dominique under the general supervision of Paul Charest, at the time a CAM adviser.16 Eight anthropologists, eight technicians and 59 native researchers worked on the project. Drawing on the work of Frank G. Speck and on the records of the province of Quebec, the survey identified the land used by the Innu in recent times as lying between longitude 57–75 degrees W and latitude 47–57 degrees N, and covering an area of 571,000 square kilometres; although the report also pointed out that ‘among the Montagnais, neither land nor society are closed entities’. The survey further pointed to the Innu’s ‘linguistically distinct toponymy’ for all the geographical features of the territory which they claimed.17

The summary included a description of the communication networks over Nitassinan:

Waterways, portage routes, paths, winter routes, camps, meeting places, and locations for leaving messages for passers-by are described. There is also a list of twenty-six roads and paths that covered the area at the time. Some are still being used, although such use is infrequent because the harnessing of waterways and rapid expansion of logging roads have led the Montagnais to opt for other modes of travel. The modern world is being introduced. The presence of numerous cemeteries in the area is also mentioned.

Although no maps have been included in the summary, the writers comment that the maps in the full survey more or less reproduce those of Frank Speck. Although the survey notes the lack of archaeological research on the Quebec-Labrador Peninsula, by looking at the pattern of deglaciation and subsequent afforestation of the region, the writers conclude that it would have been populated starting from a time between 11,000 and 6,000 years ago. Caribou would be found in coastal regions from between 8,000 to 5,000 years ago, but not on the interior plateau before 5,000 to 4,500 years ago.18 Tools, effigies, amulets and figurines found at grave sites in the region, together with hunting tools and stone axes, knives and needles pointed to occupation from 9,000 to 7,000 years ago onwards, with occupation of the valley of the River Moisie, where the Innu who now live in Matimekush Lac John originated, from 6,000 years ago. There were settlements along the Labrador coast and the Côte-Nord between 3,500 and 1,500 years ago, whose people lived on marine life and occasional hunting expeditions into the interior. These prehistoric populations are considered to be the ancestors of the present Innu population.19 The report further stated that, according to Jesuit sources, the Montagnais lived along the St Lawrence River between Quebec City and Tadoussac (where Samuel Champlain made his first landing in 1603) and along the Gulf of St Lawrence between Pessamit and Moisie.

The full report, titled in French Occupation et utilisation du territoire par les Montagnais de Schefferville, was published in 1983.20 In a comprehensive survey of land use by the Innu,21 the report follows trade relations between Europeans and the Innu from the 17th century up until 1850, observing that the native people were never dependent on this trade because of the presence in the area of the great herds of caribou in the Caniapiscau, Delorme and Opiscoteo regions, together with the George River herd, which provided subsistence for Innu families. However, from the 1830s caribou populations in the forests declined due to fires in the interior and warm winters when the ice was thin. By 1860 all game populations were in serious decline. By the end of the 19th century, nearly half the forest in the interior had been destroyed in less than 30 years. Some of the fires were caused by human intervention, both native and non-native. This decline continued until the 1930s, when numbers of fur-bearing animals were seriously affected. Some of this decline was due to better trapping technology available to the native people and commercial pressures to over-exploit the animal populations.

The report traces the modern history of the Sept-Iles Band after the closure of Fort Nascopie on Attikamagen Lake near modern-day Schefferville in 1868, when the band was first formally recognised. From that time the Sept-Iles Innu, formerly the Michikamau and Ashuanipi bands, made their summer camp at Sept-Iles near to the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) trading post, together with those Innu who came down the Moisie from the interior. In 1909 the Sept-Iles reserve came into being. By 1926 there were approximately 26 families at Moisie (Maliotenam) and 200 Innu at Sept-Iles (Uashat). By 1950 there were approximately 800 Innu at Sept-Iles. During this period the annual journey to the north continued and the fur trade allowed the Innu credit to acquire clothing and food. This also meant that hunters could equip themselves for the journey north and repay sums borrowed when they returned with the fur. However, since the HBC had a monopoly on trade with the Innu, it could control the price offered for furs and this could have serious consequences for the Innu. Because they had to repay their debts to the store, they became dependent on trapping rather than hunting for their subsistence. In addition, the Innu had to compete with non-native hunters.22

In 1941 an airbase was constructed at Goose Bay, and many of the Innu settled nearby abandoned trapping in that area and took salaried employment. Along the Côte-Nord the situation was less acute, because even at the end of the 1940s there were only 15 white trappers operating in the region. The majority of Innu at Sept-Iles thus pursued their traditional life in the first half of the 20th century, albeit subject to diminishing resources. It is these resource constraints which led to their participation in the fur trade, which alone did not produce enough to live on due to the continually reducing prices for furs. Alongside the fur trade, from 1867 onwards there was also mining development. The first such mine was at Moisie, which produced high-quality steel; however, this enterprise was dependent on the American markets and was always subject to the demands of American steelworks. When the Americans raised import duties, the Moisie works closed.

Then, the report continues, during World War I Reuben d’Anglois, a surveyor working on behalf of Toronto financiers, discovered in the region not the precious metals they were seeking but substantial deposits of iron ore. However, it was not until there was a large enough market in the United States that these were exploited. For example, in 1929 deposits were discovered around what became the municipality of Schefferville, but nothing was done during the years of the Great Depression. It was not until 1939 that the Labrador Mining and Exploration Company joined with the McKay (Quebec) Exploration Company to exploit the deposits in this region. Hollinger North Shore Exploration was formed in 1942 and the M.A. Hanna Coal and Oil Exploration Company in 1943. Exploration camps were constructed on Lake Knob in 1945 and the Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway was constructed, together with a hydro-electric plant on Lake Menehek, 25 miles from Schefferville.

By this time World War II had depleted American stocks of iron and steel. In 1949 the Iron Ore Company of Canada was formed, a company which, despite its name, was registered in the United States. In fact, this was a company formed and directed by all the exploration companies. There were 417 million tonnes of ore to be exploited. The workforce rose to nearly 7,000 and the municipality of Schefferville grew to accommodate them with houses, churches, a store, a school and a hospital. The town was incorporated in 1960. Despite this expansion, however, there were rumours of closure of the mine from 1960 onwards because the iron ore did not correspond to the requirements of the American markets. When more suitable iron ore was found in Latin America, the Iron Ore Company announced the closure of the mine in autumn 1982.

Against this backdrop, from 1947 onwards Innu from Sept-Iles began to move north, first to work on the construction of the exploration camp and the railway and ultimately to work in the mines. In 1956 the Naskapi were relocated, first to their own encampment and subsequently to the same Lac John reserve where the Innu had been relocated. The reason given in the report for the movement of the Naskapi from the north to Schefferville was so that they could fill jobs in the mine. Despite this, however, in July 1962 there were only 69 Innu and 38 Naskapi employed in the mine.

Turning to land use by the Innu of Schefferville, the writers of the report pointed out that Innu from Moisie were tempted to settle in Schefferville by the government in the first place by promises of access to their ancestral lands in the region, and became known as the Naplek Unnut (‘Knob Lake Innu’). In 1966 the Dorion Commission allocated traplines to the Schefferville Innu families according to where their fathers had hunted.

There follow chapters on the ecology of the region, the daily and annual round of life out on the land and further toponymic evidence. Turning to the shared nature of the use of land, the writers explain that, while family groups were closely associated with certain areas by their superior knowledge of the terrain and were best able to exploit its resources, others could hunt on that land with the permission of the captain of that group. If the family were not on their land, there was no need to seek permission. The territory was not only managed by small groups in portions of the land, it was also managed in its entirety so that its resources could best be exploited.23

From 1956 until 1982, following their move to Schefferville, the Naplek Innu (newly named in the report, but not elsewhere) perceived themselves as restricted, or even prevented, from exploiting certain parts of their territory. During this period, hunting and fishing were no longer considered the basis of their economy. The ecological consequences of industrialisation and the damage caused to the territory, together with government interference and the influx of non-native people, meant that a new social model replaced the traditional way of life. The writers noted the political dimension to these changes. There was no consideration of the traditional way of life of the Innu, because Quebec had never recognised the right of the Innu to self-determination.

The report concluded that the signature of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement and the North Eastern Quebec Agreement had consigned the Innu to the status of third parties, and all their rights in the land had been extinguished. This had been done in a disproportionate way – all that the state was concerned to do was to preserve its own full sovereignty over the land. The Naplek Innu had to submit themselves to certain rules contained in these agreements, which would exclude the Innu from portions of their territory unless they obtained permission from the signatories.

The Ashuanipi Corporation

After the break-up of negotiations and the demise of CAM, the Innu resident in Labrador pursued their own land claim while the Innu of Central Quebec – Uashat, Maliotenam and Matimekush Lac John – continued to pursue their land claims in the James Bay development area and in Labrador through the Ashuanipi Corporation. The Corporation was named for a lake which is at the centre of hunting territory shared by all Innu but which, under the New Dawn Agreement, will be signed over to the governments by the Innu who live in Labrador. Initially, I was invited to observe these negotiations but they closed very shortly after the invitation was issued. Nevertheless, I was able to interview some of the Matimekush Lac John Innu involved in the negotiations over the years and to learn of the seriousness of their approach and of the way in which they were frustrated by having to deal with set agendas and intransigent governments.

One former chief, involved in the negotiations in the early 2000s, explained that there were differences between the Innu chiefs even though they were conducting a joint negotiation:

I was involved in the Ashuanipi Corporation. The way I was involved was that we tried as much as possible to work together with other Innu communities. I wanted to address extinguishment – all the Innu area is subject to extinguishment provisions and I hoped somehow we could work together as Innu, as a group, one people, gather all these communities together. But there was a lot of mistrust between the Innu or even between the chiefs, who don’t want to deal with the real issues at times, who don’t want to address those issues because you don’t want to hurt the other chiefs’ feelings or don’t want to be perceived as someone who is attacking a fellow chief, and it’s very hard to be open about those issues. There is always this idea that we have to take our time, discuss calmly those issues, but it is as if it is impossible to confront those issues or confront other chiefs with those issues and I always had this belief that it’s not only this community that is affected by the extinguishment provisions – it is all the Innu people. So that’s what I was hoping – that, somehow, we would work round this with common sense. This didn’t happen. They have created one, two, three, four tables of negotiations. That was one aspect. The other aspect with these negotiations is that you have to know what you want. You have to have a set objective. If you don’t know what you want, if you don’t know what principle you will rely on to negotiate those issues … well, you will end up negotiating forever with no result. We didn’t have that. We didn’t know where we were going.

You have to deal with the community, the people, the grassroots. You have to know what they want and that’s another challenge. So you don’t know that. Then there’s all the infighting between the employees, the lawyers – who knows best and so on. You have all these disputes. You have the hidden interests as well – that sometimes there are people who want to preserve their contracts or something. They have their own interests, all those lawyers, consultants, employees. They have their own self-interest. How do you deal with them?

And when you try to address certain issues with the other chiefs and when you want to discuss face to face with another chief, you are accused of not trusting the advisers. And there is always this dispute between the consultants – one consultant to another, one lawyer to another, one employee to another. So you have all these different layers of difficulties. That’s how I got involved. It’s complex. Those are the issues, the situation you have to deal with when you are a chief.

Out of someone’s misery you will be able to manipulate [them] easily because that person somehow wants to get out of that misery. Governments play on that with the aboriginal communities. They know that they are weak, fragile mentally, and they are therefore susceptible to manipulation.

The main problem with those negotiations is that you have to deal with the governments and they come up with a set of principles, a pre-set rule or objective, and it’s up to you to accept it or not. All that is left to us is the terms of our surrender.

I didn’t agree with that and I always told the negotiators to go with the mindset that we are the rightful owners and that we should not agree to terms of a surrender. The fundamental problem that underlies the negotiations is those pre-set rules. Because the federal negotiators come up with examples, they will tell you what they did in other places with other nations. But we have a right to have our own views on this and to say [that] for us it is different. You were always stuck with the thought that you either take the money or resign.

I tried to listen as much as possible to the elders, their advice or opinion on this issue. They were always telling me that extinguishment was never to be accepted – in the James Bay Agreement, for instance, to never accept it. Always lead with the assumption that your rights are alive. Always lead with the assumption that you are negotiating existing aboriginal rights. Don’t accept the fact that people are giving you money in return for accepting extinguishment. So I always led with this assumption or this ideal whenever I was meeting other groups or in my work with government and negotiators. So we gathered and initiated those first discussions with the Inuit, the Naskapi and the Cree and then, when I was meeting them, I was always standing my ground in the sense I was telling them we were rightful owners of those lands and I was repeating this over and over again up to the point that people understood that what we were saying was true. Because at some point the Inuit said, ‘You are absolutely right. We were just occupying the coastline. So we didn’t go into the interior of the lands.’ With the Cree it was the same. We spoke in our own languages and we somehow managed to understand each other. It was an evolving process whereby we were using our elders to try to come up with some form of agreement between the nations involved. Then somehow … and I don’t want to put blame on anyone or give names [and the translator detected a lot of regret in the tone of his voice] I think we missed something there because some people didn’t agree with the process. I would have liked back then to have the right resources to work with me, the right people to work with me, and somehow it wasn’t possible. This work that we tried to do with the other chiefs in this native or indigenous environment was picked up by a bunch of lawyers and they screwed up the whole thing.

Probably we could have convened with the other Indigenous nations, the Cree, the Inuit, the Naskapi, probably we would have been able to agree on something. Maybe it wouldn’t have [had] any legal value but to the international community it would have some form of value because it would have been an agreement between indigenous nations and the government probably would have put in their policies the legal framework. We were working on something and, despite the governments’ position on the indigenous agreement, we could have told the world community that this is what happened in this part of the world and it might have offered a solution. Unfortunately, we didn’t agree that [regretfully].

I regret the fact that in all the discussion with the Naskapi, Inuit, the Cree, I regret the fact that I was not able to see any gains. It was not possible for me to move forward the negotiations in discussions with other leaders.24

This chief was not the only one to observe the counter-productive involvement of lawyers and consultants. Sitting in on the land claims negotiations in Labrador in the 1990s, Colin Samson notes:

A rather different kind of knowledge, often both abstract and predictive, is required to be produced in order that the Innu document their land claims case and beat back the continual threats posed by a host of industrial projects on their lands. What is important to their case, especially in the eyes of advisers, is that representations of their knowledge, land and identity be presented to the state in terms that functionaries can easily grasp and that pose no serious ontological challenges to the scientific materialism upon which so much Western knowledge of the world is predicated.25

He continues:

For the Innu to be able to participate in the comprehensive land claims procedures, much of the funds paid to Innu Nation are distributed to non-Native lawyers, environmental scientists, and anthropologists, who help prepare the land claim. This procedure involves the federal government subsidizing Euro-Canadian professionals to prepare a ‘case’ for the Innu. This ‘case’ has to be intelligible to government bureaucrats and is therefore conveyed, presented, and packaged to conform to the various expectations of state protocol. The advisers are intermediaries not so much for the Innu, but between Canada and the Innu.

The Innu of the Ashuanipi Corporation and its successor the Strategic Alliance are experienced, skilled negotiators who would prefer to do the talking themselves rather than rely on the lawyers and consultants that the governments insist are there to advise them. They believe that this arrangement swallows up funding that could be used for more meetings and longer sessions. Those experienced in these negotiations26 told me that the governments come with a fixed agenda and negotiate on the basis that other communities have signed up to their set, pre-drafted terms of agreement and therefore the terms cannot be changed. The Innu, represented by the Strategic Alliance, have suggested a 50-year lease so that resources can be exploited while they retain title to the land, but this has fallen on deaf ears – although a similar arrangement was permitted on Cree land.27 The Innu negotiators realise that they must keep the grassroots involved and informed, but this is difficult because of the complexity of the documentation. Over a cup of coffee in Rita’s Café in Matimekush, one Innu land claims negotiator gave me a masterclass:

When you are negotiating, you have to be able to gather different perspectives, different opinions, in the community and when confronted with the Canadian government and Quebec and Labrador. You have to seek common ground and try to come up with solutions. If you meet an obstacle, you don’t want to leave it. You ask yourself, ‘How can we overcome it? What can we discuss? What are our thoughts? How can we overcome this? What is the hope of our talks? What are we going to discuss about this?’

We are talking about societies, we are talking about land. We are talking about a treaty which will survive for 200 years, and you have to have all these things in mind when you are negotiating and I am saying these things because I was a negotiator. I went to law school, I went to the bench, I read books, I learned from experience and you don’t become a negotiator overnight, you don’t just put people there. It takes years. I remember when we had the government who were changing negotiators, they would educate those negotiators, for a couple of months, six to 12 months. And that’s fine – you have all those years for all those discussions.

We need to change the policy that is approved by Cabinet. We need to change decisions, the Royal Commission [on Aboriginal Peoples] for instance, the new alternatives for the native people. It’s an educational process. When we have new negotiators, we have new dynamics. We have to retrain the person, we have to teach, whether it’s native or non-native. We have to tell them here’s what we did over the last ten to fifteen years or the last five years and these are the elements we agreed and this is what we are about to agree. You talk about culture, economic development, you talk about the water rights, you talk about the resource rights, fiscal, taxation, self-government powers – and with the self-government powers you are talking about justice, health, social services, education, labour rights, anything. You can’t just take this on and learn it in a few months, even if you have good will, it takes years of experience to have a depth and 360 degrees of good vision.

When you are involved in the negotiations, each party has its own objectives: the Innu, the Quebec and the federal governments. The federal government wants the Indians to pay taxes and the Indians have their [status] cards. They want us to integrate into Canadian society. The Quebec government want us to confirm that they have jurisdiction over the land and that we will integrate in some way their rules, legislation and so on, and from the Innu … they just want to confirm their existing rights to the land – that they were there and because they were there they are entitled to certain rights – not to all kinds of rights because they interact with the Francophones and the Anglophones of Canada. When you are negotiating you have to bear in mind those principles.

When we had high-level negotiations in the late 1990s up to 2000 whereby three communities out of nine in Quebec signed an agreement based on the work that we did on certainty provisions or non-extinguishment provisions, we were looking for a certainty model. A certainty model is the Quebec government, the federal government saying to us, ‘Do you want to know once and for all, forever, what are your Aboriginal rights?’ Because Canada wants to confirm its sovereignty on the land, [and] the same with the Quebec government, they want to know. ‘Tell us in 400 pages or 300 pages what are your land rights as an Aboriginal person in Canada, in Quebec or in Labrador.’ And what we’d always say was that you can’t do that – as a Canadian can you define your rights, all of your rights and then you’re going to say that’s it, once and for all this is it?

You can’t change the constitution, you can’t change the law, you can’t change any rule or regulation. The same with Quebec – what are your rights as Quebecers? You made a referendum in the early 1980s and [then] you made another and another. Can you say once and for all that you are not going to pass anything in the future? No. See – well, it’s the same for us. We have a right to evolve as a society or as a group so the extinguishment provisions or the certainty models are just not right – you can’t ask aboriginal groups to surrender forever their land rights. So we have to come up with something that doesn’t imply extinguishment in any way, form or … indirectly or directly … and so we work on certainty models and then unfortunately some of the lawyers who work on behalf of the Innu don’t understand totally the concept and they came up with the [New Dawn] Agreement in Principle which is extinguishment by definition. Nothing in this agreement extinguishes the rights of the Innu but – there are a lot of buts – it’s like the Nisga’a model or other models for certainty, but some intelligent people say there are extinguishment provisions indirectly in this form and then for that reason we won’t sign this Agreement in Principle.28

The land use and other reports prepared for CAM referred to above set out clearly and comprehensively the basis of the Innu land claims in a way which refutes Canadian claims to ownership of the land, yet despite (or perhaps because of) this, the negotiations never reach a satisfactory conclusion for any indigenous parties, be they Cree, Inuit, Attikamekw or Innu. Whenever progress appears to be made that is not on terms pre-set by the governments, the negotiations collapse. For example, the last person to be appointed chief negotiator by the Matimekush Lac John Band Council told me:

Our office [the Ashuanipi Corporation] was closed in May 2009 because the government of Quebec doesn’t want to discuss aboriginal rights. That’s why they cut the money and our office was closed. When I was a negotiator we once had a meeting in Kawawachikamach [Naskapi village] and we needed C$600,000 and the government gave us only half a million dollars. With that we could only have two meetings to get Inuit, Naskapi, Cree and Innu to discuss the Quebec agreement and the impact on us. What we wanted was the recommendations of the elders on what the issues are for them and how to fix the agreement, and [with] no money [there were] no meetings after that.

He also spoke of the difficulty of explaining the long and complicated negotiation documents to the people who would be called on to ratify any agreement:

In the past there could be no information, no translation. The clauses were not well explained to the community. It is hard for a person to understand who has not reached grade 5 [in school]. Some of them didn’t finish their schooling. Maybe more than 50 per cent, and the agreement is important for them, for their community, but they cannot know what it says. They can’t read. They can’t translate it into Innu. It is hard for them to understand. We try to translate word by word. We have five ways to reach people: by post, meetings, radio stations, newspapers and to see someone in their house. We try to explain very well the contents of the agreement, small agreement or big agreement. We take time to explain.

It’s hard for the young people because, you know, when you take the agreement it has 24 chapters and when you look at that in detail it is hard to summarise that for the people here. Only specialists can summarise that. It is hard for ordinary people because there are different views from young men or women or for a man who is related to the Naskapi. There are 30–40 people here who have Naskapi blood. That’s why half the community has a different opinion from others who are not beneficiaries of the [North Eastern Quebec] Agreement.

This negotiator, I was told, had been in post for only three months before the finance was withdrawn. The same informant went on to say that the mindset of the Innu, especially those from Uashat, had changed so that they now favoured a settlement through the court, feeling that it was time to move on from the frustrations of the past 40 years of wasted effort at the negotiating table.29 There are rivalries among those who hold power and those who seek power, dissent on the best approach to negotiation, and persistent anxieties arising from the close relationship with and proximity to the Naskapi.

Yet, prior to the Tsilhqot’in Nation v British Columbia decision in 2014, the prospect of mounting a successful court case was also fraught with uncertainty. As one interviewee told me:

There are seven signatories to the agreement: Cree, Naskapi, Inuit, two governments, Hydro-Québec and Transénergie. If we decide to go to court it’s going to take maybe 12–15 years to finish that and if we use the agreement maybe we could take five years to finish that case. I think there are a lot of items to fix. One is hunting and fishing and economic development – mining, forestry, everything that we used before as Montagnais [Innu] people. I know it is hard for the Naskapi and Montagnais to discuss that because it is politics. When you talk about politics it is hard to do this between nations and I know elders are respectful to each other but the young people are angry about the agreement in the Montagnais community and Naskapi community because for the Naskapi there was no information given to the young people at that time. In our time, we heard a lot about the Quebec agreement, the Cree and Inuit nations. Because when you talk about the James Bay Agreement, it would be easy to find issues to agree on but Quebec doesn’t want to reopen that case because everybody knows that they made a mistake and Canada, which holds the land in trust, doesn’t respect what the Crown has to do for the Indians. The two governments don’t use the same way to listen to nations like the Montagnais people.

The accounts given above demonstrate a process which is tantamount to the systematic destruction of a community. There are many problems relating to the loss of Innu identity directly linked to the loss of their lands and hunting culture. Many of the people I interviewed told me they felt that they were invisible to the Quebec government and that their rights counted for nothing.

In 2008, at the fourth annual Séminaire Nordique Autochtone held at Mushuau Nipi (Indian House Lake) on the George River, Romeo Saganash, then a member of the Grand Council of the Crees and now a New Democratic Party politician, challenged Matimekush Chief Réal McKenzie over his people’s decision to leave the James Bay negotiating table, claiming that, had the Innu stayed, they could have negotiated more compensation for the loss of their lands. However, Anne-Marie André, an Innu teacher, film-maker and elder, explained to me that the decision to withdraw was unanimously backed by the Innu in every community – they held to their belief that no amount of money could compensate for the loss of land which was not theirs to give away.

In this chapter, we have seen how the Innu resident in Central Quebec have grouped and regrouped in negotiations to recover their lost lands in Quebec. We have seen the strong case they put forward for their ownership of the land since time immemorial – in this case not just a phrase of legal shorthand but the reality of ownership and control for thousands of years over the land they claim. At the same time, the Newfoundland Labrador government has employed game wardens to harass from their hunting lands Innu who were once accorded resident status in Labrador, while refusing to come to the negotiating table or to recognise these rights in any way – another stain on the honour of the Crown.

The only small success at the negotiating table came when the Innu of the Ashuanipi Corporation met with chiefs and negotiators from the Cree and Inuit communities with no lawyers and consultants present. Without these outsiders to fuel dissent, the indigenous leaders made progress in acknowledging the rights of the Innu to their expropriated lands. Then the federal government withdrew funding. During the final negotiations for the New Dawn Agreement, the leaders of the Innu Nation in Labrador distanced themselves from the continuing struggle of their relatives in Quebec and disparaged their attempts to assert their hunting rights. In an article in Le Devoir in 2003, Armand Mackenzie noted how the Ottawa and Quebec governments had already split the nine Innu villages in Quebec into separate groups under their policy of divide and rule.30

We shall see further in the next chapter the degree to which the once-close relationship between the Innu has deteriorated.