Defending the Land

Sovereignty and Forest Life in James Bay Cree Society

Ronald Niezen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780205651085
• eBook ISBN: 9781317348856
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Suitable for both introductory anthropology and upper-division courses in cultural anthropology

The campaign of the Cree people to protect their forest culture from the impact of hydro-electric development in northern Quebec has been widely-documented. Few have heard in any detail about this campaign's outcome and impact upon indigenous societies' futures. This text gives equal attention to the Cree leadership's successful strategies for dealing with major social and environmental pressures with the forces of acculturation and native communities' social destruction.

The titles in the Cultural Survival Studies in Ethnicity and Change series, edited by David Maybury-Lewis and Theodore Macdonald, Jr. of Cultural Survival, Inc., Harvard University, focus on key issues affecting indigenous and ethnic groups worldwide. Each ethnography builds on introductory material by going further in-depth and allowing students to explore, virtually first-hand, a particular issue and its impact on a culture.

Introduction

1

On the crucial question of the evolution of human society µSoviet ethnologist Dimitrii Ol’derogge] observed to me that whilst the base line and the terminus were the same for all mankind, the paths of development between them were endlessly various.

ERNEST GELLNER
‘ACADEMICIAN OL’DEROGGE’

If we look carefully at what has motivated research done among indigenous peoples during at least the past century, we usually find a fear and expectation that all societies will soon resemble one another. Whenever remote regions have been opened up to exploration, development, and settlement, the people living there, defeated in one way or another by technology and addictions, are destined to disappear, to die from disease or vice or fade from view in a quiet imitation of the intruders’ way of life. Disappearing with them are meaningful social differences. There is always a strong segment of the colonizing society that approves of the assimilation or extinction of ‘savages’, either out of a well-intentioned desire to save their souls or a covetous zeal to acquire their land and its riches. But researchers and students of ethnography often work with a sense of loss at the prospect of cultural extinction as they set themselves the task of preservation, the kind of preservation that uses the methods of observation and analysis to record everything about the native way of life before it is gone forever. At the same time, social theorists have sometimes used ethnographic observations to arrive at the general conclusion that human societies are becoming increasingly similar, organized around industrialism, the nuclear family, and the powerful forces of bureaucracy and technological specialization. ‘Tribalism’ or ‘traditional societies’ are becoming marginalized or are already part of this new social order.

In its extreme form, the view that cultures or ways of life are destined to become similar in values, standards of virtue, and definitions of reality is referred to by Ernest Gellner as the convergence thesis. He describes this rather bleak processes of modernization as a movement toward universal cultural uniformity:

Suppose it were indeed the case that the industrial mode of production uniquely determines the culture of society: the same technology canalizes people into the same type of activity and the same kinds of hierarchy, and that the same kind of leisure styles were also engendered by the existing techniques and by the needs of productive life. Diverse languages might and probably would, of course, survive: but the social uses to which they were being put, the meanings available in them, would be much the same in any language within this wider shared industrial culture (1983: 116).

Gellner is describing the terminus of human history related to him by Dimitrii Ol’derogge in the epigraph to this introduction, an image derived from the expectation that all human societies will one day resemble one another in their basic institutional organization, use of technology, and cultural outlook.

This book is about the people who have largely succeeded in defying such a pattern of cultural homogenization, at least for the present and the foreseeable future. Having been challenged with missions, boarding schools, massive hydro-electric construction, village relocation, and other agents of rapid cultural change, the James Bay Cree of northern Quebec have not only maintained basic connections to a hunting, fishing, and trapping lifestyle, but have at the same time become significant players in the ‘ politics of embarrassment’, pushing for greater native regional autonomy while resisting the threats of major resource development and Quebec’s sovereignty movement. The Cree have created a bridge between their forest lifestyle and the demands of administrative development and political struggle, between tradition and bureaucracy.

The transitions that have taken place for the 12,000 Crees of Quebec’s James Bay region during the past several decades have been, by any standard, tumultuous. Although federal involvement in native affairs after World War II encouraged settlement in villages for administrative purposes, most families followed the long established pattern of gathering in communities only in the summer months. Until the early-1970s there was only sporadic and informal contact between the Cree leaders of widely scattered communities. Then in 1972 the Quebec government of Premier Bourassa announced its plans for the construction of a —6 billion project on the La Grande River with no prior consultation with the Cree who claimed the region as ancestral territory. A union of Cree leaders was quickly mobilized and legal opposition to the project mounted. A victory for the Cree, who placed a moratorium on construction until native claims could be resolved, was overturned on appeal in Quebec Superior Court only one week later. The temporary legal success, and the promise of more legal action to come, prompted the Quebec government, together with the federal government and Cree and Inuit representatives, to negotiate the James Bay and Northern Québec Agreement. This Agreement provided the Quebec government with jurisdiction over lands on which the Hydro-Québec project was to be constructed (in fact construction had begun well in advance of court action) and administrative inclusion of Cree and Inuit communities into the provincial system. Besides the key issues of land allocation and case settlement (today amounting to —255 million), the Cree negotiated a plan for regional autonomy in education, health care and the Income Security Program, the latter providing a guaranteed income to hunters and their families who spend most of their time in the forest.

The impact of the implementation of the James Bay Agreement, which began in the late 1970s, is still being felt. The Cree were given control and responsibility for major institutions at a time when Hydro-Québec construction and flooding were forcing major adjustments to forest life. In Fort George, the community that has been the focus of my work, relocation to a site renamed Chisasibi (‘big river’) brought with it great emotional stress at a time when the social services was operating in a fledgling native organization.

Scarcely had these crises been faced when the Quebec government and Hydro-Québec announced plans for further, massive hydro-electric projects on the Great Whale River and the Nottaway-Broadback-Rupert River System. Cree opposition to these projects brought a relatively new, untested leadership into the international arena. Lobbying efforts to halt the Great Whale project, the first of the new developments to be implemented, focused on communicating the Cree point of view to the people of the United States, to whom most of the power was to be exported.

For the Quebec government, native regional autonomy was found to be a two-edged sword. While it did indeed include native administration in the Quebec system, intended in part to elevate the province’s profile, improving its claim to nationhood as a government that can deal with indigenous affairs, it did not succeed in cultivating a relationship uniformly based upon cooperation with native leaders.

This continues to have significant consequences for Quebec’s sovereignty movement. The sour experiences of the implementation of the James Bay Agreement, the hydro-electric construction, and the bitter struggle over the proposed Great Whale project convinced Cree leaders and the vast majority of their constituents to resist the inclusion of their communities and lands in a sovereign Quebec, challenging the territorial integrity of the region that Quebec sovereigntists claim as an inviolable national unity.

For many years, relations between native and non-native governments in Canada and elsewhere have been characterized by the politics of embarrassment, the use of media and public relations to expose the inconsistencies and injustices of government action. This relationship is predicated on bringing to the attention of a largely sympathetic audience of voting constituents, the injustice, bigotry and impact of the government’s negligence on the living conditions in native communities. Once government agencies and individuals have been identified as being responsible for a crisis situation in native communities, then action (or inaction) comes under careful scrutiny by native leaders and the media.

The James Bay Crees of Quebec have used the politics of embarrassment effectively, pointing mainly to the ill-considered social and environmental consequences of hydro-electric development and government foot-dragging in the implementation of the James Bay Agreement. The Cree struggle against their possible inclusion in a sovereign Quebec shows that wider issues of national and international significance can come under the purview of relatively small indigenous populations. The politics of embarrassment have expanded to include the sympathies and judgments of the international community.

The Cree response to hydro-electric development and the James Bay Agreement, however, is not really about the successful duplication of non-native administrations, political strategies and social values. Cree hunters have long used tools invented and manufactured outside their own society. Breech-loading carbine rifles or outboard motors did not undermine basic attachments to the land or erode spiritual relationships with hunted animals. Similarly, though on a larger scale, the development of Cree administrations based on southern models does not in itself mean that their values, goals, and strategies will be the same as those of parent organizations in non-native societies. Although the goal of regional autonomy, as seen from the view of government negotiators, was a closer integration of the Cree in the Quebec administrative system, from the Cree point of view it also provided opportunities for reinvigorating attachments to forest life.

Ironically, the bedrock of the expanding political profile of the Cree leadership is the forest economy, with camps usually joining several families scattered through a vast expanse of sub-arctic wilderness, nearly equalling the area of the state of Montana. Isolation is a matter of perception, a sense of discomfort arising out of distance from human companionship that can occur almost anywhere. For Cree hunters, however, there seems to be little loneliness, even in the solitude of the land. The hunting, fishing, and trapping way of life is one of the threads of continuity that has made the forest so important to Cree culture, giving impulse to both the local struggle for subsistence and the politics of international recognition. Cree language, with its great precision in representing natural phenomena and human activity, is the foundation of Cree cultural curriculum in the primary grades of village schools. Attachment to forest life is the source of recent efforts to reform the administration of justice, social services, and health care to make them more consistent with indigenous understandings of conflict resolution and a holistic approach to emotional and physical well-being. And it is the most convincing source of the claim that the Cree people of the James Bay are a distinct society with equal or greater claim to sovereignty and self-determination than Quebec’s francophone community.

This book aims to correct two basic misconceptions of Cree Society as they relate to efforts to incorporate formal administrations into a culture that identifies closely with a quintessentially informal forest economy based on hunting, fishing, and trapping. The first misconception has its roots in the basic argument that bureaucrats and hunters don’t mix. The logic of this model implies the erosion of tradition as an organizing principle of human behavior wherever it comes into contact with bureaucratic powers. For some, centralized politics and the rapid development of a wide range of bureaucratic institutions spells the decline of traditional values: obedience based on respect and continuity of the knowledge and authority of elders. Cree regional autonomy is, according to this view, the newest, and most effective form of cultural assimilation. Indigenous societies like the Cree, in which a respect for elders and the social intimacy of forest camps are being altered by village settlement and administrative inclusions into government agencies, have, according to this view, little chance for cultural survival. This view has been a major impulse behind government policies which aimed at hastening assimilation to make inevitable transformations less painful.

A variation of this view emphasizes the erosive impact of technology. Western-trained amateur and professional observers alike are easily caught up in the romance of living close to the land, fatally susceptible to finding what is lacking in their own lives and cultural heritage, rather than what is or is not present in the daily life of the camp. Imported technology becomes seen as a sure sign of cultural decline when cultural integrity is defined by the use and retention of only locally-manufactured items. But for the Cree, several key manufactured items have become central to the continued viability of the forest lifestyle. Transport to and from remote camps was a seasonal activity, with travel by canoe taking several weeks to a month in the spring and fall; now it is made much easier and less seasonal with the availability of planes, automobiles, snowmobiles, ‘four-wheelers’, and motorboats. Shotguns for small game and waterfowl and breech-loading repeating rifles for large game have greatly improved hunting success. Chain saws make it easier to construct cabins and maintain the supply of firewood. In all these instances, forest life is more often enhanced, rather than compromised, by the manufactured item. The only value intrinsically violated by such uses of technology is the non-native observer’s sense of the picturesque. The forest life of Cree camps is easily romanticized by those looking for signs of a connection with the environment they have lost, but it has not remained unchanged by such things as road construction or new technologies in hunting, trapping, medicine, and communication. Even discarded building supplies left over from dam projects in the early 1990s resulted almost instantly in more permanent and comfortable cabins in many of the camps accessible by road. The forest way of life has a long history of accommodation and innovation resulting from outside influence. And while the usual way of perceiving this relationship is to see the camps as the furthest outposts of influence from ‘civilization’ there is a great willingness to accept and to initiate change within the limits of practicality.

A political misconception of the implications of administration stresses an opposite danger. Indigenous peoples’ uses of administrations are seen to be too effective in their defense of local culture, providing them with both a distinct identity and the means to pursue radical political objectives. The central concern here is not cultural survival but the political outcome of regional autonomy and recognition of sovereignty. While the expression of this idea occurred in the context of Quebec’s political maneuvering in the international arena, it would not have been put forth if some members of the government and the public were not ready to believe it. During the 1995 Quebec sovereignty debate, which was leading to a referendum on independence, Québécois nationalists created the image of indigenous societies the world over following the lead of politically savvy indigenous groups within their own province, making bids for status as distinct nations, pursuing radical autonomy, creating political turmoil. Here the potential of Cree institutions was more realistically portrayed while the actual political objectives of the Cree leadership were, perhaps purposefully, misconstrued. Cree leaders, as we will see in more detail in Chapter 5, used their rights of self-determination to make a claim for inclusion in the federal system rather than for their own independent statehood. Apart from the political maneuvering of this conflict over the intentions of Cree sovereignty, the mistake is easy to make. The Cree have developed a political organization that in many ways resembles the ethnic nationalism so feared or hoped for in other parts of the world. Their self-reference as a ‘Cree Nation’, with an ‘embassy’ in Ottawa can be misunderstood as the outward trappings of a strong proto-nationalism, not to mention (as we do later on) many of the referents of local identity and sovereignty that fit equally well with scholarly descriptions of nationalist movements. But the principal goal of Cree sovereignty is a fair, equitable, carefully negotiated and honored inclusion in an already existing state—Canada—rather than an independent nation. The Cree provide the interesting example of a nationalism within a nation, running counter to the common perception of ethnic nationalism as driven by goals of secession.

A variation of this theme involves an attempt to discredit the place of Cree leaders as stewards of the land. The Cree are keepers of the land in name only, this argument runs, but give them the control they seek and they will pursue industrial development as ambitiously and destructively as any of their free enterprise adversaries. In a brief filed with the International Water Tribunal in Amsterdam in February, 1992, for example, Jacques Finet, vice-president of Hydro-Québec, accused the Cree of using their concerns for the environment and native society as a way of gaining sympathy in a fight for ownership of the James Bay and its resources. “It wouldn’t be six months before you would see bulldozers in the area if it was their country and they had control over natural resources” (The Gazette, 1992a). Indigenous motives for ecological balance and stewardship of the land are seen as smoke screens for concealed ambitions toward power and profit.

Although based on a politically motivated attempt to discredit the Cree leadership in its bid to control forest resources, this argument points to an important feature of Cree society: village centralization and a rapidly growing population mean that a declining minority can successfully live from forest resources by hunting, fishing, and trapping. A pivotal challenge for present and future leaders is to encourage the viability and integrity of the forest way of life, while ensuring communication of its cultural values to a village population with fewer ties to the land. It is also faced with finding meaningful activity and employment for a population living in remote villages. This situation is a basis for those who say that, given greater control of natural resources, the Cree leadership would pursue identical strategies of land use as non-native private enterprise.

If we take the themes I have just described and render them into even more basic components, we arrive at a pair of opposites with administration and technology as the defining issues. Those who stress cultural differences between Cree and Euro-Canadian societies see bureaucratic institutions and technology as threats to the distinct lifestyle of the Cree, even under conditions of regional administrative autonomy. This perception fits well with a romanticized understanding of the forest lifestyle that stresses its incompatibility with technology and village life.

The opposite argument strategically aligns the Cree ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Living on the Land
• Chapter 3 The Origins of a Dual Lifestyle
• Chapter 4 Negotiated Transformations
• Chapter 5 Crisis and Accommodation
• Chapter 6 Struggles over Sovereignty
• Chapter 7 Conclusion
• Epilogue
• References