Struggle for a Home

By Jim Niedbalski

Jim Niedbalski, an adjunct English professor at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, wrote his master's thesis for the Professional Writing program at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth on the impact of Quebec hydroelectric development on the Cree people. This article represents a portion of his thesis.

The 300-mile-long Rupert River is one of the great rivers of the James Bay region in northern Quebec, second in size only to the La Grande River. Its headwaters is the huge Lake Mistassini, a 75-mile-long by 10-mile-wide gouge at the southeastern edge of the James Bay Territory. The Rupert empties from the west side of the lake and flows through small lakes and riverine sections for about 150 miles. It then pools in Lake Nemaska, about halfway between the source and the mouth on Rupert Bay, a southerly extension of James Bay.

For centuries, a couple hundred Crees gathered every summer on the west shore of Lake Nemaska, which in Cree means "lake of many big fish." During the brief warm season, the Crees netted bottom-dwelling sturgeon and caught trout in the river. They smoked the fish and prepared for the long hunting and trapping seasons ahead. In September, when the winds turn cold and ice begins to form on the lakes, family groups headed out into the bush.

Some went upriver to the headwaters of the Rupert; others downriver toward a series of falls on the Rupert; still others south into the Broadback River drainage. They set up winter camps on their traplines, from which they hunted moose and bear, and trapped beaver and other small animals. In June, after the ice breaks up, they'd portage and paddle back to Lake Nemaska for the annual reunion and summer respite. From the seventeenth through twentieth centuries, they supplied furs to the Hudson's Bay Company in exchange for guns, cookware, clothing, and food staples.

In 1970, their world took a sudden turn.

In the summer of that year, a float plane landed on the deep blue lake and taxied up to the cluster of small cabins, tents, and shacks. A government official climbed out and, without much fanfare, told the Crees they would have to leave their thousand-year-old home. The Cree elders asked why.

"He said that the whole village would be under water soon," said Thomas Jolly, a Nemaska Cree. "Quebec was going to dam the Rupert River. The lake was going to rise about thirty feet." At that level, only the Anglican church steeple and the cemetery would be dry.

The Nemaska Crees knew little of political maneuvering in Montreal and thought they could do nothing except leave. This time, when they left in the fall, they would not have a home to return to in the summer. They packed up their few possessions, left Lake Nemaska, and moved to other Cree villages.

Some went to Mistassini on the southern shore of that lake. Others went to the James Bay coast to Waskaganish, then called Rupert House, or to Wemindji, then called Painted Hills for the colorful clay formations. The other Crees accepted the Nemaska Crees with varying degrees of civility. The Nemaska dialect was a bit different from those of other bands, and communication was sometimes difficult. Some villages resented the visitors using their traplines to harvest food and fighting ensued. The Nemaska Cree had lost their home and their sense of place in the Cree territory.

Ironically, the Rupert was never dammed. Instead, Hydro-Quebec, the province's giant public utility, chose in 1972 to dam the mighty La Grande River, 200 miles to the north. The Nemaska Cree,

having left under duress two years earlier, were reluctant to move back to their lake home in case the dam-builders once again claimed their river. The Nottaway-Broadback-Rupert project, which would divert the Rupert and Nottaway rivers to several powerhouses on the Broadback, was still on the drawing board. For several years, the Nemaska Cree remained scattered throughout the territory.

Nemaska Crees get a new home

As a result of the La Grande project plans, the Cree nation, along with their Inuit neighbors to the north, negotiated and signed the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement with the provincial and federal governments in 1975. The Crees relinquished land claims to most of their traditional territory and gave official consent to the project. Future developments were allowed under the agreement, provided they pass a rigorous environmental and cultural impact review. In return, the 6,000 Crees received $150 million in cash and retained hunting, trapping and fishing rights throughout the territory. Their eight villages would be rebuilt with modern housing and utilities, with three of them linked by road to "the south."

Rather than go back to the uncertainty of their former village on Lake Nemaska, the elders chose a site on Lake Champion, two dozen miles north. A seventy-five mile gravel road connected the new village with the James Bay highway. The old village was used as a fishing camp, but nothing more. The Nemaska Crees had a new place to live, but the traditional meeting place was fading into memory.

In the late 1980s, as the Cree nation braced for its struggle against proposed dams on the Great Whale River, the people felt a renewed sense of pride in their cultural link to the land. Soon, the Nemaska Cree were making an annual summer pilgrimage to the former village, now officially known as Old Nemaska. For the past several years, most of the 500 inhabitants have loaded up their pickup trucks and vans and driven out to the north shore of the lake. There, they clamber into their canoes wide wood or fiberglass boats seating six or more people that are equipped with outboard motors and ride the final few miles to their former

home. This usually takes place in early August.

The Rupert-Broadback trip

In late July 1994, Troy Gipps and I drove the 800 miles north from Massachsuetts to Nemaska. We planned to start our 200-mile canoe trip near the new village, paddle upstream into the Rupert River drainage, and then portage into the Broadback River drainage and follow that big river to Rupert Bay and Waskaganish. This would be the third of my five canoe expeditions to the James Bay Territory, of which Gipps, an alumnus of Massachusetts College, would accompany me on four.

As on all the expeditions, we came for the adventure of paddling wilderness rivers and embracing a landscape mostly untouched by man. We also came to further learn about the proud Cree people and to try to understand how hydroelectric development has changed their lives.

At the Nemaska village headquarters, we picked up a radio, a bargain rental at two dollars per day, that would be our safety net on our trip. On an expansive meeting table, we rolled out our topographical maps to review our plans. We wanted to get some local insight as to the best route from Lake Nemaska to the Broadback River drainage.

As soon as the maps were spread out on the table, several men appeared from various offices. They had all grown up in the bush the common term for the backcountry and probably didn't use maps much. Some of them looked puzzled as they tried to find their familiar routes to the Broadback. Dark, wind-burned fingers traced the blue lines of the map. Some of the older men spoke in Cree to the younger men, who translated the questions about our trip. We told them we wanted to know the shortest overland route to the Broadback River. Within a few minutes, a tangle of several fingers were circling the maps, accompanied by mumbling in Cree and broken English. For a fleeting moment, Troy and I were sorry we had asked.

In a break from the chaos, an elderly Cree nudged my elbow and pointed to a cove in Lake Nemaska. He traced a straight line from the lake over the height of land far less than a mile of actual

distance to a series of lakes that emptied into a tiny river. I followed his finger as it zig-zagged along the stream for a few inches roughly twenty miles and watched it empty into the Broadback. At that, he waved his hand downstream, cracked a hint of a smile, and left the room without saying a word.

Despite having pored over the map many times before leaving home, Troy and I had never seen that route. Our previously planned route would have had us portaging more than twice the distance of the old Cree's route. The new route turned out to be one of the easiest and most pleasant paddling experiences in five trips to James Bay.

Troy and I rolled up our maps, grabbed the radio, thanked the men, and headed out of the office. Matthew Tanoush, who had given us the radio, stopped us before we reached the door.

"Will you be stopping at Old Nemaska?" he asked. We hadn't planned it, because we didn't know anything was there the map only indicated an "old village site."

"Everyone will be there next week won't you be passing through then?" Our route would take us right by the village. "And I have a cabin on Lake Ukau Amikap use it if you want."

The first two days of the trip required a tortuous upstream paddle and portage into the Rupert River drainage. Out of shape and not used to carrying heavy loads, we struggled up and over rain-drenched rocks and pulled the boat through weed-choked shallows. It rained consistently for those first two days, and the only break in the showers came when a vicious thunderstorm rolled across the water and hammered us with horizontal fury. At the end of the second day, Tanoush's cabin was a welcome relief from the raw, wet weather. By noon the next day, we finally reached current that ran with us instead of against us.

The teenagers and the scouts

On a clear morning four days after leaving Nemaska, Troy and I paddled down the Rupert toward Lake Nemaska. In the distance, several brightly colored tents stood out against the dark green backdrop of spruce trees. Two dozen boats were beached at the village, and a few craft zipped over the wind-whipped blue chop.

We beached our seventeen-foot canoe a tiny boat compared to their canoes and walked up to Tanoush, who had watched us paddle in.

"See any moose?" he asked. We hadn't, but had seen lots of geese. "Good. I don't have any left in my freezer."

On the beach, a dozen children waded into the warm shallow water with plastic buckets and shovels. Two young boys, about six and eight years old, ran up to us, slingshots in hand, and asked what we were doing there. After we explained, Elijah and Simeon (many of the Crees have Biblical names) continued to plunk small stones into the lake as we chatted. The two were brothers who were here with their mother; their father lived in another village. A group of teenagers shuffled by and eyed our canoe and gear.

"Watch out for him," Elijah said, pointing to one of the teenagers. "He's no good. He'll try to steal your stuff." From then on, the young boys were our scouts and our friends.

On a small bluff above the beach, a hundred Crees milled about. Old women tended slabs of sturgeon on racks constructed above smoky fires. Others cleaned the large fish or prepared loaves of

Photo of Simeon and Elijah (#2)

Elijah and Simeon, our two "scouts" at Old Nemaska

bannock. A group of men unloaded lumber from boats and carried it to the church, where another group pounded new siding onto the dilapidated building. And as usual in Cree villages, bands of teenagers wandered around, looking bored despite a flurry of activity around them. Many teens hung out at the makeshift store, where shelves were stocked with canned foods and sweet snacks, reminiscent of the days when the ubiquitous Hudson's Bay Company maintained stores in all Cree villages.

That evening, as the Crees gathered around a bonfire on the beach, I talked with Chief George Wapachee about life in Nemaska before and after the James Bay Agreement. As we spoke, I noticed the same bands of teenagers huddled in a separate group around the fire. I asked Wapachee why the teenagers don't participate in the activities of the villages.

He explained that because so many Crees were separated from their families by the Canadian government's former policy of educating Indian youths in the south, the kids grew up without a grasp of nuclear family life.

"When I was a boy, I had to go to school in Ontario," Wapachee

Photo (#3)

A Cree elder at her camp at Old Nemaska

said. "Every fall a plane would come here and take me away. I missed my parents so much. I'd come back at the end of June, and stay through the summer, but two months with your family isn't long enough for a young boy."

A widening generation gap

These Crees, who were shipped off to school, now have kids of their own who attend Cree-run schools in their own villages, but because they were separated from their parents during most of their formative years, these Crees did not learn effective parenting skills. Also, the government's Income Security Program, which encourages Crees to hunt and trap in the bush by providing per-diem expense money, often separates the families. While one parent, most often the father, is away from the village for extended periods they must spend at least 120 days a year in the bush to qualify for a maximum of about $17,000 a year in benefits the children stay home to attend school. (An exception is the "goose break," when school is closed for two weeks in the spring and fall to allow entire families to head out to their bush camps to hunt the geese during the birds' annual migrations.) This widens the gap between generations, leaving the teenagers further disconnected from their parents. Cree teenagers today are also swayed by satellite television images of life in the south, and Wapachee said many are ambivalent toward a traditional Cree life.

The next morning, as Troy and I talked to the men rebuilding the church, our two young scouts rushed up to us. "You should check your tents. We saw some kids messing with them," they said.

Our tents had been pulled up and tossed a few yards away, but nothing was missing. The perpetrators had actually started the process of packing up for us, since we were leaving later that day. A few hours later, as we paddled away from Old Nemaska against a stiff breeze, we waved goodbye to Elijah and Simeon, who playfully shot a few stones near our boat. Women flipped fish near rising columns of smoke, and men hammered nails into the revived church. Young children played on the beach, while the teenagers stared listlessly out at the water.

As Old Nemaska faded from sight, it occurred to me that the

teens acted similarly to the average teenager in the south.

· · ·

The portage route shown to us in the Nemaska office was there, all right but sheer stupidity prevented us from finding it right away. The morning after camping at the far end of Lake Nemaska, we saw an overgrown path leading from a cove up a small hill. Although the path did not line up with our compass bearing, we each saddled up a heavy load and took it anyway. The trail soon fizzled out, and we clawed through thick spruce, dragging our heavy packs through the tangled mess. We soon realized we had taken the wrong path, but unwisely decided to keep heading toward a small lake instead of turning back. Lightheaded from hunger, thirst, and exhaustion, we trudged on. Another compass bearing and a hour of endorphin-crazed bushwhacking brought us to the height of land. Troy climbed the tallest spruce, and shouted that he could see the small lake off to the southwest, still a spruce-choked half-mile away. By the time we reached the lake, dropped our packs, and headed back on the real portage trail, it was late afternoon.

The trail cut straight through the trees from Lake Encasse to Lake Nemaska, barely rising a hundred feet. It took less than an hour to get back to our canoe. At sunset we started our final portage and arrived at the lake in darkness. Donning headlamps, we loaded up the boat and paddled around until we found a reasonable campsite. As I collapsed into my tent, I could almost hear our Cree friends laughing at us.

· · ·

As the sun hung low over Rupert Bay, our two canoes sliced through the small wave train in the last rapid on the Broadback River. Dean Pulver and Bobby Dolan had joined Troy and me at the James Bay Road for the 90-mile trip down the Broadback to Waskaganish. Ten miles of bay stood between us and Waskaganish. Crees there had told me over the phone that we should paddle the shallow Rupert Bay at high tide; otherwise, we'd have to paddle a mile out into the ocean. Near dusk, the tide appeared to be coming in and the weather was good, so we headed north to the village.

Even with the tide, the bay was only a few feet deep 200 yards from shore. A west wind kept pushing us toward shore, and the

going was slow. As the sun dropped, the wind died down, and only the sound of our blades parting the glassy surface accompanied us. We still had a few miles to go, but we paddled slowly to savor our last few hours in the bush. The clear sky offered an amazing display of Northern Lights, directly in our paddling path. Aurora Borealis "wastuskun," or "dancing spirits" in Cree is not as common here as it is farther north in the territory, and this was the first time we'd seen it this trip.

The Lights were so bright it seemed we could almost hear the static electricity dancing across the sky, like the imperceptible sound of windwhipped dry snow. As the lights of the village neared, a new sound replaced the imagined revelry. Hoots and hollers and screams echoed across the bay. Now nearly midnight, we wondered who could be creating such a ruckus.

It was the teenagers.

Marauding gangs of kids patrolled the streets of Waskaganish. We saw them high up on the bluff overlooking the bay, but they didn't appear to see us. Exhausted by the time we pulled up to the boat dock, we beached our boats and rolled out our sleeping bags onto the dock. My watch read 1:00 a.m. as I zipped up my sleeping bag, and I could still hear laughing and shouting in the distance.

The struggle against despair

One of the first questions I asked Billy Diamond when he met me at the Kashee Lodge in Waskaganish the next day was about the teenagers. Diamond, a Cree in his late forties, was the Crees' political hero in the 1970s. He was elected Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees of Quebec in 1973 and became a tough arbitrator in the struggle to preserve Cree life in the face of the La Grande project. With Inuit representative Charlie Watts, he negotiated the James Bay Agreement that brought the Crees and Inuits into the twentieth century. He gained the respect and, in some cases, the fear and disdain of some of the federal and provincial officials and lawyers with whom he fought tirelessly. Some Crees say that power has gone a bit to his head, but whether or not they like him now, Billy Diamond is outspoken and gets things done. A few years ago,

he stepped down as grand chief and came back to Waskaganish, his birthplace, to become chief there.

Two decades of committees, negotiations and politics have taken a toll on his physical appearance. A modern political leader has little time for the bush, and his belly now sags over his belt, making him swagger as he walks.

Today, about two-thirds of the 10,000 James Bay Crees are under age twenty-five, due to a baby boom in the early 1980s after the Crees moved into their new year-round homes. "The teenagers don't grasp the situation of Cree life today," Diamond said. His generation, he said, was frustrated and hopeless, too, and battled with drugs and alcohol. But he and his peers realized that they needed to turn to the land for healing. Cree elders, Diamond said, need to give teenagers responsibility and direction: "There doesn't have to be despair."

To that end, every summer a group of Waskaganish teens and elders paddle up the Pontax River and back down the Rupert in a spirit of cultural connection to the land that has sustained them for 5,000 years.      ||

Jim Niedbalski wrote his literary-journalism master's thesis on the impact of Quebec hydroelectric development on the Cree people. His article, "Struggle for a Home," represents a portion of that work. Niedbalski has written articles for several magazines and is a contributor to The Berkshire Eagle. He has taught journalism at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts for ten years, and is an academic advisor to The Beacon, the student newspaper.