(Long read)
ATTAWAPISKAT RIVER — There’s a brand-new clearing on the point above the rapids on the Attawapiskat River, 70 kilometres from Neskantaga First Nation.
By the time the planned Northern Road Link is built to the edge of this river in about 10 years, Neskantaga’s chief says those living in a permanent settlement here will be there to block the bridge and the road into the Ring of Fire.
“It’s going to be a village,” Gary Quisess says. “People are going to move away from the reservations. We’re so compressed with reservations, in the box. People are going to move away, back to the old ways where people lived separately, all over the place. That’s the way of our life, our culture.”
The Northern Road Link project that the Ontario government intends to build over this river and through these sacred sites would be the middle and last segment of what the province calls the "corridor to prosperity."
The portage around the rapids where the bridge would land on the north side of the river is mostly overgrown, but the clearings where campsites and a long house once stood are evidence the old ways are everywhere.
Since June, a contingent of mostly young people from Neskantaga and Attawapiskat First Nations have been living nearby, combing these lowlands to prove how this land has always been occupied – and in doing so, they’re still occupying it.
Some of that treasured evidence was old refuse; a rusty fuel barrel, the lid from an old can of beans, or the remnants of a rusted-out snowmachine from the 1970s, complete with fashionably bygone yellow and orange streaks.
Other findings show a deeper commitment to this place. Fluorescent flagging tape leads through the woods to moss-ridden, wooden rubble. These structures are believed to be “log tents,” two or three layers of dovetailed wood serving as the base under a prospector’s tent. They were commonly used in winter from the 1870s onward and their remnants suggest some members likely fished and trapped at the rapids, year-round.
“People think we’ve been living on a reserve,” Quisess says. “We’ve never lived on a reserve.”
The most powerful archaeological evidence is implied by the imposing eight-foot cross that looms over the river, two kilometres from the proposed bridge. No one is certain whether the person whose remains are buried beneath the cross belonged to Neskantaga in the west or was from Marten Falls, 50 kilometres south through mostly muskeg.
Neskantaga is relying on its elders to recall the many villages in this area, along the Attawapiskat River and throughout the lakes around it, particularly around 1954 when the sturgeon fishery opened. They say there are graveyards on the islands and eskers all over this territory.
Leo Moonias spent three months in the summer of 1958 blazing a trail from that channel, about 90 kilometres along the treaty line to Webequie First Nation. The 84-year-old recalls villages on Windsor Lake, cabins surrounding Attawapiskat Lake, what he called a “huge village” in between, and he’s aware of seven or eight grave sites on MacPhail Lake. He personally witnessed burials, or cremations, when no tools were available. Most of those, he says, were along the Attawapiskat River.
“People are buried all over the place,” he said through an interpreter. “Wherever the person was deceased was where they left the body.”
David Moonias, 79, spent his first summer trapping downriver with his father, at the age of 11. As the two made clothes from buckskin, the elder pointed out graveyards at the rapids, dating back to the 1930s. David recalls at least four seasonal communities and villages all the way to Pym Island on both sides of the river. He says even if the road can be built across the Attawapiskat River without disturbing gravesites, he can’t see how it wouldn’t unearth the remains of ancestors to the northeast.
“My grandfather used to tell me the eskers, which is where people lived, you can drive straight across there when the water was high in the middle of the bush,” he says, speaking through an interpreter. “Every place people have resided, there’s a grave. There’s a big concern about the cemeteries once the development goes. Every single one is probably going to get hit, all along these big eskers.”
Neskantaga has been an outspoken opponent of the proposed Ring of Fire development, citing both community traplines where the Eagle’s Nest gold mine would be built, and a legacy of infrastructure underdevelopment on the reserve.
Then this spring, Ontario passed its controversial Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act. The act allows the province to suspend any law in “special economic zones” for “trusted proponents,” and Premier Doug Ford has been vocal that he intends to make the Ring of Fire first among such zones.
Nishnawbe Aski Nation Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler promised “fierce” resistance on the land while nine First Nations are challenging the law’s constitutionality in court. First Nations leaders say the law tears up hard-won regulations around consultation and accommodation.
The bill amends the Ontario Heritage Act as to how archaeological assessments are triggered, how known sites are protected, and how exceptions are identified. Speaking to committee hearings about Bill 5 at Queen’s Park in May, Chiefs of Ontario regional chief Abram Benedict said cooperation was beginning to produce mutually beneficial results and losing that progress could jeopardize the social license First Nations grant to those industrial projects.
“First Nation communities, you have to understand, have been subject to colonization,” Benedict said. “Governments who have made commitments that have not lived up to commitments, governments who have said that they’ll bring prosperity and trampled over First Nation rights in doing that.”
Benedict said First Nation communities are not opposed to cooperating with industry and government for development projects, but that process must be done respectfully, democratically, and through consultation with Indigenous leadership.
“But the second that our community burial grounds, our sacred grounds, and traditional medicines are trampled over in the name of development, that project's social license will be revoked. Communities will not sacrifice the sacred burial grounds of our people, will not sacrifice the lands that are pristine, that have the waters, that have the medicines, that have kept our people well for decades, in the name of prosperity.”
The Ontario government’s response has been to offer a $3-billion loan envelope for First Nations to purchase equity in development projects.
Chief Quisess says he’s offended that his people should be forced to gamble by hitching their fates to these extraction companies when they have rights to the land and their community lacks basic infrastructure from the failed treaty commitments of the past.
“We want some development in our community. It’s pretty hard to give up your resources if there’s no development in the community. We have our future generations. They’re more into our livelihood,” he says. “They don’t have proper facilities up here and it can’t be only one-time funding, it has to be long-term. The other thing is, where’s the revenue sharing? I don’t think anyone in the world would want anyone coming in and taking the resources in their backyard without any revenue.”
Neskantaga’s water plant is a national highlight of failing First Nations infrastructure. It has never produced potable water since it was built, more than 30 years ago. But the longest-standing boil-water advisory in Canada isn’t the only urgent concern.
A state of emergency Neskantaga chief and council declared in April is still standing. The flooding and fuel in the groundwater below their health facility prompted them to shutter the building and nurses have been operating from a temporary outpost in a duplex ever since. While Indigenous Services Canada has pegged repair costs at over $2 million, the community has requested that a new facility be built.
Locally, these infrastructure failures aren’t just understood to be essential services that aren’t available. They’re seen as promises that called nomadic people off the land, only to fail to deliver – twice.
Quisess says his grandmother was living at the rapids downriver when Canada apprehended her and forced her to attend residential school. In the decades following the treaty signing, the government promised a better life for those who abandoned these lands to settle at the former Hudson Bay Company trading post, known as Lansdowne House.
A broken, old church still stands on the hill overlooking the pow wow grounds at Lansdowne House. The roads are intact, but the homes and other buildings all were razed in the 1990s. Canada had progressed to the next promise: a better life down the road in what is now Neskantaga First Nation.
“I come every mother’s day to offer tobacco,” Quisess says of the old reserve where he was born on the shore. “My mother gave me life. This was home. Just imagine how many houses there were here. We were forced – the government – forced us. Now today, we’re living in third world conditions.”
Quisess says the myth of prosperity is what led Neskantaga's people to forced settlement in the first place. Then it happened again when they were forced to move from Lansdowne House to Neskantaga. But, he says, it’s a lie that’s at the core of both the leadership's determination to oppose the Ring of Fire development and the imagination of youth to find their future on their land — in the same ways that their ancestors used the land years ago.
Lakehead University professor emeritus Scott Hamilton’s team found evidence of widespread traditional land use when they performed an above-ground archaeological study of the site in 2012. That included a shift to contemporary tools in the 1960s to support the lifestyle with snow machines and five-gallon barrels, cut with a chisel for heat. He said members of what is now Neskantaga and other communities lived in “dozens, if not hundreds” of seasonal gathering sites along the river, into the 1980s.
It all adds to his opinion as a professional anthropologist, but admittedly not as a legal expert, that Neskantaga has a strong claim to lands on which the Northern Road Link, as well as the Marten Falls Access Road, would be built.
“Their leadership are being sort of pushed into a corner where they’re almost forced to become gladiators to protect the interests of their communities against their relatives in other communities. And that is also part of the colonial legacy that they’ve been trying to resist,” Hamilton explains.
Ontario established a trapline registry in 1948 so trapping families like the Mooniases could have guaranteed exclusive rights to certain territory as road and rail expanded northward. That brought a flood of non-Indigenous trappers Hamilton describes as, “trapping everything out and then moving on somewhere else like a horde of locusts.”
As Canada built elementary schools on reserves, it made certain family payments contingent on living in those communities to have children attend school. Trapline rights, which may have been used by an entire extended family, formally followed one member or another as they moved to different communities for work or to start their own families.
This brings about what Hamilton calls the “modern problem,” where governments, using their own records to determine their consultation responsibilities, are not just overriding the nomadic rights of time immemorial, but are manipulating the rights of the past 70 years of recent history.
“It’s no coincidence that developers and the provincial government see this as a wedge issue to sort of break up solidarity of Indigenous political positions because they can play one community off against the other. But you can see where modern statecraft only makes sense if we understand it in the broader, ethnohistorical context,” he says.
“We’ve got to get this shit right and as we’ve watched what’s happened in Ottawa, there has been a recognition among Indigenous leadership that these are the moments that are going to decide the next 150 years of development. Can we figure out ways of living and working together in a post-colonial way or are we creating a new kind of colonialism?”
Dayna Scott is a professor at Osgood Hall Law School and the Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change. She believes conducting all the archaeological work to Ontario’s standard across this entire territory would be an expensive undertaking. Moreover, she sees the “special economic zones” introduced in the province’s Bill 5 as evidence that it’s “hell-bent” on disinheriting First Nations communities of land rights and the tools they have to uphold them.
She sees what First Nations leaders are doing in Neskantaga and elsewhere as living their legal, cultural and political order, which is inspiring an alternative path of resistance.
“The important part is not the extent to which the state recognizes those orders, it’s that in reclaiming them, the communities are re-energizing them for future generations,” Scott says.
“So it’s inevitable that the state will have to reckon with the power of these Indigenous legal orders but it’s also irrelevant, to a certain extent, whether they can right now or not — because the power of it is inside the community itself.”
When Lashaunda Waswa was seven years old, her grandparents took her to visit her ancestors on a boat, then on what she remembers as having been a long walk through the bush. He had her lay tobacco on the graves, some of which were marked with crosses, others with rocks. She has travelled northwest of the reserve many times to his trapline on Attawapiskat Lake, but she remembers her grandfather saying his parents and their parents were buried all over the territory, and that he wanted to be laid to rest out on the land.
Now, at 21, Waswa is the youngest member of Neskantaga council. She’s largely responsible for the young people who are combing the land for evidence to prove the land they’re occupying now is land they’ve always shared. Using drones, they came across a clearcut nearby the planned road where drill holes show mineral samples have already been pulled for testing. It’s clear to her that the work needed to confront this project needs to be done at the site – and she says more young people are on the way.
“You can go to big cities and protest, but sometimes, come to certain areas like this,” she says. “Now that I’m bringing these youth here, I’m hearing from youth in other surrounding communities that they want to come here too. They don’t have the supports we have in our community. We were able to talk to our leadership and convince them. Even for those youth who don’t know why they’re here, we have to show them why we’re here. We have to teach them.”
Ricochet / Local Journalism Initiative
