Cree Indians in Quebec Give Up Their Old Ways, Find New Life in Town Difficult

“You used to go and meet the boats,” Abraham Bearskin, a Cree Indian, was saying. “You had things going. You could see the bay. Now, the only place people go is the commercial center.”

Bearskin was talking about life before he and 2,000 other Cree Indians, with a scattering of Eskimos and whites, moved to Chisasibi, and what it is like now in the 5-year-old town, with curving streets, suburban-style homes and a shopping mall.

Home had been a 180-year-old site called Fort George, five miles away, but the old buildings there were threatened by erosion and by a giant hydroelectric power project and the community was forced to relocate.

Switching from the old way of living to the new has been difficult.

Men Trap, Hunt or Fish

The new town is near the mouth of La Grande Riviere, which flows into James Bay, an arm of Hudson Bay, about 700 miles northwest of Montreal. But the people can’t see the bay anymore.

Nearly all the adult men still trap, hunt or fish, as they did at Fort George, but when they return from the snowy scrub forests, they hang around a new shopping mall, between the department store, the branch bank, the airline office and the cafe.

Because of the move, the people have better housing and modern facilities, but they miss what one trapper, George Lameboy, 36, called “the home feeling.”

“I moved reluctantly. I think everybody did,” he said.

‘Some Still in Shock’

“Some of us are still more or less in shock,” said Bearskin, who is a member of the band council and Chisasibi’s director of youth protection.

Meetings of the Cree Trappers Assn. are conducted entirely in the Cree language, since practically no one older than 45 speaks English or French.

The teen-age sons and grandsons of the trappers, however, favor rock-singer Ozzy Osbourne T-shirts or Oakland Raiders sweat shirts. Their school classes are in English, but they talk among themselves in Cree.

“You see the kids, they like heavy music, they wear the T-shirts of the groups,” Bearskin said. “There’s a confusion, an adaptation to two societies. You’re exposed to things happening down south and sometimes you abuse some things or you retaliate in some way.”

Alcohol and Drug Problems

The school and the shopping mall show marks of vandalism, and Bearskin said alcohol and drugs are serious problems for many youths. The band council voted last year to ban alcohol in Chisasibi, but beer and liquor are smuggled in and the ban is being challenged in court.

In the multipurpose room of the modern school building, as part of an evening’s entertainment for delegates to a recent Canadian Indian conference, middle-aged townsfolk danced the traditional Otter Dance, then switched to Irish-style reels.

On stage beside the fiddler and the electric guitarist, Cree elders showed how to make snowshoes and demonstrated other traditional crafts.

“We’re trying to draw the good things from the new society and hold on to the traditional way of life,” Bearskin told a visitor.