‘Caught Between Two Worlds’ : Modern Man’s Encroachment in Quebec Forever Alters Cree Way of Life : Quebec Dams Evict Tribe From Home

A tepee made of black spruce poles wrapped in canvas stands at the edge of the reservoir near a hydroelectric dam the engineers call LG2.

The Cree who set up this camp have gone fishing, but scattered in the pale green caribou moss are signs of recent habitation: empty soda pop cans, used paper plates, a bag that once held ketchup-flavored potato chips. Western civilization has come, as suddenly as an early snow, to the desolate land of the Cree in northern Quebec.

“My people are caught between two worlds, and many are not doing well in either one of them,” said James Bobbish, the chief of this Cree village. “Events are moving too fast. A lot of the Cree are lost.”

5,000-Year Culture

For 5,000 years, the tribe had the run of the vast sub-Arctic wilderness, their lives bound to the life cycles of the animals and the rhythm of the seasons. The rivers and forests provided nearly everything they needed and little that the rest of the world wanted.

Although many American Indian cultures were swallowed up by modern society, the subsistence-hunting culture of the Cree was left alone. The tribe adopted a few modern tools--shotguns for hunting geese and outboard motors for canoes--but those things complemented, rather than changed, the traditional ways. For a time, it seemed that the 20th Century, like the 19th and the 18th, would largely pass them by.

In 1971, however, the government of Quebec decided it wanted the electric power that could be generated by harnessing the rivers of the north. There would be power to meet the growing demands of greater Montreal and Quebec City, and plenty left over to sell to New York and the New England states.

Uninvited, Quebec’s government-owned electric company cut a road into the land of the Cree and began building dams. As the dams have gone up, the Cree way of life has withered.

“The things the Cree care about are being torn from them,” said Alan Penn, a technical adviser to the tribe.

The invasion of the outside world has brought the Cree electricity, insulated houses, television, running water, automobiles, telephones, central heating, a cash economy and a declining infant mortality rate.

It has also stripped the Cree of most of their lands, drowned more than 4,000 square miles of their hunting grounds behind a vast network of dams and dikes, poisoned their fishing grounds with mercury, altered their diet and brought them tooth decay, heart disease and alcoholism.

“I feel sadness mixed with helplessness,” said Helen Atkinson, a Cree health worker and the sister of the Chisasibi chief. “Someone is coming and doing all this to you and you can’t do anything about it.”

Barbie Dolls, BIC Razors

Signs of change are everywhere in Chisasibi, largest of the seven Cree villages, where 3,000 people live beside the La Grande River.

In the new commercial center, middle-age Cree who used to trade beaver pelts for sugar and shotgun shells shop in the Hudson’s Bay Company Store for I-Ski brand sunglasses, Barbie dolls, BIC razors and panty hose. Some puzzle over the National Examiner and such headlines as “Lusty UFO Aliens Seduce Earth Women.”

Outside his family’s ranch-style house, Charlie Ekoomiak, 3, clutches two plastic action toys. He is dressed not in the traditional skins, but in a black leather jacket, running shoes, sweat pants and a Michael Jackson T-shirt.

The village itself is a product of the hydroelectric project. Nine years ago, the villagers lived on Ft. George Island at the mouth of the river. They were forced to move when the dams increased the flow of the river and the island began to wash away. Hydro-Quebec, the government-owned utility, spent $50 million to help build the new village.

The speed with which the tribe of 10,000 has been driven into the modern world is exemplified by Bobbish. He was born 39 years ago in a winter hunting camp on the Seal River and spent much of his childhood in crude lodges and tepees. Today, he sits behind a desk in the commercial building, working on tribal budgets and economic development plans.

“I feel drawn to the bush,” he said. “But it is hard to pull out of the office for a few weeks of hunting and fishing.”

“The bush is our natural element,” he said. “To us, it is the ultimate teacher. It gave us our knowledge to survive and our philosophy of life. If a person does not know how to make a fire, he will freeze. If he does not know how to kill an animal, he will starve. It is a harsh teacher, but a fair one.”

Only about half of the Cree still keep the tradition of disappearing into the bush several times a year for 10 to 12 weeks of hunting.

A government subsidy program intended to preserve the hunting culture allows a hunter with a large family to earn up to $16,000 by spending most of the year in the bush. A single hunter can earn as much as $5,000.

Bobbish said that is often not enough, because it costs a hunter about $6,000 a year to outfit himself, and the cost of living in the changing Cree society is high.

The number of Cree children alone is enough to doom the tribe’s old way of life.

Until about 15 years ago, 50 of every 1,000 Cree babies died in infancy. Improved housing and medical care have cut that figure in half, so now there is a population explosion. Already there are too many Cree and too little game for the tribe to survive solely on hunting and fishing, said Robert Brunette, vice president for Indian affairs at Hydro-Quebec.

Furthermore, the Cree hunting grounds are shrinking.

When hunting grounds along the La Grande River were flooded by the dams, the Cree began traveling farther to hunt along a network of roads and snowmobile trails built by the power company. When Hydro-Quebec builds new dams on the Great Whales River to the north and the Broadback, Nottaway and Rupert rivers to the south in the next two decades, the additional loss of hunting grounds will be massive and irreplaceable, said Penn, the Cree adviser.

The future for the Cree may be one of welfare and unemployment lines, a condition unknown in a society where one had to hunt and fish to eat.

“I think the prospects for the Cree are a lot bleaker than people have been willing to admit or talk about publicly,” Penn said.

But from his perspective high in Hydro-Quebec’s skyscraper in Montreal, Brunette does not see that the Cree have much to worry about. “The Cree,” he said, “are very rich.”

In a 1975 land settlement with the provincial government, the tribe received $180 million. The Inuit, a group of 3,000 natives of the far north where no dams are yet being built, received $108 million.

That is less money than it seems. For the Cree, it works out to $18,000 a person. Rather than distribute the money, the tribe has invested it and is spending the interest income on public projects.

For the money, the Cree and Inuit relinquished their claims to all but 5,225 of the 386,000 square miles of northern Quebec wilderness. The price works out to less than $1.25 an acre.

The agreement sets aside a further 60,000 square miles as exclusive hunting grounds for the Cree and Inuit, but also allows hydroelectric power, mining or other uses with additional compensation to the natives. The entire remainder of northern Quebec can be developed without additional compensation, but the Cree retain exclusive trapping rights there.

Bobbish said that the Cree hate the settlement, but that Hydro-Quebec “was going to build these dams anyway. All we could do was make the best deal we could.”

When Hydro-Quebec first invaded the Cree territory, it declared it “largely unexplored and virtually uninhabited.” The Cree, who thought the land theirs by right of thousands of years of use, had never signed a treaty with Quebec or Canada.

The seven Cree bands responded by meeting as one people for the first time. They formed a central council to represent them and hired a Montreal lawyer to file their lawsuit. Cree hunters who had never seen a city traveled to Montreal to testify in provincial court.

The initial court decision on Nov. 16, 1973, granted the Cree and the Inuit title to an area 10 times the size of Maine and ordered Hydro-Quebec to halt construction on the La Grande River.

One week later, the Quebec Court of Appeals overturned that decision, declaring the interests of a few thousand Indians could not be allowed to stand in the way “of the general and public interest of the people of Quebec.”

Faced with the prospect of a lengthy appeal, the two sides negotiated what is now known as the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement.

Because of it the land where Job Bearskin used to hunt ptarmigan and trap beaver now lies at the bottom of the LG2 reservoir.

“I miss the beauty of the land and the happiness we had from our freedom when we walked upon it,” Bearskin said in Cree as Atkinson interpreted. “I miss it in my heart.”

Bearskin and his wife, Mary, both 77, said they appreciate some of the things that have come from contact with modern society. They like the telephone and their color television set. They are grateful that they do not have to chop wood to keep their house warm.

“But it would have been better,” he said, “if the dam builders had not come.”

Before the dams, the river could speak, he said. “People would talk to the river at the rapids. The trees and the animals could talk. The spirits of the hunters who died on the land walked the river banks with the spirits of the animals they had killed. These things must have been true at one time, because the people believed them.”

When the land was flooded, he said, “it was like a killing.”

“They have drowned things that were living. What are they doing to us? What are they doing to our garden?”