Apportioning Responsibility for Cumulative Changes: a Cree Community in Northeastern Ontario

RICHARD J. PRESTON and JOHN S. LONG McMaster University Kashachewan, Ont.

In memory of Peter Sutherland, Sr., 1915-1998.

In the aftermath of failed negotiations with Ontario Hydro,1 we are continuing to collaborate in specifying the processes of change that have been affecting the environment, economy and culture of the Cree commu­ nity known as New Post over the past 130 years. We use the metaphor of a "conduit" for the transmission of cultural and environmental change, and are selectively defining the contents of the conduit in terms of a series of major modernizing processes. Our account of modernization is organized around: (1) travel; (2) larger scale (late fur- trade) transport; (3) industrial-scale (railroad) transport; (4) industrial- scale natural resource development; and (5) the implementation of govern­ ment programs and supervision. Apportioning responsibility for the modernization conduit is a difficult challenge. It requires that we identify specific externally caused changes, assess whether they were, on balance, damaging or helpful to the regional environment and indigenous culture, and then assess the approximate dollar value of the net negative effects ("impacts"). Our theoretical context for assessing cumulative cultural change was conceptualized along lines parallel to those currently being developed for

1 The immediate cause of this paper: we both worked as members of a negotia­ tion team, Richard Preston as a consultant to the New Post First Nation, and John Long as the "neutral facilitator" of the group. Long also provided a great deal of detailed information on the history of the region. Both the First Nation and Hydro members of the team were working toward the goal of assessing Ontario Hydro's degree of responsibility for impacts which were being grieved by the contemporary New Post First Nation, until (in our opinion) a change within Hydro's senior adminis­ tration ended the process. Both the Ontario Hydro and New Post members of this team prepared documents and tabled them, criticized each other's documents in writing, provided alternative calculations and interpretations of cumulative impacts, and met in person to discuss these issues, in hopes for a mutually satisfactory resolution of the grievances. APPORTIONING RESPONSIBILITY FOR CUMULATIVE CHANGES 265 cumulative environmental impact assessment (Lees and Bates 1990). Lees and Bates theorize about the assessment of cumulative change within the complexity of ecosystems, where cumulative change is seen as either the consequence of a single type of change of long duration, or of changes of several types which have mutually strengthening effects. To make the shift from nature to culture, we draw on previous theore­ tical studies of cultural change, especially on the theory of multilinear cultural evolution (Steward 1955, Murphy and Steward 1956). While not currently in fashion in anthropology, this focus on the technology-ecology nexus leads us to examine the way that changes in technology and environment limit people's options, and also transform their ability to draw adaptively on their traditional knowledge and skills. Given the scenario that we describe below, the evolutionary perspective seems to us quite compelling. It allows us to incorporate the theory of political economy, focussing on the conflict of cultures in terms of a marked disparity in structural power (Wolf 1980). We also have used acculturation theory, focussing on the adaptation and adoption of new cultural ideas, attitudes and behaviour (Sapir 1930, Hallowell 1950, Preston 1986), to account for the survival of families that had close experience with the "company family" culture of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). We believe that the three surviving (in fact, flourish­ ing) families were able to rely on their previous experience in relocating to find a more secure means of living. But this was more than taking the risk of moving to a new place and fluency in the dominant language. Most importantly, it was their bicultural technical and social competence in making periodic shifts to settlements for wage work. To account for the stark contrast with the other, more exclusively traditional "bush" families (Schuurman et al. 1992) which have (literally) died out, we follow the perspectives of cultural disintegration theory. Here we are focussing on the dysfunction or maladaptation of some trusted traditional cultural ideas, attitudes, and behaviour in the context of radically transformed ecological and social settings (Honigmann 1966, Shkilnyk 1985). To account for the recent development of a reserve-based culture, we use loss of freedom theory, focussing on the frustrationo f cultural integrity and continuity (Manuel and Posluns 1974, Driben and Trudeau 1983), and resistance theory. 266 PRESTON AND LONG

Our understanding of the cultural history of the New Post people was gained through successive attempts by several persons (Richard Neff, Linda Archibald, Lisa Schuurman, and the present authors) to distil this history, recording oral history and reading historical documents, making cultural-historical interpretations, and most recently by a "joint problem- solving" negotiation process. We both spent time with elders and others at New Post and especially with Peter Sutherland at Moosonee, people who generously shared their individual experiences with us. At the joint problem-solving stage of our analysis, we chose to use a time chart and "hang text on it" according to the major factors in develop­ ments, bringing in other impacting factors as they relate to the five major factors listed above and now described in detail.

TRAVEL The earliest conduit is organized around travel for subsistence and trade in recorded history: Ojibwe or Algonquin people2 in the New Post region would have been trading into Lake Abitibi, Moose Factory, Frederick House, Flying Post, Kenogamisee, Mattagami, and Kesagami. Travel by white men through the New Post region goes back to the early days of the fur trade: de Troyes travelled through from Montreal in 1686 on his way to capturing the HBC posts on James Bay. Annual visits by Catholic missionaries of the Oblate order begin in the 1840s, and a Methodist missionary was settled briefly at Moose Factory in the 1840s, followed by Anglicans of the Church Missionary Society from the 1850s to the present. The HBC established New Post in 1867, at the site of a convenient way-station on the Montreal-Ottawa-Temiskaming-Abitibi- Moose Factory river route. The "Cree-ification" of New Post (which previously had been populated by non-Cree from the Lake Abitibi region) began around 1900. Two families who had already moved south to Moose Factory from the west side of James Bay moved again, to the New Post region. We know that many "company family" people were sent south about 1902 in a Company downsizing (Long 1985). We suspect that the David Wynne family, from Fort Albany, who appear on the first New Post treaty list

2 The nomenclature is uncertain. These people include the Esau Omakees family; William Gull; John Luke; Daniel, Donald, Harriet and William Squirrel; Angus and Louisa Weenusk, Cecile Weenusk; and others. APPORTIONING RESPONSIBILITY FOR CUMULATIVE CHANGES 267

(1905), was one of these families sent by the Moose Factory manager. Perhaps this was also the case for Thomas and Annie Sutherland, from Cape Henrietta Maria, who were also on the 1905 treaty list.3 Sidney Archibald, the son of David Wynne's half-brother William Archibald, was adopted by the Wynnes and later married into the New Post band.

TRANSPORTATION Gradually, travel became involved with more than the local people's subsistence and the fur trade, and included Cree experiments with living "outside". By 1915-30 Cree people were travelling or sometimes sojourn­ ing outside of the New Post region as squatters around railway towns, or as students at residential schools. Some years before the railroad arrived at Island Falls in 1923, New Post people could take a cart ride to Cochrane for excitement and trading. One person adventured much further: Thomas Archibald, Sr., went off to World War I, and stayed out for some years, marrying a Scots woman and having three children. Kinship ties led to visits, and sometimes marriages, to Moose Factory people, Kesagami Lake people, and Rupert's House people.4 The kind of conduit had also changed to a larger geographical scale of transportation of goods and people originating from outside the region: HBC personnel and missionaries and their goods travelled through, and Cree people worked at freighting Company supplies on the river. The river road became increasingly a conduit of people, goods, disease, and knowledge of the outside. Disease (notably tuberculosis5) may have caused the deaths of 5 of the 20 New Post hunters in the winter of 1880-81, including the best

3 The Sutherland family moved south from the area between Severn and Winisk to Moose Factory, where the father, Peter James Sutherland, died. Some of his sons, including Thomas, then moved further south. David and Elizabeth Wynne, and David's half-brothers William Archibald and Thomas Taylor, moved south from Fort Albany to Moose Factory. William and Laura Archibald moved south from Fort Albany, and their son Sidney attended the Anglican boarding school at Moose Factory, subsequently working for both the church and the HBC, as well as trapping, wherever he could make a living. 4 For example, Sidney Archibald went to Rupert's House, and, after *e birth of his firstso n (Peter Sutherland) and the death of his wife (Bella Omakees Archibald), probably married Nancy Moses there. Later, Helen (Moses) Morrison and her uncle wintered with Peter Sutherland. 5 For a general discussion of tuberculosis in this region see Herring and Hoppa (1998). 268 PRESTON AND LONG hunter, and "before they had given in a skin" (HBCA D. 14/27).

RAILWAY TRANSPORT In 1900, the Government of Ontario created the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway (T&NO, now the Ontario Northland) to enable the development of natural resources and other commercial activities in the Moose River basin (Long 1997). These natural resources, which specifi­ cally included promising hydroelectric generating sites, were carefully integrated into the planning of the railway's route. During the construction of the roadbed, the unexpected discovery of silver in 1903 near Mile 103 out of North Bay accelerated the process. Mines and pulp mills required hydroelectric power for their operation, and all required the access pro­ vided by the railroad. Government support and cooperation between corporate developers was sometimes close, to the point that it caused a major political scandal in the early years. The rail line reached into the Moose River drainage in 1908, with the founding of the town of Cochrane (at the intersection of the T&NO and the transcontinental railways), and has since been a constant conduit of people and goods in and out of the area. However, there were initially many hun­ dreds of construction labourers. The railway caused the establishment of the town, and its connected factor of in-migration also brought diseases that contributed to a very high proportion of deaths. For the New Post people, there was a devastating 76% death rate for the decade 1913-22, although the 1919 influenza epidemic is not indicated in this location.6 Rail transportation is different from freighting by canoe brigades because the technology is larger scale, and it is permanently on the land, a source of cumulative influence. The railway was purposefully routed to the Abitibi River, where New Post lands included a major potential hydroelec­ tric site, the Abitibi Canyon. The purpose of this conduit was industrial development. Directly or indirectly tied to railroad construction, the thousands of

6 Causes of death are not often listed in the Moose Factory parish records at this time, but the number of deaths was not particularly abnormal in the period 1918-19. Bishop Horden remarked on a flu epidemic in 1908-09 in which over 100 Moose Factory Indians died. This would have been a substantial proportion of the population (perhaps 25% or more, but the 1907-13 records were lost in a fire), and may have reduced the effects of the subsequent pandemic, since those most suscep­ tible had died ten years earlier or had survived with increased resistance. APPORTIONING RESPONSIBILITY FOR CUMULATIVE CHANGES 269 people that the technology of development brought into the Moose River basin constituted — from a Cree perspective — a massive "trespass" on native hunting lands, but also created a magnet of access to urban goods, services, and excitement. This trespass was unlike any prior visitors on Cree lands, who had been few and were travelling through primarily for trade and exploration. In the Moose River basin, the large scale "trespass" brought the Cree people a tangible loss of freedom and an alienation from their traditional pursuits. In partial preparation for the new circumstances, then-Chief Sidney Archibald sent his son (and subsequent chief) Tom to residential school at Sioux Lookout.

INDUSTRIAL RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT About 1920, the conduit started to be reorganized around industrial resource development (hydro, mining, timber) that causes significant and permanent transformations of the land. The planning, implementation, and impacts of this industrial development in the Moose River basin began in 1900, when the Government of Ontario launched a comprehensive program of exploration of the province's north. Its purpose was to locate mineral, agricultural, forestry and hydroelectric power resources (Williamson 1948:9). For the New Post region, the resources developed during the first half of the century were principally hydroelectric and mining, while forestry and agriculture were more important in more southerly regions. The railroad started north from Cochrane in 1921, and reached Island Falls (within the New Post traditional lands and just south of the HBC post) in 1923, where Hollinger Mines began construction of the Island Falls hydroelectric station. By the 1930s we find squatter colonies of indigenous people on the edge of towns such as Mattice and Cochrane, along the trans­ continental railway. In 1933 Ontario Hydro began its activities as the major developer in the region, and thereby became a major source of cumulative environmental and cultural change. By this time the devastating impacts of communicable diseases were mostly past, and the T&NO construction during the preceding decade had given rise to a series of exciting but short-lived mineral pos­ sibilities, until the T&NO reached its Moosonee terminus on James Bay. The effects of the Abitibi Canyon hydroelectric project were mainly local during the early years, but given that the site is located within the New Post hunting lands, these local effects were radically transforming. 270 PRESTON AND LONG

In comparison with the other types of industrial development in the Moose River basin, the Abitibi Canyon project was massive, including the dam, its headpond reservoir, generating station, a permanent settlement known as the "colony" for maintenance, and an access road. It was probably somewhat less influential in its environmental and cultural impacts than the railroad that preceded it, but it was more influential than mining and (years later) forestry. In comparison with non-technology-based factors, such as the lure of wage labour and the commerce and excitement of Cochrane, and the influx of trespassers, the Abitibi Canyon dam remained a dominant factor. In the early 1930s, many of the "white trapper" trespassers were workers on the Abitibi Canyon project who stayed on to try living off the country. Estimation of the total impact of these factors, and the differentiation of these factors from each other is difficult. Preston charted by year the number of persons living by hunting and trapping in the bush, the number engaged in wage employment, and those living outside of the New Post region. With this data he concluded that Ontario Hydro's Abitibi Canyon dam, maintenance colony and access road, and its associated activities (such as sportsmen using the access road) accounts for approximately one third of the total cultural impacts of the period 1933-50. Given its imme­ diate proximity to the hunters' lands, this may be a low estimate. Preston believes that the losses to the traditional economy that are attributable to Ontario Hydro increased gradually into the 1960s. This was due to Cree observations of unhealthy fish near the Abitibi Canyon dam, the construction of a new dam at Otter Rapids and three new dams on the Mattagami River (195 8-63), the Little Abitibi (New Post Creek) diversion (1962), and logging of the New Post reserve (1958-59). There is a corre­ lated increase in strangers' trespassing on the land, and an increasing breakdown of Cree traditional hunting ethics and traditional respect for rights of land tenure. We regard this as a transforming, permanent intrusion into the New Post First Nation territory. Preston has personally thought of the dams as constituting huge iconic tombstones for the particular traditional Cree hunting culture of this region. But perhaps Preston is over-reacting by creating iconic symbols out of these large scale technological develop­ ments. What is the Cree view? Peter Sutherland thinks more locally. In terms of his personal APPORTIONING RESPONSIBILITY FOR CUMULATIVE CHANGES 271 experience,7 the impacts of the dams and flooding by their headponds are apparently less immediate than the New Post Creek diversion. This diversion sends water from the Little Abitibi River through the Otter Rapids hydro station. He regards this as the most intrusive act by Hydro, because it is located within his own traditional territory. Year after year the increased water flow from the Island Falls generating station continues to erode away the river banks, transforming his land, including grave sites. Peter's brother Tom was chief of the New Post band at the time of the diversion. He regrets the attitude Ontario Hydro expressed in the small size of the payment made for crossing the old reserve with an access road, and that no one asked permission for the diversion itself. He also dislikes the buildup of sandbars from siltation below the diversion, and laments the decline of Cree shamanism (reminding us that cultural changes at New Post predate Ontario Hydro). In either local or regional perspective, the Ontario Hydro intrusions changed the Cree people's feelings about their freedom and security in continuing to make their living on the land. Therefore, hydro development was radically intrusive and severely impacted the culture. And Hydro was obviously permanently there: like the railroad, and unlike the strangers, Hydro dams won't ever go away. There is little understanding of their engineering, but they remain tangible proof of incredible wealth and tech­ nology, projects that proceeded without consultation with the people who were living there, people who may understandably feel marginalized by Hydro's intrusions. Hydro has built five dams and has surveyed and planned for an additional six sites. Preston attributes a peak, around 1980, of 60% responsibility for the decline in traditional pursuits, on the part of Ontario Hydro. This attribu­ tion is based on his belief that at this time the sense among New Post people was that Hydro development was unstoppable and trapping was finished. After 1980, the Cree became more optimistic with evidence of protection under the law and with the development of self-government in

7 In the 1930s, Peter was a young man whose direct experience of the project was not damaging. He went to the Abitibi Canyon dam to sell his mother's handcrafted moosehide slippers to the workers. He remembers hearing the whistle blow daily at the dam site. He does, however, recognize that water fluctuation below the dams interferes with subsistence activities during open water (leaving fishing nets high and dry, or filled with debris, for example), and ice-bound activities (trapping, travel, and spring hunting). 272 PRESTON AND LONG

both the Moose River region and the Quebec region. At this point people began to return to harvesting the land, a new reserve was set up near Cochrane, and so the losses attributable to Hydro diminished. While mining became a significant part of the economy in the region, it was apparently not significant for members of the New Post First Nation in particular.8 With regard to timber, Tom Archibald says that jobs were available in 1948^49, when immigrants (displaced persons from eastern Europe) were brought in to work between Island Falls and Moose River Crossing. Timber from the (never-occupied) reserve was harvested in the late 1950s.

GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS AND SUPERVISION Ontario Lands and Forests moved into the north in the 1950s because the Hudson's Bay Company and the federal Indian Affairs Branch had recently established beaver preserves around James Bay, and Ontario felt it needed to assert its political and territorial rights. These regulatory schemes were seen by the Crees as interference, especially when Lands and Forests (now the Ministry of Natural Resources) imposed beaver trapping quotas, game wardens, trapline mapping, and individual trapline licences. This supervision, unlike Hydro development, doesn't change the land, but it makes hunters less free to get their living on the land. For example, Tom Archibald was charged and his gear confiscated for killing a moose out of season. Tom's wife Mary Rose couldn't understand this, even though Peter Sutherland translated the news into Cree for her. The Indian Agent in Moose factory told Tom he could fight the fine, but he didn't choose to fight. The New Post Cree regarded beaver quotas as unrealistic, since beaver were not scarce in the New Post region (as they were further north, in the James Bay region). Adapting to curtailment of freedom on the land meant living like a white man. For example, when Peter Sutherland realized that he could no longer count on making a living for his family by hunting, he went to work for the railroad, became a foreman, and then moved to Moosonee. But this adaptation changed the relationship of his life to his culture. Peter's long-term solution was to return to the land after working for the railroad for enough years to retire with a pension he could

8 The early 1900s saw major lignite claim-staking in the Abitibi area but Peter Sutherland never saw the mine; Willie Archibald (Tom's brother) worked for a few days in the mines around Timmins. APPORTIONING RESPONSIBILITY FOR CUMULATIVE CHANGES 273 depend on if hunting was poor. Most others were not so long-lived, or so successfully bicultural. Government influence has continued to support industrial development, although the Bob Rae government instructed Ontario Hydro to settle past grievances before proceeding with further development in the Moose River basin.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION From the traditional Cree point of view, the significance of events is a personal matter, and one person would be reluctant to speak for another — to offer what the significance was for another, or for the people as a whole. We have seen this in Peter Sutherland's views on the diversion of the New Post Creek. From this personal point of view, we can say that, in the early decades of the New Post band, disease was a crisis when you or a member of your family were sick. Disease was not viewed abstractly as an epidemiological problem. From the 1920s through the 1960s, transformation of the land by the railroad and hydro dams was significant because specific aspects of your land had been permanently transformed. These transforming develop­ ments were not seen as a significant general change in the region. From the 1950s to the 1980s, game wardens' restrictions of freedom were seen as serious intrusions on your personal freedom to live on the land according to your own sense of hunting ethics. These restrictions were not seen ab­ stractly as the imposition of a government ministry. Loss of personal or interpersonal power was not seen in terms of the larger context of unequal power, contrasting Ontario Hydro or Lands and Forests, on the one hand, with the New Post First Nation or the Cree of the Moose River basin, on the other. This larger-scale perspective grew with the development of organizational power, specifically Native self-govern­ ment, reaching strong articulation to the Government of Ontario in the 1980s. From the point of view of explaining cumulative cultural change, how­ ever, the more general structural processes emerging are significant. While the personal, interpersonal, and organizational types of power described above are of importance and must be appreciated, cumulative cultural impacts must be explained also as changes in structural power (Wolf 1980). Structural power operates within the settings of organizations such as 274 PRESTON AND LONG

those of First Nations, Ontario Hydro, and government ministries. But structural power also organizes and transforms these settings. In the case presented here, the structural power of Ontario Hydro's capital and technology enabled them to control the riverine environment in order to generate electricity, and to transmit it over long distances. The structural power of government's legal policies for controlling hunting, combined with Hydro's impact on the land, cumulatively diminished the traditional pursuits and culture of the New Post people. These people's own structural power was embedded in the "natural capital" of the animals and other land-based resources they used to make their living, the ethical integrity of their world view, and the environmental knowledge that served to guide their practical actions of getting a living in the bush. The consequences of these impacts were a marked dimmishment of the New Post people's power to continue their traditional pursuits and culture, felt as a loss of freedom on the land, the conviction that "trapping was finished", and that Ontario Hydro would continue to transform the land, and was unstoppable. But the past decade or so has seen a partial recovery of harvesting activities and a generalized cultural revival. And this revitalization is con­ tinuing.

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