Each season, Boréal publishes Le Boréal Express, a magazine which presents their new titles. A feature of the publication are "Four Questions" they ask their authors. Zebedee Nungak's response to the questions posed to him were too important not to present in their entirety (because they had been published in the magazine in an edited version).
Four Questions
Are the fights you
have fought for your nation a painful memory?
Yes.
Fighting for our rights is a painful memory on the following counts:
We
had to contend with governments, provincial and federal, who in their arrogance
inherited from colonial times, allowed major development on Indigenous lands
without any regard for the rights of the original occupants of these lands: the
Cree and the Inuit.
Development
corporations were given permission, and free reign, to blast and bulldoze lands
and rivers, which its Indigenous occupants depended on for life itself, without
even a notice to these people.
What
should have been rights-based negotiations between only the governments and
Indigenous parties, included, from beginning to end, direct, at-the-table
participation of development corporations. These entities had even less regard
for Indigenous rights than governments, but were allowed to promote their
interests.
The
draconian terms and conditions, especially that of surrender and extinguishment
of rights in and to the land, imposed by governments upon the Cree and Inuit
caused irreconcilable divisions among the Inuit. These divisions were deep and
profound. Close to forty-four years later, reconciliation between the Inuit of
Nunavik over these divisions has yet to take place.
40 years after the
fact, what is your assessment of the James Bay Agreement? Did more bad than
good come out of it?
The
James Bay Agreement became a marker of necessity in a relationship, however
lopsided, between Indigenous peoples and unenlightened governments. It
established, for the first time in the Canada’s existence, highly imperfect
co-existence arrangements based on the colonial legacy of superiority/inferiority
equations.
The
worst feature of the Agreement was imposition of surrender and extinguishment
of rights upon Indigenous peoples treated as inferiors by governments, who
simply dictated their superiority on this fundamental point. Governments
operated, as the title of my book says, on the basis of “colonialism on
steroids”, generally treating Indigenous people as inferior.
The
government of Quebec congratulated itself for being “progressive” and generous
enough to produce this Agreement. However, it overlooked the fact that it had
been totally absent from the territory it had gained jurisdiction over in 1912
for fifty-two years, until 1964.
Quebec
should have been providing government services, and governing the territory and
its people since 1912. Quebec belatedly agreed to provide health, education,
and municipal services only in 1975, through this Agreement. Quebec was extremely
delinquent on this matter.
After
the benchmark of the James Bay Agreement was established, Canada as a country
started progressing toward some positive thresholds in its legal and political
systems, by favorable rulings and decisions. The recognition of the Aboriginal
rights of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis in section 35 of the Canadian
constitution in 1982, and the Tsilqot’in decision of the Supreme Court of
Canada in 2014, are examples of this progress.
However,
the need to correct the forced imposition of extinguishment and surrender of
Aboriginal rights to establish agreements between governments and Indigenous
peoples is still outstanding, unfinished business.
The
worst by-product of the Agreement is the broken harmony of Inuit which resulted
from its signing. Some Inuit supported the Agreement, but many opposed it vividly,
and wholeheartedly.
In what way were
the stakes of the Inuit people in the James Bay Agreement different from that
of the other First Nations?
Inuit
were not defined by Canada as having a legal status of their own. The only
mention of Indigenous peoples in the British North America Act, 1867, was
section 91 (24), whereby Canada’s federal government was assigned
responsibility for “Indians, and lands reserved for Indians”.
In
a legal dispute between the Province of Quebec and Canada, triggered by
Quebec’s refusal to pay an invoice sent by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1936 for
welfare the company issued to Inuit during times of famine, the Supreme Court
of Canada issued a decision, called In
RE: Eskimo in 1939, which declared that the Eskimos (Inuit) of Quebec were
“Indians” for the purpose of legal definition.
In
addition to the lack of clarity of the legal status of Inuit, the James Bay
Project directly impacted the lands and rivers of the Cree of James Bay. Inuit
were less directly impacted, and were regarded by governments and development
entities as a “secondary” Aboriginal party.
This,
in part, caused Inuit negotiators to work harder to be included in all
substantial parts of the negotiations.
The
Inuit of Nunavik were the very first Inuit group in Canada to cross the threshold
of surrender and extinguishment of Aboriginal rights in a formal land claims
agreement. For this, Inuit unity was dramatically broken, when many dissidents disagreed
with the terms and conditions under which the James Bay Agreement was signed.
No
such division was experienced when Inuit from other regions of Arctic Canada
reached their own respective agreements in subsequent years. [Inuvialuit in
1984, Nunavut in 1993, and Nunatsiavut in 2005]
Do you believe
that true reconciliation is possible in Quebec between the different
communities?
If
reconciliation between different communities (Inuit of Nunavik and French
Quebec) is possible, it will take perhaps decades to achieve. Here is why:
Although
political developments have placed Nunavik in Quebec’s jurisdiction since 1912,
the Inuit of Nunavik have not shared in French Quebec’s mainstream history and
culture. It is obvious that French Quebecers are not in their natural element
in Nunavik. The climate is Arctic. The staple food is wildlife harvested from
the land and sea. The language is Inuktitut. The people are Inuit; not
descended from immigrants from across the ocean. Nunavik is not the natural
habitat of French Quebecers.
Conversely,
Inuit are not in their natural element in French Quebec. They are a miniscule
minority in Quebec’s total picture. Even with scores of the younger generations
gaining facility in the French language, most Inuit consider the French people,
language and culture, “foreign”, and do not easily embrace the “Quebecois”
identity, and all it entails.
Perhaps
Quebec can help facilitate further reconciliation by making provision in the
Quebec National Assembly for one seat for each of the eleven “Amerindian”
nations living within the Province; and demonstrate its willingness to
accommodate them in its legislature.
