Cree
Freedom
By
ABC Australia
July
1996
00:00:16
(Voiceover)
For
most of the year the hunting grounds of the Cree are ice-bound.
00:00:28
(Voiceover)
But
in the brief Northern summer these stretches of forest are connected by a chain
of lakes.
00:00:41
(Voiceover)
Matthew
Coon Come had us flown to the far reaches of Lake Mistassini
to see the areas that Hydro-Québec had wanted to
flood.
00:01:26
(Voiceover)
The
young Grand Chief led the campaign that stopped those plans.
00:01:37
(Voiceover)
But
now he’s stepped in the middle of an even bigger fight.
00:01:47
(Matthew
Coon Come)
We
as Aboriginal peoples are caught, are caught between, the disputes between the
English and the French, constantly fighting over land which is not theirs in
the first place! And we’re caught in the middle. That is the dilemma, because
of them wanting to split up a country.
00:02:16
(Voiceover)
Matthew
Coon Come had brought us to his favourite fishing spot in the middle of the
lake.
00:02:30
(Matthew
Coon Come)
My
people are hunters, they’re fisherman so they live off the land. So they come here and leave the village around September,
you know and they look for small or big game like moose or bear and uh, and
trapping for mink, otter, etc. So they’d be spending almost
six months of the year here.
00:02:56
(Voiceover)
By
summer most of the hunting is finished, this is the season to fish.
00:03:02
(Matthew
Coon Come)
So
relaxing, uh it’s amazing just to be out here on the land.
00:03:10
(Voiceover)
The
lake and its forests are divided into hunting grounds used by Cree families for
generations.
00:03:18
(Matthew
Coon Come)
The
greatest accomplishment of my people is not that we built great dams or built
great pyramids or to build monuments for ourselves but to leave the land the
way it is, the way our ancestors saw it, the way my father saw it and my
grand-father. That’s our greatest accomplishment.
00:03:49
(Voiceover)
Though
only 40 years old, Matthew Coon Come has seen tremendous changes in his own
lifetime.
00:03:56
(Matthew
Coon Come)
From
the time I was a child, until now definitely I have seen where we came from
just uh, snow shoes and dog teams now we have skidoos and trucks and when we
get to our lands we use aeroplanes. The reality is, is that, I think development,
uh, will happen, but we would like to have a say as to the pace that that
happens and to be able to at least try to hold back, delay you know and to
allow for our people time. Time for the land to heal, time for my people to
adapt to those changes that are happening so fast.
00:04:42
(Voiceover)
The
Cree have adapted and still kept much of what they
had. But they fear that all that may be for nothing if Canada splits.
00:04:50
(Matthew
Coon Come)
I
believe that, uh, that Quebec wanting to separate from Canada is probably the
greatest threat since the arrival of the Europeans.
00:05:05
(Voiceover)
There
are 12,000 Cree in isolated small towns throughout the northwest of Québec. Mistassini
is where Matthew Coon Come was born.
00:05:26
(Voiceover)
He
became the Chief here when he was 24 and Grand Chief of Québec’s Cree in 1987.
00:05:43
(Voiceover)
He’s
so popular that he’s won every election since then by a wide margin.
00:05:53
(Voiceover)
Along
with all the children of his generation he was taken south to Indian boarding
school.
00:06:01
(Voiceover)
When
he was 16 he made the discovery that would shape his life.
00:06:07
(Matthew
Coon Come)
When
I picked up a newspaper of the Montreal Star at that time, if I remember
correctly, and looked at the proposed map, in which it showed that Mistassini
Lake would be used as a reservoir. And looking at it more closely realising
that the area where I grew up would be under water. The area that I knew as a
peninsula would become an island.
00:06:37
(Voiceover)
He
was looking at the plans of Hydro-Québec and it’s multi-billion
dollar project to dam the rivers of the northwest.
00:06:47
(Voiceover)
Without
the knowledge of the Cree, engineers and politicians had decided to harness the
energy of the great rivers flowing into James Bay. That was when the young
Matthew Coon Come decided to become a lawyer.
00:07:03
(Matthew
Coon Come)
My
father used to say: “You have to go, you have to learn
the white man’s ways and you have to try and understand them and then you have
to come back. Because we will need people that understand their ways maybe to
prevent them carrying out these insane projects as we saw them”.
00:07:23
(Voiceover)
But
in 1975 an older generation of Cree leaders signed the James Bay and Northern
Québec agreement, allowing the first stage of the hydroelectric project to go
ahead. A deal most of the Cree would come to regret.
00:07:55
(Voiceover)
An
immense dam was built on the La Grande river.
00:08:04
(Voiceover)
As
the full scale of the project became clear, shifting Cree towns, flooding
hunting grounds, new Indian leaders, led by Matthew Coon Come, vowed to stop
its planned expansion.
00:08:16
(Voiceover)
There
were heated demonstrations at the sight of the next phase.
00:08:24
(Voiceover)
For
Hydro-Québec’s plans had become so ambitious, that they were making deals to
supply electricity to the whole Eastern seaboard of the USA. It took an
international campaign led by Matthew Coon Come to stop the expansion. But the
Cree now fear, with some justification, that the separatists who run Québec
will revive those plans if Québec gains its independence.
00:08:51
(Proponent
for development)
I
think in the future it would be inevitable. Is it the right moment to do it
right now? Or maybe in 5 years 10 years? I don’t know but my understanding is
that one of these days anyway we will have to do it.
00:09:11
(Voiceover)
The
Cree know how much harder it will be to stop that development if their lands
become part of a new country desperate for income.
00:09:22
(Voiceover)
A separate Québec will want to exploit the
water, the minerals and the forests.
00:09:38
(Voiceover)
As
if by the hand of a capricious giant, 150ft trees are torn from the ground.
00:09:58
(Voiceover)
24
hours a day, all year round, these machines are operating in the virgin forest
of the northwest.
00:10:08
(Voiceover)
Each
machine takes 6,000 trees a day.
00:10:34
(Voiceover)
The
world that Matthew Coon Come grew up in, is disappearing.
00:10:43
(Voiceover)
Old
Charlie Etab is the Cree tallyman of the land now
being clear cut. It’s his family’s hunting ground. The tallyman is an ancient
Cree designation for the person who must maintain and protect the hunting
ground, on behalf of his tribe.
00:11:01
(Charlie’s
spokesperson)
The
only thing they see in those trees are the dollars, that’s why it means so much
for them to take every tree that they see on the land.
00:11:19
(Voiceover)
Huge
areas of Charlie Etab’s hunting ground have
been clear cut.
00:11:31
(Voiceover)
The
old tallyman says many of the animals he hunted have now gone.
00:11:35
(Charlie’s
spokesperson)
Ever
since the logging companies came in, that there’s been no moose in these range
of mountains that you see. And uh, before the companies came in the moose was
abundant.
00:11:49
(Voiceover)
Before
this happened forestry officials asked him to mark on
a map the moose yards and other areas of wildlife habitat.
00:11:58
(Charlie’s
spokesman)
But
the following year a when they came in all those areas, these areas that you
see, had been clear cut. Those are the same areas that they had identified to
the, to Quebec and to the forest companies for protection, now there’s nothing
left of them.
00:12:15
(Proponent
for development)
There’s
some couple of examples like that, that few maybe some radical speeches.
00:12:20
(Voiceover)
Quebec’s
officials say these are all problems of the past.
00:12:27
(Matthew
Coon Come)
The
only area here in Canada that is left to develop, in order to
extract the natural resources is on Indian ground.
00:12:34
(Voiceover)
The
natural abundance of Quebec’s northwest has made it a battleground on which
Canada’s greatest question may be resolved.
00:12:46
(Voiceover)
The
exploitation of those resources has caused such distrust, that the Cree refuse
to put at risk rights granted to them by the federal government. And so they say they’ll never agree to be torn away from Canada.
But for the French separatists, these assets belong to Quebec and are vital to
their future national interest.
00:13:10
(Proponent
for development)
It
seems to us that the Cree leader and many other Native people leader are
trained to make the people believe that those aspects has to
be put under a plastic dome and not touched by the civilisation. It’s not
possible to achieve that we think.
00:13:30
(Matthew
Coon Come)
It’s
always the case that we are asked to give up a way of life. That we are asked
to compromise. If nobody raises a finger, if nobody says boo, then they can do
as they please