"Keeping the old ways flowing"

By Donna Sinclair

When the tide is high it's a 15-minute trip by freighter canoe and high-powered outboard across the Moose River separating Moose Factory, Ont., from Moosonee. When the tide is low, sandbars rise in the river like great brown whales. Those sandbars are one of the things people worry about when they talk about Ontario Hydro's plan to build six new dams and re-develop six old ones on the Moose, Abitibi and Mattagami Rivers.

Dan Wesley, for example. A teacher at the local high school, he was a seven-year-old who spoke only Cree when his trapping father, urged by a dream, brought him and his brother Norman to Moose Factory to go to school. He knows how to call down a Canada or a blue goose out of the sky, and he knows this country. More dams, he fears, and more silt, more erosion, could dry up the river.

And then how will his students, with their daily ferry, get back and forth? What will happen to the fish, a dietary staple here, Wesley says, already affected by the six dams build in the early '60s? "When I was a kid 30 years ago you'd go upriver and catch fish all over the place. I came back in 1976 and there were hardly any fish for angling; lots of whitefish, if you want to put out a net. But for sturgeon, pickerel, pike, carp there's hardly any around."

Munroe Linklater has been chief of the Moose Factory First Nation, served on the board of Northern College, and been active in Native concerns nationally. Like Wesley, he knows this country; he knows too, that the dams signify much more than a rise or fall in the water level. They are a statement about who is in charge of the land.

This is a country where even the smallest change makes a difference. The geese, for example, subject of the traditional hunt for most of April, have been disturbed in recent years by air traffic. They no longer feed in the swamps above the tidemark. Instead, "they are eating all that seaweed along the flats, now. They have a fishy taste. The system has completely changed."

And the goose hunt is important for far more than the food. It pulls the people upriver for up to a month in the spring. It's a time when the children learn a teepee has to be set up facing east; they learn the right way to leave it: always go around the fire, never step over food. The grandchildren and aunts and uncles are there, reaching them. This keeps the traditional ways alive.

When people from other areas of the province contemplate drowning over 1,600 hectares (4,000 acres) of this land and changing its river irreparably, they wonder about those old ways Linklater talks about. If people were locked into new patterns, maybe construction jobs would be good to have. But Moose Factory First Nation Chief Norm Wesley, Dan's brother, doesn't see it that way. This is a place where the old ways are still precious, co-existing comfortably with a wage economy. The same people who are teachers, for example, go upriver for the weekend, and close down the local high school for part of the goose-hunting season.

A land-use researcher from Halifax spent last summer here talking with local people. Norman Wesley remembers how "he had this map on the wall" marking the areas where people hunted geese in the spring and in the fall, where they hunted moose, and fished, and trapped and cut wood. Wesley looked at the map, with its many layers and colors. "My God," he exclaimed, "we use this land this much." He smiles. "I was really impressed with us. It was a beautiful map, an expression of who we are."

All that is at risk if the dams go through. Linklater says it would affect "beaver, mink, otter in terms of their habitat. There are certain areas where these animals congregate. All these areas would be flooded. It would change the whole thing."

And then there's the vast infrastructure these large developments require. Roads, for instance. They'd bring more drinking, more drugs, more prostitution, says Wesley.

William Nicholls is a Cree from Mistissini, Que. He has already seen the enormous damage done by Hydro-Quebec developments in the James Bay region. Mercury poisoning, for example. Naturally occurring mercury becomes toxic as vegetation decomposes under flood water, poisoning fish and those who eat them. Eelgrass, eaten by some kinds of birds, is adversely affected by changes in the salt content of dammed water. Holding, then releasing of huge quantities of water creates air pockets under the winter ice, making it unsafe for caribou and hunters. Fluctuating water levels also make for terribly confused beaver, like the ones Nicholls saw who "kept building higher and higher, adding on to their dam. Then - with the fall in water level - you ended up with a beaver lodge 24 feet in the air."

Today, the Oldman Dam is virtually complete. Water backing up behind the massive concrete barrier will eventually flood 45 kms of the Oldman, Castle and Crowsnest valleys. Some environmentalists warn that coyotes, ground-nesting birds and other animals will be displaced from their homes. Many Natives bemoan the loss of herbs used for ceremonial and medicinal purposes, willows used to fashion sweat-lodges, and cotton-wood trees that provide poles for the minister Rev. Bill Mayberry. He thinks the government could have found less-destructive methods of bringing more water to south Albertans, but now that the dam is almost built, it's time to get on with life. For Mayberry, the only remaining questions concern justice for Born With A Tooth and the pressing need to settle the Peigans' and other Natives' land claims. "The Indian issue is a land issue."

But for others, the principle at stake - the Oldman itself - is too important to let go. "I've sat in jail. I've been ridiculed. I've gone through what you would call hell. But, to me it was not hell, because I knew what I was protecting. I was protecting the river." In the basement of McKillop United in Lethbridge, Milton Born With A Tooth speaks earnestly to 20 non-Native young people attending Alberta and Northwest Conference's annual meeting. Wearing long, black braids and a beribboned vest, he appears clam although he predicts an escalation in the Lonefighters' ongoing battle against the Oldman Dam.

"They (the government) know I am willing to die. Not that that's extreme. When you really care about something, isn't that the ultimate goal? Isn't your religion based on a man who was willing to die for what he believed in?"

Born With A Tooth says he feels bound to protect the Oldman River and the landscape it nourishes because they are his ancestral home. "Three or four hundred archeological sites are being buried right now. Some are 10,000 years old and beyond. How many people here can say their bones and roots are that deeply embedded in the territory they live in?"

To Born With A Tooth, the river is a sacred force. "It's our foundation, our constitution.... If you destroy our river, that can never be replaced. You destroy everything that we are: our sweat-lodges, our thinking, our playground, our burial sites - everything is there."

The Lonefighter leaders says he doesn't like the idea of violent confrontation, but legal methods have failed to stop the dam. By ignoring court verdicts favoring the non-Native group Friends of the Oldman, the government has broken its own laws.

"We said, 'If the judicial system will not listen to white people, what makes us think it will listen to us?'"

Later, in an interview, Born With A Tooth says it's not too late to undo the damage that has been inflicted on the river - to turn the river valley into a huge natural retreat offering Natives and non-Natives a kind of medicine for the soul.

For now, his mission is to broadcast the river's plight as widely as possible. "I'm giving the river life. Otherwise, people would never have known about it. I've always said, the Oldman can teach the world something - and it is." He rises, grinning, to go to his next speaking appointment. "But, they need a bad guy. I'm willing to be it."

To Milton Born With A Tooth and his supporters, the spiritual aspect of nature outweighs economics. As the Lonefighter leader told United Church youth, Natives lived in harmony with the land in southern Alberta for thousands of years before the Europeans arrived. Inhabitants of this dry but beautiful terrain wouldn't be in their predicament if those settlers had adapted to the land instead of perceiving it as something to be conquered.

Born With A Tooth says farmers who visited the Lonefighter camp last summer accused the Natives of Trying to destroy their lives. "We said, 'Look, our lives were destroyed first'."