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Can blockades and occupations bring positive change in Canada’s Aboriginal communities?
In Blockades or Breakthroughs?, edited by Yale D. Belanger and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, contributors debate the importance and effectiveness of blockades and occupations as political and diplomatic tools for Aboriginal people.
Offering an in-depth survey of occupations, blockades, and their legacies, from 1968 to the present, this collection argues that blockades and occupations are instrumental, symbolic, and complex events that demand equally multifaceted responses.
The following excerpt is from Lackenbauer’s “‘The War Will Be Won When the Last Low-Level Flying Happens Here in Our Home’: Innu Opposition to Low-Level Flying in Labrador”.
I have seen our children robbed of everything that makes us Innu in a school system which makes them look down on their own people and culture. Our people have been deeply wounded by what has happened in the past 25 years. The one thing that has stopped our total breakdown as a people has been the months we still live away from villages in our tents in the country. For the families who now have houses in Sheshatshit we find ourselves right alongside what Canada wants to make into a NATO base. Even without a base, each year military activities grow there and the number of low-level flights increases. There is now a bombing range. Most of these activities take place over or near lakes where the Innu go in the spring and fall. We have been shoved to the edge of a cliff in the last 25 years. Now they want to push us over it.
Nitassinan is our land. We never gave it to them. How can they come in and take it and treat us as if we were not human beings, as if we were invisible? There is only one Nitassinan and one Innu people … We are fighting for our land and our identity as a distinct hunting people. We are not going to jail, becoming separated from our children just to get rich land claims. Our fight is not about land claims which is only another thing being used against us to get us to surrender what we will never, ever give up – our ownership of Nitassinan and our identity as Innu.
… In the 40 years that the military has been in Goose Bay, the Innu’s culture has collapsed. The use of our lands by others, without our being consulted, has caused stress in our family relationships and links to our family violence. The Innu did not welcome foreign domination. It happened against their will. Now we are just starting to fight back because we realize that only we can and should decide our fate.
Elizabeth (Tshaukuesh) Penashue
Elizabeth (Tshaukuesh) Penashue, born into an Innu hunting and trapping family in Labrador, moved to the community of Sheshatshit in the 1960s. Disillusioned with the plight of her people and convinced of the need for the Innu to return to the land, she (alongside other women) took a leadership role in initiating direct action to oppose low-level flying out of Goose Bay. Defence planners and pilots saw Labrador and eastern Quebec as a useful space in which to simulate tactical air strikes, and many non-Innu Labradorians saw the air force base as the backbone of regional economic stability. By contrast, the Innu viewed low-level flight training as an infringement on their unceded territory – Nitassinan – and an existential threat to their culture.
A series of Innu occupations of the Minipi Lake bombing range and the Goose Bay airfield between 1988 and 1990 stymied air operations temporarily and led to the arrest of more than a hundred Innu protestors and their supporters. Most important, from the Innu standpoint, they provided a dramatic stage upon which to draw national and international attention to their cause. The Innu enjoyed a high level of support from non-Aboriginal interest groups that helped to connect their messages of sovereignty, environmental threat, and cultural genocide to broader antidefence, human rights, and environmental agendas. In a concerted campaign predicated on the “politics of embarrassment,” the Innu manipulated ethnic symbols to establish “colour of right” and generate public sympathy. Although the Innu’s direct action tactics did not contribute to the Canadian government’s failed bid for a NATO training centre, stop lowlevel flying, or secure official acknowledgment of their sovereignty over Nitassinan, Innu spoke about how they gained dignity and self-respect from the experience. In this sense, the failure to achieve the direct political goals was offset by internal empowerment and a sense that the Innu could stand up to government and generate support for their plight.
BACKGROUND
The Innu (known as Montagnais and Naskapi in Quebec) have occupied northeastern Quebec and Labrador since time immemorial. As a hunter-gatherer society, they followed a seasonal cycle based upon small family units living in camps in the interior and at river mouths along the coast. When Europeans arrived, there was little pressure to expand development into the interior of what Jacques Cartier called “the land God gave to Cain.” Sustained contact came at a few fishing settlements along the Labrador coast and then through relationships with fur traders and missionaries. The larger bands that hunted and trapped for animal furs began to acquire European goods, but until the mid-twentieth century the impacts of non-Native settlement on Innu life were modest compared to the impacts on other Aboriginal groups living in areas where economic development interests had drawn extensive state attention and control. This lack of pressure meant that no treaty was signed between the Crown and the Innu.
Euro-Canadian developments began to disrupt the Innu’s nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle during the Second World War, when Labrador’s strategic importance drew attention and Canadian and American soldiers, airmen, and seamen arrived in a “friendly invasion.” By 1943 Goose Bay was touted as the “world’s largest airport.” For non-Aboriginal civilians, the air presence was a boon. Its creation, however, displaced a settlement of about thirty Native families and provided few jobs for Native peoples once construction finished. The Cold War reaffirmed Goose Bay’s strategic importance and allowed Canada to make alliance contributions on the cheap. US Strategic Air Command stationed nuclear strike forces at the base in the early 1950s, and Royal Canadian Air Force and US Air Force units had begun intensive training at an air-to-air firing range by mid-decade. British Royal Air Force Vulcan bombers began low-level flight training in 1967, but this training was infrequent, and the altitudes flown did not disrupt local residents or regional land use patterns. The presence of NATO allies made the base a pillar of stability in an otherwise uncertain economic geography, and despite various economic development initiatives, Goose Bay’s dependence on the military made it a “single-industry town.”
For the Innu, the postwar period was marked by profound changes. After Confederation in 1949, the federal and provincial governments negotiated arrangements to provide health, welfare, and education services to the Native inhabitants of Labrador. These services, coupled with declining caribou populations, low fur prices, and coercion from religious and state authorities, promoted permanent settlement in fixed communities like Sheshatshit and Davis Inlet in the 1950s and 1960s. Two Innu women noted the breakdown in Innu culture and in the relationship between the people and the land that resulted:
In the 1950s Europeans began to move into Nitassinan in large numbers. They built a railroad and a mining town, Schefferville. At the same time, a foreign government moved into Nitassinan. They tried to stop the Innu from moving and began to build the first houses to keep us in one place.
In a few short years, we have been completely robbed of our land and freedom. We have seen control of our country, the land that gave us birth as people thousands of years ago, taken from us. Now we are treated as though we are invisible. We are a hunting people. To keep us in one place, in a village, they have tried to separate us from everything that gives our life as a people meaning; it has also meant that we have been changed in only a few years from one of the most self-reliant, independent peoples in the world to one of the most dependent.
The organizations that play by the European rules of the game, are supposed to help us, but they were introduced among us in the 1970s to try and control us by making it impossible for us to fight back. If we did something they didn’t like, they threatened to cut off money and sometimes did so. Even here, in expressing our anger and resistance, we were dependent.
P. Whitney Lackenbauer will be a speaker at the upcoming
WALRUS TALKS ARCTIC
Winnipeg Art Gallery
March 26, 2015, 7PM
Lively, thought-provoking ideas about the issues & opportunities that make the North truly unique. Event info >
To learn more about Blockades or Breakthroughs?, or to order a copy, click here.
For media requests, please contact publicist Jacqui Davis.
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