‘You gotta know how to do things yourself up here’: For modern reserves, success is in balancing tradition and capitalism
Jonathan Kay | Jan 19, 2013 3:24 AM ET | Last Updated: Jan 19, 2013 6:31 PM ET
More from Jonathan Kay | @jonkay
More from Jonathan Kay | @jonkay
Jonathan Kay/National Post
The Post's Jonathan Kay visited
James Bay communities to see first-hand the state of First Nations
reserves in Northern Ontario. Abraham Metatawabin, centre, is a former
chief of Fort Albany, a reserve on James Bay.
When I talk with Abraham
Metatawabin about his life in the bush, there is a communication
problem. I do not speak Cree, and the 92-year-old Fort Albany, Ont.,
elder does not speak English. But even with his son Chris acting as
translator, there is another, more basic impediment: The hunting,
trapping and fishing methods he learned as a young child in the
sprawling riverlands west of James Bay are so basic to his way of
thinking that he doesn’t even think of them as activities requiring
explanation, and so I have to keep interrupting him for more detail.
Commanding a team of sled dogs, building a shelter out of wood and cured
animal hide, catching a pike dinner with nothing but a baitless hook:
You either knew how to do these things in the bush, or you became a
frozen, emaciated corpse.
I came to talk with Abraham at his home on the Fort Albany reserve not just because he is a link to a bygone era, but also because the Metatawabin family as a whole — of whom I met four generations, in three different communities, during my travels to James Bay this past week — constitutes a sort of living roadmap to the wrenching transformations that First Nations have endured over the last half-century.
Like most members of the Fort Albany First Nation, Abraham was brought up as a Catholic. But he still has strong memories of his grandfather, a traditional 19th-century medicine man whom the RCMP hunted as an outlaw. Abraham’s father was recruited out of the bush into the Canadian army, and fought the Germans in the First World War.
At the time, he tells me, Indian servicemen were promised all sorts of things upon their return — a plot of land for farming, a barn, and animals. The family even considered giving up the bush life. But when the war ended, Abraham’s father was put on a train, and deposited at the Pagwa trading post. He headed downriver to the bush, where he continued hunting and trapping until the end of his days.
Abraham remembers that life as tough but exhilarating: The hard work and natural diet made everyone strong, fit and wiry. He brought down wolf, deer, moose, caribou, beaver, muskrat, otter, mink and fox — even squirrels for his dogs to eat as snacks. At trading posts, he exchanged some of his furs and cured hides for the few things he couldn’t hunt or make, such as flour, sugar, lard, tea and coffee.
He had everything he needed. After the Second World War, the Canadian government even gave Abraham a gun and a steady supply of ammunition, as part of a Cold War-era military reconnaissance program. All Abraham had to do in return was share his knowledge of the land, and shoot any invading Russians.
But in the 1950s, he remembers, the old ways became more difficult. The fur trade dried up. And a rail line from Cochrane, Ont. to the James Bay town of Moosonee had vastly diminished the commercial importance of the Albany River, formerly the region’s lifeline. Natives started to migrate to Moosonee, which had a large residential school, a tuberculosis clinic, and a substantial government presence.
By the mid-1960s, the remaining Fort Albany band members were demanding their own modern houses and amenities. Abraham, now the community’s chief, started traveling to Timmins and other large towns to negotiate with federal officials. The old treaties, which formerly had been only a vague presence in his life during his early years, started to loom more important. For the Fort Albany Cree, it was the first stirrings of what we now recognize as modern First Nations political activism.
The wall on Abraham’s living room is full of happy photos. His 10 surviving children have produced about 35 grandchildren (he’s not sure of the exact number), including many who have gone on to post-secondary education, and a soldier who has done two tours in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, Abraham has misgivings about the way things have changed.
It was around 1965, when the federal and Ontario governments signed the Indian Welfare Agreement, that things really started getting fouled up, he tells me: For the first time, it became possible for large numbers of aboriginals to do nothing but “drink and watch television.”
“There are hardly any people who go to the bush now,” he complains. “Young people who work are looking for wage labour. The bush is too quiet for them. Everyone wants to drive a truck. And they want to be able to take a shower now and then.”
“Now I hear about people on disability,” he sniffs. “We didn’t have that in my day.”
He points to a black-and-white photo on the wall — a trapper whom his son identifies as one Xavier Koostachin.
“That fellow had one leg. But he went around the bush on crutches, providing for his family,” Abraham says. “No ‘disability’ for him.”
As we drive through the Fort Albany reserve in Edmund Metatawabin’s
pick-up truck, he asks me: “Do you see any drunk people. Are all the
homes broken down?”
The answer is no — and he wants me to say it. Based on the way the media reports stories from remote fly-in reserves such as Fort Albany, many Canadians have formed the impression that communities such as his are crumbling junkyards full of miserable alcoholics. But during my week’s travel to the James Bay reserves of Fort Albany, Kashechewan and Moose Cree, most of the homes I observed were surprisingly ship-shape. Even Attawapiskat, which became a media sensation last year over a housing crisis, was not quite as bad as I’d imagined. And while there is no doubt too much substance abuse going on behind closed doors (including Oxycontin, a growing problem), public drunkenness on the reserves is taboo. All but Moose Cree are, technically, dry.
Edmund, one of Abraham Metatawabin’s seven sons, was chief himself in the 1990s, and is fiercely proud of Fort Albany. He’s lived, studied and worked in Edmonton, Toronto and Peterborough, Ont. But a quarter-century ago, he felt the call of home, where he’s lived ever since. Now 64, he runs a sawmill business, cuts his own wood, plays hockey, consults on native culture and spirituality, and generally acts as a sort of informal ambassador for the local Cree — which is how I found myself in his car.
Socially, he’s a man of few words. But the subject of Idle No More, the native protest movement, brings him out of his shell. He supports the protesters, he tells me, but he’s not thrilled about how all the attention has gone to “the squeaky wheel” — which I take to mean Attawapiskat, whose chief, Theresa Spence, has been protesting with a public liquids-only fast near Parliament Hill. “That’s the way they do things in some places,” he laments. “They block a road or something. Over here in Fort Albany, it’s not like that. It took us 30 years to get our new school. We’re different that way. More quiet. But we get things done.”
Edmund’s generation plays a critical role in understanding modern
First Nations problems, because it was the last to be fully defined by
the experience of residential schools. (His father Abraham attended a
residential school for one year, and credits his education there with
teaching him how to read and write Cree syllabics. But Abraham disliked
the environment, and was able to escape into his previous bush life — an
option his sons never had.)
During our car trips, Edmund describes the Fort Albany residential school as a place where children were in bed by eight, and the school’s pedophiles were prowling the halls by nine, removing this or that favourite child to a secluded spot for molestation. A pregnancy resulting from such predations resulted in a basement abortion during his era, Edmund claims, with the fetus being thrown into the school furnace.
Not all priests and nuns at the Fort Albany residential school were predators. But even the unmolested students had to deal with an emotionally sterile environment bereft of the love and affection that children crave. Discipline was harsh: When Edmund got sick one day and threw up on a porch, he was forced to eat his own vomit.
As a result, many First Nations communities witnessed a generation of children who grew up without any model from which to form their own parenting skills. It’s one of the reasons that grandparents — the ones who avoided such traumas, anyway — frequently figure so prominently as caregivers in First Nations communities.
Edmund attributes his own successful recovery from residential school
to his father, who took his children out on long rafting trips every
summer — an enduring childhood memory that has rooted Edmund in the land
and its lore. On our long drive up to Attawapiskat on the ice road the
next day, Edmund called out the names of the rivers and streams we
passed, and the animals that you could kill and eat at these spots — if
it ever came to that.
Later in life, Edmund’s long exposure to urban culture in Alberta and Ontario gave him an entrepreneurial streak that is in short supply on many reserves. He owns a beautiful log house in Fort Albany, and his son is building one that is even bigger across the street, to operate as a bed and breakfast.
But they have done so largely with their own hands. And they made the decision to build outside the reserve, which allows them to own and control the land in a way that is impossible for reserve residents, who must accept smaller lots that are controlled and parceled out by the band.
“Take a look at that joint,” Edmund says proudly, pointing to one of the flawless hand-cut connections between the logs that make up his walls. “It’s all perfect. These days, how many of the people have the skills to do something like that?”
Later on, when he toured Attawapiskat with me, Edmund shook his head at the dilapidated trailers he saw: The residents didn’t even know enough to raise them off the ground to stabilize them and prevent the accumulation of mould. “You gotta know how to do things yourself up here,” he lamented, echoing his father. “If you don’t, look where it gets you.”
It is in this way that Edmund and his brothers have become early
members of Ontario’s Cree elite: men who’ve acquired the tools to
navigate both First Nations spiritualism and modern capitalism. From one
end of James Bay to the other, these are the leaders who have been at
the heart of civic, administrative and legitimate commercial life in the
area since bush days.
The modern challenge is to produce many more specimens in this mould.
Fort Albany itself has made great strides in recent years. It has a modern medical facility, and a few thriving businesses, as well as an increasingly successful school that seemed as modern and well-run as any I have seen in Toronto. Yet, too many of the good jobs are being done by outsiders — despite the best efforts, by chief Rex Knapaysweet and his band, to recruit locals.
The same is true at the more prosperous Moose Cree First Nation, located on Moose Factory Island, half a river across from the James Bay regional hub of Moosonee. During my visit there, John Beck, executive director of the Moose Cree Education Authority, told me that it took three postings for him to hire a finance manager, and he still can’t find anyone to staff an open, human-resources position. These are places where sky-high rates of unemployment and welfare dependence somehow co-exist with a labour shortage.
In many cases, Mr. Beck tells me, the Moose Cree residents who do have the skills necessary for non-menial jobs get lured off-reserve to resource-extraction employers such as the DeBeers diamond mine near Attawapiskat, and the Detour Lake gold project further south. Once they’re trained in lucrative areas such as heavy-equipment and control-room operation, these workers often leave the reserve permanently, having decided that Timmins or Sudbury is a better place to raise a young family. The result is a classic brain drain.
Another problem is that there are relatively few well-educated brains
to drain, thanks to the generally poor education levels in James Bay
communities. And the main problem for this, everyone I spoke with
argues, is discriminatory funding policies.
“Our reserve elementary school gets the standard formula funding per student from the federal government — it was $6,300 in 1997, and just $6,800 now,” Mr. Beck told me. “Meanwhile, [provincially run] Ministik Public School — which is on the same island — got $6,400 in 1997, but today gets $14,000” — although I was unable to verify his figures. “First Nations schools need to get funding that is related to the actual high cost of running education up in the north,” Mr. Beck said.
But other problems with native schooling have more to do with a breakdown in cultural values than they do with money.
“We had a staff member literally collapse in class when he heard one of our students had committed suicide,” Mr. Beck tells me. “It was a girl who you would never have expected. Then there was a boy who’d just won a hockey championship, but hung himself anyway. Substance abuse is a big contributor to that — you’ve even got alcohol issues in the elementary school in some cases. We never used to have a suicide councilor. This is a new trend.”
Leonard Rickard, the aboriginal affairs manager for Detour Gold
Corporation, has done employee-recruiting visits at various schools in
the James Bay region — including in Moose Factory, where he grew up as
the son of a well-respected government worker. He believes one strategy
for helping troubled youth would be to let them see the world when
they’re still young — because the isolation of small reserves
exacerbates the problems that lead to suicide.
“Many of these kids grow up thinking that Moose Factory is the whole world,” he tells me. “And when that world becomes full of pain, and adultery, because someone breaks up with them or whatever, the whole world looks like it’s been destroyed. We have to broaden their horizons somehow.”
Mr. Rickard took me to the house of Heather Moore, a parent in Moose Cree First Nation who has worked at the band-run school. Ms. Moore (who is Mr. Rickard’s cousin) and her husband Greg, a maintenance worker at the local arena, are so fed up with the level of education, which she estimates is three grade levels behind city schools, that they’re thinking of taking their son to Sudbury.
“Family dynamics is a big problem,” she tells me. “There’s lots of separation and switching of partners. The kids in school are basically suffering from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. You’ve got a 16-year-old trying to deal with their parents splitting up when he was three. And a big part of that is addiction — alcohol, drugs and gambling. When you’re high, you fool around with someone else. And the next thing you know, you’re separated. That pattern has become common.
At this, Eva Lazarus, Ms. Moore’s mother, who’d been listening from
the side of the room, jumps in: “I know a woman here with four, five,
even six children, all from different fathers. Then everyone sees it,
and thinks growing up like that is the norm.”
Everyone in the room agreed that the diminished respect for elders, and for authority in general, is a leading symptom of malaise on the reserve. “Things started going downhill when they said you couldn’t spank your kid,” Ms. Moore tells me. “There’s no respect for authority. They sass teachers, and workers at the store. They even don’t listen to Greg at the arena. There’s no discipline.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the community,” Ms. Lazarus quickly added, somewhat defensively, lest I get the wrong impression. She notes that some people are hard workers, including her children, one of whom works at the DeBeers Victor mine as a heavy-equipment operator, another as a traveling nurse for Health Canada. Another son works at the Ontario Power Generation construction project.
“Moose Factory is a beautiful place. I’ve lived here all my life, and I’m proud of it. It’s some of us that’s the problem. And we need to fix it.”
Yet for all the difficulties I heard about, I also saw strong evidence that James Bay First Nations are making progress. And not all of it came from horn-tooting First Nations leaders themselves.
One of the interesting people I met on my trip was a fellow — I’ll call him Dan, because he didn’t want his name used — who tours northern Ontario reserves, teaching locals how to operate their water purification systems. This week at the Fort Albany band office, I briefly watched him give a seminar to workers from nearby reserves on the fine points of volumetric measurement and covalent bonding.
“Twenty years ago, the attitude a lot of the time was that we [non-native outsiders] had to do the setup and operation ourselves, because the technical stuff was beyond First Nations [staff],” Dan told me. “Now, it’s different. I will go in and teach guys from places like Attawapiskat and Kashechewan, and then they can do it. That’s new. These folks are Grade 12 graduates, getting their tickets [i.e., accreditation] — and that means they can run water systems anywhere in this province.”
“The stuff coming out of that tap is clean,” he says, gesturing to the kitchen sink. “You can drink it.”
And the self-help notions of Abraham Metatawabin, the Fort Albany
elder, are very much back in fashion: Just about every person I
interviewed on this trip agreed that the handout-based model for natives
is a dead end. Helen Knapaysweet and her colleagues in the guidance
office of Fort Albany’s Peetabeck Academy, for instance, told me that
they are putting self-reliance at the forefront of their approach with
children. “Just like we tell parents, ‘No one is going to mow your grass
for you,’ we now have the same message for kids. We tell them ‘No one
is going to brush your teeth. There are some things you just have to do
for yourselves.’”
(Dental care is actually a serious issue up here. I interviewed one dentist who’d worked at Attawapiskat. She told me that, although dental care is provided free, paid for by the federal government, none of her patients bothered coming in for cleanings and check-ups, but simply asked to have rotten teeth removed. In a standard Tuesday-to-Thursday shift, she might take out hundreds of teeth, and then fly back home for the weekend).
I also was impressed with the spirit of professionalism I witnessed in the Moose Cree and Fort Albany band offices. At Moose Cree First Nation, widely considered one of the best-run reserves in the region, I ticked down the list of band councilors and found a series of entrepreneurs, technicians, substance-abuse specialists, nurses, teachers and child-care specialists. This is no Attawapiskat.
Moose Cree’s chief, Norm Hardisty Jr., has a refreshingly un-sentimental attitude about the trade-offs that are going to be necessary for First Nations to integrate and prosper in an increasingly capitalist, English-speaking region. “Yes, hunting and fishing and the land will remain very important to us, and lots of people still perform traditional activities,” he told me. “But the advantage of Moose Factory, the reason we got introduced to the mainstream in the 1950s, was because of the hospital and the railroad.” Unlike the other James Bay communities, he pointed out, “we’re only semi-isolated. From the beginning, there were about 200 of us working there, and they had to learn English. I can speak Cree, but most of the kids here are speaking English. I’ve worked up the coast [toward Attawapiskat], and the really young kids still speak Cree. I’m amazed.”
If there is one James Bay-area Cree who personifies the spirit of do-it-yourself self-improvement, it is Allan Jolly, chairman of something called the MoCreebec Council of the Cree Nation. The MoCreebec people share Moose Factory Island with the Moose Cree First Nation, but they do not have a reserve.
Indeed, they are not even officially recognized as a First Nation within the meaning of the Indian Act. And here’s the surprising thing about that: Mr. Jolly kind of likes it that way.
“The only thing the federal government really knows how to do in this [field] is to create reserves and bands,” Mr. Jolly told me during an interview at the MoCreebec offices. “Even though we agreed in principle to having our own land base, we were skeptical about going in that direction.”
The MoCreebec people are essentially stateless Cree — First Nations Protestants from Quebec who migrated to the Moose Factory area decades ago because of its residential school and the hospital, and never left. Now, there are about 1,000 of them, but they’re not recognized by Ontario because their ancestors never signed on to any of the province’s treaties. In fact, they are still technically members of Quebec-based First Nations.
Even as recently as 30 years ago, there were only a few shacks in the area where the modern MoCreebec business-development office now stands — and even those lacked sewage and other basic amenities.
No one at any level of government was really taking charge of the MoCreebec. So in 1980, Mr. Jolly decided that he’d run the show. “I created a subdivision to get title to the land,” he told me. “The Anglican Church, which owned it, was more than happy to turn it over to me for a dollar, if I paid the outstanding $1,300 in taxes. We came up with the money somehow, and I created 45 lots. Then I approached the province about roads, hydro service and sewers.”
Mr. Jolly knew that conventional mortgages wouldn’t work for MoCreebec, because at the time, people had no income. So he used a little-known law at the time that allowed certain low-income Canadians to pay up to 25% of their gross income to finance 25-year mortgages.
Those 25-year terms have been coming to an end in recent years, and
so many MoCreebec now own their homes outright. What’s more, the Canada
Mortgage and Housing Corporation ended up paying fees to MoCreebec’s
business development office in exchange for finding clients and managing
the mortgages, which then became seed money for future business
ventures.
“Our people now rent to own, for a four-year period during which they get used to home ownership,” he tells me. “We build a bungalow-style house with three to five bedrooms, with full services and basement,” Mr. Jolly says. “The important thing is that these are not ‘free’ houses. I was deliberately trying to get us away from something free.”
The capitalist spirit took hold: A few years later, MoCreebec started bringing cable TV service to the region. Their development company has also built an upscale hotel (where I stayed, and which I can recommend) and has branched out into high-speed Internet. Poverty, unemployment and a lack of housing are still a problem for MoCreebec members. But all told, Mr. Jolly, who’s gone from a hunter-gatherer childhood to a suit-and-tie middle age, is happy with his choice.
“It’s a question about liberty,” he says. “Our situation is unique. We’re in the driver’s seat. We make our own money. We’re hitting $6-million a year from cable and housing. And we’ve got other businesses going besides. The Indian Act, on the other hand, just would have perpetuated our dependency.”
The first involves education. In all communities, First Nations and otherwise, the local school acts as a major social and civic hub. But Attawapiskat’s elementary school was closed in 2000 due to diesel-fuel contamination dating to 1979. Children have been studying in scattered portables ever since. A new state-of-the-art facility is under construction in the western part of the reserve, to much political acclaim. But so far they’ve done little more than break ground.
Secondly, while all of these James Bay communities are “remote” by urban Canadian standards, Attawapiskat is the most remote. All of the logistical problems associated with isolation — high prices, low temperatures, poor accessibility — get worse the farther north you go. Just flying the 250 km from Attawapiskat to Moosonee (from which you can take a long train ride to Cochrane and the rest of paved civilization) costs $800, return — about the same amount as a flight from Toronto to L.A. and back.
Because the airlines weren’t flying the day I planned to travel to
Attawapiskat, I drove the winter road from Fort Albany — which is
literally made of ice, and exists only three months of the year. But
given that gas costs $3.30 per litre, even that is no bargain. Indeed,
everything is shockingly expensive in Attawapiskat. One woman whom I
interviewed said that a major reason people have such terrible eating
habits is that fresh fruit, vegetables, and other healthy food items,
are extremely expensive. “Eighteen dollars is a lot for a frozen pizza,”
she told me. “But to make a single fresh stir fry would cost me $40. So
what are you going to do?”
Third, while there is a housing shortage on every James Bay reserve — because construction is expensive, workmanship tends to be uneven, and the collective land ownership scheme that prevails on reserves provides little incentive for occupants to invest in home upkeep — Attawapiskat has had a particularly bad run of foul luck. A massive sewage back-up in 2009 rendered almost 100 people homeless. DeBeers Canada stepped up with some free trailers, but those can now be seen listing in the snow, full of mould. (A DeBeers representative I was traveling with said they would soon be destroyed and replaced with more substantial units.) The state of housing on the reserve is not quite as bad as some media’s selective use of photos would have Canadians believe, but it is noticeably worse than other James Bay First Nations communities.
(Unfortunately, I was unable to gather photos of Attawapiskat myself. On January 8, the band expelled a Global National film crew, on pain of arrest, and apparently extended the ban to all media. When I reported to the band office on Jan. 16, I pledged that if they let me stay, I would be gone by sundown, and that I would not use my camera. They permitted me to stay, but declined to offer any comment for this story.)
Finally, and most importantly, is the question of band leadership. In
this regard, the recently leaked audit of Attawapiskat’s spending
speaks for itself. All the people I spoke with in other James Bay
reserves offered guarded praise to Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence for
“raising issues” on a national stage. But most also stressed that her
management style should not be taken as representative of other James
Bay communities.
Several people from Attawapiskat whom I spoke with — they didn’t want their names used — allege that the system is based entirely on cronyism, and that “you can’t get a house, no matter how long you wait, unless you know someone on the housing committee.” (Though the view is widely shared, I cannot corroborate it.) At one point, in September of last year, there was reportedly a sort of putsch being formed against Ms. Spence. Everyone seems to know about it, but there is a climate of paranoia, and a great reluctance to talk about it.
In any case, even a brief visit to Attawapiskat’s band office suggests that the reserve’s political system has become dysfunctional. At the other James Bay communities, the administrative buildings also served as civic centers, with people dropping in casually to talk business. Attawapiskat’s band office, on the other hand, feels like a besieged precinct house, with two heavy steel doors barring entry, and a big peephole drilled into one. For a reporter especially, it is an intimidating environment — perhaps the only place in Canada where you literally can be arrested and thrown in jail for asking the wrong question.
The one person in Attawapiskat whom I did manage to corner for a
lengthy sit-down interview was a (non-First Nations) nurse at the
community’s (surprisingly state-of-the-art) hospital. She’s someone who
has worked in Ontario’s far-north reserves for years — “including places
that make Attawapiskat look good by comparison,” she said. She doesn’t
sugar-coat what she’s seen there, but she also asks Canadians to look
beyond the images of squalor they see in remote First Nations
communities, and remember that these are human beings who really do want
better lives for themselves and their children, but simply lack the
resources and capacity to attain them.
The nurse has a particularly strong memory of a mother of four who came to her with an Oxycontin addiction. “When I was listening to her, I was like, ‘What are you thinking, buying drugs instead of food for your kids?’” she recalled. “But then as I listened to the patient and learned more about her story and what she’d endured, I realized that if I had gone through all that, I would probably be dead by now. This woman doesn’t want to be addicted to drugs. It started with self-medicating, a way of numbing the pain and forgetting about the issues she has to deal with. Then the addiction takes over. And that creates its own issues.”
What keeps the nurse going is that, even among all the pain she witnesses, she says there is also a lot of strength: resilience, a love of family, even a collective sense of humour.
“If you strip away all the social problems, you discover a culture that is very caring and community-oriented,” the nurse told me. “Those who are going through these crises, they don’t have a lot of resources available to them, yet they’re taking care of grandchildren with disabilities and people with mental weakness — it’s unbelievable. Typically when a family has to deal with one issue with one kid, it can rock their boat for years. Here, a family is usually dealing with 10 or more issues, and they are still able to smile and go on.”
“The original idea that you’re going to change something or make things better — if that’s your attitude coming up here, you’re going to burn out. My mission here at the hospital is loving people and meeting them where they’re at. Yeah, it would be so much easier to be judgmental, and have the attitude ‘Hey, go get a job.’ But to that, I’d say, ‘Go walk a day in their shoes. Then let’s talk.”
But at the very least, a trip to these James Bay communities has taught me that not all is hopeless. From a policy perspective, I learned that there is enormous value in certain basic service amenities: a road, cell-phone service, clean water, a proper medical clinic, a real school, and basic, competent local governance. None of these things, on their own, will instantly change a community’s culture. But over time, in some places, they can create the platform for education, economic development and a renewal of civic life.
And one more thing: hockey arenas.
Perhaps the most inspiring moment of my trip here was on Tuesday night, when I traveled with Edmund along the ice road to Kashechewan for that reserve’s first weekly hockey match against Fort Albany.
Kash, as it’s known, is a poor place. But the mood in that arena was upbeat. If you took your eyes off the names on the banners, and just heard the crowd and watched the game, you could have been in any hockey arena, in any part of the country. Teenagers were everywhere, watching the game and texting each other on the arena’s wi-fi system — a comparatively wholesome way to spend an evening.
A lot of Canadian commentators have focused on Attawapiskat’s rink and brand new Zamboni as a symbol of waste. But if taking steps to create a healthy community is the goal, it strikes me that you’d be hard-pressed to make a better investment.
• Email: jkay@nationalpost.com | Twitter: jonkay
I came to talk with Abraham at his home on the Fort Albany reserve not just because he is a link to a bygone era, but also because the Metatawabin family as a whole — of whom I met four generations, in three different communities, during my travels to James Bay this past week — constitutes a sort of living roadmap to the wrenching transformations that First Nations have endured over the last half-century.
Like most members of the Fort Albany First Nation, Abraham was brought up as a Catholic. But he still has strong memories of his grandfather, a traditional 19th-century medicine man whom the RCMP hunted as an outlaw. Abraham’s father was recruited out of the bush into the Canadian army, and fought the Germans in the First World War.
At the time, he tells me, Indian servicemen were promised all sorts of things upon their return — a plot of land for farming, a barn, and animals. The family even considered giving up the bush life. But when the war ended, Abraham’s father was put on a train, and deposited at the Pagwa trading post. He headed downriver to the bush, where he continued hunting and trapping until the end of his days.
Abraham remembers that life as tough but exhilarating: The hard work and natural diet made everyone strong, fit and wiry. He brought down wolf, deer, moose, caribou, beaver, muskrat, otter, mink and fox — even squirrels for his dogs to eat as snacks. At trading posts, he exchanged some of his furs and cured hides for the few things he couldn’t hunt or make, such as flour, sugar, lard, tea and coffee.
He had everything he needed. After the Second World War, the Canadian government even gave Abraham a gun and a steady supply of ammunition, as part of a Cold War-era military reconnaissance program. All Abraham had to do in return was share his knowledge of the land, and shoot any invading Russians.
But in the 1950s, he remembers, the old ways became more difficult. The fur trade dried up. And a rail line from Cochrane, Ont. to the James Bay town of Moosonee had vastly diminished the commercial importance of the Albany River, formerly the region’s lifeline. Natives started to migrate to Moosonee, which had a large residential school, a tuberculosis clinic, and a substantial government presence.
By the mid-1960s, the remaining Fort Albany band members were demanding their own modern houses and amenities. Abraham, now the community’s chief, started traveling to Timmins and other large towns to negotiate with federal officials. The old treaties, which formerly had been only a vague presence in his life during his early years, started to loom more important. For the Fort Albany Cree, it was the first stirrings of what we now recognize as modern First Nations political activism.
The wall on Abraham’s living room is full of happy photos. His 10 surviving children have produced about 35 grandchildren (he’s not sure of the exact number), including many who have gone on to post-secondary education, and a soldier who has done two tours in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, Abraham has misgivings about the way things have changed.
It was around 1965, when the federal and Ontario governments signed the Indian Welfare Agreement, that things really started getting fouled up, he tells me: For the first time, it became possible for large numbers of aboriginals to do nothing but “drink and watch television.”
“There are hardly any people who go to the bush now,” he complains. “Young people who work are looking for wage labour. The bush is too quiet for them. Everyone wants to drive a truck. And they want to be able to take a shower now and then.”
“Now I hear about people on disability,” he sniffs. “We didn’t have that in my day.”
He points to a black-and-white photo on the wall — a trapper whom his son identifies as one Xavier Koostachin.
“That fellow had one leg. But he went around the bush on crutches, providing for his family,” Abraham says. “No ‘disability’ for him.”
Jonathan Kay/National PostMoose Factory, James Bay.
The answer is no — and he wants me to say it. Based on the way the media reports stories from remote fly-in reserves such as Fort Albany, many Canadians have formed the impression that communities such as his are crumbling junkyards full of miserable alcoholics. But during my week’s travel to the James Bay reserves of Fort Albany, Kashechewan and Moose Cree, most of the homes I observed were surprisingly ship-shape. Even Attawapiskat, which became a media sensation last year over a housing crisis, was not quite as bad as I’d imagined. And while there is no doubt too much substance abuse going on behind closed doors (including Oxycontin, a growing problem), public drunkenness on the reserves is taboo. All but Moose Cree are, technically, dry.
Edmund, one of Abraham Metatawabin’s seven sons, was chief himself in the 1990s, and is fiercely proud of Fort Albany. He’s lived, studied and worked in Edmonton, Toronto and Peterborough, Ont. But a quarter-century ago, he felt the call of home, where he’s lived ever since. Now 64, he runs a sawmill business, cuts his own wood, plays hockey, consults on native culture and spirituality, and generally acts as a sort of informal ambassador for the local Cree — which is how I found myself in his car.
Socially, he’s a man of few words. But the subject of Idle No More, the native protest movement, brings him out of his shell. He supports the protesters, he tells me, but he’s not thrilled about how all the attention has gone to “the squeaky wheel” — which I take to mean Attawapiskat, whose chief, Theresa Spence, has been protesting with a public liquids-only fast near Parliament Hill. “That’s the way they do things in some places,” he laments. “They block a road or something. Over here in Fort Albany, it’s not like that. It took us 30 years to get our new school. We’re different that way. More quiet. But we get things done.”
Courtesy of Abraham MetatawabinAbraham Metatawabin, centre, at his wedding in 1947.
During our car trips, Edmund describes the Fort Albany residential school as a place where children were in bed by eight, and the school’s pedophiles were prowling the halls by nine, removing this or that favourite child to a secluded spot for molestation. A pregnancy resulting from such predations resulted in a basement abortion during his era, Edmund claims, with the fetus being thrown into the school furnace.
Not all priests and nuns at the Fort Albany residential school were predators. But even the unmolested students had to deal with an emotionally sterile environment bereft of the love and affection that children crave. Discipline was harsh: When Edmund got sick one day and threw up on a porch, he was forced to eat his own vomit.
As a result, many First Nations communities witnessed a generation of children who grew up without any model from which to form their own parenting skills. It’s one of the reasons that grandparents — the ones who avoided such traumas, anyway — frequently figure so prominently as caregivers in First Nations communities.
Jonathan Kay/National PostInterior of former Fort Albany chief Edward Metatawabin's house.
Later in life, Edmund’s long exposure to urban culture in Alberta and Ontario gave him an entrepreneurial streak that is in short supply on many reserves. He owns a beautiful log house in Fort Albany, and his son is building one that is even bigger across the street, to operate as a bed and breakfast.
But they have done so largely with their own hands. And they made the decision to build outside the reserve, which allows them to own and control the land in a way that is impossible for reserve residents, who must accept smaller lots that are controlled and parceled out by the band.
“Take a look at that joint,” Edmund says proudly, pointing to one of the flawless hand-cut connections between the logs that make up his walls. “It’s all perfect. These days, how many of the people have the skills to do something like that?”
Later on, when he toured Attawapiskat with me, Edmund shook his head at the dilapidated trailers he saw: The residents didn’t even know enough to raise them off the ground to stabilize them and prevent the accumulation of mould. “You gotta know how to do things yourself up here,” he lamented, echoing his father. “If you don’t, look where it gets you.”
Jonathan Kay/National PostFort Albany chief Rex Knapaysweet.
The modern challenge is to produce many more specimens in this mould.
Fort Albany itself has made great strides in recent years. It has a modern medical facility, and a few thriving businesses, as well as an increasingly successful school that seemed as modern and well-run as any I have seen in Toronto. Yet, too many of the good jobs are being done by outsiders — despite the best efforts, by chief Rex Knapaysweet and his band, to recruit locals.
The same is true at the more prosperous Moose Cree First Nation, located on Moose Factory Island, half a river across from the James Bay regional hub of Moosonee. During my visit there, John Beck, executive director of the Moose Cree Education Authority, told me that it took three postings for him to hire a finance manager, and he still can’t find anyone to staff an open, human-resources position. These are places where sky-high rates of unemployment and welfare dependence somehow co-exist with a labour shortage.
In many cases, Mr. Beck tells me, the Moose Cree residents who do have the skills necessary for non-menial jobs get lured off-reserve to resource-extraction employers such as the DeBeers diamond mine near Attawapiskat, and the Detour Lake gold project further south. Once they’re trained in lucrative areas such as heavy-equipment and control-room operation, these workers often leave the reserve permanently, having decided that Timmins or Sudbury is a better place to raise a young family. The result is a classic brain drain.
Jonathan Kay / National PostFormer Fort Albany chief Edward Metatawabin built his own house over a two-year period, but it had to be built off-reserve.
“Our reserve elementary school gets the standard formula funding per student from the federal government — it was $6,300 in 1997, and just $6,800 now,” Mr. Beck told me. “Meanwhile, [provincially run] Ministik Public School — which is on the same island — got $6,400 in 1997, but today gets $14,000” — although I was unable to verify his figures. “First Nations schools need to get funding that is related to the actual high cost of running education up in the north,” Mr. Beck said.
But other problems with native schooling have more to do with a breakdown in cultural values than they do with money.
“We had a staff member literally collapse in class when he heard one of our students had committed suicide,” Mr. Beck tells me. “It was a girl who you would never have expected. Then there was a boy who’d just won a hockey championship, but hung himself anyway. Substance abuse is a big contributor to that — you’ve even got alcohol issues in the elementary school in some cases. We never used to have a suicide councilor. This is a new trend.”
Jonathan Kay / National PostCarmen
Edwards, left, Claudette Solomon and Helen Knapaysweet, right, sit in
the Elders room at Peetableck Academy in Fort Albany, Ont.
“Many of these kids grow up thinking that Moose Factory is the whole world,” he tells me. “And when that world becomes full of pain, and adultery, because someone breaks up with them or whatever, the whole world looks like it’s been destroyed. We have to broaden their horizons somehow.”
Mr. Rickard took me to the house of Heather Moore, a parent in Moose Cree First Nation who has worked at the band-run school. Ms. Moore (who is Mr. Rickard’s cousin) and her husband Greg, a maintenance worker at the local arena, are so fed up with the level of education, which she estimates is three grade levels behind city schools, that they’re thinking of taking their son to Sudbury.
“Family dynamics is a big problem,” she tells me. “There’s lots of separation and switching of partners. The kids in school are basically suffering from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. You’ve got a 16-year-old trying to deal with their parents splitting up when he was three. And a big part of that is addiction — alcohol, drugs and gambling. When you’re high, you fool around with someone else. And the next thing you know, you’re separated. That pattern has become common.
Everyone in the room agreed that the diminished respect for elders, and for authority in general, is a leading symptom of malaise on the reserve. “Things started going downhill when they said you couldn’t spank your kid,” Ms. Moore tells me. “There’s no respect for authority. They sass teachers, and workers at the store. They even don’t listen to Greg at the arena. There’s no discipline.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the community,” Ms. Lazarus quickly added, somewhat defensively, lest I get the wrong impression. She notes that some people are hard workers, including her children, one of whom works at the DeBeers Victor mine as a heavy-equipment operator, another as a traveling nurse for Health Canada. Another son works at the Ontario Power Generation construction project.
“Moose Factory is a beautiful place. I’ve lived here all my life, and I’m proud of it. It’s some of us that’s the problem. And we need to fix it.”
Yet for all the difficulties I heard about, I also saw strong evidence that James Bay First Nations are making progress. And not all of it came from horn-tooting First Nations leaders themselves.
One of the interesting people I met on my trip was a fellow — I’ll call him Dan, because he didn’t want his name used — who tours northern Ontario reserves, teaching locals how to operate their water purification systems. This week at the Fort Albany band office, I briefly watched him give a seminar to workers from nearby reserves on the fine points of volumetric measurement and covalent bonding.
“Twenty years ago, the attitude a lot of the time was that we [non-native outsiders] had to do the setup and operation ourselves, because the technical stuff was beyond First Nations [staff],” Dan told me. “Now, it’s different. I will go in and teach guys from places like Attawapiskat and Kashechewan, and then they can do it. That’s new. These folks are Grade 12 graduates, getting their tickets [i.e., accreditation] — and that means they can run water systems anywhere in this province.”
“The stuff coming out of that tap is clean,” he says, gesturing to the kitchen sink. “You can drink it.”
Jonathan Kay/National PostTechnical
services meeting at the Fort Albany band office.
These are local native
workers from nearby reserves, including Kashechewan and Attawapiskat,
taking training on running their own water purification systems.
(Dental care is actually a serious issue up here. I interviewed one dentist who’d worked at Attawapiskat. She told me that, although dental care is provided free, paid for by the federal government, none of her patients bothered coming in for cleanings and check-ups, but simply asked to have rotten teeth removed. In a standard Tuesday-to-Thursday shift, she might take out hundreds of teeth, and then fly back home for the weekend).
Jonathan Kay/ National PostFormer Fort Albany chief Abraham Metatawabin. The 92-year-old worked in the bush until he was in his 70s.
I also was impressed with the spirit of professionalism I witnessed in the Moose Cree and Fort Albany band offices. At Moose Cree First Nation, widely considered one of the best-run reserves in the region, I ticked down the list of band councilors and found a series of entrepreneurs, technicians, substance-abuse specialists, nurses, teachers and child-care specialists. This is no Attawapiskat.
Moose Cree’s chief, Norm Hardisty Jr., has a refreshingly un-sentimental attitude about the trade-offs that are going to be necessary for First Nations to integrate and prosper in an increasingly capitalist, English-speaking region. “Yes, hunting and fishing and the land will remain very important to us, and lots of people still perform traditional activities,” he told me. “But the advantage of Moose Factory, the reason we got introduced to the mainstream in the 1950s, was because of the hospital and the railroad.” Unlike the other James Bay communities, he pointed out, “we’re only semi-isolated. From the beginning, there were about 200 of us working there, and they had to learn English. I can speak Cree, but most of the kids here are speaking English. I’ve worked up the coast [toward Attawapiskat], and the really young kids still speak Cree. I’m amazed.”
If there is one James Bay-area Cree who personifies the spirit of do-it-yourself self-improvement, it is Allan Jolly, chairman of something called the MoCreebec Council of the Cree Nation. The MoCreebec people share Moose Factory Island with the Moose Cree First Nation, but they do not have a reserve.
Indeed, they are not even officially recognized as a First Nation within the meaning of the Indian Act. And here’s the surprising thing about that: Mr. Jolly kind of likes it that way.
“The only thing the federal government really knows how to do in this [field] is to create reserves and bands,” Mr. Jolly told me during an interview at the MoCreebec offices. “Even though we agreed in principle to having our own land base, we were skeptical about going in that direction.”
The MoCreebec people are essentially stateless Cree — First Nations Protestants from Quebec who migrated to the Moose Factory area decades ago because of its residential school and the hospital, and never left. Now, there are about 1,000 of them, but they’re not recognized by Ontario because their ancestors never signed on to any of the province’s treaties. In fact, they are still technically members of Quebec-based First Nations.
Jonathan Kay / National PostAllan Jolly, Community Economic Development Officer for MoCreebec, on Moose Factory.
Mr. Jolly came to Moose Factory in the late 1950s, when he was just eight years old. “The residential school was the only option for me,” he remembers. “We were still living off the land. We hunted to live.” Two decades later, the Cree back in Quebec signed a groundbreaking modern treaty with the provincial government. But the MoCreebec, as they came to be known, were still living in squalid conditions in Moose Factory, essentially as squatters on non-reserve land.“Being nomadic, we had never seen the use in owning land,” Mr. Jolly told me. “At the time, the thought was that we just pitched tents until someone threw us out.”
Even as recently as 30 years ago, there were only a few shacks in the area where the modern MoCreebec business-development office now stands — and even those lacked sewage and other basic amenities.
No one at any level of government was really taking charge of the MoCreebec. So in 1980, Mr. Jolly decided that he’d run the show. “I created a subdivision to get title to the land,” he told me. “The Anglican Church, which owned it, was more than happy to turn it over to me for a dollar, if I paid the outstanding $1,300 in taxes. We came up with the money somehow, and I created 45 lots. Then I approached the province about roads, hydro service and sewers.”
Mr. Jolly knew that conventional mortgages wouldn’t work for MoCreebec, because at the time, people had no income. So he used a little-known law at the time that allowed certain low-income Canadians to pay up to 25% of their gross income to finance 25-year mortgages.
Jonathan Kay/National PostThe Fort Albany hockey team straps up for their first 2013 game against the Kashechewan reserve team, at the Kashechewan arena.
“Our people now rent to own, for a four-year period during which they get used to home ownership,” he tells me. “We build a bungalow-style house with three to five bedrooms, with full services and basement,” Mr. Jolly says. “The important thing is that these are not ‘free’ houses. I was deliberately trying to get us away from something free.”
The capitalist spirit took hold: A few years later, MoCreebec started bringing cable TV service to the region. Their development company has also built an upscale hotel (where I stayed, and which I can recommend) and has branched out into high-speed Internet. Poverty, unemployment and a lack of housing are still a problem for MoCreebec members. But all told, Mr. Jolly, who’s gone from a hunter-gatherer childhood to a suit-and-tie middle age, is happy with his choice.
“It’s a question about liberty,” he says. “Our situation is unique. We’re in the driver’s seat. We make our own money. We’re hitting $6-million a year from cable and housing. And we’ve got other businesses going besides. The Indian Act, on the other hand, just would have perpetuated our dependency.”
If you strip away all the social problems, you discover a culture that is very caring and community-orientedAttawapiskat was the last First Nations reserve I visited along James Bay, and I’m glad for that, because what I witnessed at Fort Albany, Kashechewan and Moose Cree helped me put Attawapiskat’s much more serious challenges in context. That community is substantially worse off than the others for at least four reasons.
The first involves education. In all communities, First Nations and otherwise, the local school acts as a major social and civic hub. But Attawapiskat’s elementary school was closed in 2000 due to diesel-fuel contamination dating to 1979. Children have been studying in scattered portables ever since. A new state-of-the-art facility is under construction in the western part of the reserve, to much political acclaim. But so far they’ve done little more than break ground.
Secondly, while all of these James Bay communities are “remote” by urban Canadian standards, Attawapiskat is the most remote. All of the logistical problems associated with isolation — high prices, low temperatures, poor accessibility — get worse the farther north you go. Just flying the 250 km from Attawapiskat to Moosonee (from which you can take a long train ride to Cochrane and the rest of paved civilization) costs $800, return — about the same amount as a flight from Toronto to L.A. and back.
Jonathan Kay/National PostDriving on the ice road from Fort Albany to Attawapiskat.
Third, while there is a housing shortage on every James Bay reserve — because construction is expensive, workmanship tends to be uneven, and the collective land ownership scheme that prevails on reserves provides little incentive for occupants to invest in home upkeep — Attawapiskat has had a particularly bad run of foul luck. A massive sewage back-up in 2009 rendered almost 100 people homeless. DeBeers Canada stepped up with some free trailers, but those can now be seen listing in the snow, full of mould. (A DeBeers representative I was traveling with said they would soon be destroyed and replaced with more substantial units.) The state of housing on the reserve is not quite as bad as some media’s selective use of photos would have Canadians believe, but it is noticeably worse than other James Bay First Nations communities.
(Unfortunately, I was unable to gather photos of Attawapiskat myself. On January 8, the band expelled a Global National film crew, on pain of arrest, and apparently extended the ban to all media. When I reported to the band office on Jan. 16, I pledged that if they let me stay, I would be gone by sundown, and that I would not use my camera. They permitted me to stay, but declined to offer any comment for this story.)
Jonathan Kay/National Post These workers pump water from the bottom of the river to keep the
ice road surface smooth.
Several people from Attawapiskat whom I spoke with — they didn’t want their names used — allege that the system is based entirely on cronyism, and that “you can’t get a house, no matter how long you wait, unless you know someone on the housing committee.” (Though the view is widely shared, I cannot corroborate it.) At one point, in September of last year, there was reportedly a sort of putsch being formed against Ms. Spence. Everyone seems to know about it, but there is a climate of paranoia, and a great reluctance to talk about it.
In any case, even a brief visit to Attawapiskat’s band office suggests that the reserve’s political system has become dysfunctional. At the other James Bay communities, the administrative buildings also served as civic centers, with people dropping in casually to talk business. Attawapiskat’s band office, on the other hand, feels like a besieged precinct house, with two heavy steel doors barring entry, and a big peephole drilled into one. For a reporter especially, it is an intimidating environment — perhaps the only place in Canada where you literally can be arrested and thrown in jail for asking the wrong question.
Jonathan Kay/National PostThe price of food in Fort Albany.
The nurse has a particularly strong memory of a mother of four who came to her with an Oxycontin addiction. “When I was listening to her, I was like, ‘What are you thinking, buying drugs instead of food for your kids?’” she recalled. “But then as I listened to the patient and learned more about her story and what she’d endured, I realized that if I had gone through all that, I would probably be dead by now. This woman doesn’t want to be addicted to drugs. It started with self-medicating, a way of numbing the pain and forgetting about the issues she has to deal with. Then the addiction takes over. And that creates its own issues.”
What keeps the nurse going is that, even among all the pain she witnesses, she says there is also a lot of strength: resilience, a love of family, even a collective sense of humour.
“If you strip away all the social problems, you discover a culture that is very caring and community-oriented,” the nurse told me. “Those who are going through these crises, they don’t have a lot of resources available to them, yet they’re taking care of grandchildren with disabilities and people with mental weakness — it’s unbelievable. Typically when a family has to deal with one issue with one kid, it can rock their boat for years. Here, a family is usually dealing with 10 or more issues, and they are still able to smile and go on.”
“The original idea that you’re going to change something or make things better — if that’s your attitude coming up here, you’re going to burn out. My mission here at the hospital is loving people and meeting them where they’re at. Yeah, it would be so much easier to be judgmental, and have the attitude ‘Hey, go get a job.’ But to that, I’d say, ‘Go walk a day in their shoes. Then let’s talk.”
At the very least, a trip to these James Bay communities has taught me that not all is hopelessWhen I ask the nurse whether there’s anything we can do to really save Attawapiskat and more isolated places from all the hardships she’s observed, she doesn’t really have an answer. Nor will she commit one way or the other to the basic question of whether it would be more humane to transition their residents to more viable communities. For now, the question is probably moot anyway, since no political leader in Canada — native or otherwise — would find it politically advisable to face the “cultural genocide” charge that follows all such proposals.
But at the very least, a trip to these James Bay communities has taught me that not all is hopeless. From a policy perspective, I learned that there is enormous value in certain basic service amenities: a road, cell-phone service, clean water, a proper medical clinic, a real school, and basic, competent local governance. None of these things, on their own, will instantly change a community’s culture. But over time, in some places, they can create the platform for education, economic development and a renewal of civic life.
And one more thing: hockey arenas.
Perhaps the most inspiring moment of my trip here was on Tuesday night, when I traveled with Edmund along the ice road to Kashechewan for that reserve’s first weekly hockey match against Fort Albany.
Kash, as it’s known, is a poor place. But the mood in that arena was upbeat. If you took your eyes off the names on the banners, and just heard the crowd and watched the game, you could have been in any hockey arena, in any part of the country. Teenagers were everywhere, watching the game and texting each other on the arena’s wi-fi system — a comparatively wholesome way to spend an evening.
A lot of Canadian commentators have focused on Attawapiskat’s rink and brand new Zamboni as a symbol of waste. But if taking steps to create a healthy community is the goal, it strikes me that you’d be hard-pressed to make a better investment.
Jonathan Kay/National PostKashechewan arena.
Labels: Canada, Human Relations, Indigenous Peoples
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