Quebec

Like an iceberg, 1994 cont., “A place with four names”

/ Jane George / Leave a comment

 Like an iceberg, 1994, cont.: “A place with four names”

It was a smooth trip: I left Montreal at 9:40 a.m. and the jet arrived in Great Whale on the tip of James Bay in northern Quebec by 1 p.m. But the cloud ceiling was low, so we made a wide circle over the Great Whale River and then over the long beach that runs up the Hudson Bay coast, north and out of sight.

An aerial view of the Great Whale river at the site of the community of Kuujjuaraapik and Whapmagoostui. (PHOTO/ NUNAVIK-TOURISM)

An aerial view of the Great Whale river at the site of the community of Kuujjuaraapik and Whapmagoostui. (PHOTO/ NUNAVIK-TOURISM)

Rain swept across the runway in Great Whale, the community called Kuujjuaraapik by Inuit, Whapmagoostui by Cree and Poste-de-la-Baleine by Québécois. Some called it the “Miami of the Arctic,” but I was cold and dripping wet after riding to a friend’s house from the airport on her all-terrain vehicle.

My arrival coincided with Quebec election day: Sept. 12, 1994, which saw a Parti Québécois win. In the community’s triple gymnasium, three polling stations were set up, for Cree, for Inuit and for non-Aboriginals, a reminder that these three groups generally live dseparate lives despite being neighbours.

No Cree had voted by mid-afternoon, although the Inuit and non-Aboriginal turnout was good.

In pouring rain, I walked to the band council office where I ran into the chief, Matthew Mukash. He says he’s not voting, although a Parti Québécois win didn’t worry him.

Mukash said a PQ victory could put more focus on outstanding issues between Quebec and the Cree — such as Cree political autonomy and the $13.3-billion hydro-electric complex that its power corporation, Hydro Québec, wanted to build on the Great Whale River.

The Great Whale river in 1994. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

The Great Whale river in 1994. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

“I think we’re possibly looking at a resolution of some kind in regards to this issue of separation. Their issue of separation involves our right to separate,” Mukash said.

Mukash and four other Cree were on their way to Nemaska Lake in the heart of the James Bay Cree region. On the day after the Quebec election, they planned to hold a special gathering to talk about their future at Old Nemaska, a campsite more than an hour and a half away by truck and boat from today’s Nemaska. It was a place which Hydro Québec planned to flood for the project: Cree opposition to the project was why their meeting was to take place there.

I decided to accept an invitation to tag along. So I was back at the airport the next morning when the sun was shining — at least.

My Cree traveling companions arrived. They brought their own stoves along with a tent, and our bush float-plane was loaded to the top with gear. After we finally landed  on the lake, I had a moment of uncertainty as I took my bag off the shore to find tent space to sleep in: What was I doing?

There was no electricity, no phones, no way to file a story or even talk to an editor or producer, so I decided the next day to head back to Nemaska, a community that was all sand, towering pine trees and birches by the shores of smooth, blue Champion Lake.

The Cree Regional Authority building in Nemaska. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

The Cree Regional Authority building in Nemaska. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

At the goose-shaped Cree Regional Authority headquarters, I ran into Ted Moses, the Cree ambassador to the United Nations. On my first trip north in 1991, I had gone spring goose hunting with Moses and his family. This time, we weren’t talking about the how-to of goose hunting, but about self-determination.

“They say we have no more rights, which is a bunch of bullshit,” Moses said. “Can you hand over such things to an institution?”

Later that afternoon, the truck ride back to the place where we will catch the boat to Old Nemaska felt endless on the grey, bumpy road. Then, there was the boat ride — again — to bring us over the lake to the camp.

I arrived too late for supper but someone offered me a roasted goose breast. I crawled into my sleeping bag on a cushion of evergreen branches to spend a restless night. The tent fire went out, the temperature dropped, and  I was barely warm enough.

Dawn in Old Nemaska, September 1994. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Dawn in Old Nemaska, September 1994. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

In the morning the rising run gave the fog an orange tinge. A boat with a fisherman drifted by. Plumes of fragrant smoke rose from the stoves in every white tent.

In the afternoon, a few long tables were set up in a blue and white tent for the delegates, people of all ages, all Cree.

“Our government is not the provincial government, not the federal government, but us here,” said an elder.

“The question facing us is can we govern ourselves if Quebec becomes independent? The answer is yes,” Moses told them.

I then headed back to Nemaska, again a three-hour round-trip, to file another story.

Canoes approach the camp in Old Nemaska. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Canoes approach the camp in Old Nemaska. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

A sunny day for the next day: a line of canoes arrived across the lake from another community, small dots that finally grew bigger, and then landed. The slapping of the water combined with a prayer of thanks for their safe arrival filled the air.

Talks continued: a Cree declaration of self-determination would be the next step.

At the feast that night there was sturgeon, moose and smoked bear paw on the menu. Later the weather changes, and rain and wind battered the tent. No plane could land to take us back.

In the morning, I headed across the lake in the small boat overloaded with people, crouching under a plastic tarp, hoping we wouldn’t capsize, to hitch a ride on a truck back to Nemaska. I was beginning to recognize every turn in that long road road.

In Nemaska for the night, I spoke to Mukash again.

“The power of the mind can make miracles,” Mukash said. “The Great Whale hydro project will never be built. Hydro Québec has made a mistake, although they won’t admit it.”

Mukash sketched a picture of the mind, with the conscious, sub-conscious and super-conscious: it turned out that he was a fan of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.

“They will never build it.”

A delayed plane arrival also led to a talk with Robbie Dick, a former band chief of Whapmagoostui. Cree, he said are “guardians of the land.”

“If you take a plane from the southern part of the United States up to the North, you’ll see the difference between north and south. This excavating, this raping of Mother Earth has to stop.”

Makivik Corp. president Simiunie Nalukturuk and vice-president Zebedee Nungak at the 1994 signing of an agreement-in-principle on the future construction of the Great Whale hydroelectric project. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Makivik Corp. president Simiunie Nalukturuk and vice-president Zebedee Nungak at the 1994 signing of a $500-million agreement-in-principle on the future construction of the Great Whale hydro-electric project. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

We finally took off to Great Whale. There, I spent the afternoon walking around, heading down to the river. If that power project went ahead, the river’s flow would be diverted 40 kilometres upstream and the river would be reduced to a trickle.

Inuit had already signed an agreement-in-principle, worth $500 million, to allow the project to move forward — but the newly-elected PQ premier, Jacques Parizeau, put the project on ice in November 1994.

Before heading off to Nemaska with the Cree, I had been planning to fly on to Sanikiluaq to visit a former classmate in the intensive Inuktitut course in Iqaluit. But the yearly season of autumn fog descended and flight after flight was cancelled. So I finally decided to return to Montreal.

The next instalment of “Like an iceberg” goes live April 18.

You can read previous instalments here:

Like an iceberg: on being a journalist in the Arctic

Like an iceberg, 1991…cont.

Like an iceberg, 1991…more

Like an iceberg, 1992, “Shots in the dark” 

Like an iceberg, 1992, “Sad stories”

Like an iceberg, 1993, “Learning the language of the snows”

Like an iceberg, 1993 cont., “Spring”

Like an iceberg, 1993 cont., “Chesterfield Inlet”

Like an iceberg, 1993 cont., more “Chesterfield Inlet”

Like an iceberg, 1994: “Seals and more”

Like an iceberg, 1994, cont., “No news is good news”

Like an iceberg, 1994 cont., more “No news is good news”

Like an iceberg, 1992, “Sad stories”

/ Jane George / Leave a comment

Like an iceberg, 1992: “Sad Stories”

On that day in Puvirnituq, sometime during the fall of 1992, at 7 a.m. the Air Inuit 748 circled overhead before it turned down the coast to the South.

From the air, in the gray light, nothing distinguished this village from any other in northern Quebec. The rows of nearly identical houses huddled together in a few tight lines on the tundra.

Few lights were on at this hour. A woman, pale in a white parka, riding around on an all-terrain vehicle, was the only person out and about. The first real noises of the morning came from water and sewage trucks plugging into houses.

A view of Puvirnituq in the fall of 1992. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

A view of Puvirnituq in the autumn of 1992. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Snow fell in quiet spirals. Only a few days ago, the land was a mottled brown, gray and orange. Cool yellowish sand, rocks, withered Arctic cotton flowers and a few spindly grasses were now covered in white. Through the new snow, small groups of children walking to school made less noise, even as they called to each other.

By 9 a.m., from the Inuulitsivik hospital, that metallic form on the horizon, an electronic hum as computers and fax machines sprang to life. Scores of all-terrain vehicles were waking up, too. A woman with a child on her back and another in front raced by. She finally came to a stop in front of the Northern store, where the heavy doors swung open and shut all day, to a background of loudly chiming cash registers.

Huge bulldozers and front-end loaders rumbled behind the half-finished shell of the new school. The noise of a crane lifting a long metal girder broke up the constant whine of power tools. Not far away, in a small white tent, a small sound was drowned out: a soapstone carver filed and scraped a piece of stone. Suddenly, it became a seal under the ice, a bear above, peering down a small hole.

At noon, all over the village, there was a moment of quiet. Life stopped every afternoon when the television soap opera “All My Children” came on.

I was learning how Puvirnituq’s stories of death among young people rivalled the soap opera’s roller-coaster plots. Puvirnituq was then the suicide capital of the industrial world, with a suicide rate 2,000 times higher than the South’s, 16 suicides in one year in this community, whose population in the early 1990s was around 1,000.

I heard about a young girl who was found face-down, dead, just the week before my arrival. She had been sniffing inhalants, I was told, or maybe she sniffed too much on purpose. I heard lots of other suicide stories from teenaged girls and boys who hang out in the kitchen of the place I was staying.

“He broke up with his girlfriend … so he shot himself … it’s to draw attention … the suicides only happen in summer … he was sniffing hairspray and didn’t know what he was doing.”

I spoke with a young guy called M., a tall, gangly teenager with a soft voice. He told me that he lost four friends to suicide in that year.

“I never knew about it beforehand. It was a shock to me. They were gone the next day,” he said.

He said it’s because there are too many things to do in Puvirnituq, not too few.

“Three things we never had before have had a tremendous effect,” he said. “These three things are television, the arcades and liquor. These three are the common problems. Oh, yes. And sniffing. That’s the fourth thing. It’s very big.”

He said nothing seems to be getting better for young people in Puvirnituq who are swallowed up by these activities: They don’t talk much to their parents or each other.

He told me about his cousin Deedee. She became pregnant and her boyfriend was in jail. She wasn’t ready to become a mother, he said, so she killed herself. She was 16.

“And I tried to kill myself,” M. added in a matter-of-fact voice. “While I was unconscious, the rope around my neck snapped and I fell to the floor, and when I woke up, I was having a lot of pain. I could hardly breathe. I was disappointed at first.”

But afterwards, he said he felt that it might not have been a good solution, because people would have missed him.

I was taken off guard by M.’s confession about his failed suicide attempt, but I was even more surprised when a social worker I was talking to in the hospital about Puvirnituq’s suicide prevention programs began to talk about her own son, who recently died by suicide.

She leaned over to speak into the microphone, as if I wasn’t there.

“He never seems to have problem. He never seems to talk about it. It was very hard at first. I’m trying to learn to accept it,” she said.

She thought about leaving social work, she said, but decided that she could help others. She said she still didn’t understand what went wrong with her son.

“He didn’t have a sniffing problem. He didn’t have a drug problem. He didn’t drink. He didn’t smoke. He wasn’t violent at home. He was really a good boy, until his dying day. I didn’t know. I keep on asking, ‘Why? why?’ As long as I live, I’ll ask ‘Why? why?’ My son died. Will I suffer a long time? Will I want to live for a long time? I don’t want to forget him.”

All the parents feel the same, she said.

“We were supposed to move,” she said. “I said. “No, I don’t want to move from my house, because my son is holding all of us here. I want to touch where he was touching, stand where he was standing. I don’t want to run away from my son, here he was. When I think about it, it seems that he was holding all of us, he was such a good son. I keep talking to others how it feels. So, I’m getting stronger and stronger. Life is life. We’re not alone in the world, crying.”

I couldn’t understand why people talked to me, a journalist when I turned the tape recorder on. People talked so openly, yet I always had trouble — and still do — understanding why these young Inuit wanted to kill themselves. Later I would experience the overwhelming wrath of people at a big meeting of Makivik Corp. which could make me understand how vulnerable you can feel in a small northern community.

The cemetery in Puvirnituq, 1992. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

The cemetery in Puvirnituq, 1992. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

The next instalment of “Like an iceberg” goes live April 8.

You can read the first blog entry from April 2 here.

You can read other previous instalments here:

Like an iceberg, 1991…cont.

Like an iceberg, 1991…more

Like an iceberg, 1992, “Shots in the dark”