Lubicon Lake Indian Nation Little Buffalo Lake, AB 403-629-3945 Fax: 403-629-3939 Mailing address: 3536 - 106 Street Edmonton, AB T6J 1A4 403-436-5652 Fax: 403-437-0719 February 10, 1993 Enclosed for your information is a self-explanatory commentary on the plight of aboriginal people in Canada. * * * * * February 05, 193, The Globe & Mail THE DESTRUCTION OF THE LABRADOR INNU Michael Valpy You will, of course, understand that the federal and Newfoundland governments did not suddenly discover the appalling state of the Labrador Innu after last week's attempted suicide of six children in the Davis Inlet community. These governments have been complicitous in decades of systematic destruction of the Innu. Someone is going to use the word genocide to describe what Ottawa -- particularly Ottawa -- and St. John's have allowed to happen. It is not the right word, but neither is it completely off-track. To listen now to that unfortunate man, Indian Affairs and Northern Development Minister Thomas Siddon, tell Parliament that he has consultants studying the problem and ministry officials assessing the problem and that he himself is about to take a proposal to Cabinet, is enough to make one retch. The Innu -- also known an Montagnais-Naskapi -- number about 1,500 people in Labrador, primarily living in two communities: Davis Inlet and Sheshatshui. They have lived on this land as nomadic hunters for 6,000 years. There is an aboriginal land claim to 259,000 square kilometres. An examination of their history since the Second World War brings feelings of shame about being Canadian. P.W. Botha, then-President of South Africa, when questioned by a Canadian journalist about some aspect of apartheid, replied, in effect: Look what you do to your red Indians. In the 1940s, the military built air bases in Labrador. In the 1950s, the resource exploiters dug huge iron mines. In the 1960s, the Churchill Falls hydroelectric projects began that flooded the Innu's hunting lands and burial grounds. All this was done without the Innu's permission. In the late 1960s, they were encouraged to move into cheaply built, frequently uninsulated government houses. They said they were promised roads, sewage systems and other amenities that never came. By the mid-1980s, the supersonic jets of Canada and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies began using the Innu's traditional land for low-level aerial manoeuvres -- building to more than 6,000 flights a year at speeds of 800 kilometres an hour and altitudes of 35 metres. Innu complained that the flights were altering the living habits of the caribou and other game. Hundreds of Innu have been arrested for protesting against the flights. More have been arrested in the 1990s for trying to stop logging on land they claim as theirs. They have made symbolic protests against more hydroelectric stations being built on the land to which they have a claim by disconnecting their hydro meters. They have been investigated by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. A priest and a teacher were convicted of sexually abusing their children. The Sheshatshui Innu found it necessary to boycott their school before the government promised to teach the children something of Innu culture. They get their snowmobiles and weapons and food confiscated for so-called illegal hunting -- when basically they merit some kind of medal for being able to look after themselves and their families in 40-below weather. The Americans -- when they abandoned one military base that they had never asked the Innu's permission to build -- left behind 400 tonnes of PCBs that had to be incinerated. The Innu have become impoverished. They have become alcohol abusers, solvent abusers, suicidal. Perhaps the unfortunate Mr. Siddon, while he has his consultants studying this and his officials studying that, can direct them to the report prepared by Newfoundland physician K.A. Wotton nearly 10 years ago. Dr. Wotton spent two years working with the Innu (and 1,000 Inuit) on the Labrador coast. She reported that their suicide rate was five times the national average and -- get this! -- even twice the national aboriginal suicide rate. She found that the rate of deaths from fires, drowning and other accidents was 47 times the national average. She found that infant mortality rates were astronomical. She found that alcoholism, tuberculosis and impetigo were endemic. What did Newfoundland's Health Minister Wallace House say at the time? He said he was alarmed but not surprised. He said there were self-help programs for the natives. "They have the mechanism and, I would say, the responsibility to use these programs to help themselves." There was not much government could do, said the minister. "It's a whole way of life we are dealing with here" -- yes, indeed; one that governments have done so much to create. Mr. House was at least more candid that Mr. Siddon is being now. The Globe and Mail, incidentally, ran the article on Dr. Wotton's report on page 21. I suppose in those days we weren't particularly interested, either, in the rate at which a few remote drinking Indians -- having had their culture smashed -- were killing themselves. Well, they are still killing themselves. Now they're doing it as children.