Canadians

by Roy MacGregor

  He hated residential school. He couldn’t speak the language in which they greeted him. He was forbidden to speak Cree on threat of having his mouth washed out with soap. He hated the food and hated the authority of the Anglican missionaries. When he got in trouble he had his pants pulled down and was whipped with a leather shoe by a male supervisor. He stole bread from the cafeteria to give to another child in the boys’ dormitory who had somehow lost his toque and was being punished by being forced to remain all day on his knees in penance. He despised being penned in by a six-foot fence around the school grounds with barbed wire on top—as if the Cree children were prisoners of war.

  But Billy loved the library and even liked a few of the teachers. From Moose Factory he moved on to high school in Sault Ste. Marie, excelling in each grade. Many years later he returned to Rupert House, well educated and ambitious. His intention was to talk to his father about going on to law school—he would become a lawyer fighting for Native rights—but Malcolm would hear none of it. Billy had been sent away, the father told his son, to learn English and to come back and serve the people. There were new issues, not the least of which was a provincial insistence that the small children being taught in the village be instructed in French, not English, the official language of the village, and certainly not Cree, the language of the people.

  “You are going to be chief here one day,” Malcolm told his young son. It would happen almost immediately. At twenty-one Billy easily won the election and set out to challenge the authorities in a manner that gained him quick recognition up and down the James Bay coast as a force to be reckoned with. He was newly married to Elizabeth, they had a healthy baby girl, and the spring goose hunt was coming fast. Life seemed both good and entirely predictable. For a short while.

  Billy had brought home a new radio from the Soo, a tiny two-transistor with an earplug that took only a single small battery and could be carried in a pocket rather than on a sled. He was sitting, dressed in white poplin behind a snow blind, with the radio on and his earplug in when the first geese of spring arrived, drawn to the blind by Malcolm and Charlie Diamond’s “Ka-ronk! Ka-ronk!” calls. They shot, geese fell out of the sky and splashed on the melting ice surface, and Hilda and the girls quickly gathered them up.

  It was April 30, 1971. Billy listened as Robert Bourassa bounded up onto the stage of the Québec Colisée and announced “the Project of the Century”—a hydroelectric project that would tap into the powerful rivers flowing into James Bay.

  “Every day,” Bourassa would one day write, “millions of potential kilowatt-hours flow downhill and out to sea. What a waste!”

  Bourassa’s scheme would cover an area two-thirds the size of France. Five reservoirs would be built to create a water surface half as large as Lake Ontario. Eight massive dams, 203 dikes, and 1500 kilometres of roads would also be built. The massive project would create 125,000 jobs and cost at least $16 billion. “The world,” Bourassa said, “begins tomorrow.”

  But it seemed to end for the Cree of James Bay. No one had ever consulted them—yet they’d lived here along these rivers for thousands of years. Their traplines would be flooded. The graves of their ancestors would be washed away. One of the villages would disappear. And no one had even thought to ask if it was all right.

  Billy Diamond and Robert Kanatewat, another young Cree leader from Fort George, farther up the coast, tried to mobilize the Crees. Billy obtained maps and Robert made phone calls, and they went to work.

  To give some small sense of what they were up against, it’s worth knowing that the premier of Quebec was talking about the “Project of the Century” at a time when the Cree had barely managed to coin a new Cree word for this creature called “electricity.” They came up with nimischiiuskutaau—literally, “the fire of thunder.”

  The Crees had never thought to look for a word for “reserve.”

  The Crees had never signed a treaty with the Government of Canada. Natives hadn’t even gained the right to vote in the province of Quebec when Robert Bourassa arrived in office.

  To make matters worse, they had no infrastructure at all. They were a people of geography only, sixty-five hundred living among five villages and in the deep bush. They’d never had a meeting in all those ten thousand years. There was no chief for all the Crees, no political structure whatsoever to turn to.

  Billy and Robert and a couple of the other young leaders called a meeting in the village of Mistassini. They came by floatplane, by canoe, and even walked. They met in the old schoolhouse, with Billy’s maps taped up on the walls and the Crees arguing among themselves about whether they should speak in Cree, for the benefit of the elders, or in English, to allow the younger ones more opportunity to explain to the gathering what was happening.

  Billy Diamond got an immediate sense of the challenge in front of him when a hand went up at the back of the hall.

  “What is it?” he asked from the front of the room.

  A middle-aged Cree stood up, twirling his hat in his hand. “First thing we got to do,” he told the crowd, “is buy an electric typewriter.”

  “Why electric?” Billy asked.

  The man looked back, incredulous. “Why electric?” he repeated. “Because none of us know how to type—that’s why!”

  The Crees’ fight against the Project of the Century has filled other books—including one by this hand—and must not overflow this one. But let it be known that the fight was long and difficult, at times torturous, at times even comical. When village elders were called upon to testify at the court hearings going on in Montreal the government kindly sent a jet to pick them up in Timmins. The elders adamantly refused to board the jet because, as they explained, giggling, “The plane has no propeller.”

  In the end, the Crees couldn’t stop the project, as they’d hoped, but they did get major concessions in the flooded area, a new village to be built to replace flooded Fort George, a $135 million settlement, and control of vast areas of land. They signed the James Bay Agreement with the governments of Quebec and Canada, an agreement that would become the basis for the first self-government experiment in the country. It was hailed as a major triumph for Native rights—and Billy Diamond, now Grand Chief of all the James Bay Crees of northern Quebec, was held to be the Native leader of the moment, perhaps the future.

  What brought him to my little office six years later on that day in 1981 was a total breakdown of promise.

  The Agreement had been going along just fine. New houses were being built in places like Waskaganish. The Crees who wished to live on the land were being paid a per diem to trap. All seemed perfectly in line until communications dramatically broke down between Ottawa and Quebec City over the usual political issues of jurisdiction and obligation.

  The two levels of government were to work jointly in constructing new houses and waste and water systems in the villages. The new homes had been completed and ditches had been dug for the sewer lines, but then, with everything ready for one final push to completion, all work had come to a halt.

  It matters not who was to blame. The two levels of government just stopped working together. But for the Crees it was disastrous. Supplies and equipment were still to come in and, besides, the Crees didn’t have the training to finish off the work, so it was left. They had to resort to outhouses the first winter of the work shutdown. The outhouses worked fine in winter, but when the spring thaw came the sludge melted and began moving through the thin sands of the northern surface. It ended up, naturally, in the ditches that had been dug. It seeped, by gravity, down to where the main town well had been constructed. The sludge worked its way into the water system.

  As Third World women everywhere had been encouraged to do, the Cree women had turned away from breast feeding and were using formula that had to be mixed with water. There were “boil water” orders in effect, but there was also slippage. People began suffering from diarrhea, babies began to get ill.

  On August 10, 1980, four-month-old Tommy Wapachee from th
e village of Nemaska died. Soon there were others. Five more babies were dead. Their little bodies were taken away for autopsies and, the Crees claimed, one had been returned to the families for burial wrapped in a green garbage bag.

  Billy and Elizabeth Diamond’s fifth child, Philip, had also been sick, so ill that he’d been transferred by air ambulance to Sainte-Justine hospital in Montreal. The diagnosis for Philip confirmed the others: gastroenteritis infection, the Third World Killer.

  On October 19, 1980, a call came in from the hospital to Waskaganish that the Diamonds should arrange to get to Montreal as quickly as possible. Little Philip was dying.

  Billy and Elizabeth flew to Montreal and raced to the Hospital Sainte-Justine. A priest had already given last rites. The parents were ushered into Room 3616 to say their farewells to the dying infant.

  They couldn’t even recognize their son. Philip seemed more a red balloon of open sores than a baby. The gastroenteritis had given way to chickenpox and then to meningitis. The infant was continually going into seizures. The doctors wanted to know if perhaps the parents’ voices might spark some little hint of life yet in the boy, and Billy was asked to draw close and talk to his son.

  Old habits die hard. Billy, by now used to dealing in the white man’s language when among whites, began speaking softly in English.

  Nothing.

  But then, realizing that when he’d first held the boy he and Elizabeth had always spoken in Cree, he switched to his Native language.

  “Akaawii pichistaayimh, nipwaayimish. Philip, chiki chiih ihtutaan waash, akaawii pichistinh,” he told the child in Cree. “Don’t give up, my little boy. Fight. Philip, you have a future. Don’t let it go.”

  The baby’s eyes moved—a flicker.

  It wasn’t much, but enough. The doctors moved in and, instead of letting nature take its obvious course, they tried every imaginable procedure to get the child breathing normally again. They eventually brought the infection under control and the seizures stopped. It took months, but little Philip slowly recovered. After 121 days in hospital, Philip Winston Diamond was released and returned to Waskaganish.

  Don’t expect much, the doctors quietly told Billy and Elizabeth. Philip would likely never walk, he wouldn’t be able to talk. It would not be much of a future.

  “We still have no sewers,” Billy told me that day in the Maclean’s office.

  I went to see for myself. We travelled by plane, by helicopter, by skidoo, and by boat, and the story Maclean’s eventually published on the land claim gone wrong and the dead Cree babies ended up tabled in Geneva at the World Health Organization, where it proved a huge international embarrassment to Canada. But it worked. Ottawa and Quebec ceased their feuding long enough to carry in bottled water and medical supplies and complete the sewers.

  They fixed the water supply and, in other ways, they fixed Philip. Hilda Diamond refused to accept that Philip would never walk and, with Billy and Elizabeth and other members of the family, they set up a schedule where, for hours each morning and night, they would work on the child’s limbs, slowly massaging his arms and legs to build up the muscles and keep him active. Medication brought the seizures down to a controllable level and the youngster grew quickly.

  By 1986, when Doug Sprott and I headed up to Waskaganish for the Cree–Yamaha boat launch, Philip Winston Diamond was riding his little bike all through the village. He was walking and he was talking. “We can’t shut him up!” his father laughed.

  Once summer was over, Philip was going to school.

  And not any residential school such as the one his parents had been sent off to, but a brand-new school, built by the federal government under the provisions of the James Bay Agreement that Philip Diamond’s father had reached and signed.

  WE SPENT THREE DAYS marooned on little Obejiwan Island. It was one of the nicest three days of my life.

  While Doug and I walked around the schoolyard-sized island, pushing through the black spruce and the aspen, scrambling over the snow-covered rocks and lichen and watching the tides come in and go out, the two Cree hunters silently went about surviving for all four of us.

  Even before the snow had stopped, Lawrence and Charlie had turned spruce poles and the big tarpaulin from the boat into a makeshift tent. They’d found an old forty-five-gallon drum some hunter or bush pilot had once cached his gasoline supply in and, using knives and axe, they’d turned it into as cozy a woodstove as any resort has ever advertised. They found a rusted pail and Lawrence deliberately put his foot through the bottom, instantly creating a flue for the top of the tarpaulin tent.

  We had shelter, we had heat. We took off our wet clothes and dried them, dancing nearly naked in the tent while shirts dried on the ends of sticks placed in the ground just beyond the edges of the flame.

  When the tide was out Charlie and Lawrence set nets they had carried in their own packs. Wearing thigh-high waders, they went out into the shallow waters off the rocky end of the island and tacked the fine nets onto poles they hammered in between the rocks. Once the tide came in and went out again, they gathered up the little whitefish and monkfish that had been caught by their gills, then cleaned, sliced, and suspended them on sticks over the open fire, the cooked flesh so sweet and tender that it seemed to melt in our hands. We had tea. We had fresh bannock.

  The more we explored the island the more we came to realize that years ago it had been the site of a Cree goose camp. We fixed up the old outhouse with a magnificent view of the far shore beckoning in the distance. We slept at night, warm and happy, our sleeping bags tight to our necks as the two Cree hunters lay casually on top of theirs and talked in Cree and giggled, probably at us. Who could blame them?

  Charlie fascinated me. He walked with me around the island and everywhere he looked he seemed to find something. A bear skull, which Lawrence said meant we’d have good luck. A couple of stove pipes that, fitted together, took the smoke out of our makeshift shelter. It was almost as if he’d been here before, preparing the island for the shipwrecked.

  I loved to watch him walk and work. He never hurried. And when he chopped the spruce for the fire he squatted down, knees to his side, legs back, feet splayed for balance. I’d never seen anyone cut wood like this, and it struck me that he was giving up too much power and leverage. I asked Lawrence about it and he said that Charlie lived all the time in the bush, was usually alone on his traplines, and that one little slip of a sharp axe for a Cree hunter could mean bleeding to death if no one was there to help. The hunters cut their wood this way deliberately because it was safer. How different from the likes of Doug and me, or for that matter old Bruce Hutchison, all of whom would have had a splitting block set up and be swinging away at the spruce as if driving home the last spike in a railroad.

  When it partially cleared on the second day Doug and I began searching the skies for rescue planes, but we never saw a plane, never heard an engine, never even saw the high trail of a jet headed for Asia or Europe. Nothing. When I asked Lawrence if they’d be sending out anyone to search for us, he laughed.

  “Who says we’re lost?” he asked.

  True enough. On the third day the storm had passed and the chop had returned to what we’d set out in a lifetime earlier. We cut logs and used them to roll the heavy boat back out in low tide and into water deep enough that we could drop the motor down and start it up again. It took less than three hours to make our way back.

  When we turned into the mouth of the Rupert, Charlie at the throttle, we could see that the Waskaganish dock area was thick with Crees, Billy Diamond standing in the centre.

  The Japanese had come and gone. Morningside had phoned and given up. The boat was missing. And Billy Diamond was laughing.

  Wasn’t he worried? I asked.

  “Why would I be worried?” he laughed. “You were with Cree hunters—on our land.”

  BILLY DIAMOND liked to say that the Maclean’s story changed the Crees’ world—but it also changed me. From that point on I wrote increasingly
about Aboriginal issues. For every encouraging story like the James Bay Crees there seemed a dozen discouraging tales of poverty and despair and tragedy, but there was also a sense that a larger awakening was taking place—partly through the courts, partly through the media, partly because reality could not be ignored any longer.

  Change wasn’t coming fast enough, but at least it was coming.

  At the very least, relations between those who were here first and the vast majority who came along later were much better than they’d been in the past. And sometimes it’s worth looking back in history to see why working for change, even change so slow it seemed imperceptible, is a necessary goal. It’s difficult to believe how it once was in this country that today openly brags about such values as tolerance and fairness and understanding and equality.

  George Simpson, governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company from 1826 to 1860—a role roughly similar to being ruler, hence his nickname “Little Emperor”—openly despised Indians and would ply them with liquor before trading to trick them into bad deals. He was also known to hang Natives for minor crimes and knowingly let elders starve so they wouldn’t be any burden on the trading post. And yet Simpson had a long string of “country wives” and fathered children whose bloodlines—including Oxford professor Jennifer Welsh—are still traceable throughout western Canada. They were the lucky ones.