[IPSM] Montreal Gazette article on Cree Nation

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Subject: [IPSM-c] A river runs through it
Date:    Sun, August 14, 2005 9:57 am
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A river runs through it

"The Rupert River is the lifeblood of the people here. If they kill the
river, what is going to happen to us?" Heading into an election, a divided
Cree nation weighs the good and the bad of the $3.6-billion deal it signed
with Quebec. Page A4



FROM PAGE ONE

Water and power: Politics of a deal

A settlement with Quebec in 2002 gave the province's nine Cree communities
millions in provincial cash, but also paved the way for two hydro projects
in the heart of their territory

  ALEX ROSLIN

  SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE

  Saturday, August 13, 2005

  Montreal Gazette



By all rights, this month's election race for leader of the Quebec Crees
should have been a cakewalk for Ted Moses.

As Cree grand chief since 1999, Moses led his people to Canada's biggest
land-claim settlement with a first nation - the $3.6-billion Cree-Quebec
New Relationship Agreement in 2002.

The "Paix des Braves" deal unleashed a flood of provincial cash into the
nine far-flung Cree communities, spread across a quarter of the province
in the James Bay region.

A frenzy of construction is under way as Crees fix dilapidated homes,
build long-awaited schools and water-treatment plants, and pave dusty
roads - projects first promised in the James Bay Agreement of 1975 but
never delivered.

And that's just the beginning of the money flow from the province to the
Cree regional government and band councils. The agreement promises $70
million a year for 50 years, as a settlement of Cree lawsuits worth $8
billion over unfulfilled promises in the 1975 agreement. (Cree lawsuits
against the federal government over the agreement are ongoing.)

Moses's deal also gave Cree youth hope of finding work from Hydro-Quebec's
construction projects, and it put an end to more than a decade of hostile
relations between Crees and the Quebec government. Moses went so far as to
endorse the Parti Québécois in the 2003 provincial election, join
then-premier Bernard Landry on a cross-Europe tour to sell the deal, and
attend Landry's wedding.

But neither leader has fared well in the three years since the happy new
era was declared. Landry resigned as PQ leader in June, and Moses's bid
for a third term as grand chief, against two opponents in the Aug. 31
election, is considered too close to call.

Crees are still divided over his deal with Quebec, with many feeling that
a deep malaise has already set into their communities. They say the deal
endangers their fragile traditional hunting way of life, and that in turn
will undermine the Cree social fabric. They say signs of this are already
surfacing in a recent string of youth suicides and in reports of heavier
drinking and drug use - social ills that have befallen some native
communities but that the tightly knit Crees had largely avoided.

Moses's critics say the deal came with an unacceptably high price tag -
Quebec's insistence that, in return for settling the province's
outstanding obligations from the James Bay agreement, the Crees okay the
construction of two new hydroelectric projects that will flood 1,000
square kilometres in the heart of Cree territory. The second of the
projects, now under environmental review, is especially contentious
because it would divert the majestic Rupert River, known as one of last
great virgin rivers of North America.

The agreement reversed a legacy of fierce Cree opposition to hydro
projects which had culminated in a savvy international campaign that was
widely credited with forcing Quebec to shelve its proposed $13-billion
Great Whale hydro project in 1993. Yet many Crees feel they got little in
return in terms of protecting their forests from logging - a key element
in one of the Cree lawsuits.

The first of the two hydro projects, the 480-megawatt Eastmain-1, is now
70-per-cent completed, but the emotional debate that divided Cree families
and friends appears to have only gotten more bitter.

Moses barely eked out a victory in his last election in 2002. He was never
able to assume the image of charismatic leader and consensus-builder that
his predecessor, the wildly popular Matthew Coon Come, seemed to cultivate
with effortless ease.

 "I don't feel we're going where we should be going," said Robert
Weistche, chief of the Cree community of Waskaganish.

Weistche's village of 1,800 residents sits at the mouth of the Rupert
River, where it spills into Rupert Bay and James Bay. Hydro-Quebec's
proposed diversion project would redirect three-quarters of the Rupert's
flow northward into the gargantuan La Grande hydro project to increase its
power capacity. The river's flow would drop by over 50 percent at the
point where it sweeps past Waskaganish.

Reached one morning in early August, Weistche said the Rupert was a
beehive of activity that day. "Kids are swimming, people are out canoeing
and fishing," he said.

Weistche gets audibly choked up as he talks about the diversion. "God made
[the Rupert] perfect," he said. "What is man's right to say we're going to
change it? The Rupert River is the lifeblood of the people here. If they
kill the river, what is going to happen to us?"

*  *  *

At the Eastmain-1 work camp, 1,000 kilometres north of Montreal, Johnny
Saganash was one of the first people hired after the Cree-Quebec deal was
signed. A former policeman who worked for 12 years as a Hydro-Quebec
electrician, he is now the camp's Cree counselor - scouring Cree
communities in search of workers, and smoothing their transition once they
arrive.

There are currently 193 Crees at the camp, working mostly in construction,
tree-cutting and cafeteria jobs. They've joined 2,300 Hydro-Quebec
employees who have been toiling there since 2003 to build the project's 33
dikes and the dam that will contain the 600-square-kilometre reservoir
slated to come online in 2007. (Another 124 Crees are among the 526
Hydro-Quebec employees in a second nearby camp, Nemiscau, working on both
Eastmain-1 and the Rupert diversion project.)

At first, Saganash said, many Crees accused him of going over to the
enemy. But he said attitudes are changing. "Yes, it's mother nature we're
going to destroy," he said. "[But] when I go to the [Cree] villages, a lot
of people give me a handshake, thanking me for work."

Just 85 kilometres to the south of the main camp, in the Cree village of
Nemaska, changes from the project are already hitting hard.

Roger Orr owned a thriving restaurant in this community of 600-which is
the headquarters of the Cree Regional Authority-before Moses signed the
deal with Quebec. Orr said he had to close down because he couldn't
compete with the wages and the enormous amounts of overtime Crees can earn
in the Hydro camps.

But Orr said the jobs open to Crees are mostly low-skilled and temporary,
largely slated to disappear when the projects are completed. "The
agreement had a reverse effect on our efforts to start our own economy,"
he said.

The influx of workers with pockets full of cash has also brought a flood
of alcohol and drugs to Nemaska, Orr said. "People don't wait for the
weekends now. They drink all week. There are a lot of drugs. Cocaine is
one that's hitting hard," he said.

"It's amazing how fast this thing is coming upon us. The fishing spots are
overcrowded [with Hydro workers and other non-natives]. The culture is
disappearing fast. It's slipping through our fingers."

Another problem preoccupying Orr and other Crees is a rash of suicides by
young people. A Cree Health Board study earlier this year found the
suicide rate had increased since 2001, the year the deal with Quebec was
announced. It reports seven suicides in the Cree communities since August
2003, a rate that is more than twice as high as the average over the past
20 years.

"It's a crisis of epidemic proportions," said Weistche. "When a big
project happens, there is a lot of turmoil and dealing with fast change.
There is a feeling of alienation from the land."

Orr agreed. He is about to start a new job as a counselor at a Cree
substance-abuse treatment centre. In July, he said, he saved one teenaged
Cree girl who was trying to drown herself, then a day later he got a phone
call from another who had suicidal thoughts and needed someone to talk to.

"Our social structure becomes ineffective due to the loss of our way of
life," he said. "We've only seen the beginning. If the river is diverted,
the problems are going to be 50 times what they are now."

Ted Moses sounded confident and unworried about the election as he spoke
over his cell phone from a charity golf tournament in Chibougamau.

He said he, too, is preoccupied by the suicides of young Crees but
dismissed any link with the hydro project. "We're not in a position to say
what the root cause is. There isn't one single reason."

He promised "continuity" and said he is proud of the Cree agreement with
Quebec. "It brought development to the communities and the creation of
jobs," he said.

He suggested the Eastmain-1 and Rupert projects are different, tamer
beasts than the mammoth Great Whale hydro project that he helped defeat
when he was the Cree ambassador to the United Nations in the early 1990s.

"We have changed [Quebec] policy from mega hydro projects to smaller hydro
projects," he said.

Still, the deal with Quebec is bittersweet for Moses. Nearly 10 percent of
his extended family's ancestral hunting ground, known as a trapline, will
be flooded by the Eastmain-1 project-more than any other Cree family's
land. Moses lived on the trapline until he was nine years old and is now
its tallyman, the family member designated with managing the land and its
resources.

But he has come under fire even on this, because a company he heads
obtained contracts to clear trees and trap beaver in the
soon-to-be-flooded areas of his trapline from the Société d'énergie de la
Baie James, a Hydro-Quebec subsidiary that is managing construction of the
hydro project.

The SEBJ's Web site says three such contracts were given to a company
called 9143-1981 Quebec Inc. as part of the Eastmain-1 project. The
provincial business registry lists Ted Moses as the company's president
and majority shareholder.

The contracts come under a side agreement that Hydro-Quebec signed with
the Grand Council of the Crees under Moses in 2002, promising that
tallymen of traplines affected by Eastmain-1 would get contracts to cut
trees and trap beaver in zones slated for flooding. Under the agreement,
no calls for bids are required.

Hydro-Quebec spokesperson Marie Archambault said the three contracts
received by Moses's firm were given out in 2003 and 2004, but she refused
to disclose their cost.

"The tallymen whose traplines were to be flooded said to Hydro-Quebec that
there were no benefits for them or their families," she said. "So we
agreed to give them little contracts to capture beaver and also cut wood."

The four other tallymen of land slated for flooding received similar
contracts.

But Moses's opponents in the election raise questions about conflict of
interest. "I had some problems with that," said Matthew Mukash, a past
Cree deputy grand chief who lost to Moses in the 2001 election and is
challenging him again. "If it gives a direct benefit to the grand chief,
then I would say it is [an apparent conflict-of-interest]."

Moses brushes it all off. "All the tallymen have the opportunity for
that," he said. "Why should I be excluded from that? I fail to see why
people would raise that in an election."

In the end, it might be Moses's new allies at Hydro-Quebec who do him the
most political harm. When the provincially owned utility issued its
environmental-impact study of the Rupert project last December, it said
Crees would see little change in their traditional hunting way of life.

The study was so dismissive of any harmful impacts that even a consultant
for the Cree Regional Authority, energy expert Robert McCullough, judged
it to be "a far cry from state of the art" and said Hydro had failed to
justify the project or explore alternatives.

In early August, the Rupert project received another embarrassing blow
when federal and provincial environmental panels issued a joint report
rejecting Hydro-Quebec's impact study, saying it is "incomplete" and
suffers from "major omissions." The panels made 384 separate requests for
additional information.

It all appears to add up to more trouble for Moses in the election. "He's
going to have problems," said Orr. "Young people have not stopped talking
about this agreement. People are really feeling the effects. They don't
like what [Moses] brought and the way he brought it."