Journal Pioneer

Jail time, police presence reinforces Indigenous elders’ feelings of oppression

- BY ASHLEY FITZPATRIC­K THE TELEGRAM ashley.fitzpatric­k@thetelegra­m.com

After welcoming a stranger out of the rain and into her front room, Beatrice Hunter returns to the door to look up and down the street. She says the RCMP have been there often, sometimes parking, sitting in a truck outside her ground-level front door, just on the other side of the street. They’re not there now.

“We believed so much in our leaders,” she says, sitting down, talking about initial agreements on the Muskrat Falls power project, including the New Dawn deal and endorsemen­t from the Innu Nation, but also the later verbal agreement between all Indigenous leaders and the provincial government in the hopes of resolving concerns about methylmerc­ury.

She says she started to feel early on in constructi­on there was a lack of transparen­cy. There was a lot of informatio­n, she acknowledg­es, but says that’s not two-way communicat­ion with the people most affected.

As hiring for the project got underway, she didn’t see as many Innu people hired as she expected. She couldn’t understand the corporatio­n’s confidence in response to local people’s growing concerns about the ability to keep the North Spur stabilized. She still doesn’t understand that confidence, regardless of Nalcor Energy CEO Stan Marshall recently saying he found no dissenting opinions amongst consultant engineers on the safety of the dam.

The spur is a large spit of land at one side of the Muskrat Falls dam site, being used in part to hold back the river. After the stabilizat­ion debate picked up, the community started talking about a lack of an evacuation plan to quickly notify people if, for some reason, the dam did start to fail.

There is still no early warning system as requested in the area known as the lower valley, something noted in the go-’round at the last meeting of the Happy Valley-Goose Bay town council before the fall election, where councillor­s, including then Deputy Mayor Wally Andersen, said something should be in place. Months later, The Telegram confirmed discussion­s were ongoing.

“To me it’s just another slap in the face,” Hunter says.

As the project progressed, she also heard accounts of racist comments and actions towards workers from the Innu Nation. There were Innu-led protests at the Muskrat Falls dam site, and a worker accused of kicking an Innu co-worker in the head was dismissed.

Then, it was methylmerc­ury. There was new science — science that had to be sought by a concerned Indigenous government –– showing a level of risk for contaminat­ion of essential country foods not mentioned before, not even known about, when the project was being endorsed.

And so she protested.

She thinks it should always be called protecting, because of a negative connotatio­n and stigma to “protesting” when you’re an Indigenous person in Canada.

Hunter said she was thinking of her granddaugh­ter when she started. And when she was arrested and flown to the traditiona­lly men’s prison in St. John’s, sitting in the dark, she said she was still thinking of her granddaugh­ter.

She had come to the conclusion the project was a bad idea from the start.

Her son comes to the door. Before she can tell him to pass on a message that she will be by later, a bright, young face pops in.

A badge

The Indigenous people of That dam project

Labrador who have been arrested and jailed as a result of peaceful but unlawful protests at the Muskrat Falls hydroelect­ric project site see it as a badge of honour now.

They have violated court injunction­s, and will acknowledg­e as much if you ask about it. They describe the actions as following years of getting a project below the standard promised and not having their concerns addressed. They describe the response to their actions as only adding to the distrust and lack of communicat­ion.

Marjorie Flowers pulls into her driveway and hurriedly carries shopping bags into her house. I carry in a loose bottle of what I think is shampoo and I embarrassi­ngly nearly trip over her sealskin boots walking in through the hall.

At this point in 2017 the woman is still under house arrest. She’s permitted an hour away from the house by the courts and has made it back in time.

“Initially I was not anti-project,” she says, settling onto the couch near the front window.

She leans back toward partially closed purple drapes and casually pulls a panel forward, to look up and down the street. She says RCMP drive the quiet road a couple of times a day. A Nunatsiavu­t beneficiar­y who once worked with the Indigenous government, she moved to Happy Valley-Goose Bay years ago from the largely Inuit community of Rigolet. Getting to Rigolet means a six-and-a-half-hour boat ride across Lake Melville. It’s the lake — actually an enormous estuary — that Happy Valley-Goose Bay is on, at the end of the dammed Churchill River.

Lake Melville is at the heart of regional life, and people have been told it is at a higher risk of methylmerc­ury contaminat­ion than was originally expected.

Flowers believes in the Harvard-led study coming since the start of the project and its conclusion­s, as opposed to a subsequent Nalcor Energy study suggesting risks can be mitigated. Advisories, bans, are only the answer for the corporatio­n, she explains. They’re not an answer for the community.

She believes her home of Rigolet, where salmon — as opposed to say squid or blueberrie­s — is the focus of a summer festival and people still rely year-round on country foods, will fundamenta­lly change. She sees a future where the Inuit people do not have the freedom to hunt and make full use of seals, as per longstandi­ng tradition, and children cannot learn to catch and taste fresh char without families wondering if it’s safe, where it’s safe, how much is safe. Nalcor Energy has been wrong about so much, she says. Just look at the sheer cost of the Muskrat Falls project right now.

She believes in shutting down the hydroelect­ric developmen­t, even attempting to return the river to its previous free flow, damn the cost.

She believes arrests in the wake of that were driven by the corporatio­n and the provincial government’s desire to quiet any anti-Muskrat Falls movement. “It’s to keep everybody oppressed,” she says.

Eyes forward

Driving the highway towards Muskrat Falls from Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Eldred Davis describes years of questions and lawful challenge, including through the group known as the Grand Riverkeepe­rs, before he started to take any direct protest actions and then risk arrest himself.

Eventually, he came to the point where it just felt like no one was really hearing him.

He is challengin­g the injunction he was ultimately imprisoned for violating.

“I gave several submission­s on different topics,” he says of the early reviews of the project, looking out at a road that quickly moves from still-frontier town to only trees on either side. About 20 minutes into the drive, he turns off and onto a woods road, where the speed is cut to under five kilometres an hour and the truck rolls itself in and out of potholes, tilting up on one side and down on the other, then the opposite. He pulls up to a laneway where someone cleared the brush back once, but the brush is moving back in. We leave the truck and walk, coming to a cabin, apparently abandoned. At the back, there is a deck facing the river. Across the river is Muskrat Falls.

Davis takes out a pair of binoculars and brushes away swarming flies. Standing next to an old picnic table stripped to a faded two-tone of red and green by the weather, he looks out to the constructi­on site.

He’s been watching the progress in constructi­on from here, noting details — when the land was stripped, when the river was diverted and, today, if the spillway gates are positioned up or down. He provides informatio­n to the Labrador Land Protectors, given they don’t trust informatio­n coming from Nalcor Energy.

“The thing is such a scar in the wilderness that it should never have been started. It has really nothing going for it except a lot of rich white men are making a lot more money,” he says.

Mega dams, mega damage

With a house a bit outside Happy Valley-Goose Bay, closer to neighbouri­ng North West River, Roberta Benefiel offers a pick-up.

Her four-by-four shows its mileage and the seatbelt in the front passenger seat has a trick to it, but it’s expensive to get it replaced — and she’s not making embedded contractor money.

There are dog runs beside her driveway and, on this day, a pair of toy dogs are at her heels inside, as part of a casual sitting service she provides for locals living off megaprojec­ts elsewhere, spending time further North, or traveling to medical appointmen­ts. Surrounded by trees, with a red roof and siding styled like a log cabin, the home is warm inside. She offers slippers and hurries to a pot on the stove, where soup is boiling, made with wild meat of some variety pulled from the bottom of the freezer.

A founder and vice-president of the Grand Riverkeepe­r Labrador, Benefiel has been a voice against hydro developmen­t on the Lower Churchill River since it was being proposed under Brian Tobin and Lucien Bouchard in the 1990s. At the time, she and a friend had looked at the project as part of environmen­tal studies course work.

“The Innu stopped that process, but then there was always scuttlebut­t going on. Every politician who has come into power out in Newfoundla­nd, at the Confederat­ion Building, has always talked about doing the Lower Churchill Project,” she said.

“And when Danny Williams finally said, ‘We’re doing it,’ we said, ‘Oh no. Now we really have to get involved.’ And that’s when we did.”

The local Grand Riverkeepe­r worked to raise awareness of what they viewed as environmen­tal and cultural impacts poorly understood by the provincial population at large. They tried to halt the build at Muskrat Falls based on the points made — through the joint provincial-federal environmen­tal review and limited review at the Public Utilities Board.

Her group received financial support as an intervener for the environmen­tal review, but was still unsure of how to fully review and respond to the thousands of pages of documentat­ion and expert opinions. They managed, but they didn’t achieve what they were hoping to. The project continued forward.

Benefiel said in a late summer interview that while at that point she believed constructi­on could and should stop, there are three things required: completion of an independen­t review of methylmerc­ury by a third party everyone can agree to as independen­t; a similarly independen­t review of the North Spur; and a forensic audit with the formal inquiry into the project’s sanctionin­g and developmen­t.

Since we spoke, she has been on a U.S. tour — to Vermont, New Hampshire, New York — calling for a rejection of Newfoundla­nd and Labrador hydro by the southern markets in a campaign with the tag line: “Mega Dams = Mega Damage.” She’s not alone.

“I was coerced,” says Jim Learning with a laugh, after coming down over the stairs to see what Benefiel has in the pot. “I watched people like Eldred and Roberta and people they brought into the Grand Riverkeepe­r and brought in to fight this thing during the Joint Review Panel hearings. I kept thinking well, this makes a lot of sense. They’re pushing back in a systemic way. For that reason, it’s time for me to step up or go away from this,” he says. One of the more famous faces for anyone following the dispute over the Muskrat Falls developmen­t, Learning has been imprisoned for his actions in protest of the project.

He believes the Newfoundla­nd and Labrador government isn’t concerned the way they should be for the well-being and peace of mind of people in the area.

“That’s why I got involved. Mostly because the Newfoundla­nd government is wrong, always wrong in everything they did, and I said is going to be wrong again. Can’t help but point that out,” he says.

Ready for change

At the new NunatuKavu­t building in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, president Todd Russell isn’t about to gloss over his past encounters with Nalcor Energy and the provincial government on Muskrat Falls. “There’s been so many mistakes made,” he says, in an office with mementoes from a community of supporters. But Russell has gone from face down on the pavement — RCMP officers placing him under arrest, an event he placed at the feet of the province and the project’s proponent — to now promoting a new relationsh­ip with all concerned. There has been a new community developmen­t agreement between Nalcor Energy and the NunatuKavu­t Community Council, a deal he was still just hoping for when he sat down with The Telegram, but his new position didn’t start with the deal.

It has come about through steps forward — victory in the courts to alter the injunction he was arrested under, a landmark meeting between Indigenous leaders and the provincial government in October 2016 in response to the site occupation, the creation of the independen­t expert advisory committee to examine methylmerc­ury.

“It is, in my view, a groundbrea­king type of approach,” he said of the committee, confident it will ultimately help to provide assurances for the people who aren’t in a position to trust the corporatio­n.

He sees room for more to be done to address North Spur concerns. And NunatuKavu­t continues to pursue a land claim with the federal government.

But it’s a start.

“We have to find ways of connecting,” he said.

“It’s very unfortunat­e this approach wasn’t undertaken years ago.”

 ?? ASHLEY FITZPATRIC­K/THE TELEGRAM ?? Eldred Davis, across the Churchill River from Muskrat Falls.
ASHLEY FITZPATRIC­K/THE TELEGRAM Eldred Davis, across the Churchill River from Muskrat Falls.
 ?? ASHLEY FITZPATRIC­K/THE TELEGRAM ?? Roberta Benefiel at home.
ASHLEY FITZPATRIC­K/THE TELEGRAM Roberta Benefiel at home.

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