Canadian Geographic - Best of 2023
PROMISED LANDS
UPROOTED REPEATEDLY BY DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS, THE OUJÉ-BOUGOUMOU CREE WANDERED BOREAL QUEBEC FOR 70 YEARS BEFORE FINDING A PERMANENT HOME. FOR SOME, THE JOURNEY CONTINUES.
Uprooted repeatedly by development projects, the Oujé-Bougoumou Cree wandered boreal Quebec for 70 years before finding a permanent home. For some, the journey continues.
AABEL BOSUM, GRAND CHIEF of the Grand Council of the Crees, plants his dress shoes where his parents’ house once sat on a thin wooded spit that curls into Doré Lake like a dog’s tongue into a bowl of water. A late September breeze rushes through the birch trees. Bosum’s mind turns to the past. This was the site of the final village from which his people, the Oujé-Bougoumou Cree Nation, were uprooted by a mining company — this one a gold pit owned by a fellow named Campbell — in the unrelenting pursuit of monetizable minerals from the Canadian Shield.
The Bible says the Israelites wandered the wilderness for 40 years before Moses led them to the Promised Land. The Oujé-Bougoumou Cree roamed the boreal near what is now the town of Chibougamau, Que., like squatters, seeking shelter in roadside shacks, miners’ tents and trapline cabins for some 70 years before Bosum led them to secure a permanent reserve on the shores of Lake Opémisca, about an hour’s drive from here, in 1992. For some, the exodus might not be over.
Bosum was born in 1955 at nearby Lake Chibougamau, separated from Doré Lake by a thin isthmus across which the Cree could easily portage their canoes. He was the eldest of his mother Lucy’s 11 children. Lucy’s parents forbade her marriage to Abel’s biological father, Cypien Caron, a French-Canadian, and so Lucy instead married Sam Neepoosh, who was a father figure to Abel. Standing where his childhood home once did, Bosum surveys the lakeside peninsula. This is his first time back since the OujéBougoumou Cree hosted a healing camp on this plot 20 years ago. Today, it’s the site of a small family farm with chickens, rabbits and a lone cat. When Bosum and I stop in, the owners aren’t home, so technically, we are trespassing.
“I’m still amazed at those trees,” Bosum says, scoping out the paper birch outside the modest two-storey house. Bosum recalls a photograph taken of his aunt in front of one of these trunks. There’s another, somewhere in the memory books, of Bosum posing outside his family’s cabin in a pair of DIY bell bottoms (made by cutting a slit up from the cuff of the jeans and stitching in an extra triangle of denim), his hair hanging over his shoulders like a hippy. At 63, Bosum’s now silvery hair is close-cropped. He speaks softly and thoughtfully as memories return, periodically adjusting the rectangular glasses resting on the bridge of his
plump nose. “That was a long time ago,” he says wistfully.
Bosum remembers log homes built in a circle, their front doors facing inward. About a dozen structures once stood here. The builders would begin by erecting a plywood shack with a tarp for a roof. Over two to three years, using materials rummaged from a nearby dump, families slowly built up walls and roofing before sealing windows, adding insulation and finally fixing up the interior. “It wasn’t like today,” says Bosum. “We had no credit, couldn’t go to the bank.” Nonetheless, families took pride in their homes, at least in part because they were under the impression that, if they built up a dignified community, the provincial and federal governments would let them stay.
In the centre of the village, roughly where the current residents now have a front-yard firepit, there was once a makeshift ballfield. A baker used to stop to sell bread and Vachon cakes out of his van. Families pinched pennies to save for the pastries. One time, Bosum and five young friends organized a cake heist. Their plan was simple: Eddy, the fastest, would pick up a Vachon and run. The baker would give chase. His van abandoned, the other four would make off with as many morsels as they could. The scheme worked and the baker was pissed. After that, the kids weren’t allowed to come around his van anymore. Months later, during a trip to the dump for building supplies, Bosum spotted the man throwing away his cakes after making his final sales at Doré Lake. It was then he realized the breadman had been selling the village the last of his supply as it started to spoil. “That was no favour,” says Bosum.
Behind each house, there was a trail down to the lake, where families kept the canoes they used to traverse the many interlinked waterways spattered across Chibougamau and James Bay like a region-wide Rorschach test left by the retreating Laurentide Ice Sheet millennia ago. Despite the once meagre circumstances of his people, Bosum considers this a place of plenty.
Doré Lake, or Lac aux Dorés in French, is named for the doré (walleye) found in its waters. Blueberries and raspberries grow on the hill above the village. In the 1960s, a Quebec government official told then Chief Jimmy Mianscum that his people could remain here indefinitely. In 1966, the Canadian Centennial Commission even wrote a grant for $1,700 so that Anglican Church volunteers from far-off cities like Toronto could build a 15-metre-long hall for community meetings and religious services at Cache Bay, just around the bend from the village. It doubled as the chief’s home. The villagers called it “Beaver House.”
Bosum remembers a wedding party at Beaver House when he was a little boy. At around 11 o’clock at night, four police pulled up and started throwing attendees into the backs of their squad cars. The Cree were shaken and injured. “Nobody knew what was going on,” says Bosum. “There was a lot of racism back then. There was a lot of tension built up between the Cree and French people working in the mines and so forth. And so, the police — I wouldn’t say all of them, I knew some good police — but there were some police who would use their authority to just come in and crash a party. They weren’t even invited and they weren’t called.”
FOR MOST OF THE 1900S, Cree life was organized around the harvest of fur, timber and minerals for French- and English-speaking colonists who first appeared in the region in the 1600s, as well as an older Indigenous subsistence economy. In 1870, the Canadian Geological Commission sent a surveyor to the region. Gold was first discovered in 1903 at Copper Point on Portage Island in Chibougamau Lake. The Cree maintain that their ancestors, who didn’t know the value of the metals, first identified outcroppings to prospectors. A series of mining booms and busts followed, generally tracking global economic cycles: down with the crash of 1929, up after the Second World War. In 1947, the Quebec government began construction of a road into the region. It was completed by 1950, and loggers began chopping away at the spruce that grew dense, strong and tall in the backcountry. When Chibougamau was established as a company town in 1952, there were 25 sawmills operating in the region producing 50 million feet of timber, primarily for export to the United States. In 1954, the province incorporated Chibougamau as a municipality.
The Cree, who had the misfortune of building homes on top of riches claimed by white men, were displaced from village after village. And even when they weren’t removed by industry, they felt its impacts. Piles of mining garbage left atop frozen lakes in winter killed fish and ruined drinking water in summer. New mines, logging plots and roads scared off game. In the years before they established themselves at Doré Lake, the Cree lived at Hamel Island, Swampy Point, Campbell Point and Cedar Bay, among other places. At Hamel Island, they were told to move because the government needed sand to build highways. At Swampy Point, the only land not claimed by prospectors, influential clergymen cited public health concerns before telling the Cree to hit the road. At Cedar Bay and Campbell Point, the Cree were told their homes were too close to mining explosives. Each time they were uprooted, they had to find a new place to settle, clear-cut a lot and start building a new shelter. When they left Campbell Point, they had to dig up and relocate the remains of ancestors interred in a community cemetery. Many turned to alcohol to cope.
Beginning in 1962, most had summer residences at the village on Doré Lake. Men would join prospecting teams, working as explorers and linecutters felling trees in areas of interest
for mining corporations. Others found jobs as lumberjacks. They drank the water and ate the fish from the lake and supplemented their incomes with rations and welfare collected from government officials at a Hudson’s Bay Company post on the Mistissini reserve, about four days’ voyage by canoe. In the fall, families returned to camps where they trapped beaver, otter and lynx to sell to the Hudson’s Bay while they hunted moose, goose, caribou, bear, porcupine, rabbit and partridge to eat. Between 1952 and 1972, the white population of Chibougamau grew from fewer than 200 to nearly 12,000. They far outnumbered the Cree at Doré Lake, whose population was about 125 in 1968.
BOSUM REMEMBERS when, in 1962, his mother and stepfather took him on one of their trips to the HBC post in Mistissini. At the store, Bosum’s mother bought her boy the finest clothes she could afford. Bosum remembers the pride he felt, looking at himself in the mirror. The next day, a plane landed on Lake Mistissini. Bosum’s stepdad Sam said, “time to go” and walked the sevenyear-old down to the dock where Cree children were gathered. A white man stood before them, calling out names to be loaded onto the aircraft. Bosum’s name was called, and his stepfather carried him to the hold alongside 30 other children. They would be the first students of the La Tuque residential school run by the Anglican Church hundreds of kilometres south. The children cried as the plane carried them away.
That same year, despite repeated promises from both the provincial and federal governments to respect their village and build new homes, the Cree at Doré Lake, along with others from Neoskweskau, Nemiscau and Nichicun, were incorporated under the Mistissini Band by the Department of Indian Affairs. Government and industry compelled the Cree to abandon Doré Lake. Finally, when the Campbell firm discovered a new deposit near the village, the Cree caved. “At Doré Lake, we were told to move to Mistissini — that the land belonged to the white men,” Mary-Ann Bosum, a local Cree, told anthropologist Jacques Frenette in 1982. “This was not true. The land was my father’s hunting territory, and his father had hunted there, too.” Others, like Bosum’s mother Lucy, relocated to the town of Chibougamau. Some went to Chapais. The community, once gathered around the lake, the Beaver House and the ball field, dispersed.
The last Cree families departed Doré Lake in 1974. Their log homes and the Beaver House were demolished soon after. The Campbell mine operated for three years.
MAGGIE WAPACrHéE: IEN,ST8A8LL,AiTsION skinning a beaver that is lying bellyup on her kitchen table, when her son Norman walks in the front door. Earlier that morning, Norman’s father Matthew, 87, trapped and killed the animal before retiring to his room. Maggie speaks Cree exclusively, so Norman translates for me as she sets about flaying the critter. “I’m getting old for this kind of job. I can’t work as fast as I used to,” she says in her percussive Eastern Cree dialect — pointy vowels wrapped in round, repetitious consonants. (Say “Chibougamau” and you get a taste of its phonology.) Norman chuckles as he offers the translation.
The beaver, a Cree staple, can be broiled in the oven, boiled on the stovetop or roasted over an open fire. Their tender tail is considered a delicacy. But they’re also pungent when they cook, and Maggie, a gracious host, says she wants to spare our nostrils. “I would never stop doing these types of activities, because I love it,” she says as she takes a break from her work. “My late mother taught me these things, so I just want
it passed down to continue this way of life.”
Still outfitted from his early morning moose hunt, Norman points out the back of the house at the Chibougamau River, which moves at a slow crawl. There, most of his 14 siblings — six boys, six girls, plus two adopted sisters — had their walking-out ceremonies, a Cree rite of passage marking a child’s first steps. The mother and grandmother walk baby girls out into the water; grandfathers and fathers walk out baby boys. “It’s a commitment that they will raise the child, introduce the child, in the Cree way of life — that the child will be raised out on the land to maintain cultural tradition,” explains Norman. “It’s been done since time immemorial.”
The Wapachee family has lived here at Chibouchibi on the Chibougamau River for decades. After leaving Doré Lake, they lived in Mistissini for 10 years. When the Oujé-Bougoumou reserve was established, Matthew, the Wapachee patriarch, opted instead to build a house on the family trapline, which runs more or less perpendicular to Highway 167, the main thoroughfare built after the Second World War to connect Chibougamau’s mines and lumberyards to the rest of the world. (Chibouchibi is located right on Highway 167, while the turnoff for Oujé-Bougoumou is 20 kilometres west down Route 113, which transects the highway south of Chibougamau.) The Wapachee clan, who now number some 140 children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren, maintain a traditional way of life. Their seasonal hunting grounds extend deep into the bush to the southeast along Logging Road 210 to a mountain called, in their stories, Gawashebuggidnajj (pronounced “Ka-wa-she-pi-ki-ti-nach”), which roughly translates as “Gold” or “Bright” Mountain, so named for the birch trees that grow on its slopes and shine from a distance. That’s where the Wapachees can most reliably spot and hunt browsing moose. “It’s where we feed our children and our grandchildren,” explains Maggie.
BlackRock Metals Inc., however, wants to level the mountain to create a giant open pit titanium, vanadium and high-purity iron mine. In 2013, the Grand Council of the Crees and the Oujé-Bougoumou Cree Nation signed an impact benefits agreement with BlackRock. The agreement, named for Bally Husky, one of the Wapachee ancestors who hunted this land, promised to provide money, jobs, training, business contracts and environmental monitoring opportunities to the Oujé-Bougoumou Cree Nation. Norman has even worked as BlackRock’s community relations coordinator.
BlackRock plans to break ground once the company secures more than $1 billion from investors. As of 2018, the company had raised about a third of that, including $63 million from the Quebec government to support infrastructure upgrades at Port Saguenay so BlackRock’s products can be exported to China. But the mine has been delayed by mineral price fluctuations, and in the interim BlackRock seems to be rolling back some of its commitments.
Critics of the project in the Wapachee family and the community say there will be fewer jobs and contracts available to the Cree than originally promised. Meanwhile, early exploration and construction have been more disruptive to wildlife, the environment and the Wapachees than anticipated. Before BlackRock opens, for example, the Wapachees will have to relocate their rabbit camp — the cabins they use for the fall and winter hunt. “The relocations have not stopped yet,” explains Norman, who is clearly conflicted about the mine but feels he has little power to stop it. “We have
camps over here that we use seasonally for our main hunting activities. BlackRock company came in, and now what’s challenging for the Wapachee family is that we’re being asked to relocate those camps.” He continues: “It’s been repetitious, how the government works: opening doors for further resource development. … Our hunting areas in the trapline are getting smaller and smaller, and so this is where we look at what are we going to do.”
Roused by the commotion of company, Norman’s father, Matthew, emerges from his room. “He’s upset with me,” says Norman under his breath, before skedaddling out the front door.
“WE’RE IN TROUBLE!” yells Matthew. “We’re in trouble on the trapline!” Stout and cantankerous with bushy eyebrows poking out above thick black glasses, Matthew uses a beaded belt to hold his grey trousers aloft. He plops himself down at the head of the kitchen table, the half-dressed beaver still resting there.
Matthew was once tallyman, or manager, of this trapline, but has since passed that responsibility to his eldest son, Phillip. Matthew is opposed to BlackRock. But it’s a more complicated story for his children. While all express misgivings about the desecration of familial territory, some feel that development is inevitable and that they must make the best of bad circumstances.
A few, like Norman, have even chosen to work with the company. But by doing so, Matthew feels the children have circumvented his and Phillip’s authority. It’s not that Matthew is categorically opposed to development — in fact, he was one of the first Cree miners in the community. But as the land becomes increasingly bare, his sense of loss and bitterness grows. He chose to build his home out here. And now, in his old age, it’s being taken away from him. “I’m going to win,” he says in a later conversation. “The BlackRock, they’re not going to start this mine while I’m still alive.”
Once Matthew settles down, Maggie heads out to the back porch, bundled up in a jacket with a red