A World You Do Not Know

Front matter

EZH UNIVERSITY ææ OF LONDON \@ PRESS

A WORLD YOU DO NOT KNOW

Settler societies, indigenous peoples and the attack on cultural diversity

Index

Glossary of Innu words

Akaneshau/t (Kakeshau/t in the Mushuau Innu dialect) — singular and plural for white person or person of European descent.

Atuatshuap — store or shop. In Sheshatshiu it also serves as the name of the store. Innu-aimun — the Innu language.

Kamateuet — shamans and healers.

Kamestasteniunuts—spirit people who inhabit the area around Lake Kameshtashten and can be seen by the observant.

Katshimatsheshu — spirit people who inhabit the land, capable of transforming their body size and shape and able to play tricks on people, sometimes with deadly effect.

Kukumanatsheuake — a pacifier for babies containing bone marrow and other country foods.

Kushapatshakan — the shaking tent, an Innu practice used to communicate with the Animal Gods and to seek advice and guidance on how to survive on the land and where to find animals. It involves setting up a tent within a tent into which the Animal spirits enter and talk to the shaman in their different languages — all of which he can understand. The practice may also include healing the sick or giving advice on how to help those who are ill. The last performance was in the 1960s. Innu say that since then they have not had the confidence to perform it.

Minish Pemmican (pasauan) — dried caribou meat sometimes ground up with berries.

Mukushan — literally meaning ‘eat all’, is a feast made from preparing caribou bones after a kill. The bones are boiled, the fat removed and mixed with the extracted marrow. This is allowed to congeal, often overnight. It is served to the whole camp with meat and sometimes bannock to celebrate the Caribou God. Nutshimit — the country or the land, used by Innu to be synonymous also with the hunting life they live on the land.

Teueikan — the Innu drum made of stretched caribou skin with small rattles tied to strings positioned across the face of the drum, often made from pieces of bone. Historically, the drum is only played by a person who has had three special dreams. It is used in Innu dances, music and songs to communicate with the animal spirits.

Tshash Petapen — the Innu Nation land claims agreement affecting the Innu domiciled in Sheshatshiu and Natuashish, and to which is also attached an agreement to condone and participate in the Lower Churchill hydroelectric mega-project.

Tshenu/t — singular and plural for old person/s or old hunter/s.

Uinastakan — the dried undigested contents of caribou stomach used as a stock for soup and stews.

Utshimau — literally meaning ‘first man’, who in a hunting camp made a decision to go on a particular expedition. Others were free to follow him, but his authority extended only to the specific hunt. It is sometimes used teasingly to denote a person in the villages who is bossy or who attempts to influence or make decisions for others.

List of figures and tables

Frontispiece: Innu youth walkers at conclusion of 250-kilometre walk in support of continuing the Innu way of life in Northern Labrador/Quebec, Canada. Reproduced by permission of Alex Andrew.

Preface

Figure P1. Dominic Pokue and grandson Freddy at Utshisk-nipi, 1995. Author’s photograph.

Figure P2. Home-video still of Dominic Pokue atop a dummy tank at Seal Lake, 1995.

Figure P3. Map of Labrador-Quebec peninsula. Reproduced by permission of the Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Chapter 1

Figure 1.1. Tshenish Pasteen in Utshimassits (Davis Inlet), 1996. Author's photograph.

Figure 1.2. Francois Aster with Armand Mackenzie in Matimekush, 2007, “What is hardship to a free man?’ Author’s photograph.

Figure 1.3. Ben Michel and Daniel Ashini near the school building, Sheshatshiu, 1969. Reproduced by permission of Wendy Ewald.

Figure 1.4. Sebastien Benuen on swing outside school building, Sheshatshiu, 1969. Reproduced by permission of Wendy Ewald.

Chapter 3

Figures 3.1 and 3.2. Maps of Labrador Innu settlement area and of Labrador Innu lands respectively, adapted from maps 5-A and 5-B of the Tshash Petapen Agreement in Principle, available at www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/ DAM/DAM-INTER-HQ/STAGING/texte-text/ccl_farim_nl_labinnu caip_1331749872252_eng.pdf.

Table 1. Nutrient content for wild, store and restaurant fast foods.

Table 2. Comparisons of nutrient content for wild, store and restaurant fast foods averages.

Table 3. Recommended daily dietary allowances of key nutrients, minerals and vitamins.

Chapter 4

Figure 4.1. Dominic Pokue, 2005. Reproduced by permission of Jules Pretty. Figure 4.2. Industrial sculpture with prominent phallus left by miners at Knob Lake, Quebec. Author's photograph taken in 2007.

Figure 4.3. Armand Mackenzie at site of tailings pond outside Matimekush, 2007. Author’s photograph.

Figure 4.4, Ulderic and Mani Mackenzie, Matimekush, 2007. Author’s photograph.

Chapter 5

Figure 5.1. Uinastakan in Angela Pijogge’s tent at Misteshuapi, 2009. Author's photograph.

Figure 5.2. Food in youths’ cabin at Kameshtashten, 2005. Author's photograph. Figure 5.3. Innu atuatshuap (store), Sheshatshiu. Microwave foods in cabinet, 2005. Author’s photograph.

Chapter 6

Figure 6.1. Daniel Ashini at Utshisk-nipi, 1995. Author’s photograph.

Figure 6.2. Ben Michel at Utshisk-nipi, 1995. Author’s photograph.

Figure 6.3. Katnen Pastitchi sewing caribou hide, Sheshatshiu, 2006. Author's photograph.

Figure 6.4. Maud Watt, an early commentator on the health of the Innu. Figure 6.5. Contemporary Innu showshoe hanging outside tent at Kapaumiskat, 2006. Author's photograph.

Figure 6.6. Illustration of 1880s Innu snowshoe in Lucien Turners Ethnology of Ungava (1894).

Table 4. Causes of death in Sheshatshiu (population 1,200), 1995-2005, and Canada, 2002, 2005.

Chapter 7 Figure 7.1. Camp at Kameshtashten viewed from hill, 2005. Author's photograph

Figure 7.2. Tepary beans produced by O’odham Cooperative, 2010. Author's photograph.

Figure 7.3. Etienne Pone and Nikeshant Penunsi cleaning caribou bones at Kaupamiskat, 2006. Author’s photograph.

Figure 7.4, Walkers arriving at Sheshatshiu after the final leg of Giant’s walk, 2012. Author’s photograph.

Figure 7.5. Giant at the completion of the final leg, Schefferville to Natuashish, 2012. Reproduced by permission of Alex Andrew.

Figure 7.6. Manian Nui and Nora Mistanapeo in blizzard en route from Natuashish to Kameshtashten, 2009. Authors photograph.

Acknowledgements

I have benefited immeasurably from the insights, help, friendship and kindness of a lot of people. Firstly, I would like to thank the many Innu people in Labrador-Quebec. In Natuashish George Rich has helped to facilitate my trips, and along with his wife Penash to lend me understanding and hospitality. The whole Pijogge family hosted me on many occasions, both at their house and while hunting, fishing and travelling in the country. Sam, Angela, Amos, Juliana and Ivy Pijogge always made me feel a part of their family. Damien Benuen helped with translations and many other things; Sebastien Piwas and Tsheniss Pasteen allowed me to tag along on snowmobile trips to the country and were great company; Joachim and Manishan Nui will always be remembered for the journey to Nutak; the filmmaker Christine Poker and her husband Prote were endlessly patient with me and their skills bailed me out a few times. In Sheshatshiu, my friends Marcel Ashini, Napes Ashini and Etienne Pone were always available for wit and wisdom. I benefited from many conversations with Basile Penashue, Aputet Andrew, Matnen Benuen, Michel ‘Giant’ Andrew and Uashekan Benuen. Thanks also to Shushep Mark for taking me to Sapeskuashu and Kenamu and telling me many wondrous things. Anthony Jenkinson has been a constant friend, fixer and guide — he has read and commented on earlier drafts of the text. Sheila Blake and her two daughters Jolene and Jodie Ashini also made me feel like family the many times I stayed at their house in Sheshatshiu. I would like to give special thanks to Dominic Pokue for being such an inspiration. In Matimekush, I am grateful to Armand McKenzie, Yvette, Mani and Shamanis McKenzie for hosting me and facilitating all the interviews we did in the village. Although not always visible here, I have learned so much from working ‘on location in Labrador with the filmmakers Sarah Sandring and Rohan Chitraker.

This book started out as a collaborative work with Jules Pretty, whose articulate understandings of the value of reconnecting to the natural world are a constant presence within its pages. James Wilson introduced me to the Innu people and his incisive observations about the cultural clashes in North America permeate what I write and how I think. Other scholars such as Damien Short, John Walshe, Sarah Pilgrim, Charles Watters, Stephen Small and Trevor Curnow all discussed parts of this book with me, and Sal McKay shared her insights concerning nursing and health care in the far north. Being a teacher, I have learnt so much from students. To Carlos Gigoux, Pierrot Ross Tremblay, Maria Sapignoli, Katya Brooks, Rebecca Fan, Liz Cassell and Suzanne Robinson, a big ‘thank you’. My partner Nicola Gray, sisters Deborah Chambers and Eunice Beauchman, and brother-in-law Thomas have exchanged ideas with me, and continue to support me.

I received financial assistance from the British Academy, Mushuau Innu Band Council, Sheshatshiu and Mushuau Innu First Nations Trust, and the University of Essex. The University generously provided me with a sabbatical year, which I spent at the University of Arizona, where Al Bergesen, my earliest sociology teacher, was a great host. In making the manuscript into a text, I received lots of assistance for the maps from David Mercer at Memorial University, Newfoundland, and for the slides, scans and video clips from Sarah Parker, Anna Smith and Kit Wood at the Media Centre, University of Essex. Kerry Whitston, Valerie Hall and Emily Morrell at School of Advanced Study Publications, University of London, worked the manuscript into shape.

Earlier versions of a small part of this manuscript are published in: ‘Environmental and health benefits of hunting lifestyles and diets for the Innu of Labrador’ (with Jules Pretty), Food Policy (2006), 31, 6, pp. 528-53; ‘Ecocultural revitalisation: replenishing community connections to the land’ (with Sarah Pilgrim and Jules Pretty), in Sarah Pilgrim and Jules Pretty (eds.), Nature and Culture: Rebuilding Lost Connections (London: Earthscan, 2010), pp. 235-56; ‘Indigenous peoples rights: anthropology and the right to culture’, in Rhiannon Morgan and Bryan Turner (eds.), Interpreting Human Rights: Social Science Perspectives (Routledge, 2009), pp. 68-86; and “The long reach of frontier justice: Canadian land claims “negotiation” strategies as human rights violations’ (with Liz Cassell), International Journal of Human Rights, 17, 1 (2013), pp. 35-55.

Reasonable efforts have been made to identify and contact copyright holders.

I dedicate this book to the memories of Daniel Ashini, Ben Michel, Apanam Pone, Ulderic McKenzie, François Aster, Mary May Rich, Mary May Osmond and Stanley Rich, all of whom made their mark on both my narrative and the stories it contains.

Preface

“Things to teach you of a world you do not know

I pity the poor immigrant

Who tramples through the mud

Who fills his mouth with laughing And who builds his town with blood Whose visions in the final end

Must shatter like the glass

I pity the poor immigrant

When his gladness comes to pass.

Bob Dylan!

Unsettling points

In a book written to educate white Americans, Luther Standing Bear, the early 20th-century Oglala Lakota author, remarked that Native Americans were often objects of ridicule. He told readers of My Indian Boyhood how Native American attire, food, feathers, religion and even language had become sources of amusement for the advancing Europeans. Contrasting this with the Lakota sensibility, he said, ‘whenever the Indian sees things in the white man that he does not understand, he does not laugh. They may seem funny to him, but he begins to wonder if there is something hidden from him. He begins to think and seek an explanation for what he cannot account for. If you will take this attitude toward the Indian, you will find that he has things to teach you of a world you do not know.” Unclouded by doubt, Standing Bear pinpointed the attitudes under which he thought European expansion was conducted.

As one of the early generations of Great Plains peoples to be abruptly forced to alter their way of life, Standing Bear was in an unsettling position; the kind that often leads people to make unsettling points. As a child, Standing Bear had been sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School in Pennsylvania. Under school superintendent Captain Richard Henry Pratt, its motto was

1 From the John Wesley Harding album. ©Dwarf Music, New York. 2 Standing Bear, My Indian Boyhood, pp. 77-8, my emphasis.

‘from savagery to civilization.» Having learned the ‘white man’s ways’, and enduring long periods away from his family, Standing Bear returned to the Lakota shaken but also emboldened by his experiences. As he remarked in Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933), boarding school instruction was designed to mould him and other students in the image of the Euro-American. As an object of social engineering, Standing Bear became a sharp observer of the engineers. He rarely minced his words: “We were never allowed to forget’, he declared, ‘that they were emissaries of the Government; that they were endowed with superior knowledge. Never once were they intelligent enough to admit that they might have learned something from us.’4 The ‘white man’s cast of mind’, he continued, was either unable or reluctant ‘to seek understanding and achieve adjustment in a new and significant environment into which it had so recently come.’ Having deep roots in the indigenous world, but being catapulted into the boarding schools, and later in life to US Indian administration on the Eastern Seaboard, Standing Bear’s perspective was fashioned from social transformation.

What is striking when we recall Standing Bear today is his perception that Euro-American settlers were so self-confident that ignorance of the ‘world you do not know’ was often their preference. In a supposedly enlightened, rational and scientific age this seems counter-intuitive. But what Standing Bear was exposing was a deep contradiction in the European worldview itself, and particularly its inheritances from the Enlightenment. He pointed to a kind of obsessive monism typified by the liberal ideals justifying European settlement and, by extension, the formation of the US and Canadian states which are its guarantors.° The nation-builders of North America construed the good life as singular and embodied in the values of the settlers and the institutions they established. Yet, from the point of view of people like Standing Bear on the pathway of colonial expansion, the condescension and indifference towards Native Americans was at variance with the declarations of universal freedom, liberty and tolerance. At a purely logical level, surely anything that is universal and guided by ‘enlightenment’ must consider the plurality of ideas? No stock

Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep, pp. 311-16.

Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, p. 242.

5 Ibid., pp. 248-9. Other indigenous commentaries made at times when indigenous lands were being usurped were almost always diplomatic, but they rarely spoke of the open-mindedness of colonists. Although different in tone to Standing Bear, another example is the Santee Sioux physician and writer Charles Eastman, especially his ‘Civilization as preached and practised’, in Eastman, From Deep Woods to Civilization, pp. 136-50. See also the collection of testimonies in Nabokov, Native American Testimony.

6 An informative discussion of the philosophical architecture of monism in Greek,

Christian and liberal thought is presented in Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism,

A Oo of ideas and experiences should simply be cast aside without a dialogue. Yet, Standing Bear saw European expansion as anything but plural, bookending Land of the Spotted Eagle with the statements, ‘white men seem to have difficulty in realizing that people who live differently from themselves still might be traveling the upward and progressive road of life’ and ‘being narrow in both mind and spirit they could see no good in us.” Although proclaimed to be the culmination of some noble ideals, he believed that the settlement of North America was reckless and destructive. “True, the white man brought great change’, Standing Bear commented frankly, ‘but the varied fruits of civilization, though highly colored and inviting, are sickening and deadening. And if it be part of civilization to maim, rob, and thwart, then what is progress?’

Standing Bear had reason to be sceptical of Euro-American settlement. A few decades prior to him being at his school desk, wagon trains full of gold-seekers, Mormons and land-hungry emigrants had stormed into Lakota lands bringing cholera, smallpox and measles. But the death and disruption they caused the Lakota and other Plains societies, especially in 1848-9, was protected by the US Army at Fort Laramie.’ Following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Thomas Jefferson, a great exponent of Enlightenment values, had commissioned Captains Lewis and Clark and their men to explore indigenous territories about four times the size of France. Although requiring Native American assistance in the unknown lands they travelled through and claimed for ‘the Great Father’ in Washington, the two captains spoke to those they met and depended upon as if they were children, and were intolerant of the more open and democratic ways in which many Native Americans wished to conduct negotiations.'° Their travels added to the knowledge Euro-Americans collected on the lands and peoples of the continent, but this was intended to service settlement, agriculture and industry.

By the 1830s, Euro-Americans had extended their reach beyond the original 13 colonies. The French diplomat and social historian, Alexis de Tocqueville, was an ambivalent witness to the early phases of westward expansion. His Democracy in America is perhaps our best analysis of the methods by which Europe transplanted itself upon North America. Like Standing Bear, he remarked that he detected cultural peculiarities in Euro-Americans. They were having a relatively free hand in settling the continent and, in his view, were carrying this out with great hubris. Among them, Tocqueville heard ‘the perpetual utterance of self applause’ and noted that ‘the slightest joke that has any foundation in truth renders [the Euro-American] indignant. "!

7 Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, pp. xv, 227.

9 LaSalle, Emigrants on the Overland Trail, pp. 222-3. 10 See Barth, The Lewis and Clark Expedition, pp. 123-31. 11 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, p. 275.

Tocqueville, a visitor from an old world, discovered brittle insecurity in people with a mission to found a new one. The settlers freely laughed at those whose lands they wanted, as Standing Bear noted, yet were vulnerable to any rebuke to the process of settlement itself. Indeed, as Tocqueville and Standing Bear both saw, Euro-American identity was closely aligned to the Great Father’s goal for the foreign settlement of the whole continent.

Shadow societies

In Tocqueville’s observations, American national identity was both radically separate from Europe — there was no feudalism or monarchy — and it was in concert with the enlightened values that made possible the liberties settlers enjoyed in new lands. Many North Americans saw themselves not just as emissaries of Enlightenment values such as the idea of progress, but as agents of its extension into unenlightened territories.

However, these pioneers and their descendants have had to bear certain ironies. While principles in the US Constitution such as the ‘inalienable’ rights to liberty, freedom of expression, and consent to be governed were selfjustifying, they were not extended to indigenous and enslaved peoples, who in Tocqueville's eyes constituted shadow societies outside of the settler state.” Consequently, most colonists did not see non-Europeans as possessing qualities that would warrant identical rights or social conditions to those enjoyed by Europeans, and until the great assimilation experiments, the boarding schools, Native Americans were not treated as being integral to the settler state. During the Great Land Rush of the 19th century, ‘the stunning finale to “the expansion of Europe,” Enlightenment values were forwarded as if they were unique to, or at least most developed in, people of European descent. Canada, the United States and other settler states such as Australia and New Zealand were fashioned not by immigrants who sought to join an already existing society, but by settlers'* intent on making a new society according to ideals under which they represented themselves. Although contested, the stories, images and iconography of these societies fit a wider drama in which only the newcomers play the heroic roles as masters of the wilderness, wealth-creators, industrialisers, and trailblazers.!°

12 Foran expansion on this theme, see ibid. final chapter, entitled ‘Some considerations on the present state and the probable future of the three races that inhabit the territory of the United States.’

13 Iam indebted to John C. Weaver for his formulation and use of this concept. See Weaver, The Great Land Rush, p. 92.

14 For discussions of settler colonialism see Wolfe, Settler Colonialism; Veracini, Settler Colonialism; Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within; and Bateman and Pilkington, Studies in Settler Colonialism.

15 See, for example, the discussions about 19th-century landscape photography in the US in Solnit, Motion Studies, pp. 86-93.

Nonetheless, in the process of settlement and nation-building, shadow societies could not be ignored. Even though the Euro-Americans were convinced of their own rectitude, the existence of indigenous and enslaved people confused their justifying ideals. More profoundly, the real and symbolic violence needed to remove indigenous peoples from the paths of settlement, and the social instability it precipitated, exposed hypocrisies and called for a change of tack. Hence, by the time Standing Bear was writing, many attempts had been made to somehow harmonise the social, economic and psychological realities of Native Americans with those of Euro-Americans. Not only had boarding schools been established across the continent, but ceremonial practices such as the Sun Dance, Pueblo religious rites and dances, and the potlatch giveaway ceremonies had come under attack from the US Courts of Indian Offences.'® The Sun Dance practised by the Lakota among others was banned for over half a century, and not decriminalised completely until the 1950s.'7 Other Native American (including Lakota) ceremonies were held in secret until 1978 when the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed.!® Similarly, the potlatch was banned in Canada under the Indian Act of 1884 and also remained in place until the 1950s." The refusal to extend Enlightenment values such as the freedom of belief was just one of many ironies as successive policies sought to alter indigenous peoples’ ways of life. Standing Bear, for one, worried that the intended physical and cultural changes would destroy the vitality and happiness of the Native Americans.

In this book, I humbly intend to follow Standing Bear’s lead by investigating the ideas that promoted this attack on cultural diversity and how these played out in policies and the concrete realities of indigenous lives. My premise is that the singular values and attitudes that justified the new North American settler society led to an ongoing destruction of the unique ideas and practices of indigenous peoples in the US and Canada as they were forced or pressured to adopt new lifestyles in villages, reserves and reservations. The new hybrid lifestyles took shape within radically reduced land bases in which their independence was severely limited. Under the imposition of economic individualism and materialist views of nature, successfully functioning economies and sustainable relationships to land were cast aside. As indigenous peoples’ lands attenuated, their diets, health and sense of unique identity all deteriorated. It is this process of diminishing cultural diversity and the reactions to it that form the subject matter of this book. In outlining it, I do not wish to consign this process, under whatever name we may wish to call it — social transformation, dispossession, assimilation, or even genocide — to the past. Today, we can witness both the

16 Martinez, The American Indian Intellectual Tradition, p. 101.

17 See Holler, Black Elks Religion, pp. 110-38.

18 For testimony on this see White Hat Snr., Zuya Lifes Journey, esp. p. 111. 19 Niezen, Spirit Wars, p. 6.

legacies of these earlier transformations and the manifestations of the same processes justified by a similar ideological singularity across North America and elsewhere.

This singularity is of the same order as that observed as a feature of colonialism, ‘whiteness’ and Manicheeism by figures such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Richard Wright at the height of the decolonisation movements in Africa and Asia.” The presumed progressive and universal nature of European culture inevitably implied binary divisions between two peoples, and at the same time largely made the different cultural attributes of indigenous peoples inferior or distorted versions of that which was universal. Examples of supposedly successful transformations of indigenous peoples in the 19th century towards the economic and social values of the colonisers then became an indicator of progress itself. In the last 50 years, similar transformations, especially as indigenous leaderships have become involved in capitalist undertakings, are not termed progress, but rather self-determination and self-reliance.”! In some parts of academia, this shift from the language of progress to that of self-determination was paralleled by an antagonism to what was labelled as ‘essentialism’ and an embracing of the notion that indigenous peoples possessed ‘agency and resistance in the process of colonisation. My concern, however, is to offer the possibility that cultural differences were and remain important despite the onslaughts of colonisation, and that indigenous peoples’ use of their distinct histories and experiences is one form of resistance.”

Tensions between significantly different ways of being, seeing and thinking are still apparent across North America. One can see and even feel these tensions in newly configured communities designed for indigenous peoples; places where visitors today can sense a kind of agitation, places where the residents are still proud to be the original inhabitants of the continent, but are living in a world designed for them by people who did not understand them. Compared to the businesslike purposefulness of most Euro-American or

20 See Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism; Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Wright, White Man Listen!

21 For example, Gabrielle Slowey contends that ‘neoliberal globalization may be a remedy to First Nations dispossession, marginalization, and desperation because it opens up space for First Nations self-determination’. See her positive account of indigenous participation in resource extraction businesses in Slowey, Navigating Neoliberalism, p. x.

22 Significant and continuing differences in the worldviews, attitudes and sensibilities of indigenous peoples have been highlighted in the works of scholars such as N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, Vine Deloria, Dale Turner and Taiaiake Alfred among many others including numerous novelists, poets and filmmakers. See Momaday, The Man Made of Words; Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies; Vizenor, Fugitive Poses; Turner, ‘Oral traditions’, in Waters, American Indian Thought, pp. 229-38; Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness.

Canadian towns and cities, there is a kind of raw enigmatic quality to what at first glance appears to be collective torpor and abandonment. As Sara Wheeler suggests of far northern indigenous villages in The Magnetic North, ‘something mysterious and indefinable has outlived cultural collapse.” The people of these places are somehow surviving without a clear cultural template. They are constantly weighing profound losses against the promissory notes of future material happiness. In today’s bureaucratic currency, these notes are minted under bland bureaucratic phrases such as ‘capacity building’, and chivvied along by infusions of ‘catch-up capital’ for development projects, job creation, better schools, street lighting, new hockey rinks and the like — all in exchange for relinquished lands. The processes of change and adjustment which the late 19th-century Lakota and other Native North Americans experienced may not be that far from the conflicts, confusions and pathologies occurring in some of the most recently manufactured indigenous places. These places are now in the midst of a more recent Land Rush for oil, minerals and energy.”

Reservations in the US, reserves and village settlements in Canada and boarding schools in both places went a long way to refashioning indigenous societies. While questions about whether to adhere to indigenous values, traditions and practices are pitted against various understandings of modernisation in every community, they are on a knife’s edge in places where distinct societies were maintained with few radical changes until very recently. It is among indigenous groups who for one reason or another escaped the full fury of the Great Land Rush that we can see the sweeping social transformation in action, the results it is producing, and how responses and resistance take form. Living examples are presented in the Arctic and subarctic regions where mobility and hunting were, and to some extent still are, necessary features of local societies. These, along with other zones of hitherto less aggressive colonial encroachment such as the deserts and forests of Africa, Asia and South America, are now what the Great Plains were to Luther Standing Bear and his parents. Again, as Sara Wheeler quips, ‘if the solitary Inuit no longer stands motionless over a seal hole for twenty four hours at a stretch, his father did.”

Throughout this continent-sized area of what I shall call the far north, Canada takes on greater prominence for it claims the lands of a large proportion of the world’s northern peoples whose lands are increasingly earmarked for resource extraction and energy supplies and with that, migrations of the jobhungry from other parts of Canada and beyond. Significant transformations of indigenous peoples were undertaken only decades ago on the Labrador-Quebec peninsula of northeastern Canada and land claims processes there are only now

23 Wheeler, The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic, p. 8.

24 See Emmerson, The Future History of the Arctic, pp. 193-219; Sale and Potapov, The Scramble for the Arctic, pp. 158-79.

25 Wheeler, The Magnetic North, p. 15.

being resolved. This is a vast area of boreal forests, snaking rivers, capacious lakes and tundra. It was overlooked as a site of major colonial settlement until the mid 20th century when it became a target of extractive industries acting in tandem with politicians proclaiming solutions to North America’s energy and industrial development problems. It also happens to have been home to the Innu (not to be confused with the circumpolar Inuit) peoples for thousands of years.

I first went to Labrador in 1994. Although I was already to some extent a traveller between societies, my awareness of important and profound values outside my own culture matured in the Innu villages of Sheshatshiu and Davis Inlet (often called Utshimassits) and Natuashish. My sensibilities and worldview have been reshaped by spending much of the last 20 years researching, visiting, socialising and working on films with the Innu. From the first time I went to stay in a hunting camp at Utshisk-nipi, a long lake in the forested interior of the Labrador-Quebec peninsula, I was struck by the differences between our perceptions of the world. As I scrambled to orient myself to a living subarctic hunting environment, a huge gap of knowledge, skill and intuition separated me from my hosts. But this and subsequent visits and the friendships that developed over the years did more than sensitise me to cultural differences; it provoked unsettling perceptions. The injustices inflicted upon the Innu, some of which will be illustrated in this book, reflected the contradictions I perceived in England where I now live, in the US where my family took me as an immigrant at the age of 12, and in Canada where I applied myself as a social researcher and human rights activist. One of the glaring ironies was that liberal humanism, so often claimed as our inheritance and an outgrowth of some of the ideals under which states like Canada represent themselves, described policies towards the Innu only in their singularity, not their benevolence. A second irony was that the Innu, far from being the ‘Stone Age Arctic nomads’ of a Canadian Broadcasting Company broadcast about them in 1992,” were more sophisticated and nuanced in their thinking, more practically skilled and all-rounded than was the norm in my own society.