Heather House, 34, is a full-time student at McGill University, and when she’s not having her head in the books, she’s raising her eight children with her husband in the community of Chisasibi, where she lives on further north in Quebec accessible by road.
To get there from Val-d’Or, in Abitibi, you have to travel nearly 1,000 kilometers through the boreal forest by taking the James Bay road. At the very end of the road, when the road network comes to an end, you have to head west to the banks where the waters of James Bay and Hudson Bay mingle.
Feeding a family of eight children, two parents and two elders, in such an isolated community, where the grocery basket is one of the most expensive in the country, would be a feat if it weren’t for the access to the territory for hunting, fishing, trapping and fruit picking.
“The majority of my family’s food comes from hunting, comes from the territory,” explains Heather House to The Canadian Press, who gave her an appointment one evening in October at the Retro Daze Cafe in Chisasibi.
The place, which looks like a bar, is filled with young adults. Some play billiards while others eat chicken wings while drinking soft drinks. Here, it is impossible to order a beer or a gin and tonic, Chisasibi is a so-called “dry” community, alcohol is prohibited on the territory.
Seated in the cigar lounge from the café to the walls lined with vinyl covers of American rock groups, Heather House opens a computer and shows a map of active mining titles in Quebec published on the website of the Ministère des Ressources naturelles et des Forêts.
“There are a lot of mining titles in the area of the Transtaïga road, on traditional Cree hunting grounds,” she notes, referring to this 664 km road which crosses, from east to west, immense uninhabited territories of northern Quebec, where the Crees still practice fishing and hunting today.
“If these mining titles translate into mines, and they succeed in recovering what they need, what territory will remain for the next generations? Where will my children and grandchildren go to hunt and feed? worries Heather House.
There are currently nearly 400 mining exploration projects in the Eeyou Istchee region, the traditional territory of the James Bay Crees, where approximately 20,000 Crees live in nine communities. Chisasibi is the biggest.
For Heather House, forests, lakes and rivers are inseparable from the cultural identity of the Crees. With her hunter and trapper husband, she teaches her children to hunt moose, geese or caribou, to strive for self-sufficiency, as her parents and great-grandparents did.
She doesn’t want her family to depend on the few “stores full of processed foods” in Chisasibi, where food is sometimes “stale or rotten” before it even hits the shelves due to thousands of miles of trucking. The traditional territory, according to her, contains everything needed to ensure the food security of her people.
A study by the Institut national de santé publique du Québec carried out in 2015 proves him right on this subject: among First Nations who live in remote regions, “the so-called traditional diet is healthy and rich in varied and essential nutrients” whereas “Commercial diets, often high in refined sugars, trans fats and sodium and low in essential nutrients, contribute to the emergence of chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease”.
The prevalence of diabetes is 3.5 times higher in Chisasibi than in the rest of the province, according to Public Health.
Food insecurity is also linked to the cost of food. The last study on the price of food in Chisasibi dates from 2016 and, at the time, the Cree Board of Health and Social Services of James Bay indicated that the grocery basket in Eeyou Istchee Baie-James was the most expensive of the regions studied in Quebec, 40% more expensive than in Montreal.
Economic development, at what cost?
Heather House fears that the eventual mining of lithium and other critical minerals will aggravate food insecurity in the same way as major Hydro-Quebec projects.
In addition to having flooded vast hunting grounds, the construction of the reservoirs of the La Grande Rivière complex in the 1980s is the cause of mercury contamination of fish, especially those located at the top of the chain. food, such as northern pike.
“For the Crees, the only way to prevent high exposure to methylmercury was to radically change their way of life and reduce their fish consumption,” underlined another study by the Cree Board of Health and Social Services of the Bay- James in 1998.
“When they built the dams, they didn’t listen to us, when they cut down trees to the point of scaring away moose and caribou in certain regions, they didn’t listen to us, and now they want to extract lithium and other metals,” sighs Heather House.
Hunger strike against The Grand Alliance
While pregnant, in November 2020, Heather House went on a hunger strike to oppose “La Grande Alliance”, a memorandum of understanding signed between the Government of Quebec and the Grand Council of the Crees.
This multi-billion dollar infrastructure plan has, among other objectives, to position “Quebec at the center of the global mining sector, particularly lithium”. The plan provides for a railway network of approximately 700 kilometers along the James Bay road, the construction of hundreds of kilometers of new roads and power lines and the creation of a deep-water port on the traditional territory of the Shouts.
“Like many people in the community, I learned of the existence of La Grande Alliance the day the protocol was signed” and “then they promised a year of consultation, but nothing happened in the months following the signing. The COVID arrived and the confinement began a week after the announcement”, protests Heather House.
She wrote an open letter on social media, addressed to the Cree and Quebec governments, and began a hunger strike, which lasted two weeks. “To the young people, to our people, remember our grandparents, our great-grandparents and the ancestors before us. They barely survived. We are the products of their trauma, we are their voice when they couldn’t speak. It’s time to say no,” reads the letter, which has been shared hundreds of times.
During her hunger strike, she ate only caribou broth and fish broth.
But her brilliant gesture was not enough to convince the Grand Chief of the Cree Nation at the time, Abel Bosum, to grant her a meeting, as she requested.
“Anomie” and loss of identity
For many Crees who are attached to their culture like her, these traditional hunting grounds are not only linked to food, but also to health, medicinal plants, religious, spiritual, cultural practices and social organization, therefore to the identity of the Cree nation.
Heather House’s fears are shared by Retro Daze Cafe owner Roger Orr, a former social worker. The Cree “are not minors! exclaims the man in his fifties with a tattooed skull and an imposing voice to The Canadian Press, explaining that “our ancestors never dug a hole to make mines, they did not destroy the territory . When you destroy the environment, you destroy yourself”.
A graduate in sociology, he does not hesitate to refer to the concept of anomie, developed by the sociologist Émile Durkheim, to talk about “The Great Alliance” and the “various development projects imposed”, according to him, over time. by the Government of Quebec to the Crees of James Bay.
Anomie occurs when an “industrial society imposes its industrial means” on a group “rooted in its culture for thousands of years”, which causes upheavals such as the loss of traditions, common values, identity of the group.
Anomie, he explains, “is when you are cut off from your roots” and “you end up forgetting who you are”.
According to Roger Orr, with the loss of hunting grounds and the loss of rivers, comes “loss of fish and wild game, loss of culture, loss of connection to the land, loss of independence, loss of pride, loss of an effective social structure, loss of personal responsibility, loss of meaning and purpose in life and society, and loss of freedom”.
An opportunity to give more autonomy to the Crees
In July 2021, just over a year after signing La Grande Alliance, Abel Bosum lost the election, and Mandy Gull-Masty replaced him as head of the Grand Council of the Crees.
In an interview, she acknowledges that the Crees were not sufficiently consulted by their own government. “Some people told me they weren’t familiar with the process and that the Grand Council should have done more. That’s also what I believe,” says the 42-year-old chef, indicating that the promoters of La Grande Alliance have hired information agents in recent months to publicize the project in the various communities.
Their mandate is to ensure “that the Cree communities participate and get involved in the studies” concerning the projects of La Grande Alliance.
The impact of mining projects on lakes, rivers and hunting grounds are “very legitimate concerns”, according to the Grande Cheffe.
But she points out that the Grand Council of the Crees has already negotiated the protection of 30% of the Cree territory against all industrial activity by 2030 and that these protected areas will preserve the habitats of many animals necessary for the survival of the traditional way of life. shouts.
The Grand Alliance provides jobs in the energy, housing, natural resources and conservation sectors.
“There are a lot of job opportunities,” said the Grand Chief, who potentially sees La Grande Alliance as an opportunity to give more autonomy to the Crees of James Bay.
“We must understand that La Grande Alliance is a memorandum of understanding, and that feasibility studies are underway,” says Mandy Gull-Masty. A spokesperson for La Grande Alliance said that “the results of the feasibility study” will be presented in early 2023.
But for Roger Orr and Heather House, public consultations and feasibility studies should have preceded the signing of a memorandum of understanding with the Quebec government, and not the other way around.
Journalist Stéphane Blais was supported by the Michener Foundation, which awarded him the Michener-Deacon Fellowship for Investigative Journalism in 2022, to document the possible repercussions of lithium mining in northern Quebec. This article is the third in a series of four reports and has been edited for all the platforms of the Duty.