In the Archipel-de-Mingan National Park Reserve, the islands are a splendour. Magnificent landscapes, unsuspected flora, a few nautical miles from the coast. Quarry Island campsites, 14 in number, are skilfully laid out in a bay, set back from the shore so as not to alter the quality of the landscape.
Since we are in a nature reserve, yachts and sailboats will not be expected to be anchored or moored. On the single quay, the disembarking and embarking of visitors and campers continues calmly and in good humor, without disturbing the campers.
The second afternoon of our stay at Quarry Island, on the wharf where a large white yacht has been moored since our arrival, a red generator, in action, noisy and fragrant as it should be. In the evening, in another white yacht anchored in the bay, the insistent noise of another generator invades the campsite. Insupportable !
In a nature reserve, miles from cities and roads, yachts and sailboats from Quebec, Montreal or elsewhere stay for several days, use their zodiacs, their rowboats or their watercraft to refuel in Havre-Saint -Rock. Obviously, to watch their television or get warm in the morning, they need electricity and a generator. Why deprive yourself, after all, we are in a nature reserve?
The campers protest, yell. I call Parks Canada. I have been confirmed that these boaters pay nothing for their stay in the bay and that they do not have to reserve their anchorage or mooring place. Unlike campers, who must reserve, pay and abide by the conditions and rules of Parks Canada, the only obligation of these captains and their passengers is to respect the curfew from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.
I am told that this is a vested right granted to the premises. The Parks Canada agent recommends that I talk to them, to come to an agreement with them. But how to talk to someone who is thirty feet from the shore and who listens to his television in the evening to the sound of his generator?
Back on the coast, I file a complaint. My complaint states that there are double standards here. One for those who pay and make no noise and another for those who don’t pay and who spoil the silence and the landscape with their presence. Moored boats do not have to be in the bay of a nature reserve, period.
While visiting the Innu culture center of Ekuanitshit (Mingan), I learned that the islands had been frequented for thousands of years by the Innu. They hunted and gathered seals there in the summer. In a video, Chief Jean-Charles Piétacho explains that the Mingan Islands are a national park reserve because the Innu are negotiating with Parks Canada on their status. I also learned that the Innus of Ekuanitshit are not allowed to frequent the islands for their traditional activities or to stay there, unless they register as campers!
In other words, a simple owner of a noisy and polluting yacht has more rights than the Innu on their ancestral territories! It is simply insane!
Parks Canada provides in its master plan for increased collaboration with the Innu of Ekuanitshit, but in the meantime, it seems that some rights are more acquired than others! That the man of the yacht is much more visible and present than the man of the place and of history.
As for my camp, it is a form of continuity, but also of interference with the ancestral practices of the Innu. The presence of the latter should be much more visible in the park, and the Innu should show visitors what their places and traditional activities were. They should be able to pursue them according to their own conservation requirements, which are in line with the conservation vocation of the park.
All visitors should be informed that these so-called natural landscapes have been frequented and shaped by thousands of years of occupation by the First Nations, and in the Archipel-Mingan-Ekuanitshit (and Nutashkuan) by the Innu.