The election of a first Innu as mayor of Natashquan has aroused strong reactions in recent days because he does not reside on the territory of the city. The duty went there to see how the transition was going, and if this election would bring the Innu and the Whites together, or the opposite.
“I heard things. Will the name of Natashquan remain Natashquan during your term of office? Asked a citizen on Thursday at the city council meeting, the first since the election of Henri Wapistan.
The municipality of Natashquan is going through an extraordinary situation, to say the least, since its leader is an individual who is not a resident of the territory and does not pay taxes. The result of a legislative incongruity which allows the Innu of the neighboring reserve to present themselves on the white side.
Thursday evening, despite the bad weather and the rain that fell on Natashquan, the council room in the basement of the town hall was packed for this highly anticipated meeting where spat was to be expected.
But the new mayor reassured the worried. “It’s going to stay Natashquan,” he said. Mr. Wapistan was the only Innu present in the room. The members of the reserve who had voted for him obviously did not consider it necessary to travel.
At the opening of the meeting, one of the advisers, Jacques Tanguay, set the tone. By quoting anthropologist Serge Bouchard, he invited the audience to be open. “Every society needs intelligence, knowledge, humanity, benevolence in speeches, respect in debates, sensitivity, dreams and a lot of love. “
“We knew it was going to happen sooner or later”, summarized Mr. Tanguay on the eve of the meeting. “But we expected more that an Innu would introduce himself as an advisor. At the town hall, it surprised us a bit. “
In 2008, the Chief Electoral Officer informed the municipality that the Innu of the neighboring reserve, Nutaskhuan, would be added to the list of electors for the upcoming polls. However, since they did not vote in large numbers, that had not changed much.
Until this year. On November 7, Henri Wapistan defeated outgoing mayor Marie-Claude Vigneault by 189 votes to 173. Shaken by the result, the latter quickly found a job in the constituency office of PQ member Lorraine Richard in Sept-Îles. .
“We are in a very special situation. The worst thing that can happen is that something unhealthy develops between the two populations. It has never happened before, ”observed this week Jean-Claude Landry, a retired crab fisherman who is campaigning for the construction of a new fishing harbor in Natashquan, a joint project for the Whites and the Innu.
The ties between the two communities are old and precious, he says. The name of the town of Natashquan comes from the Innu name Nutashkuan, which means “place where bears are hunted”. The Innu had lived on the territory for centuries when dozens of Acadian families came to settle there in the mid-19th century.e century. Since then, the two peoples have always cohabited and maintained a peace which remains fragile in spite of everything.
“It’s not their fault and it’s not our fault that we have come to this. It is the fault of a law that should perhaps not take place, ”continued Mr. Landry.
The granting of the right to vote to the Innu in the municipality comes under the Act respecting elections and referendums in municipalities (LERM) and the fact that the reserves are considered to be part of municipal territories. However, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs had not been able to explain to the To have to this week how a municipality could avoid it.
At least 13 communities would be affected by its application in Quebec, some of which, like Mashteuiatsh in Lac-Saint-Jean, openly denounced it. The leader of this Innu community, Gilbert Dominique, has also urged his population not to vote in the neighboring town of Roberval this year.
“Do not light a fire”
However, nowhere has the impact of this law been as great as in Natashquan this year. In the small village of 250 people where everyone knows each other, the subject of Mr. Wapistan’s election was on everyone’s lips this week.
In the hours following the election, spirits were heated on social networks. The fear of being equated so familiar to Aboriginal people suddenly shifted to the white side. ” That’s it, it’s over. Natashquan won the bad luck lottery, ”wrote a resident while the Innu, struck, retorted with disturbing comments. “Soon, we will invade Natashquan, it will belong to us”, wrote a lady.
The rumor machine got carried away. People have told the To have to to have heard that Henri Wapistan intended to take control of the Town Hall by placing Innu at all posts, or even giving Innu names to all the streets. We heard that residents were preparing to move.
However, according to the tenor of Thursday’s council meeting, the will to keep the peace prevailed. The new mayor, a man of few words who was rather withdrawn at the meeting, says “he does not want to light a fire”. A school bus driver for Indigenous youth who go to school on the white side, he says he decided to run in the wake of the residential school scandal in the West and the death of Joyce Echaquan.
“I don’t want our young people to argue between Natives and non-Natives,” he told the To have to. Now is the time to work together. “
As chairman of the meeting, Councilor Tanguay moderated the question period with an iron fist by inviting people who had comments to stick to the questions. He also responded to most of them with the help of the Director General.
“The era of change”
If Henri Wapistan’s candidacy for mayor had surprised more than one, his election was less astonishing. It is that Natashquan has about 250 inhabitants, while the population of Nutashkuan continues to grow and counts more than 1000. So, from the moment when the candidate managed to mobilize part of the population of Nutashkuan, a victory was in his reach.
To get to Nutashkuan, you have to drive 5 kilometers north from the village of Gilles Vigneault. Suddenly, on the right, the conifers give way to a forest of houses and new residential complexes which are multiplying to the rhythm of a dazzling demography.
Parents of nine children, David Ishpatao and his wife, Nadine Grégoire, moved with the eight youngest to one of these houses last December. If they did not go to vote, both see the election of Henri Wapistan favorably. “It’s going to be good,” said the father, pointing out that he has good musician friends on the white side.
In Nutashkuan, the band council did not want to take a position in the election in Natashquan, nor did it encourage voters to vote for Mr. Wapistan. However, some Innu in the community saw it as an opportunity to “take their place,” argues Marie-Josée Wapistan, a member of the Nutashkuan childcare center who got involved in the campaign to elect Henri Wapistan. “With what we’re going through right now, I think we’re in the era of change,” she said, adding that “in the belief of spirituality” we call it the “seventh fire”.
As for the rule which allows the Innu to vote in Natashquan, she retorts that the Aboriginals did not ask for anything. “They pass laws without talking to us, without probing us. “
The arrival of an Innu at the head of Natashquan, she says, opens the door to joint projects. Like the development of an Innu reception site for tourists near the wharf, she suggests.
Councilor Jacques Tanguay sees it as an opportunity to improve fire coverage. “Currently, if a house burns down in Natashquan, the Havre-Saint-Pierre firefighters could come, but it’s an hour and a half away. While there are services nearby [à Nutashkuan], but we don’t have an agreement with them. “
For the rest, “if democracy is flouted as some think, the government has four years to restore things,” he said. Neither the office of the Minister of Indigenous Affairs, Ian Lafrenière, nor the President of the Assembly of First Nations, Ghislain Picard, recalled the To have to this week.