Last month, a Radio-Canada report revealed that several members of the First Nations, mainly Innuat (Innu) and Eeyouch (Cree), do not pay their Hydro-Québec bills. A few hours were enough for the almost unanimous reaction of the Quebec political class to dictate common sense: the relationship between the state corporation and certain communities may have been unhappy in the past, but there are rules to respect. Our rules to respect.
“We cannot take justice into our own hands,” responded Ian Lafrenière, Minister responsible for Relations with First Nations and Inuit, the same day. And while the leader of the Parti Québécois called for “the rule of law” and “fairness”, on the side of the Liberal Party of Quebec, the state corporation was even more invited to make a defensive gesture: “ Hydro-Québec can no longer let this happen.” A narrow framing which not only continues colonial relations, but also reminds us of the legitimacy of the gesture of refusal to be saluted.
The arguments put forward by recalcitrant communities almost systematically concern the significant upheavals that the state corporation has caused to their ancestral territories. It has been more than 60 years since Hydro-Québec began major dam and reservoir projects on the major rivers of Nitassinan (Innu territory located on what is today known as the North Shore) and Eeyou Istchee (Cree territory located in the Nord-du-Québec administrative region, near James Bay), suddenly and irreversibly transforming environments and ecosystems, as well as places essential to cultural practices and knowledge.
The rivers represent the “ancestral highways” used to reach hunting territories. The construction of these dams and reservoirs, most of the time undertaken without consultation, without compensation and without consideration for the centrality of rivers and their banks, abruptly put an end to a way of life based on movement across the territory. Cultural sites, camps, portage trails, graves, entire parts of territory occupied by families for generations — and all their equipment: canoes, snowshoes, etc. — were swallowed up.
If this story is increasingly known, its scale remains difficult to grasp for many, and its inclusion in a structure of colonial appropriation, occupation and exploitation of the territory is even more so. Relations between Hydro-Québec and indigenous communities, however, can only be understood in the light of this violence. The state corporation, in this, is one of the most significant iterations of a past and present process foreseeing the rise of colonial society on the basis of the destruction and erasure of First Peoples and spaces of relationships that are the territories.
In recent years, Hydro-Québec says it has engaged in a process of reflection and reconciliation, as evidenced in particular by its “Declaration of Commitment to the First Nations and the Inuit Nation” and its policy entitled “Our Relations with the indigenous people”. But if this approach, announcing its focus on acceptability, collaboration and transparency, appears at first sight laudable, it nevertheless misses the issues at the heart of colonial power relations, past and present, between Hydro-Québec and the communities. .
In recent decades, we are reminded of many Indigenous activists and intellectuals, including Audra Simpson, Mohawk (Kanien’kehà:ka) of Kahnawake (Kahnawà:ke), the vocabulary and political practices determining colonial relations in the Canadian and Quebec context have moved from a clear and avowed intention of erasure and assimilation to a discourse of recognition. This provides, we can say in a very general way, to see the other as he or she would like to be seen and vice versa, and to grant or be granted consideration and protection.
In this, recognition necessarily implies bilaterality, an acceptance of positions providing, on the one hand, to be recognized and, on the other hand, to recognize, or in other words a consent to positions in the organization of power. In the context of colonial occupation societies, this paradigm of recognition also implies, moreover, a temporal operation which considers the past outside the present, that is to say which recognizes and admits for example the ” past injustices” to think of them precisely as “past”.
This is what the refusal to pay Hydro-Québec’s bills responds to and on which its entire legitimacy is based: it is a refusal to acquiesce to the legitimacy and power of the State. in all its variations, whose existence is based on erasure and dispossession, as well as on a colonial understanding of time which extracts the past from the present. And it is perhaps precisely because of the precision of the analysis on which the refusal is based that we almost unanimously condemn it.