Strong Hearts, Native Lands

The Cultural and Political Landscape of Anishinaabe Anti-Clearcutting Activism

Anna J. Willow

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781438442044
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études amérindiennes

In December 2002 members of the Grassy Narrows First Nation blocked a logging road to impede the movement of timber industry trucks and equipment within their 2, 500-square-mile traditional territory. The Grassy Narrows blockade went on to become the longest-standing protest of its type in Canadian history. The story of the blockade is a story of convergences. It takes place where cultural, political, and environmental dimensions of indigenous activism intersect; where history combines with current challenges and future aspirations to inspire direct action. When members of this semiremote northwestern Ontario Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) community took action to protect their land, they did so with the recognition that the fate of the earth and the fate of much more are tightly interwoven. Anna J. Willow demonstrates that indigenous people's decisions to take environmentally protective action cannot be understood apart from motives that Western observers have most often considered political or cultural rather than purely environmental. By recounting how and why one Anishinaabe community was able to take a stand against the industrial logging that threatened their land-based subsistence and way of life, Willow offers a more complex—and more constructive—understanding of human-environment relationships.

One

Anishinaabe Cultural History and Land-Based Subsistence

On the Reserve

Heading north once more on the long and meandering road, the large sign pointing the way to Grassy Narrows again comes into view. The road to the left reaches the reserve in a few short minutes. The first thing one might notice about the reserve is how hilly it is. The second thing would likely be the proximity of so much water. On all sides, the reserve is surrounded by a jigsaw puzzle of clear northern lakes, most of them part of the English-Wabigoon River system. The shoreline refuses to remain straight for even an instant and the roadways' constant curves follow suit. The reserve's homes and public buildings, its water tower and heating plant, and its narrow ribbons of pavement do little to hide the region's natural beauty.

To most outsiders, the houses lining the reserve's nameless thoroughfare and meandering side lanes look reasonably well spaced and orderly. From an Anishinaabe perspective, however, the appearance of order belies the truth. The boxy houses, numbered and positioned in neat rows, show little regard for traditional conceptions of space or kinship. The reserve community is a product of 1960s relocation and government planning rather than Anishinaabe sensibilities about how and where people should live. Inside and out, houses on the reserve vary in quality and style. The majority are prefabricated and band-owned, differing mainly according to their era of construction and level of upkeep. Scattered throughout the reserve are several newer split-levels so identical that distinguishing characteristics—one has a satellite dish, another a broken window on the lower level—must be actively sought out. A few older homes with prominent logs or stucco, though, do seem truly unique. With the temporary annual exception of the week or two in April after the snow melts but before the school's Earth Day cleanup, the reserve's roadsides and public spaces are kept reasonably clean. Still, children's playthings and aged cars, kept around for their valuable spare parts, dot many yards. Dogs of all possible descriptions wander the roads or relax sedately on wooden porches.

The road goes on, up a precipitous hill and past the Gospel Believers—a small white church built by missionaries—and down into another valley. Then up again and past an overgrown cemetery, manifestly syncretizing Christian and Ojibwe beliefs. On and up past several clusters of homes until arriving at the powwow grounds and band office in “downtown” Grassy Narrows (people I met from other First Nations in the region often joked about Grassy's unusually centralized layout, with the band offices, multipurpose complex, and school all within view of one another). The band office is a nondescript, brown building with few windows and a high front counter that hides the receptionist from view. Bulletin boards and booklet racks advertise community events, employment opportunities, health information, and other news. A row of offices for the chief and twelve councilors—elected every two years—runs along the back wall. A break and meeting room with couches, cushy chairs, a sink, and a coffee maker is easily the building's most inviting room. On the other side of a shimmering bay—part of Garden Lake—looms the community's large school. The Sakatcheway Anishinabe School is an attractive modern facility, with separate elementary and high school wings, as well as a cafeteria, gymnasium, and two fully equipped computer rooms.

Driving slowly with the safety of the reserve's many pedestrians in mind, the road comes to an end in J.B.'s parking lot. The only permanent store in Grassy Narrows, J.B.'s also serves as the community's post office, gas station, and occasional social hub.¹ A rectangular blue building with one small, high window and a set of wooden stairs leading up to a heavy white door, J.B.'s looks like it should house a construction office or warehouse. A neon “open” sign gives away the building's true identity. Inside, soda coolers and displays of refrigerated and frozen foods line the back and left walls. An assortment of convenience-style packaged goods stocks the shelves in the center of the room. Since everything must be trucked up from town, prices at J.B.'s are high. Nevertheless, people pick up items as needs arise and children flock to J.B.'s to buy candy and soda pop. The store also carries a small assortment of fishing and camping supplies for the handful of tourists who drop in during the summer months. J.B.'s has one full-service gas pump and accepts all major credit cards. As the blockade at Grassy Narrows got underway, a large jar was placed on the checkout counter; its handwritten label read: “Donations for Blockade.”

J.B.'s rutted parking lot, situated as it is at the end of the reserve's modest system of pavement, also functions as a turnaround. Beyond this, a gravel road intended to someday reach the Old Reserve is under construction. Anyone born at Grassy Narrows before the early 1960s spent his or her early years on the Old Reserve and invariably holds fond memories of life several miles upriver. Many Grassy Narrows residents—especially elders who lack the physical ability or means of transportation needed to reach the Old Reserve by boat, foot, or snowmobile—look forward to the road's completion. They long to physically visit the sites where countless recollections and stories have taken them so many times before.

The Boreal Forest: Climate, Topography, and Ecosystems

Grassy Narrows lies between 50° and 51° north latitude and at 94° west longitude. Like the rest of northwestern Ontario, winters are cold, long, and dark. According to data from Environment Canada, the average January temperature hovers around −18° Celsius (or −1° Fahrenheit) and snowpack reaches several feet in a typical winter. Attaining the benchmark of −40° (where the Celsius and Fahrenheit scale meet) is not a rare occurrence. Lakes freeze hard enough by late December to permit vehicular traffic and the booms of breakup are not heard until the middle of April. Residents of the region celebrate spring. By mid-April, the snow disappears and temperatures rise gradually until they reach an average of 18° Celsius (65° Fahrenheit) in July. With an annual average around twenty-three inches, precipitation is most abundant in June and July, but comes when it chooses. Pleasant by most any standards, summers here are treasured. Beginning in late August, the poplar leaves turn a dazzling shade of yellow. Snow begins to accumulate once again in late October or early November.

In the heart of the massive U-shaped Canadian Shield—the worn away roots of a Precambrian mountain range—northwestern Ontario's topography offers little direction to water on its way to the sea. Although perceptibly hilly, the overall relief is low and drainage is poor. Water moves slowly to the Arctic Ocean, spending time in numerous lakes before passing through the Wabigoon, English, and Winnipeg rivers, resting in Lake Winnipeg, and eventually flowing on to Hudson Bay by way of the Nelson River. While the granitic rock of the Shield is billions of years old, surface features are the result of recent glaciations. Glaciers left their mark on this land just nine thousand years ago, and the quantity of exposed rock testifies to their scouring power.

When the glaciers retreated, they left only a thin layer of sandy topsoil behind. This fact, combined with the brevity of the northern growing season, makes agriculture impractical. When Euro-Canadian settlers first arrived, they thus found this land relatively undesirable (a bit of luck not shared by the Anishinaabe groups living in the fertile Rainy River Valley that straddles the United States border to the south and the rich Red River Valley to the west). Due to its lack of agricultural potential, non-Native Canadians have often perceived the boreal forest as a marginal wasteland. Of course, the indigenous peoples who inhabit the region see it very differently. A rich boreal forest ecosystem, dotted with countless bogs and lakes, rises from this rocky land. Poplars and conifers—spruce, firs, and pines—dominate the uplands, while wild rice and other hydrophilic plants thrive in low-lying areas. The closed boreal forest canopy allows little sunlight to penetrate the forest floor, limiting undergrowth in most locales. Even so, the slow rate of decomposition gives the forest a gnarled, enchanted appearance (Henry 2002).

Mammalian life flourishes in the boreal forest. The multitude of tracks each animal leaves behind makes the forest seem all the more alive. Looking down on the massive footprints of a timber wolf or lynx compels one to look just a little harder into the dense trees in search of eyes. The presence of innumerable black bears—at least when not deep in hibernation—also gives pause. Richard Nelson describes how for the Koyukon of Alaska, “a person moving through nature—however wild, remote, even desolate the place may be—is never truly alone. The surroundings are aware, sensate, personified” (1983: 14). In northwestern Ontario, too, the world is a watchful, living one.

The noisiest and most visible creatures in the northern forest are birds. Although only present in summer, common loons are truly “common” here and can be so loud that they keep a light sleeper awake. The silhouettes of ravens, whiskey jacks (also known as gray jays or camp-robbers), bald eagles, and hawks hover overheard. Although few birds spend the winter here (around twenty species), the spring migration brings enough songbirds and waterfowl (around three hundred species) to make up for the seasonal lack (Henry 2002). White pelicans, great blue herons, snow and Canada geese, and white-throated sparrows are among those who make their summer residence in the boreal forest of northwestern Ontario.

Anishinaabe History: Movements in Time and Space

The story properly told, or the song properly sung, is true.

—Edward Chamberlin, If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?

For thousands of years, indigenous peoples have lived in the forests of northwestern Ontario, surrounded by the harsh richness of the land. Yet, exactly when groups identifiable as Anishinaabe first arrived in the area remains a matter of contention. Today, both non-Native residents of northwestern Ontario and Anishinaabeg draw on their own interpretations of history in their attempts to establish the legitimacy of their respective claims to the land. In Indian County as in academia, the struggle to control the history of Native North America has been marked by heated battles. Who is privileged to write history? And how do those fortunate few choose to write it? In essence, these are questions about power and its consequences. History, it is often said, is written by the victors. But history can also tell us when power structures are contested and changing.

If it is true that the victors write history, what does it mean when peoples formerly considered marginal or oppressed begin imagining and writing their own pasts? In this context, what to accept as historical evidence becomes a critical question. The Delgamuukw decision set an important legal precedent in this regard. Delgamuukw began in 1990, when two British Columbia First Nations (the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en) argued before a provincial court that they retained title to their traditional lands because they had never signed a treaty with Canada. Eventually, the case reached Canada's Supreme Court. While the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en did not officially win the case, the judgment passed down on December 11, 1997 solidly acknowledged First Nations' oral tradition as a valid form of history. In Delgamuukw, “the court indicated that oral testimony and oral tradition merited considerable attention in law and that it should be taken into account when assessing First Nations cases” (Coates 2000: 91, see also BC Treaty Commission 1999). On the surface, Delgamuukw was about land claims, but at a deeper level it was about the meaning and making of history (Neu and Therrien 2003).

Exploring oral tradition as a form of history is a project that some historians and anthropologists have taken seriously for several decades now. Vansina (1985), for instance, points out that what we understand as history is culturally specific. Furthermore, other societies rarely share the Western fixation with uncovering or proving “objective” historical facts and linear sequences of events (Sahlins 1985; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992). Rather than searching for a factual picture of the past, non-Western peoples' understandings of historical truth—as remembered through stories, landmarks, art, and numerous other mnemonic techniques—have more often involved translating past events to fit contemporary circumstances and meanings. In this context, oral history may be best seen “not as ‘evidence’ about the past but as a window on ways the past is culturally constituted and discussed” (Cruikshank 1990: 14). Rather than relegating history to the forgotten past, oral societies have found ways to keep it living and relevant. As Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor (1984: 24) poetically expounds,

The Anishinaabeg did not have written histories; their world views were not linear narratives that started and stopped in manifest barriers. The tribal past lived as an event in visual memories and oratorical gestures; woodland identities turned on dreams and visions.

The historical consciousness Vizenor describes continues to inform how Anishinaabe people contemplate their own histories and how they make sense of the intersections between their own views of the past and those held by others.

Generally speaking, Anishinaabe and Western historical traditions agree that the people now occupying the Northwestern Great Lakes region have origins in more easterly parts of North America. The group of people today known interchangeably as Anishinaabe, Ojibwe, and Chippewa—together with closely related groups like the Potawatomi and Ottawa/Odawa—migrated from an eastern land of salt water, most probably near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. Assigning a precise date to the commencement or completion of their westward journey remains impossible and, in any case, the movement did not occur all at once. Instead, “the migration was a process of extended-family visits to relatives, of invitations to live with more westerly groups, and of traveling in both directions many times” (Peers 1994: 28).

In both temporal and spatial terms, the journey from the east to the Lake Superior region was an extended one. Edward Benton-Banai, an Anishinaabe elder from Lac Court Oreilles, Wisconsin, shares the oral narratives he learned from his elders in The Mishomis Book (Benton-Banai 1988). According to Benton-Banai, the Algonquin people living along North America's eastern shores long ago received prophecies warning them to move or face destruction. In response, they began a journey that would last for hundreds of years. Several stopping points marked the travelers' route: Niagara Falls, Manitoulin Island, Sault St. Marie. The Anishinaabeg knew they were close to their final destination when the prophecy of finding wild rice (“the food that grows on the water”) was fulfilled near present-day Duluth, Minnesota. From there, they traveled the short distance east along the southern shore of Lake Superior until they arrived at Madeline Island.

William Warren, a mixed-blood nineteenth-century historian, also documented the migration story. In his History of the Ojibway People, Warren wrote:

Through close inquiry and study of their valued figurative traditions, we have discovered that the Ojibways have attained to their present geographical position, nearly in the centre of the North American continent, from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, about the Gulf of the St. Lawrence River. (1984 [1885]: 76)

It is of some significance that Warren first learned of this “figurative tradition” while standing in a doorway, peering in on an initiation ceremony. Standing, as it were, in the doorway seems representative of Warren's own life. Warren was the oldest son of Mary Cadotte, an Anishinaabe and French woman, and Lyman Warren, a fur-trader of English Mayflower descent. He was educated at an eastern boarding school, spoke fluent Anishinaabemowin, and wrote in a way that combined aspects of Anishinaabe and Euro–North American cultural traditions. Critically, Warren respected and made use of oral history in his written work (see Schenck 2007).

Although Warren reported seeing a copper medallion carved with a notch for every “lifetime” the Anishinaabeg had lived at Madeline Island, he does not attempt to provide a precise date for when the migration took place. Instead, he states simply that an elder told him it was “many strings of lives ago” (Warren 1984 [1885]: 79). Following Warren's observation of eight notches on the medallion, and using fifty years to stand for one lifetime, Benton-Banai estimates that Madeline Island was settled around 1394 and that the first news of white contact—deduced from a figure with a hat carved on the copper disc—took place around 1544. Based on his knowledge of oral tradition as well as his consideration of what “the scholars” have to say, Benton-Banai believes that the migration started around 900 AD and took around five hundred years to complete (Benton-Banai 1988: 102).

Many non-Native scholars, on the other hand, date the Anishinaabe arrival at Madeline Island more than two hundred years later than Benton-Banai's calculation (see Danziger 1979: 26–27). Whether or not Anishinaabeg lived at Lake Superior beginning around the fifteenth century or not until the seventeenth, it is like...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Anishinaabe Cultural History and Land-Based Subsistence
• Chapter 2. From Aboriginal Policy to Indigenous Empowerment
• Chapter 3. A World Transformed
• Chapter 4. Beginnings
• Chapter 5. The Blockade
• Chapter 6. Blockade Life
• Chapter 7. Negotiations and Networks
• Chapter 8. Beyond the Blockade
• Conclusion: The Blockade Is Still There
• Notes
• Bibliography