Northern Labrador gets a chance to do it right Nickel, and timing

The schedule said that in early December the Innu of Davis Inlet, in northern Labrador, could begin moving to the newly built town of Natuashish, 15 km west on the Labrador mainland.

Whether that milestone will be met is uncertain, but, physically at least, Natuashish is a vast improvement over a town site that, for years, has been the Canadian television networks’ location set for aboriginal despair.

The move comes just after Inco finished off an airstrip, road, and temporary sea dock at the Voisey’s Bay nickel project, about 60 km to the northwest of Davis Inlet. The project’s relationship with northern Labrador has been seen two ways: as a project that promises a place in the money economy for the Innu and for the Labrador Inuit, who also live nearby; and as an exploitative intrusion.

The second view has had too free a ride. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s English radio network notably swallowed (hook, line and Sorel boot) a story about local Innu camping near the Voisey’s Bay area and being “threatened by [armed] mining officials.” The report didn’t mention any affiliation these “officials” might have had, though it was exciting to speculate about lawless rogue elements in the Department of Mines and Energy.

But such is the Southern prism: rapacious mining companies taking over the North at gunpoint, and aboriginal people forcibly displaced. So ingrained is the grade-school lesson that “the white man stole the Indians’ land” that fictions of this kind have not merely currency, but resonance, among the generality of people.

Balanced, precariously, against that is a reality of people trying hard to do the right thing. Inco, for example, has made donations of $1.2 million to building community centres in Natuashish and Sheshatshiu (the former North West River); Falconbridge has an exemplary partnership with the local communities around the Raglan mine in Ungava.

And the other reality — of drink, gasoline-sniffing, family violence, and dependency — can’t be willed or legislated away. Mending people takes time and effort; and to avoid the dead end of dependency and its social problems, people need opportunity.

Southern Canadian urban romantics have historically seen the “return to traditional lifestyles” as the remedy to native misery. Give them back their land, they say (meaning, of course, that land over there, not their Annex townhouses and their real-estate investment trusts). Then, listening to the voices of their elders, they will revive their historical subsistence economy, and social problems will disappear. And native self-government will invest everyone with the dignity they lost over the five centuries of continuous European contact.

Except, how much of this could a person really achieve when consigned to that life of subsistence? Not a lot, which means the inputs for self-government and social development come from outside. We know who “outside” is: the people that pay for the dependency culture already.

And what kind of subsistence economy could a land base, even a large land base, support? The mainstream press and the chattering class prose on endlessly about “vast mineral wealth,” and the royalties that would flow from it if only the First Nations were given back their entitlement.

But that view only illuminates the widespread confusion and ignorance about the resource industries and about commodity economy generally. The assumptions are made that the resources are there, that finding them is simply a matter of poking one drill hole into the ground, and that extracting them in paying quantities is a foregone conclusion. Mining and pumping oil are just that easy, and selling the product is like having a licence to print money.

The worst fault of the romantic view is that, at its centre, it means disengagement and isolation; when all else fails (and it has), then segregate. Nothing could destroy people’s ability to better their lot than to be cut off from the rest of Canadian society.

The solution to the problems Canadian aboriginal people face is not to be found in withdrawal from the mainstream, to a backwater life and a pretended “sustainability.” A job, and a chance to take responsibility for one’s own family, goes a long way as social therapy.

Voisey’s Bay is a well-timed opportunity for northern Labrador, and if Natuashish becomes a bedroom town for the Voisey’s Bay mine, that will bring more hope, and more solid betterment, than ten thousand “healing” exercises.