4 - Sunday. August 11, 1991 - North Shore News

The Cree will make stand
on the ‘killing ground’

CANADA AND her rela-
tions with the indigenous
people are big news at the
United Nations this year.

After poking and prodding
behind the bushes and townships

for human rights violations in
places like South Africa for so
many years, the UN has gotten
around to taking an equally hard
Jook at Canada.

The attention was generated by
last year’s stand-off at Oka. So
far, the international body of
legislators have not liked what
they have been learning about the
Canadian situation.

They have learned, to their hor-
ror, that Canada’s native people
spend their lives inside a labyrinth
of regulations that control their
existence at every turn.

Delegates and observers from
over [@9 countries have been
listening in Geneva to descriptions
of Canada quite unlike anything
they have heard before. The ‘‘Ca-
nadian system’’ of neo-colonialism
is being described as ‘‘soft apart-
heid.””

I mention this to set the context
for the impact that a refusal by
the James Bay Cree to recognize
Quebec's sovercignty over them
would have nowadays.

Just as the world at large,
through media reports from
Geneva, is beginning to realize
that Canada’s human rights re-
cord, when it comes to native
people, is a travesty, a civil war
(or the Canadian equivalent of it)
could be brewing in northern
Quebec over the most Indian issue
of all: land.

Back in the good old days,
when the English, French and
Spanish were jockeying for con-
trol of North America, there were
no UN Working Groups on In-
digenous Peoples peeking over
their shoulders.

There was no Amnesty Interna-
tional. No World Court.

No media.

Today there is, and this makes
it a trie more awkward for colo-
nies to break away from founding
empires if they happen to have
colonies they are lording it over
themselves. Quebec can't just
walk away. It has baggage.

The purpose of the UN Work-
ing Group meeting in Geneva is to
draft a declaration of universal
rights a.:7 principles aimed at pro-

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tecting the legal, cultural and po-
litical rights of indigenous people.
Once it is in place und catified by
the UN, the game will have
changed 100% since the time of
the conquest of the Americans.

If Quebec decides to pull out of
Canada, that’s one thing. But if
the people of a federally-regulated
Indian reserve in Quebec decide
they want to stay with Canada or
assume their own sovereignty, the
issue will immediately become a
subject of international debate,
international scrutiny — and, I
believe, if worse came to worse,
international intervention.

Had a United Nations existed
500 years ago, the Americans
would never have been colonized.

A coalition of European, Mid-
Eastern, Asian and African
powers would have ganged up on
anybody who tried. The people of
these two continents would have
been free to pursue the path of
political evolution they were al-
ready so far along.

Old-style colonialism is im-
possible to try any more. If
Quebec tries it with the Cree, it
wilt discover just how much the
world has changed. It won't like
what it finds out.

Canada, at least, has learned
that just because it is a country it
can’t necessarily defeat organized
single-issue lobby groups in inter-
national forums. It is a lesson that
Quebec is perhaps not yet
sophisticated enough to have
picked up on.

As for the Cree, they are on the
“killing ground.’’ They have
nowhere to go. They face being

swept virtually into James Bay.

The $50-billion James Bay II
project would decimate an
ecosystem the size of France. Its
impact would be even worse than
the massive damage caused by the
already-campleted first phise of
the project.

Two other UN agencies, the
Centre on Transnational Corpora-
tions and the Centre for Human
Rights, have recently come out
with reports that lump Quebec
together with India and Brazil as
regimes that utterly disregard the
welfare of indigenous people in
the rush to build gigantic hydro-
electric projects with a habit of
causing disastrous environmental
side-effects.

The first phase of the James
Bay hydro development has al-
ready dried up wetlands, disrupted
migration and spawning of fish,
contaminated reservoirs with mer-
cury, and depleted wildlife stocks,
thanks to roads and the influx of
thousands of workers.

And this is nothing compared to
what is to come.

If the Cree absolutely refuse to
surrender their land to the bull-
dozers of the hydro utility of a
newly-independent Quebec, would
the world community look on
with indifference? I don’t think
so.

Given the turmoil caused by
other collapsing empires, there is
no sure way of predicting which
way the big international players
would come down in the event of
the Cree — and probably the
Mohawks as well — breaking
away from a breakaway Quebec.

Put a spin on this one and you
can come up with almost any
conceivable scenario, up to and
including international embargoes
or the arrival of UN troops in
northern Quebec.

And never mind what the world
community thinks! How would
the rest of us in Canada feel, wat-
ching men, women and children
of the Cree Nation being force-
marched at gunpoint off their
ancestoral homes by some form of
demonstrably racist Quebec
militia?

Canada’s fate, and that of the
Indians, are inextricably linked
now.

Of course, what's new? They
have been ail along.

ARDAGH HUNTER TURNER

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