The Dene deserve justice

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/08/2010 (5918 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It is possible to understand, if not completely forgive, the sins of our distant ancestors who treated outsiders, minorities and the vulnerable with contempt and hate. It would be absurd, for example, to hold the Catholic Church accountable today for the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition.

Charity and forgiveness, however, become more difficult when the offences are part of living memory, or where the effects of the abuse are still palpable.

Such is the case of the Sayisi Dene people of Little Duck Lake in Northern Manitoba, who in 1956 were forcibly removed from their traditional home and moved to unfamiliar land near Churchill. Survivors of that experience, children at the time, remember digging through garbage cans for food, while their parents struggled to cope, never fully understanding why they had been uprooted and left to rot on the shores of Hudson Bay.

Various investigations into the human disaster, including an authoritative study by anthropologist Virginia Petch, identified three parties as bearing responsibility: the federal and provincial governments, and the Hudson Bay Company, which wanted to close for financial reasons the post that had served the band.

Unfortunately, many of the records, particularly correspondence between the three parties that collaborated in the decision to move the Dene, have disappeared or have been destroyed.

As a result, it’s not clear who first proposed moving the Dene, but the process appears to have begun when provincial conservation officers said the caribou herds that the band depended upon for its traditional way of life were in serious decline due to over-hunting.

According to Petch, they even brought a journalist with them on one trip to show that the Dene were actually slaughtering the caribou, apparently for sport. The reporter was taken to a lake where dozens of caribou had been killed and their carcasses abandoned on the shore.

In fact, the Dene traditionally killed large numbers of caribou in the fall and piled them close together. Some were butchered immediately, while “winter snows covered the remaining carcasses, acting as a natural freezer,” Petch said. The people would return to their “freezer” throughout the winter for food, both for themselves and their dogs. The animals were even positioned with their antlers up so they would be easier to find in snow.

The conservation officers were also unaware that caribou herds have natural declines in population and they occasionally alter their traditional grazing routes.

The federal government, for its part, wanted to move the Dene to a place where they would be easier to administer, even though their original new home south of Churchill was completely isolated and could only be reached by air, boat or dogteam.

The experiment in human engineering was a disaster and many Dene fell victim to social and economic distress. Their pitiful conditions were recognized by regional Indian Affairs workers, but largely ignored by Ottawa. By the late 1960s, some band members began drifting back to their traditional hunting grounds at Tadoule Lake, where the rest of the band settled in 1973.

The Manitoba government apologized this week for its role in the disaster, but the federal government, which must bear most of the responsibility, has been dragging its feet, even though the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples said the Dene were owed an apology and compensation.

The Dene’s horrible treatment occurred more than 10 years after the proclamation of the UN Declaration on Human Rights and at a time when many observers believed that their treatment was below Canadian and international standards. They deserve a federal apology now and they are entitled to compensation for their suffering and losses.

This is not a case where the excesses and abuses of the past can be excused because of the historical context or because people did not know better. There are no alibis when the victims can still remember their hunger and their shame.