The Double–Edged Sword of Hydro Development: An Assessment of the Manitoba Northern Flood Agreement and the James Bay Northern Quebec Agreement

Introduction

Indigenous lands, being rich in natural resources, have become the focus of natural resource development projects that are justified in the name of national interest and economic development. However, the indigenous communities whose lands are being developed and whose rights, cultures, and needs are not being considered appropriately are not benefiting from these projects as they were promised. An examination of the Northern Flood Agreement (NFA), between Manitoba Hydro and the northern Manitoba Cree, and the James Bay Northern Quebec Agreement (JBNQA), between Hydro Quebec and the James Bay Cree, will demonstrate how natural resource development has mainly benefitted the corporations and has caused serious damage to indigenous culture, communities, and their lands.

Missing from the NFA and the JBNQA, as from the original treaties between the Crown and First Nations, is an implementation process to fulfill promises and obligations. These agreements between the First Nations and the Crown corporations have mainly failed to provide the promised economic benefits, which could have provided a solution to the underdevelopment in these indigenous communities. This has left it up to the courts to define what the rights of First Nations are. As Mathew Coon Come states In the Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects and Globalization. Blaser et al. (2004) in relation to the JBNQA: “We have been in and out of courts since 1975 to get the governments to implement it (JBNFA). They still refuse and delay, and many of the benefits we were promised have failed to materialize. These benefits are things all who live in Canada enjoy as a right” (p. 156). Although these agreements included promises of compensation and of economic benefit, they did not provide for meaningful means to enforce the implementation of them as will become clear in the following examination of the NFA and JBNQA.

The JBNQA and NFA will be contrasted to show how Manitoba Hydro failed to follow the precedent set by the JBNQA, but rather negotiated in bad faith employing project-by-project ‘divide and conquer’ final agreements, and did not provide any monetary benefit or self government agreements to the indigenous communities affected by hydro development. In demonstrating how the JBNQA is a better example of a self-governing agreement than the NFA, it will be necessary to examine the perceived strengths of the JBNQA that made it successful in a way the NFA was not. It will also be necessary to briefly define the concept of development as it is understood by indigenous people as opposed to the corporations’ view of development in this examination which seeks to determine whether the double-edged sword of development can in fact provide the solution to prevailing economic problems in indigenous communities or whether it is contributing to them. 

Defining Development

According to Martin and Hoffman in Power Struggles: Hydro Development and First Nations in Manitoba and Quebec. (2008), development has meant a "new social contract" for the James Bay Cree in contrast to the "business only partnerships" approach Manitoba Hydro has taken toward Manitoba Cree communities (p. 3). The growing demand for electricity in Ontario and the Midwestern United States is influencing this impulse towards globalization evident in Manitoba Hydro’s present and long-term exogenous development goals.  Since 2001, non-domestic sales have accounted for anywhere from 33 to 42 percent of total system sales. Thus it is clear the limitation of a transmission system built primarily to meet local, or at best, regional loads, but which is increasingly being called upon to handle intercontinental bulk power transfers, is the reason for the push to build Bipole 3 (pp. 146-149).

Even though the Hydro Quebec development project has helped sustain the Quebec economy, the James Bay Cree have a different opinion of the development. According to a community leader speaking in the Aboriginal People Television Network film, “Down the Mighty River,” the fact that the money they received is called ‘compensation’ tell you something negative has happened – The Cree are not going to hunt and trap in their traditional territories ever again. The corporation’s view of development as mainly economically and profit driven with little regard for the environment or the indigenous people is in complete opposite to the indigenous peoples’ view which sees an intimate relationship between the natural world and the human world and therefore which believes development must respect the natural world to which we are all connected.

Hydro Development on Indigenous Lands: Costs and Benefits

Because of the Government of Canada’s long history of relations with indigenous people, their involvement in these projects should have made these projects more sensitive to indigenous cultures and their needs as a people as opposed to projects initiated by the private sector. However, according to Harvey A. Feit’s article “James Bay Crees’ Life Projects and Politics: Histories of Place, Animal Partners and Enduring Relationships,” in Blaser et al. (2004), this has not been the case. The James Bay Cree have continued to extend their hand in reconciliation, seeking the re-creation of mutual understanding with the province and Hydro Quebec to improve their relationship with the Cree and the land. The Cree feel they cannot get non aboriginals to understand their position.

In his article, “Hunting, Nature, and Metaphor,” in Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community, Harvey Tait explains the Cree ontology through use of the garden metaphor. The garden metaphor not only instructs Cree youth, it invites Quebecers, Canadians, and Americans to understand the Cree, to see them as civilized and moral. It is intended to encourage white men to learn from the Cree about the proper relationship between humans and their environment. Tait’s use of the gardening metaphor draws on, reproduces, and modifies Cree symbols of land, sociality, autonomy, reciprocity, and spirituality. This rhetorical strategy of the garden analogy is intended to highlight the spiritual element indigenous people share with the wider Christian population and their understandings of culture (pp. 444-445). 

In-Depth Examination of the Manitoba NFA

            In “The Way to Modern Treaties: A Review of Hydro Projects and Agreements in Manitoba and Quebec,” in Martin and Hoffman (2008), Romuald Wera and Thibault Martin state, “[u]nlike the JBNQA, the NFA recognized no inherent Aboriginal right but instead created a claims procedure requiring a long and usually unsuccessful, at least from the Aboriginal point of view, arbitration process” (p. 66). Wera and Martin (2008) further point out that the Aboriginal communities were so disappointed by the implementation process that by the mid-1980s the provincial government entered into negotiations with each community for an alternative, comprehensive approach (p. 69). In Manitoba, the Summary of Understanding (SOU 2003) came after the aspirations of the NFA could not be implemented in the Nisichiawayasihk Cree Nation (NCN), and the province intended to proceed on with more hydro development.

Cross Lake is the only community insisting Manitoba Hydro and the province live up to their word in the NFA and not to go the route of other communities like NCN who signed the SOU 2003. According to Peter Kulchyski in “The Red Indians,” the Cross Lake First Nation, decided it  would  not sign  the NFA, which  extinguished the rights it won in the seventies,”   “refusing to co-operate with the further ravaging of its great river” (p. 157).

According to Peter Kulchyski, in his article “A Step Back: The Nisichiawayasihk Cree Nation,” in Martin and Hoffman (2008), the NFA has legitimacy from the Constitution Act (section 35) that “[h]ereby recognizes and affirms the existing aboriginal and treaty rights.”  He states the NFA is further supported by two Supreme Court Decisions, R v. Sioui (1990) and R v. Marshall, which have drastically altered the understanding and the protocol of treaty interpretation. This set an important precedent, allowing for a liberal and generous interpretation of treaties and treaty rights by putting oral history and what was agreed to in treaties on par with what was written in the Treaty Five document (pp. 131-132). Kulchyski goes on to criticize the SOU by comparing it to the Les Paix Des Braves (2002) in Quebec, claiming “the document is not a nation-to-nation agreement in the manner of the Paix Des Braves . . . and contains no sense of vision” (p. 136). Whereas “[v]arious Cree communities in northern Quebec will gain significant financial benefit, $70 million a year for fifty years to a total of $3.5 billion, without financial risk,” as a result of the Les Paix Des Braves, the Cree in northern Manitoba have received no financial benefit only . . . as a result of the SOU (p. 137). Les Paix Des Braves agreement in Quebec came after the JBNQA, just as the SOU came after the NFA in Manitoba, to pave the way for more hydro development.

In-Depth Examination of the JBNQA

According to Peter Kulchyski’s brief history leading to the JBNQA, in The Red Indians, when the James Bay Cree and Inuit learned of hydro development plans when they were announced in the spring of 1971 on the radio, they decided to fight it. In 1972, they launched a successful court challenge, claiming that aboriginal rights and titles were still valid, thereby forcing the government of Quebec to begin negotiations with the James Bay Cree and Inuit. This led to a major land claim. In 1975, the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement was signed.

Peter Kulchyski stresses it is important to emphasize that the James Bay land claim was negotiated under a great deal of pressure. The deal involved a payment of $232 million, exclusive use of 5,500 square kilometres of land, along with exclusive hunting, fishing, and trapping rights over another sixty thousand square kilometres of land to be jointly managed with the government. The deal included income security for aboriginal hunters and trappers. In exchange for these benefits, the James Bay Cree and Inuit agreed to “cede, release, surrender and convey all their native claims, rights, titles and interests” to their traditional territories. In the court of public opinion, many activists inside and outside the Cree community accused the leadership of selling out. Others said the deal was the best they could get.

 In the years following the agreement, Kulchyski states serious problems developed in the implementation of the land claim in the areas of health, social services, economic and social development. In the 1990s, faced with plans or phase two of the James Bay hydro electric project, Mathew Coon Come, Grand Chief of the Crees said the land claim was not working, and they were prepared to tear it up (pp. 146-147). This stalled the Great Whale Diversion, and Les Paix Des Braves was negotiated and settled.

Mathew Coon Come, in his article “Survival in the Context of Mega Resource Development: Experiences of the James Bay Crees and the First Nations of Canada,” in Blaser et al. (2004), concedes the agreement was not a good. Although its intention was good, its implementation process needed court interpretations; therefore, the Crees were forced to become the environmental and economic conscience that the Quebec government did not have. Coon Come concludes that this agreement can benefit northern Crees as it provides some financial resources for their future. This agreement is often referred to the first modern day land claims agreement (pp. 159-60). According to Bill Gallager in Resource Rulers (2012) the Crees’ derailment of the Great Whale project signaled the stark reality that Quebec’s hydropower options were becoming increasingly limited (p. 78). The Crees mounted the most successful anti-development campaign ever witnessed in Canada (p. 74). Gallagher further states what gave Hydro Quebec the upper hand  from the outset in future resource development  over competing projects was having access to the Crees’ watersheds—thanks  to Les Paix Des Braves” (p. 86).

According to Paul Rynard in his article “Ally or Colonizer?: The Federal State, the Cree Nation, and the James Bay Agreement” in Burnett and Read (2012) Aboriginal History: A Reader, on the heels of the defeat of the 1969 White Paper, and supported by a landmark ruling in the 1973 Supreme Court of Canada Calder decision, the JBNQA forced the government to abandon its acceleration of assimilation policy and recognize that indigenous people’s  homelands remained valid and unextinguished.  However neither level of government was ready to live up to obligations agreed to when the treaty was signed; it seemed that the federal government was trying to proceed with a business-as-usual approach even though the JBNQA had codified and clarified many of its obligations. A gastroenteritis epidemic in several Cree communities killed several children as a direct result of poorly planned and half-finished sewers built by the Department of Indian Affairs. “A review made clear the government had violated the ‘spirit and intent’ of the JBNQA” (pp. 395-396).

A number of factors are relevant in causing the history of poor treaty implementation in both the JBNQA in Quebec and the NFA in Manitoba. Bradley and Hoffman (2008) state the key difference between hydro development in Quebec and Manitoba is the politically destructive project-by-project and community-by-community negotiating style that has long characterized provincial-Aboriginal relations in Manitoba. Thus, unlike in the case of the Paix Des Braves, Hydro and the province of Manitoba continue to deal with each and every community as a separate entity on a project-by-project basis. The implications of this strategy are best appreciated by comparing negotiations in Manitoba with those in Quebec, and specifically, with the 2004 Les Paix Des Braves agreement, which has been described as a ‘true partnership’. In contrast, the absolute inequality in Manitoba stems from the insistence on the part of Hydro that individual agreements be consummated between the company and various northern Aboriginal communities (pp. 151-152).

Bradley and Hoffman (2008) further critique the project-by-project and community-by-community strategy as it also confronts individual communities with a remarkable reality: by becoming business partners, they are, in effect, agreeing to perpetuate ecological damages that are a functional part of the project’s operation. In this respect, Aboriginal communities become participants in the continued degradation of an ecology that could support a traditional land-based way of life. However, according to The Honorable Tim Sale, Minister of Energy, Science and Technology, hydro development is green energy and contributes to meeting our national climate change targets (Kyoto) by helping to displace fossil fuel generation (pp.151-155).

 The separatist movement was another central factor in the federal government's non-compliance in fulfilling its obligations and fiscal responsibilities of the JBNQA as it attempted to avoid conflict with the provincial government of Quebec. Government funding was decided upon by policy and not in legal accordance with the agreement. According to Rynard in Aboriginal History: A Reader, an ambassador of the Crees states the poor implementation was “because it is cheaper to pay civil servants to fight Indians than it is to meet treaty obligation” (p. 397). When a Cree Naskapi Commission reviewed the capital-funding disagreements, the federal representatives told the commission that they felt obligated to give the Crees only as far as their fair share of normal Indian Affairs program funding was concerned, so they could avoid treating other Indians unequally (p.397).

Evaluation of Hydro Development on Indigenous Lands

Because of the intimate relationship indigenous people have with their lands, development has inevitably resulted in a disruption of their traditional ways and has threatened their survival, which depends on respecting the laws of nature in order to hunt, fish, and gather in both Quebec and Manitoba. Thus, it is evident from these readings that the development of natural resources in indigenous territory has not created opportunity or alleviated poverty and unemployment in Cree communities in northern Manitoba to the degree it has for the James Bay Cree; rather than prosperity, devastated environments, destroyed traditional lifestyles, and further poverty have been the result of development in northern Manitoba.

The wealth to be derived from the development of natural resources on indigenous lands is of foremost interest to the non-indigenous crown corporations and the governments involved, who want to make a profit from those natural resources regardless of indigenous rights and title. Despite the corporation’s claim of development in the name of indigenous people, development has too often taken place without any regard for its impacts on the indigenous people who live on these lands.

According to Brian Craik, in his article, “The Importance of Working Together: Exclusions, Conflicts and Participation in James Bay, Quebec,” in Blaser et al. (2004), Canada has a huge problem regarding both its present land claim policy and the future of indigenous communities. Craik claims the Canadian policy is one of maintaining the status quo rather than bringing Aboriginal communities into the revenue streams created by the development that surrounds them, which is evident in their promoting one time buy outs and asking indigenous people to accept exclusion (pp. 183-184).

Conclusion

 Thus, it is evident that although indigenous nations are rich in natural resources and therefore deserving of a share in the wealth derived from the development of these resources, they are not equal or true partners with the government or crown corporations that control the resource development projects on their lands.  Although the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement has resulted in limited economic benefits for the indigenous communities, whose lands and lifestyle have been adversely affected by the hydroelectric project, the indigenous communities affected by the Northern Flood Agreement in Manitoba have seen no positive changes due to development. As has been shown by this examination of the two agreements, the reasons for this in Manitoba are: [1] A project-by-project and community-by-community divide and conquer negotiating strategy; [2] No monetary compensation; [3] No self-government agreements. Therefore, it is clear that what is required for development to have a greater degree of success, is at the very least, follow the approach of Hydro Quebec in its hydro development agreements and work with the indigenous people as a collective entity, provide monetary compensation and self government agreements rather than the divide and conquer – business only approach of Manitoba Hydro. The fact that even with the successful model of development, the JBNQA, the benefits also came with costs to lands and lifestyle. This is what makes it a double-edged sword—benefits derived with costs.

References

Blaser, M., Feit, H., & Mcrae, G. (2004). In the Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects and Globalization. London: Zed Books.

Burnett, Kristen & Read, Geoff. (2012). Aboriginal History: A reader. (pp. 389-400). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gallegher, B. (2012). Resource Rulers: Fortune and Folly on Canada’s Road to Resources. La Vergne, Tennessee: Lighting Source Inc.

Grim, J. (2001) Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Kulchyski, P. (2007). The Red Indians: An Episodic, Informal Collection of Tales from the History of Aboriginal People’s Struggles in Canada. Winnipeg: Albeiter Ring Publishing.

Martin, T. &  Hoffman, S. (Eds.) (2008). Power Struggles: Hydro Development and First Nations in Manitoba and Quebec. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Webb, E. (Producer). (2013) Down the Mighty River [Video]. Montreal: Aboriginal Peoples Network Television.