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The Innu of Labrador

The Canadian region of Labrador is slightly larger than Britain in area, but contains only 29,000 people. It is home to some 2300 indigenous Innu, and lately to settlers too. Most of the emigrants from the Highlands and Islands went to Quebec and Nova Scotia. Some, though, went to work for the Hudson Bay Company, as its outward bound ships regularly provisioned on Orkney before the Atlantic crossing. One of the Company’s outposts was established at North West River, just across the water from what is now the Innu settlement of Sheshatshiu. In a mournful echo of the clearances of Scotland, Labrador has seen its own nomadic people dispossessed and disconnected from their lands. This time, though, it is all too recent. The once hunting and trapping nomadic Innu have been settled since the 1960s in the name of civilisation and modernisation, and they are suffering because of it. Their numbers are small, just 20,000 on the whole of the Labrador and Quebec peninsula, and so their plight is barely noticed on a global scale.

	The Innu’s nomadic way of life has almost been extinguished since Labrador and Newfoundland joined the Canadian federation in 1949. The Innu homeland is called Nitassinan, a vast area of boreal forest which transitions into taiga shield and eventually to tundra in the far north. These slow growth boreal forests, in which a finger-sized black spruce can be one hundred years old, are rich with caribou, bear, beaver, otter and porcupine, and the lakes, rivers and seashore contain vast salmon and trout. The archaeological record shows that the Innu have been present for at least 8000 years, during which time no animals have become locally extinct because of their hunting and gathering. So what is the problem? If they are few, and the land is wide, why has there been such an effort focusing on assimilation?
The Innu were first contacted by fur traders of the Hudson Bay Company in the 1700s, and though they remained deep in the country throughout most of the year, they started to come to trading posts to buy sugar, tea, baking powder, flour and tobacco. They were famed for their hunting skills, but visiting explorers and commentators still saw them as inferior to the white settlers, with hunting itself seen as an impediment to advanced and civilised ways of living. This is a theme played out on all continents of the world at one time or another – troublesome tribes making a living in the wrong way, and encouraged, often harshly and certainly hastily, to drop the old ways for the new, so that they too can become part of the modern and civilised world.
	During the 1950s and 1960s, the Innu of Labrador began to be settled in two communities on the Labrador shore, one at Utshimassits (Davis Inlet) in the north (later moved to Natuashish), and the other at Sheshatshiu on the shore of Lake Melville in the south. Children had to attend school, and so their families needed to be settled. Families also had to have a formal address to receive welfare payments. And above all, missionaries and priests made it clear that spiritual saving would only come about if people were part of what was called a modern society. Politicians were under no illusion about what was best. Walter Rockwood, director of the Division of Northern Labrador Affairs, said in 1957, “one fact seems clear – civilisation is on the northwood march, and for the Eskimo and Indian there is no escape. The last bridges of isolation were destroyed with the coming of the airplane and the radio. The only course now open, for there can be no turning back, is to for him as soon as may be to take his full place as a citizen of our society”. .
Today, the Innu are indeed settled, but it does not feel like home to them. They visit the country when they can, very occasionally for periods of months, but more usually for weeks or just days. Mostly, though, they feel thoroughly disconnected from a lifestyle and its associated community arrangements that brought them across some 400 generations of life in what they call nutshimit – the country. Today, alcoholism is widespread, childhood mortality is high, life expectancy low, and type II diabetes affects many of the population.
Instead of active lifestyles eating country foods, dense in protein and light in fats, people are mostly inactive and consume modern junk food diets. Instead of meaning and self-identity, many feel they have little hope for the future. Mary May Adele is a thin elderly woman, and as she gazes wistfully out of a window, she says, “It feels lonely here, when you look outside at the sky and the trees. Even though we are here in the village, we feel lonely.” Her husband continues, “It was beautiful and happy before. Now I sit in my home, and I feel pain and feel sick. I feel very unhappy in the house”.
What has gone so very wrong? The key lies in understanding the nature of life in the country – the daily connectedness and respect for nature, and the closeness of families and communities. When Innu look at the country, they do not just see trees and water. They see places with stories and locate specific events, they see ancestors and animal spirits wandering the land, they see the past and present intimately linked, and feel nature tied together with them.

But when civilisation marched north, it saw only the economic value of lumber, of reservoirs for hydro-electricity, of nickel in the rocks, and of the wildlife that needed protecting. This difference in values cannot be underestimated. For the Innu, to destroy one part of their connected system is eventually to undermine the whole. For outsiders, opportunities for exploitation abound, and they have been grasped with little worry about the severe consequences for people and the land.

The Innu say they always care for the country and the animals in it. They never took too much, and have a tradition of sharing what was caught with other families in the camp. They hunted beaver, otter, porcupine, rabbit, caribou, fox, lynx, duck, goose, ptarmigan and partridge for food, and wolves and hares for fur – not to eat. From the lakes and sea, they caught salmon, trout and seals. It is their view that the animals control the hunt, and so when they are caught, they are given respect by sharing the food and hanging the bones on trees. Animal spirits were like governments, as they permitted the hunting. Says Dominic Pokue, one old hunter, “the animal spirits gave approval for the hunt.” They never shot more caribou than could be eaten, and when hunting beaver would always leave sufficient females in a river as breeding stock. When an area was hunted, they would then leave it fallow for at least two years before returning.

“In the old days”, says Katnan Pastitchi, “people did not find it difficult. We never used to be tired. We were strong and happy.”There were no skidoos, but pulling sledges did not feel like hard work. It was just part of life. Men were the hunters, and women in charge of the camps. But both were seen as equals, each with their own sphere of activity and decision-making. Katnan learned all she knows from her grandmother, and today still making clothing from caribou hide. She eats wild food when she can get it, but her grandson, who lives in the same house, wants none of it. She laments the loss of a way of life.

But in truth, these human communities and forest ecosystems have co-evolved since the last ice-age. What we now see is an emergent property of human intentionality, and not some untouched, or even idle, wilderness. If this is the case, what is the consequence of removing the people? Ultimately, we recreate the wasteland inside us when we indirectly permit these disconnections to occur. Federal authorities, though, still see going to the country as something akin to summer camp, a place for recreation perhaps, whereas the Innu see it as a place for fundamental reconnection and maintenance of their identity.

The Tshikapisk Foundation was set up by a group of Innu in 1997 to promote their culture and safeguard their land. Visit website