by Malcom Howard
Malcom Howard reports for the WBAI Evening News. His
documentary on James Bay will be part of our special Thanksgiving
Day programming beginning at 2:30PM on Thursday, November 28th.
Hydro-electric dams built on the LaGrande River in the '70s
introduced a new phrase to the 14,000 Cree Indians living around
James Bay in Northern Quebec: Nimass aksiwin, or "fish disease,"
became a household word to Crees in the mid '80s after they
learned that pike, trout, and other fish they pulled from the
LaGrande contained mercury.
Below the placid surfaces of LaGrande's reservoirs, the
invisible toxin formed when methane, released from rotting
plants, combined with inorganic mercury, which leached from
newly-submerged soil. The Cree's heavy fish diet brought the
mercury into their bloodstream and many suffered neurological
damage. About two-thirds of the people in Chisasibi (a town of
2,000 Crees who were relocated after dams made their previous
island home on the LaGrande unsafe) have higher than normal
mercury levels. Some elders have 20 times normal levels.
But the Quebec-owned power monopoly that built the LaGrande
dams isn't done yet: It wants to build another 16 dams in the
Eeyou Astchee - the Cree word for their homeland. Although the
utility, Hydro-Quebec, plans to spend $62 billion to dam almost
every river flowing into the James and Hudson Bays, its immediate
plans call for three huge dams on the Great Whale River, which
feeds into the Hudson Bay.
The Cree and Inuit (the Cree's northerly neighbors) say
another huge hydro-electric project could drive their centuries-
old lifestyle of hunting, trapping, and fishing to extinction.
Flooding would destroy calving areas for caribou, submerge
nesting areas for geese, and put Indian hunting and trapping
grounds under water. Dams on Great Whale would engulf 2,700
square miles - the equivalent of sinking southern Vermont or all
of Long Island.
Hydro-Quebec, meanwhile, boasts that it is flooding only one
percent of the 440,000-square-mile James Bay region. What H-Q
doesn't say is that the one percent they would flood is the only
productive land for Crees and the only safe haven for wildlife.
In that sense, Hydro-Quebec's dams are like smart bombs: they
only target valleys bears, beavers, fox, geese - and other
animals the Cree rely on - find shelter on the wind-swept,
subarctic tiaga. The natural infrastructure devastated by the
dams, therefore, is far beyond what is actually covered by water.
In fact, a watershed the size of Maine and New York combined
would be affected. But even the reservoirs are mind boggling:
because the Eeyou Astchee is mostly flat, water from dammed-up
rivers spreads out over the land like spilt milk on a dinner
table. Reservoirs on the LaGrande inundated almost 10,000 square
miles.
Perhaps the most sickening part of all is that 60 percent of
the power which would be created by the proposed dams on the
Great Whale River will go to televisions, toasters, and air
conditioners (radio stations, too) in New York State. The state's
power authority has signed two contracts with the Hydro-Quebec
worth $19 billion. Unless those contracts are cancelled by
November 1992, Quebec's debt-ridden utility will get the American
capital is needs to build the dams.
"Up until 20 years ago, we didn't use electricity even to
cook," says Matthew Mukash, a Cree anti-dam activist. "So it's
hard for us to hear how cities to the south, with used car lots
lit all night like football fields, need all this power."
The Cree and environmentalists argue that if the New York
Power Authority (NYPA) put even a fraction of the money destined
for Hydro-Quebec into conservation programs, New Yorkers won't
need out-of-state power. Beyond that, money for installing better
heating, lighting, and energy distribution systems would create
25 to 30 jobs per million dollars spent; Hydro-Quebec's dams
would garner only six jobs per million.
In the process, H-Q would bulldoze the first roads to Great
Whale, an isolated community of 1,000 Cree and Inuit ("Eskimo")
where the Great Whale River meets Hudson Bay. Hydro-Quebec would
also build three airports (at least one of them big enough for
747s), slash a path though Cree hunting areas for 12,000
high-tension power poles, and erect a temporary factory town for
4,000 workers only 30 miles from the sleepy seaside village.
Meanwhile, the town's namesake will be reduced to a trickle
one-fifth its current size. "This river is a major calving area
for the beluga [whale] herd," says Peter Papialuk, who runs a
hunter's support program in Kuujjuaaraapik, the Inuit side of
Great Whale. Changes in the salt water content near the river's
mouth will change drastically and the belugas, which use the
rivers to molt, will disappear. So will the age old Inuit
tradition of launching canoes into Hudson Bay and hunting them.
I began my (volunteer) career as a WBAI reporter after the
Gulf War, and since then, most of my time has been spent covering
the James Bay story. One thing I've learned: Hydro-dams are not
the problem, they're a symptom.
The United States, like other consumer- or industrial-based
societies, has a habit of exporting the side effects of its
energy addictions to far away, or "remote", areas populated by
people of non-Europeans descent. The war against Iraq is only the
most glaring example. Now, in the shadow of burning Kuwaiti oil
fields, President Bush's national energy strategy ignores
innovation and conservation and calls for oil exploration in the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, home of Athabascan Gwich'in
people.
But that's just another story with a similar plot. Among the
resources being grabbed from native lands are uranium and coal
for power plants, trees for paper pulp, and water to process this
pulp. Meanwhile, rainforests are razed for hamburger meat. How
long can this go on?
"The fact is, a culture based on conquest is not sustainable,
and that's something we as indigenous people have come to
understand very well," says Winona LaDuke, and environmental
activist and Anishinabeg (Chippewa) from Minnesota. That
industrial society is enroaching on both of Earth's poles, and is
mulling over greenhouse cities on Mars, shows that out leaders
understand very little about survival.
I'm glad to tell the James Bay story during the month when
many of us celebrate Thanksgiving because it's an example of
Native Americans still showing European-based societies how to
survive in the world we share. You see, if the Cree can help us
change the wasteful ways of our state's power authority, we won't
just save North America's last untouched wilderness. And we won't
just be saving an indigenous culture that's lasted thousands of
years. We'll save money on Con Ed bills. And that's something
I'd be particularly grateful for.
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Michele Lord * Walk in Peace with
(milo@scicom.alphacdc.com) * our Mother Earth
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