by Kanikuen Nuna
I arrived with another fellow at the Voisey's Bay camp early spring 1995. We
were the first few people hired from our community of Sheshatshiu. There
were also a few more from Davis Inlet. We started our morning at 6:30 a.m.
with a wake-up call. Seven to nine choppers would be going up each morning
to the drill sites for the drillers' shift change. They worked around the
clock on 8 to 12-hour shifts. The camp personnel, including me, worked
8-hour shifts, 7 days a week for three weeks straight and then we got 10
days off to go home. I worked there from April to June. It was quite
difficult for married men to live like this day-to-day. We constantly
thought about our children. There were times when we were only allowed to
phone home once a week for five minutes. This was not enough time to talk to
the family, the wife and the kids.
After a couple of weeks, I got to know a few of the other people I was
working with. There were a few I never got to know. We were probably too
busy, I guess, but before I left in June I got to talk to a number of people
there. A few of the guys had some negative things to say about how people
from outside were taking jobs away from the locals. We felt we were capable
of doing those jobs. I told people I thought the Innu and Inuit could handle
the jobs and that the foreman's son shouldn't have been hired for a job that
the people from our small communities needed to support their families.
People were being hired because they were the relatives or friends who were
running the camp. I don't think that was fair.
The Innu and Inuit workers held a few meetings amongst ourselves to see how
we felt about what was happening and who should be doing what about it. We
felt we were being hired for many jobs - for example: core shack
technicians, prospectors, line cutters and drillers - but none of us was
getting promoted. In the meantime people from outside were working only 2 or
3 weeks and getting the promotions. We felt this was discrimination, but it
seemed like nobody wanted to speak up, fearing they would lose their jobs.
I, for one, really felt that people from the outside were taking our jobs
away.
We also talked about our concerns, like what was going to happen to the
environment. One guy was from Davis Inlet. I'm sorry to say I didn't have
any answers for him when he said how much people depended on the land. If
there is no land, as he put it, there will be no animals to hunt or fish to
eat, or plants for the animals to eat. He said if these don't exist, we as
hunters will cease to exist too. Another Innu talked about a problem he was
having at the camp. He was being called "Chief" by a few of his co-workers
and he was offended by this. We talked about this at our meetings. There
were other comments being made to us that we found offensive. We took it up
with the foreman. But these were his friends and relatives who were saying
these things to us, so he couldn't really do anything. He wasn't going to
fire his relatives.
There were a lot of problems with the environment - pollution like oil
spills, cut trees and garbage scattered all over the place around the camp.
They were burning garbage but sometimes they would leave it for a week.
Bears and small animals would take it out into the woods and make a mess.
Also the workers would feed the bears, so they would come back to the camp
or drill sites for food. Sometimes the workers would taunt the bears and
throw sticks at them. The bear would start approaching them and then turn
back into the woods. It would eventually end of getting shot. There was a no
feeding policy for bears, but everybody seemed to ignore that. I was upset
when they shot the animals. There was no need. They weren't doing anything
they didn't naturally do, like feeding on berries and small plants.
Sometimes the choppers would come in and try to scare the bears away. They
would hover over treetops to scare animals. The poor animals must have been
having heart attacks running for miles and miles to get away. Bears are not
meant to run like this. One time we saw a bear on the hill about a half-mile
away. It was huge; it must have been about 8 feet tall and weighed about 500
pounds. About 10 workers headed for the hill with knives and sticks to have
a look at it and scare it.
In the end, the reason I quit was because I didn't want to see what was
happening to the environment.
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Kanikuen Nuna is a Sheshatshiu Innu presently doing a program in
Micro-Computer Business Applications at CompuCollege in St. John's.
This story and others are available on the Innu Nation/Mamit Innuat WWW site:
http://www.web.net/~innu/
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