Cree mom wonders how mining development in northern Quebec will affect food supplies

CHISASIBI, Que. — Heather House is a full-time McGill University long-distance student, and when she’s not absorbed in books, she’s raising her eight children with her husband in Chisasibi, Quebec’s northernmost commune accessible by road.

Supporting a family of eight children, two parents and two elders in such a remote community, where food prices are among the highest in the country, would be a huge challenge if there was no access to land to hunt, fish, trap and berry would pick.

“Most of my family’s food comes from hunting, comes from the countryside,” said House, 34, in an interview at Retro Daze Café in Chisasibi.

The café has the feel of a bar, filled with young adults playing pool and snacking on chicken wings, but there’s no beer on tap as Chisasibi is a “dry” community where the sale of alcohol is prohibited. Sitting in the coffee shop last October, House opened up a computer to view a map of active mining claims in Quebec.

“If you look at the map, there are many mining claims in traditional Cree hunting grounds around the Trans-Taiga Highway area,” she noted, referring to the gravel road that begins east of Chisasibi and extends almost to Labrador.

“If these mineral claims become mines and they manage to take from the land what they need, what they want, what land will be left for generations to come?” House asked. “Where will my children and grandchildren go to hunt and feed themselves?”

There are currently nearly 400 mining exploration projects in all of the Eeyou Istchee, the traditional areas that are home to approximately 20,000 James Bay Cree in nine communities. With a population of more than 5,000, Chisasibi is the largest of the Cree communities.

For House, the forests, lakes and rivers are inseparable from the Cree cultural identity. With her hunter and trapper husband, she teaches her children to hunt moose, geese and caribou to become independent, just as her parents and grandparents did with her.

She refuses to make her family dependent on the “stores full of processed foods” in Chisasibi, where products are sometimes “stale or rotten” before they even hit the shelves because they travel thousands of miles just to get there reach. The country, she said, has everything it takes to feed her people.

A 2015 study by the Institut national de santé publique du Québec supports their claim: Among Quebec’s remote First Nations, “the traditional diet is healthy and rich in a variety of essential nutrients,” while “the commercially-based diet, which is high in refined sugars, trans fats and sodium and low in essential nutrients, contributes to chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.”

According to public health figures, the prevalence of diabetes in Chisasibi is 3.5 times higher than in the rest of the province.

House worries that the potential extraction of lithium and other critical minerals, because it deprives the Cree of certain hunting grounds, will exacerbate food insecurity in the same way that large Hydro Quebec projects have negatively impacted local food supplies.

In addition to inundating vast hunting grounds, the development of the La Grande complex’s facilities in the 1980s caused mercury contamination of fish, particularly fish at the top of the food chain such as northern pike.

“For the Crees, the only way to prevent high exposure to methylmercury was to make radical lifestyle changes and reduce their fish consumption,” concluded a 1998 study by James Bay’s Cree Board of Health and Social Services.

“When they built the dams, they didn’t listen to us,” House said. “When forests were cut down enough to scare away moose and caribou in some areas, they didn’t listen to us and now they want to mine lithium and other metals.”

In 2019, researchers from the Université de Montréal, the University of Ottawa, and the Assembly of First Nations published a comprehensive, decades-long study of First Nations diets, nutrition, and the environment.

More than half of the 6,487 Indigenous adults surveyed said access to traditional foods has been hampered by climate change, but also by industrial activities such as hydroelectric power and mining. The study also found that First Nations have no “sovereignty” over food resources.

During her pregnancy in November 2020, House went on a two-week hunger strike to protest La Grande Alliance, a memorandum of understanding signed between the Quebec government and the Crees Grand Council.

One of the goals of the multi-billion infrastructure plan is to “position Québec as a major player in the global mining sector, including lithium.” The plan calls for a 700-kilometer rail network along the James Bay Highway, building hundreds of kilometers of new roads and power lines, and creating a deep-water port.

“Like many people in the community, I learned about La Grande Alliance on the day the memorandum was signed” and “Then they promised a year of consultation, but nothing happened in the months following the signing. COVID came in and the lockdown started a week after the announcement,” House said.

She wrote an open letter to the Cree and Quebec governments denouncing the lack of consultation prior to signing the MOU and failure to update the Cree community of its contents.

“Think of our grandparents, our great-grandparents and the ancestors before us,” the letter reads. “You barely survived. We are the products of their trauma; We are their voice when they couldn’t speak. It’s time to say no.”

During her hunger strike, she ate only caribou or fish broth. However, her action was not enough to convince the then Great Chief Abel Bosum to meet with her.

In July 2021, just over a year after La Grande Alliance was signed, Bosum lost the election, with Mandy Gull-Masty replacing him as leader of the Crees’ Grand Council.

In an interview with The Canadian Press, Gull-Masty acknowledged that the Cree people were not sufficiently consulted by their own government before the La Grande Alliance was signed.

“Some people told me they were unfamiliar with the consultation process and that the Grand Council should have done more, which I think is the case,” the 42-year-old leader said, adding the promoters of La Grande Alliance have hired information officers in recent months to publicize the project in various communities.

The impact of mining projects on lakes, rivers and hunting grounds are “very legitimate concerns,” the Grand Chief said.

However, she pointed out that the Cree Grand Council has already negotiated the protection of 30 percent of Cree territory from industrial activity by 2030. These sanctuaries will preserve the habitats of several species vital to the survival of the traditional Cree lifestyle.

La Grande Alliance plans to create jobs in energy, housing, natural resources and conservation.

“There are many employment opportunities and the Cree communities will be involved,” said Gull-Masty, who sees La Grande Alliance as a way for the Cree to potentially gain more autonomy.

“It’s important to understand that La Grande Alliance is a letter of intent and feasibility studies are ongoing,” Gull-Masty said. “Once we have gathered enough information, we intend to update our members before deciding on next steps.”

A spokesman for La Grande Alliance told The Canadian Press that “the results of the feasibility study” will be presented early this year.

This report from The Canadian Press was first published on February 7, 2023.

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Stéphane Blais received the support of the Michener Foundation, which awarded him a Michener-Deacon Investigative Journalism Fellowship in 2022 to cover the impact of lithium mining in northern Quebec.

Stephane Blais, The Canadian Press

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