Forward: This post is a throwback from a paper I did in 2012. This is being republished in the context of current struggles over resource development: the ongoing Muskrat Falls project in Labrador, Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota, the Site C dam in British Columbia, among many others. It is clear that the same struggles for justice in the face of resource extraction in Labrador persist but are not being met with mounting inter-nation solidarity and political action against the the supposedly more progressive Trudeau government.

As I write, protestors are occupying the labour camp at the hydro development, and activist/artist Billy Gauthier is on his way to Ottawa to send his message to the Federal Government on the 9th day of his hunger strike. Those present at the protests and issuing solidarity are the NunatuKavut, Innu, Nunatsiavut nations, and settlers. This is the first time in history that all four nations of Labrador have united around a single cause. Furthermore, resentment towards the Newfoundland Government for forcing this project on Labradorians has mounted a new wave of desire for Labrador independence from the island. Not often are we able to call such events in history a literal watershed moment, but there it is. I have never seen Labradorians this organized and angry over anything so commonly. Something is certainly going to change politically as a result of these protests.

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These are my notes from a presentation I delivered at panel discussion for OPIRG Ottawa U called “Development at Home: Critical Perspectives of Race, The Environment and the Canadian Response”, as part of International Development Week at the University of Ottawa. February 9, 2012.

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We like to think of neoliberal globalization as a rather new phenomenon, but the history of Labrador throughout the 20th century would suggest that this system – where discourses of economic liberalism manifest in the form of market logics at the level of state activity – have been in effect part and parcel to the colonial encroachment of the Labrador Peninsula throughout the 20th century.  The elaborate history of the territory has really come to a watershed moment in the current struggle over hydro development.

Theorists of Marxist political economy such as David Harvey discuss the phenomenon of “accumulation through dispossession”, where the commons is enclosed as property and then sold of to private industry for the profit of capitalists.  The history of Labrador goes one further.  There was no recognized commons as such – or at least no foothold for any colonial state to assert sovereignty in the region to justify “development”.  Therefore what needed to occur was the insertion of a state apparatus by other means in order to render a commons for there to steal.  Labrador presents an especially unique history where the collusion of state and private industry were so tightly entangled that it was very difficult to tell the two apart.  What resulted was an almost perfect example of the sort of free market capitalist dystopia fantasized in the critique of anti/alter-globalizationists, except that this happened well before people were using the word neoliberal to begin with.

Beginnings of Colonization

In order to understand the current hydro development situation in Labrador I first need to give a brief history.  Development in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador is somewhat unique to the rest of Canada.  The space that is conventionally known as Labrador is really half of the Innu homeland, which is called Nitassinan. This region spans from the Saguenay of Quebec, all the way to Natuashish on the North Coast of Labrador and inland west to the centre of the Labrador Peninsula.  It is a region that reflects the watershed of the Saguenay river the Côte Nord of the St. Laurence, Hamilton Inlet, and sections of the North Coast of Labrador.  It is also the migratory territory of several caribou herds, one – the George River Caribou Herd, was formerly the largest one in the world, which has recently experienced a precipitous decline in population.

The Innu were one of the very first nations to encounter colonialism.  Originally inhabitants of the South Coast of Labrador, basque fishing camps started seasonally fishing and trading in the area by the early 16th century.  By about a century later Europeans had settled there permanently.  Though trade was attractive, the Innu were forced inland from over competition for land and increasing conflict with the Inuit.  This isolated the nation for a long while, since European powers were most interested in the costal area for fishing.  In fact, Innu territory lay in colonial limbo for a long time after this.  As Labrador acted as the site of territorial conflict between France and England, there were never any formal colonial claim that legally put the Labrador peninsula under the control of the Crown.  Throughout the 18th and 19th century, the coastal land bounced between English control and that of the colony of Quebec.  Throughout this time the Innu experienced limited contact with Europeans.

The process of colonial land grab really started to happen in the 1900s through a collaboration of philanthrope and corporate monopoly.  Throughout the late 19th century the Hudson’s Bay Company established trading posts in various locations in the Côte Nord, Upper Lake Melville and North Coast of Labrador.  This had two effects, it introduced a reliance among Metis and Innu trappers on Southern markets supplying them with ammunition, flour, sugar blankets, etc., it also lead to a degree of sedentarization.  The corporate system of debt afforded the HBC a tremendous amount of power over the social economy of Labrador.  They could now dictate what the Innu and Metis should harvest through the prices they could give for goods such as caribou meat, fish and furs.  The debts sometimes became such a burden that international philanthropic organizations such as the Grenfell Mission, or the Moravian Church had to step in and provide social services to dangerously overworked and indebted trappers.  The Innu were subjected to intense pressure to settle in places like Sheshashiu near the North West River trading post, when the HBC decided to drop the price of caribou meat and fish.  Both Innu and “Metis” (now named NunatuKavut) were then forced permanently into trapping.  For a number of years there was a great drop-off in the caribou heard.  This nearly starved the Innu and forced them to coastal areas to settle around churches and trading posts.

Labrador and the Economic Depression

Globalization hit the region hard in the 1920s and 30s.  During this time the coast of Labrador remained in possession of the Government of Newfoundland, a colonial territory of Great Britain.  The 1920s saw the Colony fall into recession for a variety reasons.  First, the colony was hit hard by war spending, which saw both meagre domestic resources and lives squandered during World War II.  The toll was quite physically damaging to the economy since the Battle of Beaumont Hamel, where the Newfoundland Regiment was literally decimated, they saw a 90% loss of the unit, which accounted for a significant of the colony’s labour force.  Second, the colony also faced a tremendous amount of pressure from the global economic depression of the 1920s, and borrowed massive amounts of cash to finance public spending.  Third, the Colony also saw incredible losses from an inoperable and – frankly – useless railway that spanned the island of Newfoundland.  As a result of these three factors, the Colony had to borrow great sums of principle from Great Britain and Canadian banks.  When in 1932 the Colonial Government announced that it was on the verge of default, it sent panic across the British Colonies.  London banks were leveraged to the max at this

point after having to finance a global war, as well as support risky colonial developments worldwide.  As a result of this panic both Canada and Great Britain suspended representative democracy in the colony and appointed a chairman to run the colony named Lord Amulree.  He created a commission of Canadian and British bankers to run the colony.  One of the major recommendations of this commission through the 1933 Amulree Report, was to lease Labrador to the UK for 99 years as a condition of defaulting on the interest of public debt.  However things got sticky by this point since both the Governments of Canada and Great Britain had formally legislated conflicting boarders to Labrador.  This was settled in 1927 along the claim of the Hudson Bay Company’s claim to the land, which created the 52 degree parallel southern boundary.  Quebec never recognized this claim and Canada only recognized the claim as coastal.  So the territory remained in dispute.

In order to assert sovereignty over the territory, in the 1930s the Commission Government of the Colony along with the Grenfell Mission created a division of “rangers” to manage the administrative affairs of settlements in Labrador.  The Grenfell Mission was especially involved in establishing this because it saw the need for the political participation of Labrador in the colonial government in St. John’s.  It was through this liberal discourse of “democratic” civic participation in government that many government services were established in the region.  I guess no one saw the irony in advocating this sort of participation in a banking dictatorship.  The Rangers began assuming a variety of state roles in Labrador – again, with no legal territorial claim the area.  These roles included administrating census and registry duties formerly held my missions, as well as providing legal services and policing.  These roles grew as they came to include regulation of game and hunting, as well as political representation to St. John’s.  The establishment of “good government” emerged in sites around Labrador entirely through the administration of social services.  They effectively leveraged relief under conditions of corporate-imposed indenture and poverty as the device to bring Labradorians under the legal jurisdiction of the Newfoundland Colony.

Labrador in War Time and through Confederation

Moving forward past attempts at mineral exploration and forestry to World War II.  With the United States entering the Allied force against Axis powers in Europe, war planners began to survey the current location of Goose Bay at the mouth of the Mistashipu River (more conventionally known as the Churchill River today).  In just a few years a fully operational air force base was refueling B-52 bombers and various jets for trans-Atlantic flight on their way to fire bomb civilian-filled cities like Dresden, Germany.  This new base marked complete shift in the economy of the region.  With the fur trade no longer providing livable incomes, trappers began to turn to service jobs on the base informally settling in Happy Valley, just beyond the settlement exclusion of the base.  By the way, anyone interested in knowing the history of fur trade indenture and the transition towards sedentary base-life from a Metis woman’s perspective must read Elizabeth Goudie’s incredible book Woman of Labrador.

The creation of the base and the settlement that surrounded it resulted in an entirely precarious economy in years following the war.  By the 1950s base activity slowed-down and the base then left in the hands of the Canadian Government.  The war brought an end to the economic recession, which lead to talks about re-establishing a democratic government.  Those opposing this, in favour of Crown rule also happened to be against confederation.  Those pushing for a system of liberal democracy, notably Joey Smallwood, was also advocating for confederation with Canada.  Over a lengthy and bitter political battle Smallwood became appointed to the Colonial Commission government and canvassed the Crown to accept Newfoundland confederation in exchange for development rights in Central Labrador.  Confederation was narrowly accepted by Newfoundland through a referendum in 1949, and Smallwood became the new province’s first premier.  Smallwood also became especially close to the Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the Rothschild banking family through his many trips to London.  In a 1952 National Film Board documentary about Smallwood you can actually see the conversation where Smallwood pitches the development of a massive hydroelectric dam project to Anthony Gustav de Rothschild.

Corporate Takeover of Labrador and the Violent Exile of the Innu

Smallwood’s work was wildly successful.  Within a year a consortium for development was established called the British Newfoundland Development Corporation (BRINCO).  This consortium included various banks, corporations and venture capitalists, including: N. M. Rothschild and Sons, The Anglo-American Corporation of South America, Bowater Paper Corporation, English Electric Company Limited, Frobisher Limited, Rio Tinto Company Limited, The Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company Limited, The Bank of Montreal, The Royal Bank of Canada, and the Suez Canal Company.  The consortium was issued lease rights most of the Labrador interior.  At this point the Quebec-Labrador boarder was finally settled around such developmental interests.  On the Quebec side of the boarder the Iron Ore Company of Canada began mining for Ore.  In 1952 Smallwood talks to John Doyle of Canadian Javelin Corporation and approves leasing rights for them to mine Iron Ore at the height of land of the newly named Churchill River watershed.  Workers from Newfoundland migrated en masse to the region founding the municipalities of Labrador City and Wabush.

The Innu by this point were mostly ignored.  Because their hunting spanned both sides of the border, neither Quebec nor Newfoundland claimed jurisdiction over them.  The Innu, whose territory was being divided-up for corporate development leases to the Newfoundland Government started to resist the encroachment.  However with no jurisdictional representation, neither province would recognize their claims or hear their complaints.  Smallwood had an especially racist view of the Innu.  Since they opposed development and moved freely across the boarder to hunt, he saw them as agents of Quebec trying to sabotage Newfoundland’s claim to the land and right to develop.  This lead Smallwood to give jurisdiction over the Innu to the Government of Canada through Indian and Northern Affairs.  This was done without any process or consultation, and no treaty or concession of land to any government.  This also lead to the creation of the Labrador Affairs division within the Provincial Department of Welfare, which immediately set about resettling the Innu to areas out of the way of areas slated for development or potential sites of mineral deposits.  Under the mandate of this department were several brutally violent measures.  And I apologize in advance if this is triggering to anyone.  Labrador Affairs set about assimilating the Innu by, quote “breaking their uncivilized reliance on hunting”.  This included the enforced assimilation of children through the Newfoundland residential school system, established in the 1940s.  Which, by the way former students were excluded from the 2008 apology, and only recently allowed to proceed with a class action lawsuit against the Federal Government, since the schools were operational before the province’s confederation.  Beyond the brutal residential schools, which saw the systematic abuse of Innu, Inuit and Metis young people, Labrador Affairs also discouraged Innu from hunting, forced them to settle in built settlements, which the government only provided the materials to build.  Such brutality ensues to this day, as Innu settlements are continuously short of adequate resources and services.

Labrador, Upper Churchill Hydro, and Fighter Jets

Throughout this process Smallwood continued to privatize and develop Central Labrador.  While social services began to decay in Labrador as a result of the failure of corporations to deliver them, the province began to plan massive mega projects for Labrador.  This included the attempt at establishing Labrador Linerboard Ltd., which was planned to be a massive forestry operation that ultimately failed in the 1970s because plans to build a mill in Happy Valley-Goose Bay was too expensive.  It was moved to Stephenville, which later was the result of fraud within government.  In 1965 the Grand River (which was originally named the Mistashipu by the Innu), was renamed the Churchill River, after Smallwood’s friend Sir Winston Churchill.  He also gave land and water rights to Brinco to start development on the Upper-Churchill Hydroelectric Dam.  Though construction began in 1966, Quebec continued to refuse Newfoundland to run lines through their province to the USA.  Quebec nationalism and the growing threat of revolution prevented the Federal Government from interfering.  Brinco then had to bargain with HydroQuebec to sell through their lines.  They struck a deal in 1969 where Brinco would sell power to Hydro Quebec to distribute for a fixed price until 2016, which was regarded as quite high at the time.  This deal proved to be terrible though, since it failed to account for rises in energy prices.  In 1971 construction on what was then considered the world’s largest engineering project was finished

involving a generation station dug 15 stories into bedrock, and an area flooded by a series of 88 dikes known as the Smallwood Reservoir, which is half the size of Lake Ontario and now the largest fresh body of water in the province.  This reservoir flooded thousands of kilometers of Innu land.  Many Innu and Metis lost traplines and hunting grounds.  Many sacred spaces and burial grounds were flooded.  There was no consultation and there has since been no compensation.

Around this time the Goose Bay Air Force Base shifted functions.  In 1976 the USAF withdrew from the base, and it fell entirely under the control of the RCAF.  Changing technology during the Cold War made it impossible for the NATO forces to potentially use high altitude bombing against the Soviet Union, so low-level tactical fight was needed.  Goose Bay was a prime location for such training.  In the 1980s NATO aircraft began conducting tactical low-level flight all over Labrador.  Subsonic flight that close to the ground however was having a clear impact on wildlife and consequently the Innu.  Such training threatened to severely restrict the breeding habits of many animal species.  Throughout the 1980s Innu periodically engaged in peaceful protests and occupations of the base’s runways preventing flight.  In 1989 a group of Innu women – including noted elder Elizabeth Penashue – were arrested for 19 days held in a provincial jail.  They were released when the provincial court ruled that they “sincerely thought they were on their own land, therefore not trespassing”.  This set off a string of occupations

that saw 250 arrests take place.  In 1996 the Innu withdrew from an environmental review process since it was biased towards the Federal Government and refused to accept their traditional knowledge as evidence.  Around that time the Innu also started resisting the development of the Voisey’s Bay Nickel Mine on the North Coast of Labrador.  They also began to resist the deplorable living and social conditions that saw a high incidence of suicide among youth in the community of Davis Inlet.  Reviewing the conditions of Innu settlements, Survival International concluded that the historic act of resettlement was illegal under international law, and was in fact very similar to the process of exile experienced by Tibetans under the occupation of China.  The Innu won the one case in the struggle for acceptable living conditions when in 2002 the community of Davis Inlet was resettled to the site of Natuashish on the Labrador mainland with an added compensation of $200 million.

Labrador Today: Manufacturing Consent

Currently, the greatest struggle of the Innu is regarding the development of the Lower Churchill Hydroelectric Development Project.  This development is looking like it will be composed of two phases.  Phase I will be at Muskrat Falls, just kilometers outside of the town of Happy Valley Goose Bay.  It will involve a series of a north and south dam wall.  The north wall will be 32m high and 432m long.  The south wall will be 29m high and 325m long.  These dams will produce a reservoir 59km long, flooding an area 101km2.  This phase has yet to formally commence, but once the politics of the deal regarding energy prices subsides we could expect construction to begin very shortly, which is supposed to take six years.  The second phase will be an even larger dam upstream at Gull Island will have a 99m tall dam wall, create a 1,315m reservoir and flood an area 213km2.  The project poses a number of threats to local inhabitants and ecosystems of Central Labrador, such as the bioaccumulation of methyl-mercury in country food consumed by the Innu, it will also destroy the fragile riparian zone bordering the

river that helps control flooding and erosion.  It will also drop the water table downstream threatening much of Labrador’s fragile wetlands.  And I think, with rising sea levels from climate change, lower freshwater output of the Churchill River will salinize the water table of the Upper Lake Melville region.

But there are serious political concerns that I have with the process through which this project has come about.  The first matter regarding indigenous sovereignty is the development of the Tshash Petapen (AKA New Dawn Agreement), which acts as the terms and conditions of the new Innu Land Claim, and the role that hydro development acted as a bargaining chip in its development.  There are a lot of concerns that I have regarding corporate cronyism, abuse of due process and the bias of environmental impact

assessments, but I would need a whole other presentation to talk about that.

The Tshash Petapen and the Innu Land Claims Agreement, began in the 1990s as a result of Innu resistance to low flight training – which continues to this day with the shift to UAV testing and forward operating practice targets.  The Innu from this struggle learned that self-government and legally recognized soverignty is necessary in order to stop governments and multinational corporations running roughshod over the landscape, offering no benefits to their community.  Funny enough, this process began with former Innu Nation Grand Chief Peter Penashue, who happens to be now the Federal MP for Labrador as Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs in the Conservative Cabinet.   As talks about the Lower Churchill began to materialize in 2006, then Grand Chief Mark Nui made it clear that no such development can be allowed to happen before the settlement of Land Claims Deal.  This resulted in the creation of a proposal for the Tshash Petapen

in 2008, which was drafted between the Innu leadership, INAC, and the government of NL.  Community members in Sheshashui and Natuashish cried foul on this process citing very little consultation, and benefit going overwhelmingly to Innu business owners, which composes a good portion of the Innu leadership.  Little progress was made in the next two years, but the community continued to mobilize against the project.  A particular leader in this movement was Elizabeth Penashue – again, a well-respected elder throughout Labrador and the mother of Peter Penashue.  It was not until last March that all aspects of the Tshash Petapen was settled between all the parties.  The deal includes financial redress for damages resulting from flooding and displacement from the Upper Churchill project, a small amount for what some human rights groups consider an act of ethnic cleansing.  It also included the concession of 5,000 km2 as Innu Lands, 9,000 km2 as the Innu Settlement Area.  It also includes a zone where development can occur for the new hydro project, for which the Innu needs to be consulted.  Benefits from the hydro development are also included, which involves contract deals and royalties.  This agreement was brought to the two Innu communities in Labrador for referendum in June, where it received overwhelming support.  The trilateral agreement between the Innu, province and federal government was then signed in November, which legally put to rest Innu resistance to the project.

The problem with this process is that of choice to participate.  As you have heard through the history of colonization in Labrador, a lot of it centers around making claims in land not formally recognized by any European legal system, and then performing legal gymnastics to

turn such claims into property.  This issue goes beyond the local case of hydro development and speaks to the situation of capitalist enclosure of the global commons for private profit.  Furthermore, it involves the collusion of state and corporate interests working together to undermine traditional and lived land use by Indigenous peoples.  In the case of the Labrador Innu, the NL and Federal government would not recognize the sovereignty of the Innu nation until it was willing to negotiate their terms of permitting development on their land.  Though the Tshash Petapen is regarded as a great success among many Innu, we must recognize that it has only been resolved as quickly as it has because hydro development was worked into the terms of the agreement.  In fact the land claim was only necessary in order to prevent state and capital from destroying the Labrador environment and Innu lifestyles.  This process to me shows a complete disregard to the spirit of Free, Prior and Informed Consent; and even since its establishment, the Tshash Petapen is really only a hollow version of it.  As is the case in many land claims agreements, it did not stop development, in fact it did not stop the prospect of increase military occupation.  In my opinion this process is a way to silence dissent, and incorporate community leaders into the global hegemony supporting regimes of states, colonialism and capitalism.

Sources used in this presentation:

Belvin C. 2006. The forgotten Labrador: Kegashka to Blanc-Sablon. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.

Cadigan S.T. 2009. Newfoundland and Labrador: a history. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Goudie E. 1973. Woman of Labrador. Nimbus Publishing.

Harvey, D. 2010. The Enigma of Capital: and the crises of capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Labradorian, The. 2007 – 2012. News archives found at thelabradorian.ca

Long G. 1999. Suspended state: Newfoundland before Canada. St. John’s: Breakwater Books.

Samson C. 1999. The dispossession of the Innu and the colonial magic of Canadian liberalism. Citizenship Studies 3(1), 5-25.