How a canoe trip from northern Quebec to NYC helped stop the construction of a huge hydroelectric dam
In April 1990, a hybrid canoe-kayak called the Odeyak arrived in New York City.
It had travelled thousands of kilometres from the Great Whale River in northern Quebec — a journey that had taken 60 Cree and Inuit paddlers more than five weeks.
Matthew Mukash, later grand chief of the Cree Nation from 2005 to 2009, was in that canoe. The voyage had been a protest against the construction of the Great Whale hydroelectric dam, part of the James Bay Project, a series of hydroelectric power stations planned by the Quebec government.
"The James Bay Project involved damming off all major rivers flowing into James Bay and the Hudson Bay," Mukash said in the episode "Rebuilding" from Telling Our Story, a four-part documentary series with an Indigenous perspective on the past, present and future from the 11 First Peoples in Quebec. Construction on the project began in 1971 — without permission from the Inuit and Cree who lived in the area.
La Grande Rivière had been dammed during the first phase of the James Bay Project. "When they announced that Great Whale [River] was going to be dammed, that's when I decided I wanted to get into politics," said Mukash. "And I did."
New York planned to buy electricity from Quebec's public utility
When New York signed an agreement with Quebec to purchase power from the public utility Hydro-Québec, Indigenous activists got involved. "The idea was to launch a public relations campaign in the United States to kill the market for that electricity," explains Mukash in the video above.
"The elders told us, 'Tell the people that every time they turn on the switch, there's millions of species, fish, that get affected.'"
Video footage from 1990 shows Mukash speaking to students in a classroom. "Eighty percent of our people still live off the land," he said. "They live off hunting, fishing and trapping. And with this project, the habitat of the wildlife will be destroyed. When that happens, there goes our culture."
Eventually, New York pulled out of the agreement with Hydro-Québec. And as a result, Quebec shelved the Great Whale Project.
"[The elders] always told us, 'Remember, it won't stop.'" said Mukash. "'There will be other ways of development being promoted, then you have to remind people that destroying the land is not a good thing.'"
