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NY Times, June 21 2017
Indigenous Canadians Challenge an Exclusive American Fishing Camp
By CRAIG S. SMITH
When a group of local Innu showed up recently at an exclusive, private
fishing camp on the Moisie River in northern Quebec, it had more than
fishing in mind.
In 27 motorboats, the Innu zoomed past the camp, a remote collection of
rustic buildings and expensive vacation homes, to a rocky island where
they disembarked and planted the green-and-white flag of their Innu band.
Then they read a declaration to the camp’s manager, Yvan Letourneau,
demanding that the Province of Quebec return their ancestral lands and
their rights to the river and give them control of the club.
The demand was just one of many claims being asserted by Canada’s myriad
indigenous groups who were pushed off their lands and onto reserves in
the 19th and 20th centuries by British, and then Canadian, policies and
laws.
The Innu want the entire river back, all 225 miles. Their effort is part
of a movement that is sweeping countries from Australia to Argentina as
aboriginals seek to assert what they see as long-ignored rights and
correct centuries-old wrongs. In Canada, they have wind in their sails
thanks to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s promise of reconciliation with
the country’s indigenous peoples.
The movement has been building in Canada since the 1950s. It got a boost
in 2014 with the Supreme Court of Canada’s landmark decision
establishing title for about 675 square miles of British Columbia
forest. Since then, dozens of land claims have been brought.
But the Innu claim is a bit unusual.
Wealthy Americans have long looked north for relaxation in the relative
wilds of Canada, particularly along the pristine waterways that run
south into the St. Lawrence River. And the land at issue was owned at
one point by Ivers Whitney Adams, a Boston twine magnate better known
for founding that city’s first professional baseball team, the Red
Stockings (now the Atlanta Braves).
In the late 1800s, Adams began buying land on both sides of the river
and in the end owned about a four-mile stretch, giving him ownership of
not only the land, but also the river bottom, the water that ran through
it and the fish in the water at any one time.
In 1875, Adams built a building on one of the banks, which still stands
and serves as a communal dining room. He also set up a fishing club,
which he incorporated in 1925.
Other than by deaths, there has been very little turnover in membership
in the club — Camp de Pêche de la Rivière Moisie, unofficially Camp
Adams — since then. The roster of 10 includes eminent names like
Jonathan Winthrop, a direct descendant of John Winthrop, founder of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Gordon Gund, head of the Gund Investment
Corporation and an owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team.
Donald C. Christ, 81, the club’s president, is a former senior partner
at the white-shoe law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. His father was a New
York Supreme Court judge.
The Innu’s traditional territory comprises most of northeastern Quebec
and parts of eastern Labrador. “We never gave up our rights, sold our
rights or lost a war,” Jean-Claude Therrien Pinette, the director of the
land and rights protection office of Uashat Mak Mani-utenam, the Innu
community at the mouth of the Moisie River, said in a phone interview.
Consequently, they claim that the Province of Quebec had no right to
sell or lease the land that ended up in Adams’s hands.
Mr. Christ contends that “the land was never owned, if you will, in a
modern sense by anybody.” He added that the club’s parcel had been
acquired from various people, some of whose ancestors received grants of
land from kings of France. Challenges to the ownership in the past were
finally settled by the privy council of Britain’s House of Lords, he said.
But Mr. Therrien Pinette argues that the Innu claim is not ancient
history, saying his grandfather fished and traveled on the river from
the mouth to his northern hunting grounds. “My mother was born in 1945,”
he said, “and she went to the land by canoe.”
In 1861, local Innu leaders wrote to the colonial government of the time
pleading to be allowed to fish in the river. “Can our words enter into
your hearts, you that govern?” they asked. “We can no more find our
living; our rivers taken from us and only used by strangers. Through
your will we can only now look on the waters of the rivers passing
without permission to catch a fish.”
Mr. Therrien Pinette said the Innu had petitioned Quebec’s Parliament
last year, saying that “you’re not going to make us fish in the worse
part of the river while rich Americans come to fish on the best part of
the river.”
He said the Innu had asked the province to buy back the land and restore
it to their people. “Then, we will welcome the rich Americans who would
like to enjoy the beautiful land of my ancestors,” he said.
The province has not responded to the group’s request nor to questions
for this article.
For now, Mr. Christ, who has been coming to fish for 37 years, isn’t
overly worried. “I don’t think it will bring about any changes,” he
said. “There are many places in Canada where people are trying to undo
history.”
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