Power politics

As Hydro-Québec prepares to dam the
Romaine River, the plan’s opponents
wonder if they ever had a chance to stop it

FREE-FLOWING, FOR NOW: The Romaine River

Commentary by
CHRIS SCOTT

In retrospect, I can only admire the equanimity in her voice when she spoke to me last week. At age 42, Rita Mestokosho, a band council member, mother of two and published poet, has become the public standard-bearer of those Innu in her North Shore community of Ekuanitshit, a two-day drive from Montreal, who oppose allowing Hydro-Québec to construct a series of four dams on the historic Romaine River. When I asked her about what motivated her to become an activist, Mestokosho credits her engagement to her roots in a collective experience.

“This sensitivity we have to the Earth,” she says, “is something given to us at birth. Because our ancestors communed, touched and were nourished by a philosophy that allowed them to progress. Why should we change [it]?”

It is easy to identify with her mistrust of a consumer-based economy, which she believes will take deeper hold in Ekuanitshit if the game and fish reserves upon which the community now depends are depleted. But Mestokosho was talking to me a few days before a critical vote her side would lose: On Friday, March 20, 78 per cent of voters in this town of 560 opted to accept a $56-million financial compensation package offered by Hydro-Québec. This despite an earlier poll that showed the community almost evenly divided, with 52 per cent of voters in fact opposing the hydroelectric project.

Flooded spine

According to Hydro-Québec, the Romaine project represents a good deal for the community because the land area that will be flooded remains comparatively small, at 279 square kilometres. But for many Innu, including some who vocally pushed the compensation package, the effects of the project will be substantial because the proposed reservoir area, which contains habitat vital to salmon and caribou, lies along what one band council member calls the “spinal column” of traditional Innu territory. For environmentalists, the Romaine is important because it is one of the last free-flowing large rivers left in the province. For the Innu of Ekuanitshit, which is built a few kilometres from the river’s banks, the Romaine is simply home.

When Hydro announced its plans to dam the Romaine, it first negotiated compensation packages with three Innu communities located far east of the river, and whose members frequented the Romaine territory only sporadically. By the time the leadership at Ekuanitshit signed an agreement in principle—to be endorsed by referendum—last October, it was the only one of the four communities consulted not to have approved a settlement. Being cast in the public eye as the holdout placed considerable pressure on Ekuanitshit to support the deal.

But just as significant in voters’ minds was the uncertainty if the community voted no. Mestokosho describes attending a community meeting and addressing a question to the lawyers who had been hired to represent Ekuanitshit: “And if it’s no? One of the negotiators answered, ‘The project will go ahead anyway.’ I found that very hard. The room went quiet.”

Ever since 1973, when the Quebec Superior Court overturned a lower court’s decision to halt construction on the James Bay project, a perception has grown that, when push comes to shove, the province is ready to disregard its own laws and judges to get a job done and this has arguably turned a generation of Quebec aboriginal leaders into timid negotiators. In repeated talks with Hydro-Québec, on the Rupert and now the Romaine Rivers, the terms of debate have been subtly oriented to focus on the size and delivery mechanisms of the compensation package rather than the desirability of the development in question. Following a settlement, media headlines tend to indicate that said community has “approved” a project, while in fact, the option of approving or denying a project was never on the table.

Scripted roles played out

It remains possible that, in the future, an aboriginal community may embark on a protest strategy of the type proposed by Mestokosho, and symbolically vote down a settlement offered by the province or its utility. In that event, the realities of power will at least be illustrated more clearly.

But in the meantime, it may be worth bearing in mind the words of another Ekuanitshit council member, Vincent Napish, community vice-chief who was part of the negotiating team and endorsed the compensation package in the March 20 referendum.

Speaking in front of an Environmental Impact Assessment hearing last December, Napish said, “To be honest with you commissioners, we have held and still hold the view that, just like yourselves, and the battery of analysts contributing to the study of this project, we are the actors in a giant play where everybody is playing their role, and both plot and its predictable ending have been scripted long ago.”

CHRIS SCOTT IS A SOLIDARITY ACTIVIST
WHO HAS WORKED WITH GROUPS,
INCLUDING ALLIANCE ROMAINE, THAT
ARE OPPOSED TO THE PLANNED
HYDROELECTRIC PROJECT ON THE
ROMAINE RIVER.