Naskapi Nation vows to protect its paradise in northern Quebec
CBC
David Swappie is one of the oldest members of the Naskapi Nation of Kawawachikamach, 1,150 kilometres north of Montreal, near Quebec's border with Labrador.
No one knows Swappie's exact age.
The elder, who was born and raised near Fort Chimo — the village now known by its Inuktitut name, Kuujjuaq, at the mouth of the Koksoak River on Ungava Bay — isn't really sure himself.
"I think he's at least 100 years old," said his grandson, who bears the same name.
Decades ago, Swappie Sr. and his family moved south, to Fort Mackenzie, known by locals as Waskaikinis. It's part of the Naskapi Nation's vast traditional territory, ten times the size of the island of Montreal, and the Naskapi want all of it designated as a protected area.
But the territory — which includes Cambrien and Nachicapau lakes, northwest of Kawawachikamach — is also in Hydro-Québec's sights. The provincial utility had plans to build a new hydroelectric dam in the area.
The 800 people of Kawawachikamach have deep historical ties to the territory, even though it has been uninhabited for generations. Between the 1830s and the 1950s, the Naskapi people were forced to relocate time and again, eventually to the Kawawachikamach reserve just a stone's throw from Schefferville, about 100 kilometres south of Fort Mackenzie.
Swappie Sr., however, is old enough to have been raised on that traditional land.
It's where he went hunting for the first time as a child. It's where he spent days dancing around a campfire and observing his own elders as they trapped and fished.
"I fell in love with that land because there's everything there," the elder said in Iyuw Iyimuun, a dialect of the Innu language spoken by the Naskapi people, as his grandson translated.
"Even today, I'd rather be over there than here [in Kawawachikamach], trying to get assimilated. I really miss it. I don't like following some white person who tells me what to do."
To further its efforts to turn the 5,740 square kilometres of land the Naskapi Nation considers its territory into a protected area, the community sought help from the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), a non-profit group that aims to help protect public land, freshwater and oceans.
A hydroelectric dam would ruin the landscape, said Alice De Swarte, the senior director of the Quebec branch of CPAWS.
"This would have the effect of swallowing up the whole site. It would be an insurmountable loss for the Naskapi," she said. De Swarte said the territory "is coveted because of its potential."