On the Tenth Anniversary of the Blockade at Grassy Narrows

CHARLES WAGAMESE | December 2nd 2012

An early winter nodin swishes the spruce, pine, bare aspen. Eternal, as a season turning, a planet spinning, natural as breathing.

Nearby, an infernal wind charges across treeless ground, rutted with feller buncher tracks, the oxygen supply there growing more and more scarce.

The blockade at Grassy Narrows began 10 years ago, December 2, 2002. What does it mean and what has it accomplished? Why it is even more necessary today than it was just this scant decade ago?

There are three trap lines on land occupied by Asubpeechoose Wagong Anishinabek. Without the multi-tiered strategy Grassy Narrows initiated, that aki/land area would also be in stark-naked ruin today.

Is it coincidence that the most physical, visible blockade activity is today mostly led by equahwak/women?

When we all say Mother Earth what are we really saying? That the eternal love and nurturing she provides is a feminine power…of infinite duration….

Those Anishinabeg equahwak recently erected a wigwamin shelter at Slant Lake from which they emerge to stop passing trucks. In this case, orange-clad deer and moose hunters in half tons. They politely and firmly ask for a fee/donation to help maintain the road.

They have hand-delivered eviction notices to logger’s camps. They protected community workers from harassment by armed Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) officers who helicoptered in to stop work on a back road.

Some nights they are at the blockade site, hosting travelling supporters, boiling pots of tea over an open fire, murmuring quietly in Ojibway and at other times vocalizing more urgently in caring for children and grandchildren.

Those equahwak continually hold ceremonies, ensuring that the spiritual connect to land and a good life thereon is kept alive in prayer and song.

One of their numbers found an MNR stop-work-order-or-else notice nailed to her own log cabin door. She used the 1873 treaty as counter argument, which finally got the charges dropped after months and months of Canadian legal system harassment.

They’ve conducted a contaminant study documenting the effects of pollution on animals and people. The study results were taken outside the country as Canada claims the worst effects have passed.

Grandmothers, trappers, drum-group singers, travelling the country, telling those who need to hear what keeps them on the blockade front lines….

Deer and rabbit trails crisscross the Camp Fire Lake trap line of Steve Fobister Sr. One of three trap lines scheduled to disappear in 2002 has instead, for these last ten years, felt the footfall of the indigenous and natural beings—not the impossible to traverse by foot clear cuts that totally surround it.

An Ontario Superior Court of Justice decision in August 2011 said the track, made by the Anishinabeg in pursuit of hunting and fishing culture, cannot be feller bunchered out of existence by Ontario alone. It needs the federal government to enable that.

Ontario has appealed the treaty rights-based ‘harvesting clause’ decision to another Canadian judge.

The trappers’ legal challenge was not against the constitutional authority of the province per se. The legal defense tactic was more along the lines of a burrowing-owl defence. While this produced quite dramatic ecosystem retention outcomes in the Pacific Northwest, it is by no means a recognition and respect of the treaty’s power relative to section 109.

On Clara and John Clint Kokokopenace’s trap line at Holder Lake, a cluster of chickadees land on nearby branches, greeting and cheering on the humans in whatever they are doing. Cutting plans are based on what a pine marten needs for trees. MNR technicians then leave a small circle of mitig for them to inhabit. We joke that this reserve system for critters is the very same as the ones created for us aborigines. We wonder where the chickadees fled when the nesting sites—and even twigs to alight on and sing from—suddenly got completely wiped out.

The negotiation process with a Ministry of Natural Resources continues. It seeks to restore an ecologically sustainable and culturally acceptable economic base for the reserve, while balancing the needs of industrial forestry.

While the goals of the ‘Ontario Process,‘ as it is locally, colloquially called, sound convincing, building trust when one party claims and acts as though all lands and resources belong to said provinces is the moose in the room that no one knows what to do with, let alone resolve.

The chief and council have routinely supported the blockade by calling for a moratorium, promoting process talks, sitting with the trappers’ council through their court action and, when necessary, meeting with forestry executives. The remainder of the treaty area chiefs celebrate culture-killing forestry license acquisitions with beaming provincial politicians.

‘Infernal’ according to Merriam Webster is: of or relating to the nether world of the dead, of or relating to hell, diabolical, damnable…..

The nether world of the dead is an indigenous logo on Anishinabeg logging company trucks. Some of these have just recently emerged, taking advantage of the leverage created by Grassy Narrows resistance and the governments need to show movement on the “Indigenous poverty they created file.” Others already, pre-blockade, existent accept larger SFL contracts as mere stakeholders now, content to clear-cut the land of their grandparents memories and their own cousins moose calling locations for their Anishinabeg living.

A divide-and-conquer wind will swirl the day those relatives show up with OPP escorts to dismantle the blockade. The provincial authorities who promulgate such outcomes are divided and conquered earthlings themselves, just doing what their fear of never enough deludes them to….

Climate change gases have continued to rise as the effects grow more evident. Daily, the carbon-sequestering piles of aspens at the Weyeheauser mill are still piling up, diminishing, then piling up again.

If the wind is really just the Earth breathing, the lungs of this planet lie even more exposed and exhausted. Our collective human exhalations are smokestack plumes, we are assured are satisfactory respiration for the next seven generations.

The third trap line at Twin Lake belongs to Ed Imbeault. There are tiny ecosystems you can still find there that are circles of a brilliant green, more than ankle deep moss. Small areas that cause your heart to sigh, those are so verdant, plush and peaceful. Ed, like others, struggle to keep such sights in his indigenous life while having to cope with an industrial world wind that has chewed a piece of his trap line to shreds already.

So called NGOs and ENGOs have reached across the invisible blockades created by their Canadian brethren—blockades of racism, broken trust and greed. They work as allies to dismantle those original blockades that produced these now more visible native ones.

Many have been arrested, hand-cuffed, charged and jailed over these last ten years. Others encouraged shareholders of corporations and retail outlets to show recognition and respect for land and life. Another has taken the struggle to the international arena, which is where it most probably needs to get to soon….

This pivotal pressure helped oust Abitibi Consolidated from Grassy lands. As Malcolm X says you have to talk the language being used. Today that language isshooniah/money. Addressing the cash flow can apparently open the ears of profit-at-all-cost entities.

Ten years ago, it wasthe youth of Grassy Narrows who initially felled the trees that led to the blockade being erected on that logging road. They also literally laid their bodies across it in front of logging trucks.

It is for them, their kids and their kids that this is happening.

Perhaps the reports of melting permafrost now contributing measurably to climate change is a spiritual signal to all human beings…

Perhaps Grassy Narrows, by refusing to accept as acceptable what is burning and melting the life out of Creation, the place of humans within it, will inspire holistic abandonment of exploitation economies.

What they call mino bimautiziwin…. A good life, eternal…

Those three little trap lines, not even enough to calculate a shareholder dividend from, stand in beauty, peace, wholeness…

All around a desert..a damnation?

The blockade at Grassy Narrows is even more necessary than the day it started.

The blockaders stand between an eternal nodin and an infernal one.

They do so at most risk, for the least practical benefit…

Doing what their Anishinabeg duty requires…

Today, there at the blockade and at those three trap lines …an early winter nodinswishes the spruce, pine, bare aspen. Eternal, as a season turning, a planet spinning, natural as breathing.

Nearby, as ceaseless as human fear, an infernal wind charges across treeless ground, rutted with feller buncher tracks, the oxygen supply there growing more and more scarce.