Author Issues Plea for Lost People
Bathtubs but No Water
A Tribute to the Mushuau Innu
White man’s solutions failed: Innu still face violence, alcohol abuse, school truancy
We are a lost people.” Spoken in sorrow, those are the haunting words of a Mushuau Innu chief in northern Labrador a decade ago. They jump out at you in the midst of a shocking November 2000 CBC-TV News clip of six gas-sniffing teens screaming that they wanted to die, a horrifying image seen around the world. The horrible problems of addiction, poverty and isolation plaguing the Innu community living in Labrador near Davis Inlet are rooted in their sad story of dispossession. It can be traced back to Canada’s centennial, 1967, when the Innu gave up the remnants of their nomadic hunting culture to settle in half-built houses on the northeast coast of Labrador.
The deeply disturbing and oft-forgotten story of the Mushuau Innu is brought back to life in Gerry Steele’s new book Bathtubs but No Water. The catchy title comes from a memorable quip uttered by a native elder: “What good is a bathtub when there is no water? The government must be crazy to send us those bathtubs.”
Since encountering the plight of the Innu in 1993, former Health Canada official Steele has taken a passionate interest in the welfare of the beleaguered People of the Barrens. Listening to the Innu elders and helping to produce the visionary document, Gathering Voices: Finding Strength to Help Our Children, had a profound effect on his life.
Today, when many have written-off this desperate people, Steele returns with a heartfelt plea for governments to engage with aboriginal communities by forging partnerships respecting their traditions.
The book’s author is described as a “participant observer,” but after a few pages it becomes obvious that he is a passionate, resolute defender of Innu heritage and culture. He’s adopted the Innu as his people and is sharply critical of the aboriginal policies of white governments.
Bathtubs but No Water is a little book with a sobering message. The book cover, designed by John van der Woude, is also very distinctive with its weathered barn board, adorned with white stained Innu caribou and animal markings. The Mushuau Innu were, for centuries, a remote forgotten people. When Newfoundland and Labrador entered confederation in 1949, the northern territory was largely unorganized, without any legally constituted native reserves. With the caribou herds depleting, the Innu were persuaded in the med-1960s by provincial authorities and Roman Catholic priests to give up their interior hunting lands and to relocate to sedentary coastal villages at Davis Inlet and nearby Sheshashiu.
From the beginning, the Innu referred to Davis Inlet as Utshimassit, the “place of the boss.”
The sad plight of the Mushuau Innu, ” Steele notes, “illustrates, somewhat redundantly, that an intervention in the cultural, economic, spiritual and familial life of a people, no matter how elevated the purpose, is an extremely complicated business.”
Relocating the Innu to Davis Inlet proved to be “a bad decision” and the community descended into idleness, despondency and chronic substance abuse. When six unattended Innu children burned to death on Valentine’s Day back in 1992, the Innu were thrust into the national spotlight. While Governments vacillated, the Innu initiated their own internal inquiry which produced Gathering Voices, a visionary plan calling for a land claim settlement and the creation of a community-based family treatment centre.
If there is an unsung hero in Steele’s retelling of the Innu story, it is Chief Katie Rich. Her “quiet and easy demeanor,” according to Steele, “masked a fierce determination” best demonstrated in her successful fight to secure Innu control over their justice system and their lives.
Governments paid lip service to the Innu recovery plan and the situation went from bad to even worse, affecting the health of Innu children.
Responding to the “gas sniffing” crisis, Innu leaders took an extraordinary step and appealed to government to take away their children for treatment. Some 20 of 50 gas sniffers at Sheshatshiu were sent to a makeshift detox centre in Goose Bay, Labrador and 30 or so were moved from Davis Inlet to a detox centre 1,000 kilometres away in St. John’s.
In November 2002, the Labrador Innu peoples were finally recognized as banks and acquired status under the Indian Act. A second relocation from the shanty town of Davis Inlet to the new community of Natuashish, offered initial promise, but ultimately changed little.
Over a decade (1995 to 2005), the Canadian government spent $350 million - or $400,000 for every man, woman, and child - in a vain attempt to help the Labrador Innu. Alcohol and substance abuse, neglect, violence and school truancy continued to be rampant. In spite of all this Steele’s commitment to the Innu people is unwavering. The white man’s solutions simply haven’t worked when it comes to the Mushuau Innu First Nation. Conceit or the “attitude of presumed superiority” toward the Innu, according to Gerry Steele, lies at the root of the problem.
Steele refuses to turn a blind eye or to accept the idea that the situation is hopeless. Searching for a way forward, he harkens back to the spirit of the 1995 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples now gathering dust on reference shelves. Giving back hope to the Innu, he believes would offer, in the words of American environmentalist Paul Hawken, “a kindness to a spent world.”
Lets hope the powers that be in Ottawa and St. John’s finally take notice of his plea. –Paul W. Bennett, Chronicle Herald Sunday 29 May 2011.