Questioning the Early Not- Yet- Past
For the issues that now confront the Native peoples of Labrador, history is not just what happened, nor how, nor even why. History in Labrador, as elsewhere, is primarily about pasts that are not past, pasts that still cause problems and, at the same time, are still used in trying to deal with present problems. There is nothing neat or simple about pasts that live openly, and at times confrontationally, in the present. This is often a special issue for Native peoples, who are often socially constructed in terms of what is, or is presumed to be, their history.
Using a perspective on histories that people don’t just “have” but live both within and against, we need to address three issues: (1) the production of dependency among formerly autonomous Native peoples; (2) the uses to which this dependency was put, by people who could pull the strings more or less effectively; and (3) the transformations that took place as Native peoples struggled within and against this dependency.
At the center of all these issues is use—the ways that the hbc used, or tried to use, the dependence of the people they sought to shape into the
In-dians of the fur trade, and similarly, the ways that the Moravian mis sionaries shaped almost all the Inuit in this region into the largely Christianized Es-kimo sealskin producers who were “gathered,” at least seasonally, into or around the Moravians’ northern coastal mission stations.
In all of this Native people were far from passive—they had their own strategies and their own goals. But both Native peoples, Innu and Inuit, had to deal with severe imposed constraints on their ability to develop and use effective strategies for their own purposes. The most pervasive limita-tion on Native aclimita-tion was continual dispossession and displacement. In its most basic features this worked the same way for both Native peoples in Labrador—those becoming Indians and those becoming Eskimos.
Considering how brutal the fur trade was, and the widespread belief that missionaries were mostly “good people,” or people trying to do good, it is sur-prisingly difficult to say whether missionary or fur trader shaped more past and present suffering, despite the moments of satisfaction and sustenance each also brought. The Moravian missionaries probably were less openly brutal than hbc traders, and they did many positive things, but in the long run the suffering they caused was not that much different, especially not in its present consequences.
In both cases unavoidable Native dependence on traders and missionaries enabled imposed transformations of Native societies and cultures. In both cases this Native dependence was made inescapable by displacement. These displacements began at early contact and continue to the present, shaping and reshaping lives, shaping and reshaping deaths, all in ways that stretch, while changing, from early contact with Europeans very far into now.1
To grasp this long history, still living and still murderous, we will need a very broad and thoughtful understanding of displacement. This begins simply, as forced physical movement from one place to another. From that basic start we will also consider such processes as losing the possibility of adequately subsisting oneself through one’s own activities. This was one consequence of physical displacement and use, but also a consequence of the invaders’ appropriation or destruction of key resources, leaving Native people without the means to adequately sustain themselves, even if they were not yet forced to move. The increasing difficulty of meeting their own needs, of sustaining themselves, led to increasingly dangerous or unproductive ex-tensions of procurement areas. As it became increasingly difficult to wrest a living from the land and the sea, it was possible to become increasingly
displaced without yet moving. The scars of this kind of displacement could follow wherever you go, follow you into the future and sometimes be waiting for you when you got there, because Native people often “got there” with fewer people than started out.
To more fully grasp what displacement means and has meant, as well as the ways that displacement can happen while people stay in what was once
“their place,” we will need to consider something much more general, which happens in a variety of ways. It is something pointed to by the North Ameri-can folk phrase “having the ground cut out from under you.” This, in a related folk idiom, “leaves you hanging” in all the senses of that term, including out in space, ungrounded, hanging from the noose. “Getting high” can be trying to take control of what is being done to you when the ground is cut out from under you. But you can only get so far away, so high above your own suffer-ing: what people do to rise above their abuse, their sorrow, or their tension often puts them back somewhere on, or in, the ground.
The major point here is to emphasize the fact that displacement, including being moved, or being unable to sustain a livable life, having the ground cut out from under you, is a complex matter, not easy to define or to understand.
To aid in that task, we must return to displacement’s brutal and brutalizing second- born twin: dependence.
Dependence of adults (children are always necessarily and productively dependent) has long been the most usual and the most useful consequence of displacement, for it makes Native people vulnerable to domination.2 Dom-ination sought to make Native peoples vulnerable first to the manipulations of traders and missionaries, then to the seasonal fishery from the Labrador coast, and more recently and even more pervasively to state and provincial governments. Yet dependence has never been total, and the partiality of the dependence and the vulnerability that came with it shaped a brutal history of what I will call inconclusive domination. This term names a core dynamic of Native history, for it points toward both their shackles and simultaneously their collective creative freedom.
What follows in this and subsequent chapters is not a general history of Innu and Inuit since early contact.3 It is, instead, a history of the not- yet- past: the formation of displacement, dependence, vulnerability, and use, all in ways that still ricochet murderously off the walls of the present, chasing the present into the future.
The opening set of questions on which so much Labrador history turns, the questions that deeply shape a new understanding of the contemporary problems in Native communities, are as follows: How did Native peoples who had lived for themselves in this region for so long so quickly become so dependent on the hbc and on the missionaries that hbc could starve them to death almost at will, for not doing or being unable to do just what hbc wanted? Similarly, why could Moravian missionaries bring almost all the Inuit in the region who survived the introduced diseases under their con-trol? What enabled pressuring the Innu and Inuit to abandon their former religion (a different issue from also accepting Christianity) and the Inuit to separate themselves from those who did not convert, to change their kinship- residence- marriage practices, and to ignore their former spiritual- medical leaders? How could both Innu and Inuit be forced to move from one locale to another, as hbc trading posts and mission stations were closed and reopened elsewhere? How did hbc and the Moravians get such power and control over Native people?
It is important to note that these questions have not been adequately ad-dressed in the historical or anthropological literature. While Indian depen-dency on hbc and Eskimo dependepen-dency on the mission stations have often been noted, the important question is, how was this rather intense depen-dency produced? This question about how it could be done turns out to help us all, including Native peoples, understand its consequences. The rapid collapse of Native autonomy is more than surprising; it is the foundational event that still very much shapes current issues.
Both the present forms of suffering and some of the major reasons why the programs designed to alleviate this suffering do not and cannot work are connected to the ways that dependency, formed in the early years of contact, continues to be produced and enforced, under new disguises, today. This continuity exists despite the fact that a succession of recent provincial (state) and national governments claim to have ended older systems of domination and abuse. They also claim to have a new “respect” and “concern” for Native peoples, and in recent decades these governments have increasingly provided what they regard as legal and legislative guarantees for Native rights. Yet the new and continuing forms of dependence and “concerned” control are, as we shall see, often more destructive than the openly brutal and disrespectful domination that came before.
Gaynor MacDonald (2008), an anthropologist who has worked with Aus-tralian Aborigines for decades, is one of several AusAus-tralian anthropologists
insightfully concerned with a similar set of problems among Aborigines.
In Australia as in Labrador, problems within aboriginal communities have intensified dramatically from the late 1960s to the present.4 The common elements in both cases are rooted in changing processes of state control, and these processes are far broader than Australia and Canada, impacting not just Native people but also other vulnerable peoples, such as undocumented workers, immigrants from disfavored places, women, and minorities.
In discussing the early formation of these specific instances of an enduring situation, we will start with the production of usefully dependent Indians and then shift to the more subtle, but in the long run just as destructive, dy-namics of the production of the also usefully dependent people long known as Eskimos. Keep in mind that the peoples the colonizers wound up naming Indians and Eskimos were not “found” here at contact, but rather were made by conquest, displacement, and especially use. The history of early colonial-ism is the history of Native people becoming Indians and Eskimos.
In this becoming they did not lose, or give up, all their autonomy and their own claims upon the changing social and physical landscape. Far from it. Crucially, their ability to make and partly enforce their own claims in the midst of their vulnerability was rooted in the fundamental structures of domi nation. This will be discussed in the beginning of chapter 3, in the context of a discussion of the system of trade used by both hbc and the missionaries, called “truck.” In the process of being made into Indians and Eskimos, one further important issue is how Native people were put in a position where they too had something significant to gain from becoming dependent, from becoming Indians and Eskimos.
Displacement and dependence are not abstract. They develop on spe-cific landscapes that are, to begin, physically shaped and then, inescapably, socially constructed. A few preliminary words about the physical landscapes will set the stage for the relationships that made and remade peoples’ lives on this land.
Landscapes of Struggle
Labrador, now a part of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Lab-rador, began its post- contact history as “The LabLab-rador,” which some say is a modern rendition of a multilanguage fisher’s phrase meaning the place of hard (dur in French, duramente in Portuguese) labor. The Labrador Atlan-tic Ocean coastline reaches from the Strait of Belle Isle, just north of the Gulf of the St. Lawrence River, where the river joins the Atlantic Ocean,
northward to a place called Killiniq Island. Cape Chidley, only a few miles north of Killiniq Island and politically part of Québec, is the northeastern-most point on the North American continental coastline, where it then turns westward, making the southern shore of the ocean passage that is now called Hudson Strait. Across this brutally rough strait, forty to eighty miles north, is the southern shore of Baffin Island. Going west from Cape Chidley, about 450 miles, one comes to the eastern shore of Hudson’s Bay, more than six hundred miles wide on average, and about six hundred miles from its northern opening to its southern shore, not counting the further extension of this bay southward, about another two hundred miles, into the much narrower James Bay.
The large mass of land between Hudson’s Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, more than five hundred miles wide in the north to over a thousand miles wide from the southern end of the bay to the Atlantic, is called the Ungava Peninsula, or more recently, the Labrador Peninsula. To minimize confusion, I will use Ungava for the name of the peninsula and Labrador for the political entity on the eastern part of the Ungava Peninsula. From Cape Chidley in the north to the southern end of the Strait of Belle Isle in the south, Labrador is about seven hundred miles long,5 if we ignore the complexities of the coast-line, which would greatly increase the distance.
It was only in 1927 that it was decided where on the Ungava Peninsula the political entity of Labrador would be. To make this decision, it was nec-essary to specify a boundary between Québec, a province of Canada, and Labrador, politically a part of the then independent British colony/country of Newfoundland.6 Newfoundland confederated with Canada in 1949, tak-ing Labrador, which it by then “owned,” with it. The province is now called Newfoundland and Labrador, although it is a far from equal relationship.
Labrador, in fundamental ways and especially for the Innu and Inuit, is a colony of both Newfoundland and Canada.
Labrador, as the political boundaries were defined by a British court in 1927, in a quarrel between Québec and Newfoundland over which of them
“owned” Labrador and where Labrador began and ended, is the eastern third of the Ungava Peninsula, from Killiniq Island in the north almost to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the south. On the Atlantic Ocean coast the southern boundary of Labrador ends at the southern end of the narrow channel be-tween Labrador and Newfoundland, just north of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. This channel, only eight miles wide at its northern end, is called the Strait of Belle Isle.
Map 1. Labrador, with major Inuit and Innu communities.
This channel was the center of an early fishery, including very intense sixteenth- century whaling, from the early 1500s, if not before, through the next two or three centuries. It was also the center of major confrontations first between European fishers and Native peoples, who were also using these marine resources, and then between the peoples becoming Indian and Es-kimo. Native peoples were both drawn into a confrontation with European whalers and fishers and then used against each other in ways that displaced and profoundly changed both.
The western boundary of Labrador, the map line between Labrador and Québec, is the height of land where the rivers divide, flowing eastward through Labrador into the Atlantic Ocean, or westward through Québec into Hudson’s Bay.7 The southern boundary of Labrador is a bit north of a different height of land where the rivers, instead of flowing east or west, turn southward through Québec into the St. Lawrence. The southern boundary was mostly drawn as a straight line, so it only approximately can be specified in terms of the features of the landscape.
The east- west height of land is an irregular line in the middle of the great plateau of the Labrador interior. The plateau receives about the most snow-fall of any place in the world, as the moisture- laden air from the Atlantic and from Hudson’s Bay crosses into the intense winter cold of the central Ungava Peninsula. When this massive snowpack melts in the summer, the river runs are extraordinary. Indeed, the whole landscape in the interior of Labrador is webbed with an uncountable number of rivers, streams, brooks, rivulets, and deep layers of living and dead moss, called muskeg, all punctuated by pockets of glacial boulders, major rock outcrops, and stretches of dry forest land. In the summer the frozen surface ground melts and much of the muskeg becomes water soaked.
The land becomes immensely difficult to traverse in the summer. The muskeg becomes spongy soft, and the vast clouds of mosquitos and biting flies, spawned in all this water, terrorize the people who must live there. It is also a hard land to live on in the winter, with intense cold and storms, tem-peratures that drop to −30 or −40 degrees Fahrenheit (which is −34 to −40 degrees Celsius), and ice on the lakes often seven to nine feet thick, difficult or impossible to cut through, from midwinter to spring thaw, to get access to fish. The rivers, especially the smaller ones, are often rock strewn, remnants of recent glaciation, with multiple rapids and difficult portages, making ca-noe travel more difficult than usual in Canada.
Southern Labrador is forest, mostly spruce and some birch, with alder in the wetter areas, giving way in the northern third of the interior to scrub, and then quickly into the caribou barrens of the north, with small pockets of trees in the more sheltered valleys, and the rest of the rocky, river- strewn land growing only moss and lichen. Strong winds keep much of the moss and lichen on the northern barrens free enough of snow cover to provide food for the caribou—the same animal as the reindeer of northern Norway, Finland, and Siberia, but in Labrador not domesticated.
The Labrador coastline is rocky, with cliffs and glacier- strewn boulders right down to the sea edge in most places, and with a multitude of islands, from tiny to large, along the length of the coast—fishing, sealing, and bird-ing stations, or so these islands were. The northern half or two- thirds of the Labrador coast (in some years more, recently much less) is blocked with pack ice—sea ice driven against the coastline by wind, current, and tide, forming a solid mass in midwinter, safe to walk across to access sea resources, easily supporting dogsleds and now snowmobiles. It is treacherously almost impos-sible to cross, on top or in a small boat, during the several months when it is forming in the fall and breaking up in the spring.
John McLean, a chief factor (agent- trader) for the hbc, was sent to Fort Chimo, near the northern tip of the Labrador Peninsula, in 1837 to open a fur trade there, and over the next years to find a river route to the central
John McLean, a chief factor (agent- trader) for the hbc, was sent to Fort Chimo, near the northern tip of the Labrador Peninsula, in 1837 to open a fur trade there, and over the next years to find a river route to the central