6 t’ąt’ú náídé nuhghą hílchú ląt’e kúlí ąłų́ dene k’ezí náídé

Combined with the increasingly strict system of harvesting laws enforced by the warden system, exclusions from Dënesųłıné territories taken up by the Park created serious problems for people living outside the Park. Many people faced periods of severe hardship, some even to the point of starvation. Meanwhile, those who could remain in the Park fared somewhat better because competition was limited. Dene people in the Delta, however, did not benefit from the protections afforded to Park residents and faced serious challenges. Hunger and hardship became realities for Dënesųłıné people in the Delta, especially those who had been evicted from the Park. After the expansion of the Park, many were forced to take government relief, whereas only a few decades earlier they had provided for themselves from the land. Chief Jonas Laviolette’s 1927 letters to Indian Affairs officials emphasized the challenges people were facing: “There are lots of men here looking after the buffalo, no one looking after us. . . . No one seems to care if we starve or not.” His letter continued, “sometimes the Police give us a little rations . . . but we cannot live on that all the time. Since the fur has left the country, you don’t know how poor we are, not only in food but clothing and blankets too.”¹ As Indian Affairs officials had feared from the start, Dene families were often forced to rely on government assistance because they were unable to freely harvest as they had always done.

Faced with these challenges, Dene people frequently and clearly resisted government officials, asserting their concerns through protest, petition, and requests for government support. They indicated that new state-imposed regulations and evictions from the Park not only interfered with their livelihood, leading to widespread hardship and hunger, but also were violations of their Treaty and hereditary rights. As Sandlos describes, through letter writing campaigns, political delegations, protests, and subversions of harvesting regulations, Dene residents and land users have always articulated “a set of cultural and political values rooted in the notion of customary use rights, hereditary land title, and . . . a treaty guarantee of the right to hunt and trap.”² Dene oral histories allude to the strength and resistance of Dene people who used many different means and forums to express their concerns about restrictions on harvesting and the resulting suffering they experienced, and to resist and challenge attempts at eliminating their sovereignty and ways of life. As this chapter’s Dënesųłıné title states, “the way we lived was taken from us; however we still live/stay there as Dene people.” 

Extensive letter-writing campaigns were a key form of Dene activism from the time the Park was created. Letters written by harvesters and leaders indicated that Indigenous residents opposed laws imposed from afar and without their consent or regard to their needs and rights. Letter writers repeatedly stated the concern that their Treaty Rights were being violated and that this was causing extreme difficulty. In 1926, several Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents contested the Park annex in a memorandum to Charles Cross: “So unnecessary is any such establishment in the area in question, and so harmful would it ultimately prove to be to those now resident in that area and vicinity that we pray that the above-described terrain shall under no circumstances be set apart as a Buffalo Park, or as an annex.” ³ They continued, “As you are doubtless aware, when the Treaty was first made . . . the members . . . were given the solemn assurance that they would be as free to hunt and fish after the signing of the Treaty, as if they had never entered upon it.” ⁴

After the annex, a 1927 letter from Chief Jonas Laviolette called on officials to respond to Dene demands for the establishment of the reserves promised in Treaty 8 to his Nation, which would protect the people from increasing trapping competition and the hunger that resulted from game laws.⁵ Numerous other letters throughout the period expressed people’s frustrations with the regulations, encroaching white trappers, their fears of starvation, and concerns for their families’ health and well-being.

Delegations made up of leaders and residents asserted Dene rights and concerns to government officials. Chief Jonas Laviolette travelled to Edmonton more than once to state his concerns directly to officials, sometimes taking a delegation of other leaders with him. A 1935 delegation of Cree and Dene chiefs stated their view to Austin L. Cumming, District Agent and Park Superintendent, that the revised permitting regulations were infringing on Treaty Rights.⁶ At Treaty Days, leaders repeated their concerns to Indian Agents on a yearly basis.⁷ Some refused treaty payments to protest the Park and game laws.⁸

Another common form of resistance was to ignore or break state-imposed game laws. Some Dene harvesters continued trapping and hunting in the Park as a political act, “an attempt to return to the time before an arbitrary and largely impersonal state bureaucracy” dispossessed them and restricted their movement and lifeways, as Sandlos explains.⁹ By harvesting as they had always done in areas currently restricted through colonial law and refusing to share information with Park wardens, he argues, Dene harvesters expressed “collective dissent against the arbitrary application of state power over traditional hunting rights in the region.”¹⁰ Historians connecting Parks with colonialism in Canada often draw this conclusion from their reading of archival sources; Wood Buffalo Park warden diaries and patrol reports from the 1920s to the 1940s contain evidence to support the assertion. In 1930, several Indigenous harvesters were tried and found guilty of hunting bison in the Park and were sentenced to three months of hard labour at the RCMP Barracks in Fort Chipewyan. The trial generated widespread interest among local Indigenous communities; according to warden Dempsey’s notes, roughly sixty Indigenous residents were in attendance. According to Finnie’s summary of the proceedings, the convicted men argued that they would not have hunted bison if the government wasn’t starving them, and further that “the Indians were not advised when treaty was made that buffalo from Wainwright Park would be imported.”¹¹ Finnie dismissed this defence as irrelevant, missing the point. The harvesters’ argument implied that they perceived the importation of plains bison and subsequent Park extension and accompanying regulations to be a violation of Treaty 8. By hunting bison, they were exposing this violation while also asserting what they knew to be their treaty rights.

Numerous other instances of harvesting in the Park and breaking regulations are evident from Park records; wardens tracked these instances meticulously. A 1935 report by Warden Dent to Supervising Warden M.J. Dempsey suggested that Dene residents in the Birch River area were hosting their kin from Fort McKay. Dent reported that Peter Ratfat and Vzckial Ratfat had visited Adam Boucher and his two sons at the Birch River settlement and that they were reported to be trapping without permits there. When Dent questioned Adam Boucher and his sons, they denied the reports. Dent wrote, “It is evident that someone is not telling truth. As you are aware, the Birch River Indians are related to some of the McKay Indians, so really it is difficult to get them to convict one another.”¹² Two years later, in 1937, warden Dempsey reported people trespassing in the Birch River area.¹³ These may have been assertions of Dënesųłıné harvesting rights in the area from which they had been removed or perhaps an attempt to return to the homes from which they had been evicted. One warden reflected in 1947 that in his interactions with local trappers, he learned that many were “extremely suspicious of new or proposed regulations” and that if those regulations were generally considered harmful, “individuals gain personal merit by breaking them and not being caught.”¹⁴

The oral histories shared in this chapter also explicitly document these sorts of acts of resistance. Elders and community members shared examples of Dene people entering the Park to harvest despite the regulations banning them from doing so. Some Dene harvesters might enter the Park with a Métis or MCFN trapper who held a permit. Others recalled that some harvesters would wait until dark to enter the Park and harvest a bison and then store the meat throughout the Park, such as in rat houses or in residents’ freezers, under a pile of moose meat, to avoid being caught. “They made sure it was all hidden,” said one Elder. Other times, harvesters found that wardens did not know the difference between moose meat and bison meat and would capitalize on that ignorance. Two Elders shared accounts from the 1980s to the early 2000s in which they entered the Park to hunt or fish with the aim of initiating legal action. They notified Parks officials of their plans to harvest in the Park, including details of when and where, with the intention of getting arrested to initiate a lawsuit. While wardens met them and ordered the men to return home, they did not arrest the harvesters. Nonetheless, this is an important example of Dënesųłıné assertions of their uninterrupted and treaty-protected rights throughout their territories.

Assertions of Dënesųłıné rights and concerns like these were ignored, dismissed, or punished by provincial and federal authorities. The 1935 Edmonton delegation of Chiefs was dismissed by officials who told them that “there were no drastic changes in the Wood Buffalo Park regulations.”¹⁵ Officials sometimes responded to Dene activism by increasing warden surveillance. In 1937, after Dempsey had reported trespassers in the Birch River area, one official wrote, “I am asking Park Warden Dempsey to have wardens patrol this area as much as possible this winter to try and prevent any trespassing by unwarranted persons.”¹⁶ When residents suggested revisions to the permitting and harvesting laws, they were often denied. For example, in 1937 leaders in the Northwest Territories requested permission for heads of families to kill a bison if their families were starving. They were refused on the basis that “the privilege would be abused” and that “the Government was preserving the buffalo for the Indians’ own good.”¹⁷ Chief Jonas Laviolette’s letters went unanswered. He described a generally dismissive attitude characterizing the federal administration’s responses: “I have been waiting long to hear from you that I think you have forgotten all about me and my people from Fort Chipewyan. Four years ago, I went to Edmonton on purpose to see you about my people and my country. Times were hard then but now they are worse. My people are very miserable because they cannot make a living anymore from the fur.”¹⁸ Thus, a central component of the history of the Park’s relation to ACFN, especially after 1926, was the dismissal of Dënesųłıné rights and concerns. Dene protests and petitions, as well as the intimate knowledge they had of the land and water, were mostly ignored, and the struggles resulting from physical displacements went unnoticed and uncompensated by the government.

Establishing Reserves: Delays and Denials

In addition to refusals and dismissals, government officials took decades to secure the reserves promised in Treaty 8. Families who were evicted from the Park needed protected space where could safely reside, harvest, and practice their rights. Although the park administration itself was not directly responsible for the long delays, park restrictions and evictions were a central reason Dënesųłıné leaders fought to secure reserves in the first place. They saw reserves as a key space where the people could survive physical displacements, restrictive game laws, and erosions of their Treaty Rights. As McCormack notes, without the potential protection of a reserve, and facing the influx of outsiders and newly imposed restrictions on land use and mobility, people found themselves living “in a condition of total insecurity, at the mercy of the park administration, which they distrusted.”¹⁹ Chiefs Alexandre Laviolette and Jonas Laviolette had lobbied the government for reserves since the signing of Treaty 8 to mitigate these issues. But as the Treaty and Aboriginal Rights Research report concluded, “repeated Indian demands for protection from unregulated, irresponsible and sometimes illegal outside competitions—by the establishment of preserves—had been fruitless” for many decades.²⁰

Indian Affairs eventually acted on Dene leaders’ urgent and repeated requests for a reserve in 1931—thirty-two years after the Nation signed onto Treaty 8 and nearly a decade after the Park’s creation. However, the province of Alberta challenged the proposed allotment size, which was almost 34-square kilometres larger than the Nation’s Treaty entitlement required. The province was particularly reluctant to transfer control over prime muskrat trapping terrain in one section of the proposed reserve. It was not until 1937 that federal Order-in-Council 1399/27 granted certificates of title for the surface rights to 200 square kilometres of land for the Chipewyan Band (now ACFN) reserves in the Athabasca Delta. The province retained control over waterways, mines and minerals, and fishing in the Band’s IR 201A-G reserves. Surface rights were not officially transferred from the province to the federal government until 1954.²¹

The negotiation of the reserve allotments occurred largely without the input or consultation of Dënesųłıné leaders and land users. The original, larger allotments that leaders had previously negotiated were ultimately reduced and re-negotiated by the provincial and federal governments without consultation. As one Elder explained, “when the Dene were kicked out of the park, the government gave the Dene a piece of land over here. . . . We didn’t have a choice on where we wanted to be, you know. They put us over here by Jackfish Lake, Old Fort, and up the river a couple of other places. . . . So I was telling the chief we should pick some reserves or a piece of land or lands somewhere where we want to live, not where they want us to live. We want to decide rather than the[m] telling us where to live.” As the various levels of government argued over reserve boundaries, Dene people who had been removed from the Park continued to face hunger and economic hardship with little recourse or help.

The 1935 Order-in-Council to protect Dene Harvesting Rights: Another Broken Promise

In 2013, Elder Pat Marcel related the oral history of another effort by Dënesųłıné leaders to mitigate the harmful impacts of the Park and the conservation restrictions after 1926. He explained that, as the IR 201 reserves were being negotiated, Chiefs lobbied the government for the establishment of protected harvesting reserves outside the Park, in addition to the IR201 reserves. Indian Agent Card wrote to Indian Affairs in 1927:

On behalf of the Chipewyan Indians, under Chief Jonas Laviolette, Jackfish Lake, Ft. Chipewyan, I would call the attention of the Department to the wishes of the band . . . to have, independently of these special reserves, the survey, in the coming spring of the reserve, for the band, guaranteed by Treaty, June 21st, 1899. I might add that they are very urgent on this matter, as there is a prospect of rats [muskrats] coming back and they wish to protect the marsh grounds surrounding their homes.²²

By 1931, officials were still discussing the request: “For many years the Indians of the Chippewyan [sic] band at Fort McMurray have been pressing to have a game reserve set aside for them,” wrote one official.²³ As Elder Pat Marcel explained, Dene leaders and land users were determined because they knew that “most of the better lands [outside the Park] would be taken up” by non-Indigenous trappers competing for harvesting space, and by a growing industrial presence in the region.²⁴

Due to Dene activism, the 1935 Order-in-Council 298-35 set aside a large, protected conservation area in addition to the IR201 reserves. The Order-in-Council closed trapping to anyone but local residents in the following area:

Beginning at a point where the Inter-Provincial boundary between Alberta and Saskatchewan joins the south boundary of the North West Territories, thence southward along the Inter-Provincial boundary to the 27th Baseline, thence west along the said 27th Baseline to the Athabasca River; thence north along the eastern boundary of the Wood Buffalo Park to a point where it joins the southern boundary of the North West Territories, thence east along the southern boundary of the North West Territories to the point of intersection of the Inter-Provincial boundary.²⁵

The oral histories indicate that this area was exclusively intended for Indigenous residents, and Dene leaders saw it as an important space to protect Dënesųłıné people who had been expelled from the Park. As Elder Pat Marcel stated, “I am sure that Chief Jonas Laviolette convinced the government that if we didn’t have that agreement, then the white population would run rampant and kill everything off, and we would not have anything to survive. So this is what happened with the 27th Baseline and our land.”²⁶ However, the province abandoned this Order-in-Council, likely shortly after the Registered Fur Management Area (RFMA) system came into effect in 1942.

A series of letters among government officials from 1935 to 1942 suggests that the administration struggled to manage the complex and sometimes contradictory trapping arrangements within and outside the Park, including for this new preserve. The 1935 Order-in-Council added controversy to confusion by excluding non-resident harvesters from trapping or hunting in the large preserve. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous harvesters who resided south of the Delta region were not permitted to harvest within the preserve boundaries, which frustrated Dene harvesters who resided south of the area but had relatives in the Delta.²⁷ After 1942, the province no longer acknowledged the Order-in-Council that set aside preserve land; trapping throughout the area was subsequently managed through the RFMA as with the rest of the province.²⁸ In this way, another attempt by Dënesųłıné people to protect themselves and their rights after being expelled from the Park was thwarted by government authorities. Pat Marcel’s oral history of these events is quoted at length later in this chapter.

ACFN members continue to challenge colonial systems of land and resource management in Dene homelands. In Spring 2022, a WBNP warden ordered ACFN member Melissa Daniels to stop travelling to the Park’s salt flats to harvest salt for wellness products she creates through her small business Naidie Nezu. The roughly 200 square-kilometre salt plains are a distinguishing feature of the region and are among the elements of Outstanding Universal Value for which Wood Buffalo National Park was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983.²⁹ Indigenous Peoples in the region have harvested in the salt deposits for various purposes such as for food preservation since time immemorial. Parks Canada took issue with Daniels’ purpose for harvesting. Harvesting salt for personal use was not an issue, according to the communication, but “commercial harvesting” was not permitted. Indicating that she never had plans to mass-produce or widely distribute the Naidie Nezu products and that harvesting salt for any reason was a Dene right, Daniels took the exchange to the public. As she told a CBC reporter in April 2022: “The implication that my land-based, hand-harvested practice is a threat to the natural environment is insulting to me, our Nation, our ancestors and the land itself.”³⁰ Daniels argued that this was a blatant refusal of Dene people’s Indigenous and Treaty Rights and their land-based ways of life, stating that she would not stop harvesting. As she noted publicly, “colonialism is colonialism is colonialism” and that this situation demonstrated the need for “a radical reconfiguration of environmental dynamics.”³¹ By excluding Indigenous Peoples from their homes and homelands and restricting their movements and ways of life, while supporting extreme extraction outside of Park boundaries, Canadian authorities continue a legacy of environmental racism. Daniels explained that she had no plans to stop harvesting and that supporting the business and soaking in “forbidden bath salts” itself could be seen as an act of resistance, of “soaking in a century worth of reparations.”³²

In the oral testimony shared in this chapter, Elders discuss efforts to challenge encroachments on Dënesųłıné rights and homelands, and to respond to the harmful impacts of the Park’s and province’s policies.³³ Dene people have engaged in activism and resistance in organized forums and in their everyday lives. Whether by harvesting salt, passing down oral histories, exposing tailings leaks that industry and regulators have kept hidden from Indigenous Peoples and the public,³⁴ teaching Dene language classes, or writing this book—the Dënesųłıné have always resisted and challenged colonial attempts at elimination. They continue to express and maintain Dene knowledge, rights, ways of life, and relations to the land and water.