7 t’a nuhél nódher sí nuhenéné bazį́ chu t’ąt’ú nuheba horená duhų́, eyi beghą dene héł hoílni
The Dënesųłıné title of this chapter translates to “what happened to us regarding our land and how we are in difficulty today, about that we tell our story to people.” The title highlights the central intention of this chapter and of Remembering Our Relations: to tell the story of the intergenerational impacts of the Park on the Dënesųłıné people.
During much of the twentieth century, Wood Buffalo National Park was one of the only national parks in Canada that allowed some Indigenous Peoples to harvest within its boundaries. Yet, despite Parks officials’ contention that the Park and its policies existed for the good of Indigenous Peoples, exclusions from WBNP were especially damaging to Dënesųłıné residents and land users. Dënesųłıné oral histories emphasize that the impacts of Wood Buffalo National Park’s creation, expansion, and management throughout the twentieth century have been severe and long-lasting, complex, and multi-layered. Virtually all ACFN members who shared testimony for this project described in detail direct and cumulative impacts, both past and present. The impacts of the Park touch on many areas of Dene lives and well-being, with demonstrable long-term effects on the community’s connections to Dene homelands, sovereignty, community dynamics, family connections, identity, and overall health—physical, spiritual and mental. The oral testimony shared in this chapter describes these complex, multidimensional, and multigenerational impacts cut “of Park policy.”
A Holistic Understanding of the Impacts of Wood Buffalo National Park
Dene oral histories place the impacts of the Park within the wider context of colonization in Northern Alberta. The physical displacements and separations of Dënesųłıné families due to Park policy occurred within a wider historical context of drastic changes that Dene people in Northern Alberta were already facing, including the Residential School System, devastating epidemics, the influx of settlers and extreme extractive activity, the destruction of the Peace-Athabasca Delta and the many habitats it sustains (especially of fur-bearing animals) after the construction of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam in 1967, and the increasing power of the Canadian state over northern Alberta. Because ACFN members do not separate the impacts of the Park from this wider context, describing instead how other colonial processes, institutions, and policies compounded issues created by the Park, the oral histories in this chapter include excerpts that may not appear to directly pertain to WBNP’s relationship with Dene people. These are indicated by subtitles like “On Residential Schools” or “On the Bennett Dam.” It is important to honour this testimony because, as Chief Allan Adam puts it, “It was all part of it. Everything played into it. Residential [school] was created there to take the people off the land and everything because the government knew that land was full of resources, rich in resources—that people were living good.” Chief Adam’s statement suggests that the wider context of colonial eliminationism in Dene territories was directly tied up with the specific impacts of the Park. According to the oral histories, the Park was a major player in a history in which “an originally healthy and relatively affluent society . . . has been colonized and disenfranchised and has been losing traditional lands” over the past 250 years.1
A series of influenza and smallpox epidemics from 1916–1928 devastated Dënesųłıné communities in the region. Tuberculosis also devastated the community at various times throughout the twentieth century. In some cases, entire families were lost. As one ACFN Elder explained when recalling the oral history he had learned, Elders and children were the most vulnerable to these diseases. The loss of Elders was profoundly harmful to the well-being and continuity of the community because it is the Elders who hold and pass on the language, knowledge, ways of life, and oral histories and traditions. Further, he explained, if diseases hit the residential school, many children died as well, but priests and nuns usually survived the epidemics. A strain of the Spanish flu in 1920 hit the Holy Angels residential school and also killed Chief Alexandre Laviolette at age 41 in 1921.2 Another flu epidemic arrived in 1922, taking the lives of children, Elders, and sometimes entire families. Roughly ten percent of the population was killed by this epidemic. It is probable that Dene leaders Julien Ratfat and Sept Hezell, both of whom were active at the negotiation of Treaty 8, died from influenza.3 Another tragic flu epidemic hit Dënesųłıné families outside the Park again in 1928, leading to such population declines that Indian Affairs agents feared it would be impossible for many families to provide for themselves in advance of winter.4 Several Elders spoke of epidemics and mass graves when discussing the oral histories of the Park. Numerous gravesites including one in Fort Chipewyan and others near the Birch River settlements and elsewhere in the Park are physical markers of these devastating losses. As ACFN’s oral histories suggest, throughout the history of the Park, the Dënesųłıné population shrank, and leadership, families, and communities were devastated by disease. The severe impacts of Park policies throughout the twentieth century only amplified the tragic situation.
Elders also spoke of the genocide caused by the Residential Schools System. Many Dene families in Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan have their own traumatic histories with residential schools, with many children forcibly taken from their homes and sent to Holy Angels Residential School in Fort Chipewyan. In 2021 and 2022, ACFN undertook ground-penetrating radar research to confirm the presence of numerous unmarked graves to which Elders and survivors have been pointing for decades. A number of Elders interviewed for this research are residential school survivors. Several shared their personal stories, while others described the experience in more general terms. Elder Ernie “Joe” Ratfat explained:
They never asked anybody about the residential school [Holy Angels] too. They just decided to put it there. Yeah. That messed up so many families . . . And also they lost languages and our cultural ways. You know, they had a really big impact on us. I was in the residential school. We had no choice. And if we didn’t go there, then our parents would be thrown in jail.
The testimony about residential schools encapsulates the devastation they wrought on families and the community at large. The loss of children and the Dënesųłıné language, the restrictions on cultural practices, the violence and abuse teachers and administrators committed against children, the deaths that often went unreported, and separations from family and land created harmful, intergenerational impacts.5 These were only enhanced by the Park restrictions after 1922. Displacements and treaty violations related to the Park went hand-in-hand with the trauma of residential school and epidemics.
In addition, significant economic and environmental transformations occurred in Northern Alberta from the 1920s to the 1960s; these had serious impacts on Dënesųłıné lives and livelihoods and were acutely challenging for those who were evicted from the Park. Victor Mercredi’s diary described some of the impacts of these dramatic shifts in the 1960s:
Many years have pulled by. Time passed. Old Fort Chipewyan was affected by the tide that swept past it. The fur trade has diminished. The wavies [snow geese] are leaving the place, the fishing is not as good as years ago. The old place of the H.B.Co. [Hudson’s Bay Company] near the rock is abandoned. All the buildings are now worn and a store more modern was built in a situation more convenient to the people. Fort Chipewyan was the northern Indian life play[ed] out. Nowadays Crees and Chipewyans keep more around the Fort and they give up the ways of their fathers.6
Dene participation in the fur trade declined significantly after the Park expansion, in part due to declining fur populations, and in part due to increasingly restrictive conservation policies imposed from the 1930s onward and the establishment of the registered fur management area (RFMA or trapline) program across the Province in 1942 (discussed in Chapter 5). Dënesųłıné trappers also found themselves competing for trapping areas with an increasing number of trappers from the south, which peaked in the 1930s. Archival and oral sources alike suggest that, whereas Dënesųłıné trappers struggled to secure enough furs to feed themselves and their families, white trappers were often reported to be over-trapping to maximize profits. They used poison, destroyed Dene harvesters’ traps, ignored conservation practices, and depleted fur stocks; their aggressive approach put Dënesųłıné land users at a significant disadvantage. As provincial fur supervisor J.L Grew summarized in 1945 Indigenous harvesters outside of the Park were being “crowded out.” “It must be remembered,” he wrote, “that these people for the past thirty or forty years and particularly in the past fifteen or twenty years, have been losing their hold over extensive trapping areas by white settlement and the intrusion of white trappers and have felt that at any time they might be crowded off their traditional hunting grounds.”7
The influx of trapping competition also brought a wave of tensions and violence that particularly affected people who had become excluded from the Park after 1926. Newcomers aggressively protected the trapping areas they claimed within Dënesųłıné territories. For example, an extensive series of official memoranda and letters described the activities and behaviour of Grant Savage, a white harvester who moved into the Park to trap in 1926, as well as his interactions with local Indigenous harvesters. He frequently complained to the Park administration, claiming that Indigenous locals were encroaching on the trapping area he had claimed. Due to his aggressive behaviour, the administration eventually wearied of him, and Savage was banned from the Park in 1941. This forced him to move his enterprise outside the Park, where he continued harassing the Indigenous residents and harvesters who had been pushed out. Wardens and Park officials documented his behaviour. Although Savage may be an extreme example, the frustrations expressed by Dene letter-writers and leaders, and recalled in the oral histories, suggest that he was probably not the only white trapper violently oppressing Indigenous harvesters in the region during those decades.8
The “nail in the coffin” for the northern fur trade—indeed an environmental catastrophe with sustained impacts on life at the Peace-Athabasca Delta—was the construction of BC Hydro’s WAC Bennett Dam in 1967 on the Peace River. This dam destroyed the habitats of fur-bearing animals and many other species, resulting in irreparable damage to Dene trapping economies, relations to land, and the community’s health and well-being for generations afterward. Several Elders lamented the total loss of the ways of life they had grown up with. Alice Rigney’s poignant discussion of the profound, intergenerational impacts of the dam is quoted at length in this chapter. Some members also mentioned their current concerns about the new Site C dam, a $16 billion project under construction about eighty kilometres downstream of the Bennett Dam on the Peace River and slated for completion in 2025. Members fear the impacts of this dam will be as bad or worse than those of the Bennett Dam and perceive it as an infringement on their Treaty Rights and a threat to the well-being of future generations.
Amidst the decline of the fur trade in the mid-twentieth century, other intense extractive activities took centre-stage in the landscape of colonialism in Dënesųłıné homelands. What Westman, Gross and Joly call “extreme extraction” has had significant impacts on the many ways that the Dene people have always related to the land and water and all life they support. State-supported extractive activity—including the extraction of bitumen, oil, sand, gravel, and minerals such as uranium as well as through commercial fishing and harvesting timber and pulp—across Indigenous territories has placed increasing pressure on Indigenous lands, waterways, and communities. Some ACFN members and Elders see extreme extraction as colonialism in its most recent guise—further restricting where and when they can safely travel and harvest and resulting in harm to the health and quality of the animals and plants that people harvest. Leslie Laviolette concluded, “the land was healthy. Now the land is polluted today.” With waters warming and increased air pollution, the migratory patterns and movements of both migratory birds and river fish have shifted; fish have also become too toxic to eat.
One ACFN Elder indicated that few benefits from the extraction economy flow to Dene people: “You know, people they don’t use the land very much anymore . . . we’re poor, everything’s polluted, and there’s no water, nothing, they killed it, the government.” He continues, “But there’s still more, more, and more, you know, more industry, more companies, like that’s what happened, we get nothing—we should get something out of it. Government’s getting all the money.” As the Dënesųłıné have watched their livelihoods and lands harmed by intensive industrial activities, they have also had to manage the impacts of being evicted from their homes and harvesting places within the Park since 1922. Park evictions and permitting regulations, as well as a strict system of harvesting laws, have combined with the ecologically harmful activities described above to erode Dënesųłıné connections to and sovereignty over the land and water.
Impacts of the Park
Displacement
Displaced from their homes at the Birch River/House Lake and Peace Point settlements and from other areas throughout what became the Park, such as at Moose Island, Lake Dene and Lake Mamawi, along the Birch Mountains and all the rivers identified in Treaty 8 as Dene territory, Dënesųłıné people lost the freedom to practice their deeply rooted land-based ways of living. Not only were many forced to leave their homes in the Park as a direct result of its creation and expansion (and many were refused the ability to return). The permitting and harvesting laws also restricted access to their hereditary harvesting areas in the wider territory, including places where people harvested fish, mammals, birds, medicines, and other plants. Displacing Dene people from their homes and harvesting areas within the Park—fragmenting their wider homelands and territories—Park exclusions and the colonial land-management regime as a whole caused harm on many levels. ACFN Elders and Members’ testimony shed light, for example, on erosions of Dene sovereignty and self-determination; losses of physical homes and belongings; alienations from Dene ways of life; interruptions of the intergenerational transmission of language and knowledge; losses of some members’ senses of identity, pride of culture, and self-esteem; and separations of families and the fragmentation of widespread kinship networks. In turn, as the oral histories in this chapter show, Dene people have suffered at physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels.
One significant outcome of the displacement has been an erosion of Dene sovereignty and self-determination. The oral histories shared in Chapter 1 suggest that Dënesųłıné stewardship laws and legal orders have guided Dene ways of life and relations to the territory, as well as governed the active management of lands, waters, and wildlife for generations. After 1922, evictions from the Park, permitting and harvesting regulations, trapline arrangements, and the warden system worked together to limit and erode the community’s sovereignty over a substantive portion of their homelands. As Sandlos writes, “decisions that had previously been made locally about what species to hunt and the best time of year to take particular game animals were now at least partly circumscribed by a formal legislative and regulatory framework that emanated from Ottawa.”9 Park policies and boundaries that excluded and alienated Dene people, as Joly and other scholars of WBNP describe, were part of a system intended to eliminate their legal orders from the landscape.10 In these ways, Park policy was key to attempted erasures of Dene authority over land-based decision-making, sustainability practices, subsistence harvesting, seasonal mobility, and wildlife management.
Displacement also led to hardship. Archival and oral records demonstrate that some families removed from the Park experienced scarcity and hunger, sometimes to the point of starvation, especially from 1930s to the 1970s. In Footprints on the Land, Elders confirm that for those who were denied access, “the park eventually became a major contributor to hardship.”11 Hunger and economic strain became a reality that Dënesųłıné people in the Delta, especially those who had been evicted or otherwise refused access, faced throughout the twentieth century. Steep competition for dwindling furs, restrictive game laws, and a lack of alternative economic opportunities made for challenging times for Dene people outside the Park after 1926.
Park officials largely remained obstinate, and policies remained the same. When missionaries and Indian Agents petitioned on behalf of those facing starvation, officials often dismissed their concerns. As one official flippantly claimed, “with regard to an Indian starving, the word ‘starving’ with the Indians here, does not necessarily mean total hunger.”12 When, in 1937, some hunters requested permission to kill one bison in the case of very serious need, they were refused because the officials believed people would start to fake “a starving condition very quickly” if given the opportunity.13 Elders and members quoted in the oral histories in this chapter draw direct connections between the creation of the Park, and the evictions that followed it, and the severe hardship people faced. Their testimony clearly connects Park policies and exclusions with colonial elimination in the form of starvation; something that scholars of genocide and elimination in Canada argue was central to colonial politics of genocide.14
Furthermore, much of the oral history indicates that families and individuals who were forced to leave their homes within the Park, or who were refused access through the permitting system after 1926, lost their houses, cabins, and belongings. Some members said that their families’ cabins were burned down by Parks Canada after they were forced to leave the Park. Through threats and intimidation, Parks Canada officials kept Dënesųłıné residents from returning to their physical homes in the Park after evictions. This was a reality that many other Indigenous Peoples in Canada faced throughout the history of national parks in Canada. For example, Dene oral histories about being forcibly removed from the Birch River area and leaving behind belongings—and coming back to find their cabins burned down— are strikingly similar to what happened to members of the Keeseekoowin Ojibway Nation in Manitoba during the creation of the Riding Mountain National Park in their territories.15
In some cases, the oral histories make direct connections between being denied freedom to move and live in the lands taken up by the Park and the physical, mental, and spiritual health and challenges that ACFN sees in the community now. Loss of access to Dene homelands not only cut harvesters off from trapping, hunting, gathering, and fishing areas within the Park that were key to Dënesųłıné lives and subsistence but also led to alienation from sacred places, areas of cultural and spiritual importance, and access to medicines.16 Being able to gather medicines, carry out cultural practices, and access spiritual sites, as ACFN Elders explained, is fundamental to Dene relations to the land and water and is critical to health and well-being.17 As Keltie Paul noted, “you can’t put a price on that. So where do these people . . . who get thrown out [go]? Well, where would you go for that? It’s like . . . it’s not just a pharmacy, it’s a hospital. It’s a spa.” Some oral testimony in this chapter demonstrates the deep significance of being cut off from the cultural and spiritual resources of the land and water within the Park.
This is only compounded by the mental, spiritual, and emotional trauma resulting from strict Park policies of exclusion and accompanying warden surveillance and policing practices. Community testimony indicates that, even today, fear and stress about entering the Park or harvesting persist, as well as feelings of landlessness, disconnection, a loss of home, sadness, and deflation. Some Elders explained that even though Dene people have been allowed to go into the Park after the laws changed in 2005, a sense of caution and trepidation persists. One ACFN Elder stated that people are still afraid to enter the Park, and they are keenly aware of ongoing surveillance as Cree residents and Parks officials watch who enters and exits the Park.
Another significant impact that is described in the oral histories has to do with the intergenerational transmission of knowledge, language, and ways of life. Elders and members explained how Park-imposed displacements and boundaries have limited the abilities of Dene people to share knowledge and to learn and grow through travelling and using the land.18 As McCormack notes, “on-going land use is critical to the transmission of the historic stories, to understanding the relationship of these stories to specific places, and to maintaining the spiritual relationships between people and land. . . . The very government regulatory systems that alienated Chipewyans from much of their traditional territory have over time contributed to a diminished ability . . . to learn about new lands by personal experience, the most important source of this knowledge.”19 The intergenerational transmission of Dene knowledge includes the transmission of the Dënesųłıné language, which some Elders and members note was interrupted in the twentieth century as a direct result of displacements from the land. This only compounded the deliberate work of residential schools to eliminate Indigenous languages and ways of life. Park displacements and restrictions have led to alienation not just from the physical land and water, but from language, way of life and senses of identity since the continuity of these are intimately tied to relationship to homelands.
When combined with the membership transfer in 1944, the effect of the Park’s displacements and restrictions on people’s senses of identity is also a critical theme expressed in the oral histories. As ACFN writes, “The identity of a people is ultimately defined by their relationship to the land. . . . The core of their [the Dene people of Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation] identity and culture is still tied to their traditional use . . . and spiritual understanding of the land.”20 Relations to and knowledge of the land and water is both a key determinant of Dene health and well-being and a central part of Dene identities. Many members express the view that, being cut off from their kinship relations, homes, and territories within the Park, the community’s connection with the “core of their identity and culture” has been affected. This loss has led directly to profound, intergenerational harm. ACFN social worker Lori Stevens explained that she sees this impacts in her work every day. She noted that disconnection from the teachings due to Park policy and boundaries has “huge implications” for the mental health of ACFN members to this day: “you’re no longer who you are. You’re no longer allowed to be what you know. So it definitely shows the mental, spiritual, emotional impacts [of] uprooting somebody.” Elder Joe Ratfat’s story of the impacts of landlessness on his identity poignantly summarizes how alienation from homelands, Dene ways of life, and ways of knowing the world led directly to intergenerational trauma with serious implications on individuals’ and families’ health and well being. In his oral history, Joe described the profound impacts of displacement on his mental health, his sense of self-esteem, and his pride in his identity and culture. He discussed his battles with alcoholism and his time being houseless as a youth and explained this was all because of the harms caused by the creation and expansion of Wood Buffalo National Park. “They really wrecked a lot of families,” he concluded.
Separations of families and severance of kinship connections
Park regulations restricted and impeded Dënesųłıné connections to land and water, but also affected the family and kinship connections on which the health and resilience of the community depend. The permit system divided families between those who were allowed to stay in the Park and those without access. Even immediate relations between parents and children, siblings and spouses, were severed if one family member was denied a permit. The 1944 membership transfer extended and reinforced these separations. As such, Park policy led to “dramatic changes to community, kinship, and cultural relationships.”21 “Our families are all connected,” ACFN member Lori Stevens stated, “but kind of like split up now because of the Park, right?”
Members identify several layers of harm cascading from family separations, especially emphasizing disconnections from Dënesųłıné identity that some people have experienced. Park exclusions and the 1944 membership transfer explicitly contributed to colonial attempts at what Matthew Wildcat calls “social death”: the eliminationist processes that “undercut or destroy the collectivity of Indigenous Peoples” and the destruction of the “social vitality of a community that gives meaning to life.”22 He describes disruptions of social and kinship relations that have sustained Indigenous communities, like those of the Dene people of the Peace-Athabasca Delta for generations, as an enactment of eliminationism on the part of the colonial state.
Oral testimony shared in this chapter suggests that the forced identity changes and family separations resulted in deep emotional trauma. After the implementation of the 1926 permitting system and the membership transfer in 1944, some families whose lands were taken up by the Park were split in half, and many extended families experienced fragmentation. These separations happened in both a legal and physical way: on paper, Indian Agents and Parks officials kept track of family members with and without access to the Park, while wardens maintained the system whereby people were physically barred from entering the Park, even to visit family. Many ACFN members and Elders are working to reclaim their Dënesųłıné identity and address this profound impact of the membership transfer. Relatedly, some Dene families for generations after the membership transfer learned to speak Cree rather than Dënesųłıné as their first language; this created generational communication divides among community members who could speak both languages and those who could only speak one. This affected families’ capacity to transmit knowledge, language, and cultural practices, especially after the prohibition on Indigenous language use in residential schools. Few fluent Dënesųłıné speakers remain in 2021 and language revitalization efforts are being keenly pursued by some Elders.
Population losses
Finally, some members and Elders note that the permitting system essentially cut the community in half in the 1930s, separating those with and without access to the Park, and then the 1944 membership transfer enshrined this separation in the treaty payroll lists. As a result, ACFN lost roughly half its recorded population. As Elder Pat Marcel related in 2013, “so, what you see here is the government being guilty for forcible removal from the Park, but also reducing our membership, by forcing our members to join the Cree band. The numbers of the Cree band, right now to the present day, I would assume that almost half are of Dene descent and are Dene members.”23
Drastic population changes like this have social and political impacts. Some Elders concluded that the loss reduced ACFN’s political weight and bargaining power in negotiations with government and industry. In part, this is because the loss of membership meant a loss of potential leaders. Elder Charlie Mercredi wrote that if it were not for the membership transfer, “ACFN membership would be bigger and we would have stronger voices in all negotiations. . . . Due to the loss of our members to ACFN we are a much smaller band and for that we tend to have a weaker voice and get fewer benefits from the feds.”24 He continued: “Elder William Laviolette use to say if we didn’t lose that many people to MCFN he was sure that most of Birch River area would have been included in our reserve land.”25 Other members stressed that a loss of membership translates directly to reduced per-capita-based transfer payments from government for the Nation. Finally, some oral testimonies suggest that the divisions resulting from the Park boundaries and permitting systems exacerbated tensions between members of AFCN and MCFN. Some community members feel Mikisew Cree’s claims to the Park were privileged over ACFN’s. While members generally maintain respectful relationships, resentment remains.
In 2018, Stoney Nakoda Elders told historian Courtney Mason that exclusions from Banff National Park have had traumatic and long-term impacts, similar to those that Dene people experienced throughout the history of Wood Buffalo National Park. As one Elder said, “It cut off all the circulation that was providing us of life . . . when we lost access to the area this meant straying away from all of our roots and our physical and spiritual energy. ”26 Like in the context of other Parks, the impacts of Wood Buffalo National Park’s creation, expansion and management throughout the twentieth century on the Dënesųłıné are complex and multidimensional. The oral history and testimony shared below indicates that these impacts are direct and cumulative—compounded in a wider history of changes in Dënesųłıné territories after Treaty 8—and intergenerational, experienced by individuals, families and the community as a whole to this day. They touch on relations to land; Dene language, culture, and knowledge; Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty; community and family dynamics; and health and well-being. Given the diverse range of impacts discussed in the passages that follow, we have occasionally indicated specific topics using sub-headings, noting for example, when members are discussing the impacts of specific aspects of the Park’s history, residential schools, or the W.A.C. Bennett Dam. The permitting system restricting movement and harvesting in the Park after 1926, the suite of strict harvesting regulations and the powerful warden system, and the 1944 band membership transfer had direct, profound impacts on Dënesųłıné people on both sides of the Park boundary. As Alice Rigney said, the community’s strength, resistance, and resilience have ensured their survival throughout this history—but the impacts are still keenly felt across generations.