Oral History

Allan Adam (2 February 2021)

But there are quite a lot of people that were affected by it—in ways where we did lose our belongings and lose our stuff. We lost a community basically, two communities: House Lake and Birch River. And those were Dene-populated, the water people. History was removed. But the legacy still lies within myself and my brother, my family. Lies with the stories that are still there. And you probably can see for yourself that just thinking of the hardship of what my granny went through still touches me, even though I wasn’t there, one hundred years later. And when I tell this to my kids, my kids get very feisty and they want to fight. Because they see. And I tell them, “just leave it alone. I’ll take care of it.” Maybe that’s my job. Maybe that’s why I was given so much information. And that’s why I’m still the Chief today. I’m a human being like everybody else. I’ll keep on promoting that I’m a human being. I feel, I hurt, I cry, I laugh. You know, it’s all part of human growth. Some had it tougher than others. Some had it better than others. You know, and I’m just grateful that the good Lord always looks after us and keeps on guiding us where we’re supposed to go, and there will be closure on this one day. It might not be [in] my time but it’s very close. Could be even sooner. I don’t know. That’s what we’re working on. . . .

The impact that happened was that our people were displaced. Like I said, my granny had everything and then she struggled for a while, moved five times, five locations back until 1958. She struggled to maintain and everything, but the impacts were hard on everybody. The ones that were affected deeply. They had to move, to go places. In 1920-something, I forget what year, 1930-something, ACFN chief Jonas Laviolette wrote to Ottawa and said “I want to create reserve 201 out of Delta because our people are all over the place. We don’t have no fish and everything.” And it’s all highlighted. It’s all written in the archives. And he pleaded with the government. He said that “my people are starving because we’re being encroached [on].” We got kicked out of over here and people are still coming over here. And we have no land base.

I remember now because I read that story. I read the letter that Chief Jonas sent to Ottawa and that’s when they created the reserve. And it was officially mapped out I think in 1935. I’ve seen all the legal documents and everything and stuff like that. So it was hardship, and it was—people were just being pushed around. Ever since Wood Buffalo National Park kicked us out of the Park, out of our homeland, it just seemed like anybody else that just came along and seen our people just pushed us around.

And now you’re making me mad, now I get really pumped up here because I don’t like being pushed around, and I see this that’s happened and what they’ve done in the past and how they’ve done it. And I’m glad that Chief Jonas Laviolette, he did what he did. And he secured our homeland. He put us back right there. And you got to remember Alexandre Laviolette, his brother, who was the former chief who died in the pandemic in 1918. Our Chief, original Chief, was buried in Edmonton with four other bodies on top of him. You know, and how do we bring them home? This happened, like it just happened. We lost our Chief in 1918, we didn’t get another Chief. I forget when he [Jonas] became chief, in 1922 I think. . . . So we were without a chief for a while in that span of time when they’d taken the Park over from us. We had no representation, nothing whatsoever. A pandemic was going on. A lot of stuff were happening back in the day. No communication, nothing like we have here today.

So there was a lot of people that were impacted by it, because I still talk to all the Mikisew First Nation members who were supposed to be ACFN. They tell me that today, “you’re my Chief, you’re supposed to be my chief.” How much of Mikisew members suffered the burden that I suffer when our people got ripped apart? My heart just got torn. I still feel it today. You know, I look at them and I feel for them and I see the hardship that they go through. You know, the struggle of being Mikisew Cree First Nation when their heart belongs to Dene. How do they feel when they walk around every day? Knowing they belong to the Mikisew Cree First Nation, but their identity tells them who they are. Their DNA tells different story.

And look at all the wealth and all the benefits that are generated over the years. It was one of the richest prime lands of hunting, trapping, and fishing. You know, everybody that lived in the Park benefited from it. But ACFN we plummeted. We lived in poverty, our people struggled.

On residential schools

It was all part of it. Everything played into it. Residential 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. The thriving people, the Dene people, were very healthy at the time.

Horace Adam (19 March 2021)

ACFN Elder Horace Adam described the implications of Park boundaries on the seasonal movements of Dene people whose traditional harvesting practices depended on access to extensive and well-known routes along the rivers that were taken up by the Park. For many who could no longer access the Park, well-known travel routes had to change, and harvesters had to go elsewhere.

Oh yes, it was hard for them. Because, the Fort Chip people, it used to be [that] there was no Park [but then] the Park’s at their back door. And they can’t go out the way they usually go on the west side of the river. Both sides, the west side of the Athabasca River, Peace River, and the Slave River, all those were in the park. Our people used to go all the way up, a far way to our territories, they’d go to Fort Resolution . . . then they had to go to Saskatchewan, on the west side, to go hunting moose and that. It was pretty hard for us First Nations to go.

Alec Bruno

Our people, [ACFN] members, probably felt like they didn’t exist in reality. Not only did they lose their rights to their traditions and way of life, they were told to leave the area of Birch River. Trappers were the ones that had the bigger loss [if] they refuse[d] to change bands, so they had no choice but to move elsewhere. This was their home base; families were raised from one generation to another.

I mean, mom used to cry sometimes wanting to go back there. Nothing but the things she lost. She wanted to go back and see the gravesites too, her two boys [who were buried at Birch River] and she wasn’t allowed to do that. Till today I always think about it.

Jimmy Deranger (24 March 2021)

Jimmy Deranger described what he sees to be the biggest change resulting from the creation of the Park.

JD: The land use. Over the park boundary, which we had used for hundreds of years, we were no longer allowed to use that area of land. And because of that, there was some degree of scarcity on our side, regarding animals for food and the use of the resources for ourselves. When I say resource, I mean that the living resources—not the mineral resources—the living resources like the different animals and also the berries and the vegetables, the natural vegetables, and also more importantly, the medicines of the land.

PF: So, sounds like it caused pain that was felt at the time but still felt today.

JD: Yeah, there was pain at that time. And then the young generation never got to understand it. Because they were in a residential school, Holy Angels residential school, throughout the land, all the land knowledge was never given to them. Traditional land use knowledge of the resources, the living resources, were never given to them. Only in pieces. But not the full.

Dora Flett (19 March 2021)

On residential schools and being cut off from the land

I was raised up in residential school and taken from my home, my bush life, from 1946 to 1950 [from the ages of six to ten]. After that I lived in town, so I forgot my traditional ways of living off the land. I didn’t know nothing about bush life—I forgot. By my 20s is when I learned how. I had lots of fun because I made lots of mistakes. I learned how to make moose hide, and dry fish and dry meat. I was learning how to make moccasins and mitts. I had lots of fun doing them. Oh, the mistakes I made making moccasins!

My husband came back from hunting on the trapline, and I said, “here’s the moccasins I made for you.” I gave them to him, and he put them on. The moccasins were big on him, they were just round. He just laughed at that. Then, I made him mitts with the other hide, I told him to put them on the table. The thumb of those mitts didn’t go down, they just stayed sticking up.

I didn’t know nothing. Then I made him a fur hat. It was supposed to cover the ears. He put it on, and it only covered his head, the ears were just sticking out. I’ll freeze my ears, he said, you go to fix it, he old me. Because I didn’t know nothing, I had to learn. I had lots of fun doing things though, making mistakes and then I learned after.

Garry Flett

Garry talks about a Group Trapping Area within the Park that belonged to his grandfather, Isidore Simpson, who was once a Chipewyan Band Member but was transferred to the Cree Band along with many other Simpsons in 1944 (as described in Chapter 4). Because of the rules that later excluded his mother from re-entering the Park, Garry and his siblings have never shared access to his maternal family’s harvesting areas, while his cousins maintain their rights there.

The main piece that really affected me on how all this came to light was . . . all of my relatives that were in the Cree Band and the Mikisew Band were able to hunt and trap on that line, but culturally and historically that line had belonged to my grandfather. But when I went to Parks Canada to get a hunting license for [the Park], what they call the Parks hunting license, I was denied because I had no affiliation with Parks Canada. And they said, “no, maybe try becoming a member of the Métis and you could try again. But ACFN, no, you’re not [allowed].” So I was bewildered by it. I knew little of the history and approached my mother, and she was livid about it. But there wasn’t much we could do.

So, I spent my years—if you were going to hunt in the park, I couldn’t go with you. Even if they were my first cousins. They can all go but I couldn’t. And members of my family could. So yeah, that’s the piece that when I said that it affected me personally, that’s what it is. So, I had to stay away from there, from the Park side.

But, you know, it affects everybody uniquely I suppose. . . . I would love an apology from them to say, “I’m sorry that we denied you access to exercise your rights in the Park.” My mother went to her grave being denied access to the Park and without an apology. Without doing anything wrong. She, I’m not saying that was front and center of her thinking, but I know it was. She hated the park because of it. I think it was just the alienation of the parks to members of the ACFN and where she grew up—she was unentitled to be, to have any further affiliation with that area. For that, I think that the Park missed the boat in apologizing to my mother.

I just know that she was wronged, and she went to her grave being wronged. So, not just her, if you look at others that were raised in similar situations. It’s just wrong.

John Flett (18 March 2021)

Back in the day, this was twenty years ago, us ACFN, we couldn’t even go to the park and hunt and anything like that. We were restricted back in the days . . . there’s one place where like, you were born [but now] you can’t go [to] the river and exercise your rights there. They’re just taking [it] away from you—it’s our land. I’ve been rerouted. And yet, that land up there belonged to ACFN. Yeah, and that’s good, good land up there, it’s high ground. That’s why we should be up there.

The Park formation wasn’t good. Way back in those days, the members, they wanted to go back there, and they wanted to live in the Park back then. It was our Elders and that’s how they talk about it when they would sit around having coffee. They'd talk about the bush, and a lot of them, that’s where they wanted to be, in the Park, back then.

Leonard Flett

I lost knowing the country that my mom was born in, Birch River and that area. I would like to go back there and look at it. Maybe camp out there. . . .

That’s why you call it Indian discrimination. It’s just unacceptable. They had no rights to do that, you know? Absolutely none. It’s just, what they did to my mom, it’s unacceptable.

Scott Flett (17 March 2021)

I heard some stories about—they had to come back into town here and go to Indian Affairs and try to get some food and stuff [after being denied access to the Park]. Some flour, I guess, and maybe, I don’t know if they had meat or something to give away or some rations I guess, from the stores and stuff. That’s the only thing I heard about.

[It’s] like the same feeling when they get kicked out of your home or something. And you’ve been there for so long and then, that’s your home, and then you have to go live someplace else. I guess, back in the day, it’s lucky that our reserve, 201, had plentiful of rats back in the day, eh? So that, when they made that reserve there, people were forced over there, they had, especially at Jackfish, they had fishing right there. And then they had their muskrats and you’re right in the Delta. . . . But they weren’t allowed after, back in the Park. Even I remember back in the day, people from ACFN couldn’t even go in the Park to hunt. I mean to hunt birds or anything in the spring. Or even moose hunt. And like I said, the next thing is some person comes in here and marries, or even stays with a Native girl here that belongs in the Park, they could go into [the] Park and then these other people that were born and raised in Fort Chip couldn’t go. How do you—how does that make you feel? Makes you feel not so good.

How you could word that is, you know, it was always yours and then somebody else comes out and takes it away from you, but still it’s yours and you’re a part of it. Like it [the Park] was part of the culture and part of the traditional harvesting areas that you could use.

On epidemics

My grandfather was born in 1899 and he . . . got enlisted to join the army . . . him and that other guy, John Gladue, I think his name is, enlisted in the army, the barracks or something in Edmonton. And they were like going for training and stuff then the next thing the war was over, eh? In 1918. So they came back through Fort McMurray by train or something and sit around McMurray. I think they got the flu there. I think they were kind of sick or something and they were wrapped up with something, with this Hudson Bay blankets and stuff and they finally made it back to Chip. But that’s when the flu, well like it came after, that’s why they call it the Spanish Flu . . . because it came mostly from the war veterans, eh? Brought it in from, well they came back from fighting in Europe.

But he came here and then, he used to bury like at least, the cemetery just behind the northern ridge over there. They have, you know, sometimes there’s six or eight people buried in one grave because he couldn’t dig fast, dig it right fast enough when the ground is frozen, eh. No backhoe back then, eh. They had to dig a hole . . . burn the wood and thaw it out and dig it down and burn again. Like it takes, a long process to make a grave, eh? Yeah. There’s so many dead there and then like six people in one grave so when the spring came along, summer came along, you smell the stench of the decaying people, eh? But they said that in Birch River, like somebody went over the Birch River and they, I guess this cleaned out the whole community that was there.

Fred “Jumbo” Fraser (12 March 2021)

When the Park kicked them out, they [the Dene people who were kicked out] just said “to hell with you” and they went. You know, never even bothered trying to come back in because I just don’t know of anybody that tried.

Leslie Laviolette (22 March 2021)

It’s all bush and different country that you see and you know, you can start on the east side of the lake [Athabasca] and end up at the west side in the Park. Like we used to travel. And all that was taken away. Once the Park came up, that was shut down for us. And then we moved to Richardson area, Jackfish Lake area, Old Fort area. And then we had Point Brulé and Poplar Point. We had those areas that we could go and harvest whenever we wanted. As long as you were on the reserve back then. If you are off the reserve, you had to watch because if it wasn’t Fish and Wildlife, it was Parks down on your back. . . .

And even to get into the Park back in the day, you couldn’t. You had to go through the paperwork and everything. And it was a certain group that didn’t want us in there. They kept avoiding our application. There was a lot of rules and regulations that we had to learn and how to get around all this stuff to get our food. We shouldn’t have had to hide or sneak around corners to get our food.

Now we’re just in the corner now. And the government made more profit off our land than we did. We’re still struggling today, and the Park doesn’t want to acknowledge that, that they did wrong to us because compensation-wise they would have to pay lots . . . whenever they admit it, that they did wrong to us.

On residential schools

They said that if we didn’t come out of Jackfish or out of the bush, the cops are gonna come there and get all of us kids and put us in jail. So the parents right away, “well okay, go on to the mission.” And when you got in the mission, man, you got a bunch of abuse there. From the father that’s supposed to be working for God and the nuns giving you a lickins and abusing you. That’s all we had to learn, cause we didn’t talk then.

I went home and told my parents what was happening in school. [They responded] “oh those are God’s people, don’t talk like that, it’s not nice.” And I said, “why, why are they allowed to do this then?” That’s why I keep saying like . . . I’ve seen some nuns there and the priest and I thought man you know, if I had a big stick right now, boy I’ll give you guys a good lickin, just to give you that licking that you gave me. You know, show them how it feels. But then right away, a little light went off and “no, don’t do that. Forgive and forget.” But I still have to hold the pain.

I went, and my grandpa is the one that got me out. I just went through the door. I just made it through the door and two of my buddies were ahead of me and they had long hair too like me and all of a sudden they come out around the curtain and they’re bald. Then it was my turn and all of a sudden, somebody tapped me and I turned back and my grandpa right there, he said they could take me home, they could look after me he said, so let’s go. “You don’t belong here,” he said. But I ended up in day school for ten years. And went through all the abuse. Or had the priests and the brother abusing you and the two school teachers. Two male school teachers, and that still haunts me today. That’s why I say today, now when I’m around kids, it’s like, kids are gonna get whatever they want because I didn’t have it. And I went through the abuse part. And it took me just about forty years just to talk about it. I could talk about it now. Before I couldn’t—it was something that made me cry.

Big John Marcel

Well, as far as I know, when Parks took over [is] when everybody had to get out of there. If you don’t belong to the Park, they were burning houses and everything as far as I know. Parks did that.

On epidemics

Big John and many other Elders shared stories passed down to them by their relatives who worked as gravediggers during the epidemics in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Many of these stories emphasize how emotionally and physically traumatic it was for gravediggers to face the number of casualties they did on a daily basis. In many cases, they resorted to digging mass graves. ACFN has recently commissioned archaeologists to identify these graves in their territories.

My grandfather was telling me when I was young when that flu came around, he said, people were just passing out. One time he said, there were seven boats [carrying] people they brought to Chip that had passed away and that they were buried there. And, in one spot he said, “my boy,” he said, you know what he said? “There were seven people [who had died in one day], they couldn’t keep up with it, so they have this one big spot. They put several people in there.”

Charlie Mercredi (n.d.)

I do feel the loss of membership to MCFN had a big impact on our membership. Elder William Laviolette used 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.

If WBNP was not created, many of these people would still have access to their traditional land. Because of WBNP, these people were denied access to their homeland. This to me is not right, people should come first before the bison.

Marie Josephine Mercredi (1998)

It would be better to live like old times, live off the lake—the land. The children used to listen to you. We used to all pray before bed. If things were the same, my children might have been still alive—better off.

Keltie Paul (25 November 2020)

I think identity is our core. I think that they [the government] sold their [ACFN’s] identity [through the membership transfer and the displacement], and they made them assume another identity. It messes up with everybody’s identity. “Who am I really? Who am I?” People spend their whole life trying to answer these questions that become a psychological problem, because people who lose their identities lose their footing, their space, their reasoning sometimes. Identity is our core. And when you just pick up and steal somebody’s identity and then force them to live like somebody else, it’s going to cause all kinds of psychological problems, networking problems, problems within families. . . . You become something you’re not and then somebody says, “Well, if you’re not this, I’m going to disown you.” I mean, that’s a horrible thing to happen.

On residential schools

Well, they moved a lot of people out of different areas in the Park when the public schools came into existence. And one of the tactics that DIAND [Department of Indian and Northern Affairs] and other people used, was to threaten to withhold the family allowance. And the family allowance, I think came in ’48? Am I right on that? It was around that time, I know it was post-war, and the family allowance came in, and it was a godsend for people. You gotta realize they have big families, and then they got family allowance. So, they really had a stake, that they could use that money for food, for the nutrition for the family. And to be threatened with having [that taken away], I mean, nowhere else in Alberta were people threatened to have their family allowance taken. My parents were living out on a farm, we never got threatened with something stupid like that.

And yet, they threatened to take this monthly allotment away from them if they didn’t move into Fort Chip or Garden River, because they wanted kids to be educated [assimilated into the colonial system]. So, a lot of people came in off the trapline. That doesn’t mean they didn’t go out; they did go out in winter, and sometimes, that they had to have like a residence in town in order to be counted for the public school, enumerated for the public school. So that was going on at that time. . . . So, it’s just one thing after another that they’re trying to use to get people to sedentarism. Because they believed that sedentism is, quote, “civilizing the savage”—those are in air quotes. And that’s what they were trying to do even up into the ’60s and ’70s.

Ernie “Joe” Ratfat (19 March 2021)

Joe Ratfat’s family’s experience with the 1944 band membership transfer is described in Chapter 4. The harmful impacts of the transfer also combined with the intergenerational trauma of residential school that took Joe away from his family and homelands for his adolescent and adult life. His story is a clear example of the ways that park displacements and the forced membership transfer worked together with other colonial institutions and residential schools to alienate people from their lands and families, disconnecting them from their lives, histories, and homelands. A portion of this interview is available online as a digital audio recording.²⁷

I’ve lost a lot of things. As far as my pride and things like that. I didn’t know who I was, I couldn’t speak Cree and I was supposed to be a Cree member. And I was too brown to be white. So, I didn’t fit in anywheres, you know. I ended up on the street, you know, like —alcoholism. Through alcoholism, like I said, a lot of my family members passed away from alcoholism. I’m the only one left now in my family. Everybody else has gone and they all had a really rough death of alcohol.

So I looked at different areas to look after myself, to forget alcohol and drugs and other things. And, through Sweat Lodges and other ceremonies that I ran across when I was out—I’ve never heard of before in our hometown [St. Paul, Alberta, where Joe was sent for school as a youth]—that’s how I got a sense of pride So, that's where I'm at right now, and even my marriage broke up because of alcoholism. And that’s all coming from being displaced. Yeah, going back and being displaced, and having—don’t know who you are. It’s all from that. And those people should pay for it. Those people should do something about it because they really wrecked a lot of families. . . .

And myself, I had no land base. It really hurt. It hurts me. It does hurt.

On residential schools

Yeah, they never asked anybody about the residential school too. They just decided to put it there. That messed up so many families. . . . And also they lost languages and our cultural ways. You know, like 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.

Alice Rigney (16 and 17 March 2021)

A portion of Alice Rigney’s interview is available as a digital audio recording online.²⁸

Well, one thing that happened because of the dislocation and being evicted is loss of trust, once again. And maybe it wasn’t, you know, our Elders were not so verbal in those days. Because my granny did not speak any English at all. She never had any formal education. Her education was on the land. She was very good. She was a very excellent land user . . . but they lost trust [in] the white people again.

On the W.A.C. Bennett Dam

A portion of Alice Rigney’s interview is available as a digital audio recording online.²⁹

The Bennett Dam was a curse to our land, to our people. I mean by them taking our water at this end and flooding it by the man-made lake and other side of the Bennett Dam, where they totally destroyed Aboriginal homes—you know graveyards. I mean, that was all, I think they were given like forty-eight hours to move out. I mean, I talk about power of the Europeans. I don’t know what else to [call] it, but you know, for them to write a letter to us saying that our Delta would not be affected, makes us feel—my Uncle Fred [Marcel, a member of leadership at the time the dam was built] believed them. And we saw the results almost right away. The lake here has dropped at least three meters. And this is the lake, and so the Delta, which depends on the floods, not every year, but every other year. So, we would get a flood that would replenish the Delta, the snyes, and inland lake. You know, so the muskrats and beavers were plentiful. And that was all taken away. The water dried out, the lakes dried out, and my dad saw that. Not only my dad, most of the people here who are land users noticed that.

Because, in the early ’70s we were swamped with scientists that came to check, they called it the Delta project. And we had scientists doing fish count and duck count and all kinds of samples of what was happening to our land as the water dropped. The reports are someplace out there. We’ve been interviewed to death about the death of our Delta, there’ve been documentaries made about it, stories told about it. And this was before the influx of the tar sands. So our water from the Peace River was held back by the Bennett Dam, which did damage to the farmers there. With no consideration because they saw the water as a way—[as a] resource. . . .

And you know, issues like the Bennett Dam was just another tactic that they used—that our say was not worth anything. So, the Bennett Dam did a lot of damage. That was just like the resources. But when you think about the people that were affected, the families that were affected by a loss of a way of life, where trapping was taken away from them, they had to move off the land. Well, they were more or less forced to move off the land and into the community. And idle hands turn to the wrong things—alcohol and that.

And many of those trappers were the best. We used to call them the riflemen and because they were such sharpshooters. Their families were well off, living off the land. And then to have that taken away and forced to move into matchbox houses, and our way of life that was on the land diminished over time. People start eating less and less traditional foods and going with fast foods. Of course diabetes is on the rise. We have a community of 1200, [and] I think we have about 200 diabetic people. And so, I mean a lot of children do not want to eat the food from the land, they prefer chicken nuggets and fries and stuff like that.

So, the impact of the Bennett Dam is not just the loss of the water, it’s all that and more that happened after the fact, when you think about it, and it’s still ongoing. It’s getting to the point—last summer we had lots of water, we all got flooded out you know, which is an unusual year. There was a lot of snow runoff in the mountains. I have a home in the Delta and my clearing where my husband and I had our tourist campus totally destroyed. And I mean, I’m a widow now and so I’m not going back to move there. I’m just going to move out, but everyone that had a cabin out in the land in Wood Buffalo National Park, we were all flooded out. I was not flooded out as bad as those in the Park because they built on flat ground and so they were—their homes—they had water in the houses. So you have all those things from the Bennett Dam. . . . And so, the Bennett Dam changed our way of life here. Took away our resources, created a lot of social problems for many families, a lot of alcohol related deaths, alcoholism on the rise, and drug use now. . . .

It’s just, everything has changed because we have our water taken away from us. But last summer, we had high water, I mean we talk about global warming. This is the winter that the lake never fully froze. It’s open. Right now, I can see open water and usually we don’t have open water until probably the end of April. I remember when they were first building it [the dam], my husband and friend and I always talked about how we knew—we were quite young—but we knew what was going to happen, because we could see it happening. 

I was a social worker, I dealt with a lot of the issues that came out of all the damages done by the Bennett Dam, by the family breakdowns. You know, the trappers having to sell their snowmobiles, their boats, their guns, their traps, you know, for alcohol. And now a lot of them, now the new trapline is the oilsands [where people now go to make an income].

On oilsands extraction

I’m an environmentalist. I strictly oppose the dirty oilsands. It hurts to see what they’re doing. It’s a destruction. It’s not a blessing. I live at Jackfish. I’m still a land-user. I’m seventy years old. My son is buried there. It holds dear to me. But the changes I’ve seen of the land really hurts. But every day is a blessing—that is how I see it.

Mary “Cookie” Simpson (11 March 2021)

They were robbed of their land, they were robbed. Robbed of their traditional land. And for many years, they couldn’t even come to the Park because only Cree Band hunters and trappers were allowed to hunt in the Park, right? Allowed to have their trapline in the Park. And so, the Chipewyan lost out on that, they lost out in going into the Park.

On residential schools

They said that everybody had to put their children in. They had to move to Fort Chipewyan so their children can go to school. They had a residential school there. And then if you didn’t put your child in residential school, because education was the law, then you’d end up in jail as long as your kids were not in school. And then they would come and throw you in. And take your kid anyway. There was so many wrongs.

And then my dad said he had a brother named Marvin. And they all had to go to residential school. There was about four or five of them that had to go to residential school. All of a sudden, my dad said, they took Marvin, and then they never seen him ever again. And then when my mushum, my grandpa, went to pick his kids up, Marvin was missing. They said that he died of influenza.

There was a lot of impact on everybody. Because all of a sudden now you had to move to Fort Chip because your children had to go to school, right? So you weren’t in the bush too often. And then, you kind of lost your children, I suppose. Because they were all now in residential school, otherwise, you’d go to jail. So that was a big impact on the people. And then when your children were in residential school, then they couldn’t speak their language. So they’d go home and you’d try speaking Dene to them and then of course, they wouldn’t understand you because they had to block it in order for them to survive it in residential school. They'd have to block their own language. And so, it had a big impact on the families.

Lori Stevens (25 May 2021)

Portions of Lori Steven’s interview are available as a digital audio recording online.³⁰

On the membership transfer

LS: Just how, you know, mixed up people are because like Cree and Dene are two completely different people with different values, different family systems. . . . And then you’re switching these families into different family structures. So those roles are different. So where does that leave those people? What does it look like for traditions and medicines, prayer, spirituality? We are not the same and a lot of the Elders they’ll tell me, you know—ribbon skirts, like everybody’s buying ribbon skirts and everybody wants it. And the first thing they tell us is, “you can get that, you can show it for your ceremony, but that’s not our way.” I’m constantly hearing, “that’s not our way. That’s not our way.” And then it’s like, well, jeepers, what is our way? Because it feels like this is our way, but in my opinion, it’s because of that transition of some of those Dene people going to Cree. Because now they’re muddled, and they’re passing on those traditions. And saying, “this is our way,” but in reality, you know, 100 to 150 years ago, it wasn’t our way. So, that’s what I hear the most about is, “that’s not our way. That’s not our way. That’s not our way.”

ST: So it’s impacting on people’s identities, really, and how they’re understanding . . . culture and their heritage?

LS: Yeah, and our drumming. Our prayers, when we’re giving thanks to the land, we do it differently. Medicines. So a big one that an Elder told me is . . . skunk pee? I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of skunk pee. She was like, “we don’t use that. Everybody’s using it. But that’s not our medicine.” And I’m like, oh, thank gosh, because I’d never want to drink it. But little things that are popping up and then it’s like, well, jeepers, what is our identity? Okay, we don’t Pow Wow but we Tea Dance, and what are the dances for the Tea Dance? Who knows these tea dances because all we’re seeing is Pow Wow right? So, the jingle and the fancy [dances], and that’s not us. So, it’s kind of like well, what is us? What is the Dene people of Fort Chip? Because it feels like we’re just so muddled, for lack of a better word. 

ST: Have you heard about any connection between the loss of language speakers as well because of the transfer? The loss of Dene-language speakers?

LS: Yes, for sure. Because now you have all these individuals who have to identify as Crees, so they’re all speaking Cree. So they’re not passing down Dene. They were passing down Cree. And like a lot of those Indian Agents, they all spoke Cree because Dene is a hard language to learn, right? So more people were going with Cree than actually our Dene language. Yeah, there’s not a lot at all, especially with what it would have been like in our dialect. Because, if you go to Janvier [a small rural community 123 kilometres south of Fort McMurray], they speak real fast and nasally and they can understand each other, but somebody else speaking Dene, trying to understand what they are saying, they have to slow it down. And then when you talk to the Dene in the Dene-Zaa area³¹, they’re slow [speakers]. I did some training with them and when they were speaking, I was like, “oh, my, I could probably learn from you because you’re speaking so slow that I can probably pick it up now, right?” And so, it’s kind of, what was it [the dialect of Dene spoken] here? We don’t have that many people. We also have Elders who spoke it but didn’t pass it down because they married somebody who was Cree. So, if you were a female, you went to Cree Band [i.e. because they married a Cree man]. So, they passed on that Cree language versus that Dene language. So, there’s not many—I can only think of a handful of people who actually speak it. My adopted dad does speak it, and he’s from Fort Fitzgerald. So, he can speak it, but he doesn’t pass it on. And there’s shame in that too from him, right? Like, when we’re like, “oh, teach us,” he’s not about to, but when it relates to this, I don’t have anybody in my family close to me—I have cousins who are relearning it, but I don’t have any Elder who speaks it.

On displacement

Well, from then, [some members of the community] probably didn’t even realize [the displacement was happening] because of the different types of—we didn’t have that type of ownership, right? They probably didn’t understand at all that you would not allow us to come back to where this really good hunting ground is. “You’re trying to starve me” is basically probably what was going through their heads, and then also trying to relocate their families. So, these are a lot of families who had multiple children. What did that look like for them to move? And did they even know where to move? Like we hear stories of the Métis and Big Point and Alexandre Laviolette giving space on ACFN land to the Métis because they were like “where do we go?” And so, it was probably the exact same thing. So that’s why you would see a lot . . . of the families just outside of the Park and trying to stay close to those better hunting grounds that were in the Park without stepping on that boundary.

And now, there’s just this unsung rule of, you don’t pass that [Park] boundary. Don’t really know why, or there’s not given much of a definition as to why you can’t, it’s just, “you’re Chip Band and so you don’t get to go there.” Basically, you don’t get to hunt there. You don’t get to have your traveling there. Just that boundary has just hindered that cultural aspect of the trapping and the fishing and of that migration of following the animals. And then culturally, like I did [already] say, you’re going from one identified person of Dene to now Cree, which is completely different. Different way of talking, different way of knowing. Just because everybody is Indigenous does not mean that they are the same. . . . And like, did that contribute to so many Dene people getting sick with the flu and that, because they did not have access to the wildlife or the hunting grounds that they knew? So, they had to go and try and figure out where to hunt now. So, there’s most likely a correlation as to why so many Dene people were sick and when they were forced out. . . .

With respect to their identity, we see a lot of addictions, mental health, trauma from just identity—where do I belong? So a lot of people will speak of it, like with CFS [Children & Family Services], like these people don’t know where they belong. Well, that could be incorporated for being pushed out of your homes and your traditional hunting areas, just the same. Like 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 that uprooting somebody [has]. And not only for some people who chose not to become Cree, uprooting them and changing everything about them.

But also, for those who now have to identify as a completely different person. That’s like me going and saying “I now identify as Australian” or something, right? It’s completely different. So, they’d have probably a lot of stress, of one minute I’m this, next minute I’m not. So, I’ve definitely seen it. And you can see it in the compounding issues of what we see today with mental health issues or addiction issues, people just don’t know where they belong. And this definitely plays into it.

On epidemics

Growing up, I remember the mass graves in Jackfish for the children who passed away from the Spanish flu, and my uncle, Charlie Voyageur, who’s passed, he was telling us about how the kids were just all dying, and that it was mostly the Dene who had passed. It wiped out a big population in Fort Chip. And they talked about there was like, big strong men that at the beginning of the day would seem like they were okay and by the end of the day, they were dying. Ones who were like helping to dig these graves and stuff like that, didn’t show any signs and by the end of the day, they had the flu, and . . . the next day they were gone, is what they were saying. It just hit them fast. And these were, according to Uncle, strong, young, healthy people, right? . . . I just remember we went to go clean the graveyards and there was lots of like the last name Laviolette . . . and then there was like these big, long fenced off mass graves. And then there’s multiple little kids in there. And then, they died so quickly that they had to put the fence up.

Beverly Tourangeau (21 March 2021)

Well, a lot more people moved into town. You can’t really just go out there just hunting, whatever, because everything was just kind of drying up . . . their traditional way of life. They had to come into town and there was no more like trapping and all that. Because the Delta and that was all drying up. So, all—like where do you go for all the fur-bearing animals? Can’t trap, so people just went different places to go look for work. . . .

Well, it’s kind of like, my sense, the way I felt was we didn’t belong there. You know? So it’s kind of like, there’s separation even though some people are getting married Cree. They’re slowly—that separation between ACFN and MCFN, there’s still that separation.

Edouard Trippe de Roche (25 November 2021)

I just know one incident where this woman was married to this guy and they were trapping in the Park. Her husband died, so she remarried another guy who trapped at the Athabasca Lake, and she went back to retrieve her belongings. They both went over there, and her cabin was burnt. I guess her marrying somebody that’s trapping out in the Park didn’t sit too well with the Park wardens or the Park guards or whatever you want to call them.

Leslie Wiltzen (21 January 2021)

Well, I think, you know, always the big part [is] the people being disconnected from the land. That’s a big thing, right? Because I mean, like I said when I go back to the words of Treaty [8], where it says “the Athabasca, the Chipewyan people, the Athabasca, the Birch River, the Peace River, Slave River, Gull River,” those are all territories that were once ACFN members,’ right? That’s where they always— that was their homeland. Now imagine being taken away from your homeland and forced to go outside. Long ago in—when you go back to the 1920s—getting around wasn’t an easy thing. Most people traveled by canoes. You know, fast machines weren’t around. Fast boats weren’t around like today. I mean today, you can go from Fort Smith, Fort Chip, in one day—four hours. Just going from Fort McMurray to Fort Chipewyan. But you know, if you go on a map, and you start looking at the size of Lake Claire and you start looking at [the] size of Lake Mamawi and that traditional territory now, when you’re familiar with an area where to go hunting, you know how long it takes to get there. You know how many days you need to get there, how many days you need to get back. You know how many days you need to hunt. So by removing ACFN members, you force them to learn a whole new area of the Park that traditionally [they knew] . . . But to force everybody to relearn things like that, that’s a hardship.

And you know, that’s one of the hardships but for me, enduring being disconnected from the land. That’s a big thing. It’s hard to describe. And it’s hard to say how you’ve been affected because you’re affected—you’re affected. I mean, all your life, you grew up knowing that you’re not allowed in a certain area where traditionally, for thousands of years, the generations before you lived there, then all of a sudden now you’re not allowed. And people tell you you’re not allowed there and then you become a criminal by even thinking about it. So now I mean, so how do you put—how do you describe that in words? How do you justify something like that? I don’t know. It’s a good question.

Anonymous ACFN Elder (16 March 2021)

On the W.A.C. Bennett Dam

Elder: Oh, that’s a big one, that one there. Put it this way: at that time, us Indians, when I was young, we set up a garden at Jackfish Lake, okay, we had potatoes growing. We had the whole field full of potatoes and it was waiting for growing. Then we come back to Chip on Friday, Saturday, we went back Monday, and it was covered with water. The Bennett Dam said nothing of reopening the water. So we come back Sunday night, and it was covered with water. All that work for nothing.

ST: You lost everything?

Elder: Yes, we lost everything. They never said a word to nobody. I mean, we didn’t know, eh? So we put our guts into that garden because we were going to start a five-acre farm in those days. So we lost everything.