W.J.T. Mitchell has argued for understanding landscape “as something like the ‘dreamwork’ of imperialism, unfolding its own movement in time and space from a central point of origin and folding back on itself to disclose both Utopian fantasies of the perfected imperial prospect and fractured images of unresolved ambivalence and unsuppressed resistance.”1 The intricate connection between landscape painting and colonialism has been studied in the Canadian context by Jonathan Bordo, who, in his analysis of the canonical work of the Group of Seven, has extended the chain of connections to include contemporary modes of relating to landscape as wilderness, noting that “it is in the correlation between wilderness piety and correct conduct that the question of aboriginal presence and its erasure unexpectedly emerges.”2 It is impossible to write about landscape without participating in a language historically shaped by colonial nominalisms. It is equally impossible to write about a community like Fort Good Hope without evoking the surrounding context of local meaning-production. The landscape that situates Fort Good Hope remains in tension with the community: metaphors generated from the landscape reach into the inferiority of the socious, symbolic representations are inscribed on the landscape in an attempt to bring together disparate discourses of the sacred, the physical structure of the community opens itself to the river that many of its inhabitants depend upon for subsistence. And, of course, my own narratives of landscape always fall perilously close to repeating those marked by colonial desires for mastery, twisting around a history of representations that are never easily shed, even when self-reflectively acknowledged.
The only way of driving to Fort Good Hope is along a treacherous winter road, open only when the cold weather allows the swamp, lakes, and rivers to freeze solid enough that a road can be ploughed over them. Even then, the road is for the stout-hearted, with plenty of emergency supplies and hope of good weather. It’s not an everyday sort of trip, although travel to Norman Wells is a bit more frequent. I’ve rarely gotten to Fort Good Hope by way of the winter road. Flying, or, in summer, by boat along the river are the more common ways of reaching the community, located about 100 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle on the Deh Cho and relatively isolated by most people’s reckoning.
Fort Good Hope (the Dene language name Radeli Ko is not used in everyday talk) is a small but important Dene community of about 800 people, the majority (about eighty per cent) of whom are Slavey speakers. The remaining ten per cent are nearly equally divided between Ḿtis and nonDene, making the latter group relatively small indeed. The importance of Fort Good Hope is both intangible and incalculable; it’s known for the strong Dene leaders who have come out of the community, the leadership provided by the community in opposing the construction of the pipeline, the establishment of a unique model of governance for the community based on the consolidation of the municipal and band councils into a community council, and many other contributions to Dene political life. It is also known as one of the most beautiful Dene communities in a gorgeous setting.
The town stretches northwards from a boat-landing site near a small river, Jackfish Creek, which winds into the Deh Cho, which also flows north. From this point, the bank slopes up a bit more gradually than else-where, allowing a road to connect the river to the town. Both this point, the end of the peninsula, and another space, which I designate as “the commons,” open the community up to the river that runs along it. It is hard to be anywhere in Fort Good Hope and not be aware of the presence of the Deh Cho, and all paths and roads seem to lead down, to invite, to pull towards it. At the top of the hill, the first building is one of the most prominent in the community, its Catholic church. Constructed in the middle of the nineteenth century and partially finished by the missionary and amateur ethnographer Emile Petitot, one of the most important early European recorders of Dene ways, the church is now an historic site. From the church, on the left of the main road, are prominent government buildings—a nursing station and RCMP office—leading to a drop-in centre and community fire hall, and, finally, one of two centres of town, the Northern Store. Out front of the Northern Store, across the main road, is a bench from which the comings and goings of pretty much everyone in town can be watched and commented on by those who have the time and inclination to do so. Along the right side of the road are private homes, looking over the pines that slope down to the creek. Behind the government buildings are also a few houses, some overlooking the Deh Cho. They lead to the lone hotel in the community, owned and operated by the community council’s development corporation. The Northern Store and the Ramparts Hotel are two corners of a baseball field or ‘commons’, a large field in the centre of town, half circled by two groups of houses.
The houses, according to another friend, Barney Masazumi, can each be identified in connection with the housing program that provided the funds to build them, which are in turn associated with the various Indian Affairs ministers who were in office at the time. There are the ‘Hugh Faulkner’ houses, and the ‘John Munro’ houses, and the ‘Jean Chretien’ houses, and so on. Each type of house, prefabricated, or log cabin-type construction, is one of a series. Many of the houses have teepees outside them, made of the plywood used to package the housing construction materials sent up by barge every summer. The teepee smokehouses usually consist of bits of bright blue or red plastic tarpaulins, which augment the plywood. The teepees are often as tall as the houses, and are used to smoke or dry meat or fish, and sometimes as storage areas.
The far end of the commons, opposite the Northern Store, is a hill, with houses built about halfway up. On the east side of the hill, away from the river, is the T’Seleie School; on the west side, overlooking the commons and the river, is the second centre of town and gathering place, the community office. This is a large, log-construction building with a hall and a few offices including that of the community radio station on the first floor, meeting rooms and offices on the second, and a large, flat, wooden platform at the entrance. The main community council meeting room is a beautiful room on the second floor featuring a painting of a wolf by Dene artist John T’etso and a balcony that offers a view of the river and the main part of the community.
Further north, houses stretch along the river and in small subdivisions in among the spruce trees, with a gravel strip airport about a kilometre east. The gravel road that connects all this leads up past the biggest hill that overlooks the whole of town, past the refuse dump just over a kilometre, and continues north until it ends, just a few kilometres later, at “Rabbitskin” River, on the maps called Hare Indian River. This is a popular place to swim or to fish or to picnic on the hot, dry summer days that are common to Fort Good Hope.
Fort Good Hope is situated about 800 kilometres north of Liidli Koe on the Deh Cho, just south of the Arctic Circle and at the north entrance to the Ramparts, one of the most prominent features of the Deh Cho. A ram-part is defined by The Oxford Paperback Dictionary as “a broad bank of earth built as a fortification, usually topped with a parapet and wide enough for troops etc. to walk on.” Ramparts are defensive barricades. The Ramparts that stretch for a few kilometres south of Fort Good Hope are steep cliffs, of a rusty orange, brown, and yellow colour. The Deh Cho is itself almost two kilometres across, so the cliffs form a broad canyon: they are one of the few landscape features not completely dwarfed by the Deh Cho.
One time, in 1985, during a visit to Fort Good Hope, my research assistant and friend Rita Kakfwi toured me through the Ramparts. She showed me the island that was the giant’s overturned canoe, and the places—breaks in the cliff—where the giant’s head and hands and feet had rested when he stretched out across the river. I saw the thousands of bird nests that cluster along the cliffs. I saw hunting cabins placed at different points along the Deh Cho by different families from Fort Good Hope. I saw the falls or rapids at the south entrance of the Ramparts. Two huge, heron-like birds, frightened into the air by our small boat, wafted away. Fish were to be found in nets set along the bottom of the cliffs. Later, on other trips, I also saw the campground where community assemblies are frequently held.
This is a landscape suited to a culture in a defensive posture, buttressed against and actively resisting the ruses of totalizing power. The Ramparts and the river that runs through them: both gateway and obstacle, invitation and last-ditch stand. The moral topography of a barrier—one cannot easily climb the Ramparts to get at the land beyond it—and of a majestic entrance—one passes through this magnificent canyon to reach Fort Good Hope from the south by boat—where the culture and economy of a people focussed on the land and river still breathe, somehow in struggle reproduce themselves, dance their dialectic of totalization and resistance, still standing strong and proud of their place on this powerful part of this powerful river against the world-historical forces ranged against them.
The political structure of Fort Good Hope is markedly different from that of Fort Simpson/Liidli Koe, reflecting the differing circumstances of the two communities. Fort Good Hope is governed at the local level by a community council, which functions both as a band council and as a municipal council. This is one of the ways in which Fort Good Hope has shown creativity and initiative in local governance, effectively subverting the imposed political structure and creating something genuinely new and unique out of its material. The community now wants to use the movement towards self-government to push this process even further, though whether it will be successful remains to be seen.
In the late sixties, as with many Dene communities, there was a local band council that had minimal official responsibilities: its role was largely confined to Treaty Day celebrations. One of the old-timers in the community, who preferred “not to have his name in any books,” told me that in the old days, after the treaty, the chief was not elected but “instead people just raised their hands,” pointing to an interesting distinction between the individualism presupposed by the more recent secret ballot system and the collective/public implications of the older show-of-hands system. As government began to get more involved in the community, particularly concerning housing programs, both the band council and the Ḿtis local responded by themselves becoming more active, agitating on behalf of their members in the community. Meanwhile, the newly energetic post-1967 territorial government established a settlement council to act as municipal government, in a similar fashion as it had done in many other northern communities.
Frank T’Seleie, who comes from a prominent family of community leaders and was himself elected chief several times, told me about how in 1974 he became “the youngest chief at that time.” Although, he said, “most of the old-timers, they provided me with really good advice,” he also inherited very little in the way of administrative structure: “when I became chief I was handed a shopping bag! That was the office. No resources to work with. Up until just before that the territorial government established with the Dene chiefs up here core funding for administration, so that was in place, but I had very little to work with.” But the biggest obstacle to community governance was the establishment of a separate political structure:
We lost a lot of control when the territorial government moved in in 1967 and began establishing their own administrations in the communities, and completely bypassing the authority of the bands. One of the first things that we done was we started a process of regaining our control by doing away with the administration that they set up and the way that was accomplished was by the people refusing to vote and reinstating the chief and council.
T’Seleie also noted that there were “mainly non-Natives [on the municipal council], people like the priest and contractors.”
George Barnaby, another prominent political activist in the community, told me that “we don’t like that municipal style government, so we develop [ed] our own and we put all the people as the authority on [it] and the council as the representative and their leadership under.” In Barnaby’s view, the replacement of the municipal council by the community council helped the community achieve control over its governing institutions, particularly in allowing the mechanism of community-wide meetings or assemblies to play a prominent role:
The assembly came out of the, all the, what happened with the settlement council. That time, the way that the constitution, the local government ordinance, settlement council act, it said, you know, there’d be six councillors and a chairman, they’ll have all the responsibility and the right, have everything. The public has no say in it. And if they persist in saying something, like, you have to leave, you know, throw them out. The people didn’t like that. They wanted guarantee that the people in the community are going to have a say. So they put it right in their constitution, right there. The assembly is the main authority with anything new, strategy for band, or something, have to be approved by the assembly, so.
The settlement council became a competitor with the band council as local governing authority. When it began to make decisions without consulting the people of the community or their representative bodies, it lost legitimacy. People boycotted settlement council elections, and it became defunct. Its functions were taken over by the band council, which then became a community council, in charge both of federal Indian Act functions and of municipal government functions established by territorial legislation.
Barney Masazumi, with whom I worked closely in the summer of 1992, told me a story that graphically demonstrated the need for local government. We were standing at the airstrip, looking up towards the high hill, which Barney said was where trails leading inland to Colville Lake, the nearest community, ran from, leading along a ridge of land going eastward and inland for miles. One day in the early seventies, people heard a loud sound and found out that a bulldozer was on the hill, clearing land to build something, perhaps a fire tower. Some of the people immediately ran up the hill to put a stop to this; in their view it was sacred ground, not to be flattened. That someone had thought they could just go ahead and build where they wanted to build and bulldoze where they wanted to bulldoze brought home to the community the need for an effective local government; more importantly, that they were able to stop the bulldozer brought home the fact that they could have an influence on events, that they had power.
The community council is run by local Dene on a band council structure—that is, with a chief and council, the number of councillors being determined by the relevant Indian Act provisions. The community has no official settlement status with the territorial government, so the band assumes municipal responsibilities. A major community assembly is held once a year to determine general direction and policy; open community meetings are held with some regularity to discuss particular issues of importance. The council meets frequently, about once a week, usually in the morning, with most business discussed in English.
There are three broad kinship or family or ‘clan’ groups in Fort Good Hope. These are inland or Colville Lake people, river people, and mountain people. Anthropologists call them Hare or Hareskin, though the people I met called themselves North Slavey speakers. The families— Kakfwi and Barnaby, T’Seleie and Tobac, Granjam and Pierrot, Bucan and Kochon, Masazumi and Manuel—have all participated in the community council structure, though the chief has tended to come from among one of the larger family groups, the Barnaby/Kakfwi family network, which the chief at the time of my research, Isidore Manuel, was connected to by marriage.
In Fort Good Hope, at the local level the ‘ethnic’ government is also the ‘public’ government. The Dene and Ḿtis have direct control over all local affairs, but the federal and territorial governments still define what constitutes local affairs and handle many programs and policies in which the community feels a need for some input or control. This is a unique model and one that the local residents want to extend.
Fort Good Hope, like Fort Simpson/Liidli Koe, has its own sense of history. One important part of it circles around Tusi Ko. A version of the Tusi Ko story is printed in “Mom, we’ve been discovered,“ a Dene Cultural Institute publication, as “A Dene Discovers the White Man,” told by Suzanne Gully. In Fort Good Hope I was directed by my friend and sometimes research assistant Bella T’Seleie to an older man who knew the story. When I visited his house one afternoon, he did not like the idea of being interviewed and told me that a photographer had once taken his picture without his permission, later running it in a newspaper. This incident had disturbed him greatly. However, during the course of an afternoon-long conversation over tea, he said I could certainly pass on his words and refer to him as “an elderly gentleman,” since he preferred not to have his name in any books. He has since passed away, but I must respect his wishes. In outline, as he told the story, Tusi Ko (Dry Loon) may have been from the Colville Lake area, but had a fish camp on the Deh Cho. One time, he found some wood chips floating in the river that had not been made by a beaver. Tusi Ko had a dream and must have had medicine power because he decided to follow his dream. He decided to try to find the source of these chips.
He travelled far up the Deh Cho, carrying four marten skins, hiding from other people, until he found the cabin of a man with yellow hair. At first, he hid and watched from afar. But, after three days of this, he revealed himself. He told the white man something about the river and people on it, and received from the white man an axe and some clothes (or, in other versions, a gun and a pot, these latter being the two most important goods brought by fur trading companies as staples of the trade), which he took back to the people. The next year Alexander Mackenzie, guided by old Beaulieu and three other men, travelled down the Deh Cho. This initiated important changes in the life of Dene.
There are slightly differing versions of the story, but also some remarkable consistencies. Most interesting from my perspective is the way in which the story claims agency for the Dene in making their history. The Dene take responsibility for bringing the fur trade, rather than being its passive recipients. Furthermore, the story inverts the logic of discovery: a Dene explorer ‘finds’ the white man just as Dene and Ḿtis guides would show Alexander Mackenzie the river that inappropriately bears his name.
So too, today, Fort Good Hope Dene are taking on, reconfiguring, subverting, restructuring, absorbing, marking, the wood chips, documents, proposals, forms, guidelines, policies, laws, floating along and through the mail, couriers, fax machines, e-mails, meetings held to disseminate them. Following against the current, Dene have for more than a century been tracking these to the source, trying to decide what to bring back. Stephen Kaldwi from Fort Good Hope, living in Yellowknife as premier of the territorial government. Ethyl Blondin-Andrew, also from the Sahtu region, in Ottawa as a junior minister in the federal government. What will they return with after the arduous journey homeward?
Fort Good Hope is in a region called Sahtu, a Dene name for Great Bear Lake. There are four Dene communities in Sahtu: Deline (formerly Fort Franklin) on Sahtu; Tulita (formerly Fort Norman) at the juncture of the Sahtu De (Great Bear River) and the Deh Cho; Fort Good Hope further north on the Deh Cho; and Colville Lake (inland north and east of Fort Good Hope). Another community, Norman Wells, situated between Fort Norman and Fort Good Hope on the Deh Cho, is a largely non-Native oil town, though many Dene and Ḿtis make it their home. The Sahtu region was the second Dene region to opt for a regional comprehensive land claim after the failure of the 1990 AIP. The general feeling was that Sahtu delegates had voted in favour of renegotiating the AIP during the summer of 1990 because they were persuaded that this would not ‘kill’ the claim; when the Dene position did lead to an impasse and the Gwi’chin just north of them negotiated their own regional claim, the Sahtu Dene followed suit.
For much of the eighties, the Dene Nation president was Stephen Kakfwi, an articulate Dene leader from Fort Good Hope. Kakfwi had crafted and overseen a Dene Nation policy that separated the issues of self-government and land claims. The former would be pursued through the vehicle of the territorial government, the latter through the federal comprehensive land claim process. By the late eighties, with the land claim nearly settled, Kakfwi felt it was time to leave the Dene Nation in order to make progress on the self-government issue. He ran for the territorial government as a representative of Sahtu, was elected, and remains one of the key territorial politicians. But in his absence, the Dene Nation first rejected the land claim and then split into regional tribal councils with quite different positions on the crucial issues of land claims and self-government.
Kakfwi advocated a regional land claim for the Sahtu, based on the 1990 AIP model. This is what the Gwi’chin had negotiated. Sahtu negotiators hoped to achieve something more, and this was structured symbolically through a reconceptualization of the approach to comprehensive land claims: the Sahtu claim would be called a Sahtu Treaty. The region was slower to negotiate a claim, and somewhat less well prepared and organized than the Gwi’chin, but nevertheless soon established an Agreement in Principle. The Sahtu Tribal Council, centred in Fort Norman, was led by George Cleary; the chief negotiator of the Sahtu Treaty was Norman Yakelia.
The Sahtu Treaty contains an extinguishment clause, number 3.1.9, which reads, “in consideration of the rights and benefits provided to the Dene/Ḿtis by this agreement, the Dene/Ḿtis cede, release and surrender to Her Majesty in Right of Canada all their aboriginal claims, rights, titles and interest, if any, in and to lands and waters anywhere within Canada.”3It also contains a provision that replaced specific aspects of Treaty 11. For much of the three years spent in my study of Fort Good Hope, political discussion focussed on the question of whether to accept the claim, which was to be voted on in the summer of 1993. Some communities wanted to be able to opt out of the claim by voting on a community-by-community basis. This was rejected by the federal government: it was an all-or-nothing deal, to be established on a regional basis.
In the summer of 1992, a kind of coup d’etat took place in local governance of Fort Good Hope. The story of this coup stages many of the issues and dynamics of local politics, and involves in one way or other many of the local politicians. It began with a now near-mythical event, the attempt by some band councillors to go out and stake land, using money provided to the community as part of the land claim negotiations process for land selection.
What the councillors were attempting, what their intentions were, remains open to question. What they actually did is clearer. They chartered a private float plane using land claims funds, which, significantly, landed on the Deh Cho at the north end of town, away from the more public dock and loading area at Jackfish Creek. Some saw this as evidence of their guilt—they wanted to hide their activity by having the plane load and unload in a less public location. In any event, they certainly were not successful in hiding their activity, if that was the intent. One of the councillors was seen with a pile of wooden stakes, walking down to the plane. In the intense, hothouse, political climate of Fort Good Hope, where discussion of land claims was the main issue on people’s minds, the incident provoked comment. The comment spread. Curiosity—what were they up to?—quickly turned to concern—they are band councillors, supposed to be working for the people, why doesn’t anyone know what they’re up to?
Staking land implies establishing private ownership; this is something that band councillors should not have been using band funds to do. Two theories circulated. On the one hand, some people thought the councillors were guilty of fraud: they were staking or trying to stake land for their personal gain. Perhaps they hoped to select lands that would then be selected by the community, in which event the government might have to compensate them. Perhaps they were simply using the privilege of access to an aircraft to claim land for their families. Either way, it was seen as dishonest, from this view. One the other hand, a second theory went, perhaps they were staking land so that the community could eventually control more than the land it would be allotted ownership over through the Sahtu Treaty. In this view, they were attempting a misguided strategy to benefit the community: by staking land they would add to the land quantum the community would control. The strategy was misguided because in order to maintain ownership of staked land it has to be ‘worked’ or ‘improved’ enough over the years to satisfy government that there is an active interest in the land; if individuals were to stake out enough land to be of significant benefit to the community, they would then have to spend all their time ‘improving’ that land, and even then might not make a significant dent in the community land quantum. The “stakers,” as they became known—a few members of the band council, not including Chief Everette Kakfwi—were called on to account for their actions.
The forum of this accounting was a public meeting at which, in the words of one of the four people who told me this story, they were “caught with their hands in the cookie jar.” They were directly confronted and publicly lost face, both rare events in Dene community dynamics, in my experience. A formal land selection committee was set up to accomplish the task of choosing the lands that would make up the community’s land quantum. The committee was led by three women: an older woman who was a justice of the peace, a younger woman who was a ‘youth’ representative, and an energetic, middle-aged woman who was clearly the driving spirit of the whole group. The group also consisted of an ex-chief, a young man who had returned north from university, an older but quite active local ‘diplomat’, and another man who was on the band council but not a staker.
This group took over the process of selecting the community’s land quantum, but also played a role as an informal check on the community council, a kind of alternative political structure that was seen by many as a more legitimate representative body. It had been appointed at a very well-attended public meeting, rather than by the less immediate voting process for chief and councillors. And it acted with an assertive moral authority in the context of a band council that had lost some of its legitimacy and moral authority. That it was dominated by women, as opposed to the community council, which was dominated by men, meant it also gave a structure or vehicle for the politically strong women of the community to intervene in more active ways than they had previously in the formal public sphere.
Two events in its functioning are worth comment here. At one of its early meetings, which I attended, the subject of funding was brought up. There was a lengthy discussion of what had happened to the money allocated for land selection, whether it had all been spent by the band councillors in their “high-flying” way, and whether it had been adequately accounted for. There was concern expressed that the committee would have no money with which to function. At that point, the president of the Ḿtis local, who was in attendance and whose local had also been allocated funds for land selection, simply volunteered their funds to the committee, whose work would help both groups. These funds would help the committee initiate its work while it determined what happened to the monies provided to the band. The offer and its acceptance demonstrated the close working and trust relations between Dene and Ḿtis in the community.
A few days later, a community council meeting was held. The land selection committee attended the meeting in force. Ostensibly, it was there to report to the community council and gain formal approval and support for its proposals on how to proceed. However, the political dynamic in the room was clearly highly charged and largely reversed the reporting relationship. At the meeting, the council was performing under the watchful eye of the committee. Not only did the council not dare to challenge any of the committee’s ideas, but on other agenda items—for example, hiring an employee—it was clear that the council was minding its p’s and q’s; a relative of one of the council members was passed over for the job.
This event was an exercise in governance that reveals and stages, in my view, the very interesting and healthy political situation where an alternative power structure was developed to challenge the formal structure, because the latter had lost its legitimacy in the eyes of the people. That there was structural room for such an event to take place testifies both to the level of political involvement, creativity, and engagement of community members, and to the flexibility of local governing structures in a situation where “face-to-face” politics still has relevance. Among the eventual outcomes were a more systematic, community consultation process in the actual selection of the land quantum and a transition in the membership of the community council. The stakers eventually resigned, and the next election saw a dramatic change in council membership.
The main office area of the community centre features a painting of a man, a portrait in realist style, the man dressed in camouflage greens, against the background of the Ramparts. The man is Charlie Barnaby, for many years the chief of Fort Good Hope. Charlie’s style was a joking, populist approach. Two consistent themes of his conversations with me were street encounters—the notion of face-to-face meetings that he regularly deployed as a metaphor to explain the issue he was discussing—and talk, conversation. Both these came together in one statement he made to me, to the effect that “you know what kind of guy I am, I never faced away from people. But I don’t talk you know for a few minutes, I go crazy. I gotta talk. I see someone going there, it’s good to say hello. Some people, they don’t want to see you, you know. They go the other way.” Talking is emphasized in the work of Pierre Clastres, among others, as a critical function of the chief: “talent as a speaker is both a condition and instrument of political power.”4
Although he formally retired as chief, Charlie Barnaby remains active in community politics. He was on the land selection committee in 1992 and back on the band council as a councillor in 1994. He has an outpost camp upriver, past the Ramparts, near where the Hume joins the Deh Cho; a beautiful spot. These days, he plays a teasing, tricksterish-like role, poking fun where it won’t cause offence, being serious when the occasion demands. In conversation with me and Charlie Tobac, a local counsellor, he emphasized the theme of sharing:
To be honest, you know, it’s good to talk in front of one another, eh? Because people are, Native people you know, when it comes to think about it and really look at it, we always been sharing, eh. If somebody shot a moose down here, me and him we could run down there. We get a chunk of meat. But if you go down Edmonton you never see that! And that’s what I mean, the past history, we always been well known for sharing. Now somebody packing fish up here. Like yesterday, I ask a guy about fish. He would give me some. Won’t say ‘gimme dollar’ or something. Next time I seen with fish, give him some too. But a lot of this next generation, they don’t know that. . . .
Charlie Barnaby often alternated as chief with Frank T’Seleie, who, in that sense, might have been seen as his political rival, yet I never heard any expression of bad feeling between the two. They worked on the band council together for many years, one as chief, the other as councillor. And they worked together, in whatever capacity they found themselves, for the good of the community. In a conversation with me, T’Seleie emphasized responsibility to the land: “The way we were brought up like each clan or family unit was responsible for certain places or geography on our land Philosophically our people understood their resources of their land. They were really strong. I was brought [up] on those principles, taking into consideration all of creation or the whole. . . .” He told me about how he had found an ancient campsite and could ‘see’ how land had been used in the past. He referred me, in that context, to stories that inscribe the relation between the landscape and the social:
You could see it, visualize how the land was governed. Some of it was stories and legends associated with certain landmarks, Pelican, Anderson River areas is really interesting, one of the landmarks there is associated with the creation story. A lot of knowledge is for teaching. We were coming around the river, these boys and I, just above Sansu. There’s a long straight stretch, cliffs on one side, you’ve seen it, one place there’s a figure of an animal sitting way out on a rocky ledge, way out by itself. That’s supposed to be a wolverine that turned into a rock, and it’s used for teaching, for like here the wolverine jumped out to the rock where someone had stored, had a cache and he’s trying to steal it, turned into a rock, you know. That’s spiritual voice I guess, teaching about stealing, about taking what’s not yours, that kind of stuff: legends of, ideas of, good and bad, right and wrong. That kind of stuff is all in our language but in order to understand it, it’s got to be, like to sense in our own language. It loses a lot of its meaning when you translate it. There’s another one that’s, it ends somewhere around here, the story, there’s landmarks. It ends in Cambridge Bay.
Teaching stories, stories inscribed in landmarks and landscape: ‘how the land was governed’. Stories that reach far into the distance, one end in Fort Good Hope and another end in the Inuit community on Victoria Island about a thousand kilometres northeast; and reach deep into the social, “about stealing . . . ideas of good and bad, right and wrong.”
Near a bend in the Deh Cho as it passes though the Ramparts, about halfway up the cliff and dwarfed by it, is a statue of Mary in blue robes, arms outstretched. Rita Kakfwi called my attention to it on my first trip through the Ramparts, and I’ve noticed it on every subsequent trip. In the Fort Good Hope Catholic church, among the many very bright paintings of biblical scenes—including one that shows very white angels condemning a dark-skinned Satan to hell and damnation—is a painting by Father Bern Will Brown from the fifties that shows a Dene woman having a vision of a figure on the Ramparts. The painted vision and the statue, apart from size, look remarkably alike. Stories circulate about the figure on the Ramparts. I’ve heard differing accounts of who put it there, and why.
It recalls the story, told by Eduardo Galeano, of the Caribbean Islanders who were given by the Christians a number of statues and Christian iconographic figures. When the good Christian Spaniards returned a year later, they found that the Caribbean people had buried the figures in the ground. In punishment for such disrespect, they slaughtered the islanders. They never realized, or wanted to realize, that the Caribbean people had buried the figures because they believed the Spanish, they believed that the Spanish gods had power(s), and put them in the soil hoping the power would improve fertility and guarantee successful crops. They had done the most respectful thing they could with those figures and been ruthlessly punished for it.
Michael Taussig, too, tells of symbolically laden objects whose meanings twist around and subvert both official church narratives and older spiritual beliefs, in the chapter called “The Wild Woman of the Forest Becomes Our Lady of Remedies,” in his book Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. There, he suggests that the everyday stories of ‘popular iconography’ do not merely involve “the strumming of the string of defeat and salvation that creates multiplicity of versions concerning the Virgin, the juggling with the semiotic of the miracle” but also “the way the heavy tone and mystical authority of the official voice of the past is brought down to earth and familiarized with gentle and sometimes saucy wit.”5 Interestingly, Taussig frequently deploys landscape metaphors to textually motivate this discussion of semantic richness, as in: “we can describe a ‘sacred’ contouring of land made from interconnected chips and fragments of place meanings,” though only, in his view, if “we endorse a notion of sanctity that endorses the strength the of human weakness”6 here the repetition of “endorse” in the sentence seems to grammatically act out the “human weakness” being invoked.
The figure on the Ramparts evokes a Dene version of this story, told and retold in the New World, the world that Dene storytellers like George Blondin would implicitly call an old world, a tired world, no longer new, a world where magic has been disenchanted and healing power weakened, where the spiritually powerful must gain and give strength to the same land that gains and gives strength to and from the people who live with it, where the power of the sacred places, the powerful places, must be brought into contact with the power of the bible, of Jesus, to ensure that both work for each other, with each other, in the same way that the people must work for each other, with each other. In a good way.
Sometimes the sacred enters into the everyday unannounced, not bounded by ritual or prayer, as if it were a comet that one grew accustomed to after the first week of nightly viewings so that it became merely another part of the night sky, so much so that one forgets it will not reappear in a life-time, or two, or a thousand. It is this way with the gift of food, the differing but related food-sharing practices of Dene and Inuit. This gift is hidden in the protocols of everyday life. When one visits for a chat, the protocol is to ‘help yourself to the tea or coffee and bannock that are usually ready on stove and counter. One does not tax one’s hosts with the demand that they serve such daily necessities, and one would not want to tax one’s guests with the obligation of patiently waiting until food and drink are offered. Food sharing among Aboriginal peoples, which has been written about extensively in the social science literature and goes under the imposing term “generalized reciprocity,” continues to be practised extensively in northern communities like Fort Good Hope, particularly with regard to so-called country food, wild meat or fish. But the practices are also inscribed in everyday politenesses, in everyday gestures or forms of conduct that assume and enact a commonality necessary to community. Communities, whether the term is used to encompass nomadic but stable social arrangements or peoples settled in close proximity to each other, deserving the name “community” are built and inscribed in gestures of this sort.
as Colville Lake is to Fort Good Hope, as Fort Good Hope is to Yellow-knife, as Yellowknife is to Ottawa, as Ottawa is to Washington, as Washington is . . . The periphery. The site of wildness. Of a ‘healing’ calmness. Of a mythical reality. Since my first visit to Colville Lake, its image has remained forcefully lodged in my memory: a ‘traditional’ community. In Fort Simpson, when I mention Colville Lake to Leo Norwegian, his eyes light up, he smiles—”fish!”—and so much more. For a while, it seems as if everyone I talk to in Fort Good Hope traces their family back to Colville Lake, wants to be connected with it in some way, associated with its ephemeral, ambiguous power.
In the late eighties, Colville Lake decolonized itself, established itself as a separate band, rather than a sub-band of Fort Good Hope. It got electricity. And a new band office, a building that could finally compete in the architectural landscape of Colville Lake with the church and privately owned fishing lodge, owned by Bern Will Brown, transformed by marriage from ‘Father’ to ‘Mister’. Colville Lake, the community, is situated on the lake of the same name, called in Dene K’ahbamitue. It is inland, accessible by air or skidoo or foot.
The small houses in Colville circle a commons and open up onto the lake itself. There are still about 100 people living there. Most of the houses are small log cabins, built some time ago by the people who live in them. Newer houses are going up as the community grows, usually prefabricated houses, organized around the fact of electricity that Colville Lake now has, along with other amenities.
Yet, something of the place called to me, calls me still. The absence of amenities couldn’t hide the presence of something else, a rhythm of life, which remains even with the newer amenities. After two summers in the early nineties in Fort Good Hope, by 1994 it was time to go back to Colville. By then there were ‘scheds’: regularly scheduled flights, one direct from Fort Good Hope. When we got to Colville and settled in, we (my then partner Elizabeth and I) got directions to Rita Kakfwi’s place and knocked and opened the door—”YOU!” she exclaimed, “I never thought I’d see YOU again!”—and there was much laughter. For the first time, with her young family and friends all piled into a boat, I got a chance to go out on the lake and catch a few of the delicious trout waiting to be caught.
We learned some painful things about Fort Good Hope. Talking with some of the older women, Elizabeth confronted the difficult issues being grappled with by the community: sexual assault, violence. These are as much a part of Colville Lake’s reality as the rhythm of its life. They won’t easily go away. And there is not much support for the women who want to work through them. The painful things linger. And still, Colville Lake calls to me. It is, to Fort Good Hope, as . . .
On June 29, 1993, as the day approaches when a decision must be made about the Sahtu Treaty, a public meeting is held to discuss the matter. George Cleary flies in to explain the terms of the claim and to answer questions. The meeting is well attended. By this point, there is a feeling that a vote in Fort Good Hope could go either way. Chief Kakfwi has been interviewed on the radio, sounding quite critical of the claim, many people have serious doubts, opinions seem to hang in the air, ready to be blown by whatever strong wind comes.
Cleary explains the Sahtu Treaty well, emphasizing its strengths. There is no one to speak against the claim. He stresses that only minor parts of Treaty 11 will be modified: they will no longer be entitled to reserve lands specified in that treaty; the chief’s treaty right to a new suit is surrendered; and hunting and fishing rights under the treaty are exchanged for more clearly specified rights under the new claim. The trivial and the profound are thrown together. There is concern about what would happen if the Sahtu Treaty is rejected. Cleary notes that there is no guarantee a new federal government would provide more generous terms (a federal election was due and in fact took place, in which the Conservative government was replaced by a majority Liberal government, which had promised to replace the extinguishment policy) and that the freeze or moratorium on land development will be lifted. The spectre of the diamond rush then taking place on Dogrib territory is mentioned.
Earlier that day, Isidore had said to me that “we need to get united. I think we should go for it [the claim]. I think we have to stop bickering. I’m going to go for it. At least it’ll give us something to work with, to carry on with, and we can go from there.” He had made up his mind: the unity of the community was the critical factor informing his judgement. By late in the meeting, Chief Kakfwi spoke also in favour of the claim, saying that “it’s up to the people to make up their minds,” but also indicating his own—albeit cautious—support for it. George Barnaby, who had written in Dene Nation: The Colony Within that “the land claim of the Dene is a claim not only for land but also for political rights,”7 was of the opinion, which he had expressed to me earlier that week, that the land claim “was just a real estate deal” and that the real action would be in self-government negotiations.
After the meeting, people, especially the older men in the room, huddle around the large map of the area that has been put up, indicating what lands have been selected. Fingers touching the differently coloured areas of the map. Questions. Comments. Concern. Somehow, it is clear to me that the vote will go in favour of the Sahtu Treaty.
Isidore Manuel, trying to express his frustration at the difficulty of explaining the treaty terms to people, once showed me the definition of a tree in the treaty:
‘trees’ means a single stemmed, perennial woody plant growing to a height of more than eight feet, and which is found in a wild state in the Northwest Territories, including Pinus species including Jack Pine and Lodge Pole Pine, Larix species including Tamarack, Picea species including White Spruce and Black Spruce, Abies species including Alpine Fir, Salix species including Beaked Willow and Pussy Willow, Populus species including Trembling Aspen and Balsam Poplar, Betula species including White Birch, Alaska Birch and Water Birch, Alnus species including Speckled Alder and Mountain Alder, and Prunusn species including Choke Cherry and Pin Cherry.8
Who can read this? he implicitly asked. How do you even know where to start? Whereas the earlier treaty had been written in English (although written in legal English in its day, the treaty is relatively short, a few pages, and today is relatively easy to read; in 1921, it is the fact that it was written in a foreign language that took the official version of the treaty out of the hands of Dene), a language not widely spoken and even less widely read by Dene in 1921, so that Dene would have to rely on their own version of what the treaty said, this later treaty was written in the language of lawyers, equally foreign to the people who were supposed to decide whether they were ‘for’ or ‘against’ it. Not much more than a week later, in a vote held in the Sahtu according to the procedures established by the comprehensive claims negotiation process, the Sahtu Treaty was ratified by the people.
That summer I was treated to another version of what a written treaty looked like. I was staying in Henry Tobac’s house while Henry, then on the band council, was away with his family in Edmonton. He had given me the use of his truck, and I tried to repay his generosity by giving rides to anyone who needed one, especially older people. One afternoon, I found myself giving a ride to one of the older community councillors, a man named Jim Pierrot. He said he had been on the council, off and on, since 1967.1 had seen him at council meetings, where he tended to be one of the quieter members, though he gave off an air of thoughtfulness. We talked for a long time, sitting in the cab of the truck, outside the log house where he wanted to be dropped off. He had many concerns about the land claim and said he thought many of the older people felt as he did. He said they were especially concerned about the land selection part of it, drawing lines on the map, dividing up the land.
At some point in our conversation he pulled a piece of well-weathered, lined writing paper out of the side pocket of his nylon jacket. He carefully unfolded it and showed it to me. It was a map of sorts, though it took me a few minutes to make it out. It showed the Deh Cho, I realized, and the community, as well as a mountain south along the river and an inland lake; it had the words “f.g.” (for federal government) and “band” written across the top. Along the side, it read “treaty.” With this as his basis, he launched into a lengthy discussion of treaty relations, of peaceful coexistence. This is what treaty means to him, and he sees its presence in the landscape. The treaty as a ‘writing’ on the land, about the land and the people. The treaty as a kind of moral topography, an inscription of social relations embodied in a landscape of rivers, lakes, mountains: a community of river people, mountain people, lake people.
One can read into that piece of paper, or read out of it, the network of social relations and the degree to which they are over-inscribed by newer lines of power. The river, lake, mountain, and community: a moral topography of Fort Good Hope itself, seen in terms of the most important family groups. ‘Above’ this social/landscape setting rest the power relations: band and federal government. No landscape representation for these abstract forms of power, which must relate to each other and to the landscape and to the community through something called treaty, which runs along the side, in some way encompassing this whole, both of it and out of it, along it and inside of it. This way of seeing, of seeing the people, the land, the writing, as integral, layering each other, circling around and through each other, is one reason why the Comprehensive Land Claim of the Dene in the Sahtu region of the NWT is called the Sahtu Treaty.
A territorial government official and friend once mentioned to me that George Barnaby is thought of in some circles as the ‘philosopher king’ of the western Arctic, and this has always seemed to me entirely apposite. He is certainly a diplomat of the highest order; along with Isidore Manuel, he was one of the very few people who moved back and forth between the community council and the land selection committee in the highly charged political climate of the summer of 1992. This was not an easy feat to negotiate, but he managed it ably. There were two things that convinced me the official’s assessment was accurate, apart from that observation. George Barnaby had a lengthy experience in territorial government, being one of the first Dene to be elected to the Territorial Assembly in the early seventies and staying active, in one way or another, in politics ever since. He also had a consistent vision, a coherent philosophy, of politics, which he has spent most of his life struggling to enact.
As noted earlier, though the story bears repeating, Barnaby had written about his mid-seventies political experience in the first part of “The Political System and the Dene” in Dene Nation: The Colony Within. Reading this, one can still sense the frustration he must have felt as one of the only Dene on the territorial council: “the first session of Council I went to, we spent two weeks on an ordinance that had no importance to the people I represented. At this time I asked for more control for the communities. This was voted down. I don’t know why.”9 In an interview with him in 1994, he said he resigned from the council because he became convinced it was not serving the people: “So I told [Justice Thomas] Berger that I can’t stay in a government like that, doesn’t serve the communities, doesn’t recognize community rights—I forget the exact words I had. So I said I’m resigning, making an official announcement that I’m resigning as the representative for the Great Bear Region and going to work with the Dene Nation to develop a Dene government.” He held a press conference to express his concerns, publicly rebuking the territorial government system. For a few years, he worked as a vice-president of the Dene Nation, but the pressures and feeling of not accomplishing his goals led him to resign from that position, which he did in a particularly Dene fashion: he went off into the bush for the spring hunt. After a while, his absence was noted and no one could find him in order to determine what his plans were. He returned to his home community in the eighties and concentrated his energies on politics at the local level, trying to find a way of achieving his goals there and putting his talents at the service of the community. He has served on the band council for two terms, but has never been chief. He has always been active, attending band council meetings and in the nineties assisting with the self-government ‘portfolio’ at both the regional and community levels, characterizing his role “as a consultant to the band, mostly on political and other community issues . . . I negotiated . . . for the community. I guess that’s the kind of work I’m doing for the community, political stuff, developing new ways of, you know, of dealing with issues that concern the community so, you know, [we] get our own government, our own constitution, our own way of doing things.”
His political philosophy is also enunciated in the article on “The Political System and the Dene.” It involves enacting Dene ways, at the political levels, Dene ways of making decisions: “The way decisions are made is another law. No one can decide for another person, everyone is involved in a discussion, and the decision is made by everyone. Our way is to try and give freedom to a person, as he knows what he wants” (120). Barnaby argued that the system of territorial governance “is wrong: wherever only a few people decide for the rest of the population, it oppresses people” (122). George Barnaby’s philosophy is democratic through and through; not the formal democracy of Western political systems, but a participatory democracy that questions the nature of representation as a vehicle for expressing and enacting the wishes of the people. I asked him about his model for community self-government, and he replied:
Well, basically I guess it’s community control, then under that it’s, you know, there’s the Aboriginal Rights, so that could be the band council and then there’s the public. Then we’re creating a charter community so that could fall under that hat. Same council but not all councillors deal with all subjects. The Aboriginal deal with everything but non-Aboriginal wouldn’t deal with, none of the band stuff. So basically it’s community control.
The model here is not to have a separate Dene government, or even a Dene ‘house’ or Senate with veto powers over specific areas. Rather, it is to have a public government with Dene representatives having exclusive jurisdiction over specific areas, those related to band matters, and nonDene participation through normal representation mechanisms. However, the model also features community assemblies as the foundation and final authority.
In the eighties, as the Dene Nation moved to separate out the logic of negotiation of land claims and self-government, Barnaby crafted a self-government strategy for the community of Fort Good Hope. By 1992, a version of this strategy was embodied in two documents, one called “A Model for Self-Government,” authored by The Fort Good Hope Dene Community Council and dated March 21, 1991, and the other called “Government of Fort Good Hope: Self-Government and Program and Service Responsibilities,” dated May 14, 1992, with no author listed. The development of this model was encouraged as a pilot project funded by the territorial government. There are three basic principles enunciated in these documents: 1. community government would be open to all members of the community, band government would only be open to Dene band members, and the two would form a concentric circle; 2. community and band assemblies, open to all members, would be the highest decision-making bodies and would meet regularly; and 3. the community would be recognized to have authority over all programs and services delivered at the local level, but responsibility would be transferred only at the community’s request.
The model comes out of a clear sense of the specific history of the community and its current situation. Among the issues George mentioned in our conversation, here related to the colonial history, was a certain ‘de-skilling’ of the people: “if . . . we look at capability and deal with administrative skill or self-government skill, but the other one is the capability to work together. I mean after living under the territorial government for twenty-five years, you know, a lot of problems been created in the community.” Interestingly, the skills being emphasized have to do with cooperation at the community level, rather than administrative: the ‘skills’ that people need for the project of democratic government to succeed. He added that “people used to really work good together, live, and they cooperate, have respect and good feelings. Now there’s lot of bad feelings, lot of jealousies, back-stabbing and all that stuff. In order to manage and run our things you have to deal with that as well.”
In 1992, as the last pieces of the Sahtu Treaty were being negotiated, I worked with Barney Masazumi and George Barnaby to draft legal language that could be used in the Sahtu Treaty to incorporate this model. George would spend the morning talking with Barney and me, and we would sit in front of the computer through the afternoon, writing and revising. Ironically, the model was a few years ahead of the proposed self-government provisions of the Charlottetown Accord, a set of proposals for revision of the Canadian constitution that was rejected by the Canadian public in the fall of the same year. The language we worked on, a “Draft Agreement for Sahtu Regional Self-Government,” “Draft Proposed Amendments to the Sahtu Treaty,” and “Sahtu Dene and Ḿtis Self-Government Framework Agreement,” were not incorporated into the Sahtu Treaty or negotiated in a separate package with the territorial and federal governments.
A critical question in this political vocabulary relates to the politics of form, in this instance evidenced at the level of political structure. George Barnaby noted, in response to a question I asked about the turnover of political leaders at the local level, that it was “the same as Canadian politics. You don’t like conservatives, you elect the liberals, or, but really, it’s the system, the structure, everything’s got to change. So as we keep trying to elect better leaders we provide training and workshops. . . .” He put it nicely in the context of some broad statements about self-government, saying that “if it’s the same guys working on it, then nothing will change, it’s the same. Same guys, only thing is, elect them this way, don’t use an x, use an o. Really nothing changes. Same structure.” The structural change that needs to be made, in his view, involves extending democracy:
Make some structural changes. It’s like building a new car I guess, you keep identifying problems, keep changing, it gets better all the time. So we’re not going to live with something we know doesn’t work very well. And that’s what Good Hope did with settlement council, it wasn’t what they wanted so they, they couldn’t change it so the only answer was to get rid of it. Then they went with the band, but they didn’t really write a constitution to change it. After getting rid of settlement council, then they went with the band, but they brought the bad habits and procedures from settlement council. They’re starting to end up the same structure, only with more people in it. With the change in council . . . after a couple of years they wrote up this new one to put the people on top, the assembly, so that’s what we have now but there’s still something missing. It’s that human, community, development. Healing, getting rid of the bad things, putting good things, working together, then, the training completed are needed, so that things will work better all the time.
Here, the political vocabulary leads almost inevitably outside the realm of the political narrowly conceived, circling around notions of community healing, community well-being, community development, in the search for a political structure that will embody and address these issues.
In 1993, George worked on a plan for restructuring the council’s electoral system. The plan would have involved representation by family group, to ensure that each of the major family networks had a representative on council. At a public meeting on June 28, he raised the issue for discussion. Everette Kakfwi, then chief, noted that there were both large and small family groups and the proposal would be difficult to implement. Isidore Manuel spoke in favour of it, saying it would ensure smaller families were represented on the council. A woman on the band council spoke against the proposal, arguing it might lead to pitting the families against each other and suggesting instead that voting by areas within the communities would be a better system. Others spoke in favour of this. George then spoke about the need to ensure that more women were on the council, another problem. A few people mentioned that it would be a good idea to consult the elders on this, and the meeting turned to the next agenda item. The idea was dropped; no consensus or agreement had been developed.
In the summer of 1994 the community was working on a self-government plan to negotiate transfer of programs and services to the community. The core idea of the plan was that the community would determine its priorities and readiness to take over each specific area—social work, health care, education, justice, and so on. At that point, they would notify the federal and territorial governments of their readiness to take complete or partial control, and it would be transferred.
Many people have suggested that Aboriginal self-government is an undefined concept for which Aboriginal people are not ready. In the case of Fort Good Hope, there is a clearly defined vision that is coherent and consistent, workable yet working towards the achievement of ideals that correspond with prominent critical notions of social justice. Much energy has gone into developing proposals, models, legislative language for this vision. That it remains a vision and not an actuality is a testament to the failure of the dominant political system, not to the lack of definition or the unpreparedness of the people of Fort Good Hope.
The Fort Good Hope self-government model is interesting precisely because it is less concerned with what powers the community should have than with establishing a way of transferring powers based on a recognition of community authority (that power derives from the people) and with establishing a system of community governance that ensures active and meaningful participation of community members (that power derives from the people). This touches on the question of the politics of form, of establishing a form—in this instance, community control through enhancing participatory democracy—that would work within and challenge the dominant form.
In another, vastly different, context, Rosalind Krauss has named this process or challenge “informe,” writing:
let us think of informe as what form itself creates, as logic acting logically to act against itself within itself, form producing a heterologic. Let us think of it not as the opposite of form but as a possibility working at the heart of form, to erode it from within . . . a structure destabilizing the game in the very act of following the rules. To create a kind of ‘mis-play’, but one that, inside the system, is legal. The spring winding backward. Like clockwork.10
Here, the form structure or logic of the dominant system, a logic of abstraction in the name of an ever more illusory, banal, eroded, and alienated democracy, is turned towards itself; its own claims are used against it. The challenge is from within. A “logic acting logically to act against itself within itself. . .”
The public meeting on June 28, 1993, at which George Barnaby proposed his restructuring of the community council, had three items on the agenda: elections, band membership, and community concerns. A short discussion of the council structure took place under “elections.” Also under that item, dates for nominations and elections for chief and councillors were announced. The band membership discussion also involved a quick report. The “community concerns” item, on the other hand, led to a long, emotional, and intense discussion of the community’s alcohol policy. The meeting had been scheduled to start at 7:00, but actually got underway at about 7:45. It was held in the downstairs hall of the community centre. About fifty adults attended, and about one-third were women. Lucy Jackson, a local justice of the peace, provided translation services during the meeting for the elders, since most of the meeting was conducted in English.
Fort Good Hope, like Fort Simpson, has an alcohol rationing system that sets daily limits on how much alcohol any individual can bring into the community. Since the community is not easily accessible by road and does not have a liquor store, the ration system works to keep the community somewhat ‘drier’ than Fort Simpson, where there is a liquor store. The rationing policy had been determined by the community in a referendum and was long established, in spite of occasional challenges.
A group of young people proposed that a local beer dance be held in the community on the same weekend when nearby Norman Wells holds its annual summer Black Bear Jamboree. This would help to prevent boating accidents and the funds raised could be used to build a community basket-ball court. A series of young people spoke in favour of the proposal, adding details, and then an older man and the chief spoke against it.
A series of people then started to try to talk; voices were raised. George Barnaby called for order, asking that other people who wanted to speak be allowed their turn. Voices for and against the proposal were heard, more of the latter emerging as the meeting progressed. By this time more people had crowded into the meeting. The community centre can be seen from most of the town. When a lot of trucks are parked outside in the evening, residents know that something is up and they start to gather. Clearly, the rumour that a big discussion was going on had spread, and the intensity of the discussion brought the smokers in from outside as everyone waited their turn to speak, or watched and listened and assessed.
After the first hour, a series of strong speeches by a middle-aged woman, who chastised the band council for allowing the idea to come to a public meeting, a young woman who spoke passionately against the proposal, the local drug and alcohol counsellor at the drop-in centre, and a female and a male elder, all strongly opposed, silenced the proposal’s supporters. Chief Everette Kakfwi then suggested drawing the discussion to a close, admonishing the recreation committee that they were “not in place to come up with this sort of activity that half the people don’t agree with,” to which a younger woman from the committee responded with the comment that it had come forward “as a suggestion to raise ten thousand dollars for a Scoreboard” and not meant to cause harm. The first elder who had spoken then summed up that there was “no agreement on it. We can’t talk about it all night. Let’s throw it back on the council.” No vote was taken, and it was clear from the tone of the meeting that the council would reject the proposal. The young man who had first raised the idea, and his friends, were upset and dejected.
The meeting, though, continued. A young man suggested limiting gambling in the community to weekend nights. There was no comment on this. Another man suggested establishing a neighbourhood watch system. Then an elderly man, who hadn’t spoken all evening, responded to the gambling suggestion: “There’s too much complaining here,” he said. “You don’t want us to have any fun. What kind of fun can we have without gambling? People will start drinking again. There’s nothing to do around here, it’s just dead!” A shorter discussion ensued, following a similar trajectory to the earlier one. The chief then closed the meeting by noting that “these are the two most troubling issues” in the community, which was “always going to be dealing with them.” By then, it was late in the evening. The meeting had slowly emptied, and the last twenty to thirty people stretched, chatted, drifted outside into the long late evening light, lit cigarettes, unwound, went home.
The issues had been difficult and there were no final resolutions. But there was active participation of a good proportion of the community. And a demonstration of the passion and emotion with which people held different concerns and ideas in the community. And, for me, a practical demonstration of the effectiveness of George Barnaby’s ideas, that community assemblies could work as the basic decision-making bodies in a context such as that of Fort Good Hope. Consensus is often thought of colloquially as “full agreement,” a much harder to reach goal than that of “general agreement.” This meeting demonstrated consensus on two distinct but important levels. One was that of the ethics of speech, the guiding rules of discussion that allowed everyone who wanted to speak to be heard, every voice to be treated with respect. The respect of community members for each other, even across the boundary of heated opinion, was constantly being demonstrated, enacted. Secondly, the eventual outcome—more so in the instance of the electoral system discussion but arguably also in the beer dance discussion—involved a consensus of the negative sort. Because there was no general agreement, action would not be taken and this was understood without a vote. Action could only be taken, not necessarily only with full agreement, but if there was strong enough support that the dissenters, after having been heard and themselves noted the tone of discussion, voluntarily ceased their dissent and allowed a momentum of supportive opinions to carry the day. The intricacies of face-to-face politics, a multiplicity of subtle nuances, tones, momentums, shifts, continue to structure the basic political life of Fort Good Hope.
The same meeting had its share of on-the-side dramas. One of these had to do with the upcoming election of chief and council. Isidore Manuel, my close friend, was running against Everette Kakfwi, the chief who was also brother to Stephen Kakfwi, one of the most prominent Dene politicians in the NWT. Everette himself had won the position as chief on a platform of spending more time in the community; past chiefs, during the years of federal constitutional negotiations, had been called on to spend much of their time out of the community. Everette was committed to addressing local concerns and to being present to deal with individuals who had problems. That summer, when I interviewed him, he was officially on holiday, and not only met with me, but, during the hour I spent, was called on by several people for small favours or help that he as chief could dispense, and was finally called away because a cheque needed urgent signing.
He was, and is, a dedicated man and lived up to his promise of spending more time in the community. In my first encounters with him, I found him difficult to get to know, but professional and well organized. Later, I would find that, perhaps because of not having the worries and responsibilities of the office of chief, he was much friendlier and kinder, and I grew more impressed with his leadership abilities. However, one thing did impress me from the outset, and that was his dedication; he took the job seriously and was constantly on the run.
His sole opponent was Isidore Manuel. I never saw Isidore actively do anything to seek office, though he may have campaigned more when I left. His sole tactic seemed to be that when people came up to ask him if he was running for chief, he would nod, smile shyly, and finally say “yes.” The people who came up and asked would then say, as a few did during the community meeting, “well, you’ve got my support.” There was a quiet strength in these exchanges, a calmness and determination. Isidore never said anything negative about Everette, though there was much talk about how things needed to change, the band office needed to be more responsive to the community. Isidore’s strengths were his seriousness, his dedication, his experience with the band council, his having gained some education outside the community, and his close connection with people from many different families. On the basis of this fairly random evidence, I was not surprised to hear, weeks later, from Yellowknife, that he had won the election. On the phone to me soon after, he said he was going hunting to get some moose for the community assembly. He had begun his career as chief.
Two delicate matters. The next summer, when I came to Fort Good Hope, Chief Manuel was out of town at a meeting of the Sahtu region leadership to discuss issues pertaining to the land claim. I discovered that the election margin had been very narrow—a bare handful of votes separated the two candidates. The outgoing chief was very upset, especially because the turnout had been quite low and there was some concern that proxy votes had not been used. The whole council had changed dramatically; more young people had been elected as councillors. However, on the council, Everette had slowly come around, apparently, and impressed me as an able and concerned council member; it was almost a year later and he had taken his defeat in stride, now doing what he could to contribute positively. Mean-while, Isidore now had a furrowed brow and was worrying more than ever about the community, about whether the land claim was going to work out properly. Isidore and Everette had reached, with some difficulty, the position where they could continue to work together to achieve the goals of the community. I wondered if, in part, a new generation of leaders was following the practice, or rather, political dynamic, established by their predecessors: as Frank T’Seleie and Charlie Barnaby had worked together over the years, each serving terms as chief, would Isidore Manuel and Everette Kakfwi do the same? It turned out not to be the case.
In my discussions with Leo Norwegian from Liidli Koe, he had described in some detail what he thought it took to be a good chief. He had said in part that “you got to be really strong to be chief. I don’t think I could ever be chief, my temper is just too bad [laughing]. . . . If the people like you, they support you. You have to work together.” The stress was on bringing people together, being the pacifier, and this meant that there was no room to be self-centred or temperamental. In speaking about an ‘old-time’ chief he admired, Old Man Cli, Leo had said, “He’s very, very level-headed man. Some people call him names and it don’t bother him. . . .” Isidore, bytemperament, struck me as in this way a ‘traditional’ chief, someone primarily concerned with ensuring that people are getting along, keeping his eye on the main long-term objective of community well-being.
It became clear to me that in his term of office as a new chief, Isidore was slowly feeling his way, hesitant to assert the authority of office, wanting to use the office in something like a traditional manner, to help people. But he was not having an easy time of it. He spoke to me of the frustration of going to regional meetings “where all they want to talk about is setting up this or that board of this or that development corporation.” He could not find a way of getting real community problems, or the issue of healing that was then being widely talked about in Fort Good Hope, on the agenda. Frustrations, worries, hesitations, doubts: the job of a chief. But even those who criticize him commend him for his dedication, and the most they would say in criticism is that he needs more time.
Nevertheless, in the next election, Isidore lost the position to John T’Seleie, who had recently returned to Fort Good Hope from Yellowknife. T’Seleie himself lost the subsequent election to none other than Everette Kakfwi. It was almost as if Fort Good Hope represented a mirror image of Liidli Koe. In Liidli Koe an administration in turmoil was counterbalanced by a fairly stable political leadership; in Fort Good Hope the administration, which did change over the years, was remarkably stable while the political leadership went through dramatic change. In each of the following three elections a different chief was elected: Fort Good Hope had become a political hotbed in which leadership experience was being circulated through a select group of women and men.
One time, Isidore and Millie Manuel took me along on the river from Fort Good Hope to Norman Wells and back. We left early in the morning for the five- or six-hour, depending on stops, trip. The first forty minutes take us through the Ramparts; for the next few hours the landscape is dominated by the river itself, until we begin to see mountains as we get closer to Norman Wells. On the way down we discover that the Dene camps along the river this summer—including Bella and Frank’s—are much preoccupied with picking mushrooms for the Japanese market: a new short-term cash source has been discovered that supports the subsistence economy. Each of the camps we stop in at has fish or moose or caribou meat ready to offer guests, along with tea and bannock. We offer news, make sure everyone is doing well, visit for a half hour or so, and continue on our way.
That time, on our return trip, we found about three other boats of travellers, also returning home to Fort Good Hope. After about an hour, we find the other boats drifting together: the lead boat, the fastest one, is out of gas. They’ve been sitting for a while, sharing smokes, chatting. Isidore passes over some gas, as does someone in another boat, tanks are refilled, and we’re off again. About an hour later, the same thing: a second boat is out of gas. Difficult calculations are made, gas is redivided, the party starts off, but Isidore confides that, now, none of the boats has enough gas to make it back! Nevertheless, it goes without saying that the problem is shared among each of the boats. We travel on, what else is there to do? At worst, after we all run out of gas, we’ll drift in to town, carried along by the powerful current. Isidore tells a story about the last time he drifted with a boatful overnight, through the Ramparts, into town. The fastest boat skims on ahead, the others slowly spread out, trailing along behind. Then, as the boats are gathered together a third time, as if by some miracle, a boat with two young men, partying, dangerously charges up. They have nothing but gas and laughingly pass it out, enough for all. By some serendipity they just happened to be out on the river, cruising around. They tease Isidore, saying, “You’re chief, you’ll have to make sure we get paid,” and, also, “I guess we’re just like 9-1-1,” and he gracefully accepts the teasing; it never disturbs his dignity or upsets his equanimity. The boats all start off again. We start off first, but are slowest. One by one, each of the other boats passes us. As the last ones go by, Isidore takes out a paddle, pretending to ‘speed up’ by paddling alongside the boat, enjoying the joke: the chief has the slowest boat.
That time, we came through the Ramparts just after midnight, as the sun was starting to set. The cliffs on the west side were dark, in shadows, but along the east shore, where our boat travelled, the setting sun splashed across the Ramparts, bringing out a vibrant, stunning gallery of colour, dominated by orange and yellow, lit up as if by an internal light, and we watched as, through the twenty-odd minutes it took us to get through the Ramparts, the shadow cast by the earth itself as it turned away from the sun painstakingly crawled up the cliff.
In an interview some days later, I ask George Barnaby, “What’s the goal of self-government—is it a mechanism to achieve something else, or an end in itself? What do you ultimately want to achieve?” He pauses, thoughtfully. His answer: “I’m not really sure. Part of a, like I said, part of a big picture. Because really the goal is to have a good life in the community.” The good life. Somewhere, it can be found. Perhaps echoed in the midnight sun on the Ramparts on the Deh Cho.
In recent years the proposal for a Mackenzie Valley Pipeline has resur-faced. This time, the plan appears to be, according to my friend Petr Cizek, to bring natural gas down from the Beaufort Sea and the Sahtu region to the tar sands of northern Alberta for use in processing the crude oil there: natural gas is needed in massive amounts in the production of this oil, and do not ask questions about the logic of using ‘clean’ energy to produce ‘dirty’ energy. This time Aboriginal people are to be partners, or, at least, the development corporations established by land claims agreements are contemplating buying equity positions in the megaproject. There can be no doubt that the current land claims (modern treaty) model, which turns First Nations into capital holders who must make wise investment decisions, sets in motion the events that lead to these kinds of ‘buy-ins’. A map produced by the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee shows a spiderweb of pipelines around Colville Lake that will be a likely result, or worst-case scenario, depending on your view, of the project. Fort Simpson and the Dehcho region continue to oppose the project, which will have to cross their unsurrendered territory. Some of the people I know in Tulita and Fort Good Hope are now working for the pipeline company. Others oppose the pipeline but the best they can do is try to drive a hard bargain, ensure they get ongoing taxation, rent, or resource-sharing revenues for the life of the pipeline. If the companies and State think this is too much and decide not to build, they’ll cry crocodile tears. Perhaps the time I have spent in Fort Good Hope and Colville Lake will have to be filed under the category: witness. Perhaps twenty years from now someone reading these words may say, “That is what it was like then,” as they survey the wreckage of one, ten, a thousand Norman Wells-style oil towns in the NWT. But it is still my preference to think of the political dream embodied in Fort Good Hope not as a nostalgic throwback to a distant past or a fading present, but rather as the promise of a possible future.
In a recent visit, Frank T’Seleie takes me hiking up the Ramparts and teaches me something new about them: they were perfect summer fish-camp sites. Instead of a mere backdrop, as I have tended to discuss them in this chapter, they were actually the foundation of the summer gathering of peoples, a safe, resource-rich, place on the river. Runners carried messages along the trails at the top of the Ramparts from camp to camp. In the still evening air I can almost see the smoke from many fires, hear the laughter of children, smell and taste the dry-fish. For the energy companies, breaching the Ramparts means building along their banks. For myself, breaching the Ramparts means recognizing them not as backdrop but as ground, as a foundation, for a community that reaches into the heart of the land as much as a land that reaches into the heart of a community.