Pikangikum Rez: Exemplar of Canada’s Environmentalist Gulag

The fur trade transformed the Canadian aboriginal’s way of life. The trade, mainly in beaver pelts, began in the 1500s, peaked in the 1800s, and then declined until today when it supplements the incomes of a few thousand people. Trapping and trading consumed aboriginal communities. They traded pelts for tools, cookware, firearms and blankets – technologies that re-made their culture. The fur trade changed where natives lived; and where they could live. It facilitated the adoption of European language and religion. Trade-induced contact with Europeans spawned peoples of mixed ancestory. By 1830 aboriginal culture bore little resemblance to any pre-contact way of life.

By 1930 few aboriginals followed the “traditional” fur trading lifestyle. Among those that did were five Ojibway families plying the shores of north Ontario’s Pikangikum Lake. In the 1950s a Hudson Bay post began distributing welfare cheques to this community, then numbering 100. Expert testimony given by a Pikangikum elder in an Ontario Court of Justice case relayed how band leaders interpreted welfare:

“…the more kids you have, the more the government will pay. So if you’re looking at 300 or 400, 500 bucks a kid, that’s a lot of money, a month, a lot of money a year. So they became sort of like little money makers.”

Nourished by this manna, and husbanded by pro-natalist polices, Pikangikum’s population tripled every 20 years. Currently, 2,900 members reside on their 18 square kilometre reserve. Pikangikumbians no longer depend on hunting and trapping; such activities are recreational relics. Instead, Pikangikum receives mind-popping dollops from provincial and federal ministries. In 2015 and 2016 they received $66 million and $63 million respectively. This rounds to $150,000 per household. Much of this money goes to nurses and teachers from outside the community; or to pharaonic projects like their new $27 million school. (The previous school got torched.) Any normal town enjoying such largesse would bustle with happy campers. Not Pikangikum; it’s the suicide capital of the world. Its suicide rate exceeds 2.5 per thousand per year.

---

Suicides of two teenage girls in July elicited another shower of articles and pronouncements. Ontario’s Health Minister chivalrously set aside jurisdictional wrangling to dispatch 20 mental health workers to Pikangikum (price: $1.6 million). These will reinforce the 8 mental health workers already tending to the 380 Pikangikumbians under suicide watch. The Globe and Mail’s contribution to the media shower was the editorial: The Unspoken Problem of Pikangikum. The secret, according to these sleuths, is the reserve’s 80% unemployment rate. Unemployment isn’t 100%. Some have jobs. Foremost among them are the Chief and his merry Councillors who officially earn $70,000 to $100,000 per year, tax free. Four families monopolise politics. As the Band is the reserve’s sole employer, all jobs are political appointments. The Band controls the: airport, power authority (a diesel generator), elementary and secondary schools, nursing station, day care center, water treatment plant, arena and campground. Two hotels, a department store, business centre and restaurant are also run by Pikangikum’s politburo. About 75 households have breadwinners albeit at the sufferance of the dozen political bosses who, through the double-dipping endemic to reserves, probably enjoy annual incomes north of $200,000. Visualize: honking new 4X4s, motor boats, planes, ATVs and trips to Vegas.

---

Support Canada Free Press

---

Also visualize: houses with plumbing – something 80% of Pikangikum houses lack. The lower 80% live off the $10 million Ontario’s Ministry of Social Services disburses annually. This translates into 300 households collecting $30,000 each. Because Pikangikum doesn’t have year-round road access much food and sundry are flown in at considerable cost. Hunger stalks the lower 80%. What’s life like on Pik rez? In 2013 a health assessor commented:

“Almost all the youth drink and no one is here to stop the drinking, the violence and things like gas sniffing, it’s like a tornado of drugs, alcohol and violence.”

Half the population is under 20. Some 500 youth, including pre-teens, sniff gasoline. Pikangikum is a “dry” reserve but harbours a brisk trade in homebrews and opioids. Several hundred assaults are reported annually. Mental health workers concentrate on extreme bullying and trauma counselling. Of the 89 documented suicides since 1990 most were teenage girls which explains the reserve’s preponderance of males and suggests other goings-on that render Pikangikum an unbearable hell for girls. Policing Pikangikum is problematic. In 2010 a howling mob, led by a Councillor, overran the Ontario Provincial Police station before marching all 11 OPP officers to the airport and forcing them onto planes (an almost unreported event). The OPP returned; but not the officers involved, some of whom remain on stress leave. The mob returned in 2015 to trash the station and destroy vehicles.

---

Law enforcement is being devolved to the Pikangikum Police Department and the ever-growing Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) police force. Meanwhile, on Pikangikum’s gravel roads, bedlam reigns. Devolution to Band Councils, or their alliances, is uniformly pushed by pundits and politicians. The Globe editorial chimes:

“On Monday, Ontario, Ottawa and NAN officially signed an agreement to give NAN communities control over health care services. That will help, as could Ontario’s 2013 decision to grant Pikangikum a licence to develop the ancestral boreal forest that surrounds it. If the community can find a way to exploit the timber resources and create jobs that might make all the difference.”

The latter sentences are deliciously disingenuous. There will be no logging boom. Ontario granted Pikangikum First Nation a Sustainable Forest Licence for the Whitefeather Forest (11,749 square kilometres of unequivocally ceded territory) only after the Band signed: A Partnership Framework for Managing Cheemuhnuhcheekuhtaykeehn (Dedicated Protected Area) in the Whitefeather Forest. This document’s canopy of eco-verbiage shades this gem:

“For greater certainty, permitted timber uses shall include the harvest of trees and bark for the production of handmade artisanal Ojibway products from wood including snowshoes, birch bark canoes, sleighs, toboggans and cradleboards.”

---

---

The land-use plan enshrined into the forest license was drafted by Pikangikum’s honchos in conjunction with: World Wildlife Fund Canada, Federation of Ontario Naturalists and Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. The explicit objective of the Whitefeather Forest Initiative is not economic development but wilderness conservation. Mining is even less welcome than industrial forestry. Whitefeather Forest Initiative documents affirm the supreme importance of indigenous culture in every paragraph. Initiative inspired uber-environmentalist NGOs (Forest Eco-system Management Program, Indigenous Knowledge Training Centre, and Whitefeather Forest Community Resource Management Authority) provide cushy jobs to select Band members. Pikangikum’s rulers boast their proliferating minions maintain 100% retention of the Ojibway language. Pikangikum children start school as unilingual Ojibway speakers. Ojibway is promoted at school and demanded at work. The rulers stress:

“We see the threats to our language and are determined to protect it.”

All Whitefeather Forest Initiative documents must be translated, at government expense, into written Ojibway – no mean feat given that Ojibway was never a written language. The Indigenous Knowledge Training Centre focusses on conserving their language… and their traditional lifestyle. Pikangikum’s lords eschew industrial development. Why wouldn’t they? They’re living the life o’ Riley now by performing a function crucial to Big Green i.e. separating Canadians from Canada’s natural resource endowment. The greater the misery they lord over; the greater the graftable cash-flow from Ottawa. The traditional lifestyle they champion harkens to the fur trade; an episode that constitutes but a flicker of time in their own history and hardly embodies the climax of human civilization. Keeping the memory of the fur trade alive might warrant a wing in an anthropology museum somewhere but 600 sprawling theme parks strewn across the continent seems indulgent.

Further Reading

• Ratio decidendi of Judge Gibson in R. v. Suggashie
• Indigenous and Northern Affairs stats and financials for Pikangikum First Nation
• Globe and Mail editorial July 25, 2017 The Unspoken Problem of Pikangikum
• Blatchford, Christie. OPP on remote reserve chased out by rock throwing mob. Globe and Mail, August 5, 2011
• APTN article on the 2015 riot
• Whitefeather Forest Initiative documents
• Whitefeather Forest Initiative documents
• Whitefeather Forest Initiative documents
• Whitefeather Forest Initiative documents