Sixty Degrees North (12 page)

I escaped into the Church of St Isodore, part of the Mission Historic Park, where buildings from the town's Catholic mission are being rebuilt or restored. The hammering rain
increased, and soon it was coming through the roof and in the door. Hail stones erupted from a bulging black sky. The noise was enormous. I wandered around the room, taking my time with the interpretive signs, loitering, until the girl behind the desk invited me to play pool on the old table in the centre of the church. We shouted to each other across game after game, struggling to hear above the noise outside. It was more than two hours before the rain eased enough for me to venture back out to the street.

Later, when the storm had cleared, I walked out to the bluff overlooking the river. From the bench there I could see the Rapids of the Drowned, and the white specks of pelicans on the water. I let my eyes relax into the view, enjoying the distance. For most of my life I've lived in houses that looked out over the sea. In Fort Smith, hemmed in by trees, I felt half-blinded, and that spot offered the nearest I could find to a horizon. I imagined that water rushing on to the Arctic. Ahead of it whole oceans had gone, while Fort Smith stood watching. The Dene name for this area is Thebacha: ‘beside the rapids'. The story of this place has been defined by the river.

That night I struggled back into my tent. My arms were red and lumpy, sunburnt and bitten; I looked like a victim of some hideous disease. But the insects had vanished, and the evening was chilly and quiet. The jack pines around the campsite whispered and scritched, as though they didn't want to be heard, and the sharp, sweet smell of them filled the air. The more nights I stayed in the tent, the more I was conscious of the ground beneath me. I had no sleeping mat, and though I'd not noticed for the first few nights, I was now aware of tree roots, twigs and pine cones spread out underneath my body. I could feel their shapes pressing into me.

The storm broke again around 11.30 p.m., just as the fading light forced me to give up reading. A few distant rumbles
had become closer and more frequent, and all at once the tent was lit up. I counted the seconds. One, two, three, four … it was twelve seconds before another crack and long burst of thunder filled the air. A few spots of rain turned at once into a deluge, clawing wildly at the sides of the tent. I sat up and checked that everything was tight and able to keep me dry, then lay on my back and waited. Another flash. Eight seconds. And another. Five seconds.

Wood Buffalo National Park was on high alert because of the long period of dry weather. Lightning strikes could easily set off a forest fire. The previous morning the sky had been blue-grey with smoke from a blaze somewhere in the park. The helicopters were out and the watchtowers would be manned. The rain was a constant howl on the canvas, and I closed my eyes, trying to let the sound wash over me. Somehow, I slept.

I was woken at six a.m. by the light and the cold. It was close to freezing, and I was shivering hard. I dragged more clothes on and curled up, trying to find some warmth. Sleep arrived again then, stealing quietly into the tent, and a clear, bright morning followed close behind, without a hint of the night's violence.

‘White people have lost their relationship with the land', François Paulette told me. ‘They must have had it or they could not have survived for thousands of years. But now all people think about is money. All they have in their heads is money.'

He looked at me, unsmiling, then returned to his lunch. Paulette is a former chief of the Smith's Landing First Nation. He is an influential and respected Dene Suline elder, who today spends much of his time campaigning on land rights and the environment. When we met, he had just returned from Norway, where he'd been invited to speak to
shareholders of Statoil, one of the companies exploiting the Athabasca tar sands in northern Alberta. His speech that day in Stavanger began: ‘What you do with your money is your business. But when you begin to spend your money in my territory [in a way] that disrupts and destroys our way of life, our civilisation, then that becomes my business.'

Paulette is an imposing and intimidating figure – well over six feet tall, with long grey hair pulled back into a pony tail, and a thin moustache on his broad, rough-sculpted face. As he enters a room, attention instantly surrounds him. Everybody turns to greet him. He shakes hands, asks questions and remembers names, like a perfect statesman.

As we sat together in a near-empty restaurant one afternoon, François spoke slowly and with a heavy accent. He paused between sentences, sometimes for long periods. During these pauses, he was not waiting for me to respond or to fill the silence. Rather, he was talking at the appropriate pace. He was gathering, carefully, his thoughts.

‘The Dene culture is entirely about our relationship with the land,' he told me. ‘It is a spiritual relationship. It is emotional, mental and physical. The land is sacred, and there are protocols for everything. When I take a plant from the forest I must leave tobacco in thanks. When I am out on the river I must thank the river.'

This insistence on gratitude and propitiation is not unlike that of the Inuit in Greenland. It is a focus on reciprocity, and on the bond between people and place. For the Dene, the land is not a resource, it is a presence; it is not something separate from their community, it is integral to it. When François told me about a hydroelectric dam that developers hoped to build on the Slave River – an idea first raised in the late 1970s but still no closer to reality at the time of my visit – he was adamant. By restricting the flow of the Slave and flooding the land above (some of which is owned by the Dene) the dam would not only ‘desecrate the
river', it would ‘desecrate our history'. ‘It will not happen in my lifetime,' he told me.

It would be fair to say that Canada's indigenous people suffered less direct violence, historically, at the hands of European settlers than those of the United States. But that would not be saying much. Over the centuries, native people here were exploited, discriminated against and abused. Battles over land rights continue to this day, and the active suppression of native traditions and culture went on until the late twentieth century. From the 1870s, thousands of young indigenous people were forced to attend ‘residential schools' – such as Breynat Hall in Fort Smith – whose principal aims were the Christianisation and assimilation of ‘Indians' into mainstream society. Often, children were banned from speaking their own languages, and some had little or no contact with their families for months or even years. Many suffered physical and sexual abuse in these institutions, and sanitation levels were often appallingly low; at least 4,000 children died, mostly from diseases such as tuberculosis.

In 2008, twelve years after the closure of the last of the residential schools, the leaders of all of Canada's main political parties issued a public apology, as did representatives of the churches who had run them. A ‘truth and reconciliation' commission was established to assess the enormous psychological and cultural damage done, and millions of pounds in compensation has been paid to those who attended. The legacy of the residential system is an appalling one. In their aim of separating native children from their communities, the schools were very successful; but they were far less so when it came to ‘assimilation'. Graduates often found themselves unable to fit in, either back at home or elsewhere, and a wide range of social and psychological problems became commonplace: post-traumatic stress disorder, criminality, alcohol and drug abuse, depression.

Although what happened to young native Canadians has been described as ‘cultural genocide', the residential schools did not succeed in eradicating the traditions of indigenous people. Those traditions survived. And they did so, in part, thanks to the tenacity and articulacy of campaigners like François Paulette, who have helped to bring the concerns of Canada's First Nations to the fore. But François's words troubled me. His verdict on ‘white people' sounded like a judgement that could not be overturned; it was a sweeping, cultural indictment. And that was hardly surprising. The Dene's relationship with the land has evolved over countless generations, and is passed down through stories and protocols. But these are culturally exclusive, and the ways of thinking they engender cannot be recreated from the outside. The understanding of the Dene is, for the rest of us, largely inaccessible. So if François Paulette is right – if European cultures have entirely lost the traditions by which a relationship with the land is maintained, are we then destined to be estranged from our places? Can we never truly be at home?

An answer to these questions was offered to me by Jacques Van Pelt, whom I met, so I thought, to talk about pelicans. This stretch of the Slave River is the northernmost breeding ground of the American white pelican. Their nesting sites are concentrated on the rocky islands of Mountain Portage Rapids, but I had seen them in the air, soaring like ghosts above the town. There are few people who have spent as much time observing, recording and studying these birds as Jacques Van Pelt. But on the day I met him, Jacques wasn't much interested in talking about pelicans, at least not in the way I had expected. Instead, he wanted to talk about connections.

Jacques came to the north in 1959 and moved to Fort Smith the following year. He was employed to work across the northern territories on community development projects
for the government. Later, he and his wife ran a tourism company, taking visitors on excursions down the river and out on the land. When we met for the first time, Jacques greeted me with a hug and called me ‘Brother Malachy'. He moved laboriously, but his mind was quick. He talked with enthusiasm and excitement, though with no clear train of thought. Some of his words made me wince, reminiscent as they were of New Age platitudes. He referred to ‘the communion of people and nature', and advised that ‘“I” must become “we”'.

Jacques spoke often of circles, of how indigenous people had built circular homes rather than straight-sided ones. They'd understood the significance of the shape, he said, and recognised its physical and metaphorical strengths. The sixtieth parallel excited him for the same reason; it connected people and places. My conversation with Jacques also seemed to turn in circles. During the hours I spent with him we returned again and again to his vision of nature's ‘connectedness' and ‘togetherness'. When he did speak about pelicans it was to try and explain to me what these birds had taught him. Over the past few decades, Jacques had spent innumerable hours observing the Slave River pelicans, counting them, getting to know them and warning others about the fragility of their population. He had walked and kayaked throughout the region, often for weeks at a time. He had brought visitors to see this place that he loved, and to share it with them. And though he could no longer do these things, though his back was bent and his joints stiff and sore, he still coursed with a kind of static energy and a relentless positivity. And the time he'd spent with the birds, his time on the river and in the forest, were somehow at the core of the person he'd become.

I was drawn to Jacques, to his openness and generosity, and to the joy that seemed to brim up inside of him as he spoke. But the cynic in me recoiled. As I listened, I found it
hard to hold on to his vision of the world. I felt I was grasping at water, clutching at something that was vivid and alive, but which slipped through my hands as I tried to close them around it. And yet I couldn't brush off his words. I couldn't ignore the feeling that I had missed some fundamental point, something truly important that I'd not been able, or perhaps willing, to comprehend.

It was not until later that it struck me: behind the spiritualised language, behind the platitudes and the positivity, Jacques' lesson was simple. What mattered was not understanding, exactly. One could never, just by looking or thinking harder, fully comprehend the connections between your own body and the pelicans on the river, or the river itself. The extent of those connections was beyond understanding. What was important, rather, was recognition.

In
A Sand County Almanac
, Aldo Leopold wrote of a ‘land community', encompassing the entire biosphere of a given place. This land community is not separate from, nor exactly additional to the human community; both are part of each other. What he described does not require any kind of spiritual insight or enlightenment to see, merely a certain awareness of reality. The food we eat is born of the earth and is fed by the lives of other organisms, by the sun that warms us and by the water that quenches our thirst. We are joined in a myriad of ways to the world around us. These relationships are matters of fact, and they exist at every level from the atomic to the macroecological.

Jacques' vision of connectedness was an active recognition of the interdependence of things. It was, in a sense, the most banal and commonplace of understandings, a conscious acceptance of what ought to be obvious. And yet today, like the very idea of community, that act of knowing feels radical. What Jacques was advocating was a kind of
placefulness
: an engagement with place that is united with and strengthened by our engagement with people. No one
can disconnect themselves entirely from the world; we are all dependent, always. But if we fail to recognise and to consciously reassert these connections and this dependence, if we fail to build placefulness and community, then we risk being homeless. And that is no kind of freedom at all.