From the Spring 1987 issue of the Vancouver, BC, anarchist magazine Open Road (subsequent to the publication of this article more than 200 Innu people were arrested by RCMP for re-occupying the NATO military base on their territory, as depicted in the documentary film Hunters and Bombers)
If the Canadian government gets its way, military training in Goose Bay, Labrador will soon be making life intolerable for the Indigenous people of the area.
Canada has been actively soliciting NATO officials in an effort to sway an impending decision about whether to build an $800 million NATO Tactical Fighter Weapons centre in Goose Bay or Konya, Turkey. The NATO Base, if approved. will be one of the biggest expansions in northern Canada since the 1950’s and will bring hundreds of fighter jets into the Goose Bay area as early as 1990. In response to this, the Innus are escalating their campaign to halt the construction of this Centre as well as the NATO flight training activities already occurring over their hunting camps.
The Innu oppose the militarization of their land for the following reasons (see Assembly of First Nations Resolution):
1. Present training activities are disturbing the wildlife and making life miserable for the people who live in regions where low-level flying is occurring. The loud and unexpected noise produced by these aircraft (e.g. West Germany’s F-4 Phantom 11 emits a noise level of 110-126 dB) exceeds the pain threshold for most people.
The NATO base would make the flying zones virtually uninhabitable due to:
a) increased low-level flying.
b) super-sonic low-level and higher altitude flying which would produce frequent sonic booms (and focus booms which in some parts of the southern U.S. smash windows and crack walls in houses).
c) the presence of three to four bombing ranges with intensive flying activity occurring around each one.
d) the possible use of toxic defoliants which would contaminate fish and wildlife upon which the Innu depend for subsistence.
e) the presence in the flying zones of significant levels of electro-magnetic radiation generated by AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control Systems), jamming and counter-jamming equipment on low-level aircraft and ground stations (forming part of the Instrumented Air Combat Manoeuvering Ranges).
There are valid reasons to believe that the electro-magnetic radiation at the levels emitted by AWACS, etc. is dangerous to human and wildlife health.
2. The NATO base will have a serious impact on the environment of the region. Already, an oily slick (like paint) is left on drinking water, and fish, beaver and muskrat are found dead for no apparent reason. The caribou, a near sacred animal in Innu culture, have been diverted from ancient migratory pathways.
3. The training activities are taking place on Innu territory which has never been ceded to the Canadian state, and is therefore rightfully the property of the Innu people. Such training activities and various Euro-Canadian economic initiatives seriously prejudice Innu rights and land claims.
4. The kinds of training activities that are occurring at the moment and which will be expanded if the NATO base is built (for example, “Deep Strike” and other “first strike emerging technologies”), lower the threshold for a nuclear war. The expanded military presence in Goose Bay will make the Innu communities a prime target for a nuclear attack. Moreover, the Innu consider themselves a peaceful people and do not want their territory to be used so that more powerful nations can perfect their weapons of destruction.
Brief History of Goose Bay
Canada and the U.S. first established a base at Goose Bay in 1941 to service wartime flights between North America and Europe. In the early 50’s Goose Bay was made a support base for the U.S. Strategic Air Command. As the “Cold War” developed, distant early warning sites were constructed in the Arctic in addition to the Ballistic Missile Early Warning Site in Thule. Greenland. When the USAF terminated its SAC presence in 1976, the population of the community at Goose Bay fell to its present level of about 7,000 people.
The Royal (British) and Canadian Air Forces have been conducting low-level training flights since 1967 and 1979 respectively, with the West German Air Force joining them in 1980. (In 1983, West Germany signed a 10 year agreement with the Canadian government under which air space was rented for 25 million Deutschmarks a year.) In 1986, the Belgium Air Force and the Royal Netherlands Air Force followed suit. A ten-year agreement is on the verge of being signed between the Dutch and Canadian governments.
The Labrador testing ranges cover two areas, roughly 100,000 sq. km, located north and south of Goose Bay. These areas were chosen because the land is flat with great open spaces, is “uninhabited” from the military’s point of view, and because it approximates the terrain of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
The Innu of Ntesinan [Nitassinan /ᓂᑕᔅᓯᓇᓐ]
There are about 9,600 Innu living in Ntesinan (literally “our land”). They have pursued a hunting, trapping, fishing, and gathering way of life in the forests and on the tundra in the interior of the Quebec/Labrador peninsula for thousands of years.
Though blanket claims to native lands in Canada have been made by both England and France over the last three centuries, the whole question of land entitlement remained unknown to the Innu until Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949. The Innu, who never signed a treaty regarding their land, were left out of Confederation negotiations whereby Newfoundland (which Labrador is part of) became Canada’s tenth province.
With both their people and their land artificially divided between Labrador and Quebec, the 38 years since Confederation have seen the Innu faced with the ongoing threat of assimilation. At first, in the 1950’s, they were required to leave their children in village boarding schools to learn white man’s “superior” ways; a few were even sent to high school in St. John’s, sixteen hundred km away. In 1962, families were forced to move from the wilderness into shoddy box houses in order to keep their children in school ten months of the year so they could qualify for benefits from the Newfoundland government.
Lumber companies have leased or purchased their woods (from the government), and mandatory bunting and fishing licenses class the Innu with the many outside sportsmen, commercial and private, who are encouraged to fly in and out of the bush.
For over a decade, the Innu have fought an increasing sense of despair by returning to the land for three months in the spring and three again in the fall. However, it has become increasingly difficult for Innu children to learn the traditional hunting way of life during this half year.
Native spokesperson Ben Michel says “it will be impossible for the military to avoid Innu camps and hunting/gathering parties when the training activities reach their fully operational level. The net result of all this will be to force the Innu out of the country and into government built communities where alcohol abuse and a whole range of social pathologies resulting from cultural collapse, alien domination, and a humiliating dependency on our colonizers are so prevalent.”
The Innu realize that their situation is representative of a world-wide trespass and land grab of aboriginal territory and resources. As part of a nationwide struggle to end Canadian practices against the earth and its indigenous peoples, the Innu have pledged themselves to “use any peaceful means at our disposal to put an end to the flights and their abuse of our people and our land.”
For more info, contact the Naskapi Montagnais Innu Association, Sheshatshit, Labrador, Canada AOP IMO
RESOLUTION
Assembly of First Nations – October, 1985
Subject: NATO Military Low-Level Manoeuvers over the INNU Territory (Quebec and Labrador)
WHEREAS Canada has since 1980 signed agreements with the NATO countries, authorizing them to conduct military manouvers at low altitude over the Innu Territory, by identifying two large geographical zones of training, directly over the traditional territory of the Innu people; and,
WHEREAS Canada has nominated the Innu Territory as a site for proposed NATO Tactical Fighter Weapons Training Center, where aircraft would not only train for low-level ground attack but also for air-to-air combat and air-to-sea combat; and,
WHEREAS the territory used for low-level training exercises has, for thousands of years, been the traditional Innu Territory and today, the territory is fully occupied by the Innu families who live off the land and its natural resources; and,
WHEREAS the Innu have evidence that these low-level flights have already seriously affected the wildlife and certain disastrous consequences of those repeated flights have been identified, namely:
– disruption of the caribou’s migration patterns
– abandonment of the calving grounds of the caribou
– severe reduction of live births of the wildlife
– a significant decrease in the trapping of the Innu people residing in the territory; and,
WHEREAS the Innu families, in particular the elders and the a children, have been traumatized by repeated flights over their camps and the Innu hunters are unable to leave their camps and can no longer leave behind the elders, the women and children at the main camps because of possible accidents and other problems which arise when the planes fly over, for example, children fleeing into the forest in fear of the flights, people in canoes panicking at the sudden noise because of the low altitude of the jets, pregnant mothers under nervous shock that might affect the life of the unborn children; and,
WHEREAS these military manouvers are destroying a whole people and their way of life and the land is becoming empty and dead like a desert; and,
WHEREAS the Innu people, the lawful owners of this territory, have never ceded, through any treaty or land claim agreement, their collective right to self-determination and permanent sovereignty over their territory and its natural resources; and,
WHEREAS the Innu people are being arrested and their materials are being seized by Newfoundland Game Wardens for crossing an imaginary line which is the Quebec-Labrador border that bisects the Innu’s traditional territory; and,
WHEREAS the collective land rights of indigenous people are recognized by international law; and,
WHEREAS the aboriginal rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada, including their land title, are recognized and affirmed in the supreme law of Canada (i.e. S.35 of the Constitution Act 1982); and
WHEREAS the Assembly of First Nations of Quebec has adopted at its last meeting in Kahnawake, a resolution condemning the military low-level training flights of the several NATO countries over the Innu Territory of Quebec’s north shore and Labrador; and,
WHEREAS THE Council Attikamek Montagnais has already started environmental, biological and sociological impact studies and is doing important work in defence of the Innu people in this issue,
BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED THAT the Confederacy of Nations declares its solidarity with the Innu First Nation regarding its rights and jurisdiction over its territory; and the rights of its citizens to practice their way of life in peace; and,
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT the use of the Innu Territory for military low-level flight training against the will of the Innu constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and of the Canadian Constitution; and,
BE IT ALSO RESOLVED THAT the Confederacy of Nations strongly objects to the harassment of the Innu by Newfoundland Government officials and that the National Chief and members of the Confederacy pressure the Newfoundland and Canadian Governments to stop this harassment; and,
BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED THAT the Executive Council including the National Chief do whatever is necessary and possible to have the Canadian Government cease the low-level flights and military manouvers and fulfill its duty to protect and respect the rights of the Innu Nation.
MOVED BY Guy Bellefleur (La Romaine, Quebec) SECONDED BY John Bekale (Dene Nations, NWT)
Edmonton, Alberta October 31, 1985
Reprinted from Akwesasne Notes
Also
“The militarization, that’s what you have to fight,” says Francesca Snow. “They will destroy the land, they will destroy the animals, and they will destroy your life.”
Innu Women and NATO: The Occupation of Nitassinan, from Cultural Survival (1990)
“For the 9,500 native people of northern Quebec and Labrador known as Innu, 1988 has been the fourth year of active protest against NATO’s low-level jet flights and simulated bombing runs.”
At war with the fighters: To Labrador’s Innu, NATO is an enemy, by Glen Allen (1988)
If We Must Fight, Let’s Fight for the Most Glorious Nation, Insubordination