Wars change soldiers and the ones that he had seen had changed Will’s faith in his army. The Canada he deserted had deserted honour first when it walked away from its pledge to the Afghanis he had fought to protect. For Canadian politicians, Will thought, honour is a pliable thing. He and a few others soldiers were the real army, the army of soul, duty, singleness of mind and purpose.
He knew and accepted that race meant nothing in the army. There, only truth, duty, and valour command all. The creed needs no explanation, abides no excuses, and has no nationality. But his people, his people, were the Cree; he would not desert them. Instead he was now part of a different army, as honourable as his Canadian Forces, and it would fight as well and maybe even win. He promised himself long before he returned home that no matter the success or failures of the Movement, he would lead his people to his kind of peace and freedom.
* * *
Out the window, below, Will could see his old home, the James Bay territory: a mass of granite, part of the Canadian Shield, one of the oldest geological formations on the planet; endless mountaintops, smooth and peakless, ancient yet enduring, shaped by the grinding of advancing glaciers and the constant assault of wind, snow, and rain; and everywhere the sparse landscape commanded by black spruce, just “the forest” in his youth, but, as he had learned later, actually the largest single-species forest in the world. To the north, where the trees reluctantly gave way, the lichen – reindeer moss, as it was commonly called – covered the rocks and thin topsoil like a soft, pale green mat. Cladonia rangiferina. To the white man, strange green stuff on rocks, but to the people, vital food for the caribou they hunted and, sometimes, for the hunters as well.
His people, the Cree, and the Inuit with whom they shared the land in northern Quebec, had hunted the caribou, along with other animals, for millennia before the whites came. They had learned how to survive in this harsh place; and, Will thought, despite all the terrible changes the arrival of the whites had brought, they still managed to survive. For Will, the approximately 12,500 Cree and the few hundred scattered Inuit families who continued to eke out a living on the northern perimeter of the territory personified the tenacity of the human mind in the face of nature’s indifferent outrages.
The outrages inflicted by the whites were more difficult to deal with. Not only had most of the animals on which the natives depended for their livelihood been killed, not only had the whites brought disease and the alcohol that had destroyed so many lives, but most of their land had been taken too. Today, they shared the territory with about 15,000 non-natives, many of whom were transients.
Will knew everyone in the territory was once a transient. The first inhabitants were migrating natives who settled on the land because they found just enough substance and a climate just tolerable enough to provide a precarious existence. Boucanier’s distant ancestors had settled the area as fishers, hunters, and gatherers long before history came to these places. They lived off the land – what else could they do? Like native people across northern Canada, they could not conceive of any other world, and only moved on to a new sameness that offered better hunting grounds once they had depleted the area where they had been living. Or they moved to escape savage, bloody competition with other bands and the “meat-eaters, the Eskimo.” But nature was the real enemy, always unforgiving and deceitful, ready to snare anyone who ventured too far onto the land, or worse, the water. Will had no illusions about it. For centuries, sameness, violence, and hard nature had framed the Cree’s existence. But they had found joy as well as hardship, and they had loved the land as well as they feared it.
Much later, Europeans moved through and into the territory, to trap, prospect for minerals, and to hunt and fish. Some settled in small communities to service the transients and the mines. Their coming meant trouble: not only disease and booze, but an alien religion based on fear of God rather than his people’s religion founded on harmony between the people, the land, and the spirits. But at first, the Europeans who had stayed in the North shared the Cree’s respect for the land and saw in the bleak wilderness an overwhelming beauty. Later, things had changed; more white men had come to alter the land – to master it, not live with it – and brought disaster to Will’s people on a much greater scale.
The Cree might still be living a so-called traditional life, like the more northerly Inuit, had it not been for the white man’s gluttonous appetite for electricity. But the hydroelectric dams came, and history decided that the Cree would now exist in the unsettled world between the shaman’s animist vision and the complexity of modernity. Lured by jobs and the promise of broader horizons, many native people departed the traditional world to help export to the modern world the energy that drove its machines and its cities, that made European Canada thrive and grow, and in so doing helped the modern world bring disaster to traditional communities.
Negotiators from the communities had, of course, signed papers which all sides expected would at once bridge the gap between and protect the two worlds. These “treaties” supposedly allowed all the economic benefits, the good of the modern world, to be blended into the traditional native world. Unfortunately, the communities found that these papers were no barriers against all that was bad in the modern world. The white man’s economy took away the reasons, the rhythms of the old ways, turning tradition into inertia, ignorance, and stale custom. But it didn’t bring Will’s people into its rhythms either; it left them wandering like vagrants between a world that no longer existed and one they couldn’t enter.
No more. Will knew he was himself in part a product of the white man’s world. He was a modern soldier as well as a traditional warrior, at home amid technology and organization as well as at home on the land. After today, he would dedicate all his skills to the service of the people – a promise, he sometimes pondered, that might one day make him king.
The airplane brought him back to his childhood world and his people, scattered in tiny communities with familiar names like Wemindji, Eastmain, and Waskaganish along the coast of James Bay, and in others such as Nemaska, Sakami, Waswanipi, and Oujé-Bougoumou farther inland. But it was Chisasibi on the south bank of the La Grande Rivière that held his special attention. His home village, yes. Near the James Bay coast. But also near Radisson, the administrative centre of the La Grande power project, and six kilometres from it, the Robert-Bourassa hydroelectric power plant.
Will tightened his seat belt as the Dash 8, banging and complaining, lowered its landing gear in the final approach to the runway. The pilot fought the strong wind, and the little plane, drifting sideways as it descended to the tarmac, bounced twice, and then, its engines roaring in protest, slowed to a halt just before running out of runway. As the Dash taxied toward the terminal, the young native attendant made the usual empty plea for the passengers to remain seated and said “Welcome to Chisasibi” unconvincingly in three languages.
Will reached for the bag under his seat and checked his watch. If his luggage had come through without damage, and his contact from the local cell was on time – and sober – he would get straight to work training whatever “warriors” the local band chief had assembled for him. He had low expectations for his new troops, but that was okay. He didn’t need JTF2 for his mission. The kids only needed to do as they were told and show some steadiness in the initial attack. He would do the rest.
Monday, August 30, 1220 hours
Akwesasne: Native People’s Council Planning Headquarters
Alex woke abruptly as the van slid roughly and halted at the entrance to somewhere. He pushed himself up on an elbow from his cramped backseat bed and slid half-awake onto the floor with bright sunlight shining in his face. How long had he been out? More importantly, where was he?
Although Alex was a key combat leader in the NPA, he knew that his status didn’t mean he was a trusted agent in the inner circle.