An Apology
As the heads of Parks Canada, I write to you with a critical request; Do not let the sun dawn on a second century of colonial violence at Wood Buffalo National Park. I fear that if you do not hear this call now, this Land[i] will not support the lives it was designed to protect in the century to come. To begin this conciliation process, you must apologize to those this Park was designed to exclude; the Dene, Cree and Chippewa peoples who have sustained it since time immemorial. In the wake of this apology, you must demonstrate the sincerity of your words and support their guardianship of the Land.
Inspired by a vision of the future written by Chloe Dragon Smith and Robert Grandjambe, I have drafted some suggestions for your apology. You must do as they suggest; make these words your own and carry them to the Mikisew Cree First Nation, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Fort Chipewyan Metis, Salt River First Nation, Little Red River Cree First Nation, Fort Smith Metis Council, K'atl'Odeeche First Nation, Hay River Metis Council, Deninu Kue First Nation, and Fort Resolution Metis Council. You must stand before these communities and name these wrongs. Don't be surprised if your apologies aren't immediately accepted; you must back them up with transformational change and repatriation of Indigenous Land.
Like you, I do not intimately know this Land; my suggestions are all drawn from the western archive, and so they are just a starting place. When you go to these communities with your apologies, please listen without defensiveness to the hurt that this institution, and the people who continue to make it possible, have caused. You will undoubtedly find there is more to atone for.
Ron, Michael, Joëlle, and Darlene, I was once like you. I have hated the idea of taking animal's lives or the burning of forests, but that was because I had been told through my language and culture that nature is something outside of us and that we cannot trust humans with it. To care for nature is to leave it alone. But this Land was never empty, was it? I was wrong. We all need to admit we were wrong.
Harvesters and guardians have always managed this Land, but Canadian society, the society we have inherited and benefited from, has been trying to erase their stewardship and knowledge for generations. Will you be part of ending this genocidal campaign? Will you open your eyes to what these communities have to teach us, namely, how to live well and in reciprocity with the Land?
In apologizing you will cause pain and trauma to resurface. You must work with each community before, during, and after the apology to ensure that those hearing it are supported and cared for. This process must not leave people further harmed. Remember, this act of making amends is not to appease your guilt. No one in these communities is under any obligation to make you feel better. There are somethings that cannot and should not be reconciled.[ii]
Thank you, and please expand on the apologies and commitments that follow.
Sincerely,
Michelle Wilson
- I want to speak to you today about what we did. When I say we, I want to be clear I am speaking for many branches of the Dominion government and the people who ran them. Sometimes this we refers to treaty negotiators, the Department of the Interior, or Parks Canada. I will not confine my apologies solely to the actions of Parks Canada because it is impossible to untangle my institution from others enforcing colonization and assimilation. The creation of Wood Buffalo National Park, like the establishment of colonial conservation regimes throughout the world, was an act of "ecological imperialism."[iii] I hope by not equivocating which governmental department was responsible for what wrong that I demonstrate my wholesale condemnation of this legacy.
- Our predecessors made brief, prejudiced, and ill-informed forays into your territory at the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s. Men like NWMP inspector A.M. Jarvis and naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton published racist, ignorant reports blaming your ancestors for the wood bison’s decline. Jarvis and Seton's easily disproven accounts set in motion the establishment of Wood Buffalo National Park, which was meant to disposes and displace your communities from its outset.
In 1896 we, the Dominion of Canada, agreed with leaders at Fort Fitzgerald and Fort Smith on a four to five-year moratorium on hunting wood bison. These leaders consented to the closed season because they were concerned for the survival of their kin, human and non-human. Your ancestors used traditional knowledge to conserve and manage resources since time immemorial, yet our ancestors ignored the complex ecological knowledge they held.
The ban on hunting bison between the Slave and Peace rivers south of Great Slave Lake has never truly ended. In 1899 the government's treaty negotiators deceived signatories at Fort Resolution by telling them the government would not enforce the ban. We reneged on our commitments time and again. Instead of trying to understand one another better, we exploited miscommunication to deceive. We are sorry, and we commit to working to regain your trust.
- From its first inception in the racist mind of Maxwell Graham, Wood Buffalo National Park was designed to be a place that excluded Indigenous people, a place where Canada could extinguish treaty rights. We turned exercising your rights and sovereignty into a privilege. We used racial dogmas to determine who had hereditary rights within the Park, and we used a politics of purity to drive communities apart. Who was and wasn't permitted in the Park separated families. We ignored letters pleading to be reunited.
- We armed police to arrest and harass your guardians.
- We particularly want to apologize to the kin of Francois Byskie; the first Indigenous person arrested for hunting wood bison. We are ashamed of NWMP inspector W.H. Routledge who scoffed at Francois Byskie’s claim of near starvation, his sentence of 10 days hard labour, and his theft of the bison’s remains.[iv] We also want to apologize to the kin of Pierre Gibot, Theophile Gibot, John “Mustus” Gladu, Joseph Wakwan, Joseph Pamatchakwew, Leo Pamatchakwew, Boniface Driscoll, Modeste Desjarlais, Joseph Desjarlais, Aimable Pamatchakwew, Leonard Packham, David Beaulieu, and Fred Gibot. Not only for criminalizing harvesting bison, which we now recognize as an act of resistance and survival, but for the life sentence of exclusion from the Park. This sentence made an already precarious existence even more difficult for these men and their families. We would like to work with you to make restitution for these wrongs.
- We created a policy of surveillance and intimidation. Park administration met resistance to these policies with expulsion. Because the issuing of permits was at the superintendent's discretion, countless other families were undoubtedly forced from their Land without trial or recourse. We want to work with you, the descendants of the dispossessed, to move beyond access and towards true sovereignty on the Land.
- When the Parks Branch assumed direct control of Wood Buffalo National Park in 1965, over four hundred individuals had recognized hereditary hunting rights within the Park, though many were not actively harvesting.[v] We spent the first years of our stewardship arguing our legal right under Treaty 8 to gradually exclude native harvesters from Wood Buffalo National Park. We were not entirely successful, but we tried, and we apologize that we made your communities fight, yet again, for what was theirs.
- When the United States Government stripped the Salish, Kootenai, and Pend Oreille peoples of the Flathead reservation of their lands, we opportunistically bought their bison and called it salvation. Instead of making space for these plains bison to resume enriching ecosystems, we tried to harness their symbolic and financial potential by treating them like domestic cattle. The resulting ecological disaster embarrassed us. With the world's eyes on us, we didn't want to expend the political capital to carry out the mass slaughter of over six thousand bison. So instead, we rounded up the young, the still nursing, and the sick and sent them to your Land without consultation or permission from your community. We knew many of the bison would die. We thought, "well, it will be far from the public's view there, far up in the North." But of course, your ancestors saw it. We buried their accounts of thousands dropping dead in those first years.[vi] It shouldn’t have surprised anyone that wolf populations ballooned after we abandoned thousands of young bison “into unfamiliar habitat, with no traditions, no leaders and no experience with predators.”[vii] We responded to wolf proliferation by introducing poisons into your Lands. Our lack of care is inexcusable.
- We saw the bison as an exploitable resource and used their bodies to save money. Our park wardens slaughtered bison one day and persecuted your hunters the next. Later, when moose became scarce (in part because we had prevented your Land management), we imposed hunting quotas. Still, we would not let you hunt bison within the Park. Even when we built abattoirs and killed hundreds a year, still we kept you from the bison. Our roundups were dangerous. 10% of the bison we corralled died in the process. We thought our ways were best. We refused to listen or learn from you. We were wrong.
- We recognize that by slaughtering bison within the Park and giving the meat to missionaries and Indian agents, we contributed to the residential school system and intentionally engendered dependency instead of acknowledging your right, established in treaties we signed, to hunt and practice lifeways on your own lands. Our complicity in supporting The Holy Angels Residential School[viii] is unforgivable and we will not forget the intergenerational harm it caused.[ix] We recognize that our attempts to exclude you from the Land and our government’s kidnapping of your children were connected tools of colonization. Assimilation and control were at the heart of both efforts. We must now put our efforts into supporting your work towards decolonization.
- The best cuts of meat from the mass slaughters in the 1950s were sold south at subsidized prices, while your communities were offered meat rejected by southern meatpackers at ten times the price. We recognize the destructive hypocrisy of denying harvesters within the Park their modest and consistent request of one bison per family – a request the Dominion government agreed to when they imposed the first ban on wood bison hunting in 1896 – while carrying out export-driven mass slaughter.[x] Particularly, as revenue from the sales was used to bolster the park administration and not reinvested in the communities within it, “where they could have created circular reciprocity with the Land.”[xi]
- Our pools of knowledge are shallow, and our spatial and temporal scales are different than yours. We try and develop models to predict, plan, and control the infinitely complex relationships of the Land with the least investment of time and money. We set policies from a distance when they need to be local, and the tenure of our initiatives match the cycles of elections, not the generational commitment the Land needs
Your pools of knowledge are deep and dependent on a connection to place and language.
We tried to sever those ties; for that, we will work for generations to prove our remorse.
- We have come to embrace the term “two-eyed seeing”, a Mi’kmaw concept of “learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of mainstream knowledges and ways of knowing, and to use both these eyes together for the benefit of all.”[xii] But we cannot let our newfound plurality obscure the fact that for most of its existence the Canadian government stripped Indigenous peoples of their treaty rights and cultural identities if they sought a university education. From 1876 to 1961 we tried to outlaw “two-eyed seeing”.
- We are taught that borders on maps are natural. We have come to see that the Park's borders are a conceptual construct with dire consequences when imposed on the Land. Not only because we have created a swath of Land where vital relationships between human and non-human have been severed, but because imagined borders gave us the convenient cover to not fight against the forces that flow into the Park; Dams, pulp mills, oil extraction, climate change.
Our attachment to conceptual borders extends to policing the boundaries between Wood Bison and Plains Bison, between pure and hybrid, between contaminated and uncontaminated. We have been steeped in the logic of white supremacy so long that we did not see how these logics of purity were weaponized against both bison and your people. The borders imagined by white supremacy place bison and Indigenous peoples outside the protective bounds of white and human. We believed our science was objective and ignored its eugenicist overtones. We were blind to how these discourses traumatized and retraumatized over decades.
- When convenient, we butchered thousands of bison we knew to have Bovine Tuberculosis for human consumption. However, when TB was eliminated from Canadian cattle in the 1990s, we allowed Agriculture Canada to push through plans to eradicate all bison in Wood Buffalo National Park—and replace them with pure and uncontaminated wood bison from Elk Island National Park and the Mackenzie Bison Sanctuary.
- Instead of consulting with First Nations and Metis communities within WBNP about the Brucellosis and Tuberculosis afflicting the bison, the Environmental Assessment Review Panel determined that complete extermination was the only way forward. Only then did we want to hear from your communities. Not as peoples whose Land claims, treaties, and cultures give them an authoritative and valued voice, but lumped into general public comment. Again, we chose to ignore your unique connection to the bison and distinct rights under Treaty 8. On your own time and at your own expense, you came and battled state bureaucracy and lobbyists. Your elders made it clear that this was not simply a debate about diseases and genetic purity but the role of Indigenous harvesters in managing the Land upon which they depend. The testimony of members of your communities demonstrated the limitations of our knowledge and values. Chief Johnson Sewepagaham of Little Red River Cree Nation told the panel, “all of these animals are related in terms of dependence and inter-dependence with each other and how they function within…. The bush. Every animal has a role in the whole development of the bush. The wolf has a reason for being there, the wood buffalo has a reason for being there, the moose has a reason for being there.”[xiii] The extermination campaign would have been disastrous because it followed the same logic as Buffalo National Park before it; it imagined the bison were an insular manageable commodity and ignored that they are an integral strand in a complex web of obligate relations. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the managers believed they could wipe the slate clean and start over, undoing the mistakes they made when they brought the plains bison from Buffalo National Park. They chose to believe that pulling the strand of bison from this web wouldn’t cause it to unravel. You forced them to face the truth.
- We are ashamed that we fought for nearly a century to avoid fulfilling our Treaty 8 commitments to your Nations. We apologize to you, the Mikisew First Nation. Even after the 1986 land entitlement agreement returned nearly nine thousand square kilometres of traditional territory to your nation, we failed in our obligation to consult with you and later fought your nation in court over the disruptive building of a winter road. This pattern has continued up until this day.
What could have been the beginning of a new relationship instead proved to be just a continuation of adversarial acts, and we take responsibility for those hostilities. It is shameful that Smith's Land First Nation and the Salt River First Nation, had to wait until 2000 and 2001 to have their claims to reserve lands within Wood Buffalo National Park (established under Treaty 8) met. We acknowledge that our organization, Parks Canada, was not the only barrier to establishing your reserve lands, but we bear responsibility as an arm of colonial authority.
We recognize that decolonization isn’t a metaphor. We, Parks Canada, have committed $59.9 million to revitalizing Wood Buffalo National Park. We now recognize that the best way to protect Wood Buffalo National Park is to return it to its original stewards, and to support the transition of Wood Buffalo National Park into an interconnected web of IPCAs. We are not abdicating responsibility for the mess we have made; we will be here to provide knowledge and assistance but in the end it will be your governance systems and laws that guide us. This process will not be swift or simple, but we hope that you will hear the sincerity of our apologies and believe us when we say will see it through.
[i] My capitalization of Land was learned from Smith and Grandjambe’s Briarpatch Magazine article “To Wood Buffalo National Park, with Love.” They explain the capitalization as a way to “convey its encompassing importance. When [they] speak of (L)and, [they] acknowledge that it includes People, cultures, Languages, and knowledge.”
[ii] Tuck & Yang 2012
[iii] Sandlos 2007
[iv] Sandlos 2007
[v] Sandlos 2007
[vi] McCormack
[vii] Van Camp 1989
[viii] I have found numerous references to bison meat being sent to a residential school or schools. It is often refered to as relief. As the children from the Wood Buffalo area were sent to the Holy Angels Residential School I assume the meat was as well. Please confirm this within your own files.
[ix] McCormack
[x] Sandlos 2007
[xi] Smith and Grandjambe
[xii] Elder Dr. Albert Marshall qtd Reid 2020
[xiii] Qt Ferguson and Burke