HIS PLACE IN TIME

Curt Meine

We head north at sunset through choppy waters along the east shore of James Bay. Fred guides our fleet of three fully loaded, twenty-foot freighter canoes though a labyrinth of islands, mainland points, and submerged granite ledges. Fred is the ouchimaw in this part of the Cree nation of Wemindji. Among the James Bay Cree, the ouchimawch serve (in the words of one student of their vital role) as "senior grassroots managers of this vulnerable ecosystem."

We have spent several days at the community's annual gathering on Old Factory Island, forty miles downshore as the canoe glides (figure 1.1). Now we are heading back to the village, where the Cree relocated two generations ago, in 1959. Bouncing over the waves in the pink subarctic twilight, we pass islands crowned in dark spires of white spruce and balsam fir. One small island catches my eye. Beneath a rise of barren granite, a series of terraces steps down toward the chilly waters of James Bay. The land around the bay in Quebec and Ontario is rebounding. At the time of the last glacial maximum, twenty thousand years ago, this place lay buried under five thousand meters of glacial ice at the heart of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. The burden was so immense that it compressed the earth's crust. Over the millennia, as the great ice sheet melted back, the depressed land has sprung back. It is still rising. The geologist's term for the phenomenon is isostatic rebound. The Cree speak of "the growing land."

The terraces on the small island are ancient beach ridges, each one marking a pause in time as the land has grown. The terrain at Wemindji has risen about seventy meters over the last six thousand years. It continues to rebound at the rate of about a meter per century—fast enough to outpace the rate of sea level rise that also came with the melting, fast enough even to be noted across a human lifetime. Wemindji's elders can tell you of places that have emerged from the waters, of plants and animals living differently here than they once did, of the Cree responding and adjusting.

My opportunity to be here has come through colleagues from McGill University in Montreal who have joined the Cree in an innovative partnership. The academics and the Wemindji Cree are collaborating on a proposal to establish a protected area that would embrace two entire watersheds feeding into James Bay. The proposed protected area would coincide closely with the hunting territory that Fred oversees in his capacity as ouchimaw. It is a creative proposal that defies traditional expectations—as well as recent criticisms—of protected areas as a conservation strategy.

The twelve hundred Cree of Wemindji represent the latest generation to live upon, and with, the growing land. By almost any conservation standard they have lived well here and have done so for some five thousand years. Cree traditions and practices have served to reinforce a tight network of reciprocal relationships connecting the land, the water, the plants and animals, the people, and the spirit.

In the four centuries since the arrival of the Shaped-Wood People from Europe, the resilience of those relationships has been constantly tested. Yet, even against the backdrop of those last four centuries, the rate of change in the last two generations stands out as remarkable. Transformation has come to the culture, economy, and landscape of the James Bay Cree in a series of cascades, one consequence after another: the forced relocation of Cree children to government-supported residential schools; the movement toward permanent settlement in Wemindji; the loss of the age-old pattern of families living a subsistence life in "the bush" for half the year; the announcement in 1971 of the Quebec provincial government's vast plan for hydropower development in the Cree lands east of James Bay; construction of the paved Route de la Baie James to facilitate the hydropower plan. Now the pressure to open gold and diamond mines in Wemindji country is growing. And in this subarctic land, the impacts of global warming on the ice and wind, the plants and animals are noticed even by the younger Cree. The Wemindji Cree wonder, along with communities around the world, how changes in their land will result in changes in their identity—and vice versa—and how they ought to respond.

My academic colleagues and my new friends from Wemindji are gathered to review the progress of their partnership. My appointed task, the reason for my even being here, is to offer a few relevant—I hope—words about Aldo Leopold and the land ethic in the land of the Cree. I am not at all convinced that this is possible.

The sun sets by the time Fred maneuvers our big canoe around the last spruce-studded point, into calmer waters, toward the lights of Wemindji.

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As we may learn from the growing land, the terra is only relatively firma. Our science and our stories tell us that land changes and that human communities change. They change in different ways, at different rates. They change in response to each other. They change due to forces large and small, long-term and immediate, far away and close at hand. Amid such change, conservation aims to encourage ways of...