Lubicon Lake Indian Nation
Little Buffalo Lake, AB
403-629-3945
Fax: 403-629-3939
Mailing address:
3536 - 106 Street
Edmonton, AB T6J 1A4
403-436-5652
Fax: 403-437-0719
March 13, 1993
Enclosed for your information is a copy of a review of the Goddard book
on the Lubicons written by a prominent Canadian academic and appearing in
a Canadian scholarly journal.
* * * * *
Canadian Ethnic Studies, Vol. XXIV, No. 2, 1992
Last Stand of the Lubicon Cree
John Goddard. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 191. 256 pp. $26.95
cloth.
Anyone in Canada who reads a newspaper or tunes in to CBC public affairs
programming will be familiar with names like Grassy Narrows, Oka and
Lubicon Lake as points of confrontation between Canada's First Nations
and government at the federal and provincial levels. Without a
comprehensive and well situated narrative to contextualize these crisis
points, however, the reader is left with sympathetic feelings but little
real understanding. LAST STAND OF THE LUBICON brings together the
information necessary to understanding one such experience, the nearly
successful bureaucratic and corporate attempt to annihilate a small Cree
community in Northern Alberta.
John Goddard is a former Canadian Press journalist now doing independent
investigative reporting. Goddard's book is very much the work of a
meticulous and dedicated journalist rather than that of a disinterested
scholar. I mean this as a positive comment. Without access to the
information Goddard brings together, scholarly analysis of the Lubicon
case would be impossible. Goddard's medium is entirely appropriate for
weaving the story of events among the Lubicon into the larger history of
which we are all a part. As one gets more deeply into the narrative,
there comes a moment of truth. This story is about us as Canadians, not
just about a small and often oppressed band in northern Alberta. Goddard
takes the reader through a labyrinth of bureaucratic and corporate deceit
that has driven, confused and educated the Lubicon Cree. The non-
aboriginal reader experiences events through Lubicon eyes and then
realizes that his or her own institutions are the instruments of this
oppression and frustration.
It is impossible to read this book without taking sides. Unlike a few
scholars who are so terrified of being identified as advocates that they
fail to state the obvious conclusions about cultural genocide, Goddard
tells the Lubicon story as a sympathetic outsider who has been witness to
events about which he cannot remain silent. Advocacy, in this case, is
the only informed alternative. In telling the Lubicon story, Goddard
takes the reader through the educational process he experienced with them
between 1984 and 1991.
The story that unfolds as the Lubicon's last stand is an almost
Kafkaesque nightmare that begins when bands of Cree people hunting and
trapping away from the major rivers were not enumerated by the
commissioners for Treaty Eight in 1899. An attempt to correct that error
in 1939 failed. By 1941, scores of Lubicon Crees had been removed from
the band rolls by a zealously racist bureaucrat, Malcolm McCrimmon.
Families were broken by this callous attempt to reduce the Indian
population. Orphans were taken from their adoptive families. Those
lucky enough to retain Indian status were forcibly separated rom those
capriciously denied status.
The injustices that Goddard documents would have been bad enough if they
were the product of an assimilationist policy carried out by an
overzealous bureaucrat in less enlightened times, but the 1940s were
nothing compared to what the Lubicon Cree suffered in the 1960s, 70s, 80s
and 90s. Oil exploration of their lands gave governments a powerful
profit incentive to intensify the oppression. Because the events Goddard
documents are still in process, there is no ending to his story, happy or
otherwise. Happily, though, Goddard's story is also one of heroism and
strength. Lubicon resistance reflects the strength of their young chief,
Bernard Ominayak. Part of Ominayak's success came through his ability to
organize support from sympathetic outsiders, accomplished in partnership
with Fred Lennarson, a brilliant non-aboriginal activist whom the Lubicon
came to call "our white man"(67).
Goddard leads the reader through a maze of legal maneuvering and
stonewalling by the Alberta and federal governments. He presents
invaluable and otherwise unavailable documentation of the Lougheed
government's "master strategy" to subvert Native land rights in the
interest of corporate resource development. As of the book's publication
date, the fate of the Lubicon Cree as a community and Ominayak as its
leader remain in question. In 1991 the federal government successfully
engineered the creation of a "Woodland Cree" band by offering $50 to
eligible voters to participate in a referendum and $1,000 if the
agreement was passed. Beneficiaries of these payments learned later that
all moneys received would be deducted from welfare payments, a condition
affecting up to 90 per cent of band members.
LAST STAND OF THE LUBICONS powerfully demonstrates that capital knows no
community and that the forces of globalization have no respect for local
people or places. The Lubicon experience should serve as a warning to
Canadians generally that similar forces threaten us all. Our prior
complicity as victimizer does not grant us immunity from victimization.
Global forces are impersonal. Only people are personal. John Goddard
gives outsiders a chance to see the Lubicons as people like ourselves.
Robin Ridington
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
University of British Columbia