Intro:

Silence and dispossession are connected. Those who have been displaced from their lands no longer can tell their stories in the places where the stories belong. Those who have been denied the right to their ways of life are not heard. Those who have denied or subverted the rights of others will insist that those others have nothing to say. And they themselves, the colonists and their governments and churches, often have not wanted the history of the colonised to be heard.

Much of my work has been centred on the double need to listen, to find the history and hear the stories and, at the same time, to support those who resist dispossession and silence.

This work has included participation as a witness or so-called ‘expert opinion’ in a number of public inquiries and court cases. And, on two occasions, as a person given the job, along with others, of reviewing a project that has entailed or is going to cause dispossession. In each of these roles the job has meant both listening and bringing what I have heard to those in power, or the courts that have had, at critical moments in the modern history of Indigenous peoples, the job of adjudicating the relationship between the dispossessors and the actual or potentially dispossessed.

The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry. Known as The Berger Inquiry, 1974-77

Berger Inquiry. Photo: Michael Jackson / Prince of Whales Northern Heritage Centre

Much has been written about the Berger Inquiry. (for details see wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackenzie_Valley_Pipeline_Inquiry.) Its most important and brilliantly innovative feature was a series of open-ended community hearings. Thomas Berger, supported in this aspect of the Inquiry most directly and crucially by Michael Jackson, professor of law at the University of British Columbia, decided from the start of the Inquiry that it must be a forum and process that ensured the voices of the peoples of the Mackenzie Valley would be heard. And Berger understood that to ensure that that these voices were authentic, and not constrained by either limitations of time or intimidating and alienating formalities. To these ends, he arranged to travel to all the communities and towns of the potentially affected area, and, in whatever venue each community chose, to listen to people’s concerns and questions for as long as they, the people of the communities, might need. These, ‘the community hearings’, became the basis of Berger’s understanding of the meaning and implications of the project along the Mackenzie Valley itself.

An important feature of the community hearings was the extent to which they were reported in the media. Through the involvement of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the process of the Berger Inquiry became a regular feature of news and comment, both in the North and across the country. Reinforcing this national engagement with the Inquiry, and taking the view that the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline raised questions of deep national significance, Berger also arranged for there to be hearings in major cities.

Berger and his team also organised formal hearings in Yellowknife, capital city of what was then The Northwest Territories (including what would later become Nunavut). At these formal hearings, specialist and technical issues could be raised and interrogated. Since this was a Royal Commission, Berger decided that these hearings should be carried out under oath, with rights of cross-examination given to each of the interested parties. Thus lawyers and specialists represented First Nations (especially the Inuvialuit of the Mackenzie Delta and the Dene of the Mackenzie Valley), the pipeline companies proposing the project, and the Commission itself. Issues ranged from the problem of construction on permafrost, possible impacts on caribou migrations, economic opportunities and risks, to possible effects on social and cultural realities.

Evidence on all of these issues was led by individual with relevant experience and expertise or panels of specialists; each such witness was then cross-examined by lawyers representing opposing views.

My role in the Inquiry began at the formal hearings in Yellowknife. The Committee of Original People’s Entitlement (COPE), the organisation that represented the Inuvialuit of the Mackenzie Delta, gave evidence through panels. These were coordinated by the Canadian geographer and northern expert Peter Usher, who had for some years been working with Nellie Cournyer, President of Cope, and Inuvialut elders of the region. COPE asked me to make submissions to the Inquiry on the nature of modern change and industrial impacts across the Canadian Arctic. At the same time, the Inquiry itself commissioned two submissions from me relating to the problem of alcohol in the north, and the prospects for Inuktitut, the Inuit language, in the context of rapid social change.

These submissions were subsequently published, with minor editorial corrections, as:

‘Industrial Impact in the Canadian North’, Polar Record, Vol 18, No 115, 1977, p 333-339

‘Eskimo: A Language With a Future?’ , Polar Record, Vol 18, No 117, 1977, p 587-592

‘Alcohol’, Études Inuit, 1, Laval, 1978

Following the conclusion of all the hearings, the Inquiry had the formidable task of assessing and reviewing the massive volume of evidence and technical detail, as well as the opposing opinions it had heard in relation to both engineering and socio-economic realities. I was invited to be a member of the team involved in this analysis and then to work with Justice Berger (along with other members of his team) on preparation of the two volumes of his report. I was much more engaged with the writing of Volume 1, in which the socio-economic questions are raised, than of Volume 2, which is focused on technical matters. Based on considerations and discussion set out in Volume 1, Berger reached his primary recommendation: that no pipeline or energy corridor along the Mackenzie Valley go ahead for at least ten years, allowing, in that time, for the resolution of outstanding Land Claims in the region. The socio-economic and cultural discussion, along with considerations of land claims, in the first volume of the report, are critical to understanding Berger’s recommendations, as also to getting a picture of the Canadian North at that time.

Volume 1 of the Inquiry’s final report was released in June, 1977. It was subsequently published as:

‘Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland’, Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1978.