INDEPTH: ABORIGINAL CANADIANS
The Innu of Labrador: From Davis Inlet to Natuashish
CBC News Online | December 14, 2004
It started out with hopes for a new beginning. After years of living in squalor and struggling with social problems, the 680 residents of Davis Inlet started packing up in December 2002 to head for a new settlement that had been built for them.
The plans for Natuashish began to be hatched in the late 1990s, after news reports detailed how unbearable life was in the Innu community. Crammed living spaces. No running water. Buckets for toilets. No reliable heating.
There was little to keep people occupied. Alcoholism was rampant and many of the children of Davis Inlet were addicted to sniffing gasoline. The community suffered from one of the highest suicide rates in the world.
The town of Davis Inlet had been established in 1967 after government officials decided the nomadic Innu should have the opportunity to settle down. They were promised comfortable homes with indoor plumbing.
Those promises were never kept. Instead, the residents of Davis Inlet found themselves slipping out of touch with their traditional way of life - and they had difficulty adapting to a new way of life. Rates of alcoholism increased.
In 1993, details of the conditions in Davis Inlet made headlines across the country - and around the world - after a tribal police officer released a videotape showing six Innu children getting high by sniffing gasoline. They shouted that they wanted to die.
Within two years, the federal government agreed to move the residents of Davis Inlet so services and facilities could be improved.
The government spent more than $150 million to carve out a new community in the bush 15 kilometres away on the Labrador mainland and to build and furnish modern split-level bungalows for the Innu to live in.
The move began in December 2002 and was completed within seven months.
By the time the community moved, most of the gas-sniffing problems had ended. Many of the children had been through treatment programs. Some stayed clean. Others continued to have problems.
"The reason you're not seeing kids out there anymore with gas bags in their mouths is because they transfer all their addictions to drugs," Luke Rich told CBC News as he prepared to move into his new home in 2002. "Most of them are very heavily into drugs."
Rich's son, Desmond Rich, and Lisa Tshakapesh, Desmond's girlfriend, were heavy gas sniffers in 2000, but they gave it up after several friends nearly died.
"Kids are doing drugs now. Marijuana, 50 bucks a gram. That's it," he said. Desmond Rich and Lisa Tshakapesh said they both began abusing alcohol, and moving from run-down Davis Inlet to Natuashish wasn't likely to change that.
Report points to problems in Natuashish
A year-and-a-half after the last of the Davis Inlet homes was vacated, reports of new problems surfaced.
A two-year study - commissioned by the federal government - found that only one in three Innu children attends school and 35 per cent of students suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome, which is caused when a woman drinks a significant amount of alcohol during pregnancy.
The study also found that most 15-year-olds in the community were an average of five years behind on their math and reading levels. In addition, only three children from Davis Inlet-Natuashish had graduated high school since 1993.
The report's authors attribute some of the problem to language. About two-thirds of students hear only the Innu language in their homes but the students are taught almost entirely in English. Interpreters have been hired for the school in Natuashish, but they are rarely used.
"It's a national scandal," said Lloyd Wicks a child and youth advocate in Newfoundland. "If this were happening in any white community, there would be an outcry."
Jody Hale, a teacher who moved with the community from Davis Inlet to Natuashish and worked with Innu children for three years, said it's time to start training Innu teachers.
"What I'd like to see there, which would start addressing the problems at the school level, is the development of an Innu curriculum where you start training Innu teachers," said Hale.
Innu leaders say the report shows that the government hasn't learned much over the years but continues to use the same policies and approaches that led to the problems at Davis Inlet more than 30 years ago.
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Total population of Canada: 31,414,000
Total people of aboriginal origin: 1,319,890
Origin
North American Indian:
957,650*
Métis:
266,020*
Inuit:
51,390*
More than one aboriginal origin:
44,835
Reserves
People of aboriginal origin living on reserve: 285,625
People of aboriginal origin living off reserve: 1,034,260
People of non-aboriginal origin living on reserve: 36,230
(Source: 2001 Census, Statistics Canada)
*includes people of a single aboriginal origin and those of a mix of one aboriginal origin with non-aboriginal origins
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