Promised Lands

UPROOTED REPEATEDLY BY DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS, THE OUJÉ-BOUGOUMOU CREE WANDERED BOREAL QUEBEC FOR 70 YEARS BEFORE FINDING A PERMANENT HOME. FOR SOME, THE JOURNEY CONTINUES.

- JULIAN BRAVE NOISECAT

ABEL BOSUM, GRAND CHIEF of the Grand Council of the Crees, plants his dress shoes where his parents’ house once sat on a thin wooded spit that curls into Doré Lake like a dog’s tongue into a bowl of water. A late September breeze rushes through the birch trees. Bosum’s mind turns to the past. This was the site of the final village from which his people, the Oujé-Bougoumou Cree Nation, were uprooted by a mining company — this one a gold pit owned by a fellow named Campbell — in the unrelenting pursuit of monetizable minerals from the Canadian Shield.

The Bible says the Israelites wandered the wilderness for 40 years before Moses led them to the Promised Land. The Oujé-Bougoumou Cree roamed the boreal near what is now the town of Chibougamau, Que., like squatters, seeking shelter in roadside shacks, miners’ tents and trapline cabins for some 70 years before Bosum led them to secure a permanent reserve on the shores of Lake Opémisca, about an hour’s drive from here, in 1992. For some, the exodus might not be over.

Bosum was born in 1955 at nearby Lake Chibougamau, separated from Doré Lake by a thin isthmus across which the Cree could easily portage their canoes. He was the eldest of his mother Lucy’s 11 children. Lucy’s parents forbade her marriage to Abel’s biological father, Cypien Caron, a French-Canadian, and so Lucy instead married Sam Neepoosh, who was a father figure to Abel. Standing where his childhood home once did, Bosum surveys the lakeside peninsula. This is his first time back since the OujéBougoumou Cree hosted a healing camp on this plot 20 years ago. Today, it’s the site of a small family farm with chickens, rabbits and a lone cat. When Bosum and I stop in, the owners aren’t home, so technically, we are trespassing.