MURRAY CAMPBELL
PIKANGIKUM, ONT. — The view as the plane descends to the gravel landing strip is a never-ending vista of green. There’s a carpet of conifer trees with a web of magnificent blue lakes, but no roads, no sign of human intrusion.
For countless generations, this has been the traditional land of the Ojibway. They hunted, fished and trapped but left no footprint.
This 1.3-million hectare, pristine wilderness is under threat, however. The Ontario government prohibits commercial forestry on the Crown property above the 51st parallel. But most of the land below that line has been “taken up,” to use the language of the century-old treaty that governs relations between the Ontario government and aboriginals. And the pressure to expand the development zone northward is intense and unrelenting.
The Pikangikum First Nation was among the first bands to recognize this and to fear that non-native forestry companies would move in. For the past decade, the reserve has worked to establish a commercial forestry that it could control.
Those efforts culminated last week when the native-owned Whitefeather Forest Management Corp. signed a land-use deal with the government to allow a forestry operation that would balance environmental and economic interests with traditional aboriginal values.
The signing was a low-key affair in the Pikangikum community hall, which is unadorned except for improbably pink curtains. A prayer from a 92-year-old elder and a meal of walleye and bannock were as ostentatious as the ceremony got.
But the casualness of the three-hour event shouldn’t hide its significance.
“Today is a historic moment,” said Grand Chief Stan Beardy of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, which represents 49 reserves across the north. Ontario Natural Resources Minister David Ramsay was equally effusive.
“We have made mistakes in the past and with your plan, we have been able to learn from those mistakes,” he said. “Your vision to me is very complete.”
The land-use strategy is the first under the northern boreal initiative established in 2000 by the former Progressive Conservative government. Its aim is to allow reserves to assume a leadership role in developing the resources around them and to bring them some desperately needed prosperity. It is expected that commercial forestry in Pikangikum — providing 350 jobs — could begin in a few years.
The 2,300 people living in the 10-square-kilometre reserve, about 450 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay, threw themselves into the complicated task of identifying the resources in the traditional lands (aided by a sophisticated computerized mapping operation that has more than 11,000 data entries) and the wisest ways to exploit them. They were guided at every step by the reserve’s elders.
“This comes from a deep, deep belief in the sustainability of the land…
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