Powley Case
News - Articles I I
Mar. 17, 2003
AUDIENCE: 12,700, 06:12
Length: 00:07:00
Ref# 2B2E62-1
Anchor/Reporters: RUTH REID, RUTH REID, PAUL PIGETT
MORNING NORTH (HR1) (CBCS-FM), SUDBURY
MITIS RIGHTS
MARCUS SCHWABE: In what could be a landmark case, the Supreme Court of Canada is set to consider an Appeal of a case against two Mitis moose hunters. Ontario Courts ruled that the two men were not hunting illegally in 1993 when they killed a moose near Sault Ste. Marie. The Court said they have the same special hunting rights as Canada's aboriginal people, but many provinces are fighting to get that ruling reversed. As Paul Pigett reports from Newfoundland, Mitis across the country are watching this case closely.
DICK MICHELIN / Mitis: Heading down towards a place we call Churchill, I set my traps all down through there...
PAUL PIGETT: Dick Michelin is snow shoeing on a trail not far from North West River, a village about thirty kilometres from Happy Valley Goose Bay.
MICHELIN: My father, his father, his father's father, and his father before him all trapped here in Lake Melville up Churchill Falls, and we just keep on doing what he was doing. He taught me how to set my traps and go around the country, and stuff like that. So it's just passed down.
PIGETT: But hunting and trapping is a lot more difficult for this generation. In the 1990s Dick lost his status as a Labrador Inuit. With an Inuit great great grandfather, an Inuit great grandmother, he decided to join the Labrador Mitis Nation instead, but Newfoundland and Labrador, like all provinces except Alberta, won't recognize special hunting rights for people with mixed aboriginal and European heritage. Michelin says that lack of recognition affects the food he's able to bring home to his family.
MICHELIN: From the day, not a hundred percent of my food comes from the land, but it's pretty high, partridges, rabbit, caribou, porcupine. I still hunt porcupine. Today we're not allowed to, but I still do. I'm not ashamed to say it either, but I think I've got the right as well as anybody else.
PIGETT: Michelin says he knows he's breaking the law and it makes him nervous. It's the same for most of Canada's almost one million Mitis. The two Ontario men at the heart of the Supreme Court case hope to change that. Steven Powley and his son, Roddy, caught a moose near Sault Ste. Marie in 1993. They were charged for not having a license. The case ended up in Ontario's highest court. Mitis leaders say a Court ruling in Ontario has far reaching implications for all Mitis people in Canada. In 2001 the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that as Mitis, Powleys have constitutional rights to hunt moose, but Provincial Governments don't agree. They interpret Mitis as the mixed people of the prairies who signed treaties with government in the 1800s, now it's up to the Supreme Court to decide. Brad Morris is a law professor at the University of Ottawa. He says the Powley case is an important one.
BRAD MORRIS / University of Ottawa Law Professor: This really is the first time, surprisingly enough perhaps, in Canadian history that the highest court in the land is being asked to come to grips with these questions. Who are the Mitis? Who are Mitis communities? What aboriginal rights or treaty rights Mitis people collectively possess?
PIGETT: Morris says First Nations and Inuit must prove their connection to the people who lived in Canada when Europeans first arrived. It's a Supreme Court test that's difficult for the Mitis, who by definition came on the scene after the arrival of the Europeans. If the Court agrees that people with mixed ancestry do have special hunting rights, Morris says a new test will have to be written for Mitis.
MORRIS: Or else really say that the test is the same so long as Mitis people can demonstrate their connection to their Indian or Inuit ancestors.
PIGETT: Ontario's Attorney General argues the Powleys don't do that. Their ties go back to one of Steven Powley's grandmothers. In 1918 she decided not to join in the ojibway reserve near Sault Ste. Marie, as a result Ontario says the Powleys have given up their special hunting rights. The President of the Labrador Mitis Nation disagrees, Todd Russell, traces his heritage to Inuit in Southern Labrador even though the biological connection to his ancestors is diluted. A connection to the original aboriginal society remains.
TODD RUSSELL / President of Labrador Mitis Nation: Inuit hunted, Inuit fished, and they occupied the land and related to each other in particular ways, and you see that in its forms and in its way in our society today. There were Inuit people living on the South coast of Labrador, in to that society came who? Europeans, not in waves. We had Englishmen. They married into families and into a society that was existent. Did it change? No society remains a static, but we're still here, we're still in the same place practicing sometimes only in a different fashion then our ancestors practiced for generation and generations prior to that.
PIGETT: Back on the trap line, Dick Michelin admits that he doesn't know the details of the Powley case, but he's hoping it will mean a better life for all Mitis.
MICHELIN: The way I see it, I mean we should have the right the same as the Inuit or whatever. We should have the same right as they got. I mean our father grew up with their fathers and then that's the way it is.
PIGETT: A ruling on Powley will also give direction to hundreds of other cases against Mitis that are now stalled in Provincial Courts. The Supreme Court should have a ruling in about six months. In Happy Valley Goose Bay, I'm Paul Pigett.
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