Talking about dealing with the poles on his trapline, Waswanipi’s Teddy Otter recalls George Orwell’s book Animal Farm.
“They taught us that in school,” he said, about the story of animals that organize and fight to take control of their own destiny from their human masters, only to see some in their ranks win power and decide that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
“That’s what it’s like dealing with the Grand Council,” he said with a laugh.
The problem, Otter explains, is that the Eeyou Communications Network (a non-profit corporation) has installed poles on both sides of creeks and other water on his trapline in order to run fibre-optic cables over the water.
Isaac Voyageur, Director of the Cree Regional Authority’s Environment and Remedial Works Department, says this is a necessary step to installing cable.
“For fibre-optic cable,” he said, “most of the time it’s buried in the road, due to the fact that it’s electricity infrastructure. But when it crosses a creek, there have to be posts put up on both sides of the creek. That way it doesn’t go too close to the culvert because, if the frost heaves up, it could break. For that reason, they have to string it across small creeks or water.”
Because the lines generally run north, while waterways run west to James Bay, Voyageur says that most cables cross in one place and require only two or three poles per waterway.
“They don’t go along the rivers,” he said. “They cross perpendicularly, at a 90-degree angle.”
Otter, however, didn’t like the poles from the start, and says it took him a long time even to get an explanation of what they were doing with them.
“About four years ago they started clearing some of the land on the side of the road, and they dragged in these greasy poles,” he said. “They were putting these poles on both sides of all my creeks and culverts on the trapline. We didn’t know what was going on. It took me about four years to find out who was doing it.”
Otter says that the Band Council and Cree Trappers’ Association were not helpful in informing him about the installation of the poles, and to make matters worse, he says, they were installed sloppily.
But above all, he’s angry about the danger to birds presented by the lines.
“Every waterway,” he explained, “has fog in the morning and fog in the evening. Birds know that where there’s fog there’s water, so they fly toward the fog. They can’t see the cables. It’s no good – I haven’t had any geese or ducks in the past two years. They avoid the poles – they’re scared of that line. They don’t come near my trapline like they used to.”
Voyageur says that when he and Alfred Loon from ECN and the Grand Council met with Otter on June 28, “[Otter’s] concern was that a bird or a goose could run into [the cable]. So we suggested that we could make them more visible: for example, we could put something reflective on the wire, so that if a bird passes by and sees that, he can avoid that. [Otter] agreed to that measure to be put in place. His concern at the time was that he was afraid birds would run into the wires. It seems like it’s a different scenario that he’s giving [of birds avoiding his trapline entirely].”
Otter remembers the meeting differently.
“I tried to explain [the problem], but they didn’t want to hear any more. They just left. Alfred said we should hang something on the cables, some weight or some ribbons. I said, ‘That’d just make it worse!’”
Voyageur says he’s confused to hear of Otter’s frustration.
“When we left him, he seemed to be happy that we had resolved his issue, and addressed the concerns that he had,” Voyageur said. “He understood that it wasn’t 100% guaranteed that birds wouldn’t actually run into the wires, even if we put these visible markers on them. We weren’t prepared to give him that guarantee.”
The poles and cable, Voyageur underlines, are necessary for the proper functioning of modern life in Eeyou Istchee.
“You have to be mindful that this fibre-optic cable is one of tens of cables – telephone lines, hydroelectric cables, wires – that service the entire north,” he said. “A very small fraction is represented by this cable we’re talking about. We explained the importance of that cable. It’s connecting all the emergency services together – the ambulance service, the police service, the Cree Health Board. He understood that, I would think.”
But Otter doesn’t agree, and he doesn’t like the way the whole business has been conducted.
“All I want is to get these poles out of there. That’s the first and the only thing I told them to do.”
