Churchill at a Crossroads: looking forward from the past

Chapter 1: The Waters

It’s a cloudy, grey day on the shores of Churchill, with water a few shades darker than the sky. The ice floes are dirtied from the wind spraying sediment off the coast. Someone spots a beluga. Heads turn as the whale emerges briefly from the water, as if trying to catch a glimpse of the history happening on land. 

It’s the first water ceremony in Churchill’s history, and the town's matriarchs, past, present and future, are honouring the water of Hudson Bay with a pipe ceremony and tobacco offering. The wind whips cold, so the crowd keeps their hands in pockets or gloves with their shoulders hunched up, including the bear guard who sits at a distance on a quad, rifle on his back.

To the left of the ceremony is the port. It’s marked by the town’s iconic grain elevator, which stands tall over Churchill like a memorial to a past era. 

The people and leadership of Churchill, provincial ministers, Parks Canada, First Nation conservation leaders and environmental organizations are gathered for the water ceremony. It’s hosted by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) Manitoba and Oceans North as a step toward creating a National Marine Conservation Area (NMCA). 

An NMCA is designed to balance the needs of economic development with protection of ecosystems. It adds new monitoring by Parks Canada staff and/or Indigenous guardians, and excludes oil and gas activities, mining, dumping and bottom trawling. None of these industries are particularly active yet on the Hudson Bay coast, but with the federal and provincial critical mineral strategy pushing development, there are concerns the world’s largest beluga population, the southernmost polar bears, and hundreds of migrating bird species could be threatened with an industrialized Hudson Bay. With such a rich ecology, a NMCA could provide the region with greater protections and resources.

The prospective conservation area would stretch down the western edge of Hudson Bay on Manitoba’s Arctic coastline, producing an increase in resources, regulations and support to ensure a healthy coast in the sensitive low-arctic waters. Churchill, along with several First Nations, will decide the project's fate, government officials and environmental campaigners told Canada’s National Observer. But it’s unclear if their decision will arrive before the changing political winds come for Ottawa, or whether it will be enough to protect the sensitive arctic ecology that is susceptible to climate change.

Still, there’s an urgency to protect northern Manitoba’s rich biodiversity, particularly for the environmental organizations that know federal funding cuts can grind conservation to a halt, even in a place like this, teeming with such diversity of fauna and flora that it has been recognized for its mosaic-like biodiversity. During the last Conservative government, then Prime Minister Stephen Harper created national parks but cut over $200 million in environmental funding, leaving Parks Canada with a shoestring budget to tend them. The Conservative Party, under leader Pierre Poilievre, issued a policy statement last year that only mentioned marine-protected areas in the context of not wanting to create them where there’s potential for economic development. With that in mind, environmental organizations hope to begin a feasibility study before any cuts can happen. 

Here, more than 250 species of birds flock to the area every spring to nest. The world’s largest concentration of belugas use the estuaries where rivers flow into Hudson Bay during mating season. The iconic polar bear remains threatened by a collapsing and changing climate, even as Churchill, the “polar bear capital of the world,” brings in tens of millions of dollars from tourists who want to see them. 

A marine conservation area for this area — a project that’s still in such early stages it’s not even listed on the federal government’s website for candidate sites — would contribute to the provincial government’s election promise to protect 30 per cent of Manitoba and help fulfill a key policy point in the NDP’s climate platform that’s in line with the federal government’s international commitments under the Montreal-Kunming agreement.

Ron Thiessen, president of CPAWS Manitoba, can claim some credit for bringing the Manitoba NMCA proposal this far. It’s not his first. For three decades, his conservation work has led to the establishment of 23 parks and protected areas in Manitoba. He also played a supportive role with First Nations to create the Pimachiowin Aki initiative, which resulted in large protected areas and eventually a UNESCO World Heritage Site near the Manitoba and Ontario border. 

Now, Thiessen is hoping to jumpstart the protection of Manitoba’s coast, to ensure the “coastal province” (Manitoba does, in fact, border the ocean) maintains a healthy coastline in one of Canada’s more sensitive marine regions. 

“There’s just so many reasons to protect the resources that are there that are, both paramount for nature conservation, but also for economic opportunities,” Thiessen said in an interview with Canada’s National Observer, pointing at the rich opportunities for ecotourism. 

That said, Thiessen is well aware of the history of conservation in Canada, and more specifically, in northern Manitoba. The Dene have been relocated in the name of conservation, while the Cree have been relocated to Churchill and away from their ancestral lands by the federal government. Trust was broken in the twentieth century, and now Thiessen aptly puts it: “we can only move at the speed of trust.”

However, at the same time, a political window is open, and it could close in the future, Carley Basler, Parks Canada project manager for the proposed NMCA, said in an interview. Basler agrees with Thiessen and locals must decide their speed, but at the back of her mind and internally, Parks knows the funding and commitment to protecting 30 per cent of Canada is there today. Meanwhile, with changing winds in Ottawa, it’s not clear that the funding or conservation targets will remain priorities for the next Parliament. 

And so organizers, like Thiessen, know what’s at stake.  

Chapter 2: A Forgotten History 

Parks Canada is still working toward regaining community trust that was destroyed by a dark and pervasive history of dispossession and relocation. 

There was a time when the Sayisi Dene, the most eastern Dene people in the North, would live off the land and the caribou that sustained them. In the winter, it was common practice to leave the hunt near the winter camp, processing an animal in emergencies, as if the edge of frozen Little Duck Lake was nature’s chest freezer. 

According to federal documents recounting the relocation, provincial conservation officers at the time saw the Dene harvesting methods as “unnecessary caribou slaughter,” and the Dene were then labeled as “butchers.”  

Based on the knowledge and cultural attitudes of the time, federal officials decided to move the Dene into the Canadian town of Churchill, effectively dumping them on the same shores where the water ceremony would take place 70 years later. 

The attitude of concern over animal populations rather than Dene is apparent, with one official urging that “...it is imperative that we evacuate these Indians not later than the end of August. The large caribou trek reaches this area early in September and we feel we must have them evacuated before that time or they will wish to remain for the kill which might upset our plans.”

Once the Dene arrived in Churchill, many were left to survive in a state of poverty and culture shock. 

Mike Spence, mayor of Churchill, remembers Sayisi Dene growing up as a kid in the flats, the settled area for Crees in a segregated Churchill. He saw them as kids growing up, how they were being mistreated and neglected by the government and “left to fend for themselves." 

“It was just a total act of colonization in the name of conservation,” Maxwel Burke, a young resident of Churchill, told Canada’s National Observer. 

It was a different Churchill back in 1956, Spence recalls. That was the year the Sayisi Dene were forcibly taken from their homelands and relocated to the shore of Churchill. The American military base was in full swing, serving as a major missile testing centre for the Americans during the Cold War. The military base ballooned the population of the town to over 5,000 people. 

The Dene village was on the outskirts. Dene, who thrived by hunting caribou and creating beautiful ornate clothing to keep warm through harsh winters, were left to survive on scraps. Some Dene even resorted to finding food in the garbage dump, Ila Bussidor writes in her book Night Spirits.

It was genocide — a word memorialized on a plaque that now sits at the Dene village’s ruins — undertaken in the name of conservation, to protect caribou with systemic disregard for the people whose culture is inseparable from them. Over one third of the Dene died tragically in Churchill, the plaque reads. 

Georgina Berg, a Cree knowledge keeper, says that Indigenous Peoples have never been asked about their knowledge of living off the land; instead they were told how the land had to be managed. For living their ancestral ways in Canada, they paid the price.

“If [the federal government] had asked before they acted, this might not have been such a tragedy with the history of the Dene people,” she said. 

Burke tells Canada’s National Observer that he believes many people in Churchill, especially those with Indigenous roots, may be worried about a federally-led conservation area because of history so brutal in its approach to conservation, an attitude that cares more for animals than the human beings who have lived with them since time immemorial. 

“When we have this history of constant projects that have resulted in constant displacement and ecological chaos and harm to everyone involved, we're going to be wary of it, we’re going to be cynical,” he said. Burke notes any conservation in the region must put the residents at the table and in the driver's seat.

“I think the top-down approach has been proven not to work,” Burke said. “People should be in charge of their own land.” 

Chapter 3: The long-road of consultation 

On a Wednesday evening in the lobby of Churchill’s rec centre, Thiessen is speaking to an audience over live music, souvlaki and Greek salad. Short speeches about what a National Marine Conservation Area could mean for the town are given by CPAWS Manitoba, the mayor of Churchill and two provincial ministers, Tracy Schmidt, minister of the environment and climate change, and Glen Simard, minister of tourism. From the buffet table, Hudson Bay’s boundless ice floes stretch into the horizon’s edge where the ocean meets the sky.    

Thiessen pitches the community members on a conservation area as a way to bring further resources into Churchill. There will be jobs in conservation, he says, more scientific research and investments that can bolster tourism like Parks Canada-managed docks and wharves on the coastline. There is also a chance that a conservation area can even increase Churchill’s already substantial national and international profile as a tourist destination in the North. 

But Thiessen has to choose his words carefully. The town is a multicultural melange of people of many backgrounds from many places. There are Inuit, Dene, Cree and Métis. There are residents from the south, and surprisingly, plenty from Newfoundland. 

Like its ecology, Churchill’s economic environment is sensitive and undergoing a radically changing climate. It has only recently revived shipments of zinc concentrate from its legacy port after a long hiatus following the departure of Omnitrax, an American transportation company that owned the railway and port. For years, the rail line that supports the port and town degraded, falling victim to melting permafrost, another growing challenge for the North. The rail has only recently begun revitalization with the needed provincial and federal investments. 

Thiessen speaks plainly, with a neighbourly rasp. It’s a warm tone from a man who has the air of a cool uncle: a greying beard, black square glasses and a warm register to his voice. 

National Marine Conservation Areas “can protect culture as well as economic relationships between the whole community and this marine ecosystem,” he tells the crowd. 

“It’s all about balance.” 

It’s not clear how “balance” will be defined in Churchill, but it’s clear that it will be decided by the town. The mayor, Spence, has made that much known. The port and rail line will play a central role moving forward, and no southerner is going to waltz into town and tell Churchill and northern First Nations what to do with their land. That has been done before, and Mayor Spence is adamant that it will be no longer. 

There has been a long history of neglect, mismanagement and violence done to the region of Churchill perpetrated by decades of genocidal policies and economic depressions stemming from decisions made in Ottawa or Winnipeg. 

When Harper killed the Canadian Wheat Board in 2012, the port lost almost all of its shipments overnight. Then, Spence and the rest of the town watched as Omnitrax, which had promised a revitalization, mismanaged the port and railway before jumping ship, leaving the project to rust. 

The Omnitrax pullout prompted the community’s push to own and manage the port and rail line, which began its first shipments of Manitoba-mined zinc concentrate last month. The Arctic Gateway Group — the consortium of First Nations and local governments that purchased the rail line and port from Omnitrax — hopes to restore both institutions to their former glory. Spence sits on Arctic Gateway’s board and plays a crucial role in its advocacy. 

Chris Avery is CEO of the Arctic Gateway Group. He expects the first shipment of 10,000 tonnes of zinc concentrate mined in Manitoba and bound for Europe to launch the renaissance of the Port of Churchill. The world’s search for critical minerals, of course, will be a big piece of that renaissance; Canada lists zinc in its critical minerals strategy, while Manitoba is currently developing its own strategy to secure a supply chain in the province. 

But Avery hopes to diversify the shipments from the port, including an array of agricultural products, a shade of the historical commodity that was moved through Churchill. There is also hope that the port can help move goods through the Kivalliq region of Nunavut, rather than depending on flown-in supplies.

Spence insists he won’t allow the proposed protected area to get in the way of the economic revitalization that’s so long overdue. He wants the community to be in charge of where it goes, and what it does.

“We’re stewards and guardians of our homelands, and we will do well,” Spence told Canada’s National Observer. “Enough of other people controlling [our] destiny — that’s not going to happen anymore.” 

It’s why Parks Canada insists NMCAs can be compatible with ports, Basler said, pointing to the Tallurutiup Imanga National Marine Conservation Area that carved out possible future ports within its boundaries. And then there is the Saguenay–St. Lawrence Marine Park that sees hundreds of ships moving through the marine conservation area each year. 

Protection is not incompatible with economic growth, the advocates assure locals. But for people who have been at the receiving end of devastating government diktats in the past, any outside rule-making will stir up hard memories.

This piece is the first in a series on conservation in Northern Manitoba. This story was made possible in part by an award from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.