METHYLMERCURY PROTESTS: WAS ANYTHING GAINED?

If you are one of the people going gaga over the deal with the aboriginal people of Labrador over methylmercury, you might want to think about what you are cheering for.

The issue is important – it’s just that the cost of even a minimal solution will finish off a project already effectively bankrupt.

There are other lessons that emerged from the protest and its aftermath that the public might want to note, too.

First, if the 2041 Group had occupied Nalcor Offices four years ago, and risked going to jail - as did some aboriginal people – the North Spur might have gotten independent review. The fake Oversight Committee would have been shut down, too and replaced with one both credible and honest. Only because the Inuit were unafraid to face down authority is everyone going kissy face.

SOUTH OF SAGLEK: A NUNATSIAVUT ADVENTURE

Photo Credit: Des Sullivan

There is a belief, perhaps commonly held, that Labrador, especially its northern domain, is “the Land God Gave to Cain”.  It is an ascription which Jacques Cartier gave the entire north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Ostensibly, he was alluding to Genesis 4:11–16 which tells us that, as punishment for having killed his brother Abel, Cain is condemned to survive a barren land.

Cartier may have known scripture, but it seems he gave little assessment to the place he perceived only as bleak and desolate. He may have been right about Cain’s reward all the same. It just seems that he had such a limited expectation of a deity he might have thought a merciful God.  

Just possibly, the allusion to “barren” elicits an excess of subjectivity anyway. Indeed, who would argue that destiny’s plan for the biblical Cain might have been not just to survive but to thrive. 

Could there be a better place to embolden and to renew the human spirit than this arctic oasis?

Did the land not testify to an ancient and gifted human occupation — where two great contemporary aboriginal cultures, the Innu and the Inuit — have endured?