The ice is breaking up slowly on the lakes that surround Ojibways of Onigaming First Nation, 110 kilometres south of Kenora, Ontario. The snow’s receding, and mining prospectors are eager to get back into the field. Meanwhile, a trade war with the U.S. is threatening to ramp up critical minerals at volumes and speeds that would transform the entire national economy.
But if a gold rush is coming like the one that took place in the 1880s and 1890s on Treaty #3 lands here in northwestern Ontario, the vote-rich cities where Canada’s political titans vie for power won’t bear a fraction of its impact compared to the First Nations people and fishing camp outfitters who live along this remote, secondary highway.
Onigaming is 11 years into a mental-health state of emergency, and the crisis comes in cyclical blows — addictions, suicides, funerals. Promises of trade routes and global markets don’t resonate for those who have been coping with frequent sudden death for a generation.
As Canadian leaders at all levels of government promise wealth from the ground, Ojibwa leaders are still managing their community’s recovery from a resource promise that’s long gone and that left them behind. They’re resolved that their community’s health will come from solutions in the culture and on the land, not from the minerals beneath it.They’re also concerned that despite the stakes, nothing will change with the new minority Liberal government, which will leave them no choice beyond being forced to accept resource development.
Former Chief Kathy Kishiqueb declared the state of emergency in 2014 after four proximate deaths by suicide. “I would say almost every day, we were dealing with either a suicide attempt or we were dealing with a youth that’s missing and presumed that they wanted to go and commit suicide,” she says.
The cycle of instability persists.
“It’s as if we’re on eggshells,” she says. “What’s going to happen next? Who’s it going to be? Because that’s how repetitive those deaths have happened — and my son was one of them. I lost my son. It will be two years this November.”
Kishiqueb’s son, 43-year-old Robert “Greg” Kelly, was among 43 on-reserve members who lost their lives to either suicide or illicit drug poisoning in the past three-and-a-half years — over five per cent of the First Nation’s 900-person population.During the election, the Liberals promised to fast-track energy projects while working in “true partnership” with Indigenous peoples. Prime Minister Mark Carney also pledged to expand the Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program, which helps Indigenous communities invest in energy infrastructure.
The Conservatives on extracting critical minerals and oil. Leader Pierre Poillievre promised to build a national corridor to connect resources to international markets, and to encourage First Nation participation by allowing companies to redirect a portion of their federal corporate taxes to local First Nations.
Onigaming already knows where that path leads. In Kishiqueb’s time as chief, she inherited the final stages of an agreement with Rainy River Resources, a company, now known as New Gold, that operates an open pit mine 40 kilometres south of Onigaming. Her band office had been converted into social support space and, even then, first responders had to attend to a suicide attempt in the washroom. She told the company her council was in crisis and had no ability to consent. Onigaming is listed on New Gold’s website among First Nations with which it shares “Participation or Impact Benefit Agreements.”
The elders and youth have told Kishiqueb they’re interested in pursuing a different path.
In her current role as education director, she is focused on reversing a low school-attendance trend that has accelerated since the lockdowns of the global pandemic. This community that produced Manitoba’s first Indigenous Premier in Wab Kinew, the first Indigenous adviser in the Prime Minister’s Office in Jeffrey Copenace and the first female Grand Chief of Grand Council Treaty #3 in Diane Kelly has even produced a teacher at Harvard.But Kishiqueb says its high school, the oldest in all of Treaty #3 territory, hasn’t graduated a single student in the past two years.
She says the rebuilding effort has focused on language, culture and land-based learning. The gymnasium, visible from the school’s front doors, is no longer the site for the community’s funerals.
“We have a lot of students that are in school right now who have lost a parent or two parents or lost a grandparent or lost somebody really close to them,” she explains. “It’s over maybe a year now, where this chief and council have decided we would have no more funerals there. It was just too hard on the kids, too hard on the staff, kids and families — because that’s what it did: it reminded them of all the losses.”
Canada is still making amends out here for imposing resource extraction projects in violation of its own laws, some reaching back to the last gold rush. Onigaming was one of 12 First Nations on Lake of the Woods that settled a claim in 2022 over dams built to support the energy needs of 1890s-and-early-1900s mining, forestry and other industrial developments.That resolution comes amid a social crisis that is being managed but won’t let up. Some people attribute the beginning of the wave of suicides and illicit drug poisonings to the legacy of residential schools and the multi-generational effects of abuse sustained at the hands of the church. Others say a hinge moment occurred when alcohol and illicit drugs became more available and addiction spread from underlying traumas. However it began, a decision has now emerged where the physical and cultural survival of this community has become antithetical to resource exploitation.
“There have been proposals for mines in places that are very sacred to us,” says Onigaming member and former Grand Council Treaty #3 Grand Chief Diane Kelly. “And so it doesn’t matter the amount of dollars being waved in front of us — those are things we cannot do. It’s against our culture. We’re not just chasing a dollar so we can build a house or run a program for a certain amount of time. We cannot sell out our culture.” Kelly is responsible for managing the $80-million flood claim trust and another $20-million account Canada paid on Onigaming’s logging claim. Community surveys have designated that money for physical and social infrastructure, education and vigilance over protecting their treaty interests.
In February, the federal government reduced the range of eligible supports it funded through Jordan’s Principle, a legal mandate designed to address inequities in Indigenous health outcomes. Until then, Jordan’s Principle was funding an 18-member, after-hours crisis response team in Onigaming — a community so remote that police response times are unpredictable. It also supported activities that built cultural pride and community connection, including beading, regalia-making, drumming, a fitness centre and sweat lodges. Most were after-school programs, with up to 30 youth participating nightly. The Jordan’s Principle team rented two houseboats last summer and brought families to the old reserve at Crooked Foot — only accessible by water — to live on the land.Leaders have ordered Kelly to spend a million dollars from the principal of the trust the community received from Canada’s past resource encroachment to ensure those cultural and safety programs continue, all while Canada’s political leaders dazzle voters with promises of the next wave of mineral wealth.
To Onigaming’s north, First Mining Gold has already built rudimentary exploration infrastructure, but the First Nation has signed no deal for development to proceed. Another company called Golden Rapture has consolidated a group of eight mineral deposits over 10,000 acres, some of which were developed in the 1890s. The proposed site is also in the area of spring-fed lakes that support Crow Lake and Lake of the Woods on either side of the community. When Onigaming Chief Jeffrey Copenace told company president Richard Rivet that the community had declared a moratorium on mining in the territory, the miner responded in writing, “Hi Jeff, maybe your reserve is in such bad shape because you’re a terrible leader.”On Tuesday, Grand Council Treaty #3 issued a statement condemning Rivet’s comments as “disparaging” and saying they “ultimately are a reflection of the Crown as a delegated authority for consultation.”
The statement, written on behalf of the territory’s 28 member chiefs, also said, “The continued mistreatment of the Anishinaabe Nation in Treaty #3 peoples and communities through these processes are detrimental to not only the necessary processes to duly authorised projects but additionally to protect the spirit of the lands and waters throughout the Territory.” The chiefs add that all proposed resource projects in the territory must pass through Treaty #3’s own resource law process, known as Manito Aki Inaakonigewin. Ontario has not responded to requests for comment on that statement or the correspondence between Golden Rapture and Copenace.
Copenace says his community is prepared to do whatever is necessary to protect the land. He says he has gone so far as to return provincial Ministry of Mines funding that’s designated to help Onigaming participate in mining and map culturally sensitive areas, because community surveys among young people continue to show it’s not the kind of economy Onigaming sees in its future.
Those surveys exposed an interest in tourism, small-scale agriculture and small business. They envisaged the community store reopening on the highway and the development of a coffee shop, a cannabis store, and a greenhouse.
Resource extraction seems to be the only answer Canadian governments have when it comes to economic development, according to Copenace. “They don’t talk about tourism,” he says. “Sometimes they do – a little bit here, a little bit there – but they really don’t. They don’t talk about culture. They don’t talk about language. They don’t talk about the aspects of us that make us so beautiful: our identity.”
All Canadian elected officials talk about reconciliation as a transactional contract to enable resource development, not about consultation as a relationship of partners wherein any alternative development is possible.
“But they always talk about the land that we live on,” Copenace says. “They always talk about the waters that we live on. And they always have these magnificent proposals. And the thing that really bothers me and that I struggle with is that there is no opportunity for First Nations to say ‘no.’ There is no saying ‘no’ at all in this country.”
Jon Thompson,
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Ricochet
