“Our first experience with industrial development was with the Churchill Falls power project. We were never consulted or compensated for this use of our land — in fact, we were never even told that below the dam the Churchill River would be reduced to a trickle, that Churchill Falls would cease to exist, and that our canoes, camps, trap lines, hunting grounds and our ancestors burial sites would be drowned forever by the Smallwood Reservoir. I visited a site at the edge of the reservoir with two archaeologists and my uncle, and saw that the reservoir had eroded a hillside and uncovered some Innu graves. I had personally heard of these stories from people in our communities before but they never did really sink in until this direct experience. It was very sad to see that those graves had been destroyed, and completely unforgivable in my opinion.”

The late Daniel Ashini, former Grand Chief of the Innu Nation