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8 OVERVIEW HEARING AT THE MACKENZIE VALLEY PIPELINE INQUIRY, 1975 At the start of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (MVPI) hearings in 1975, J. K. Stager, a geographer from the University of British Columbia, and I shared the task of surveying the human populations of the Mackenzie region, along with overview presentations by specialists on the flora, fauna, and geology of the region. This chapter comes from the transcription of my oral testimony at the overview hearing. Dr. Stager’s portion of our joint presentation mainly addressed Inuit contact history and white economic interests and enterprises and is omitted. For Mr. Justice Thomas R. Berger’s encapsulation of the conclusions from the full MVPI, see Berger (1977). Commissioner Berger: Well, Dr. Helm, Dr. Stager, you have prepared your presentation, your evidence for the Commission in a form that is suitable to yourselves, and I would ask you to introduce it and carry on, please. Dr. Helm: Thank you. Dr. Stager and I did have the opportunity to meet a few weeks ago and discuss what we felt were the most critical points to bring up in a very limited time period relating to what we may call the contact history of native and nonnative persons in the Northwest Territories. Our areal research concentrations indicated that I should attend mainly to the area upstream of the Mackenzie River delta and to the Dene Indian groups there, although I will occasionally refer to Inuit as well. Dr. Stager’s activities have been concentrated in the delta and coast, so he will give his perspective on those areas. Indeed, the contact histories of the two areas have been somewhat different, so our division of labor corresponds to historical circumstance itself. I might add that we are going to try to cover about half a million square miles and 250 years in three hours. survey of native peoples and linguistic geography The first topic which I am taking is a survey of native peoples and linguistic geography of the Northwest Territories. We must recognize that the aboriginal inhabitants belong to two great language families: the Eskimoan, represented by the Inuit or Eskimo peoples, and the Athapaskan, represented by the Indian peoples or Dene (or variants of that term as they express it in their own languages). I cannot take time to go into the archaeological evidence from the present into the past, but we have evidence of aboriginal occupation in this land as soon as the great continental ice sheet began to retreat and it was possible for man and animal to subsist. Indeed, in several areas we now have archaeological connections by what we call the direct historical method—from known sites of historic contact times back into the past—where we can pretty well pinpoint that the ancestors of Dene people were at least two thousand years ago living in areas in which we find them today. [See Noble (1981) on the Taltheilei Shale Tradition.] In other words, I am establishing the credentials of both Inuit and Dene as peoples who have been essentially in their respective areas since, as we say, ‘‘time immemorial.’’ The distribution of these two sets of peoples in Canada corresponds to the great major environmental-ecological zones of the North. The Inuit are coastal peoples; they are sea mammal oriented. They lived on the margins of the polar sea or on the sea ice for much of the year. The Dene peoples, and these include not only the Indian peoples of the Northwest Territories but also those of the Yukon Territory, are subarctic, interior forest–oriented peoples. The Dene are large land mammal oriented. The barren grounds, or tundra, is a zone of seasonal exploitation for both of these great native American groups. In Canada we find one Inuit group, the Caribou Eskimo of Keewatin, who live inland year-round. But the emphasis for most Inuit had been to exploit the sea, to move inland to caribou and fishing sites in the summer and then retreat to the coast, whereas the Dene traditionally stayed within the woods or at least within the forest-tundra ecotone. Only in early fall did Dene go beyond the edge of the woods in pursuit of caribou. Then might Dene and Inuit on occasion encounter one another at such places as Contwoyto Lake. I should speak briefly to bilingualism and the problem of language loss. I’ll speak just of Indians. At present [1975] the Kutchin [Gwich’in] people are the...

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