Matthew Coon Come to receive Honorary Degree

Matthew Coon Come, Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees, and a leader in the Aboriginal self-government movement in Quebec, will receive an honorary Trent University degree at the President's Installation October 2.

Grand Chief Coon Come will receive Trent University's highest award, an honorary Doctor of Laws degree, for outstanding leadership in the advancement of native peoples. He studied political science at Trent University during the mid-1970s and was a president of the Trent University Native Association. He went on to McGill where he intended to study law. Instead, at age 21, he was asked by a delegation of Cree elders to run for election as the band's deputy chief, thus beginning his political career.

He has served for the past 11 years as the third Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees, the governing arm of the nine Cree communities that comprise the Cree nation. The James Bay Crees are an Indigenous people numbering approximately 12,000 who have lived, hunted, shed and trapped on the eastern shores of James Bay since time immemorial.

Chief Coon Come, 42, was born in a hut on his parent's trap line near the community of Mistissini, then a seasonal Cree encampment for hunting, shing and trapping in the bush. It was so isolated that the rst white person young Matthew saw, when he was six, was an Indian Affairs agent who arrived by oat plane to remind the family it was time for him to go to residential school. The young Cree attended residential schools in Moose Factory, LaTuque and Hull.

He was drawn into politics by the threat to the land posed by the Quebec government's hydroelectric project which would harness the power of the rivers through the heart of Cree territory around James Bay. He fought successfully against the multi-million dollar second stage of the James Bay project, along the Great Whale River, gaining international support.

In 1975, the Cree, federal and provincial governments signed the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, which was part of the deal to permit the rst stage of the James Bay power project. The Cree maintain that this agreement which "extinguished" Cree rights to their ancestral homelands, was signed under duress. In any event, the agreement cannot be altered without the signature of all three parties, which would prohibit Quebec's unilateral separation from Canada.

Chief Coon Come, and the Cree nation, is at the centre of Quebec's separatist debate. The 12,000 Cree lay claim to more than 150,000 square miles of land, or about two-thirds of the province's land mass, in a wide belt across the resources-rich centre of the province from James Bay to the Labrador border. Other than the Cree, few people inhabit this wilderness. The Cree, and the Inuit of Nunavik, maintain that a vote for Quebec separation cannot take them and their traditional lands out of the country without their consent.

He was awarded the Equinox Environmental Prize and is a recipient of the Goldman Global Environmental Prize, awarded by the Goldman Foundation in San Francisco, for his leadership of the Cree people in defence of Cree lands and waters against hydroelectric mega projects.