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.
![](../../../images/space.gif) 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.
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