Staking Claims: Innu Rights and Mining Claims at Voisey’s Bay

ID:	HARP-286
Title:	Staking Claims: Innu Rights and Mining Claims at Voisey’s Bay
Source:	Cultural Survival Quarterly, Issue 25.1, http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/csq/print/article_print.cfm?id=12A2F149-5758-4F44-9721-4F287416B4E8
Parties:
Dispute Resolution Organ:
Year:	2001
Pages:	0
Author(s):
Keywords:	Canada, human rights, mining, movement and residency, civil and political rights, Inuit, migrants, minority rights, self-determination
Abstract:	This place has many names, attesting to the different human histories intertwined here. Archaeologists have found evidence here of human habitation going back 6,000 years, and the descendants of these early peoples have continued to make extensive use of the place.(1) To the Innu, it is known as Kapukuanipant-kauashat, or more recently as Eimish (or “Emish”). To the Inuit, it is Tasiujatsoak. Settlers called it Voisey’s Bay after the family that established a trading post here in the early 1900s, and this is the name that found its way onto the government maps and into public consciousness in November 1994, when a small company called Diamond Fields Resources (DFR) made a significant mineral find. This event marked the beginning of an exploration boom that some compared to the Klondike — but it also set in motion a complex web of conflicts between the Innu, the Inuit, and some of the most powerful interests in the global mining industry. Voisey’s Bay/Eimish/Tasiujatsoak became contested terrain, and the issues at the heart of the conflict are a reflection of tensions within contemporary Canadian society.
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