I stop at the only gas station along the James Bay Road where bathroom graffiti reveals the presumptuous attitudes held by hardened outsiders. Similarly, industry has presupposed the need for ‘development,’ the mark of which has already destroyed ecological communities and has furthered the degradation of native homelands.
Ronald Niezen points out that the generation that emerged after mega-dam implementation “seems to have lost a close connection with the forest lifestyle and is deeply affected by the lack of self-esteem and identity that this can bring about (Niezen, 1998: 91-2).”

Niezen, Ronald Defending the Land: Sovereignty and Forest Life in James Bay Cree Society, MA: Allyn and Bacon. 1998.

Along my ride I meet someone dedicated to the empowerment of aboriginal Cree communities and he brings me to a mitogan. A mitogan is a log house structure covered with sphagnum moss, overall forming a shelter beneath a living swamp. Structures like this are capable of keeping warm through subarctic winters.

The floor is covered with bouncy and aromatic spruce boughs, which provide wonderful human nesting materials.  Miraculously, no black flies follow me in from outside.

This river is named after Pontax, one of the traditional Cree fur trappers. The conservation of the trapper livelihood remains a central concern of Cree negotiations with outsiders.
Accord to Daniel Francis and Toby Morantz, fur trading has been fair, cooperative, and peaceful since the seventeenth century (Francis,1983:25,167).

Francis, Daniel; Morantz, Toby Elaine. Partners in Furs: a History of the Fur Trade in Eastern James Bay. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983.