A year of wrangling leaves Davis Inlet worse off than ever

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Natives in a tiny remote villager on the Labrador coast are marking a wretched anniversary this month, an anniversary that needn't have occurred if the federal and Newfoundland governments had acted responsibly.

It's been a full year since the world first saw video images of Innu children in Davis Inlet, high on gasoline fumes and screaming about suicide.

It's been a year of press conference and government meetings for exasperated inlet Chief Katie Rich and her weary band council, meetings, over upgrading and relocating the village, that appear to have done little beyond pass the time.

It's been a year of therapy for the 18 children who were airlifted out of the community last January and flown to Alberta for solvent addiction therapy and sexual assault counselling. Today, 17 of them are back to their old gas-sniffing habits.

And then there's the suicide attempt rate, which at this time last year was a little more than four per month. It's now at around 12.

Those depressing events are horrible in and of themselves. But they take on an additional nightmarish quality when one considered that they need not have happened, and probably would not have happened, if Ottawa and the province of Newfoundland had acted to move the people of the inlet to Sango Bay when the Innu first asked.

It's remarkable the way the two governments managed to pass the buck for so long and keep the beleaguered villagers where they are, stranded on an island community with no running water, no sewage facilities and woefully inadequate housing.

Upon hearing of the Innu's desperate situation in the news last January, bureaucrats from Brian Mulroney's Conservative government flew into the inlet to check the situation out, made promises to improve the community infrastructure and then scampered back to Ottawa. When the Innu put their recommendations together, those same bureaucrats stalled the community upgrading and relocation with ridiculous excuses about the way the document was written.

The province also helped maintain the status quo. Premier Clyde Wells, insisting that he knew what was better for the Innu than the Innu themselves, first suggested strongly and later dogmatically that the villagers think of some site other than the preferred one at Sango Bay for their relocation. Four reasons yet to be explained, the premier believed the move would do nothing more than transfer the Innu's social problems to a new location.

It is unlikely that social ills as ingrained as alcoholism, rampant suicide attempts and sexual abuse would go away simple because the community changed locations. But the move to the mainland would have been, could still be, the fresh start the community needs to help leave those problems behind. Wells did no good by denying that opportunity and, in fact, only ensured things would grow worse.

Despite all the governments' excuses and reasons for not doing more for Davis Inlet, the fact still remains that the village is in desperate turmoil, existing on the brink of disaster. After a full year of wrangling with Ottawa, fighting a pig-headed premier and undergoing addiction therapy, the Innu are still in the same unimaginable mess.

But this anniversary, as bleak as it is, needs to be marked. And the best way to recognize it is, perhaps, to ensure that the Innu are not in the same miserable situation next January.