The Frozen Garden

By R.Z. Sheppard

STRANGERS DEVOUR THE LAND

by BOYCE RICHARDSON 342 pages. Knopf. $12.50.

It is a measure of American priorities that Paul Bunyan never served a day for raping Mother Nature. He became, in fact, a hero, his exploits serving as the wishful equivalents of a developing technology whose bulldozers, logging sleds and chain saws would eventually dwarf the feats of any legendary giant. Compared with the James Bay Development Corp., for example, Bunyan might have been playing in a sandbox.

In 1971, the Quebec government-run corporation announced plans to transform an area nearly the size of California with a series of dams and reservoirs. The goal was to increase Canada's electrical output by 30% and stimulate the province's economy. There was also a good deal of cultural pride at stake. To the Quebecois, the project was an economic extension of a struggle to strengthen French identity.

Ironically, the price would have to be paid by another proud tradition. The Cree Indians--and still smaller groups of Inuit Eskimos, who inhabit the vast subarctic regions of northern Quebec --numbered about 10,000. When word of the James Bay Project filtered along the trap lines and river banks, the Cree sent a delegation to Montreal to protest. They gathered in an overheated courtroom with a lawyer named O'Reilly to argue that damming the seven great rivers of their "garden" would not only cut off their livelihood but destroy their culture.

In a hearing conducted in French, English and Cree, it soon became clear that the Indians' livelihood and culture were inseparable. As members of the last cohesive hunting societies in North America, they lived in a vital, even religious relationship with the animals they chased and ate. A Cree family band ranges over hundreds of square miles, fishing and hunting with the strict procedures and skill that amount to ritual. Bear bones, for example, are never thrown to the dogs. The Cree believe that animals shun being captured by people who show disrespect.

Attorneys representing the province of Quebec found all this quaint but irrelevant. Their argument was simple, traditional and arrogant: how could a handful of primitives in a vast wilderness stand in the way of progress? The government also tried to persuade the judge that Cree and Eskimos were eagerly embracing the white man's ways. Considerable effort was made to produce a witness who had seen Indians eating Kentucky Fried Chicken.

As it happened, there were natives who lived in towns, drank gin and read

Playboy. But as the case progressed, it became apparent that the cultural gulf between Indian and white was immense.

Asked by the court to give his address, a puzzled Job Bearskin could only an swer, "I have come from what I have survived on."

Strangers Devour the Land is full of such natural poetry. By contrast, the numbers and statistics of economists and engineers and the jargon of sociologists and bureaucrats add up to a stultifying litany. Boyce Richardson, a New Zealand journalist, skillfully blends both sides in his documentary about the cri sis of a culture. The cumulative effect of his book is like being overtaken by a glacier. Even when describing the rich life in a Cree hunting camp, where he produced an award-winning film, Richardson cannot really mask his sense of fatalism. He accepts the fact that the Indians must give ground. The dominant culture naturally asserts its necessities, even though they may go hand in hand with waste and inefficiency. The James Bay Project has already been muddied by corruption scandals and enormous cost overruns.

Paper Promises. By any historical standard, the outcome of the Indian case could have been worse. Last month the Cree and Inuit agreed to relinquish all claims to their vast lands in return for $225 million, plus specific hunting, fishing and trapping rights and some voice in the governing and development of the region. But there remain Indians still un satisfied by the deal -- and who can wholly blame them? It is one of the laws governing the balance of human nature that paper and promises erode much faster than real estate.

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