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It was only during this final hearing where 12 members of the Fox Lake Cree Nation, who traveled to Winnipeg for the meeting (the first three hearings were held in the north), that the explosive information came out.

One by one, Marie Henderson, Mary Beardy, Sophie Lockhart and Franklin Arthurson spoke about gang rapes organized by RCMP, widespread sexual abuse and Hydro workers plying Indigenous women with liquor and taking advantage of them in the 1960s and 1970s.

“They would pick up Fox Lake women, take them to jail, and bring all of the Hydro guys there to do what they wanted with these young women,” said Arthurson.

“When we talk about the sexual abuse we went through, I can name a few men that I can put behind jail right now that abused me,” said Beardy.

So what was the CEC to do with this explosive testimony? They put some of it in their report, but barely. There’s no reference to any of it in the report’s introduction, executive summary or conclusion.

There’s no mention of sexual abuse or violence against Indigenous people at all until page 36 of the 86-page report. And it’s only in the summary of the Fox Lake hearings where it’s briefly mentioned. There are only three sentences in the entire report that refer to sexual abuse. It was largely glossed over.

You have to go to the CEC website and review the transcripts of the Fox Lake hearings to get the full stories.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty of other testimony and evidence in the CEC report documenting the environmental degradation Hydro projects have caused over the years, including the devastating effects they’ve had on Indigenous communities, their livelihoods, their culture and their relationship with the land. It’s heart-wrenching. And it isn’t until you read the real-life stories of the people who lived through it – how their homes were literally bulldozed and their way of life utterly destroyed – that you can even begin to understand how northern communities have been treated by Hydro over the past 60 years.