Thomas Berger was a towering Canadian

Just when I thought I had done about everything about Canada’s North that might interest you, along came the news last week of the death of 88-yearold Judge Thomas Berger.

This man was instrumental in reminding all Canadians that there were people who needed to be heard.

It has been said that Berger gave First Nations a platform to tell Canada that they wanted to have control over their ancestral lands. He certainly did a lot of his lawyering work in First Nations jurisprudence.

I remember him best for the unparalleled work he did on the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry. When I dragged out the two-volume final report published in 1977, all that incredible work came back to me. If you would like to know how important he was to our country’s history, there are two websites that are well worth looking at. The first is a special edition of CBC North’s Northbeat run on April 29, 2021, on the passing of Berger. The second is a 1974 interview on CBC Radio’s This Country in the Morning with Justice Berger. I have put the links to them at the bottom of this column.

The other thing that the

Berger Inquiry did was give a platform to a remarkable group of young First Natives leaders at the time. These were smart, educated, savvy people who not only saw this as an opportunity to tell their stories on a grand stage, but who went on to become the leaders in the formation of some remarkable forms of government.

I think of Steve Kakfwi from Fort Good Hope who went on to be premier of the Northwest Territories; Nellie Cournoyea from Aklavik on the Mackenzie River Delta who went on to be premier of the Northwest Territories; Jose Amaujaq Kusugak from the West Coast of Hudson Bay who helped drive the Eastern Arctic push to become its own territory; Ethel

Blondin-Andrew from Tulita who was the first aboriginal woman MP in Canada; and Tagak Curley from Salliq (Coral Harbour) is considered a living Father of Confederation for his work leading to the creation of Nunavut.

There are others, but these are people I met as a reporter. I felt huge respect for the work that they did in a huge chunk of Canada that many in the southern part hardly knew anything about.

Some of the people here in Annapolis County many remember an Ernest Buckler event in 2019 in Bridgetown when one of the featured writers was Whit Fraser. I am indebted to my friend for remembering those important days of the Berger Inquiry. He was there, and I highly recommend his book True North Rising.

This column along with the previous two, took me back a long way to a time in our country that I would never have missed. I am grateful to have been witness to a major change in my country.

April 29, 2021 CBC Northbeat’s special on Thomas Berger:

CBC Radio’s This Country in the Morning with Justice Berger: https://www.cbc.ca/archives