It's not every day that a man lying in a box gets a standing ovation.
But then, it's not every day that a country loses one of its greatest leaders - even if that country couldn't even pause long enough to note his passing.
They did here, however, on a windy Wednesday with a fine chop coming in off James Bay and up the mouth of the Rupert River to where, history records, in 1611 Henry Hudson bilked his first native by demanding twice the standard number of pelts for a hatchet.
A great voice was silenced this past week when Billy Diamond, former grand chief of the James Bay Crees, was felled by a heart attack at the age of 61. He went so quickly he hadn't even slouched in his chair or closed his eyes, his passing announced by an unnatural quiet.
His father, Malcolm, had been known as "the Shouting Chief." The son rarely shouted, but when he spoke - in a voice that made Darth Vader sound like Pee-wee Herman - people listened.
His message of personal responsibility and economic empowerment was, in its time, revolutionary - and it brought his people Canada's first comprehensive land-claims settlement, transforming their society forever. He became a mentor, and remains an inspiration, to the likes of Chief Clarence Louie, the young Osoyoos, B.C., band leader who turned his community around economically at the same time as he turned his back on self-pity and outward blame.
When the young Billy Diamond was seven years of age, the Shouting Chief - who spoke only Cree - put him on a floatplane bound for the residential school at Moose Factory, Ont. He was terrified when they picked him up in a truck, a vehicle he had never seen. He staged his first political protest that night in a midnight showdown with the sisters over the vegetables he refused to eat.
A half-century later, there are paved streets in the town they used to call Rupert's House. There are trucks, mostly new, everywhere. Instead of floatplanes, the Waskaganish airport is busy with flights of Air Creebec. But not everything changes: To the end, Billy Diamond refused to eat his vegetables.
They filed past by the hundreds: elders in wheelchairs weeping openly, young mothers holding babies up, teenagers in rap T-shirts trying to fight the sting in their eyes.
If Bob Stanfield can go down as "The Best Prime Minister We Never Had," then Billy Diamond is "The Greatest National Chief Canada never had." His passion and his life was the Cree Nation, largely created by him. He did not seek the national stage; he refused all offers to stand for office; he turned down the Senate.
They remembered him for this, and for his outrageous humour, at times offering up some of their own.
"Even when we were hunting," said his nephew, John Paul Murdoch, "it was almost as if the geese would line up to be shot, so they wouldn't be yelled at."
And they remembered his battles. At 21, Mr. Diamond was the youngest chief in the country - forced by his father to take on the task despite his own wishes to attend law school - and by 23 he was grand chief of all the James Bay Crees.
When Mr. Diamond heard - on a small transistor radio he had smuggled into the family goose-hunting blind - that the province of Quebec was planning to turn the rivers of Northern Quebec into the world's largest hydroelectric system, he decided to fight the "Project of the Century." No one had bothered to ask the 7,500 natives who had lived along these rivers for 10,000 years, much of whose land would be flooded.
He called the first Cree meeting ever, showing everyone maps detailing the family traplines and graves that would be lost. He had his own plan, but others had their own ideas of what was needed.
"First thing we have to do," one of the older men told the room, "is buy an electric typewriter."
"But none of us even knows how to type!" Mr. Diamond protested.
The man looked at him, incredulous: "And that, Billy, is why we need an electric one."
Such change in so little time: This week at Waskaganish's Gathering Place, they had to ask everyone to turn off their cellphones before the funeral service began.
The fight against the hydro project in the courts of the 1970s is the stuff of Canadian history: Cree trappers and Inuit hunters travelling to Montreal to testify, caribou and seal meat hanging from their hotel windows. They won an injunction, lost in the Supreme Court, but then successfully negotiated the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, which set a precedent for all major Canadian land settlements to come.
Mr. Diamond dramatically changed the plans for the massive damming of the rivers, but he was proudest of an income-
security plan that he called "the only per diem for trappers in the entire world."
At the service, Montreal lawyer James O'Reilly spoke passionately about those years, reminding people what Mr. Diamond had accomplished beyond the James Bay agreement. He brought them self-government. He built their own airline (the "Iacocca of the North," Peter C. Newman once called him). And he was the key strategist - dealing with the likes of Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chrétien, René Lévesque - behind the 1983 amendment that enshrined aboriginal rights in the Canadian Constitution.
It was not a simple, sweet story. Construction delays on new water and sewer systems led to an E. coli breakout that left five Cree babies dead and Billy and Elizabeth Diamond's fourth child, Philip, severely damaged. They said that their baby wouldn't live, then that he wouldn't walk or talk, yet Philip, now a grown man, stood beside his father's casket this day and thanked and hugged everyone who passed by.
Mr. Diamond fought his own demons of drink and despair - the residential-school experience flared regularly - but in recent years had had recovered amazingly, largely through prayer and spiritualism.
A year ago, he suffered a stroke and was saved only by an operation that removed a significant portion of his skull, which months later was replaced successfully. Ever irreverent, he claimed to be "the first grand chief ever scalped."
He sought nothing and, in doing so, stayed out of the spotlight that Canadians restrict to the cities and to national office. The Diamonds lived simply. This past spring, in an expression of gratitude, the villagers gave Billy and Elizabeth $267,000 to purchase a home - their first house.
He leaves behind a huge extended family and a vast expanse of friends. I first met him 30 years ago while researching a magazine cover story on the deaths of the five babies, wrote a book about him ( Chief) and talked so often on the phone that it will be a long time before I stop picking up long-distance calls holding the receiver well away.
But he also leaves a legacy that remains an inspiration to young native leaders across the country who believe in the same things he fought for: rights, dignity, responsibility, economic sustainability.
"My Indian friends from India had Mahatma Gandhi," Matthew Coon Come, the current grand chief, told the gathering. "My American friends had JFK. My Afro-American friends had Martin Luther King. My South African friends had Nelson Mandela. My Cree Nation had Chief Billy Diamond."
They listed 89 pallbearers on the service pamphlet. If it takes an entire village to raise a child, then it seemed only right that it took this entire village to bury its chief.
It had rained heavily during the service, but when they opened the doors, they found a rainbow had spread over the town.
Taking turns, they carried his coffin through the streets, past the modern homes, the little shopping centre, the school that he built to ensure that no one would ever again be flown away to a place where far, far worse could happen than a standoff over vegetables.
They placed him in a fresh grave with a simple wooden cross and took turns filling in the earth.
While the simplicity seemed in keeping, so too would be the inscription he once told his son Ian he wanted for his tombstone: "Gone to a meeting - will return."
Roy MacGregor is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.
Roy MacGregor