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Documentary makers like to believe that our films show our audiences new realities – but those films are also like Rorschach tests in that people tend to see in them what they are already inclined to see.
No character in WATERLIFE draws a more powerful response than Josephine Mandamin, the Anishinaabe grandmother from Thunder Bay who walked around the Great Lakes to raise interest in their plight. But the responses are polarized.
Many people – the vast majority -- have told us they are inspired by Josephine. Her presence has prompted questions at screenings which, though phrased in different ways, tend to be variations on the same theme: “Why do aboriginal people take so much better care of the environment than we do?” It’s not an easy question to answer, because it contains an assumption which is sort of true, but not always. We all have strengths and weaknesses, influenced by our backgrounds and the contexts that we live in, but it’s a trap, of course, to assume things about people simply based on their race or culture. Josephine Mandamin is a wonderful steward of the environment for many reasons that are particular to her.
A minority of people who have seen WATERLIFE have taken the opposite view and criticized the film for including Josephine because she is an aboriginal woman with an environmental message. Norman Wilner, a movie reviewer at Toronto’s NOW Magazine, attacked the film for using “naive footage of a native woman standing at the water’s edge looking sad”. To him, Joephine is a caricature, reminiscent of the "crying Indian" anti-pollution commercial from the 1970s. It’s the classic pose of the young, urban hipster, whose view of reality is shaped by pop culture, rather than life. For his ilk, aboriginal folks concerned about the environment are inherently clichés, because that image has been on TV since The Mod Squad days.
So, two perspectives on natives and the environment, both influenced by urban experience and media images and both somewhat distorted. My view, after two decades of working in the Canadian hinterland, is that people who live in rural areas, and pay attention to them are simply much more likely to understand the enormity of the changes happening in our environment than are those of us who live in cities. Many aboriginal people live in rural environments – and always have. So their roots, simply put, are broader and deeper.
For a sense of all the complications around these issues, listen to Joseph Gilbert, chief of Walpole Island First Nation, who we interviewed for WATERLIFE but did not include in the film. His community is on Lake St. Clair, in one of the largest fresh water deltas in the world, a maze – and paradise – of wetlands, reminiscent of the Florida Everglades, that is incongruously set between Sarnia and Detroit.
Q: Do you remember a time when people could drink the water out of the river?
A: I remember a time when I used to drink the water, without any concern. I can remember taking a pail in the summer, drawing water from the river, and in the winter going and cutting a hole in the ice where you could dip the pail down in there and you drank it. You wouldn’t dare do that today because we’re informed there’s a lot of stuff in there that isn’t beneficial to our health.
Q: Stuff from where?
A: Chemical valley [in Sarnia]. Runoff from farms, you know, the fertilizers. All of those things that are, you know, in the ecosystem today.
Q: At the same time your community does do farming. Do you think people in this community because of their traditional connection to the land are more likely to do that in a sustainable way than others?
Q: I would say so, because we have drained some marshland and wetlands to take advantage of the rich soil. But a lot of people would look at this vast area and drain it all. You know, use it in a strictly commercial sense. Our development that we try to sustain the environment, one of things that we do is through our [community business development corporation] we’re taking over more and more of the leasing of land from community members. And the objective behind that is to bring the benefit to our people because non-native farmers for years leased the land and made good money off the produce and the product. The other objective is to look at, to ensure that whatever kind of fertilizers are used, we know what they are, and I think there’s even a movement to say we will dictate what is allowable in our community for the farming industry.
Q: What’s the scale of the wetlands in here?
A: The scale I guess in miles would be about 12 miles across from east to west. North to south something like 10 miles. If you get in the interior here, if you don’t know where you are, you can get lost very easily. That’s why I have expert [guides] boating us around. I would get lost.
Q: Because it’s kind of a maze in here?
A: Yeah it is. I mean these gentlemen, they know this area. They can tell you where they are, they have names for sites and locations within this wetland that if they mention it I don’t know where it is. But when I ride with them, I don’t worry. When we’re coming downriver, they know where to speed, they know where the shallows are, they know this area. Cause they’ve lived here. You know, in a recreational sense, fishing sense, hunting, and of course the two gentlemen who are with us are resource protection officers.
Our hunting and fishing guide services are a main source of revenue for many people in the community, but it’s also recreational and by recreational I mean not only you know boating, I mean it’s a beautiful area to boat, but I mean just to come into a setting like this and relax, that’s recreational.
So people do come, and just spend time to be here in the natural setting. Even if you look at the north end of our community here on Walpole Island, there’s quite a bit of traffic there. Small as our community is, there’s still a lot of car traffic, ship traffic, so coming to a place like this where it’s so nice, it’s relaxing. So there are people who use it for that reason, they come down here.
And I’m sure there are people who come down here and who know the traditional medicines they can gain, come here and harvest that for their uses. [That’s] increasing. Because most modern medicines are chemically based. And the side effects are probably worse than the original affliction. So a lot of our people know the traditional medicines that were used and they rely on them.
When you’ve live in it and you know what’s here, you know there’s nothing here that threatens you. It’s a beautiful place and to come and again refresh yourself in a natural setting is beautiful. To wake up on a frosty morning and maybe it’s nostalgic or whatever, or romantic or fantasizing, but I try to think back to what it was like for our people before any modern developments. They survived here for thousands of years. I’m still here. My people are still here. Because they learned to survive in this and they lived off the land. And we’re still here and I think we have to appreciate that and there’s not many places like it left.
The shoreline has definitely changed because of erosion. The ships that come through here today are from around the world, so we have invasive species coming in. The ships that travel through here create what we call backwash, which creates erosion of the shoreline. When I was a young boy growing up in my neighbourhood, which is in what we call the High Banks area, I remember the sandy beaches. Most of that is gone now in my area, because it’s overgrown with phragmites [an invasive grass] that have come in. A lot of it’s washed away. So it’s not the same as when I was a child and I’m 63 years old so in my lifetime I’ve seen dramatic change. And I’m sure elders who are older than I am have seen even greater change.
Q: Is there anything that you’d like to add? That you think is important?
A: Well I guess from a political standpoint, if the general public and the governments can look at how we’ve managed our territory and preserved what is here as it is, I think it’s time governments that are sitting down and talking about environmental laws don’t do it from the legislatures in huge cities. Don’t do it from high rise office buildings, but allow the voice of the people who live off the land, who know the land, who know the environment, who understand the relationship between the various species and life forms. And the importance of that. Allow them to give the governing principles that would structure the laws that protect our environment.
If you were to bring someone from the city here, they wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about this area. They’d look at it as a bunch of weeds and water. But our people can tell you the benefit of all this and it’s an important ecosystem to the Great Lakes. This a natural filtering place. Think of all the cities on the American side and the Canadian side, the towns along the Lake Erie shoreline that draw water. You know, this is the filtering place. Let’s protect it. Consult us, take our advice, use our expertise.
We know this area, this is our homeland. And again politically, when governments and policy makers refer to First Nations people as stake holders, they are totally out to lunch because we are not stake holders. We are landowners. This is our land. This is our homeland. We didn’t immigrate here, you know in wooden ships from Europe or other areas. We were placed here and we can go back thousands of years. This is our homeland and why shouldn’t we have a major voice in how it’s developed, to sustain it?