NFB Interactive Website
April 6, 2009
KINGSTON – Josephine Mandamin warms you with her grandma’s smile and speaks in those soft aboriginal tones that lull you into agreement even as she conks you on the head.
“I really think -- and I don’t like saying it either -- that it seems that it’s always been the native people that bring these things to light. When they’re not happy with something they will do something … to awaken people. Jolt somebody. Like, tear the railroad tracks down. We can do that.”
What Josephine, an Anishinaabe elder from Thunder Bay, wants illuminated is environmental collapse. And while you might be annoyed at the idea that aboriginal people care more about that than the rest of us, let me quickly add that Josephine has walked 17,000 kilometers to reinforce her point.
Of course, by now, we all basically grasp the environmental challenges we face and that nobody has a monopoly on ecological anxiety or virtue. If you travel Canada’s backroads, you’ll meet many a ruddy-faced fellow delighted to skewer the Earth-loving-Indian cliché by pointing out old cars rusting around the local rez. On the other hand, we liberal urbanites tend to buy into the stereotype, especially us zoomers who got our environmental nursery-schooling from the 1971 “crying Indian” TV commercial. “Some people,” baritoned the narrator, “have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. And some people don’t.” As teens, we knew which kind of people we were, but had yet to understand that little deuce coupes drown polar bears.
So Josephine’s sentiment would seem seriously passé were it not for all the evidence to indicate that she is, more or less, right. It’s not that First Nations’ grandmas love their grandkids more than you love yours, it’s that they have a clearer view of the horizon.
Most of us still see three-fifths of Canada as trackless expanse. Resource companies see that same land as a storehouse. But it is, in fact, home to the peoples of rural First Nations. For city folk, climate change or clearcutting or mining pollution are mostly abstractions experienced through media. But if you fall through sea ice that should be solid, or can’t find a totemic cedar in the deepest bush, or can’t eat caribou because it is full of PCBs – well, then you feel environmental destruction through your skin. And you will go to the wall to stop it.
Josephine grew up on Manitoulin Island, eating fresh fish daily and drinking straight from Georgian Bay. During her lifetime, she has seen the Great Lakes nearly ruined -- the fish killed by invasive species, the harbors poisoned, the beaches fouled by sewage and, now, the water disappearing into the clouds of global warming. Since the lakes provide drinking water to 35 million people, you’d think their health would be a public issue. But it hasn’t been, really, since the first flush of environmentalism that followed the Great Cayahoga River Fire of 1969. In 2005, 60 scientists declared the Great Lakes ecosystem so stressed that it’s nearing “irreversible collapse” – a prediction ignored by almost all the media in the region.
In the Anishinaabe tradition, women fetch the water. “I’ve carried water my whole life,” says Josephine. That made her responsible for its purity and aware of its value. So, in 2003, when she was “moved by the spirits” to speak out for the Great Lakes, it seemed natural for her to pick up her copper pail and start walking. She decided to circle the lakes and tell everyone she met that “the water is sick... and people need to really fight for that water, to speak for that water, to love that water”. Every spring since, Josephine and a small band of followers has walked around one of the lakes, taking two springs to tackle Lake Michigan. This spring they are walking up the St Lawrence River, ending their mission where the lakes’ water pours into the Atlantic Ocean (bearing so much poison that a quarter of the beluga whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence have cancer).
Six years on, the water walkers are heroines in First Nations and are feted at each they pass through. Very occasionally they are noticed by the larger society -- Michigan’s Canadian-born governor, Jennifer Granholm, for example, gave them a nice plaque – but mostly they travel unseen. Josephine doesn’t care. She’ll cheerfully talk to anyone, but she’s not looking for publicity, per se. “That’s not what it’s all about,” she says. “What it’s about is the walk.”
Coming to a beach, Josephine will stop and talk directly to the water, offering it prayers, tobacco and encouragement and giving it her thanks. If that seems quixotic, well, she says: “I’ve heard so many times: you’re crazy. You guys are crazy…. But we know it’s not a crazy thing we’re doing, we know it’s for the betterment of the next generations.” Anyway, friend, crazy is relative.
One of the communities on her route was Aamjiwnaang, a traditional Anishinaabe village clinging to a scrap of land on the St. Clair River, surrounded by chemical factories. In the river, 70 per cent of male frogs have ovaries. In the community, it is common for women to have several miscarriages and female babies are born at twice the normal rate.
Walking up the St. Lawrence, Josephine will soon come to Akwesasne, which straddles the river at Cornwall and is renowned for its gambling, smuggling and Mohawk warriors. A mere 40 years ago, Akwesasne was known for its farms and fishery, which had thrived for at least 3,000 years, making it one of the pillars of the legendary Iroquois confederacy. Henry Lickers, head of Akwesasne’s environmental department, likes to remind Torontonians that the reserve shipped its extra food to our soup kitchens during the Depression, but we didn’t even notice when their economy disappeared.
The fisherman and farmers were put out of business by the industries that came with the St. Lawrence Seaway. Cornwall’s Domtar Paper and General Motors, on the American side, salted the river with mercury and PCBs, wrecking the fishery. Alcoa Aluminum pumped so much fluoride into the air that cows’ teeth grew brittle and broke and they died. And the farms went bust. At the time, nobody outside the reserve much cared, or even noticed, because, well, that’s “progress”. Now, Domtar is shuttered and GM has split town. But the river and fields are still useless and will be for a long time, even if governments were serious about rehabilitating them, which they aren’t.
Henry Lickers draws a straight line from the destruction of Akwesasne’s agriculture to the rise of its new privateers and their warrior platoons, always spoiling for a fight. “People look at me kind of funny when I say PCBs caused the Oka crisis,” he says. “But that’s what happened.” It is not NIMBYism that pushes natives to the barricades, but a well-founded premonition of apocalypse.
There are some 800 outstanding native land claims in Canada, maundering along endlessly, sewing perpetual conflict as industrial developers work furiously to strip disputed land while its once and future owners try to stop them. But we only hear about these struggles when they bleed or get too close for comfort. Barricade a budding suburb or block the 401 and the microphones come running. Make your stand in the sticks – like the Algonquin trying to block uranium mining north of Peterborough -- and you’re thrown in jail – as their leaders were -- without even getting on TV.
When he was Indian Affairs Minister (and, BTW, can you believe they still call it that?), Jim Prentice, now Minister of the Environment, said: “Blockades are not in anyone's interest. They harm innocent people and they do damage to aboriginal people … The worst thing, I think, is that they erode the goodwill that exists toward aboriginal people.”
That sounds reasonable, in a suitish way, but it’s just not true. For every situation that devolves into a bitter, bigoted mess like the Caledonia stand-off, there are two in which non-natives are cheering from the sidelines to see rapacious, oblivious extractors hobbled.
Consider Haida Gwaii, the archipelago of BC rain forest previously known as the Queen Charlotte Islands and often called “Canada’s Galapagos”. The Sitka spruce there are the largest living things on Earth, taking 800 years to grow 90 meters. Multinational paper companies were furiously felling these behemoths until the Haida – whose monumental culture was built of cedar and spruce -- put themselves between the trees and the chippers. So began a drama that raged on muddy roads for decades and ultimately brought the islands’ two communities -- native and non – together. The latter – loggers, fishermen, soldiers and hippies – all knew the Haida were not against logging. They’d done it forever. But everyone also knew the multinationals would rape the forest until every last tree was reduced to toilet paper, then they’d lay everybody off and leave. So veteran loggers stood with the Haida on the blockades. Mounties forced to arrest Haida elders were in tears. To make a long story short, the Haida won and are now, effectively, back in charge of their islands. Notwithstanding the ecological value of giant trees (as the Earth’s lungs) one need only behold the majesty of a giant spruce to realize that the Haida’s sacrifices were in the interest of all humanity.
But the sacrifices are real and not taken lightly. A few summers ago, I visited the Pic River First Nation, on Lake Superior, and was invited to dinner by then-Chief Daniel Couchie and his wife Eva. Over a dinner of moose-meat sausage, the conversation wandered from their daughter’s brilliant career as a Toronto dancer, to how mining and paper-making had polluted their lake and river, to the absurdities the community had endured for decades fighting its land claim, which the community believes crucial to improving social conditions. People were growing frustrated, especially the young. Many had suggested blocking the TransCanada highway, as they easily could. But Daniel and Eva constantly counseled restraint. Firstly, they didn’t want to inconvenience their neighbours in Marathon, the factory town next door. “We play ball with those people,” Daniel said. And, of course, they were afraid that someone would get hurt.
Then again, doing nothing is not an option in communities where many still feel bound by the Great Law. First codified by the Iroquios confederacy, possibly before the Magna Carta, the law dictates that every societal action be weighed for its impact on future generations, the usual standard being seven. That’s not an abstraction for Josephine Mandamin. “My third great-grandchild will be born soon,” she says. “If I live long enough, maybe that child will have a child… I may see five generations before I die.”
It is a visceral sense of those cascading generations -- with their basic need for food, air and water -- which compels Josephine to action and, very occasionally, to the observation that First Nations carry a disproportionate share of the burden of saving our collective asses.
So should you be gliding upon the 401 next week and chance to glance at the side road and spy a curious old lady carrying a brass bucket, ask not for whom she carries that water. She carries it for us all.
Kevin McMahon is the director of Waterlife, a documentary about the Great Lakes. Josephine Mandamin appears in the film, which premieres next month at Hot Docs.