‘I decided to work with Grassy’s youth because they saw me as a leader’
> DARWIN FOBISTER, 21
I didn’t find out until the age of 5 about the mercury poisoning. I started having seizures — my mother’s umbilical cord had a high amount of mercury in it. The doctors knew when I was born that I wasn’t a normal baby. When I was 8, my grandma and my dad told me everything. They said my parents ate a lot of fish, and explained about the pulp mill, which dumped mercury into the river system in the 1960s. They told me we were sick. Every day I have headaches, and I can’t feel my hands sometimes. They get numb. My speech was way off, too — I had to take special education.
But I never let mercury bother me too much. We need to move forward.
Now, I’m the recreational activator at the community’s multi-purpose complex. I put on activities for the kids to give them a brighter future and an active life.
I decided to work with Grassy’s youth because they saw me as a leader. They looked up to me because I never turned to alcohol and drugs.
I can’t say kids here have everything, but I see everything in them. They’re involved in their culture, they’re learning how to get the community back together instead of separated. They enjoy the moccasin game; they pick wild rice and learn how to process and cook it.
I see leaders around here. I don’t see mercury. When I think about our people, I think about our hunting, fishing and trapping — the cultural practices we still live today.
The media’s focus on mercury means we’re no longer alone. We have the world’s support and it makes everybody in Grassy feel stronger.
But our community is not all about mercury. We don’t want to think of a dying tree, we want to think of a living tree — healthy with growing green leaves. That’s the truth. I enjoy my life. I enjoy my fishing and my great-grandfather’s teachings.
Part of my happy story is filmmaking. I started taking pictures and videos as a teenager because I love nature and the beautiful sites around the reserve. I take them to bring out beauty in the community, so people don’t think that they have nothing.
My friends from around the world like my videos. They start to see what’s really going on in Grassy, the positives and the negatives. My work is showing people that there are youth here who are interested in these kinds of things, and in honouring the land and the water the way our elders did — but with the new tools available to us.