Reconciliation with First Nations requires action
On the surface, it seemed like unfortunate political timing. On May 30, Kathleen Wynne apologized for historic abuses toward indigenous peoples as part of her official response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “We do not approach reconciliation as something we need to get over with — we approach it as something we need to get right,” she said.
And yet, just an hour later, she was getting heat in question period for getting it very wrong in her response to an environmental crime-in-progress on indigenous land that has been going on for almost 60 years.
It just so happened that week was the biennial Grassy Narrows River Run, when community members from the First Nation travel 1,700 kilometres to Toronto to press the government for action on the disaster of mercury in their lakes and rivers. Their struggle has been continuous since 1970, when the vast industrial dumping of the toxin into the English-Wabigoon river system first came to light.
This time, the folks from Grassy came armed with a game-changing scientific report — commissioned by a working group set up by Wynne herself when she was aboriginal affairs minister — that makes an irrefutable case that the mercury poisoning can and must be cleaned up.
When I was a kid, growing up in Scarborough in the early 1970s, I heard a lot about Grassy Narrows. That’s because my father Stephen Lewis, the leader of the Ontario NDP at the time, was battling the government of the day to respond to the mercury emergency
We had a book of photographs at home by the legendary Life magazine photographer Eugene Smith. It was called Minamata, and it shaped my political consciousness. The heartbreaking portraits of the victims of severe industrial mercury contamination in Japan were made all the more powerful by the fact people in our province were suffering the same impacts.
I couldn’t believe kids my age — for the simple act of eating fish from the lakes and rivers — could suffer such agonizing consequences. And yet when doctors from Japan travelled to Grassy Narrows to conduct tests, the government refused to accept their diagnosis of Minamata disease. To this day, the Ontario government cannot bring itself to call the disease by its name.
Recently, I went back and read some of the transcripts from the legislature in the 1970s. There was one incident that jumped out for me.
After the mercury poisoning came to light, commercial fishing was banned in the area and most recreational fishing lodges shut down. At the stroke of a pen, the entire economy of the region was gutted, with unemployment exploding from 5 per cent to 95 per cent virtually overnight. Even today, unemployment remains 80 per cent in Grassy Narrows.
Rather than cleaning up the river, the government of the day — in a revealing gesture of hopelessly colonial charity — constructed a building-sized freezer in Grassy Narrows and filled it with processed frozen fish. This was supposed to be some kind of solution.
The cultural gap is breathtaking. Of course, the people didn’t eat the weird frozen fish and to this day this incident gets rehashed as proof that Grassy Narrows has been offered remediation in the past and refused it.
But the symbolism is rich: what better image than a concrete bunker full of rot to tell us that paternalistic solutions are way past their best-before date? And yet the shelves seem perennially stocked full of them.
Until we as settlers really “get” the centrality of living off the land for indigenous peoples, we will never “get it right.”
And governments across this country need to understand that attempts at reconciliation will fail until we deal with the fundamental issue of land rights — from the Energy East pipeline in Quebec to the Site C dam in British Columbia.
It may be that Premier Wynne is starting to learn that lesson. On May 30, the premier had never heard of the scientific report calling for remediation of the river system. By the end of the week, her environment minister said the government was just deciding which of the remediation approaches to fund. Then last week, the government announced a delegation of cabinet ministers and scientists to Grassy Narrows.
This issue is back on the agenda in Ontario in a way it hasn’t been since I toddled along behind my dad on those endless red carpets in Queen’s Park. But this time, the frame has changed, and the message is as clear as the water in Grassy Narrows Lake: the conversation about reconciliation can begin when the fish are safe to eat again.
Avi Lewis is a filmmaker and journalist. He directed the documentary This Changes Everything.