When members of Asubpeeschoseewagong Anishinabek (Grassy Narrows First Nation) and their supporters arrive at Queen’s Park this week, they’ll be calling for the Dryden pulp and paper mill that’s been poisoning their water with neurotoxins for nearly 60 years to permanently close.
“We want everybody to be compensated, we want the mill to shut down, and we don’t want no mining or logging in our territory. We just want it all to stop,” says Chrissy Isaacs, lead organizer of the caravan.
Isaacs has been a staple of the annual River Run demonstrations since they began in 2010. She was a leader among Grassy Narrows youths who blockaded logging trucks from entering the nearby Whiskey Jack Forest in 2002 and is currently travelling 1,900 kilometres to Toronto from her community near Ontario’s western border to protest the downriver effects of methylmercury poisoning.
Staff at the upstream Reed paper mill in Dryden, Ontario, about 150 kilometres east of Grassy Narrows, dumped nearly 10 metric tonnes of mercury into the English-Wabigoon River system in the 1960s and early 1970s. Mercury poisoned the plants and fish that the people of Grassy Narrows, and neighbouring Wabaseemoong Independent Nation, were consuming.
A half-century later, medical experts are finding that varying nervous and neurological health effects affect up to 90 per cent of Grassy Narrows residents.
The Grassy Narrows road blockade to prevent clear-cut logging and mining from happening in their traditional territories has stood for 22 years, and in that time Isaacs’s children have had children of their own. She says the conversation has never been transformed as much as it has this year.
In May, scientific researchers released the revelation that sulphate and organic matter in the effluent that the mill is still releasing into the river is making methylmercury in the river system even worse, as opposed to diminishing over time as they were told.
“Back then, I made that commitment that I wasn’t going to stop until there’s justice for my community, until there’s justice for my children. And, and even back then, I was already thinking about my grandchildren, you know? And then to hear this spring that they’re putting another poison in our river, and that’s poisoning my grandchildren, that was like a slap in my face. And it, it made me angry and it made me hurt for them. And it just like stoked that fire again,” Isaacs said.
Still only in her 40s, Isaacs is beginning to struggle to open jars and she even sometimes finds walking to be a challenge. She points out the health effects of consuming mercury are intergenerational and cumulative, including neuromuscular effects and memory loss. All reasons it’s more pressing, she says, to respond to this environmental, health, constitutional, and human rights issue within a single generation.
“Even back then, I was already thinking about my grandchildren, you know? And then to hear this spring that they’re putting another poison in our river, and that’s poisoning my grandchildren, that was like a slap in my face.”
“I pray – I pray – that their grandchildren don’t have to be doing this work. It’s already sad that my grandchildren are standing up too when it shouldn’t even be that way. It should have stopped,” she says. “If you think about towns or cities, if something goes wrong with their water, they get it cleaned right away, they get compensated. They get taken care of, you know? And for us, it’s over 50 years now.”
Grassy Narrows Chief Rudy Turtle was 11 years old in 1976 when scientists pulled him out of class to have his hair tested for mercury poisoning and asked him how often he ate fish. Turtle ate fish often, as his parents were commercial fishers, working for decades in the community’s largest economic industry before mercury dumping wiped it out. It wasn’t until 2019 when Turtle and other surviving community members finally saw how high their own childhood test results were.
“It made me wonder why people weren’t alarmed,” he said. “It’s almost like it was no big deal. I’m talking about the government of Ontario or Canada. Even medical professionals to sound the alarm and say, ‘these young people – these kids – their mercury levels are just way too high.’”
When Turtle first became Chief in 2018, he declared Grassy Narrows’ 2,850-square-kilometre territory off-limits to resource development and struck a Land Protection Team to monitor the land. The Chief and his council filed a lawsuit in Superior Court in July, alleging Ontario’s free-entry system to register mining claims fails to uphold its constitutional responsibilities to consultation and accommodation.
The First Nation also filed a lawsuit against Canada and Ontario this summer, alleging governments allowing the Dryden mill owners to pollute the river system and failing to remediate it constitute a violation of Grassy Narrows members’ treaty right to fish. That lawsuit includes the provision that the Crown cease allowing the Dryden mill to contaminate the water.
“The government has been lying to us, and even the paper mill, they keep ensuring us that whatever’s being poured into the water no longer has an impact,” Turtle says. “They were saying they monitor the plant, that safety measures are being followed and what’s going into the river is good and ‘you don’t have to worry about it’ when in fact, that wasn’t true. They were still pouring stuff that’s making the mercury worse.”
Turtle says his community wasn’t surprised to discover the mercury effects are worsening but members expressed “disappointment and anger” to hear those fears confirmed. On top of studies going back to 2015 that found mercury levels continue to rise in some lakes, he said people have been noticing water discoloration and unusual sediment along the banks.
Ontario has made ‘very little progress’ cleaning up the mercury
Turtle says half of the $85-million fund that Ontario allocated in 2018 to fund mercury cleanup and remediation efforts in the English-Wabigoon River system has already been spent. He says “very little progress” has been made as the panel of advisors, lawyers, and scientists are “digging in the same pot.”
Similarly, progress has been slow on the 22-bed long-term care home specializing in Minamata disease and other mercury ailments that the federal government committed to build in 2017. Canada has committed $90 million to construction and ongoing operations, but Turtle says construction has stalled. A separate health clinic is currently being built.
And while Turtle values those investments, he sees them as commitments to manage the poor health of Grassy Narrows members, rather than ensure the long-term health of the land and people. The priority, he says, needs to be on cleaning the mercury out of the river bed.
“My preference is just cleaning it up,” he says. “It may not be 100 per cent but at least if you could remove 80 per cent or 90 per cent of it, at least it’s cleaner than it is. And eventually, years down the road, I hope the rest would clean itself up.”
Jon Thompson is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter based in Thunder Bay
