Grassy Narrows First Nation, an Anishinaabe community, lives along the English-Wabigoon river system, northwest of Lake Superior and directly north of Lake of the Woods. Until about the middle of the previous century, they lived by fur trapping, harvesting blueberries and wild rice harvest, and the river fishery. Fish formed a significant part of the people's diet, and they also found work as guides at the fishing resorts on the river. They did not have a bucolic lifestyle, enduring unwelcome interactions with the majority society, particularly in the form of the cruelties of the residential school system.
Then the government built a series of hydroelectric dams, which disrupted the wild rice harvest. Intensive logging destroyed the blueberry harvest. And the greatest blow, the one which makes the name Grassy Narrows a source of shame to every decent Canadian, fell in 1970: high levels of mercury were detected in the English-Wabigoon river system, and medical tests showed the people of Grassy Narrows were suffering from mercury poisoning.
None of this is mysterious. Scientists and medical personnel have known for centuries that mercury is highly toxic; our common phrase "mad as a hatter" refers to the effects of the mercury used to make felt for hats. There was no question about where the mercury had come from, either; a chlorine plant upstream had dumped ten tons of untreated mercury waste into the river system at Dryden, upstream of the Grassy Narrows reserve, in 1962. The pulp and paper industry had polluted a river used by people as a source of food from time immemorial in an act of gross negligence. Governments, with equal or greater negligence, had allowed them to do it. Both now had a clear obligation: stop the pollution, clean up the river, and provide a decent level of care and compensation for the people who were poisoned.
For fifty-four years the people of Grassy Narrows have demanded the government do exactly that. Youthful activists have become grandparents, calling in vain for successive governments of this province to show a shred of compassion, or failing that decency, or failing that, responsibility for a plain obligation. For at least the past fourteen years, members of the Grassy Narrows First Nation (Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek) have marched in Toronto to call for the Ontario government to address the harms done to them.An increasing number of supporters have marched with them.
