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.
A diverse crowd will contain diverse people, diverse groups, and those diverse people will inevitably have different agendas and levels of involvement and understanding. Given the preoccupations of the past year, I was profoundly disappointed but not surprised to hear the chant, which has become ubiquitous this year: "Turtle Island to Palestine, occupation is a crime."
I remember thinking no good would come of these chants.
I make no secret of my belief that a demonstration has the best chance of success when it has wide public support and focuses that support on a clear set of actionable demands. River Run has such a set of demands: clearly defined, and clearly within the ability of the government of Ontario to accomplish. The Ontario government, on the other hand, has neither the means nor the responsibility to "free Palestine", even if anything like a consensus on what a "free Palestine" would look like existed. Linking a call for justice for one Anishnaabe community to the suffering of the people of Palestine risks ensuring that no call for justice gets addressed.
I might have left the event with a sour taste if I had not encountered an old friend from Grassy. I was abruptly called back to the reality of why I show up for River Run every year: I have the privilege of knowing some of the people of Grassy. I have enjoyed their hospitality, experienced the warmth of their culture, and felt their generosity in the face of all the harms done to them.The speeches of the leaders of the Grassy Community brought it home: whatever distractions I had encountered earlier, we were here to support a badly abused community, to add our voices to their call for justice.
The distractions, unfortunately, proved useful to people who did not want the call for justice for Grassy heard. They focused on young students taken to the event on a Toronto School Board field trip, some of whom were apparently Jewish; they or their parents found the chants referencing Palestine offensive. I have no doubt some of these students and their parents felt genuine distress, but that doesn't mean their reaction was not useful to those who had far more cynical reasons for distracting public attention from the actual purpose of the demonstration. Successive governments in Ontario have pursued a policy of mining the land and people of the North, both literally and figuratively. Premier Ford, who has made no secret of his ambition to proceed full speed ahead with mining development, has every reason not to want to rights of the people of the land to get in his way. He has repeatedly and consistently refused to lean up the river, stop the ongoing pollution, or even meet with the leaders of Grassy.
Students have a right and a need to know about this history and about the ongoing malfeasance of those charged with governing them. I would argue parents have a duty to allow their children to learn the truth about their country and the province they live in, particularly when those facts are painful. The teachers who took students to this event were engaged in a completely legitimate and indeed laudable educational activity. It's also clear the event itself was completely peaceful. If the Ontario Ministry of Educational is indeed "investigating' teachers for bringing their students to meet, and see, people their government's policies have harmed, they are acting shamefully. If their concern is with the exposure of students to chants opposing Israel or Israeli policy, then I would ask where they expect teachers to guarantee their students will not hear such chants.
None of this excuses the people who took it upon themselves to inject their concerns and their beliefs into a demonstration calling for desperately needed relief for a deeply abused community. The people of Grassy Narrows are highly sophisticated at organizing. If the feel the need to link their cause to the people of Palestine, or Ukraine, or Kurdistan, or Xinjiang, they are perfectly capable of saying so. If they do not, I don't think it too much to ask people in a march with a specific goal to keep their focus on that goal, if not out of respect for their fellow supporters, then out of respect for the courage, resilience, and humanity of the people we are advocating for and with.
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