The Great Lakes

Here's what someone has been doing to draw attention to the condition that the Great Lakes are in.

---------------------------------------------------------
Kevin McMahon
special to the star
KINGSTON–Josephine Mandamin warms you with her grandmotherly smile and speaks
in soft aboriginal tones that lull you into agreement, even as she conks you on the head.

"I really think – and I don't like saying it either – that it seems that it's always been the
native people that bring these things to light ... to awaken people."

What Mandamin, an Anishinabe elder from Thunder Bay, wants illuminated is environmental
collapse. And while you might be perturbed by the notion that aboriginals care more about
that than the rest of us, it should be pointed out that Mandamin has walked 17,000 kilometres
to reinforce her point.

Mandamin grew up on Manitoulin Island, eating fresh fish daily and drinking straight
from Georgian Bay. During her lifetime, she has seen the Great Lakes nearly ruined – the
fish killed by invasive species, the harbours poisoned, and, now, the water evaporating into
the clouds of global warming.

Since the lakes provide drinking water to 35 million people, you'd think their health would be
a raging public issue. But it has ebbed and flowed from public consciousness since the
Cuyahoga River fire of 1969.

In 2005, more than 60 scientists endorsed a report declaring the Great Lakes ecosystem so
stressed that it's nearing "irreversible" collapse – a prediction ignored by most of the region's
media.

First Nations' grandmothers do not love their grandkids more than you love yours, but they
may have a clearer view of the horizon.

In the Anishinabe tradition, women fetch the water. So, in 2003, when Mandamin was
"moved by the spirits" to speak out for the Great Lakes, it was natural for her to pick up
her copper pail and start walking. She decided to circle the lakes and tell people that
"the water is sick ... and people need to really fight for that water, to speak for that water,
to love that water."

Every spring since, Mandamin and a small band of followers have walked around one of
the lakes. Next weekend they depart from the Katarokwi Native Friendship Centre here to
walk up the St. Lawrence River. Their mission will end where the lakes' water pours into the
Atlantic Ocean (bearing so much poison that a quarter of the male beluga whales in the
Gulf of St. Lawrence have cancer).

At every tributary, Mandamin stops and talks directly to the water, offering prayers, tobacco
and thanks. "I've heard so many times, `You're crazy...'" she says. "But we know it's not a
crazy thing we're doing; we know it's for the betterment of the next generations."

Walking up the St. Lawrence, Josephine will soon reach Akwesasne, which straddles the river
at Cornwall and is renowned for its gambling, smuggling and Mohawk warriors. But 40 years
ago, Akwesasne was known for its farms and fishery, which had thrived for at least 3,000 years
and made it a pillar of the legendary Iroquois Confederacy. Henry Lickers, head of Akwesasne's
environment department, likes to remind Torontonians that the reserve shipped its extra food
to our soup kitchens during the Depression, yet we didn't even notice when its economy disappeared.

The fisherman and farmers were ruined by the industries that came with the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Domtar Paper and General Motors poisoned the fish with, respectively, mercury and PCBs. Alcoa
pumped so much fluoride into the air that cows' teeth grew brittle and broke, and they died. Pollution
also caused the farms to go bust.

Henry Lickers draws a straight line from the ruin of Mohawk agriculture to the rise of the privateers
and their warrior platoons. "People look at me kind of funny when I say PCBs caused the Oka Crisis.
But that's what happened."

There are some 800 outstanding native land claims in Canada. Most concern the three-fifths of the
country that urbanites view as trackless expanse, resource companies see as a storehouse, and rural
First Nations call home. These claims sow perpetual conflict as industrialists race to strip disputed land
while its once-and-future owners struggle to protect it. It is not NIMBYism that pushes natives to the
barricades, but a well-founded premonition of apocalypse.

We only hear about these struggles when they're bloody or inconvenient. If you block the 401, the
media come running. But make your stand in the sticks, as did Algonquins blocking uranium mining
near Peterborough, and you're thrown in jail without even getting on TV.

When he was Indian Affairs Minister, Jim Prentice, now Minister of the Environment, said: "Blockades
are not in anyone's interest... The worst thing, I think, is that they erode the goodwill that exists
toward aboriginal people."

That sounds reasonable, but it's not true. For every situation that devolves into a bitter mess like
the Caledonia standoff, there are two in which non-natives cheer to see rapacious extractors hobbled.

Consider Haida Gwaii, the B.C. archipelago often called "Canada's Galapagos." Its Sitka spruce take
800 years to grow 90 metres. Multinational paper companies were furiously felling these behemoths
until the exasperated Haida – whose culture was built of cedar and spruce – set up blockades. So
began a drama that raged on muddy roads for decades and ultimately brought the islands' two
communities – native and non-native – together.

The latter knew the Haida were not against logging; they'd always been loggers. But everyone also
knew the multinationals would rape the forest, then lay everybody off and leave. So loggers and
fishermen stood with the Haida on the blockades until they won.

But these struggles are not undertaken lightly, and some native communities – fearing strained
relations with neighbours and the possibility of people getting hurt – don't resort to blockades.
Then again, doing nothing is not an option in communities where many still feel bound by the
Great Law. Codified by the Iroquois Confederacy, it dictates that every societal action be weighed
for its impact on the next seven generations. That's not an abstraction for Josephine Mandamin.
"My third great-grandchild will be born soon," she says. "If I live long enough, maybe that child will
have a child... I may see five generations before I die."

So, should you be driving along the 401 next week and spot an old lady carrying a brass bucket,
ask not for whom she carries that water. She carries it for us all.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kevin McMahon is the director of Waterlife, a documentary about the Great Lakes. Josephine Mandamin
appears in the film, which premieres next month at Hot Docs.

_________________

"The monkeys are throwing stuff at me again."
-Survivorman in Costa Rica

That was a good read Bush Cool

Thanks for posting it Smile

_________________
A Knifeless Man is a Lifeless Man
Canadian To The Core
Carry Less by Knowing More
Knowledge Weighs Nothing

Good for her Hopefully people will wake up . Great find Bushrat ♥

Last edited by LaraCroft on Wed Apr 08, 2009 6:55 am; edited 1 time in total

I am going to watch a show on the history channel about how the Great Lakes where made it's called how the earth was made great show. it's on tonite. Very Happy

_________________

	linsleyk wrote:
	I am going to watch a show on the history channel about how the Great Lakes where made it's called how the earth was made great show. it's on tonite.

I'll have to watch for them to run it here.

The Great Lakes are of particular interest for me. I was born at the south end of Lake Huron, and have lived for decades near Lake Ontario. And I have spent a lot of time (though never enough) in the Bruce Peninsula that seperates Lake Huron from Georgian Bay. (The former name of the Bruce Peninsula was the Saugeen Peninsula, as per my avatar.) I have seen all the Great Lakes. Being on the last lake, I am in effect drinking whatever enters Lakes Michigan, Superior, Huron, Erie, and their watersheds. This woman says she used to drink right from Georgian Bay. Great Lakes freighters used to take on their drinking water from Georgian Bay. You could fish in Lake Huron in the Bruce Peninsula and catch your limit every time. Those days are gone.

_________________

"The monkeys are throwing stuff at me again."
-Survivorman in Costa Rica

Yea sad when that happens Bushrat. It seems to happen every where though. My neighbor next door used to live in the mountains and used to be able to drink straight from the river when She was a child,but not any more. I know I won't eat anything out of the rivers around my house,but some will. Cool

The days when you could catch your limit every time out of Lake Huron were gone before we were born.

This isn't news, really. The Great Lakes have been stumbling from one crisis to the next since WWII, and they weren't doing too well before that, either. The Atlantic Salmon was extirpated from Lake Ontario by 1893.

Some of us have been making noise about this for years. It would be helpful if all the voices of concern could be raised as one, but instead we get certain native activists pretending that they're alone, and playing the same old racial blame game.

And when the media does cover the lakes, they overblow things, which actually discourages cleaning them up. Why bother, people think, if the lakes are that far gone? We'll never fix them. One quarter of male belugas in the Gulf of St Lawrence have cancer from that water! (Never you mind where the entire GTA draws its drinking water. Does 1/4 of the GTA have cancer? Perhaps that water isn't as poisonous as some people pretend.)

These scare tactics are counterproductive. Show people something beautiful and ask them to protect it, and they will. Show them a cesspool and ask them to clean it up, and they'll suddenly remember that they have to wash their hair.

Lake Erie used to be synonymous with pollution. It has been cleaned up a great deal. We need to look at the progress we have made in places like that and carry on with it there and in other locations.

_________________

"The monkeys are throwing stuff at me again."
-Survivorman in Costa Rica

watched How the Earth Was Made last night about the great lakes very good,

did you know the great lakes are drying up because of crustal rebound from a massive glacier that covered it and now the land is springing back.

_________________

Lake Erie is actually the poster child for the improving state of the Great Lakes, although Erie's problem was not so much industrial chemicals as over-fertilization. Too much phosphorous, from sewage and from detergents, combined with Erie being the shallowest and most productive of the lakes, caused algae blooms that depleted oxygen levels and caused massive die-offs of fish. The lake wasn't so much dead as "hyper alive."

Reduction in phosphate detergents, and the introduction of tertiary treatment in sewage facilities, brought Erie back.

But there are also excellent indications that toxic pollution of the lakes has abated. Take the cormorants, for example -- they're now a nuisance. Ospreys have become common, and the bald eagle is on the rebound. Recovery among all these fish-eating birds is a great indication that the fish are much healthier to eat.

What the media always confuses is the connection between toxic pollution and fish populations -- there really isn't one. What keeps knocking out fish populations in the lakes is not pollution but a combination of habitat loss and continual ecological disruption caused by invasive species. For example, the zebra mussels did a number on walleye and perch in Erie, but at the same time, because the lake is fairly healthy, bass and pike numbers took off. Now we're seeing a decline in baitfish in Lake Huron, which is doing a number on salmon, but fish like rainbows, with more elastic eating habits, are doing okay. So the fish populations stumble from one crisis to the next, but while any given fishery is always facing collapse, the lakes themselves are much better off than they were when I was a kid.

great points Andrew_S Very Happy

_________________