Eagle's return a sign of hope for Mohawks

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Golden eagles are occasionally sighed these days flying high above the Akwesasne Mohawk territory that straddles the international border alongside the polluted waters of the St. Lawrence River near Cornwall in Eastern Ontario.

The return of the majestic bird, which has a special spiritual significance to Mohawks, is a sign of hope for Henry Lickers, director of the Akwesasne Mohawk Council's environment department on the Canadian side of the Native territory.

"It's an indicator of something happening," the Mohawk biologist said. "There

are some improvements going on."

Pollution levels appear to have reached a plateau, he says. But he adds that the sad truth is that the eagles, driven away years ago by pollution, are returning to a Native community whose way of life has been contaminated too, leaving serious health and social problems.

Only a few minutes drive from his cluttered office in the Mohawk village of St. Regis, three aluminum manufacturing plants on the U.S. side of the border are about to begin a massive three to four-year attempt, at a cost of more than $100 million, to clean up years of discharged PCBs.

Across the river in Cornwall, the federal and Ontario governments are about to launch a multi-million dollar attempt to get rid of decades of accumulated mercury and other metals and contaminants that have got into the river from the city's chemical and paper industries.

For years, the 12,000 Mohawks of Akwesasne have been caught between the two major sources of contaminants on both sides of the international border.

"The Mohawks have been, and there's no doubt about it, the most impacted by this pollution," says Daniel Green of Societe pour Vaincre la Pollution, a Montreal-based environmental group. "They ate the fish, breathed the air, and drank the water. But the bottom line is that nobody cared or cares."

The Mohawk name Akwesasne means "where the partridge drums." Because of pollution, there have been no partridges at Akwesasne for many years.

Environmental problems began in the 1950s with the construction of the St.. Lawrence Seaway. Mohawk lands were flooded. The river's natural flow was changed. Instead of water levels fluctuating with the seasons, they remained static. Fish spawning patterns were changed and fish populations altered. Marshes and the animals that thrived in them died.

As part of the Seaway development, the Moses-Saunders power dam was built upriver from Cornwall, creating cheap electricity. The power attracted General Motors, Reynolds Co. and the Aluminum Co. of America, which built aluminum manufacturing plants on the U.S. side of the river.

Until their use was banned in 1978, the three companies used polychlorinated biphenyls, which were later determined to be highly toxic chemical compounds, in the production of aluminum. The PCBs discharged into the river system, finding their way into the sediment and aquatic organisms.

The toxic sediment acted as a continuing source of PCBs, which moved out of the sediment into the food chain, harming fish, birds and animals. Birds of prey and mammals such as mink and otter disappeared. The fast St. Lawrence River current swept PCBs downstream and dumped them in Canadian waters, including Lake St. Francis.

The results were disastrous to the Mohawks.

The eating of fish and snapping turtles was restricted because of the high level of PCBs and other toxic substances.

"We think it was not unusual for the people to have 12 to 13 fish meals a week," Mr. Lickers said. "Something like 60 to 70 per cent of the protein source came from the river. People were mostly fishermen, farmers, hunters or trappers."

Not only were fish catches reduced because of spawning and habitat changes created by the Seaway, but what fish were available were contaminated and often carried open sores on them. Fish were found to have high mercury levels and tests of river water identified about 100 harmful substances in it.

In 1978, Mohawk authorities oneach side of the international border advised women of childbearing age and children under 15 not to consume fish taken from the St. Lawrence River. The advisory remains in effect.

At the same time, airborne fluoride from the Reynolds plant was identified as the pollutant that damaged trees and vegetation on Cornwall Island on the Canadian side of Akwesasne. The fluoride deformed or killed cattle owned by Mohawks. The company paid Native farmers compensation, but keeping cattle is no longer a viable form of farming on the island. The pollution destroyed even the island's bees.

"then, people had stopped eating fish, farming had all but ended and the marshes that had sustained a trapping industry of about 22,000 to 30,000 muskrat pelts a year, along with some beaver and marten, had decayed," Lickers said.

1985, the pollution and the habitat changes that began with the Seaway construction were causing a breakdown in the traditional structure of the Mohawk community, creating factions and internal disputes.

"The traditional economy was breaking apart," Lickers says, "and the beginnings of the trouble of 1990 and the big blowup at Oka were taking place."

1990, the Mohawks, who had lost their old economy, were bitterly divided over whether gambling should be developed on the U.S. side of Akwesasne. The dispute involved beatings, arson and armed confrontation. It ended only when heavily armed police forces from Canada and the United States moved onto the territory after two Mohawks were shot to death.

Lickers says Akwesasne is a classic example of environmental change bringing about violent conflict.

Some of the angry Mohawks who played leading roles in the violence at Akwesasne in 1990 went on to take part shortly afterward in the Oka crisis in Quebec,

in which Mohawks from Kanesatake were at the centre of a 78-day armed standoff with police and the army.

The change at Akwesasne from a traditional fish diet to meat and other foods high in carbohydrates had adverely affected the Mohawks' health, Lickers says.

"The change from a traditional diet has been deadly."

As with other Native people, whose metabolism is different from non-Natives, the Mohawks now suffer unusually high rates of diabetes, obesity, hypertension and heart disease.

"The Seaway was a huge trauma for the Mohawks,' an official with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, who is in charge of the PCB cleanpup project to the United States. "Historically, they have been badly hurt."

Carson says cleaning up the PCBs discharged by the three aluminum manufacturers will begin this summer and make take up to four years to complete.

"It's a massive amount of work," she said. "GM is committed now to taking 30,000 cubic yards (of contaminated sediment) out of the river...If you only look at the river portions of these cleanups, you're talking probably well over $11-million between the three industries, because it's an incredible amount of contamination.

"Each of the companies, todate, have footed the bill for investigating and cleaning up these sites. This is coming entirely from company money, with EPA oversight."

But there are concerns about the safety of the U.S. cleanup program, according to Daniel Green of Societe pour vancrela pollution, who has met with James Blanchard, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, to express his organization's views.

There is little experience with dredging PCBs on the scale of the cleanup on the U.S. side of Akwesasne, he says, and the concern is that if a mistake occurs, huge amounts of PCBs could be released into Canadian waters.

"Just imagine if during the GM dredging that a barge would tip over and massive contaminate sediments would rush to Canadian waters," Green says. "That would create a diplomatic incident. We would almost have to shut down Montreal's drinking intake if that happened."

At Cornwall the federal and Ontario governments, both hard pressed for funds because of government deficits, also face a major cleanup tak.

Domtar Inc. operates a major paper mill in the city and the smell from its operations are invariably blown by the prevailing winds into the city's downtown area.

It is the most dominant of the offensive odors created by many of the city's industries.

Elaine Kennedy, a high school teacher and environmental activist, remember arriving in Cornwall to teach in 1972.

"'That smell is money to our pockets,' people used to tell me. But there has been a change in 22 years in thinking about pollution. People realized it's not healthy and there was a need for change."

Domtar announced this year that it would install state-of-the-art pollution controls over the next three years to meet stricter government standards.

ICI Forest Products, owned by Toronto-based ICI Canada Ltd., announced last month that it would close a 60-year operation that produced chlorine and caustic soda - with a loss of up to 170 jobs - because it could not afford to comply with stricter environmental controls.

British textile manufacturer Courtaulds PLC closed its fibre plant in December of 1992 because it was having difficulty getting the money to modernize and clean up its effluent. The company was the city's second-largest manufacturing employer; 360 people lost their jobs.

Courtaulds, without admitting any legal liability, will contribute to the cost of dredging several thousand cubic metres of mercury-contaminated sediment from the

St. Lawrence River in the fall in front of its waterfront property. The rest of the estimated $400,000 cost of the demonstration project is coming from the federal and provincial governments.

The city has said it is committed to improving its antiquated sewage system, which discharges pollutants into the St. Lawrence during heavy rainfalls and spring runoffs.

"It will take us into the next century to deal with the problem," says Rick Kirk, an officials with the Ontario Environmental Ministry.

(Reprinted with permission form the Globe and Mail.)