Yes. It sounds goods.
I'm really honoured to be here to talk to you today. I've come a number of different times to this type of forum to talk.
I bring greetings from the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne and from the Mohawk people of Akwesasne. We want you to know that we're still on the St. Lawrence River and we're still trying to protect that part of the river where we live.
We've had many different approaches over the periods of time. Our first approach to, at that time, Upper and Lower Canada, was in 1834, when our people, the traditional chiefs, went to the British government and complained about building the Beauharnois control structures and how they would impact the environment in Akwesasne. I think they were promised something like £120,000 for the damages that would be done to the St. Lawrence. They never saw that money, but that was one of the agreements.
We have a long history together on this. The department of the environment at the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne started in 1976, just five years after Environment Canada and six years after the EPA in the United States. Since Akwesasne sits in Quebec, Ontario, and New York State, we work with both federal governments, provinces, and state governments.
The department grew out of problems with fluoride, mercury, Mirex, PCBs, dioxins, dibenzofurans, and a whole raft of things that were coming down the river. The major ones found in our own area were being produced by aluminum companies, by Domtar, and the chemical companies that surround it in Cornwall. We have a good knowledge of where those compounds come from, but as we looked at the problems with these in Akwesasne, more and more we saw that the health impacts on our own people were as important to us as could be.
In 1980 we had a health study carried out and research on the contaminants in Akwesasne: fluoride, mercury, Mirex, and PCBs. Of course we were told at that time by the epidemiologist who worked with us that there would be no way possible to simulate what the mixtures were and what they were actually doing to us since there would be so many different things happening. But we continued, and we still worked on the fish.
We have helped MOECC, now our Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry to do some of the best fish monitoring in the St. Lawrence River in our area for contaminants, mercury, and those others. We found that the models that were used—and I don't know who to addresses this—to establish and to look at the impacts of these compounds on human beings were using standardized methods. Scientists like standard temperature and pressure because then they can measure one compound and know how it acts. The problem is that it doesn't act that way in the environment.
What happened is that we were able to find that there were many more compounds in the fish. A lot of them, they said, were at safe levels; a lot of them weren't. We actually knew how much fish we ate—I don't look like this from eating a 250-gram portion of fish; I eat probably closer to a kilo of fish, and I tend to like the bigger fish. What happens is that bioaccumulation in those fish make us prime suspects for accumulating those compounds.
After the epidemiological work was done, we were told that, yes, they could find a lot of symptomology but no direct medical dysfunction in the people at Akwesasne. That's not a very nice sort of thing for $7-million health study to come out with, because our people are still suffering from a lot of different diseases like diabetes, cancers, and everything else, which seem to accumulate among the traditional people who are using fish from the river.
No one has been able to tell us yet which way this goes.
We are also working more broadly than just for Akwesasne in that we are also a member of the International Joint Commission. I sit on the scientific advisory board on the science priority committee. We are continuously looking to see what's happening in the environment and how we can work with them.
We've worked with Environment Canada. I sat on the science and technology advisory committee for a number of years in order to advise about impacts within CEPA and things that were happening. The people in our department have good knowledge, working on the environment with the Ministry of the Environment and also Environment Canada.
Today, we have our own environmental assessment process, which we use for all projects within our community, and we coordinate those with projects outside the community, again looking at compounds. We have our own wildlife conservation law, which we apply to everyone, not just Mohawk people but anyone who is fishing or hunting within our territory, so that we can advise them of the compounds we have been able to find in the fish. We also have our own court system, so if people want to act up a little, we can take our own people to court, but we have also had a number of occasions when some other people have had to be looked at as well.
In 1999 when the act was proclaimed, we were really quite pleased to see it. At that time, there was forethought; it was amazing that native people were actually mentioned in the act. The preamble to the act mentioned how we were going to work together and co-operate and merge our knowledge systems to see how we could come up with some solutions. We were very happy about it. We saw it as a victory that the minister had a duty to consult with native people, but in that 16-year period from then to now, the concept of reasonable accommodation seems to have been forgotten about.
It is the duty to consult and to reasonably accommodate aboriginal people in Canada that is most important to the act. I say that because the act itself, while looking at the environment, needs regulatory people and people on the land who know what's going on out there. My people at Akwesasne know every pipe and every ounce of stuff that goes into that river, and they are continuously reporting to us and to the Department of the Environment on what we think are violations. We also continuously report to others who can maybe do something about it.
It is about time that we recognize that, and that we begin to see how we can reasonably accommodate native people to actually help with the monitoring, help with the accommodation or infractions, which is encouraged, and maybe even help with some of the things you find complex within the environment.
There are a number of stories I could tell you about the accommodation we've had with scientists who have come to Akwesasne in order to do sampling. I'll just say that the best fish survey ever done on the St. Lawrence was done because Mohawk fishermen took part in it. The scientists like to say, “We'll get our fish out of this spot” and the fisherman looks at him and says, “No, you'll only get pike out of that one. If you want to get all of your fish, here's the area you're going to have to have as your site”. We were able to do that. The integration of traditional knowledge is important.
The other thing I was talking about is the concept of mixtures. Every scientist I talk to says it is so complex that they don't know what to do. If we can send people to the moon and we can cure a lot of diseases, I think it's about time for the Environmental Protection Act to pick up mixtures and look at them seriously. There are many good techniques out there nowadays to look at these mixtures.
In the simple things that we've been able to do, we've been able to find something like a hundred different compounds in the fish we eat, and we're still being told they're okay to consume. Each of them might be just a little below the safe level, but what happens when you put them together, we ask? There's a blank look on their faces.
The last thing I will say is that under the Environmental Protection Act, those responses aren't the only problem that you have with it. Those responses to a compound are just part of the story. You have to move up the hierarchies and scales.
The reason that Canada and the United States have spent $2 billion on policing us at Akwesasne since 1990 is the environment. The environment's impact on our people meant that we could no longer take part in our traditional economies that we had, and suddenly we saw the non-traditional economies come in, which erupted in Oka.
Since that time, we've been dealing with it at Akwesasne. We hope that our partners are there with us.