It has a huge impact.
Our people have to travel so much farther to access marine resources because of how the contamination has happened. In the inlet, when there are derelict boats, they contaminate the whole inlet, so it's affecting all of the food resources. For our community members to have access to marine resources, including clams, oysters and seagrass.... The marine environment has always been our breakfast basket. It's our food basket. We've depended on it for many years. We've come to a point that we're unable to harvest any natural food sources within the water. Anything we want to collect, we can't, so it has a huge impact on us.
We have the boats in our inlet. The contamination is...it's very difficult to have a vision of that. It's right in front of us. We see it happening. We don't know what to do about it. Also, who do we contact? We've been advised that if we want to start looking at doing any kind of cleanup.... Do we have the authority to go and clean it up? It's in our swiya. Do we have authority over the waters to go and remove things as we see fit? How can we clean it up? How much of a cost is that going to be?
The impacts of leaving them there are huge. Some of those vessels have been out there for years and years. Most recently, we've had a ferry boat sink in our swiya. It was purchased by a group of people who thought it would be a great idea to have it so that they had somewhere to go and work on developing their drugs. It was a drug boat. They were making all of the drugs on this boat. They were having parties on the boat. We were trying to figure out what we could do to stop this, and then the boat sank and it's still sitting there. Nobody knows what to do. We don't know what the impact is going to be on that area. We don't know what kinds of drugs were on that boat, let alone what's in the boat itself. What are the materials on the boat? What will the impact to the environment be just from the materials? It is huge.
We just don't have the resources to be able to go and clean them up, and we don't have the resources to restore the food in the waters so that our community members have access to it. As first nations people, there are a few things we hold on to dearly, for dear life. We hold on to our language. Our language is who we are. That's our identity. Our land is who we are. The food we gather that feeds our people in our traditional ways is who we are. We're fighting to keep our traditions in place. Every day, we're losing something. We lose some part of us. Some part of us is getting lost in the big cloud, and we are fighting to sustain it.
The biggest impact is on food security. Food security is huge for us, next to housing. If we don't have housing, we have nowhere to cook our food.
This has a huge impact to our people. Food security is huge, and we're trying to look at every avenue to see how we can address it so that we can begin that restoration for our people.