The saying is, you know, water is life.
We're a water-born people.
We depend on it.
This fishing spot is ancient.
The Mohawk — the ​​Kanienʼkehá꞉ka — were fishing here
thousands of years before the first European settlers arrived.
This is Akwesasne where the Mohawk have fished since long before this border
cut their nation in half.
Fishing in this community is important.
I know for our grandparents it was a way of life.
I believe in having those traditions passed down so that they never are forgotten.
That one's huge!
Seeing those little boys and girls smiling and catching fish and enjoying themselves...
That's the best.
If you head upriver, just a couple of miles from this spot
you’ll find two abandoned industrial sites.
This is the spot where poisonous chemicals made their way into the river...
into the fish...
and into the Mohawk people.
Forty years later, they're still carrying that poison.
And chances are, you are too.
People used to live on the islands themselves.
Totally self-sufficient.
My grandfather used to live on St. Regis Island.
He's the one that introduced me to fishing.
We would row across the river.
The shorelines were covered with weed beds...
and it was a task to get a rowboat through the weed beds.
We'd catch perch, sunfish, rock bass.
He showed me how to clean fish...
explain to me what it was all about.
My grandmother used to take me out to the berry gardens
and we picked raspberries and strawberries, blueberries out there.
We had potatoes. Vegetables.
My grandfather had a herd of cows.
Just about everything we needed was out there.
I remember that.
In the 1950s, the US and Canadian governments started a massive project
to connect the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean
by widening and deepening the St. Lawrence River.
The Seaway changed the geography of Akwesasne.
"All the trees on the affected area must be cut down."
There was an apple orchard there.
Big apple orchard.
Old man John owned that.
And they said they were going to build a bridge across.
They hadn't even consulted him until the equipment came up.
The Seaway’s locks and dams allowed giant container ships like these
to navigate to the Great Lakes
and the dams supplied electricity
which the state of New York promised to sell to companies for cheap.
"Every cent of expenditures will be recovered through total charges
and revenue from the sale of power."
"In the long run, it will cost the people of the two nations nothing."
The press coverage focused exclusively on the benefits for Canadians and Americans.
But there was a third nation whose people were affected.
A lot of our older people couldn't speak English.
They couldn't understand why, how this could happen.
How could a people do this?
How could engineers do this?
When the Seaway went through, they weren't informed.
They weren't asked what they thought about this.
"The power to run the machines, the motors, to light the signs, the homes...
supply energy for the thousand and one needs of an expanding economy."
There were nine islands that were flooded.
There used to be a big inlet.
It was a swampy area.
They filled that in.
They said, oh, we'll do you a favor.
What about the muskrats?
What about the beaver?
They're gone. They're gone now.
"Thus, man is conquering another of nature’s challenges."
"Moving the Atlantic Ocean to the entire mid-continent empire."
When the frogs come out and they start to make noise
that for me indicates that the water and the ground temperature is right to do the spearfishing.
This is it, this is the magic spot.
So much life happens here.
When you enter the water
it's not really good to walk where the fish are doing their thing.
That's their spawning bed, that's where they want to lay their eggs.
So it's pretty precious space there.
You've got to be gentle and you've gotta be selective.
Just recognizing that it's a gift.
You should just respect it.
Just having that gratefulness that we're still able to do it, that's what I always get to.
We're so lucky.
We're really, really lucky.
This is what I know.
I’m the oldest son, so I have little brothers and I teach them this stuff.
The Mohawk creation story says at the beginning of time, the whole world was covered in water
and there was no land.
That's when Skywoman falls from the sky.
She falls to the earth with a child in her belly.
The ducks and the loons and the geese decided that they would try to help her from falling
straight into the waters.
In the end, it was the giant turtle who said that he could put the soil on his back.
She could land on his back.
And as she danced in the circle, as she shuffled her feet on the dirt, it expanded and expanded.
Our people give thanks to the water.
They see it as an essential part of who we are.
New York’s plan to lure industry upstate with cheap electricity, it worked.
Two major corporations: General Motors and Reynolds Metal
built factories in the mostly white town of Massena, right next to Akwesasne.
According to the local newspaper
Massena’s politicians and business leaders reacted “with joy”.
But for the Mohawk of Akwesasne, the news meant something else entirely.
Soon after the new factories opened in the late 50s
Mohawk farmers on Cornwall Island started to notice their calves
weren't growing as well.
Then the cattle started mysteriously dying off.
Later, it turned out that 400 pounds of fluoride ash
was spewing out of the new Reynolds' plant each hour.
Veterinarians discovered it had poisoned the grass and eroded the cows teeth
making it too painful for them to eat or drink.
They were starving.
If you look across the history of settler-colonialism
in areas where indigenous people remained and still lived
corporations working under the laws of the United States were able to dump
the most dangerous chemicals and pollutants there.
While I was in early practice doing home births here...
there was a cluster of babies born.
One baby born with an omphalocele, which is where the intestines grow outside the belly.
Another was a baby born with no intestines at all
and we had to let that baby die.
As an anecdote, it still gives you a sense of... where is this heading?
"That is polychlorinated biphenyls which are used in a wide variety of manufactured products."
PCBs started showing up in American news stories in the late 1960s
when they were discovered in salmon and poultry.
At the time, there was just one manufacturer of PCBs in the US:
The Monsanto Company of St. Louis.
They marketed the chemical under the name Aroclor
and sold it to other companies who then used it to make products like shower curtains,
paint, and electrical equipment.
Including the electrical equipment in those plants
the ones GM and Reynolds had built right next to Akwesasne.
In 1971, a Monsanto representative told the New York Times
that the company was studying the chemical’s effects
on rats and dogs.
So far, they said, “no ill effects had yet been detected.”
But Monsanto’s internal documents from that time tell a different story.
They knew that PCBs caused liver damage in rats.
They knew that PCB exposure had sent workers to the hospital with symptoms of hepatitis.
And in 1970 one of Monsanto’s own studies on PCBs in fish
showed that doses of PCB "which were believed to be OK produced 100% kill."
All the fish died.
Eating a certain food isn't just putting the stuff in your mouth.
It's what goes on all around that moment of consumption.
My mom would tell me stories about how my father and his family would have these fish
skinning competitions.
And it makes me so happy to think about how that was in itself
like a way that we created community and family for each other
and supported each other.
With really good friends or really good family members…
We've known them for a long time.
We trust them.
We know that they respect our independence and our consent.
In indigenous ways of understanding the world
we can use that way of thinking about relationships as a model.
What would it mean to have relationships of trust with fish?
Relationships of reciprocity with a forest?
Or consent with a plant?
Our community is not just the humans, but all of our interdependent relationships.
When we teach our children about giving thanks
that's what we’re trying to do is get them to see that they’re not just fish,
but they’re, fish! [said with emphasis]
And these fish help us to maintain our life.
In 1981, two pits full of PCB sludge were discovered
behind the GM factory near Akwesasne
prompting scientists to start testing local wildlife.
At the time, chickens with PCB concentrations of more than 5 parts per million
couldn’t be sold in supermarkets
but most of the fish in Akwesasne had levels much higher.
30 parts per million is considered toxic waste.
Researchers tested one snapping turtle with a PCB concentration of 835 parts per million.
It turned out, both GM and Reynolds had been dumping PCB waste into the St. Lawrence River
for decades.
We were just straight up told not to eat fish, that we would die.
They were telling us the tomatoes that were coming out of our garden shouldn’t be eaten
by children.
A lot of people just stopped farming altogether.
I remember talking to an older lady from the island here
and she actually burst into tears.
And she said, “When I go down to the shoreline to look for Sweet Flake, it's not there."
"I look for my Sweet grass.
It's not there."
"What have they done to this place?”
The plants, the animals, the ecosystems are thought of as part of the bonds
part of the friendships.
And imagine if somebody were to take something that was really important to a friendship
a family relationship that you have and just pollute it
and just damage or destroy it.
That hits us hard, right?
That's devastating.
But see, this is what Native people have been through with colonialism
a systematic, comprehensive destruction of all of those touchstones in our society
those environments that formed the contexts through which our best relationships unfolded.
We lost pieces of our language, of our value system
with the river because of our disconnect
because of these fish advisories.
And so right now, I can't recommend people to consume fish because that's our policy.
But, personally, we have to consume fish so we know their names
and we reconnect with them.
There was an existing relationship they had with everything that water system provided.
It was part of their life.
And it was taken away. It changed.
All of a sudden, it wasn’t there.
In the decades since PCBs were discovered, scientists documented the scope of the PCB
problems outside of Awkwesasne.
People all over North America were told not to eat the fish from the rivers, streams,
and lakes where they lived.
Scientists also learned that PCBs can move from soil into the air through a process called
volatilization.
Which means that even if you don't live near a PCB dump you can still be exposed through
the air that you breathe.
In 2013, the UN’s International Agency for Research in Cancer stated officially:
"PCBs are carcinogenic to humans”
and they are “probably in the body of every human” on earth.
I can't do too much given our current reality.
But I can go out there in the morning and sing.
[singing in Mohawk]
To be...
To be grateful.
You come from the ground up.
You give thanks to everything.
[speaking in Mohawk] We will put our minds together as one and acknowledge the fish.
The roots, the trees, the plants, the skies, the wind, the stars.
On wha nagula.
One mind.
[singing in Mohawk] One fish, two fish, three fish
four fish, five fish, five fish...
The river has a right to community and to build community around itself.
And I think a lot about how that's our responsibility as Ongweoweh people to facilitate that.
There was a little boy ice fishing and he was putting the fish in a big plastic bucket.
And we saw him at the end of the day, take his bucket and run home with it.
And I wondered, what is his mother going to say when she sees the fish
her little son caught?
She’s going to be proud of him.