Aboriginal and Inuit Non-Mining Issues

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

A Globe review shows water treatment plants are failing on reserves across Canada. For every system the government fixes, plenty remain in a shambolic state

Several days each week last fall, water trucks left Sudbury and drove 130 kilometres west to the Serpent River First Nation, a reserve on Lake Huron’s north shore. There, they emptied about 18,000 litres into a reservoir to supplement the community’s water treatment plant. John Owl, the plant operator, said it ran 24 hours a day and still could not provide enough water to meet the needs of the reserve’s 350 inhabitants. Not that they could drink it – it is subject to a drinking water advisory.

A snowstorm in December shut the Trans-Canada Highway, blocking the water shipments. A pipe ruptured in the crawlspace of an abandoned home, draining about four truckloads of water. And as temperatures dropped, the plant’s output fell. “As the water gets colder, it gets denser and it’s harder to push through the filters,” Mr. Owl explained.

Serpent River’s woes resemble those of the 90 other Canadian reserves under drinking-water advisories. But there is a cruel twist: This water treatment plant is barely a year old.

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http://news.nationalpost.com/

OTTAWA — Under fire from his political opponents for not doing enough for the welfare of aboriginal children, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was indignant in reply.

“The fact of the matter is that no government has done more to repair the relationship with indigenous Canadians than this one, with $8.4 billion over the next five years in building infrastructure, supporting young people, and supporting indigenous communities,” Trudeau told the House of Commons Tuesday.

And yet, a growing number of indigenous leaders are coming to the conclusion that such lofty rhetoric is sounding increasingly hollow, that it does not match the record of the Trudeau government’s first year in office.

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http://www.nationalnewswatch.com/

OTTAWA — At night, he would arrive in Corey’s room by crawling through the window next to the bunk bed where she slept. She knew from the smell when he was there. By day, she endured different hands, sometimes under the most mundane circumstances — once, she recalls, while in the kitchen eating lunch. He pulled down her underwear and started fondling her. He left money on the table.

They were family members, these two predators — their unwanted touch impossible to escape for a young girl living on a remote First Nation in British Columbia.

That isolation, a fact of life for many Aboriginal Peoples, is a pernicious barrier to the essential goal of exposing the scourge of indigenous sexual abuse and incest, says Perry Bellegarde, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations.

Bellegarde is pleading with chiefs to confront the problem head-on.

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https://www.thestar.com/

For the past seven days, nearly 230 households in a remote northwestern Ontario community have gone without clean drinking water and proper sewage. There are four ruptures in the main line that delivers water from a treatment facility to houses in North Caribou (Weagamow) Lake First Nation, said Chief Dinah Kanate. North Caribou is a 45-minute flight north from Sioux Lookout.

North Caribou’s water treatment staff have been working around the clock to try to fix the situation. They need to keep water moving through the line for fear of contamination, said Kanate, but she fears the water is unfit for use. Residents are using the water to wash clothes and bathe in. Samples were taken and flown out to health authorities on Sunday.

“If the pressure is lost, the water will become contaminated,” said Kanate. “What we have now is young children and adults have rashes. Eczema is flaring. People are complaining of stomach pains. Some kids were jumping in the showers and they are coming out with sores.”

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http://thestarphoenix.com/

We witnessed the unseemly sight this week of Parliament voting unanimously to force Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada to obey an order by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. It was a low point in the administration of the First Nations file, but it also was very revealing of a federal department that considers it a law unto itself.

On the same day media reported that INAC had lapsed more than $900 million that had been allocated to be spent on First Nations.

The motion, moved by New Democrat MP Charlie Angus, called on the Liberal government to comply with all the orders made by the human rights tribunal, which had ruled that Ottawa was practising racial discrimination by underfunding child welfare programs. The motion also ordered INAC to “immediately invest” $155 million in child welfare and develop a financial plan for future years.

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https://www.thestar.com/

The young generations of Grassy Narrows and another nearby First Nation community have a “surprisingly” high rate of mercury poisoning symptoms, according to leading Japanese researchers.

The research team, which examined dozens of people of all ages in both communities during a 2014 trip, found that nearly all those tested had sensory disturbance — a telltale sign of mercury poisoning that includes a loss of sensation in the hands or feet and around the mouth. That rate is “extremely high,” according to a report released by the researchers Tuesday.

“This is a new finding,” Dr. Masanori Hanada told the Star through a translator. “I think Canadian doctors and Canadian officials should start looking at (this issue).” His team is a world leader in the study of mercury poisoning.

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The following is an edited excerpt of a talk given by John Fraser at an exhibition of Charles Pachter’s paintings at the historic London Charterhouse, the only extant building left in London where Queen Elizabeth I held court, on Aug. 18.

In the beginning, in Canada, there was just the aboriginal population. Then the French came at the start of the 17th century and, in the name of the king of France, set up trading relations with the aboriginal people, who, soon enough, turned into three main groups: the ones we now call First Nations, the Inuit in the Far North and the Metis — or people of mixed race — all along the trading routes.

The French developed a variety of informal treaties, or trading understandings, with the aboriginal population. Then the British came in the name of their king and defeated the French in 1759. That produced some revamped loyalties with the First Nations, as well as a whole new set of trading treaties. This time, however, there were royal proclamations, endorsed and passed by the British Parliament, many of which still stand as law in Canada.

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Amanda Klasing, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, specializes in the right to clean water.

“She likes to take a bath, but [the water] irritates her skin,” Susan said of her active two-year-old daughter. When the little girl was 18 months old, Susan started to notice rashes all over her daughter’s legs. “I thought it was something from the grass,” she said. Instead, a doctor informed her that the baby’s rash was probably from her water. Susan can’t bathe her daughter at home now; she takes her to a daycare centre or relative’s house.

Susan lives in Grassy Narrows First Nation in Ontario, where I spoke to her and other families in February to learn about living under a “do not consume” water advisory.

The water in the well that supplies her home is contaminated with uranium; water trucked in from a local treatment plant to fill a cistern at her house has dangerous levels of a cancer-causing byproduct that comes from treating dirty source water.

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Despite an election promise by Justin Trudeau to eliminate boil-water advisories on reserves within five years, data suggest the federal government will fall short of the objective without significant changes in its approach to rectifying problem, Matthew McClearn reports

One-third of First Nations people living on reserves use drinking water systems that threaten their health, an investigation by The Globe and Mail has found.

Roughly 57,000 people living on 101 reserves across Canada obtain water from treatment plants and pipe networks the government deem to be “high risk,” an analysis of federal data shows. Although these systems are not necessarily producing unsafe water today – some are, some aren’t – the government fears they could fail under adverse conditions, such as a sudden deterioration in source-water quality. Another 95,000 are served by “medium risk” systems located on 167 reserves.

Combined, that amounts to roughly one-third of the approximately 462,000 people living on reserves – or about 30 communities the size of Walkerton, Ont. In 2000, bacterial contamination in Walkerton’s water system sickened more than 2,300 people and killed seven. Although the Walkerton tragedy prompted wide-ranging regulatory changes across Canada, this hasn’t resulted in safe water for many reserves. Indeed, many First Nations water systems remain in shambolic condition.

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