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By Christine Graef
Akwesasne, Ontario (NFIC) 7-08
After 15 years of negotiation, the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne accepted the terms of Ontario Power Generation’s damages to the St. Lawrence River during the past 50 years as well as a formal apology from OPG to “acknowledge its regret for the disregard of the Mohawks of Akwesasne.”
“The settlement is a start of a healing process,” said MCA spokesperson Brian David. “We’re in a time we’re seeing apologies made for wrongs done against people decades and centuries ago.”
Voters of MCA, one of three Akwesasne governments, cast their ballots
during June to accept OPG’s March 11 proposed settlement to pay $46
million to MCA over 10 years. The settlement also includes the return
of Adams, Toussaint, Presquile and Sheek islands which were partially
flooded, an agreement of shared environmental stewardship, employment
opportunities and contracting services that bring a representation of
Mohawks to the work force in the Saunders Generating Station.
Cheap hydro-power was not included in the agreement, but the proposal
does provide opportunities to work with OPG on future alternatives such
as submersible turbines and other energy initiatives.
As the license neared its 50-year renewal, the International Joint
Commission (IJC) launched a five-year, $17 million study, this time to
determine the impact on environment, economics and recreation. The IJC
study team came up with four proposals and narrowed the choices for
renewal to Plan B+ and Plan 2007.
At one of 10 public hearings, held recently in Massena, New York,
residents of both Canada and the states spoke unanimously in favor of
Plan B+. Of concern was the lowered water levels that trade-off
protections from erosion for south shore owners of Lake Ontario living
in flood zones.
Plan B+ strives to restore nature’s seasonal rhythms of water lows
and highs to the Lake Ontario and St. Lawrence River living systems,
the way earth structured them before the St. Lawrence Seaway and
Hydropower Project, according to IJC.
“Plan 2007 does not restore the 30-year cycles that maintained the
wetland and dunes of Lake Ontario’s coast prior to the advent of
establishing the first water level regulation 50 years ago,” said Sean
Mahar of Audubon New York.
Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River and the recreational economic
that they support have been seriously and consistently degraded for 50
years, he said.
“Plan 2007 artificially lowers the lake and upper river in fall and
spring, even more than the current regulation regime,” he said.
IJC spokesperson Frank Beracqua said Plan 2007 has half the benefit
to wetlands as B+ but addresses economic concerns of erosion on Lake
Ontario.
If implemented, IJC will review Plan 2007 after two years and if
mitigations are adequate, they will implement a plan based on B+.
Skip Shoemaker, a region six engineer for the New York Department of
Environmental Conservation, said that DEC supports B+ as the only plan
that moves toward restoration of wetlands but DEC is committed to
undertaking the mitigations required for IJC to move into Plan B+.
This time too, the Mohawk were part of the study team.
“This is a river that wants fluctuation in order to stay healthy,”
said Henry Lickers, Director of the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, Dept.
of the Environment and former IJC board member.
Lickers said the Mohawk favor the most environmentally beneficial plan,
although this would mean damages to properties that have been built on
flood plains. Lickers, who has worked on environmental issues on the
St. Lawrence River for 33 years, said that this is not a “flavor of the
day issue.”
“There will be severe impacts to the Great Lakes over the next 50
years and climate change is a part of that,” he said. “What about the
20 to 30 percent mortality rate in this river. You can’t keep that up
and expect to sustain life.”
Fifty years ago the St. Lawrence-FDR Power Project pierced the river
banks on the St. Lawrence River to create a series of locks and canals
opening markets for international ships to sail inland to the Great
Lakes. Harnessing the power of the water brought three hydropower
operators to the river – the New York Power Authority, Ontario Power
Generation (OPG) and Hydro Quebec – that serve about 2 million homes
with a market value of $1.5 million.
At the time of the Seaway’s construction, Akwesasne was a
self-sustaining community with no telephones, no electricity and very
few roads. The community’s economic system was based on barter from the
abundance of fish, hunting, trapping and agriculture. Most people lived
on the islands because the river provided year-round transportation.
The St. Lawrence Seaway and Power project was complete on July 1,
1958, when the river waters spread across 100 square miles to form Lake
St. Lawrence.
The rapids near what became Massena were silenced and stagnant.
The oxygen the bubbling rapids infused into the water disappeared.
Eight Mohawk villages were flooded. More than 6,500 people were
relocated. A passage was cut through Cornwall Island and other river
islands flooded, shredding open lower marshes and destroying spawning
beds of fish that sustained the Mohawk of Akwesasne and their children.
Ten islands north of the international boundary line and west of the
power dam were affected. Burial sites were flooded.
The region supplied so much bounty for the community that
fishermen described putting out their nets in spring and catching so
many fish that their boats rode low in the water. Sturgeon, now
disappearing from the Great Lakes system, were caught easily in excess
of 100 pounds, much of it on the shores of Barnhart Island, one of the
islands that was flooded. The Saunders Dam was once a place the men
spear fished at night.
An entire way of life disappeared.
“We can’t even go back to the markings anymore, how much of our
land is flooded,” described another woman. “Aultsville is completely
gone. Had almost 21,000 maple trees to make and sell maple syrup.
Another thing about the Seaway was the wear and tear on the Islands
too.” Her father told her that the ships coming through erode
shoreline. She guessed that every ten years they lost a foot of land.
Where once families could fill burlap bags with butternut, hickory
and hazelnuts, there now was a vast pool. Hundreds of trees were cut
down, placed in a ditch and buried. The people no longer can show their
children and grandchildren what their own grandparents had shown them
or teach them the language that connects to shared experiences of
gathering the nuts and medicine plants once flourishing on the islands.
“As a younger person, I’d always wondered how could something like
this take place,” said David. “Talking to the elders helped answer
that. They told us what they experienced, what they saw, what life was
like before the Seaway. In one lifetime, it was gone.”
OPG approached the Mohawk Council to open discussions about the grievances caused by the project in 1993.
David said a major part of the negotiation was based on interviews
with more than 100 elders in 1993-1995 who described a river “so clear
you could see to the bottom,” a river that was “dunked for drinking
water.”
One elder said, “A lot of Chiefs couldn’t read or write English
but they had interpreters who would explain. The Chiefs would take one
of them to Ottawa with them whenever they needed him and understand
what was going on… We were never told of the negative consequences
about the construction of the Seaway, maybe if we had we could have
done something to stop it.”
The low-cost hydroelectric power attracted a triangle of
industries upstream from the Mohawk – Reynolds Metal Company, General
Motors Powertrain and Alcoa.
More than 297,000 tons of PCBs and the other toxins settled
quietly in the river sediment and on vegetation eaten by fish and
wildlife as they made their way into the food chain. In 1978 the
community issued a fish advisory warning the people not to eat more
than one meal of fish each week from any of the waters around the
reservation.
Fishermen walked into their backyards and cut their 300-foot nets
to let them lie on the ground to rot. They would never fish again.
Gardens were abandoned for fear of being poisoned.
Natural foods were replaced with affordable pastas. By 1990, half
the people over age 40 were diabetic, a disease unheard of in the
community 50 years ago, according to the Akwesasne Task Force on
Environment.
“For as long as I can remember since I was a child I never knew
anyone that had sugar,” said one woman interviewed. “Now, I have twelve
children and most of them have sugar. That is what their father died
of. He always blamed the Seaway for this disease.”
The elders who were interviewed said that once the river is healthy again, the people will become healthy again.
“The way many Aboriginal people look at the world is a circle
within circles,” said Lickers. “In the center is the smallest we can
look at. An example, is sub-cellular. Then at an individual, then
family or group, then community, then nation, then nation in the
Confederacy, then in the spiritual realm around us.”
Was it bad economics at Akwesasne that resulted in violence? he said.
“No,” he said. “It was PCBs. At the sub-cellular level, look at
fish. The individual equals the fisherman who take the consequence. The
family equals no income, so they look for income. The community equals
the respect of trade between fishermen and the farmer, the political
changes. The nation starts approaching other ideas. The Confederacy is
fractured and there are disputes.”
Canada and the United States called in the army – spent $2.5
million to police Akwesasne since a 1990 outbreak, he said.
“To prevent that equals a fraction of that $2.5 million to clean
the river and fish,” said Lickers. “Fishing, instead of midnight fear
running across the river.”
There was once a bay on Cornwall Island, a protected cove where
the people could fish and the fish could grow. As the Seaway project
excavated, the dredge was dumped on properties, along the shores and
filled in the cove.
“There was a whole culture of a river… among our Mohawks there was
a river culture, there was a river language, there were feelings, there
were songs, there were stories and the Seaway just amputated that,” an
elder said when interviewed for the study.
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