‘We want the mill to shut down,’ #GrassyNarrows #FirstNation to #Ontario
After nearly 60 years of industrial poisoning, the northwest #Indigenous community continues to demand justice
September 17 2024
by Jon Thompson
"When members of #Asubpeeschoseewagong #Anishinabek (Grassy Narrows First Nation) and their supporters arrive at Queen’s Park this week, they’ll be calling for the #DrydenPulpAndPaper mill that’s been poisoning their water with #neurotoxins for nearly 60 years to permanently close.
"'We want everybody to be compensated, we want the mill to shut down, and we don’t want no #mining or #logging in our territory. We just want it all to stop,' says #ChrissyIsaacs, lead organizer of the caravan.
"Isaacs has been a staple of the annual #RiverRun demonstrations since they began in 2010. She was a leader among Grassy Narrows youths who blockaded #LoggingTrucks from entering the nearby #WhiskeyJackForest in 2002 and is currently travelling 1,900 kilometres to Toronto from her community near Ontario’s western border to protest the downriver effects of #methylmercury poisoning.
"Staff at the upstream #ReedPaperMill in #DrydenOntario, about 150 kilometres east of Grassy Narrows, dumped nearly 10 metric tonnes of #mercury into the #EnglishWabigoon River system in the 1960s and early 1970s. Mercury poisoned the #plants and #fish that the people of Grassy Narrows, and neighbouring #Wabaseemoong Independent Nation, were consuming.
"A half-century later, medical experts are finding that varying nervous and neurological health effects affect up to 90 per cent of Grassy Narrows residents.
Members of Grassy Narrows First Nation stopped to demonstrate outside of the Dryden mill before heading to Toronto for the annual River Run demonstration at Queen’s Park. There, they will call on the Ontario government to compensate the community for generations of industrial poisoning and call for the mill, now owned by First Quality Enterprises, to be shut down.
"The Grassy Narrows road blockade to prevent clear-cut logging and mining from happening in their traditional territories has stood for 22 years, and in that time Isaacs’s children have had children of their own. She says the conversation has never been transformed as much as it has this year.
"In May, scientific researchers released the revelation that #sulphate and organic matter in the #effluent that the mill is still releasing into the river is making methylmercury in the river system even worse, as opposed to diminishing over time as they were told."
https://ricochet.media/indigenous/we-want-the-mill-to-shut-down-grassy-narrows-first-nation-to-ontario/
