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Even as Trudeau Reaches Out to First Nations, Mercury Rises
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: December 6th, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/opinion/even-as-trudeau-re...
The Nunatsiavut government in Labrador has released a study from a Harvard mercury researcher on the effects of the newly constructed Muskrat Falls dam. The study showed that water flooding the reservoir behind the dam would contain methylmercury levels to the point that they exceed regulatory thresholds for exposure, building up over time in fish and other game consumed by the native population. Muskrat Falls will affect three peoples - the Innu, the Nunatsiavut and the NunatuKavut - who will have to alter their diets, and as such their cultures. Methylmercury ... can lead to intellectual impairments and immune system problems. Some of the hydroelectric dams have already disrupted the hunting and fishing traditions of the Cree living nearby. Muskrat Falls echoes what the Canadian historian James Daschuk has called the politics of starvation. In his 2013 study, Clearing the Plains, Mr. Daschuk argued that famine was a conscious settlement strategy to create ecological conditions in which disease exploded. Nutritional questions have always been cultural questions for the indigenous peoples of Canada. Hunting and fishing are more than a traditional way of life. The land is the connection to the larger world and to history. High methylmercury levels would render the land untrustworthy. If you cannot trust the land, what can you trust?
Note: A recent BBC article described Canada's treatment of First Nation peoples as "cultural genocide" after an official inquiry found thousands of indigenous children had died and been buried in unmarked graves after being forcibly relocated to residential schools. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption and health.
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