Decades-old mercury poisoning shown to have lasting effect on native community

Published: April 6th, 2010

By: Anna Mehler Paperny

For Rudy Turtle, the shakes started 15 years ago – his body overcome by tremors when he tried to lift wood or anything heavy. They were soon accompanied by a constant numbness in his forearms. His fingers are now curled into a permanent crooked position.

He was just five years old in 1970, when the Ontario government told the people in Grassy Narrows to stop eating the fish from the local river; his first memory of the mercury poisoning in his community is of his parents going to get tested when he was 11.

Betty Riffel, now 75, is old enough to remember seeing local dogs collapse in seizures in the streets of tiny Quibell community. Her own tremors became uncontrollable in the early 1990s, making it impossible for her to keep her nursing job in Kenora.

Ms. Riffel and Mr. Turtle say their symptoms can be traced to the mercury that environmental groups claim was poured into the Wabigoon River system by Dryden Chemicals pulp and paper mill between 1962 and 1970. The chemical, says a 2001 report, contaminated the water for 250 kilometres, made the fish inedible and effectively decimated the economies of tiny native communities by the water’s edge.

Neither Ms. Riffel nor Mr. Turtle received compensation from a disability board set up in 1985 in response to the crisis. Research published Tuesday conducted by Masazumi Harada, the well-known Japanese scientist who put mercury poisoning on the world’s radar decades ago, suggests “there are many patients still suffering that have not been acknowledged yet.”

The research conducted in 2002 and 2004 found the effects of mercury poisoning on residents of Grassy Narrows and Wabaseemoong first nations communities about 80 kilometres northeast of Kenora to be worse than previously suspected. Although concentrations of the toxic chemical found in the hair of residents had gone down significantly since samples were taken in 1975, symptoms of mercury poisoning and Miramata, a neurological disease associated with the chemical, had risen significantly.

For Grassy Narrows’ Chief Simon Fobister, the new data prove just how much the chemical continues to poison his community. He said he hopes it will provide new impetus for ongoing negotiations with the province about control of land use. The mercury poisoning forced the closing of the resorts and commercial fishing that drove the local economy. Chief Fobister said giving natives complete control over land use would help restore prosperity in the area, which now has an 80 per cent unemployment rate.

“Our people are suffering needlessly,” Mr. Fobister said. “Ontario has never met its obligations to compensate our people. … The suggestion is that everything’s fine. It’s not fine.”

Gary Myers, a neurologist at the University of Rochester, says tying symptoms to mercury poisoning is almost never clear-cut. Although there’s no doubt in his mind residents were exposed to harmful levels of the toxin, it’s hard to pinpoint the specific damage it caused.

“One of the difficulties with exposure such as this is that those symptoms are not always specific to the actual exposure,” he said. “There’s a goodly amount of interpretation, oftentimes by the investigator, as to whether or not there’s a causal relationship.”

A spokesman for Ontario's aboriginal affairs minister Chris Bentley said the province hasn't had time to read the report yet. Scott Cavan noted the provincial and federal governments are still providing benefits for “eligible people” under the 1985 Settlement Agreement.

“Officials from my ministry have been in discussions with the chief and other representatives of Grassy Narrows on how to move forward on the many social and economic concerns and issues that the Grassy Narrows First Nation is dealing with,” he wrote in an e-mail.

“There have been significant changes in environmental law since the initial contamination occurred, and there are now stronger rules in place to ensure something like this does not happen again.”

With a report from Karen Howlett in Toronto