Celebrating a tremendous — but fragile — victory at Grassy Narrows
We are fighting for something that’s quite simple — the ability to say no to development in our homelands.
This muted autumn morning, in preparation of the 20th year of Grassy Narrows’ Slant Lake blockade, I’m sifting through my eroding memories of a trip I took to the site 16 years ago, with my mom and my two young children.
My heart is studying the five decades of Anishinaabek struggle to bring us to this moment, tripped up on the people of Grassy Narrows’ unwavering commitment to take care of their families and the network of life Anishinaabek worlds are enmeshed, through broken treaty relations, relocation, the impacts of hydroelectric development, residential schools and mercury poisoning.
Starting in 1913 and continuing to present day, the pulp and paper industry in Dryden and Kenora has dumped an array of toxic substances into the English-Wabigoon river system. This included the infamous 10 metric tonnes of untreated mercury in the 1960s and 1970s, and more recently, bleaching waste that produces phenols, polychlorinated dibenzodioxins (PCDDs) and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs), also known as dioxins and furans.
Pollution from pulp mill effluent is only part of the story though. In order to make pulp, industry needs trees; trees that share time and space with bears and moose, blueberries and Labrador Tea. Forests have lived with the Anishinaabek long before their worth, our worth, was measured in dollars.
This blockade started out as a flash point. On Dec. 2, 2002,after more than a decade of letter-writing, protests, petitions, speaking tours, and legal efforts to protect their homeland from further industrial development without their consent, young Anishinaabek laid down on the logging road to prevent large multinational corporations from destroying traplines, hunting grounds, and medicines to supply mills in Dryden and Kenora with trees.
And while Abitibi and Weyerhaeuser continued to log the more remote sections of Grassy Narrows’ territory, in the summer of 2008 Grassy Narrows and its supporters finally forced AbitibiBowater to give up its license to the Whiskey Jack Forest, and commit not to log without consent from the community. This halted all logging on Grassy Narrows territory.
A tremendous victory and one that is fragile. Despite its 2018 Land Declaration banning all industrial development in their homeland, Doug Ford’s government is proposing to open part of Grassy Narrows territory to logging, while also allowing mineral claims by mining companies and prospectors to grow into the thousands.
Over the past two decades, what started out as a flash point response has transformed into much more than a refusal. This blockade is a generative site where people come together for feasts, drumming, praying and storytelling.
It is a place that holds our dreams for making a world that is grounded in care, enmeshed in the natural world and designed to bring forth more life. It is a place that reminds me that the struggle to make worlds that refuse exploitation and greed, is long and requires commitment, persistence and sacrifice.
It is a place that reminds me that whether the blockade is Wet’suwet’en or Dakota or Anishinaabek, we are all fighting for something that’s actually quite simple — the ability to say no to development in our homelands, so that we can live in a way that is counter to the forces that have thrust us all into our current climate crisis.
Today, I’m remembering of all those who have passed on and who live with mercury poison and illness. I’m thinking of Palestinians, the Wet’suwet’en, Kayapo and Overhereo and of Black feminist abolitionists in Canada dreaming worlds beyond our current realities.
I’m thinking of those strong-hearted Anishinaabek who did what they had to do to pass their homeland to the next generation with as much sanctity as possible. I’m so grateful to them for challenging me to burst out of my scale-down visions of a better world and to remake the worlds of our ancestors where forests and rivers are our precious relatives.