Insult has been heaped upon indignity on the Indigenous people of Canada for hundreds of years. It’s hard to know where to begin, but we know it must end. One example of the egregious treatment is what we see happening to the people of the Grassy Narrows First Nation.

Ten tonnes of mercury was dumped into the Wabigoon River, upstream from Grassy Narrows, during the 1960s. The neurotoxin poisoned the fish. The people who ate the fish developed tremors, impaired hearing, tunnel vision, slurred speech and lost their muscle co-ordination. Suicide attempts and suicidal thoughts are higher than the national average. Women who ate fish at least once a week while they were pregnant gave birth to children who were four times more like to have a nervous system disorder or learning disability than those whose mothers didn’t eat fish, a recent Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) study shows.

Two levels of government have worked, sort of, to cope with the repercussions of the mercury poisoning.

Queen’s Park has set up an $85-million trust to help clean the river and fund pre-remediation studies of the river. Health Canada ordered umbilical cord blood tests in 1970 and 1992 for 357 infants of Grassy Narrows and the Wabaseemoong Independent Nations that found mercury levels high enough to affect the children’s brain development, but the results never revealed to those affected.

When the samples were taken, Health Canada sent letters of advice to residents whose mercury levels were beyond acceptable levels. The mothers should have been informed, but the information wasn’t always passed on, the Toronto Star reported last month. Partly this had to do with privacy concerns and consent forms.

In March, however, Indigenous Services Canada wrote to Grassy Narrows Chief Rudy Turtle and the band council saying the records of the cord blood testing would be released, without consent forms, to Donna Mergler, the UQAM researcher who has been working with the First Nation on the effects of the mercury poisoning. She will now give the data to affected individuals who wish to have it.

The release of the results is decades late and comes at a time of mounting frustration over the progress of a care facility Ottawa had promised in 2017 to build and operate. In late May, Seamus O’Regan, Indigenous Services minister, visited Grassy Narrows and … left without agreeing to a funding arrangement for the facility.

A Grassy Narrows First Nation source told the Star the care facility was expected to cost about $17 million to build with operating costs of about $70 million for 30 years. The facility would include a residence, exam rooms, and customized baths and showers. The reserve’s current community clinic does not offer such essentials for the treatment of those affected by the mercury poisoning. The facility is also is needed for outpatient treatments like physiotherapy, vision care, speech therapy, cognitive stimulation, counselling, traditional healing and palliative care.

The project is only 1 per cent funded, Grassy Narrows officials say. They question Ottawa’s sincerity in delivering on its promise and who can blame them? Chief Turtle said that though a $170,000 feasibility study is done, the feds have said they won’t spend any more money on the project until the provincial government commits to covering medical care in the care centre.

That condition was never on the table before, Turtle said, and officials in the Ford government have said there was no such commitment on the part of the previous governing Liberals and that Trudeau’s camp is trying to create a distraction over its inaction on getting the centre built.

O’Regan is on the record saying progress is being made, but until the agreement to secure the facility’s funding is signed, that’s just another broken treaty.