Hitting home
In Michael Haneke’s 2005 movie Caché, a successful French television presenter finds himself receiving videotapes containing footage of the front of his house. Sometimes they are accompanied by unusual drawings. His search for answers leads him to reconnect with an Algerian man he knew as a boy, forcing him to confront a childhood whose echoes he had long ago repressed.
The film is generally taken as an oblique parable about French efforts to bury memories of the country’s violent colonial past – and what happens when that past, almost literally, comes home to roost.
On Sunday, August 25, a neon-hued marching band paraded to the home of Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne. Drums are common at protest marches, but there were brass and woodwind contingents, too. In its colourful, cacophonous exuberance, the pageant was downright Seussian.
A protest at a person’s home is an inherently aggressive tactic, especially when there’s no direct connection between the dwelling and the issue being protested. But bridging the vast psychic chasm between Wynne’s Mt. Pleasant and Eglinton house and a community sitting 1,300 kilometres to the northwest was precisely the point.
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Grassy Narrows is approximately as far from Toronto as Memphis, Tennessee, is. Near the Manitoba border, a bit north of Kenora, the First Nation community of 1,000 is now in its sixth decade of suffering from mercury poisoning.
“The provincial government is acting like an ostrich and burying its head in the sand on this whole problem,” local MPP Patrick Reid told the CBC. That was in 1970.
The Dryden paper manufacturer responsible for the toxic discharge cut off its pollution of the river that year and ceased operations in 1976. But mercury remains present in the fish that serve as a key element of Grassy Narrows’ diet and culture, and will likely continue to be present for quite some time.
This poisoning, or Minimata disease, comes to Grassy Narrows in addition to the more common litany of problems inflicted on Canada’s First Nations by a colonial relationship that was (and perhaps still is) at best clueless and at worst genocidal.
When the public broadcaster did a 40-years-later follow-up, the despair and frustration were palpable, expressed not just by interview subjects but by the reporter himself.
Peter Wall closed his piece: “So another journalist comes and another journalist goes – 40 years after the first came to Grassy Narrows….
“Only 60 more years before the mercury’s gone.”
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From October 20, 2011, until she stepped down to run for her party’s leadership just over a year later, Kathleen Wynne was both the minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing and the minister of Aboriginal Affairs.
When Grassy Narrows members and allied activists held a “fish fry” on the lawn of Queen’s Park in June 2012, Wynne came out to meet them.
“The ministry and the band’s leadership have accused each other of not returning calls, but Wynne saw the fish fry as an opportunity to reset discussion on the establishment of an inter-ministerial panel to explore mercury poisoning in the Wabigoon River system,” wrote the Kenora Daily Miner And News. “She envisaged a table where her ministry will sit alongside the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Ministry of the Environment and Grassy Narrows to reel in solutions.”
Wynne is now premier, and the Grassy Narrows-Ontario Working Group is now a thing that exists. But whether it will lead to real change is another matter entirely.
“We’re disappointed [that] we entered into a process with Ontario to try and work on a relationship – and work through those issues around logging – and there hasn’t really been a meaningful engagement. It’s still one-sided,” J.B. Fobister tells me on the phone from Grassy Narrows. He’s in his late 50s and has lived there his whole life.
“They’re still pushing to continue with business as usual.”
The logging problems concern the persistent issuance of permits by the Ministry of Natural Resources – a significant sticking point.
Beyond the mercury poisoning, Grassy Narrows has been devastated by decades of clear-cutting. It is the site of the longest-running blockade in Canadian history. And certain lands are the subject of Keewatin v. Ontario (Natural Resources), an epic and precedent-setting legal case; Grassy’s application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court is currently under review.
“The way they want to resolve all our problems,” says Fobister of the province, “is to engage us with other First Nations and form a partnership with industry, and log with the same conditions: clear-cutting, large volumes, no recognition of rights and so on.”
In June of this year, Grassy Narrows and several other groups wrote to Wynne to ask that the province, as a “good faith” gesture, stop handing out logging permits.
They say they never heard back.
On August 22, Grassy Narrows, Amnesty International, Greenpeace Canada, the Council of Canadians and other heavy hitters released a joint statement calling for such a commitment from Wynne.
And so three days later, this was the thrust of the event outside her house: good first steps, now back it up with action.
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The protest is playful, lighthearted and counterintuitively positive in its tone. On its lead banner, in place of the leaf on a Canadian flag, is an image of Blinky the three-eyed fish from The Simpsons.
Starting out at North Toronto Collegiate Institute, some 75 people head west on Roehampton, then north up Yonge. The music echoes through the stores and restaurants as midtowners pop out to see what’s up. Most seem receptive to the leaflets they’re handed.
I grew up in this area, and until now never realized the sudden appearance of a marching band was precisely what was missing.
We turn onto a side street (whose name the premier’s staff later scold me for tweeting) and continue east until we arrive at a handful of houses guarded by a dozen bicycle cops.
The activists spend 45 minutes outside playing music, dancing and listening to speeches on the intersections between indigenous rights, environmental issues, reproductive justice and missing and murdered aboriginal women.
Judy DaSilva, joining us from Grassy Narrows via a phone hooked to an amplifier, remarks that it’s “really good to hear those drums.”
The joyousness softens the action’s potential hostility.
“We are very privileged to be here today,” says Rhythms of Resistance’s Katelyn Blascik, speaking to the crowd on behalf of non-native allies. “And it was important to us to exercise that privilege and take responsibility, because Grassy is a small community that can be easily forgotten by the decision-makers here in Toronto.”
While the protest was still taking place, the government issued a statement from the minister of Aboriginal Affairs assuring us that, no, they haven’t forgotten about Grassy Narrows and that the working group is going quite well, thank you very much. “Both the community and the province have been very pleased on the progress of the [working group] tables,” David Zimmer is quoted as saying.
(“I’m a little upset that he says that,” Fobister tells me. “We’re not happy.”)
As for the ongoing logging, the release says the Ministry of Natural Resources works “closely with representatives of Grassy Narrows First Nation to address their interests and concerns.” But they also “recognize this will be a longer-term process.”
While standing outside the premier’s house, organizer Syed Hussan puts this duality in blunter terms. “She’s talking on the table, but they’re issuing permits in the back,” he says, “and we simply cannot allow that.”
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“Oppose the proposed condominium at Strathgowan & Yonge,” reads a lawn signon Wynne’s street.
“This home is Bullfrog-powered,” reads another.
And after the protesters leave, there is a new message, on posters affixed to hydro poles.
“You wouldn’t live with mercury in your home…” it says. “Why must Grassy Narrows?”