VEZINA: The public health disaster of mercury poisoning at Grassy Narrows
The tragic history of residential schools in Canada and its impact on Indigenous people has ignited another long-standing concern — unsafe water on reserves.
For a better understanding of that issue, let’s focus on one example — Grassy Narrows.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, a pulp and paper mill chemical plant operated on the local river.
The plant processes at the time resulted in methylmercury being emitted into the environment by both air and water pollution.
The problem was the English-Wabigoon river had a surrounding population downstream of the chemical plant, which lived on fishing and tourism.
They were members of the Asubpeeschoseewagong First Nation, also known as Grassy Narrows First Nation, near Kenora in northern Ontario.
It has been known for a long time that methylmercury is extremely toxic.
Indeed, the saying “mad as a hatter” and the Mad Hatter character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, originally came from the effects of mercury poisoning on workers in the hat-making industry, because of the process to convert fur into felt going back to the 18th century.
Exposure to large amounts of methylmercury can result in a wide range of mental and physical health problems which, as late as 1975, the medical community in Canada did not know how to identify reliably.
That’s one of the major reasons the Ontario health ministry at the time sent medical experts to Japan to study and better understand the effects of mercury poisoning, known as Minamata disease.
The disease derives its name from Minamata Bay in Japan, where in the late 1950s the local population was exposed to mercury poisoning from the wastewater of a local chemical plant, which entered the human food chain because of people consuming fish.
Symptoms of mercury poisoning can include damage to hearing and speech, muscle weakness, numbness of feet and hands and ataxia, which is a loss or lack of muscle control over voluntary movements. In rarer cases, paralysis, coma, insanity and death can eventually occur.
In Grassy Narrows, the local Indigenous community had a strong cultural belief, and expectation, of living off the fish in the river.
When the government of the day banned fishing for public health reasons, it essentially obliterated the local economy built on fishing and tourism.
After all, who wants to eat fish from a chemically poisoned river?