PART 14
December 20, 2008 Ottawa Sun
By MARK BONOKOSKI, Sun Media
TYENDINAGA — The cement footprint for a new police station, its cost estimated at $2 million, sits a few hundred metres from a school where the water cannot be drank.
Bureaucracy and opportunity — the abundance of one and the lack of the other — have made conditions on a great number of Ontario’s reserves so unpalatable that many First Nation’s people, and youth in particular, are increasingly moving to cities.
Certainly it is a problem and a reality at Tyendinaga.
There is already a police station on this Mohawk reserve, which seems adequate enough for the seven officers connected to the Tyendinaga First Nations detachment here and who report to Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Julian Fantino.
Drinkable water?
Or a new police station? The priorities appear skewed but, within days of an early October visit here, the pre-fab structure for the new detachment was scheduled to arrive on flatbed trucks from an assembly site outside of
Yet the water fountains at the Quinte Mohawk elementary school still remain boarded up with plastic garbage bags. Warning signs against drinking the water are still posted in each and every washroom.
In a central hallway, case upon case of bottled water are still stacked against a wall for the children to drink.
“When we lost our water some 18 months ago because it did not live up to Walkerton standards, it didn’t create even a ripple of controversy because the whole community is suffering the same way,” says school principal Kathleen Manderville, a Native educator who has been at this school for 18 years.
“It’s heartbreaking, it is hard to shrug off, but that’s the way it is.”
Along a thinly populated dirt road, work crews prepare to have it widened, and then paved.
Drinkable water? Or the paving of a rarely used road?
The road wins.
Money designated for a new police station, or money earmarked for road works, cannot be re-allocated to give this community potable water — with the mix of governments (federal, provincial, municipal and band), their various bureaucracies, and their various bureaucracies’ incomprehensible guidelines regarding funding making the issue more complex than any puzzle yet invented.
It makes no common sense at all to have a new police station, and a new road yet to have no drinkable water.
Yet therein lies the reality on many of
Common sense does not prevail.
If there is one member of this Mohawk territory of 2,100 residents and 18,000 acres perched along the shores of the
And it could be argued that the boomer generation who condemn him today for his headline-grabbing political activism — leading the blockade of the train corridor and the 401 during the 2007 First Nations’ National Day of Action, for example, or going to jail for protesting the poisoning of the reserve’s water by dump seepage almost a decade ago — are the same boomers who once admired Abbie Hoffman and the Chicago Seven’s stand against the Vietnam War.
Shawn Brant, however, unlike Abbie Hoffman, has more right to walk the walk.
Except, to too many, he’s “just an Indian” — which he is.
Despite sporting “white man’s looks,” as opposed to the “round face.” he is “100% full-blooded Mohawk” with his genealogical roots “going back forever.”
He speaks the Mohawk language fluently.
His traditional name is Ratatewenniyo. Roughly translated, it means “He’s Free.”
Back in 1989, when his first wife, Sandra, was pregnant with twins, she slipped while lifting a bucket from the well on their reserve property, and immediately went into labour.
The twin girls died, and the Shawn Brant of then became the Shawn Brant of today — fighting for “his people” on issues ranging from running water, to poverty, to housing, to land claims.
At the end of January, he was supposed to go on trial for his role in the blockade of the CN line and the 401 back on June, 29, 2007, and it was predicted to be a trial filled with political hot buttons, including the wire tapping of various phone lines by the OPP, and calls to Brant’s cellphone by OPP Commissioner Fantino during which he was threatened with his “world crashing down.”
That trial, however, won’t happen.
During pre-trial motions late last month, a plea-bargain deal was struck that would derail that full-scale trial, with Brant pleading guilty to mischief charges and receiving no jail time — just time served, a 90-day conditional sentence, and one year’s probation.
On this reserve today, 50% are on a boil-water advisory, the main reason being the contamination of the watershed by toxic waste in a landfill that provincial authorities did not properly line, or adequately cap. Of that 50%, half cannot used their water for washing or bathing, let alone drinking.
There is a public spigot in
That water, which also serves the 50% of the reserve not relying on wells but on municipal water lines in the south end, is piped in from the nearby town of
“I don’t know how people (outside the reserve) cannot appreciate the indignity of this,” says Brant. “Imagine having to bring your children to a public place to shower? Imagine having to line up like cattle to get a bucket of drinking water?
“Does no one see this as wrong?”
It has been estimated that it will cost from $13.5 million to $14.3 million to “fix the system” but, with the government reportedly ordering a new algae study, the costs of that will push it over the $15-million mark — which will push it into a new budgetary bracket and which, in turn, will necessitate another level of the treasury department being thrown into the mix.
“All it does is push everything back another five years,” says Brant. “As if we have not been waiting long enough.
“It’s long past being cruel and unusual punishment.”
Back in 1995, Brant spent 13 months in prison for his protest of the “nasty condition” of the drinking water of that era.
“Five years later, nothing had changed,” he says. “Health
“People were crying, yet their tears were not felt.
“When things are bad for so long, it simply becomes a normal way of life,” he says. “But it does not make it right.
“It’s an abysmal way of living.
“People on this reserve would give up their homes to have clean water. They would live in shacks worse than they live in now to have clean water,” he says.
“How could you, as a father, put your children to bed, read them a story, and then simply go off and cry to yourself because there is nothing you think you can do to change their lot in life?” he asks.
“I can’t do it. It’s just not in me.”
***
There are 126 First Nations reserves in the
Of those, 11 have their own water and waste-treatment facilities and 37 are on a “boil water advisory” — many in far northern climes.
Tyendinaga, however, is on the banks of
But it is one of the 37 on a boil advisory.
The majority living in this First Nations community rely on drilled or dug wells, but most of them have long been tainted by toxins seeping in from an old landfill bordering the reserve.
The reserve, itself, has no self-contained and self-administered water treatment plant.
Barry Brant — no relation to Shawn Brant — is an elected member of the Tyendinaga band council for the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte, and has water and sewage as part of his infrastructure and public works portfolio.
“If I had what I want, we would have had a new water treatment plant 10 years ago,” he says. “But we don’t.”
Some $250 million of the overall federal budget for Ontario reserves is dedicated to overall capital expenditures — an umbrella under which items such as water and waste services, roads, school construction, and building maintenance would have covered under a complex formula system that defies any simple explanation or breakdown.
Most are project based, meaning individual reserves submit their proposals and their needs and then INAC decides which get the money, and when.
In a way, it is a worst-comes-first scenario with “health and safety” projects receiving priority funding.
Back in January, Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl issued a progress report on First Nations water, stating the number of high-risk water systems identified in 2006 had been reduced from 193 to 85. Of 21 communities identified as priorities, meaning those communities had both a high-risk system and a drinking water advisory, INAC claims only six communities remain on that list.
“Our government launched a water action plan in 2006 because conditions were unacceptable and, as a result, we have seen more than half of high-risk systems removed from the high-risk list,” said Strahl. “The work is not yet done, and today I’m proud to announce the next steps to ensure First Nation communities have the clean, safe water they deserve.”
Protests on Tyendinaga, however, have not abated because of talk coming out of
As Shawn Brant put it, “We have a crisis here. If we don’t protest, who will?”
Earlier this month, for example, and unreported in any national media, Tyendinaga Mohawk police issued criminal arrest warrants against 11 adults and two youths — Shawn Brant being one of the adults — for their alleged roles in two recent protests on the reserve.
The first involved a protest at a private quarry operated by Tom Maracle, brother of the Tyendinaga police chief Ron Maracle, after protesters alleged blasting on the site brought about the collapse of a number of residential wells nearby.
The second protest, at the end of October, involved the blocking of the main road leading to the site of the new police station in order to impede the impending arrival of the modular units for the building.
That protest did not end, in fact, until the units were carted away to an undisclosed location, leaving just the cement pad of the police station’s foundation as a reminder of what is to come, and of priorities seen as skewed.
Tomorrow: Reconciliation