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I'll talk to you soon. This is a CBC Podcast. This is The Secret Life of Canada, a podcast about the country you know and the stories you don't. History by non-historians. Hey, Leah. Hey, Phelan. What are we doing today? Okay, so this is a bit different, I think, in some ways. Today, where I want to take you is to a bunch of places because we're going to look at water. Okay.
It's a big topic, and it might seem like it might not connect to history entirely, but if you stick with me, I think I'm going to make a good case for it. Okay. Okay, so there's a few things that I want to talk about. I want to talk about indigenous trade routes that nations would have used that would have helped shape the country. Right. We're going to learn a little bit about corn vampires. Okay. Yes, you heard me right. Corn vampires. And...
Of course, we can't talk about water without talking about some of the very real, very big problems facing our water today. So we are definitely going to have to address some of that. Okay. Okay. But first...
Before we get there, I wanted to start with a little quiz. Oh, great. Yay. Surprise quiz. Pop quiz. Who doesn't love a pop quiz? Love it. Okay. It's not that hard, I promise. So I'm going to ask you a series of questions and you just have to answer them. Okay. That's generally how quizzes work. Thank you. Okay. That was the first part of the quiz. Okay. Ready? Uh-huh. So question one. Uh-huh. What are the three forms of water?
Insert jeopardy music. Well, liquid water. I mean, like, water, water, liquid. And then ice, water. I don't know, like...
Rain water, snow water, like rain or snow. Snow water. You're close. So solid like ice. Yes, liquid like liquid. And gas like steam. Okay, right. I was going to say people come for the history and leave because of the science because this is like a terrible science lesson. But yes, I never thought of that. Okay, that makes sense. Yes, steam. So, okay, question two. Are you ready? Okay. How much of the Earth's surface is made up of water?
I'm going to say 50. You're wrong. Okay. 71%. Okay, that's, yeah, that's a lot. Yeah. I mean, 50 is a lot, but 71 is more than 50. Gold star. Yeah, I'm like, have you looked at a globe? 50%.
I don't have a globe in my house. Well, I know what to get you for Christmas next year. All right. So, yes, 71 percent. And 96.5 of that is saltwater. And the rest of it is freshwater. So can you tell me what is the largest freshwater source on Earth? I mean, obviously, no. I have no idea because I don't know. I mean, I feel like it's probably in, you know,
Russia somewhere or like China or some someplace I've never been that has some lake that I've never heard of that I should know. But so because I'm here, I'm going to just say Lake Ontario. That's just. Well, you're you're partially right. You're close. So, yeah, I mean, it's it's the Great Lakes system in its entirety. So Lake Ontario is a part of that. But that is the largest freshwater source in the world. And did you know little.
Little side note here that Manitoulin Island is the largest freshwater island in the world. I did not. OK, cool. Bill Nye. This is very interesting. But what does this all have to do with history? If we're going to talk about history in a meaningful way, in a really meaningful way, then we have to talk about landscape and we have to talk about water. OK, that makes sense. Yeah. And I know that you have heard me say this before. At least I think you've heard me say this before. But I think it bears repeating.
Settlement is not arbitrary. People stop and stay and create settlements in places for very specific reasons. And one of the main reasons...
is water. And I mean, that's obvious because people need it to live. You need it to stay alive. For sure. Yeah. I mean, what's the statistic, right? Like you, you can only live without water for a week or so. Right. Some, some say a week, some say three days. Sometimes it's longer than a week, but it depends on, you know, where you are in the world. Right. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. So.
Aside from water being important to just live, it's also used to travel, it's used for trade, and it's used for agriculture, and the water in Canada is no different. So today, I would like to make the case that waterways and water are historic. Water is historic. Okay, I'm on board. Take me on this watery journey. I will. So one very important way water shaped Canada was trade.
Pre-contact, before Europeans came over, a number of sophisticated trade routes and relationships existed between indigenous nations, and many of these routes relied on waterways. Right, because travel and land would be so much slower. Yes, exactly. And when you look at a map of North America and just focus on the waterways, kind of do like one of those magic eye things where you just like focus on the waterways, it's really easy to see why it would have been this way. Let's take where we are right now. The CBC? Well...
Not exactly, but close. The CBC building in Toronto, where we record the podcast, is very close to Lake Ontario. And Lake Ontario is a part of, as I said, the Great Lakes water system. Right, homes. Homes. No, the Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. Oh, I thought you were calling me like homes, like homie. Oh, God, no. No, never. Please never say homie again. No. Okay.
Homes. Homes. Homes, yes. Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior are the Great Lakes. And these lakes were an essential part of the trade network in Canada and North America as a whole. They helped to connect indigenous nations across the continent, even into Mexico.
That's far. Yeah, that is very far. And so I have to say, a lot of the stuff that I learned about these Indigenous trade routes, I learned from Bonnie Devine, who's an academic in the city, she's a visual artist, and she's done a bunch of independent research, kind of like us, just for fun. Because people do this just for fun. This talk by Bonnie Devine that I attended, and it was one of those lectures that makes you feel like your brain is being rewired in the best possible way ever.
And so in her talk, Bonnie explained how these trade routes would have worked. So, Leah, I'm going to give you this map. Oh, my God. Yeah. You know what? I remember my parents having maps when we were driving, like on driving trips. And it was always like, I can't see where Highway 16 is. You know, it's like that kind of stuff. It's so complicated. Listeners at home, feel free to Google up a map for yourself and follow along. So let's start in Toronto. OK, so from Toronto.
You could easily take the Caring Place Trail, which is a historic portage route. You take that all the way up to Lake Simcoe. Okay, yeah, I see that. Okay. Now from there, you can quite easily find your way west to Georgian Bay. Right. Okay, got it? Uh-huh. Okay. And from there, you can get to the north side of Manitoulin Island. Okay. Right? And you're going to want to be there because that channel is going to be more protected from the wind. Okay.
Right. OK, so now if you keep going west, you get to make a choice. Oh, it's like a choose your own adventure. It's like a Bandersnatch. What's it called? Is it called Bandersnatch? No, it always feels. It sounds rude. It does feel like a choose your own adventure. It does. It does. It does. But this one's this would have been way more high stakes. I think you're going to have a choice here. You can either go south into Lake Michigan or you can keep going west into Lake Superior.
Okay, I'm going to go west. So let's choose Lake Superior. All right. I was hoping you'd say that. Oh, good. If you go across Lake Superior, you get to what is now Minnesota. And do you know what's in Minnesota? Okay, looking at my map here, I'm going to say Prince's hometown of Minneapolis. R.I.P. Prince, the purple genius. Yes, the purple genius. I saw him live. It was really sad. Okay, anyway. What I'm looking for here is the Mississippi River. Oh.
Oh, wow. It goes that far north. And we are not done yet. So if you hop on the Mississippi, head south into the U.S., all the way through the States. Oh, my gosh. Do you see where you end up? Yeah. The Gulf of Mexico. That is incredible. I know. So it's like a massive highway. Yes. Yes. Like the first highway. Yeah. The first ever highway. Yeah. Here's Bonnie Devine to tell us a little bit about what would have been traded on this route. So my name is Bonnie Devine.
I am a member of the Serpent River First Nation. It's located in Gnabiching, which is on the north shore of Lake Huron. One of the really interesting commodities that was exchanged and that can really be traced up the length of North America is corn. Corn is not a native crop to northern woodland people. And yet we find it here, and there are accounts from the early French settlers.
So... What Bonnie is saying is that corn traveled from Mexico all the way up the Mississippi, and that's how it ended up here.
That's impressive. It's super impressive. And when you think about it, it is massive. Corn is incredibly important as a crop. I mean, historically, it was imperative to the development of many, many indigenous nations and their societies. It not only sustained nations like the Mayans, the Aztecs, and my people, the Haudenosaunee, what's up? But also many other nations across the Americas. What corn allowed for.
was a reliable and secure food source. So this meant these nations would have time to focus on other things. Like hair care? Partially, probably. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I don't know. I just made up a thing. They made rubber balls. Did you know that? The Aztecs created rubber balls and chewing gum. Amazing. Yeah, and when Europeans came over and they saw, like, rubber balls being bounced, they were like, what the hell is that?
It would be amazing if you think about what did they have before then? Rocks? Like, I mean, I've definitely done this before, but like the food, like the food stuff that I learned working on this, I was like, because it's like tomatoes, squash, chilies, chocolate. Right. I know you love your gum. Oh, my gosh. Gum is a necessity.
Tobacco. Anyway. So what else were they doing at this time? They were building giant cities. In fact, the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, where Mexico City now is, was massive. Tenochtitlan had about a quarter of a million people in the 1500s, which would have been about twice the size of London, England at the time. All that due to corn. I mean, take that, London. If only they had corn.
They wouldn't be now Brexiting and people hysteria in the streets. They're Brexit boxes that people are putting in, you know, 90 days of supplies. Where's their corn if they only had corn? I don't disagree with you here. Right? Corn's badass. It's great. I have a lot of feelings about corn after this. Theresa May, if you're listening, corn.
She'll know what to do. And you're welcome. Brexit solved. OK, so back to the Spanish. All right. OK, so when the Spanish showed up on this side of the world, they were pretty gold hungry. And so when they asked. Cast is putting it lightly. Good point. Cast is putting it extremely lightly. They asked the indigenous people for a majestic yellow substance and the indigenous people gave them corn.
They were like, yo, have you tried this stuff? It is amazing. And the Spanish took the corn back to Europe because they were like, yeah, this is kind of amazing. It's pretty tasty. And it was really embraced. And over time, it helped to rebuild a plague-ravaged Europe. But wasn't corn also looked at as a poor person's food? I mean, wheat was viewed as a more desirable option, mostly. I mean, the rich had wheat, the poor had corn. In Europe, corn was used for animal feed and really to feed poor people. That is absolutely true.
And a lot of poor people did eat corn, sometimes raw corn, so much so that a lot of them got a disease called pellagra, which is a deficiency of niacin. And although pellagra sounds like a very...
pretty word, it is a devastating disease. The symptoms for pellagra can include skin lesions, insomnia, hair loss, a red tongue, dementia, diarrhea, and light sensitivity. Wow, that sounds terrible. There are even some stories that pellagra from corn may have had something to do with the resurgence of vampire lore in Europe. Corn and vampires.
are potentially linked. So corn was being consumed in large quantities and some people were getting pellagra. And this would have been around the time when the lore of vampires was coming back into popular culture. And some of the symptoms of the disease are very, I guess you could say, vampiric. The skin lesions, which could be brought on by the sun, the sensitivity to light, the red tongue, the insomnia. The diarrhea.
Well, maybe not that one. So why didn't the Aztecs or the other indigenous people get pellagra? Well, the indigenous people in the Americas had been farming and cultivating corn for 10,000 years. They had learned how to treat corn by soaking it in an alkaline solution. And then they could avoid becoming diarrhea corn vampires. I just I feel like I don't know how we got here and how we're going to get back. I know.
It's a corn maze. It is a corn maze. You're disappointed in yourself as you said it. I am. I was sad about it. Okay, okay. So let's get out of the corn here. Here's Bonnie again to tell us a little bit about what else would have possibly traveled up the Mississippi. Other things that have been brought here and that have been found here are samples of turquoise.
Turquoise found on the north shore of Lake Superior can only have come from Mexico. Wampum is a really, really interesting commodity. It comes from a seashell. It comes from the ocean. The technology to make the beads from those shells is uniform across thousands of miles of geography. I think that one of the things that is often missing...
from accounts of the Indigenous people in North America as just how cosmopolitan they were, how much interaction there was and exchange. And, of course, there was a thriving economy here. And I think people are often shocked. You know, the erroneous view, of course, is that the only people who have a functional economy are Europeans. Of course, it's just not the case. The underlying ethos of colonialism...
was the idea that this was an empty, uninhabited land. And because of that, because their idea was that there was nobody here or nobody of any account, they needed to expunge any evidence of a more advanced or sophisticated civilization here. And I think they did it really, really effectively, the way that Indigenous names were erased from the maps and replaced with other names.
Or the way those names endure, but we've lost what they mean. I think that all of us are suffering from a deep, deep hunger to learn the truth. And I think that, you know, as all of us came through the curriculum and the education system here in Canada, which was not interested in telling anything like an accurate account of how Canada was settled.
or how the land was explored, or who was here when the first settlers arrived. So I think there's this big gap, and everybody feels it, but the information is not readily available even yet. Wow, to think that there's so many things here that made it all the way up here. Without a plane, without, you know, a person on a moped bringing it up, that all of these things arrived here just because of these waterways. Pretty incredible. Yeah. And I mean, it would have been a really...
difficult trip I found an article online where a couple paddled the Mississippi and it took them nearly two and a half months but they were going from north to south and I imagine south to north would be a much harder route I mean that must have been a really hard trip but let's ask the big question did they do it blindfolded I mean did they do a bird box challenge where they put you know the blankets I just saw the movie I just want to say something no spoilers but
I don't understand how those birds in the box survived because when they were on that water, there's no way the birds survived. Did they survive? Yeah. I mean, there were CGI birds. I found it implausible. Anyway, let's get back to trade routes. Bird box. Bird box. So these routes would have been.
So important. And they were developed over thousands of years. This wasn't just one bird box trip up the river. It was developed over a long time. And there are other trade routes that connect North America. Some used land, some used water, some used a combination of both. One such trail was the Grease Trail on the West Coast.
Okay, the grease trail. Tell me about it. All right, so the grease trail is called the grease trail because the predominantly traded item was a fish, a small smelt-like fish called an oolican, and it's incredibly oily and incredibly fatty. In fact, when you dry the fish, you can actually light it on fire and it'll stay lit, kind of like a match.
And so the oil from these fish was traded for a number of reasons. It's extremely nutritious. It has many medicinal properties. It's still used today. And so this fish would have been traded up and down the coast from Alaska to California and into the interior.
I found this really cool. Some scholars even think that the name Oregon comes from the word Oolekin. That's how important the fish were to the region. So these trails, like the Grease Trail, you know, that are on land to water, they would have started...
mostly at the ocean or fishing sites where people fished. Yes. So they would have started at water and moved inland, sometimes up and down the coast. It was a really complex network. And when the fur trade began in Canada and the U.S., the traders who were coming in used those established routes because they were by far the easiest to navigate. So they would have been used by companies like Hudson's Bay. Yes. And if you want to hear more about the Hudson's Bay Company and fur trade, you can check out episode one from season two called Bay Blankets.
That's a very nice plug. Okay, many people consider the Hudson's Bay Company and the fur trade in general as the foundation of Canada. These routes were pretty essential to the development of the fur trade, so therefore... So therefore, we can think of Indigenous trails as the foundation of Canada, or at least a very important part. And many of these trails still exist and became the blueprint for some of Canada's most important transportation routes.
Tanya Mosley didn't even know she had a sister until she went missing. Her sister Anita left home in 1987 and never returned. Now Tanya, along with the help of her sister's son Antonio, is determined to find out what happened. I'm Kathleen Goldtar and this week on Crime Story, one woman's search for her long lost sister. Find Crime Story wherever you get your podcasts.
The Nishkandiga First Nation in Northern Ontario, just north of Thunder Bay, has been without clean drinking water for, get this,
20 years. Parents there have taken to cleaning their children with baby wipes. It is a continuing effort just to keep baby bottles clean enough to put milk in for children. Residents of Budlitek First Nation in Nova Scotia say they're hopeful water problems like these will dry out over the next year. Just last year, residents were told not to consume the water at all for nearly three months. There were dangerously high levels of manganese in the water supply. Contamination that can impair brain development in children.
Well, there's a lot of development in our territories. There's a lot of development around the shores of Lake Superior. I think that a lot of that development does have an effect on the water situation, including our wells. Even on reserves where the water is apparently safe to drink, there's another barrier, indoor plumbing. But here's the astounding thing about NASCO's water troubles. A few years back, the federal government promised a fix. In fact, it built this state-of-the-art $3.6 million water treatment plant.
But folks here still can't drink their water. The chlorine system malfunction. Filters broke. Parts and repairs take ages as it works through layers of bureaucracy. Why are we stuck with crappy water? People just don't give a rat's ass because it's natives. It is impossible to talk about water in this country and to not talk about the water crisis on First Nations reserves. Yeah.
Yeah, let's do it. And I don't want to get too much into how reserves came to be in this country. But don't worry, Canada, we're going to go there very soon in an upcoming episode. But one important thing to understand about reserves is that sometimes.
A lot of the time, they were set up and used to move Indigenous people off of their land so that the Canadian government could use land that they viewed as useful or profitable. Canada. So people would have been moved from communities where they and their ancestors would have lived for thousands of years and then...
you know, forcibly moved and confined to a smaller track of land. Yeah, and that land could be completely different from where they had existed before. So it would completely shift and change their way of life overnight sometimes. This led to a system where indigenous people were really no longer in control of their resources, right? Exactly. And when you aren't in control of your resources...
that can result in a multitude of problems. So what about your community and you when you were growing up? So a few months ago, my community of Six Nations was in the news. The Guardian reported in October that 91% of Six Nations residents didn't have access to clean water, even though there was a newly installed water treatment plant.
And I remember reading that article and feeling this weird mix of emotions. I felt angry and annoyed and sad. Seeing your community reduced to that place 90 minutes from Toronto without clean drinking water. We're so much more than that. We're a vibrant, historically rich community with really talented artists. Right. But on the other hand, I knew this was true.
I knew this was the case. I knew that many didn't and don't have clean drinking water. I didn't when I was a kid. We bathed in rainwater. We had a slot bucket. We had an outhouse. So why did this news report bother me? I imagine that it is because in 2015, the federal government made a promise to ensure that all reserves had clean drinking water by 2021, which seems like a tall order.
And it was since that promise was made that the feds have now backtracked and said now they will only end long term drinking water advisories. But I don't really know what that means or what the difference is. It means that they're only focusing on communities that have had a boil water advisory for a year or more. And there have been some improvements on that front. According to my research, there are now 69 long term drinking water advisories, which is down from the 105.
that it was when the liberals took office in 2015. Well, that's something. It is. And I'm sure it has been life changing for many communities and it's great news. It really is great news. But the more that I thought about it and the more that I thought about all of this, I just kept wondering why. Yeah. Why isn't there clean water on reserves? Why has this been going on for so long? I want to know. I mean, I have to say I.
I have zero understanding of this. And like, I just think of us. We both grew up in rural areas, right? We grew up in the country. So why did I have clean and running water and you didn't? Okay. I don't understand. But a rural area is different than a reserve. Rural places are governed by a municipal government and reserves are not.
Reserves have an elected band council a lot of the time. And so how is this different? I spoke with Hayden King to see if he could help shed some light on this. My name is Hayden King. I'm from Beausoleil First Nation and I'm the executive director of Yellowhead Institute based on the faculty of Ark at Ryerson University. When we created pre-confederation treaties and number treaties, there was no provisions for water.
because First Nations always expected to just maintain jurisdiction over water. And you look at the early relationship, and First Nations, certainly around the Great Lakes, did exercise jurisdiction over water. Then when the Indian Act came along, which truncated a lot of treaties, there was no mention of water, actually, but of course there was the imposition of the federal government into the lives of First Nations. The process has evolved out of this confusion over...
who has jurisdiction, who should have jurisdiction, who wants jurisdiction, and the continual passing of responsibility. I think Canadians often just think of water problems as being in remote areas. You know, the infrastructure is difficult to establish when you're in the far north. But as you point out, with Six Nations, there's no clean drinking water at most of the reserves. And I teach in Tayandonega, Mohawk Territory.
And you can't drink the water in the classrooms. I teach at a college in Tyndinaga, and the college doesn't have clean drinking water. And this is a reserve that's south of the 401 on the shores of Lake Ontario at the border with the United States. So I think it's a misconception among Canadians that the clean water issues are just a result of remoteness, when in fact a lot of communities in the south don't have clean drinking water.
There's a thing that I think about often, which is, you know, you see those commercials for third world countries and they're like, help these children who, you know, don't have running water. And then to hear that in 2018, there are so many communities on this land that don't have running water and are in the same situation that their schools that don't have water is.
Like I and the sad thing is, is I'm only getting angry now. Like I'm only now just tapping into this where this is what I don't know. I don't think you're I don't think you're alone on that, though. I think I think people are starting to to see the imbalance of what has been said, what is being said and what is being done.
Because you can talk about reconciliation all you want, but when you looked at the fact of the matter, like you can't say that Canada's relationship with Indigenous people is so very important and then totally disregard their rights and bring the RCMP in and...
blast through a gate and arrest elders and protesters i mean i know protesters protesters is a bit of a loaded word yeah i know so people who are it's like it's civil it's civil disobedience in a way right and so but this is but civil disobedience for water yeah we're not talking about
Civil disobedience for... Lower bus fares. Right. Or, you know... Better garbage pickup or whatever. Cheaper gas. This is just... Buck of beer. The thing that we all need that was provided to us by this earth. So it's very overwhelming to hear that there are schools in this... Canada is giving with one hand and taking with the other. And I'm just... I'm enraged and confused.
at the state of things but I'm glad to see I'm glad to see that more people are getting angry about this and and and feeling shame I feel like it's important that shame is important like I think we all need to those of us who are not indigenous and are you know coming online for the first time or whatever feel the shame move through it and then try to
take some action. But I just want to know, I mean, why is it that so many reserves don't have clean water? It was a difficult ball of yarn for me to unravel.
What I looked at is I looked at the process and it's incredibly complex. And I'm not a politician. I'm not sure if you know this about me, but I'm not a politician. I get you swear a lot. Although we know that that doesn't actually, that's not a thing anymore. Yeah. So the process for a reserve to get a water treatment plant in a nutshell is this. Elected councils on reserves, you'll sometimes hear them called ban councils. They come up with a detailed feasibility plan for a water treatment plant. The report gets sent to Indigenous Affairs.
represents the Canadian government, then they ask for changes and the back and forth begins. This can take years. Then when Indigenous Affairs finally accepts the report, it funds some.
Usually not all of the project. So where does the rest of the money come from if the government's not funding all of it? The communities, like my community of six nations, have to take out loans. And these are not small loans. They are millions and millions of dollars sometimes. This process, I don't... I know. It's... It's bad. It's a bad process. It is. And I wonder if it's like so... If it was so difficult for me to figure out this. Like, is that intentional?
Is it intentional that people don't know this stuff? I would only assume so. I feel like that's what I learn every episode we do. It's like, oh, you have to dive down this deep hole to try to uncover the truth of it all. And the truth is usually unsavory. And I feel like that's why it's quite hidden. But I'm trying to figure out.
What happens to these plants once they're built? So there's a plant. Yeah. So there's a plant. And then you would think, OK, everything's great. But that's not actually it. Because once the plant is built, you have to have someone to operate them. And sometimes they're in remote communities. And frequently these operators that they hire, they don't have adequate training or they don't have adequate pay. There are some places where people are paid $12 an hour to work in a water treatment plant. Wow. I did a quick Google to just see what other people in the country would have been paid for the same job.
It's about 30 bucks. So there's a pretty big gap there. And once the water plant is built, then you need to get pipes to all the homes because those aren't built yet. And so I wanted to speak with someone who's right in the thick of it, someone who is in the process of building this infrastructure. So I called up Chief Ava Hill of Six Nations.
joined council, and I joined council like 14 years ago. Dealing with the bureaucracy at Indian Affairs is just horrendous. In the end, it was our belief that they should have funded the thing 100%, and they wouldn't. So in order to get it completed, we had to go and get a loan. It's like a $42 million water treatment plant, and I think they only funded up to 30, like my figures are just ballpark. So we've got a new water treatment plant here.
But how do we get that water to the communities? You know, we've got 45,000 acres. You know the size of our community. We're the largest populated. We've got 2,500 homes. And even when we opened that water treatment plant, there was only service provided to 9% of the community because that's the only place where the infrastructure reached.
So, you know, we've got this big water treatment plant, which is quite capable of serving the whole community, but now we need funding for the infrastructure and the piping to get to those houses. And that process is underway now, correct? Well, it's underway now, but you can't just plunk a new water treatment plant there and say, okay, we did it. You've got to get it to the houses. And you've also got to be able to operate and maintain that facility. And we're having a constant battle with the Department of Indian Affairs. Not everybody still calls it that.
about the O&M dollars, which are the operation and maintenance dollars. And those can be quite high to maintain a facility like that. So if they're going to get rid of these boil water advisories, they need to, one, put the water treatment plant there, make sure that there's funding along with it to ensure that the infrastructure and the piping is also there so it can reach all of the homes, and third, to make sure that the adequate dollars are there to operate and maintain it on an annual basis.
I do hope that we do get to that stage, you know, where we can all get good, clean, potable water for all of our communities. So we've got still a ways to go. Like, you know, a little bit over half the reserve maybe is done, but there's still a lot to get done. And so our push is to continue to seek those dollars to make sure that every household in our community can eventually get hooked up to a water main if they choose. Like some people may not choose to do so, but, you know, we want to have that there and have that option.
In addition to that, it gives me good pleasure to drive around and see fire hydrants all over the place because they're hooked up to the waterline, and that's so instrumental in helping with the fire protection in our community. Yeah, no fire hydrants, of course. I mean, that's something that I would never think about when I think about...
Or when you said we're going to look at water today and how that connects with indigenous communities, the first thing I thought was, oh, boil advisories. I didn't think, oh, yeah, there are no fire hydrants. So there are no sprinkler systems in schools or community centers in some places. And so the risk you take even when you're just the day-to-day stuff. Well, and for me, I think.
For me, it made me reflect on my entire life and you sort of, you know, look backwards through it and you see all of you see all of the things that you didn't have. And you only know you didn't have those things until all of a sudden you have them. And then you realize I didn't have this. Why didn't I have this? And I mean, you have to come to the obvious conclusion, which is racism. It's racist.
reserves were constructed as places to keep us quite literally quite literally to you know there was a time when we weren't allowed to leave them because we're not supposed to be here we're supposed to be extinct by now or assimilated yeah so why would you build us pipes yeah why would why would we build anything that would
preserve you preserve you and serve you yeah so yeah i think as an indigenous person you see these things and and you can't know what you didn't have until you have it it's like a hurt that that runs backwards through your whole life oh yeah and you wonder It is still happening. You can only come to the conclusion that it's racism. It's systematic, institutionalized racism. And I think I heard this thing on the radio the other day that was like...
denial is a useful thing when you get older and i think denial is a useful thing if you're indigenous in this country because it's the only way we sometimes can move through the world yeah yeah yeah because if you actually consciously think every day about the the barriers that are put in your way and the things that you are denied you would go crazy yeah quite literally
Yeah. Yeah. Another explanation for why there's no clean water on reserve is that I don't think Canada ever expected reserves to succeed. You know, these are places that were supposed to be temporary holding places for First Nations until we went extinct or we assimilated.
So why would you invest anything in the infrastructure or the water or wastewater management system if the people who are going to benefit from it are really only going to be there temporarily? And I think that was sort of an initial impulse that lasted 100 years or more in Canada. So again, that's sort of us defying those expectations and Canada continuing on with their frustrated neglect.
Wow. Yeah, this is why we gave you corn vampires earlier. Yeah. Okay. And so now we have corporations draining the water from the Grand River, the river that was granted to the Six Nations people by the Queen for our service during the American Revolution. We sided with Britain. We were allies. And that was supposed to entitle us to certain...
rights and certain respects but it didn't so seven miles on either side of the grand river were given to us and now nestle is draining that water from our river and our people people from six nations are having to drive to stores to buy that water just so they can live i just i can't i know information and nestle is such a huge
How do you go up against a company like that? And why – the bigger question to me is why would our government grant a company like that permission to do something like that? Like they're – it's a web, a giant web. It is, and it's money. Yeah.
It's all money. And I don't want to be a total downer here. I know. I'm sorry. I kind of feel like we knew this was going to happen. But this is a very real and a very current problem. As we record this, the hereditary chiefs, the land protectors and water protectors of Wet'suwet'en Nation are fighting to prevent the coastal gas link pipeline from going through their territory. Right. And that's the pipeline formerly known as Kinder Morgan.
Yes. And that pipeline would go through their territory. And one of the main reasons that they are attempting to halt it? Water. Those people are salmon people. And if that pipeline bursts, their way of life and the lives of those children for generations, it will be damaged. And this is just one example of problems with Canadian water. Right. I think of places like Grassy Narrows, actually, in northern Ontario that have a mercury.
problem in their water supply. And I didn't know this until I met a really talented theater artist who was from Grassy Narrows. And I remember asking him, I saw him one day and he looked kind of tired. And I was like, oh, hey, were you out last night? Like, what's going on? He was like, oh, no, it's mercury poisoning. It's just mercury poisoning. I was like, oh, did you do a science experiment? Like, why would you have mercury poisoning? It sounds so, you know.
It sounded really random to me. And he said, well, everybody in Grassy Narrows has it to some degree because the water's poisoned. And it just, it, it, like you put me into this kind of, it was a shock to the system to think somebody who's my contemporary grew up with water that's so bad that he now has mercury running through his body. Oh, God, here we go again.
I know I'm, and it's, and it's like mercury is awful in so many ways, but like one of the horrible things I learned is that mercury is, it stays in the system and then it's passed on. Right. And then on. And so this thing that was, you know, this, this pulp and paper mill that leached mercury into the water. And then people, you know. And so what's going on in Grassy Narrows? What's going on on the West Coast with Wet'suwet'en? What's going on here with Nestle?
What's going on in places like Manitoba, where Lake Winnipeg won the Most Threatened Lake of the Year Award in 2013. And even Victoria, beautiful, beautiful Victoria. The Victoria Harbor is reported to be the dirtiest body of water in BC. Okay, so what, you know, you hear all this.
We're crying. What can we do? What can we do? Because that's the thing about news. A lot of times you watch this news and you go, oh, no, it's terrible. Yeah. The end. I had that exact same thought. And I want to make sure that we do. This isn't this is a problem. Yes. And this is a problem that we really need to take seriously because water is going to be the next oil in this country. It's going to be a huge economic thing.
I wanted to make sure that we ended with something sort of positive, something proactive, something that we can do to help to reverse this, to help to make smarter choices. And so I spoke with the Council of Canadians, which is an organization that advocates for clean water. And I wanted to ask them how we can start to give our bodies of water the respect they deserve. Because if we don't, we are in some serious, deep trouble. Yeah, all of us.
Not just Indigenous people, all of us. All of us. My name is Maude Barlow, the Honorary Chairperson of the Council of Canadians, which is Canada's largest social and environmental justice grassroots organization. I'm also a writer. I would say that Canadians take our water for granted.
I call it the myth of abundance. We grew up thinking we have so much, it doesn't matter what poison we put in it or where we move it from, you know, where nature put it and is needed to where we think we want it because it serves us. We just have this notion that it's never-ending. And that is absolutely incorrect. Canadians need to understand that we too have water crises. Many of our lakes are very sick.
not just from climate change and global warming, but from what we're doing to them, and we do not have proper legislation. So that's kind of the big first picture. The second picture is the few laws that we had were gutted by the Harper government in the 2012 omnibus bill. We have no national drinking water standards. We have no national standards on the runoff from factory farms, what they call eutrophication into at least 246 major lakes.
like Lake Erie and Lake Winnipeg, which are very sick from this. We do not protect our groundwater. We do not have adequate legislation, and we haven't mapped our groundwater properly. We need much stricter laws around sewage, the leakage of raw sewage into our waterways. And, of course, we continue to have the crisis in First Nations of water and sanitation. Even if we somehow...
have enough water for as much water as everybody thinks. And you'll read that we have 20% of the world's fresh water. That's only true if we were to drain every lake and river. We have about 6.5% of the world's available, accessible fresh water. That means the fresh water you can use without diminishing the water stock. Learn as much as you can. Stop drinking bottled water and talk to everybody who, I mean, our water coming out of our municipal taps in Canada is clean.
It's tested every couple of hours. It's safer than bottled water, which is sitting around in plastic, which if it's been anywhere in the sun, you shouldn't be drinking because the plastic leeches. But in any case, we should be drinking our tap water and rejoicing in it and being grateful for it. We need better laws. We really desperately need a new National Water Act or one that would be...
developed with the provinces and municipalities and First Nations communities around who gets access and under what conditions. Why the hell does Nestle have the right to have three wells, massive wells? When that third one comes on stream, they'll be pumping something like 6 million liters every day. Why do they get that right?
for that raw water when we need it for the human right to water, when there are going to be people from around the world having to come here because they've run out of water in their own communities, their own countries. So we need to ask those really tough questions. And if we have tough laws around this and national standards on drinking water, protection of our groundwater, protection of water from agriculture runoff, the chemical-laced runoff from factory farms, then we will have...
So I think listening to Maude speak, one, she knows so much. She's so smart and she is such a good advocate and said so many things that I already knew. Don't drink bottled water. Don't throw things down the toilet that you can't use anymore. Those are all things that you know, but I think the way that we think about the world's water and Canada's water specifically, that it is this abundant thing.
This is a thing we really need to pay attention to because we are in deep, deep trouble. And it's not like it's beyond our abilities. Pay attention to what's going on. Vote for the people who care about the environment because this is it. This is all we've got.
The Secret Life of Canada is recorded in Toronto on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee, Wendat, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit. It's written and hosted by me, Phelan Johnson. And me, Leah Simone Bowen. And produced by Katie Jensen. Our script editor is Yvette Nolan. Research assistance is provided by John Weir.
The folks from CBC Archives and the CBC Image Research Library. Our digital producer is Fabiola Carletti. The senior producer of CBC Podcasts is Tanya Springer. And the executive producer is Arif Noorani. Special thank you to Myseum, who hosted the talk on Indigenous trade routes. It was really good. Yes, it was so good. You can check them out on the web. Come hang out with us in our Facebook group. You can chat with us about the episode or check out other cool history-related posts. Tell us what you think. We're also on Instagram and on Twitter at secretlifeofcad.
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