AKWESASNE'S TOXIC TURTLES
While looking through the
websites for review I came across the title of Akwesasne’s Toxic Turtles. This intrigued me, so I read further.
The Natives have always
had a great respect for Mother Earth.
They were careful when hunting and farming to maintain a balance so as
not to destroy the land or the creatures that inhabited it. The Natives also held different religious
views on how the world was formed. The
Mohawks, part of the Iroquois Nation, believed that the earth was formed on the
back of a turtle. They resided along the
areas of what are now Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River. The Mohawks resided in a land of thick
forests, rich soiled lands, and home to many animals. This land was named Akwesasne. In Mohawk, Akwesasne means
"land where the partridge drums".
(Grinde, Johansen). In two
generations, the land of natural wonders had become a place so poisoned that it
was not safe to eat the fish or game.
“Today, environmental pathologists are finding turtles at Akwesasne that
qualify as toxic waste” (Grinde, Johansen).
The area was also home to many factories. General Motors, Reynolds Metals and Alcoa
were three mentioned in this article. These
companies directly contributed to the degradation of the Akwesasne. As Grinde and Johansen state “A once-
pristine landscape of rivers and forests has been turned into a chemical dump
where unsuspecting children played on piles of dirt laced with polychlorinated
biphenyls (PCBs) dumped by a nearby General Motors foundry.” These factories had dumped by products of
their manufacturing processes directly into the seaway, and also onto the land
in unlined and uncapped pits, poisoning the land and animals. The pollution had eventually spread to the
Atlantic.
Little action was taken to try and rectify the
pollution. The companies and the DEC
were not in agreement as to the source of the problem initially. The factories tried to downplay the issue in
order to save money, all the while continuing to dump toxins into the land and
waterway. The situation became worse as
additional studies were performed, earning the nickname ‘contaminant cove’, and
had become “one of the worst pollution sites in New York State and possibly one
of the worst in North America” (Grinde, Johansen). An example of this is the DEC testing of a
female snapping turtle that had been caught.
Testing revealed the turtle contained 835 part per million of PCB’s. To put this in perspective, the federal
standard for edible poultry is 3 ppm, and fish 2 ppm. Soil that contains 50 ppm is considered
hazardous waste. The female turtle
contained approx. 15 times more than this.
A couple of years later, a male snapping turtle was caught and found to
have 3,067 ppm, sixty times the minimum standard for hazardous waste (Grinde,
Johansen).
For many years the Mohawks watched their land
degrade in front of their eyes. This
only shifted into high gear when the St. Lawrence was realized as a source of cheap
power, and more factories settled in. Eventually
the pollution had led to a warning to the Akwesasne Mohawks not to eat the fish or vegetables
from their gardens. As Grinde and
Johansen stated, “They cannot raise crops on it, hunt animals that fed on it,
nor fish from water bordering it without poisoning themselves.” In essence the Akwesasne Mohawks way of life had been ruined.
