AKWESASNE'S TOXIC TURTLES

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.