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By Bob Rodgers CA Source: reviewcanada 1/1/2009

“First they took us kids away to the residential school. Next they built hydro dams so the rice got flooded and old graves went underwater. Then they made the families leave their log houses and go into prefabs all crowded together on a back bay. After that came the mercury that poisoned the fish. Now they’re taking the trees away.”
 

The speaker is Ivy Keewatin, the place Grassy Narrows, 80 kilometres north of Kenora, Ontario. I had been a fishing guide there for five summers in the 1950s under the tutelage of Ivy’s father, Andy Keewatin, head guide at Ball Lake Lodge and chief at the Grassy Reserve. Anchored below Wabigoon Falls with Ivy, our fishing lines strung out and humming in the current, I remembered the many times I had taken my guests to fish this spot and stopped for a shore lunch of crisp, deep-fried pickerel our American guests called “walleyes.” It was still good fishing here, but Ivy and I would not be eating fish today. Throughout the 1960s Reed Paper in Dryden dumped 9 metric tonnes of untreated inorganic mercury into the system 200 kilometres upstream and the fish are still contaminated.

 
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