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Bold Scientists: Dispatches from the Battle for Honest Science
© 2014 Michael Riordon

First published in 2014 by
Between the Lines
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Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Between the Lines would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Riordon, Michael, 1944–, author
Bold scientists : dispatches from the battle for honest science / Michael Riordon.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77113-124-7 (pbk.).
ISBN 978-1-77113-124-7 (epub).
ISBN 978-1-77113-124-7 (pdf).

1. Science—Political aspects. 2. Research—Political aspects. 3. Scientists—Canada—Interviews. 4. Scientists—Interviews. I. Title.

Q175.5.R55 2014 500 C2014-902459-2

Cover design by Gordon Robertson
Text design by Gordon Robertson

Between the Lines gratefully acknowledges assistance for its publishing activities from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program and through the Ontario Book Initiative, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

001

For the wondrous Brian

Contents

Thanks

In the Beginning

1. When the River Roared

First Nations, a long view

2. Digging Thistles

A post-oil farm

3. A Dialogue with the World

Biology, from the ground up

4. Blood on My Hands

In the garden, life and death

5. Stolen Children

Genes and human rights

6. The Cloud

Watching Big Brother

7. ODD

Psychology and power

8. Awe

The wisdom of a spider web

9. Pesky Data

Under lakes, dark truths

10. The Unsolved Problem

Shattering the earth

11. When the Lights Go Out

Awakening in an ice storm

12. No Time for Cowardice

The fight for science and democracy

Thanks

My deep thanks to:

The bold thinkers who trusted me with their thoughts, stories, and challenges.

And many kind folks who provided suggestions and contacts, smoothed my travels, asked questions and made arguments, invaluable for testing and clarifying free-range thought.

And the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, without which this book would not exist. They are essential, and under constant threat from the wrecking crews. Also the Access Copyright Foundation, which supported the creation of a companion blog, Nature, Science & Power: Questions need to be asked.

And all who care enough to think for themselves, to imagine, to ask questions, and to resist the seduction of easy answers in a world where easy answers always carry price tags.

In the Beginning

The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall.

— SIR FRANCIS BACON, Essays, 1625

SCIENTISTS KNOW. Sometimes they know less than they think they know, but often they know more than most of us, at least in the particular realms they study. In a time when science carries a certain authority, we tend to believe its practitioners as some of us believe clergy. They are supposed to know.

Sadly, some scientists turn this trust into a lucrative trade as experts for hire, paid to convince the rest of us that we have nothing to fear from whatever product or process their benefactor designates: genetic manipulation, smoking, nuclear power, pharmaceuticals, tar sands, global warming. The pay is good, and a well-trained mind can rationalize almost anything. Other scientists go about their work with their heads down, wrap themselves in innocence, and deny any responsibility for malignant end uses of their knowledge. In doing so, they disconnect cause from effect.

I went looking for scientists of another kind, people who create new paths by defying the status quo, bending the rules, and asking prickly questions they aren’t supposed to ask. Such actions have costs. But these thinkers have each concluded in their own way that the price of silence and complicity is intolerable. These are not famous people, except in circles that know enough to appreciate their contributions. I hope you’ll find each of them as unique and splendid as I do.

My original impulse to write this book sprang from an encounter some years ago with 17th-century politician-philosopher Francis Bacon. I was writing a radio play about the origins of the King James Bible, which was published during Bacon’s lifetime. Bacon famously asserted that if we could break down nature into its parts—her parts, he said—we would learn her secrets and thus be able to control her to our benefit. The tool he proposed for this conquest was analytical science.

Four hundred years later, I’d say the results are mixed, and questions need to be asked. Some of them are vital to our survival.

I’m no scientist, but my work as a writer is propelled by a spirit of restless inquiry, a lifelong habit of asking questions and then questioning the answers. I consider this spirit fundamental to any pursuit of knowledge, including science.

Bold Scientists emerged from my own fear, anger, and curiosity. I’m afraid for the earth, for imagination, for compassion, truth telling, humility, and common sense. We are so smart in our inventions that we believe we’re omniscient, and so powerful in our effects that we believe we’re omnipotent. But we are neither, and believing we are makes us crazy.

I’m angry because so few people hold so much power, with no just cause, and do so much harm with it. I’m angry because so many of us fail to exercise the limited but real power we still have. I include myself in that charge: it’s not that I do nothing, but neither do I do enough.

To satisfy my curiosity, I’ve searched for a range of scientists in Canada, the United States, and Central America who insist on revealing knowledge that the authorities would prefer to conceal. The scientists you meet here may seem a random selection, but I chose them carefully for who they are, what knowledge they pursue, what they find, and what they risk.

Bold Scientists plumbs the deepening fault lines between nature, science, and power. By nature I mean the universe, which is not of our making and in which we are becoming, more and more, a pest. By science I mean the pursuit of knowledge, which can be sought and used in infinite ways. And by power I mean the capacity to act, which all of us have.

Tyrants are fond of telling us there is no alternative. They lie. There are alternatives, always. When tyrants prevent us from seeing them, visionaries insist on imagining alternatives and fighting for them.

Bold Scientists emerges from that imagining and that fight. I think of it as an antidote to despair.

When the River Roared

AT KAWEHNO:KE the leaves have fallen. The air is crisp, the sky laden with dark cloud, winter pending. Traffic whines overhead, crossing the steel-grate bridge between Canada and the United States. Linking the two countries, the bridge stands squarely on Akwesasne Mohawk land. Off the island’s south shore, the bulk freighter Maccoa glides east. The freighter, registered in Cyprus, rides low in the water, its passage through the St. Lawrence Seaway marked by a deep throb.

Flowing around Kawehno:ke, named Cornwall Island by English invaders, the St. Lawrence River—so named by French invaders—licks at manicured shores and wetlands bustling with invisible life. On a windless day the river flows deep and flat, slate grey, silent. It wasn’t always so docile.

At his office at the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, Environmental Science Officer Henry Lickers takes me back a few millennia. “Some of our earliest stories about this area talk about a time when the river roared. Now, as a scientist I know that the last ice age occurred about fifteen thousand years ago, when a glacier came down and covered this area. Five thousand years or so later, a fault in the land shifted and split that tongue of ice. The ice had functioned like a dam, holding back an inland sea that covered the whole area of the present Great Lakes. When the dam gave way, this enormous volume of water flowed out to create the river. That’s when the river roared. As a biologist, I look at stories like this not as myths, but as sometimes really accurate accounts of how things were.”

In my initial approach to Henry Lickers, I mentioned that I’d like to explore with him the deepening fault lines between nature, science, and power. What did he think, could we talk?

Henry replied, “This question is most intriguing and has occupied much of my thoughts for many years. I’d say nature, science, and power can co-exist if they are viewed through a lens of peace. But used as engines of greed or commerce, they are unbridled and destructive. Yes, I think we should talk.” He opened his reply with She:kon (How goes the way with you?) and closed with Sken:nen (May you go in peace). These, he tells me later, are elemental courtesies. Refreshing, I’d say, in this age of txt.

The power of stories

Of the Seneca Nation, Turtle Clan, and father of three children, Henry is a scientist who understands the power of stories, whether it’s other people’s held over your head, or your own, found and lived. He learned his stories young. Henry came into the world on May 1, 1947. “A red letter day,” he says, his long grey hair gathered and loosely tied behind his head. “In the Celtic calendar that’s Beltane, when the dark of winter gives way to the light of spring.”

He was born at home, on the kitchen table, in Six Nations of the Grand River, the only territory in North America where all six Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) nations live together. Henry got off to a rocky start. “I was very premature,” he says. “They rushed me to hospital in Brantford, and from coming out so early, I’ve always had a tricky heart.” On his bulletin board I notice a yellow Post-it, emphatically reminding: “Take your pills!!”

“Back then,” he continues, “they used to put you on pure oxygen, which damages the eyes. So mine haven’t worked too well. Growing up I was always the sick kid—scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, and so on—and until eight or nine, I was the only one of thirteen kids [in the family] who couldn’t go outside. At the time that was horrible, the worst thing. Everyone else was out playing and my mother out working, but I had to stay home all day listening to my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my grandfather too when he came home at night. Now I realize this is when I took in all the legends, the stories of our people, in several languages—Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, a little Tuscarora. My grandparents and uncles would speak one of these when they talked about us kids, thinking none of us would understand. But I learned pretty quick!” He chuckles with delight, or mischief.

“Now I think, where would I be without those stories in my head? I can tell them to other people: this is where a particular reference comes from—like when the river roared—and this is what it means. Often they’ll say, I never heard that before, I had no idea.”

At age twelve Henry moved with his mother to Toronto. “The city was a huge shock to me,” he says. “It seemed crazy. I grew up in a traditional family and believed the whole world was like that. So I did what I knew best. For a few years I ran a trap line from Dufferin Street to Yonge Street, in an alley that runs across the north side of Bloor. I caught the biggest raccoons you ever saw, skunks, squirrels, and I made really good money at it because nobody else was doing that.

“I also harvested geese in High Park. I would go down there on my bike with a bag of popcorn and a stick, and on any given night I could collect four, five geese. It was easy, and nobody seemed to care. If you went after geese on the reserve, you had to really prepare because they were wily as hell; they knew enough to avoid you. Not in High Park. I had been taught the ceremonies, so I’d always do those whenever I caught geese. Then I’d bring them home, pluck and prepare them, and my mother would cook them up into a really good stew that she loved to make and I loved to eat.” A chuckle follows, marking a fond memory.

Henry survived high school, but emerged with marks too low for the big old universities. However, a small new one called Trent had just opened in Peterborough, Ontario, and they asked him to come for an interview. On a dismal transcript, the biology and geography department heads had spotted two surprises: 98 per cent in biology, 97 per cent in geography. Henry remembers being nervous and tongue-tied until they asked him what books he’d been reading. Sparked, he launched into a passionate, detailed account of one he had just finished, Treatise on Limnology, by George Evelyn Hutchinson.

“After a while one of them tried to interrupt me, but I said, No, no, you’ve gotta hear this. The ecology of lakes, carbon cycling—this stuff is so vital to life! Then they said, Okay, okay, you’re in. The next four years was just as exciting for me, all that learning—I needed thirty courses and took thirty-eight!” He also married at Trent.

To pursue graduate studies, Henry won a Queen Victoria scholarship, originally intended for Native students but apparently a well-kept secret; no one had applied since the late 1800s. “The university had to be somewhere in the empire, so my wife and I said, Let’s go someplace in the world where nobody we know has ever been. We picked New Zealand and went to the University of Waikato. It was quite exciting, for a biologist, to walk off the plane there and the only plant I recognized was a dandelion!”

Soon enough, the excitement wore off. “Whether you’re an undergrad or a graduate student, the approach to education there was very British—you learn what they tell you, and then you repeat it back to them. I was working on the ecology of the black swan population, and discovered that the wildlife service was this old boys’ club that managed New Zealand like an English estate. They would bring in any species they liked, and they succeeded in destroying 90 per cent of the swan’s natural habitat. I disagreed with that approach, got a kind of Ducks Unlimited started, and ended up fighting with half my professors.”

At the same time, he was working with Maori young warriors, Nga Tamatoa, on a battle over land. “Interesting how things come around in your life,” says Henry. “There was this Maori sacred site, taken by the Ministry of Defence during the war. It was supposed to be given back, but the government refused. Instead it was going to become a golf course—sound familiar?” It does: in 1990, Mohawks in Kanesatake (near Oka, Quebec) resisted municipal plans to turn a burial ground of theirs into a golf course. The government responded with a massive seventy-eight-day police/army siege, to remind the Mohawks of their place. Still unresolved, the confrontation left deep rifts and scars.

“[In New Zealand] there were huge demonstrations that I took part in and helped organize. I was also a riding manager for the Labour Party, and we actually managed to get our candidate elected. Doing these things strengthened my belief in myself, but as you can imagine, they don’t win you any friends in the conservative government that came in. They told me, either toe the line or they’d revoke my student visa. It was tough—Do I keep my head down and get my degree, or do I do what I think is right?—but once that line was drawn, it was relatively easy to decide.”

Land where the partridge drums

Back in Canada, Henry was offered a chance to study for a PhD, but by then he’d had enough of the academic mill. Instead he went to Ottawa to look for a job with the federal Department of Indian Affairs. “So what do they do? They see a kid with biology, geography, and computer science majors, and they offer me a job in housing. Housing? What am I supposed to do with that? I came out the door, and ran into one of the Trent professors who interviewed me. He had just come from a meeting at Environment Canada, and he said, A First Nation community—St. Regis near Cornwall—needs a biologist. Why don’t you go work for them? I came down here, talked to the chief for about an hour, and he said, You’re hired; can you start this Thursday? We’ve got a meeting and I’d like you to be there.” Henry was there.

And here he is today, in what was the St. Regis Mohawk reserve, named after a Jesuit priest, but now called Akwesasne, a nation of about thirteen thousand people. Reclaimed by Mohawks, the ancient name means “land where the ruffed grouse (or partridge) drums”—a drumming sound made with the wings is part of the bird’s mating show. But even the naming, like everything else here, is complicated by the fact that Akwesasne straddles not only the St. Lawrence River but also two imposing national entities, two provinces, and a state, all of them only a short bridge away.

Henry explains the jurisdictional maze like this: “On the northern portion of our community, which Canada claims, is the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne; on the southern portion, which the American government claims, is the St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Council. Over both of those is the Mohawk Nation Council of Chiefs, the traditional sovereign government of Akwesasne. We put it this way: the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne extends to its people the programs and projects that the Canadian government provides by law to Aboriginal people in Canada. On the St. Regis side, the same is true vis-à-vis the U.S. government.

“At the people level, a Mohawk who lives in Canada is also registered in the U.S., and vice versa, so, for example, we can access health care in both. We fought two really big, long fights in court. First to get recognition that we are all Mohawks, one nation we call Kanien’kehá:ka; then to get recognition that as a sovereign nation, we have a right to land claimed by both Canada and the U.S., and to services promised by both. Just because governments change doesn’t mean treaties cease to exist. The problem is you’re never quite sure what they’re going to say or do next.”

The traditional form of Mohawk government that Henry mentions emerged organically from ancient laws and cultural practices. In many First Nations or American Indian territories it co-exists, or contends, with the band/ tribal council government, a structure imposed by colonial pressure. The two forms are radically different in both processes and outcomes. Since one is favoured and the other often opposed by the colonial regimes, clashes are not uncommon between adherents of the two forms of government. In Akwesasne, people have worked hard for the past three decades to build a more collaborative relationship between the elected Mohawk Council of Akwesasne and the traditional Mohawk Nation Council of Chiefs.

Henry identifies as traditional. As our conversation evolves, it becomes clear what this means. In 1976, when he launched the Akwesasne Department of the Environment, he “wouldn’t have told the band council [he] was traditional because there was more conflict then.” He explains, “I would have been on the outside, where I couldn’t have done my job. But now almost all of us in the department are traditional people, and the council pretty much says, You guys know how to take care of the environment, so we’ll leave you to it.”

The river was abundant

I ask Henry what ecological changes he’s seen in his four decades here. The big changes came earlier, he replies, with the Seaway. “We have people here who remember how things were before the Seaway came. Atlantic salmon used to run the whole river, right up into Lake Ontario. If you look at middens [ancient domestic dump sites] of our people from thousands of years ago, it’s not unusual to find salmon, sturgeon, eel, and white bass bones, lots of them, which means those were probably the major food fish here. All of them are gone now. And we grew corn, beans, and squash—the staples, what we call the Three Sisters—in abundance, so much that by 1930s, during the Depression, we sent the excess to Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto for the soup kitchens.

“Here on the island we think [that by 1950] there were seventy-three barns, close to two thousand head of dairy cattle that supplied two cheese factories here, and thousands of gallons of milk and cream to nine dairies in Cornwall. You can still find the records. So here you see a people very dependent on an abundant environment. Some worked away—usually in high-steel construction—but they had a good life here, good food, taught their kids, had the structures they needed to maintain themselves. And most important, they had the river, the abundant river. Then the Seaway hit.”

Having grown up in Montreal, I remember the orchestrated thrill when the Seaway opened in 1959, Queen Elizabeth and President Eisenhower waving grandly from the royal yacht. The St. Lawrence Seaway, the media trumpeted—an engineering marvel. The great river was bullied into a 3,700-kilometre marine highway for commerce from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Ontario, and then on to Lake Superior, through a series of locks that lifted ships 183.5 metres from sea level to the final lake.

What were its repercussions for Akwesasne? “Huge,” Henry replies. “By inserting the locks and power dams [one of them a little upstream from Cornwall Island], they changed the water environment radically from open river to a series of interconnecting lakes. Of course the fish changed accordingly, from species like the Atlantic salmon that used to run the whole river to lake fish—pike, bass, perch, pickerel. But even those had a hard time due to all the contaminants.

“Industry saw the Seaway as a highway to and from the ocean, to bring things in and take things out; also a cheap source of power from the dams. Late fifties through the seventies it was boom time on the river—pulp and paper plants, rayon, nylon, chemicals, and on the U.S. side, aluminum smelting and industries that used it. All those industries figured the easiest solution to pollution was dilution, so the river became a huge sewer, right down to the Gulf and out to the Atlantic.”

This was the alarming reality faced in 1976 by the new Akwesasne Department of the Environment. “There were just two of us then,” says Henry. “We ran around looking at everything we could, trying to figure out what was going on and what we could do about it. The first big issue to hit here was fluoride from the aluminum plants [Reynolds and Alcoa, both upstream and upwind from Akwesasne], which we discovered was killing cattle on the island. We researched that for a number of years, and in 1980 Irving Selikoff from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City did probably the largest health study ever done on Native people in Canada.

“They came here, but unfortunately seven thousand people is considered too small a sample for a proper epidemiological study—remember, it took millions of people studied to show that cigarettes cause lung cancer. They said they could find no significant medical dysfunction among the people at Akwesasne, but concluded that there would likely be problems in the future. Thirty years later, we’re starting to see some of those problems, but nobody has the heart or the will to go after the industries.”

Following our afternoon together, Henry will go over to the town of Massena on the New York side for a meeting on cleanup plans for the Grasse River, which feeds into the St. Lawrence. High levels of toxic PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) persist in the river bottom, residues from an abandoned generating station and the Alcoa plant. In an early attempt at cleanup, the company tried to cap the river bottom so that the chemicals could be contained. The plan failed. Next they tried sucking up the sludge for burial on Alcoa’s property. “That seems to be about all they can come up with, to bury everything. But some of our people are saying, No, you can’t do that, it won’t work. It will just leach into the soil, and eventually the PCBs will end up—well, guess where.”

Sovereignty = survival

Each of these environmental assaults represents the costs of manifest destiny, a colonial conceit that presumes a God-given mission to civilize others by conquest. It’s a mission that meshes smoothly with capitalism. Historically, Canada and the United States have both been in frequent conflict with the Haudenosaunee, the People of the Longhouse, including the Mohawk nation. “For these communities,” says Henry, “the long struggle for our rights has sharpened how we understand ourselves in relation to the world around us. It has forced us to develop a strong sense of sovereignty, and to fight for it when we have to.”

Sovereignty. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “a country’s independent authority and the right to govern itself.” Then it adds, more broadly, “freedom from external control.”

The insatiable ambitions of manifest destiny often require Indigenous land. To the high priests of manifest destiny there is no such thing as Indigenous land, and history suggests that anyone who gets in the colonizers’ way is first a problem, then a threat, then a target. At Akwesasne and across continents, in any place invaded and occupied by imperial power, the struggle for sovereignty—freedom from external control—is driven by the elemental instinct to survive.

The same story is told the length and breadth of Turtle Island, as the land now called North America is named in Haudenosaunee creation stories: in the southwestern United States, Navajos fight uranium mining and nuclear waste dumping on their land; in northern Canada, Lubicon and Cree fight the devastation of land, water, and air by tar sands mining; in eastern Canada, Elsipogtog and Mi’kmaq fight toxic hydraulic fracturing of the earth to extract gas; in southern Chile, Mapuche fight the corporate plundering of Indigenous forests for export . . .

A short history of the long struggle at Akwesasne illustrates how the story goes:

1794: The Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, Between His Britannic Majesty and The United States of America (the Jay Treaty) is signed. Article III acknowledges the age-old right of Indians to freely cross the newly created border by land or by water, and to do so with no duties imposed on their trade.

1925: In dismissing charges against a Mohawk high-steel worker accused of illegal immigration from Canada to the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Mohawks are an imperium in imperio, a nation within a nation, and are thus not restricted by Canada–U.S. border rules.

1929: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the Jay Treaty was terminated by the War of 1812. Since then other courts have made other rulings on the matter, back and forth, to and fro . . .

1950s: St. Lawrence Seaway construction takes Akwesasne Mohawk land, especially on the U.S. side, and creates havoc in the fisheries. Construction of the south and north channel bridges in 1958 and 1962 takes more Mohawk land. In 1958, when Lake St. Lawrence is created to feed the new hydroelectric dam, it floods several thousand acres of Mohawk land.

1956: The Canadian Supreme Court rules that Mohawk Louis Francis has to pay duties on U.S. goods he’d brought into Akwesasne (the Canadian side), arguing that the Jay Treaty has no force in Canada because it has never been ratified by the Canadian government.

1968, autumn: The Canadian government imposes duties on all goods valued over five dollars, including food, brought into Akwesasne from the U.S. side.

1968, December: To protest this imposition of federal duties, which directly contravenes the Jay Treaty, Akwesasne Mohawks blockade the Seaway International Bridge. Forty-seven protesters are arrested. The duties are not cancelled.

1983: In Ottawa, the Special Parliamentary Committee on Indian Self-Government recommends that Parliament take immediate steps to implement Article III of the Jay Treaty. By 2013 it had still not done so.

1988: Along with several other First Nation chiefs and about four hundred Akwesasne Mohawks, Grand Chief Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell walks across the Seaway International Bridge from the United States into Canada. They bring with them goods for community use and as gifts for the Tyendinaga Mohawk community, west of Akwesasne. Grand Chief Mitchell is arrested, charged with violations of the Customs Act, and tried in the Federal Court of Canada.

1997: Finally the Federal Court rules that the Mohawk people do indeed have an Aboriginal right to pass freely across what is now the Canada–U.S. border, and the right to bring goods from the United States into Canada for personal and community use, or non-commercial-scale trade with other First Nations, without having to pay customs duties. Since the court sets limits on the rights, and fails to acknowledge the Jay Treaty, this is considered a partial but nevertheless crucial victory.

2009, May: The Canadian government announces that from June 1, border services officers would be permitted to carry handguns at all crossings. Akwesasne Mohawks immediately protest that the policy violates their sovereignty. The Cornwall border post is located on Mohawk land, at a major crossroads in a residential area with a bus stop, recreation fields, a play area, and several small businesses. On May 30, after Mohawks surround the post in protest, all officers withdraw, claiming safety concerns. The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) closes the border until July 13, when a temporary post is opened at the north end of the bridge.

2009, September: On the 18th, the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne accuses the CBSA of seizing vehicles from Mohawk residents who refused to report to the new border post, and requiring a thousand-dollar fine to recover each vehicle. The next day, in response to a protest by Mohawks against the vehicle seizures and fines, Cornwall police shut down access to the Seaway International Bridge for five hours.

Henry Lickers reduces this last clash to its elements: “Customs comes to the Mohawks and says, We’re going to arm our officers. The Mohawks say, Fine, but not on our island. Canada says, But they’re all going to be armed, it’s our new policy. The Mohawks say, Fine, but not here. Canada: Well then, where can we go? Mohawks: Over there.” Henry points north, toward Cornwall. “The next thing you know, they’re over there, armed, but not on the island. It really wasn’t that difficult to figure out.” He chuckles, shaking his head.

“It sounds funny when you describe it, but this is how the conflict goes on. Their right is to arm their officers. Our responsibility is to protect the community. We know those officers, and we wouldn’t trust them with firearms for anything. If they’re all armed, and one of them accidentally shoots himself or someone else, guess who’ll get blamed? The Mohawk guy sitting in front of him. So—go ahead, have your guns, but not here.”

When I visit Henry, construction is well advanced on a new bridge from Cornwall to Kawehno:ke. “Right,” says Henry. “That’s the next big thing. So now they’re wondering, where are we going to put our customs post?” Henry points north. “Over there. Come back on the island if you want, but not armed. That’s what sovereignty means.”

In 2013, despite protests from the Ontario government, the Canadian government confirmed its plan to move the border post entirely out of Canada into the United States. In addition to removing an object of Mohawk protest, the move will also further another goal of the Harper Conservative regime in Ottawa, to merge Canada’s border security into the American “perimeter.” They appear to value Canadian sovereignty somewhat less than the Mohawks do theirs.

Nuisance permits

I ask Henry to name the most pressing biological/ecological issues that Akwesasne faces at the moment. “Contaminants in the river, still a big problem. Since 1970 the levels have fallen through actions at the international, regional, and local area, but the background levels are still too high for us to consume the fish as we did in the past—that includes PCBs, mercury, mirex [a chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticide that bioaccumulates], about 135 chemicals that we know of, and new ones being added all the time. Environmentally we co-ordinate our work with organizations like Save the River, who know we have an active way of looking at the environment so they want to work with us. In the Eastern Ontario Model Forest [EOMF] we work with Parks Canada and two Ontario ministries, Natural Resources and Environment. To build these partnerships, we use what we call the Great Way of Peace to identify projects everybody’s interested in and can work on.”

For example? “Sustainable forestry,” he replies. “It’s a big ecological problem in eastern Canada. It’s to our advantage to work on that, but how do I get the neighbours to say I can harvest medicines or berries in their forest? If I march up to the farm door and say, I’m going to harvest your wild berries, maybe somebody’s going to try and shoot me. So we helped build the Eastern Ontario Model Forest, in which we now talk about things like the way we harvest berries and how it would be advantageous for communities or farmers to let us go harvest them. We also work with farm communities on harvesting some of what they call ‘hyper-abundant animals,’ like wild turkeys that eat their crops.”

Where I live, in a rural county not far from Akwesasne, some local hunters resent the concept of Aboriginal harvesting rights, calling them unfair. Conveniently they ignore the fact that we stole a continent that sustained Indigenous people for millennia. “But we won,” one of them complains, “and they lost.” In such a context, how would the hyper-abundant turkey arrangement work between Mohawks and farmers?

“First the farmer has to go to the Ministry of Natural Resources [MNR] to get a nuisance permit,” says Henry, “which they’ll give out real easily. Then the farmer has to find someone to shoot the turkey. If a non-Native shoots a turkey, MNR rules say they can’t remove it; they have to leave it there until it rots back into the ground. But if a Native person shoots a turkey, they can take it away for eating. So we let people know we’re willing to hunt like that, if they get a nuisance permit. Then if an MNR conservation officer approaches us in the field, the farmer shows the nuisance permit and we show our band card and tell them we’re exercising Native harvest rights. When I was harvesting geese in High Park, I think that’s what I was doing. The only difference is, High Park didn’t have a nuisance permit.” Henry chuckles.

I’m starting to see him as a trickster. In many Indigenous cultures, including Mohawk, the trickster is a valued deity, spirit, human, or animal who pokes fun at normal rules and conventional behaviour.

Over there

For people who live on a river, shore erosion is another pressing ecological concern. Henry explains the particular dilemma at Akwesasne: “In this community some people want to go the Western way and harden the shorelines. Put in steel pylons so you get a nice straight shore, then you plant a grass lawn right down to the shore—that’s what they see on the other side. What they don’t realize is that over there, people are now saying, We’ve got to naturalize the shorelines, keep them intact, keep the wetlands. We’re trying to convince our people that hardening the shorelines is not a good idea, not over there and not here. We say, How many minnows are you catching? None. Well, when you harden the shoreline, that’s what happens, there’s no place for minnows. Well then, I’ll just go out and buy some. Unfortunately that type of buy-sell culture can drive people away from our own way of doing things.”

His phrase “over there” is rich with layers of meaning: first, the other sides of the river, north and south; then the two power-hungry entities looming over there; and perhaps most insidious, a contagious state of mind that fatally equates happiness with consumption and success with aggression. Another kind of erosion, and harder to counter.

A few years ago Henry redefined his job. After thirty-five years as director of the Environment Department, he had grown weary of bureaucracy and paperwork, always compounded by a dense web of overlapping jurisdictions. Four years ago he told the council, That’s it, I don’t want to do this anymore, I quit. The council told him he couldn’t quit. Henry replied that of course he could, he would just sign a letter and walk away. Council asked what he wanted. No administration, said Henry, and no personnel issues. Done, said council, you don’t have those anymore. So what do you want to be? Henry replied, How about environmental science officer? Council said, Okay, what do they do? Henry thought a moment, then asked, Anything I want? Council said, No, it can’t be that broad. Next thing you’ll be meddling in administration and personnel. What do you want to do? Henry came back with, Research, work with kids, Elders, people in the community, and other compatible organizations, that kind of thing. “They wrote it all down,” says Henry, “and then they said, You are now the environmental science officer. Be happy in your work.” He is. “I’m overjoyed.”

Ecological mentor and ambassador—would that describe it? “Sounds okay to me,” he replies with a smile.

Sovereignty for sale

If we who fancy ourselves owners of this land by right of conquest were less arrogant and myopic, we could more easily see that the original peoples’ fights, for both environment and sovereignty, should be our fights. Like it or not, we all live upstream and downwind from someone else. We have only one planet and, ultimately, no place to hide.

In Canada and almost every other state on the planet, governing regimes are hard at work selling or giving away what is not theirs to give, the sovereignty and well-being of their people. They do it behind our backs via trade agreements, like the one recently signed by the Canadian prime minister with the European Union, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), negotiated in secret by governments in service to their corporate backers. While the Harper regime’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development paints a glowing picture of the TPP, the real deal in all its brutal detail was leaked by Wikileaks in November 2013.

As part of the same vast yard sale, the current regime in Canada dutifully shredded an array of hard-won environmental and water protection laws, to demolish any perceived obstacle to profit. The most notorious legislation, the omnibus budget implementation Bill C-45 of 2012, eliminated environmental protection for over two and a half million rivers, lakes, and streams.

To First Nations this was a new chapter in an old story, a brutal assault on the life-support system that was yet another attack on treaty rights and sovereignty. Not surprisingly, the first responders were Indigenous, mostly women, who coalesced rapidly into a vibrant new movement, Idle No More, which sparked creative protests across the country. At Akwesasne, Mohawks organized a bridge blockade in solidarity.

Henry’s approach tends to be quieter, as befits an ecological ambassador. “What we say is we mustn’t take the same path the Canadian government has taken. Whatever they say or do, we’re going to take care of the fish, and if they want to fight us over it, we’re ready to fight. The same goes for environmental assessments. We decided a long time ago that we’d be better off doing our own. There will be discussions, I’m sure, because it will come down to their way of doing things versus ours.”

Rights/responsibilities

The gap between the two ways of doing things is immense, almost unfathomably deep. Henry explains why: “The framework for our environmental assessment process comes from the Haudenosaunee opening address, or thanksgiving address. It goes through all the things of creation, which gives you a framework for not missing things that you ignore at your peril. If you and I are talking about something, let’s say a wetland, we might say, Oh, we haven’t talked about the lizards yet. They’re important in the world, so what do you think about them? That’s why Haudenosaunee people discuss things for a long time, to make sure we touch on all the essentials.

“When you’re putting up a building, you don’t shine the lights up but down, so birds don’t get confused and fly into it. When you’re crossing a marsh, you change from white light to blue, so toads won’t jump onto the road to stare at the light—they don’t see blue. These are things we know, science has helped us figure them out, so we can incorporate them into our environmental assessment.

“Then we ask, What do the four spiritual beings have to say about this? What about the teachers? These are wise people from the past that bring us our knowledge and understanding. Then we go one more step and say, What’s the creator going to tell us? In a Canadian environmental assessment, there’s no place for spiritual questions like these. But in ours there is.”

Could he give me an example of how it works in practice? “Yes,” he replies, “a good one: There was a Native guy with his own land here who wanted to establish a fibreglass plant on the reserve. Technically speaking he did everything right for the environmental assessment. But when we got down to those important spiritual questions—Is there a place for this in our community? What do the teachers tell us?—we found we couldn’t really answer them, so we had to go to the people. They listened, they talked about it, then they said, The environmental assessment was very good until it got down to those big questions, but you know, we just don’t want this in our community; we’re not comfortable with what might come of it. The guy said, Okay, if people don’t want this here, I won’t do it here. I’ll move it somewhere else. He did; he moved it to Cornwall, and for them, the environmental assessment was just fine.”

I can see how unfathomable the gap must feel in negotiations with government officials. “For sure,” says Henry. “It can be really hard for a politician or an engineer even to understand these terms. But then here’s a further complication. Our society is responsibility-based, so that means I’m responsible for taking care of the environment. The outside society is rights-based—this is my land, so I have a right to build this plant here. Then you need a law court to tell you what your rights are. I don’t need anyone to tell me what my responsibilities are; I know that, I’ve been taught. In a responsibility-based society, learning this becomes the most important thing.

“In Western society, we see what my grandfather used to call the rule of kings, where you need to have all these rights codified, because 4 per cent of the population keep trying to do things that will be damaging to the rest. So then you have to negotiate a law with the king to protect the maximum amount of people from those damages. Then you need lawyers to defend for and against this law, and you need a judge to say whether you’ve interpreted it correctly. In a responsibility-based society, you don’t need all that.

“So we’re always in this fight with Canada or the U.S.—over here we’re talking about our responsibility to protect the environment, and over there you’re saying it’s your right to do what you want. That’s not a good way to function, especially in relation to the environment. You should be aiming really high to protect your environment. Oh no, you say, that would cost too much, it can’t be done at present, et cetera—is it any wonder the world is going the way it is?”

A practical way of doing things

Still trying to fathom the nature of the unfathomable gap, at this point I pursue an intriguing comment Henry made earlier, about the Great Way of Peace. This is the Haudenosaunee constitution, conceived as early as the thirteenth or fourteenth century by Deganawidah, the Great Peacemaker, during a time of intense strife among the several nations living in what became, much later, the northern United States and central Canada. It was conveyed in a series of wampum belts that are now held by the Onondaga, the Fire-Keepers, one of six nations in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Wampum belts are intricate arrangements of shell-derived beads that serve as pledges, records, and memory aids in oral tradition. In English translation, the Great Way of Peace contains 117 articles, laying out roles, responsibilities, and decision-making processes for each nation, matriarchal clan, and leader.

I ask Henry to explain its essence to me, to someone who is open to learning, but who does, after all, come from “over there.” He laughs, then sets out to translate: “In essence it can be spoken to you in three words, and if I say them to any kid here, they’ll understand what I mean. Then they’ll spend the next sixty-five years of their life trying to unpeel the onion—it gets more and more complex as we go through life. I learned it when I was very young, in four different languages. Then I went outside our community, and people said they’d never heard of the Great Way of Peace. So then I started to wonder, how do I translate it? It took me from about twenty to forty-five to figure out how a community could work this way.

“I call it the zeal to deal. You’re not generating the actual deal but a way of working together toward a deal. To do that well you need the three words of power—keep in mind we’re translating into English, where things come out a little different—the three things you need are respect, equity, and empowerment. Each of these has its own tools. For respect it’s understanding, communication, and honour—these are things you need in order to show respect for each other. Equity—in the Western world that means money right off the bat, but in the Great Way of Peace it’s knowledge, who has it and how can you share it. It has to be transparent, no backroom deals, and it has to be balanced. The last of the three words, empowerment, in our language it’s Sken:nen, which means in peace. To us peace is a verb, an active word, so you can translate it as ‘to do peace, to wage peace.’

“Now if you’ve gone through the first two steps, respect and equity, then you have to follow through, to do what you say you’re going to do. Many times I see that people have respect for each other, and they generate the equity, but then they do nothing about it—they’re too busy talking. A Haudenosaunee person would say, Let’s do something, have dinner. Once you do something together, that builds more respect, then you’re willing to put up more equity, and then you’re more willing to empower yourself and the other. This flow then maintains the cycle of peace.”

Earlier Henry said the Great Way of Peace helped build effective partnerships among some rather improbable partners in the Eastern Ontario Model Forest organization. How?

“When I was young,” says Henry, “I didn’t think white people could do it, but working in the EOMF has really turned that around for me. We’ve used the Great Way of Peace for the last twenty years of our operation, not only for how to do things together, but also to analyze our failures. If we fail at something, we ask, Did we communicate enough? Did we listen enough? Did we really understand what the other was talking about? With this kind of introspection, you can fundamentally change the way you do things. It’s a really good tool, a practical way of doing things. Like I said, it starts with three words that you can teach any kid, but then you spend the next sixty-five years trying to unpeel the onion, analyzing it to see what’s there. As a scientist I like doing that. So did my grandfather; he was more of a philosopher. He and I could argue forever about the head of a pin.” Another trickster chuckle, and I can imagine them going at it as days came and went, weeks, whole seasons.

Henry is a scientist, and he lives in a responsibility-based society. From this unusual dual perspective, how would he define the responsibilities of a scientist?

“The responsibilities of a scientist,” he repeats, weighing the words. For a moment he considers a painting of a wood duck over his desk, bought for him surreptitiously by colleagues after they observed how drawn to it he was. “First, as a scientist you need to acknowledge that you can’t know everything. So, what would I like to know, to look at? I like ducks, so I’m going to learn about them. I like water systems; I’m going to learn about that. It can be many things, to the capacity that your mind can hold, but then you need to push a little further, a little further.