'Everybody is a fighter in Grassy'

Grassy Narrows First Nation – William “Bill” Fobister remembers when things changed, seemingly overnight.

The 79-year-old had grown up fishing across the sprawling English-Wabigoon River system.

And the deep blue waters that lap the shores of his Ojibwe community - Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek, better known as Grassy Narrows - had fed his people since time immemorial.

“[My dad] was a commercial fisherman, and I helped him. That’s how we survived,” Bill recalls, sitting at a yellow picnic table in his backyard on a rainy August morning.

Then, he says, in 1970, “everything shut down.”

That’s when authorities confirmed that a pulp and paper mill in Dryden, upstream from Grassy Narrows, had dumped more than 9,000kg (20,000lb) of mercury into the river in northwestern Ontario, Canada, starting in the early 1960s.

Bill, then in his 20s, remembers the first signs that something was wrong.

“We noticed the fish were floating in the bays, and then we reported it,” says the soft-spoken Indigenous community elder. “They tested the fish. Sure enough, they found mercury in the fish.”

His family and neighbours soon began to fall sick. The commercial fishing that so many in Grassy Narrows relied on was shut down. And a way of life that goes back thousands of years was unmistakably shaken.

It was one of the worst environmental and health disasters in Canadian history.

“They devastated [the community] without having any concern about what they’re doing to us,” says Bill, who wears a purple hoodie and blue baseball cap emblazoned with a multicoloured fish.

Bill has been diagnosed with mercury poisoning. His late father and some of his uncles also had it, he says. Now, so too do his wife and several of his children and grandchildren.

They are among the 90 percent of people in Grassy Narrows believed to be suffering from mercury poisoning today.

“Almost everyone in the community has something: diabetes, cancers and heart attacks, kidney failure and the liver [problems],” he says, running through the long list of symptoms.

“It’s still ongoing today, and a lot of kids have been damaged.”

That continued harm has pushed multiple generations of people in Grassy Narrows to raise their voices to demand justice and accountability as the river system remains polluted - and, according to a recent study, is getting worse.

Their decades-long battle is now culminating in a landmark lawsuit that could have far-reaching impacts for the environmental rights of Indigenous communities across Canada, with the outcome potentially setting a precedent for how First Nations can defend their territories from industrial threats.

Bill and his neighbours want compensation for past and continued damage to their health and way of life - and for the mill that poisoned them to be shut down, once and for all.

"I don’t think they totally, fully understand what’s happening to them," he says of affected community members.

"But they notice that they’re sick, they feel different. Even looking at their kids, some of them are almost deformed. That’s the scary part. So a lot of them don’t want to have any more kids because of the fact that they have mercury - they don’t want to pass it on."

Sprawling lakes peek out from either side of the main road to Grassy Narrows as it winds its way northeast from the Trans-Canada Highway near Kenora, Ontario.

Green conifers and aspens line the way for about 90km (55 miles) before a towering drum flanked by two huge wooden feathers welcomes residents and visitors to Grassy Narrows First Nation.

The Indigenous community has 1,624 band members, about 1,000 of whom live on the reserve today.

A sparsely populated region roughly the size of France that stretches across two time zones, northwestern Ontario is home to dozens of remote Indigenous communities, some of which can be reached only by plane.

One-storey homes and trailers lie along the dirt road that leads to the centre of Grassy Narrows, which this week in August is preparing to host the community’s 40th annual powwow.

Several white wooden grandstands are erected around the powwow circle, a sacred space where, days later, dancers of all ages will perform in traditional Indigenous dress at the gathering to celebrate their culture.

“I think it’s a beautiful community. I grew up here, so I’m used to being semi-isolated from cities and towns,” Jaydon Fobister, 28, says from the shore of Garden Lake near the powwow grounds.

“You’re surrounded by family and people you know, and you’re surrounded by lakes and forests. There’s a lot to do. There’s a lot of fishing, medicine picking or berry picking.”

Jaydon says fishing is a tradition passed down from his father, Travis, who knows the river “up and down”. “I was able to fish whenever I wanted to. I was taught the river system,” he says.

Born decades after the mercury was dumped into the English-Wabigoon River, Jaydon first remembers finding out about what happened when he was in elementary school.

But he says he didn’t worry about it too much, even when he began to show symptoms associated with mercury poisoning. Without a formal diagnosis, Jaydon can’t be sure - but he says his hands have been shaky since he was a child and he has poor vision.

"I always thought it was normal," Jaydon says. He realised only later that it wasn't. "I always grew up kind of nervous, so they say anxiety and all that, depression, could be a sign of [mercury poisoning].”

Mercury exposure can have myriad long-term effects on human health from motor and sensory skill loss to altered cognitive functioning and mental health issues. It has also been associated with premature mortality.

Donna Mergler, a professor emeritus in the department of biological sciences at the University of Quebec in Montreal, has carried out a series of studies with Grassy Narrows First Nation, exploring the health impacts of mercury contamination on the community. She acknowledges that more studies are needed to grasp the full effects on the body.

“The big picture is that mercury poisoning is all-encompassing. What we’ve published so far is almost the tip of the iceberg,” Mergler says, noting that the concern stems from both past and present exposure. “The mercury is found almost everywhere in the body and can affect many of the body’s systems.”

Mercury can change forms depending on the environment. In the rivers and lakes that lead into Grassy Narrows’s traditional territories, inorganic mercury discharged from the Dryden pulp and paper mill, where mercury was used to produce sodium hydroxide and chlorine for paper bleaching, led to the formation of methylmercury. This more toxic compound was then incorporated into the aquatic food chain - and the people relying on those fish - through the process of bioaccumulation, or the gradual build-up of contaminants in living organisms.

When mercury from contaminated fish is ingested and absorbed into the bloodstream, it is distributed to organs and tissues throughout the body, including the brain, heart, liver, kidneys and intestinal tract.

One of Mergler’s starkest findings: the prevalence of youth in Grassy Narrows who have attempted suicide is three times higher than in other First Nations in Canada.

“The tradition of eating fish went from one generation to the next, and the major determinant of the children’s risk for attempted suicide and their emotions and behaviour ... was prenatal exposure - from the fish that the mother ate when she was pregnant with that child," Mergler says.

According to Jaydon, people in Grassy Narrows have become more fearful of eating fish. A provincial advisory cautions against eating larger walleye, the main fish in the water there, because they contain more mercury than other species, such as whitefish.

Before he became a father last year, Jaydon says he talked to his partner about not eating too much fish during her pregnancy “because they say that the mercury passes on from the mother to the foetus”, he explains.

“She had no fish, so I’m hoping my daughter won’t be affected by mercury ... and she’ll be able to eat fish later when she’s able to.”

Despite the risks, he says fishing remains an integral part of his life, helping get him through tough times, including a struggle with addiction. “I’ve always eaten fish, and I still do to this day – and I enjoy fishing. I try to get out as often as I can,” he says.

On a windy afternoon, Mike Fobister expertly guides his motorboat across choppy waters in the direction of the wooden cabins that dot a rocky hillside on the other side of the lake.

His father, Joseph “JB” Fobister, 69, sits to his left. The pair chat quietly as the waves whizz by before Mike slowly brings the boat to a stop near the shore.

Many of the cabins have seen better days. Windows are broken or missing outright; roofs have caved in.

A dilapidated wooden boardwalk, overrun by tall grass and shrubs, leads up towards what was once the heart of this now-defunct tourist camp, known as Grassy Lodge.

For decades, the people of Grassy Narrows would come here to guide fishing tourists through the network of rivers.

Mike worked at Grassy Lodge as a river guide when he was a teenager in the 1990s, helping visitors reel in and clean their daily catch. Years earlier, his father did the same.

“As I get older, the memories have started to slowly fade,” 48-year-old Mike says from the shore, an old fish-cleaning shack standing in the distance behind him.

He remembers the camaraderie that he and the other fishing guides built in their time at the camp. Often, after the day’s work was finished, they would spend hours swimming in the lake.

“All the young guys would go across to the big cliffs over there … and jump off the top of that cliff,” Mike says, pointing to a crag jutting out across the water.

“It’s probably about 20ft [6 metres] up,” he says. “The older guys would tell us, ‘You guys are crazy,’ because they would see us on top of that cliff and see us jump off.”

Today, Mike and his father go out on the water whenever they can. So, too, does Mike's teenage son.

The river system is expansive, and the water stretches out as far as the eye can see. Rocky cliffs and tall conifer trees line the shores.

“I think a lot of Grassy people, that’s where they get their healing from, is being out on the water,” Mike says. “There’s something. There’s something there that calls us out.”

But the ruins of Grassy Lodge and the nearby Ball Lake Lodge serve as a bittersweet testament to what was stolen from the community when its waters were poisoned.

Ball Lake Lodge was the larger employer of the two, giving dozens of people from the community jobs as guides, cleaners and maintenance staff.

It shut down abruptly when the poisoning was discovered in 1970, while Grassy Lodge continued to operate throughout the mercury crisis until tourists stopped coming and it fell into disrepair.

“It’s sad it had to turn out like this. It probably could have kept going,” JB says, his voice echoing in the large, empty, dust-covered room that once served as a communal lounge for tourists.

“We weren’t allowed to come in here when the guests were here,” JB recalls.

In the next room, the former kitchen, the sun shines through a gaping hole in the roof. Wine bottles, coffee mugs and cleaning products litter the counters and floors. Industrial cooking appliances sit haphazardly against one wall.

“Me and my brother used to maintain the yard here,” Mike says once he and his father are back outside, staring out over an overgrown lawn. “We’d come and do the grass. That’s a lot of grass.”

“Didn’t bother me,” JB interjects with a laugh. “I was getting paid. I’ll do it. It didn’t seem like work. [When] you’re [animal] trapping, you’re working hard. Pushing a lawnmower is like a piece of cake.”

The federal and provincial governments have been aware of the effects of the mercury contamination for decades.

In the 1970s, the Ontario government ordered all companies in the province to stop discharging effluent containing mercury and banned all commercial fishing downstream of the Dryden mill.

The following decade, a federal-provincial government steering committee released a report that found that “in the absence of intervention, mercury levels in fish are expected to remain unacceptably high for many years.”

Separately, in the mid-1980s, Grassy Narrows reached an agreement with the Ontario and Canadian governments, and subsequent legislation provided for the establishment of a disability fund and a disability board to oversee compensation to residents with symptoms of mercury exposure.

After residents complained for years of low approval rates and payments of only a few hundred dollars per month, compensation levels have increased. But many feel the process remains onerous and want everyone to be compensated.

At the same time, the Dryden mill has continued to discharge sulphate into the English-Wabigoon River, a process that “significantly increases methylmercury formation”, according to a 2024 study by University of Western Ontario (UWO) scientist Brian Branfireun.

“Although both mercury and methylmercury levels are very high because of the historical release of mercury to the river in the 1960s, which still requires remediation, the problem is amplified by the current mill wastewater discharges,” Branfireun notes in the study, adding that if the discharges were stopped, there would be a rapid reduction of methylmercury in fish.

Breaking the chain of contamination is especially important in the context of what has become a deadly intergenerational problem, with Mergler citing the need for more research on the effects of mercury on the children growing up in Grassy Narrows today.

In 2020, she contributed to a study published in Lancet Planetary Health that revealed, for the first time, a significant link between long-term mercury exposure from freshwater fish consumption and premature mortality in Grassy Narrows.

Another study published this June in the journal Environmental Health found an association between childhood mercury exposure and early death. Both studies relied on biomonitoring data from the community collected from 1970 to 1997.

“Many were parents by the time they died. The mean age at death was about 38 years,” Mergler says. “They were parents. They had children, and their children are affected by the death of their parents. And this goes on. It doesn’t just go away.”

For many of those who were old enough to remember the early years of the mercury crisis, there is a clear break in their memories of daily life in Grassy Narrows before - and after - the river was poisoned.

“I feel like I caught the tail end of the good life in my community,” says Judy Da Silva, a lifelong Grassy Narrows resident who was born in 1962 and has spent decades fighting for mercury justice.

The sun has just gone down, and Da Silva, the community’s environmental health coordinator, is reminiscing about the time when people lived off what the land provided, such as wild rice and moose meat.

“All we ate was wild food,” Da Silva recalls, sitting next to a roaring fire, the flames reflected in her glasses as she speaks.

People spent most of their time on the land, and their houses were just a place to sleep, she says. The sense of community was strong, as were familial ties and traditions.

“Even funerals, when people died, it was just like everybody came together and they would all bring food. It was like a potluck and the people that were mourning would be taken care of,” she explains.

“It was just like a whole different world than it is today.”

Then, suddenly, her father - who had been “thriving” with fishing, Da Silva remembers fondly - and others in Grassy Narrows were no longer able to provide for their families when commercial fishing was shut down.

This stands in stark contrast to the early 1960s, when about 80 percent of the households in Grassy Narrows had at least one family member who worked as a fishing guide, and many were involved in the commercial fishery, according to research by Mergler and her colleagues.

But the effects have gone far beyond social or economic problems alone.

“It’s not just like in the Eurocentric system, where you say, ‘Oh you lost this much money.’ It goes deeper than that. It’s like losing who we are as Anishinaabek,” Da Silva explains.

The poisoning emerged after Grassy Narrows residents had been forced in the early 1960s to relocate across the water to where the reserve sits today because the government argued they would benefit from electricity and other services.

Many didn’t want to go but eventually relented as they saw their family members and neighbours make the move. This relocation and other colonial events of the time, including the forced removal of children to attend residential schools, had a lasting impact on the community.

The poisoning worsened that already difficult situation, completely upending lives. Many families had to rely on welfare, doled out by the government, and Da Silva says the upheaval led to a weakening of family structures. “The industry that poisoned our water brought that on us,” she says.

Robert Williamson, another veteran Grassy Narrows activist, says his early years in the community’s former location with his parents were “a very happy time”.

“I remember waking up every morning and stepping outside immediately,” the 69-year-old reflects. “That’s where my living room was, outdoors. And here, when we moved, … immediately our lifestyle changed. That’s how we became disconnected to our lifestyle, our way of life.”

Like Da Silva, Williamson describes the mercury poisoning as akin to being told “to stop being who you are”.

“For generations, our river was our lifeline. It fed our families. It shaped everything we did: our ceremonies, our spiritual wellbeing. It was part of the way it was. It was what sustained the Anishinaabe way of life,” he explains.

“How do you look into your family’s eyes, as a man, and tell them that the land that defines you becomes a weapon against you? That is what I saw in my parents when they heard the news that we can’t fish anymore, the fish are poisoned.”

That deep, intergenerational wound is something that Williamson and others in Grassy Narrows have been working to address.

Part of the process has involved showing younger generations that they have a right to physically occupy their traditional territory by hunting, fishing and generally being out on the land.

“That is something that we teach our young people now, to not be afraid – you don’t have to ask permission to go on the land and do what you need to do to exercise your rights as an Anishinaabe person,” Williamson says.

It’s a lesson learned by decades of struggle, he adds.

For years, the people of Grassy Narrows have confronted different threats - from the mercury poisoning to clear-cutting and mining.

“I figure [it’s been] about 60 years since the mercury was discovered, and I think the battle started about that time - 60 years ago,” Williamson says, referring to when leaders and residents first started holding protests and appealing to governments to clean up the river.

But in the early 2000s, the people of Grassy Narrows saw that logging was accelerating on their traditional territories and their appeals through regular channels weren’t working. So instead of writing letters and holding meetings with government representatives, the community decided to take direct action.

It was a stand that residents say ultimately gave a boost to their mercury battle, too.

Chrissy Isaacs, Williamson’s daughter, was in her early 20s when she began noticing that the boreal forest she had grown up hunting and picking berries in with her family was steadily disappearing.

So when she and her sister noticed a logging truck go by while they were out driving one night in November 2002, they decided to do something about it.

The siblings felled some trees along a major road to block the loggers’ path. And within days, on December 2, 2002, the community had erected a blockade to stop clear-cutting on their territory.

“I just remember being scared,” Isaacs recalls feeling at the time. “I didn’t want to disappoint my community, my family.” But she says she needed to protect her children and safeguard their access to the land and to their culture.

“I wanted their core memories to be picking berries, eating fish,” she explains. “For me, that was my push - for my kids, for them to have something.”

Dressed in winter coats, scarves and hats to guard against freezing temperatures, Grassy Narrows residents spent weeks at the blockade site to stop logging trucks from getting to the Whiskey Jack Forest to pick up wood.

Schoolchildren were bussed in to take part in the fight. Archival footage from Canada’s public broadcaster CBC shows a line of determined young people blocking a truck on a dirt road. “We believe in traditional land … not clearcutting,” read one sign held up by a land defender.

“There must have been about 50 to 75 kids stopping trucks. Trucks just stopped, and they didn’t want to move,” recalls JB, who took part in the direct action.

Residents set up a makeshift encampment, where they cooked over woodfires and held ceremonies. With locked arms, they stood or lay down in front of the trucks.

And when some of the loggers tried to reach the forest via alternative access routes, those were quickly blocked too. “They’d come at 3 o’clock in the morning to get our wood. So we started getting up at 3 o’clock in the morning to go and blockade,” JB explains.

The community’s sustained fight - the blockade still stands today - led to results: In 2008, the logging company gave up its clear-cutting in the area, citing the uncertainty, delays and added costs caused by the land defenders.

“At first, a lot of people were scared. That was a very confrontational [approach], but [the fear] didn’t last long,” says Williamson, who took part in the blockade himself.

“Physically stopping the cutting of trees ... seemed more real than sitting down at the table with people that are not listening,” he adds. “The more we saw the results of physically blocking and occupying the land, we saw that was the only way that anyone would listen.”

A documentary shot by local journalists from the early days of the blockade shows community members confronting a forestry industry contractor after he is told he won't be able to truck away the logs.

“The beef isn’t here,” the contractor says, telling the land defenders to go to company and industry offices with their grievances instead. "We've done that,” a community member responds. Eventually, the truck turns back down the road.

Isaacs says what she remembers most about that time was the sense of community that grew out of Grassy Narrows’s stand.

“We were all doing something," Isaacs says while sitting in front of a fire at a clearing in the forest where the blockade started more than 20 years ago.

"We were all busy chopping [firewood], keeping the fire cooking. For the first time, I was like, ‘This is how our people felt when they were working together in a village, in a community. This is what it felt like.’”

LISTEN: Judy Da Silva, Chrissy Isaacs and Indigenous elder Chickadee Richard sing by a campfire at the site where the community first resisted logging.

Today, a wooden cabin, wigwam and other structures sit at the blockade site, just off a dirt road. Community members use the area for ceremonies and other gatherings. The wooden gate that was used to block logging trucks still stands.

“Our people, our community, we’re really resilient,” says Isaacs, whose front-line activism continues.

She recently set up a tent outside Queen’s Park, the Ontario legislature in Toronto, to protest against a new law known as Bill 5, which allows the province to bypass environmental regulations and Indigenous rights to build major resource projects.

When she got home, community members told her they, too, were ready to protect the land and the water against Bill 5. “’If we go back out there, I’ll be there,’” she says people told her.

“I feel like as long as there’s people like me or [others] who keep speaking out, we wake more people up. I don’t feel afraid. I feel like I have hope.”

Lexx Paul is one such person.

Sitting in the bleachers at the Grassy Narrows powwow site, the 19-year-old bobs his head and quietly mouths the words after hitting play on a track on his cellphone.

“To this day, we still protest/Our people are strong together,” Paul’s voice rings out on a verse of Mercury in the Water, a rap song that he and other young people recorded last year to draw attention to how the mercury poisoning still affects their lives.

“I just jumped in to join the community with what’s going on in my rez [reserve] because mercury is a big thing for us, did a lot of damage to us, so we’re fighting for justice every day,” he says.

A year ago, for the first time, Paul joined the River Run, a major, recurring protest that takes place in Toronto in support of Grassy Narrows.

“The first experience was intense,” Paul says, adding that he wanted to be there to represent those who couldn’t travel the 1,900km (1,200 miles) to Canada’s largest city.

He likened the community’s activism to a ball rolling down a hill, gaining momentum as it goes. The goal, he says, is to remain united and to send a message to Canadian leaders, including Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

“He’s treating us like we don’t know what we’re doing,” Paul says. “But we know what we’re doing for our rights, for our land.”

This quest for justice, spurred on by the findings of the UWO study last year, is what drove the community in June 2024 to launch a landmark legal case against the Ontario and Canadian governments, arguing they have “egregiously violated” their obligations by failing to ensure that the people of Grassy Narrows can safely practise their right to fish. The governments are expected to file their statements of defence in the coming months.

In addition to direct compensation, the community wants the court to halt the mill’s ongoing pollution and other industrial threats.

According to lawyer Lisa Glowacki, co-counsel on Grassy Narrows’s legal team, the case could set a precedent for other Indigenous communities seeking to deal with past and present harms to their environment and rights.

“Despite the Nation’s tireless efforts to heal their people and protect their land and waters in the decades since mercury was first released, the government has still not actively remediated the river and indeed continues to allow industrial pollution to be discharged into the river that exacerbates the mercury poisoning of Grassy Narrows people,” Glowacki explains, adding that the community needs concrete action to enable it to rebuild and its members to live securely on their land.

Describing the lawsuit as “a measure of last resort”, she cited an endless series of meetings involving government representatives and Grassy Narrows leaders during which no long-term resolution has emerged.

“Right now, in addition to the very real impacts on their health and way of life, the community lives with constant anxiety about the state of the environment and their future,” Glowacki says.

“That is not acceptable and needs to change. ... We need to collectively address this intolerable history.”

As Grassy Narrows seeks compensation for the decades-long pollution, the community is trying to stop new threats.

It’s a cloudy August day as JB, wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, shuffles through the sheets of paper in front of him on a patio table in his yard.

The witty, longtime community advocate quickly finds what he’s been looking for: a map covered in what looks like blue veins, showing the outlines of the many waterways that crisscross Grassy Narrows’s territory.

“This is our protected area,” JB says, tracing his finger along a green line that cuts a huge rectangle around the reserve.

Within that zone, formally known as an Indigenous Sovereignty and Protected Area (ISPA), Grassy Narrows has banned industrial logging, mineral staking and mining, dams, and oil and gas extraction, among other activities.

The ban was put in place in 2018 when the community approved a land declaration reasserting sovereignty over its territory. “We will make our own decisions, determine our own future, and care for our Indigenous homeland,” the declaration reads.

The decision came amid a push by the government of Ontario to greenlight the search for critical minerals key to the green energy transition, which are abundant in the province.

Many of these mining claims - parcels of land where individuals or companies have asserted a right to extract minerals - have been in northwestern Ontario, including near Grassy Narrows.

When the land declaration was passed, there were thousands of mining claims on Grassy Narrows territory, says JB, director of the community’s Land Protection Team, a group of residents who monitor major industrial development projects in an effort to ensure the territory is safe from any threats.

The community has been able to fend off a large portion of them, thanks in large part to the declaration, JB says.

“It’s very effective because there’s a lot of uncertainty if Grassy is not comfortable with mining on our territory. That discourages miners from staking more claims,” he says. In other words, when companies see that the people of Grassy Narrows will oppose mining or other industrial activity on their lands, those companies will decide the fight isn’t worth it and abandon their projects.

None of the remaining mining claims is inside the ISPA, JB explains. But because the community’s watershed, an area of land that channels rainfall and run-off into a body of water, is so expansive, much of what happens even outside the community’s territory will have a potential effect on its residents.

“There are mining companies there,” he says, pointing to a handful of red squares on the map, just outside the green line marking the ISPA’s boundaries. “Everything flows from these mines into our community.”

Although Grassy Narrows recently secured a temporary moratorium on the clear-cutting of its forests, Glowacki, the lawyer, notes that "the threat of the logging industry persists."

She also points to the risk of further contamination of Grassy Narrows’s territory from ongoing mineral exploration, including a proposed gold mine that Branfireun, the UWO professor, has warned could lead to additional sulphate emissions into the river.

In addition, a proposal for a nuclear disposal site in the area shows "such blatant disregard for the past harms and current rights of Grassy Narrows that it is hard to fathom that the government could even consider approving it", Glowacki says.

Indigenous people in Canada have inherent rights on the territories they have inhabited for thousands of years.

This was recognised and affirmed in the Constitution Act of 1982, which states that the government, formally known as the Crown, must consult Indigenous people when their rights might be infringed upon.

Grassy Narrows’s rights are also outlined under Treaty 3, an agreement signed between the Ojibwe and the Crown in the 1870s to govern land in the area.

Treaty 3 further reaffirms that the government must consult Grassy Narrows on any projects that could impact the community’s territory and way of life.

For JB, this all means that Canada and Ontario have clear obligations when projects may harm the people of Grassy Narrows: “Consultation has to occur and there has to be consent.”

Grassy Narrows has made its position clear, too, JB says.

“Everybody now is a fighter in Grassy. Nobody wants logging or mining,” he says, adding that he is proud of the community for continuing to take a stand.

“The more we fight, the more we gain.”

Eric Head, a spokesperson for Indigenous Services Canada, a federal government body, acknowledges that the legacy of mercury contamination in Grassy Narrows “is a tragedy”.

He notes that all levels of government have spent decades studying and monitoring the impacts. This research along with community-based work has “informed government policies and initiatives to manage the impacts upon and, where possible, to compensate for damages to community members”, he says.

The settlement in the 1980s resulted in more than $16m in compensation to Grassy Narrows and a neighbouring First Nation, paid by the federal and provincial governments and the operators of the Dryden mill.

More recently, Head notes, the federal government committed more than $150m towards a specialised mercury care home in Grassy Narrows.

“Everyone deserves to live in a healthy and safe environment, including First Nations whose communities are located downwind, downstream and next to polluting industrial facilities,” he says. “These communities need the tools, resources and political support to protect water in a self-determined manner, so that their communities and loved ones are protected.”

Head directed questions about other industrial threats facing Grassy Narrows, such as the proposed nuclear site and mining claims, to Environment and Climate Change Canada, which declined to comment, citing the ongoing court case.

In Ontario, the Ministry of Indigenous Affairs directed inquiries to the provincial Ministry of the Environment, which acknowledged receiving a list of questions but did not send a response or reply to follow-up emails.

Dryden Fibre Canada, which acquired the Dryden mill two years ago, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

As the people of Grassy Narrows continue to wait for the river to be cleaned up, they are also awaiting the opening of what will be Canada’s first and only mercury care home.

“It’s a sanctuary for healing in our terms,” says Williamson, who is overseeing the project on behalf of Grassy Narrows.

Designed in the shape of a sturgeon, a fish that holds high importance in Anishinaabe culture, the facility will offer Anishinaabe medicine and ceremonies along with specialised care for patients suffering from mercury poisoning. After years of delays, construction began this year, and the home is expected to open in 2027.

“Right now, there’s really no place to go. A lot of our people end up in care homes outside of our community. Some people struggle at home, and some have gone - passed away - because this hasn’t happened fast enough,” Williamson says.

“I know some of them would still be alive today if there was a facility like this or more recognition from Canada and the province that the issue really exists and that the people were suffering.”

But while Williamson describes the care home as “a sanctuary for survivors”, he says “true justice means shutting down the Dryden mill”.

That’s a demand that has echoed far and wide across Grassy Narrows for years.

“No matter how much we cry and yell and scream and do rallies or protests and say, ‘You guys are killing us because industry is poisoning my people,’ it falls on deaf ears,” says Da Silva, the longtime activist.

“The mill being in operation is evidence in itself of how they have a total disregard of my people living downstream from the poisons that they’re still dumping into the water. We’re just expendable.”

JB says residents have protested to try to get the mill shut down, but the response they get back, time and time again, is that the facility provides jobs. “We pay with our lives for people’s work,” he says.

But the elders in Grassy Narrows say they haven’t lost hope that the next generations will carry on their fight.

“We’ve always got to think seven generations ahead, even though it’s scary,” Da Silva says, referring to an Indigenous principle of thinking about how actions will affect people over the next seven generations.

“So I’m hoping that’s how these kids will be, they’ll have that inside of them, that they think seven generations ahead and [about] what do they want for their babies. Do they want clean water? Do they want clean air? Do they want a forest that [they] can go get food from?

“I’m hoping that that vision will carry on.”

This story was produced in partnership with the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources.