The following presentation was made August
23, 2002, at the annual Council of Georgist Organizations
conference held in London, Ontario, Canada. In Canada the
name First Nations generally replaces the term Indian
for the native tribes who lived for many centuries on the
land of southern Canada and northern America before the
Europeans arrived.
FIRST NATIONS RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Mike Williams, Assistant Director, is in charge of
the natural resources and environment division of the
Walpole First Nations Heritage Center, which is like a
research center. His father is Ojibwa and mother is
Potawatomi, and one of the unique things about Walpole
Island First Nation is that it is not one nation, but a
council representing the three tribes of Ojibwa,
Potawatomi, and Ottawa.
Williams' presentation covered resource management,
cross border movements, and pollution issues. Those are
important issues for First Nations as they take care of a
lot of the gifts that the Creator has provided.
Historically, many years ago there weren't
international borders separating the United States and
Canada. There were political affiliations made with the
wars and the Ojibwa people ended up being an integral part
in the way things settled out. Chief Tecumseh is probably
the most famous historical figure in this era from the
First Nations side. He was killed in the War of 1812, and
a monument was built at his burial place by the war
veterans from six different nations. Quoting Tecumseh,
1768-1813, "The Great Spirit above has appointed this place
for us on which to light our fires and here we will
remain."
Treaties were signed many years ago even though
nobody really owned the land. First Nations occupied this
territory, they used this territory, and the basis of a lot
of the treaties signed were to share the resources with the
newcomers. There was a major misinterpretation over the
treaties with the British crown who probably felt at that
time that they were taking ownership. The First Nations,
however, didn't look at it as giving up ownership of land
they had occupied for many, many years. This year is the
207th anniverary of the treaty which is more specific to
Walpole Island. The 1796 treaty stipulates we are to be
perfectly free and unmolested in trade and hunting grounds
and to pass and repass freely to trade with whomever we
please, Williams said. That treaty was made with the
British Crown and the people of Walpole Island (two
sovereign nations) and it was very specific, and that is
one of things that we keep trying to push front and center.
Walpole Island is located on the international
border. You can take the ferry across the St. Clair River
to Algonac, Michigan. Customs will ask for citizenship.
We tell them we are First Nations citizens, where we came
from, and they will usually let us go. Coming back to
Canada, we get a rougher time. Customs usually search your
car, and ask you to pay for goods and sometimes confiscate
your goods. When we go across in power boats, 200 of us
come across at the same time in boats, and they don't want
to deal with that, so they let us through. We have to keep
pushing, Williams commented. Other First Nations along the
border (Chippewa of Sarnia) do that as well.
Following is a quote from "Walpole Island, the
Soul of Indian Territory." It is now on CD rom and on
First Nations' web site. The quote is from Major John
Richardson of the British Army back in 1849 as he was
passing through Walpole Island. These are the words that
he wrote down in his diary. "As I contemplated the scene
and contrasted the native dignity and simplicity of these
interesting people with the hypocracy of civilized life, I
could not but record the fast approaching extinction of the
lords of this soil, gentlemen of nature, whose very memory
will soon have passed away with little or no authentic
record behind them of what they once were." First Nations
are still a vital community and still a vital people.
As far as cross border movements go, First
Nations are still doing that and are still exercising those
treaty rights. It is very difficult getting governments to
recognize treaties. Treaties were very explicit as to what
the First Nations were giving up, and interpretation by the
courts is that First Nations still have an interest in
shared resources. Williams
observed that instead of giving up, we still claim to have
hunting and fishing rights and gathering rights to those
places that were subject to treaties.
Williams gave a slides presentation of southwest
Ontario between Lake Huron and Lake Erie; Walpole Island
First Nation is the southernmost First Nations territory in
Canada. Six nations shared the territory, including the
Chippewa of the Thames, Oneida of the Thames, and Munsee
Delaware. The Potawatomi were affected by the Indian
Removal Act in the States in the 1800s. The Potawatomi,
the Ojibwa and Ottawa had a loose confederacy called the
Three Fires Confederacy, because all occupied the same
territory in the same area and shared the resources and
also shared the responsibility of protecting that area.
Walpole Island is actually six islands in the
channel at the St. Clair River right along the
international border between Canada and the United States:
St. Ann's, Walpole being the big main island, Potawatomi
island, Squirrel island, Bassett island, and Seaway island
which is a man-made island and part of the St. Lawrence
seaway shipping channel. Years ago the big ships used to
call on this area which was a little curvy and dangerous as
ships got bigger, so First Nations surrendered this area
back in 1956, and when they dredged the channel they dumped
all that stuff on to that land and created Seaway Island.
All the treaties and surrenders for Walpole Island
go to the water's edge. This is a big difference with the
treaties made with the United States governments. All
those treaties with the United States government stipulate
to the international border. So we've got this gray area
that is not covered by treaty. That is part of our
aboriginal title of litigation. They weren't covered by
treaties; they are still ours, Williams stressed. That is
what unceded territory means. These islands were never
covered by treaties nor surrendered and it is pure
unadulturated Indian territory.
Shown in slides were some of the infrastructure
that First Nations have on Walpole Island: the band office
(like a city hall), fire department, senior citizens
apartment complex, children's center, day nursery, day
school and study center, pre-kindergarten up to grade 8
(when students are shipped off to Wallaceburg, about a 15
minute bus ride), sports complex, and skating complex
which also can be rented out.
Walpole Island's farming operation started in
1971-72 with about 200 acres and now is about 4,500 acres,
the largest cash crop operation in Ontario. It is a band
owned operation, and First Nation citizens make up board of
directors. Henry Ford donated some tractors. The Walpole
Island Anglican church is 100+ years old, and there is also
the United Church here, as well as the traditional sweat
lodge.
A heat sensor photograph of the area around Lake
Erie showed in blue all the things that trap heat,
sidewalks and main roads. Walpole Island shows up as a
dark spot in the middle with the cities of Detroit,
Windsor, London, Wallaceburg, Sarnia, and Port Huron
showing up in blue. Walpole has paved roads and brick
buildings, but those are few and far between. It is not to
say that we are not a progressive or developing community,
Williams noted. Visitors from more northern First Nations
come down to Walpole and we are one of the most progressive
and most developed of the First Nations communities in
Ontario if not in all of Canada.
On the southern end of Walpole Island are about
17,000 acres of marshes, probably the biggest on the Great
Lakes. It has got some of the best hunting grounds. You
see a lot of ponds and wetlands, pathways and cuts to
ponds. That is not a Duck Hunting Unlimited project but
what First Nations people do. A straight line separates
the marsh and the farm land. It wouldn't take much to move
the dike further south and drain that area, but that
probably won't happen, as the people still depend a lot on
the hunting and fishing that goes on in the marsh. There
are some roads that cut through the marsh but sometimes
after a rain it gets kind of rough out there with a lot of
mud.
Regarding natural resources, Williams guessed at
one point those rentals could be duck hunting permit sales.
We have three main allied ministries back at home, duck
hunting, fishing, and muskrat hunting. To hunt ducks on
Walpole Island you have to have a Walpole Island duck
hunting permit. You have to be accompanied by a Walpole
Island band member as a guide. And we also lease out
several thousand acres of our marshland to hunting clubs,
about six of them operating there, and again they hire our
band members for guides, managers, cooks, and other jobs.
About ten years ago we tallied up and probably about 75
people work in the duck hunting business. There are
probably an additional 125 in the community that offer duck
guide services during those three months of duck hunting
season. In the leases we can stipulate the number of ducks
taken, the number hunting at one time, and we can make sure
they provide sanctuary areas for their leased area. Those
are good management tools so we make sure that they take
care of that marsh that we are leasing to them.
Muskrat hunting is not as big as it used to be,
Williams said. Stats that show that one year our people
sold about 80,000 pelts at about $6 per pelt. That is
about $480,000 coming into the community. The fur
activists got involved and the price dropped to $1.50 per
pelt, and our people didn't go out hunting any more simply
because they couldn't make any money after putting gas in
their boat motor, upkeep of their vehicles, spears and
traps, etc. It wasn't paying off.
To fish on Walpole Island, you need a Walpole
Island fishing permit, and there
are Walpole Island band members that will guide you, though
you don't have to be accompanied by a band member to go out
and fish. So they may take you out two or three times and
then you know where the good spots are so you don't need
them anymore. Fishing is still important, though Walpole
Island may be losing out a bit on income for guides.
There are a lot of natural areas left on Walpole
Island, and in those natural areas are a lot of wildlife.
Some of that wildlife is considered threatened. The Risk
Act in Canada says that we have got 45 plants and animals
that are endangered species in Canada. Walpole Island has
.002 of Canada's land mass but 14% of their endangered
species. Williams noted that we are taking pretty good
care of the land.
Walpole Island is part of something called the
Carolinian life zone. Roughly from Toronto west to Lake
Huron and south of that is considered Carolinian life zone,
and it is called that because a lot of those plants grow
down south -- this is their northern extremity, and that is
one of the reasons Walpole Island has these plants and
animals. This area is lush and very green and doesn't look
like southern Ontario, but that is where it is.
Slides were shown of animals and plants on the
endangered species list in Canada which are doing well on
Walpole Island: the American Bittern, the Eastern Spiney
Softshell Turtle, and the Eastern Fox Snake.
Walpole Island also has rare plant communities.
Tall grass prairie sites are called the "bush" and look
like some areas of the states. The Tall Grass Prairie is
one of the rare plant communities in Ontario, and not only
Ontario but in Canada, and in North America. People come
in from Chicago and the plains states and provinces to look
at Walpole Island's prairies because they have restoration
projects going on and they want to have a good idea of what
their end product is supposed to look like. Some of the
plants in the Tall Grass Prairie can grow 6 to 8 feet tall.
There are five or six plants that only grow on
Walpole Island and no where else in Canada. The oval
ladies tresses, small white lady's slipper, yellow lady's
slipper, prairie white fringed orchid, and pig milkwort are
on the endangered species list. The prairie white gentian,
or cream gentian, is on the endangered species list, and
Walpole is the only place that it grows.
One of the things that Williams does at the
Heritage Center is pull together traditional knowledge and
western science knowledge, so he knows what is very rare
and on the endangered species list. They did an assessment
back in about 1990 in Canada and found 19 plants and went
back there about 3 years ago and found about 45 plants.
They are taking care of themselves and Walpole Island is
doing our best to take care of them as well.
Though not on the endangered species list, Walpole
Island is the only place that the Ohio buckeye tree grows
naturally in Canada, though a lot of them grow down in the
States.
Up the St. Clair river, which is relatively
straight, is the city of Sarnia. The nickname for the
Sarnia area is chemical valley. There are 28 petro-
chemical facilities up there. A lot of them were built in
the late 1930s and early 1940s to help with the war effort.
Back then the environment wasn't much of a concern, so they
made the St. Clair river their big personal toilet. All
the outlets went straight to the St. Clair river and
straight down toward Walpole Island. Dow was responsible
for mercury being put into the system in the late 1960s and
they shut down the fishery for the decade of the 1970s. It
was opened up again in 1980 because the province was
involved, selling provincial fishing licenses. The sports
fishery was only shut down for a few months. Seven or
eight First Nations families had been licensed to do
commercial fishing, and now there is only one left. That
is because those families didn't know whether a commercial
fishery would be opened up again, so they sold off their
licenses, and that is a social impact because those
families then had to find another way to make a living.
Now only one family still goes out and fishes.
Dow was reponsible for the blob that made headlines
in the mid 1980s, a perchlorethylene spill that is now
being cleaned up in the St. Clair river after 15 years.
That brought a lot of exposure as to the impacts of
pollution to the St. Clair river and it really gave Dow a
black eye. That was bad publicity for them, so they
started cleaning up their act. Now Dow has a river
separation project that they recently completed, and it is
totally separate from the river. We are watching,
Williams stated, to make sure that the other companies
follow suit as well.
What happens when there is a serious spill and we
have to shut off our Walpole Island water intake? Our
water treatment plant gets its water intake directly from
the St. Clair river. Historically there were a lot of
those spills since the chemical companies started up in the
1940s. It wasn't until 1985 that we started getting
reports about what was being spilled in the river. So
there is about a 45 year gap of not really knowing what was
going into the river. From about 1985 to about 1990 they
were averaging maybe 120 spills into the river a year,
which is one every three days. Now and with the river
separation project there is a lot of pressure being put on
those companies. Now it is 12 to 15 spills a year, which
is a lot better. It has been a long time since Walpole
Island had to shut down our water treatment plant. But
that possibility is still out there.
Whenever there was a serious spill, what used to
happen was these big water trucks would come out to the
island and park at the fire hall
or at the school or the band office, and people would have
to get their pails and go get some good drinking water
there. Now we have a stone reservoir in back of the water
treatment plant. So instead of them parking one truck in
the parking lot, we make them continually bring in trucks
of water to pump into the reservoir, Williams commented.
In the 1980s the company that was responsible for the spill
would be paying for the water. Instead ofjust paying for
one truck, we now make them pay for 100 trucks. Nobody has
told us no yet and I don't expect they will and hopefully
we will never have to run into that situation.
Because of the chemicals, bacteria and viruses in
the water, a lot of people bring their fish, pickeral and
walleye, in for analysis. The health center will put up a
warning, "these waters are considered unsafe to go swimming
due to recent pollution" signs. Many adults who didn't
have that information on what was spilled into the river
when they were growing up are now worried about what was
taken into their bodies through eating habits and swimming.
Big boats go by in the St. Lawrence seaway shipping
channel, with the propeller action churning up sediment and
contamination from chemical valley. The St. Clair River is
a naturally shallow body of water. The US Army Coast Guard
and Corps. of Engineers, depending on which side you are
talking about, have to go in there and do a dredging
project probably once every two to three years. There is
one going on right now. Walpole Island is totally
involved with those dredging operations because back in
about 1992 the federal government decided the sediments
were clean enough so they could just go ahead and open up
the lake. We told the federal government, "hey it is not
clean enough," and we had a bunch of reports from a
department of the federal government of Canada that said it
wasn't clean enough. One branch of the federal government
was saying this and we had different evidence from another
branch of the federal government. It ended up in the
courts. Walpole Island ended up with an agreement with the
Coast Guard and Public Works Canada and now is involved
with a lot of the sampling that goes on prior to those
dredging projects.
When the big boats go by, they suck the water out
and after they go by they push it back in, creating a lot
of shoreline erosion. A lady was about to lose her house
to erosion, so Walpole Island First Nations had to find the
dollars to put up a breakwater to protect it.
There are some exotics that we and everybody else
in the Great Lakes now are subjected to, like the sea
lamphrey. We try to keep the gobies at a level we are
comfortable with. Purple loosestrife likes wetlands and we
have a lot of wetlands, Williams said. We are concerned
about it. We hired a crew probably six or seven years ago
and they went around and manually pulled as many of the
plants as they could. A couple of years later we did the
same thing. This year we again have a crew out there doing
that. It takes a lot of work.
It is also important to tell our story. Groups
come to the Heritage Center, and we also try to make sure
that we send our message out and bring in our kids from our
own grade schools. They are the ones living out there with
these rare plants, so we want to educate them as much as
possible as to the very special place that they are living
in. Hopefully they will grow up knowing that. The
Heritage Center over the past 10 years hired probably over
200 people, mostly for short term programs, summer
programs, some student programs, and other programs that
are available to us. We just expose them to a lot of work
that we are doing, and they can't help but get involved.
The Global Rivers Environmental Education Network
Program, or Green Project as it is called at the University
of Michigan, is one of the projects we ran. Since then it
has moved down East and we are not associated with it
anymore. It was a good program because it enabled our kids
to conduct nine different water quality tests and report
back at a gathering of the community as to how healthy or
unhealthy the water was.
If you look at Walpole Island in a bigger map of
the Great Lakes, it is kind of at the cross roads and there
was a lot of trade going on historically. We are a delta
and we don't have rocks. We found arrowhead points in the
sand at Walpole Island, so a lot of this stuff was brought
from Ohio and the Kettle Point area or out East and in
northern Michigan. The oldest artifact that we found goes
back to about 6000 years ago. Walpole Island was used as a
summer hunting area or winter hunting area because of an
abundance of fish and wildlife, but not permanently settled
for quite a number of years.
First Nations has people who still make big black
ash baskets and smaller sweet grass baskets. Sweet grass,
tobacco, sage, and cedar are sacred and part of our
customs. Walpole Island is working with Environment Canada
on one of their programs to try and protect those areas
where those rare plants are growing. But they are only
interested in the rare plants and are not interested in
these plants such as sweet grass that are very important to
us culturally. We tell them maybe some of those rare
flowers are there because the sweet grass is there. We
have millions of monarch butterflies, which were recently
on the endangered species list in Canada.
Usually First Nation has a pow wow the third
weekend in July, with a lot of singing, dancing, food for
sale and neat things going on. Usually 6,000 - 8,000
people come to Walpole Island that weekend.
-------------------
Editor's note: Walpole Island Heritage Center
Assistant Director Michael Williams, Wallaceburg, Ontario,
Canada, may be emailed at mwill@ciaccess.com