Conference on Lake St. Clair: Its Current State and Future Prospects Port Huron, Michigan
30 November - 1 December 1999

Boozhoo, I bring you greetings from Chief Joseph Gilbert and the Walpole Island First Nation.

I am glad to have this opportunity to contribute to a conference on Lake St. Clair. Especially, since the ‘current state and future prospects’ for that lake affect the twenty-two hundred of us who live in the Walpole Island First Nation more directly than is probably the case for virtually all of the participants in this conference. For many of you it may be a place of recreation and pleasure; for others a main focus of your research or professional careers. For a few of you, I can believe that it has become your life’s work. As I will try to show in the next few minutes, however, Lake St. Clair is not merely my First Nation’s home; it is the focus of our economic, social and spiritual life.

I should warn you of two things at the outset. First, despite what was suggested in the title proposed for my talk by the conference organizers, I cannot talk about the issues and concerns that may face other aboriginal groups; I can only speak from a Walpole Island perspective. Other First Nation’s have their own stories. Secondly, it may be that Walpole Island’s view of these issues and concerns is rather more bleak than those of the majority of other contributors.

As is well-known and has been mentioned previously several times this morning Lake St. Clair is the only Great Lakes connecting channel, all the way from the mouth of Lake Superior to the St. Lawrence River, that was not made an Area of Concern under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. Of course, this could be regarded as rather ‘faint praise’ but let’s be glad about it nevertheless.

If we ask, however, why has the lake tended to be less polluted than the St. Clair River, which provides 98% of its inflow, then a good part of the answer, especially over the decades, has been the delta on which our First Nation lives. The transporting power of a river varies as something like the fourth power of its velocity: where a fast-moving river encounters relatively still water, most of the sediment that it is carrying is deposited and a delta is created. If those sediments are contaminated by chemicals or other pollutants, the pollutants remain. The delta area is hence a filter, and while we at Walpole Island are glad that the filtering protects Lake St. Clair, we are also very much aware that we live on the filter. Nowadays, it is true, the volume of pollutants coming down the St. Clair River has been substantially reduced, and most of the delta formation that is taking place at present is on the western (U.S.) side of the river. But, as I shall show later, this is of little comfort to my First Nation.

It is also well known that ‘The St. Clair system contains one of the largest coastal wetlands in the Great Lakes.¹ A very large proportion of that wetland is contained in the unceded territory of the Walpole Island First Nation. Why is this so? One superficial answer is simply that deltas tend to be wetlands by their very nature. But that is very superficial, because our wetlands are in many respects the surviving vestiges of what used to be huge areas of wetlands. There are about 13,000 hectares of wetland remaining in the St.Clair system, but on the Ontario side alone, ‘... over 400,000 hectares of wetlands in three contiguous counties have been converted [to agriculture] since the late 1800s.’²

If you are inclined to say that attitudes have changed, and that such conversion of wetlands is now discouraged, allow us on Walpole to be rather skeptical, on the strength of the following:

In Ontario, wetlands are currently being lost to agriculture. The wetlands from the Thames River north to Chenal Ecarte dwindled from 3,574 ha in 1965 to 2,510 ha in 1984. . . Draining for agriculture accounted for 89% of the wetland loss, whereas marina and cottage development consumed the remaining 11%.³

In such a context, Walpole Island First Nation finds it both ironic and thoughtless - one might even say, insulting - that suggestions have been made that our wetlands should be designated for protection under the Ramsar Convention. They would undoubtedly qualify as ‘wetlands of international importance’ but consider the situation from our point of view. The Ramsar Convention is essentially an agreement among nations, including Canada and the USA, that they have not done a good job of protecting wetlands in the past. They therefore agree to try to do a better job in the future. Very good, but not, I suggest, relevant to Walpole Island First Nation. We have done a good job in the past, and we have every intention of continuing in the future, for all sorts of reasons. As just one example, this is duck hunting season, and we draw hunters from a wide area. We have long-standing agreements with several clubs, who have built lodges on our wetlands because they have confidence that we will continue to maintain our wetlands. More specifically, one agreement that we have is with the St. Clair Flats Shooting Club which began in 1876, over a century ago. I submit, a resource management and conservation tool that has survived the test of time and serves us well today. With this sort of track record, why should anyone suppose that our wetlands need the ‘protection’ of an international convention?

The Walpole Island wetlands are also recognized as a valuable, and perhaps a vital nursery for the fish that make Lake St. Clair so important as a recreation site.

Of the more than 70 species recorded as native [to Lake St. Clair] or migrants, 34 use the lake for spawning. . . Most of the 28 native species spawn in shallow water along the delta . . . or other shoreline areas or in tributaries to the lake.⁴

The more that other wetland areas around the lake are converted to agriculture — or to sites for cottages for people who wish to fish the lake — the greater the dependence on the Walpole Island marshes as spawning sites. We value the fish of Lake St. Clair at least as much as others who live around the lake or come to fish there for recreation. We also fish for sport; we fish for food; and we derive a significant source of our First Nation income, as with duck hunting, from licensing, guiding and other services to visitors based on the fish resource.

So far, so good. But consider what happened nearly 30 years ago, when the threat of mercury pollution caused a ban on commercial fishing in Lake St. Clair in 1970. We in the First Nation were no part of the pollution that caused the ban, but there were many in our community whose livelihood in the commercial fishery was drastically affected by the ban.⁵ Given the danger, those fishermen, and the Walpole Island community could accept the need for the ban, and the consequent disruption of their lives.

What was not easy to accept was that this ban was then used by the Government of Ontario as a policy instrument to remove commercial fishing permanently from the lake. When the ban was lifted in 1980, only one Walpole Island community member was able to obtain a commercial fishing license. Pressure from sport fishery interests led to a situation such that, by 1986, according to Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources:

…no-one will be allowed to establish a livelihood through commercial fishing on Lake St. Clair again. . .⁶

As we on Walpole Island see it, of course, ‘sport fishing’ is just as ‘commercial’ as ‘commercial fishing.’ Indeed, it is because it involves more money, more potential revenue, and more voters than ‘commercial fishing’ that the latter is being deliberately forced out, regardless of the impact on the people affected. And, as an environmental audit of Walpole Island First Nation noted a few years ago:

If one is to judge from the Chatham District Fisheries Management Plan, 1987-2000, published by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources in 1990, the Government of Ontario would prefer to ignore native fishing completely. One of the maps that it contains does show a ‘native fishing area’ in the vicinity of Walpole Island, but the Management Plan does not otherwise mention native concerns, even in the context of a discussion of real and perceived conflicts between different fishing interests.⁷

I said earlier that the reduction in the volume and character of pollutants coming down the St. Clair River has been of little comfort to us on Walpole Island. There are several reasons for this, but as this is a conference about Lake St. Clair, I want to focus on what happened ten years ago in regard to dredging.

As many of you will know, our First Nation agreed to surrender part of our Territory to enable a straight Seaway channel to be cut through the delta. We also provided a location for Canada to create a confined disposal facility for dredged materials, similar to the facility at Dickinson Island used by similar navigational dredging by the United States. Ten years ago, however, the Canadian Government and its dredging contractor were anxious to save money. They therefore did a limited analysis of the sediments in the area to be dredged, concluded that the sediments were not contaminated, and therefore announced that the material would not be placed in the confined disposal facility, but would instead be dumped in the open waters of Lake St. Clair.

We took the Government of Canada to court over that one. We initially failed in our bid to get an injunction to prevent the dredging and dumping, but we did, after the fact, get a commitment that nothing like it would happen again. This was helped by the fact that more detailed sampling of the sediments showed the presence of such persistent toxic chemicals as hexachlorobenzene (HCB) and octachlorostyrene (OCS), neither of which had been looked for in the first set of analyses.

There are several conclusions that we draw from that experience, and that I hope you will endorse. The first is that, as environmental conditions improve, the tendency is to assume that fewer precautions need to be taken, and saving a buck looks more attractive than saving the environment. A second, and less obvious, conclusion is that big organizations, like national, provincial or state governments, are all too often examples of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. What made the dredging situation more glaring was the fact that, less than 12 months earlier, a major study of the St. Clair River and Lake St. Clair had been completed and published, under the imprint of eight government agencies: U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Environment Ontario, NOAA, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, Michigan Department of Natural Resources, US EPA, and Environment Canada.

That is how we, on Walpole Island, knew that the sediments were likely to be contaminated by HCB and OCS, and other pollutants. Was it too much to expect that Public Works Canada and the Canadian Coast Guard should have looked at the same book before making their proposals for open-lake dumping? And why did Environment Canada go along with their proposals?

The final conclusion, I regret, is that we at Walpole Island First Nation simply cannot trust other jurisdictions to have the same care for our environment, including Lake St. Clair, that we have maintained for generations. It is not pleasant to live in such an atmosphere of distrust, and we remain ready and eager to cooperate with others whenever there seems to be a real opportunity to improve the situation. But we have had too many negative experiences for us to be ready, any time soon, to substitute trust for our own vigilance and our conviction that we are better protectors of the environment than those who would like to do so on our behalf.

REFERENCES

1. Upper Great Lakes Connecting Channels Study, 1988, vol. 2, p. 337.
2. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 24.
3. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 358.
4. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 356.
5. Dean M. Jacobs, Environmental Impacts on Fishing Economies: A Community-Based Approach, Walpole Island Indian Reserve, Ontario, Canada, 1985, p. 26.
6. Susan J. Marchand, Environmental Impacts on the Lake St. Clair Fishery: A Case-Study of Mercury Pollution and its Effects on Walpole Island Indian Reserve, 1986, pp. 83-84.
7. C. Ian Jackson, Environmental Audit of the Walpole Island First Nation, 1993, p. 39.