In the early seventies, institutions like Cornell and the University of Montana started finding evidence of fluoride poisoning at Akwesasne. Reynolds cut down on its hourly fluoride emissions in 1980, yet the health problems persisted. Finally, in the mid-eighties, GM admitted in a report to the EPA that it had been dumping polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), trichloroethylene, formaldehyde, and other cancer-causing toxic wastes in and around Akwesasne since its opening. Reynolds and ALCOA made similar confessions, inciting a flurry of investigations, lawsuits, and fines. For one study, the New York State Department of Conservation captured a female snapping turtle whose fat contained 835 parts per million of PCBs. (The federal standard for edible fish: 2 parts per million.) Given the sacred role turtles play in their cosmology and clan system, Mohawks were distraught by this. When the government issued warnings against eating more than half a pound of fish a week, many refused it altogether, putting a hundred commercial fishermen out of work. As news leaked out about the contaminants, families abandoned their gardens, too. Canned meat and commodity cheese replaced sturgeon and greens as the staples of a Mohawk diet. In his book Life and Death in Mohawk Country, Bruce Johansen estimates half of all Akwesasne residents over forty were diabetic by 1990. A quarter century later, a diabetes prevention worker I interviewed put the tribe’s obesity rate at about 75 percent.3 The only place where I have seen unhealthier-looking people is my hometown, which Men’s Health renamed “Corpulent Christi” in its “America’s 10 Fattest (and Leanest) Cities” report in 2010.
Thompson Island is one of many tribal initiatives to combat these threats. Year-round, Mohawks travel here for vision quests, spending days and nights alone in the woods with neither food nor water to better hear the Creator. In the summer months, it becomes an environmental camp where indigenous youth study basketry, trapping, canoeing, woodworking, and plants. Elders travel to the island to harvest medicines. Tourists travel here on holiday. As the director of these endeavors, Bob worries about the long-term effects of lingering toxics. The old GM plant is so poisonous, it has made the Superfund National Priorities List,4 while Reynolds and ALCOA have both been declared state Superfund sites. Remediation is under way at all three facilities, but no one knows when it will be safe to fish or garden again, which is the equivalent of saying no one knows when Mohawks can live as traditional Mohawks again.
Bob raises his walking stick to the sky, where menacing clouds are fast approaching, and cracks a joke about our not making it home tonight. “Don’t worry, though, you won’t starve,” he says, turning away from the river and tramping back into the forest. “We’ve got lots of mushrooms and berries, eh?”
IT LOOMS ABOVE THE DINERS and donut shops of Route 37 like a lotus: Koi Express, Akwesasne’s only sushi café. I try to eat sushi every few weeks because my intestinal tract always feels like it’s had a hot shower afterward, but this particular café strikes me a bit suspect, given what I’ve learned about the surrounding waters. Nevertheless, I try it one evening with a colleague and a student. Though it is dinnertime, we are the only customers. A noodle bowl sounds tempting, but I can’t help asking the waitress about the origins of the fish. She looks up from her notepad. The back of a delivery truck, obviously. Not wanting to be obnoxious, I order the bowl. Its brown chunks of fish are tougher than mutton and bereft of flavor. I eat only noodles and bypass dessert (fried ice cream or fried dough).
Our next stop is the Akwesasne senior center, a spacious facility decorated with autumn foliage, gourds, dried corn, and a bingo flashboard. A suit-and-tie EPA administrator asks us to sign in and—if we’d like—take a number. Tonight the agency will be fielding public commentary on remediation plans for the Grasse River, the nearby tributary of the St. Lawrence River where ALCOA dumped PCB-laden wastewater for twenty years. Since ordering its cleanup in 1989 and supervising some waste removal in 1995, the EPA has been determining how best to complete the project. The ten possible courses of action range from doing nothing to investing $1.3 billion into dredging and capping the river. The majority of Mohawks want the river returned to its pristine state, no matter the cost, but many citizens of nearby Massena (who held a similar hearing yesterday) are willing to settle for far less. ALCOA employs more than a thousand people there and is currently considering expanding its operations. Massena wants to seem as accommodating as possible.5
Among the first arrivals, we take a table near the front and watch everyone else file in: retired steelworkers, clan mothers, elders, chiefs, and a handful of people under forty. Nearly everyone wears either a hoodie or a black leather jacket along with totems signifying their clan: wolf, bear, turtle, snipe. Some of the older women have shorn their hair ear-length while most of the younger women and nearly all of the men wear ponytails. They mingle among their friends, laughing and joking, before ambling over to the tables.
A slide projector beams an image of an indigenous couple silhouetted against a full moon inside a dream catcher. THE WORDS THAT COME BEFORE ALL ELSE, the caption reads. After a time, a subchief stands in front of the room and begins to recite something in Mohawk that quiets everyone immediately. He is a soft-spoken man, middle-aged and shy-seeming, yet his words are melodic and continue on for some time. Every so often, he scrunches his face, thrusts his hands into his pockets, and backtracks until he finds the rhythm again, whereupon he smiles as more words surge forth. After certain passages he becomes completely silent, during which moments the crowd verbalizes the affirmation “Tho.”
My colleague leans over to explain that this is the Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen, or the Haudenosaunee’s traditional Thanksgiving Address. No two people say it alike, but they follow a similar trajectory of individually acknowledging and thanking every life force in the universe: the people, Earth Mother, the fish, the plants, the herbs, the animals, the trees, the birds, the four winds, the thunders, the sun, Grandmother Moon, the stars, Enlightened Teachers, and finally the Creator. All six tribes of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy express this communal gratitude before every gathering of minds, from ceremonies to social functions to meetings. Some schools even open and conclude each day this way. The complete address can take up to three days to deliver. This version has been whittled down to five minutes. By the time the subchief returns to his seat, the energy of the room has shifted. People are focused now and ready to rouse. An EPA administrator starts calling out numbers, and one by one, a Mohawk stands to address the room.
“I might look like you, but I am not like you,” a middle-aged woman clad in black tells the table of EPA personnel. “I try to live my life as our original instructions gave us. We live off the land here. We eat fish and deer. But now, do I know where the deer has drank his water from? Where the fish has swam? What if I have a grandchild born with two heads or no legs? Would you like your grandchild born like that?”
Then an elder in a tracksuit: “I worked for GM twelve years. Every day I had a bloody nose and a migraine headache. I probably would have died from that place. I don’t know you guys; I don’t trust you guys. No matter what plan you choose, we are still looking at thirty years before we can start to eat fish again. Maybe my great-great-great-grandchildren can eat fish; maybe not. That’s all I got to say.”
Next, a woman wrapped in a fringed shawl: “People on the front lines, we knew something was wrong here long before the scientists told us. There were tumors in our fish; there was a change in the meat, in its color, in its texture. I saw the anger, I saw the hurt, when fishermen realized they might be poisoning their community. We were denied the ability to provide for our families. It goes deeper than eating the fish. It is our relationship to our land. The techniques, the respect, the language that goes along with these practices will soon be lost.”
Then a man adorned with multiple piercings and tattoos: “I have three sisters, and they had twenty miscarriages between them. You could take the teeth out of all of their mouths and still not have enough for a pair of dentures. Just about every single one of us has diabetes. So many of u
s have thyroid problems. That comes from our ‘advancement’ in civilization. Once we put up all the steel, guess what? They laid us off. You could count on one hand all the Indians working at that plant, and not one of them is alive today.”
I attended dozens of public hearings back when I was a newspaper reporter. Maybe one in seven speakers said something quotable. Here, practically everyone is an orator, speaking without notes but with narrative precision. Some weep as they do so. Others quake with rage. Two hours into the evening, six women try to allay the mounting tension in the room by pulling out drums and rattles and breaking into song. “My grandmother said the water was nice a long time ago,” one says. “When you were thirsty you could take the water right out of the river and drink it.”
Toward the end of the hearing, a woman in jeans and a hoodie walks to the front of the room. Her dark hair is cropped close to her head; reading glasses perch on the tip of her nose. Nothing about her seems extraordinary—until she opens her mouth. She doesn’t just say her lines, she fillets them, leaving them hemorrhaging on the floor. “I want to know who the ALCOA people are.” A table full of white men in business suits meekly raise their hands. She glares at each one, then asks the EPA representatives to raise their hands. “I have no faith in you’s whatsoever. EPA, you allowed them,”—she stares daggers at the ALCOA executives again—“to pollute and destroy our land, the minds of our children, the bodies of our women, the bodies of our men. You stood by the corporations more than you stood by the people. You did one study after another. You make it sound like you did a wonderful job, but you have dumps hidden behind all of our trees!”
She thunders on, ticking off sixty years of corporate and federal transgressions while the Mohawks whoop and the executives stare ahead with no expression whatsoever. Though I know the Mohawks’ preferred $1.3 billion remediation plan would never be selected, I can’t help but wish that the power of their discourse could make it so. I join in their cheering when the woman finishes, then settle back in my seat for the next speaker, a hulking man wearing bear clan insignias. “I am not here to make a comment,” he informs the executives. “I want to speak with your attorney.”
A thin man with a balding head walks to the front of the room, a cashmere sweater over his pink button-down shirt. The Mohawk stands half a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier. The attorney must tilt his head back to make eye contact as the Mohawk presents him with a wampum made of rawhide and beads. “This is from our nation to yours. You tell the people you represent this message that I give you.” He then reads from a typed edict outlining the ways in which natural law supersedes corporate law. “You have ten days to respond. If you don’t, we take it you agree with everything that is in there.”
The microphone is then seized by a man whose head has been shaved completely bald save for a thick raised mound running from his crown to his nape.6 He looks ripped beneath his black leather jacket. His face and fists are riddled with scars. Clenching the microphone, he walks toward the ALCOA table, leans in close, and sneers: “This is one of the faces you will see as one of your worst nightmares.” He then proceeds to stare at them without blinking.
And this, more than anything, seems to explain the Mohawks’ participation in these proceedings. They too know that the EPA will ultimately choose a tepid remediation plan7 that will require many more studies and several more decades and millions more dollars before there will even be a chance that they can fish and hunt and garden and otherwise live as their ancestors once did. Many likely see these proceedings as yet another federal dog-and-pony show and thus respond with a performance of their own. This is not to suggest cynicism or complicity on the part of the Mohawks but rather tenacity. Being here tonight gives them the rare opportunity to stare into the eyes of ALCOA executives and tell them exactly what they think of them, to brand their faces right into their consciousness. It might not make a speck of difference, no. But it’s the verbal equivalent of taking a bullet in the chest instead of in the back.
BEFORE LEAVING THE EPA HEARING, I ask the word-slayer, Dana Leigh Thompson, for her phone number. Her husband is Kanietakeron, the man who proffered the wampum to the attorney. They invite me over one cold December morning with instructions to turn off Route 37 at the 2,000-foot driveway. I assume I’ve misheard, but no: it really is that long and leads through the woods and a thicket of NO TRESPASSING signs to a sprawling estate on the river. German shepherds trot over as I park between a wooden gazebo and a three-car garage with a speedboat inside. In addition to running Onkwe Bingo Jack in the eighties, the Thompsons made a princely sum in the cigarette trade. This particular property is owned by their son, who breeds show horses.
No need to knock; the dogs announce my arrival. Dana Leigh and Kanietakeron greet me on their porch. She’s wearing pink fleece over jeans and reading glasses; his steel-and-silver hair hangs loosely around his shoulders. I open with small talk. Can you believe it’s December already? How are you spending the holidays?
“We don’t celebrate the holidays,” Dana Leigh says flatly.
Of course not. They are Longhouse, not Christian, meaning my question was as tactless as asking whether they cooked a turkey for Thanksgiving. While I stumble over an apology, Dana Leigh asks Kanietakeron to get us breakfast. He heads over to his Ford F-150. She then tells me to get in my car, as we’ll be meeting in her library this morning. I follow her through the woods to a second estate on the river, park by a two-story building, and marvel when its door opens to reveal row upon row of ceiling-to-floor bookshelves lined with thousands of volumes. Dana Leigh leads the way up a flight of stairs to an office featuring a ziggurat of lateral filing cabinets, computers, and photocopiers; a conference table that seats nine; and piles of paper stacked as high as my chest. I once worked at a nonprofit that staffed ten people with only half this much equipment.
“Are you … a lawyer?” I ask.
“Nah, I had to learn all this on my own,” she says, pouring water into a kettle and nodding at a nearby law book. “To try to understand how their system works, you have to read all of this shit. I call it investigative journalism for survival.”
Her files represent decades’ worth of research into topics ranging from tribal law and sovereignty to the health effects of PCBs. These findings have not only fueled the couple’s activism but also enabled them to defend themselves in their many quarrels with the law, including one that sent Kanietakeron to federal prison for eighteen months in 2000 for manufacturing cigarettes without a certain license. Dana Leigh also serves as pro bono counsel for a young Mohawk woman who launched a human rights tribunal against the Canada Border Services Agency for harassment.
We are settling down to tea when Kanietakeron arrives with a box of Dunkin’ Donuts and sausage-and-egg English muffins. “Now we will break bread,” he says with a pleasant formality. His face is creviced and pitted, but he has the prettiest eyes, so pale a green they are almost translucent. Although he is the one who has been featured in media around the world, Dana Leigh does most of their talking. He’ll start a story with an amicable air, but she’ll steal it to give exact stats and facts.
They met in 1979, when Dana Leigh traveled from her home in Kahnawake to Akwesasne to monitor the political situation at Raquette Point, where Kanietakeron’s family homestead is located. Weeks before, the St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Council had decided to build a fence around its territory and needed to clear trees to do so. Apparently without permission, it sent a work crew that started cutting a trail right across the Thompsons’ property. This so incensed Kanietakeron’s older brother, Loran, he confiscated the chainsaws, which in turn angered the council. It dispatched the tribal police to arrest him, but by the time they arrived, hundreds of Mohawks had barricaded the property with sandbags and were crouched inside a trench, rifles at the ready.8 The ensuing standoff lasted thirteen months and involved not only New York State Police and Governor Mario Cuomo (who threatened to invade the nation) but also white sympathizers like Peter Matthiess
en (who chronicled the ordeal in his book Indian Country).
United by the standoff, Dana Leigh and Kanietakeron fell in love. Together, they set about building a family on Raquette Point. Dana Leigh especially relished the summer months there, when she could slip off her sandals and sink her toes in the soil. She spent the whole season tending a garden that not only fed their family but healed their ailments, too. Yet just beyond their fence loomed the massive aluminum engine–casting plant owned by GM. It began attracting attention of its own, soon after the standoff.
“Now come the scientists, the universities knocking at the door, asking for permission to go out and catch frogs and pick grass and, oh, can we test this, can we test that? There were people all over the world that came. We didn’t know what was happening. We said this is crazy, so I educated myself,” Dana Leigh says.
She started by reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which offered a crash course in toxics as well as corporate cover-up. Even before GM admitted to its longtime use of PCBs, the Thompsons had their suspicions.
“GM had a huge dump right by our house,” Kanietakeron remembers. “When I was a kid, we would find barrels out there and use them to collect rainwater. There was a stream connecting our properties, and when we got hot, we would drink right from it. There were two or three ponds full of pure PCBs that made a nice ice-skating rink. Once, a kid fell in up to his waist.”
He points at the many scars blemishing his face. “They call this chloracne. I’ve always had these breakouts on my hands and ears that were the size of a dime and filled with maybe a hundred individual blisters, itchy as hell. I started getting them at age eight or nine, and they lasted all the way to high school. I used to wear a bandanna around my forehead just to cover it.”
His father worked for ALCOA back then, he says, and grew so asthmatic he could hardly breathe. Diabetes cost him a toe and then a leg before killing him at sixty-nine. Kanietakeron’s mother died of a heart attack at forty-three, as did a brother at thirty-nine. He and another brother have both undergone open-heart surgery, and one of their sisters endured sixteen miscarriages and only one successful birth. She now has kidney cancer.
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