First Nations Resource Management

Mike Williams

[Reprinted from GroundSwell, 2002]

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.

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.