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Polluting The Nottoway Indians

Decent Essays

Polluting the Indigenous

The environment has always been important to Indigenous people because they lived off of the land. Tribes like the Mohawk of the Akwesasne Reservation or the Nottoway Tribe in Virginia depended on the land to provide all the basic needs of life. They did not exhaust their sacred land, but rather, they lived in harmony with it. When the Europeans came over to North America, they didn’t have the same mindset as the indigenous; the Europeans were focused on an economically gain. This mindset led the Europeans to exhaust the land and make a profit off of it. As time went on, not only did the Europeans exhaust the land, but they also began polluting it and dumping their waste with no regard for environment. This had a …show more content…

In the early 1950’s, the reservation was introduced to industrialism after the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway (Johansen 2011). Several companies sprung up around the reservation, the most notable of which was General Motors which was fed raw materials that aluminum and steel mills were digging up from the area. These plants had designated sites where they dumped all of their waste and after just a few years of operation, the toxins leaked out of the dump and into the environment (Johansen 2011). Without any government agency to regulate the waste, deadly toxins like polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) and insecticides seeped into just about every animal food chain in the area. In 1980, ten years after the creation of the EPA, a wildlife pathologist began examining the animals in the area. The current federal law for PCB in poultry is three parts per million; he found a snapping turtle with 3,067 parts per million of PCB in its body. PCB which is this concentrated in an animal is also six times the minimum concentration to consider it toxic waste (Johansen 2011). By 1990, the EPA got involved and released a Superfund cleanup plan which totaled $78 million (Johansen …show more content…

It poisoned all of the wild life so hunting, fishing, and gathering were all no longer possible (Johansen, 1993). In some places the water was not even safe to drink. Despite major cleanup efforts to replace contaminated soils and dredge parts of the St. Lawrence River, much of the area still remains so toxic that crops cannot be grown and fishing is prohibited (LaDuke 1994). Today, the Mohawk people are trying to battle this issue, even though they have no money to do it with. “The next ten years will be a cleanup time for us, even without the resources.” said Henry Lickers, a Seneca employed by the Mohawk Council (Johansen 1993). Lickers has played a major role in educating younger environmentalists in the area because he knows that just cleaning up the pollution is not a permanent solution; they need a way to prevent it from happening in the future and the best way to do that is by educating the next generation. Lickers also believes that the rise in high-stakes gambling and smuggling on the reservation is due to the destruction of the environment (Johansen 1993). This makes sense because the people of the reservation have no make of making a living anywhere on the reservation. On the plus side however, to help come up with more money for the cleanup, the Mohawk tribe has just recently established a trust fund to help monitor the cleanup (Piche

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