The smell of burning wood is pouring in the open window over my bed, filling my nostrils before I even have the chance to open my eyes. The last time I smelled smoke this strong was two summers ago when the corner of my trailer was on fire. I don’t jump out of bed, though. These fires are an emergency of a different kind. The winds have been blowing from the northeast for five days; the sky is hazy, and the sun looks like a lens flare from the wildfires in Quebec. It’s hard to say if the smell will disappear if the wind shifts because the province of Ontario is also on fire. The bush behind my house has yet to catch, but the nearby community has.
Last night my Elder’s husband was driving around the rez with tobacco pouches to find a firekeeper for his brother-in-law’s funerary arrangements. He joked that they didn’t have to do this because the presence of the Catholic Church had prevented them from practicing their ways. It was illegal. Over here, the people light and tend a sacred fire when someone walks on to aid them in their journey to the spirit world. It feels ironic to be lighting fires in the middle of wildfire season, and the bitterness I am feeling is matched only by the acrid smell of smoke wafting through my trailer.
I remember my father shouting at the tv screen during the evening news one day that he didn’t understand why people who live in Tornado Alley in the US don’t just move. Why do they continue to live in places where they know their homes will be destroyed? Before I understood the world, I’d agree with him. Now I know. In the 50s and 60s there was a lot of uranium mining around here, and corporations in charge had promised economic development to the reserve if they would host an acid plant for processing the mineral. Having barely survived generations of poverty and having been promised that it was safe, the people agreed. Three generations later, they’re still waiting for the government to make good on a grant to clean up the site. The chiefs have signed another bad faith deal for a quarry up the highway in the wetlands that threatens to disturb the uranium tailings. I want to scream at them, ‘Don’t you remember what happened last time?’ And remind them of when they had to move the pow-wow grounds because the dancers were getting holes in their moccasins from the acid that had seeped into the earth.
Now I know why people stay. Even if I could afford to move somewhere else, my adoptive family is elderly, and I can’t leave them to haul their water if the watershed becomes poisoned again. I also can’t abandon the land; she has welcomed me and loved and nurtured me in emotional health. If I leave to go somewhere else, the destruction will follow. I cry for the land and the people who have forgotten that all the wealth we need around us comes from the surface we stand and rest our bodies on. ‘The bush has everything we need,’ I had said at a meeting of native and non-native grassroots people for the protection of the Blanding’s Turtles. ‘If the water becomes poisoned, we won’t be able to hunt or harvest; then we will know true poverty,’ I said with vibrato, my voice shaking so much.
I have long suspected that the ‘proposed quarry,’ the one that has already been signed off on for the trap rock in the Canadian Shield, is so desired to build the billion-dollar highway from the south of us to stretch up to the lowlands of James Bay, the 5,000-kilometers-wide ‘Ring of Fire’ touted as the most significant mineral deposit in the country. More importantly, though, the remoteness of this territory means that life has remained relatively unchanged for the dozen or so First Nations in the area. And while I can’t speak for them or their experiences of poverty, I know that the wholesale destruction of the land makes me afraid. More afraid than being shot at by militarized police and mercenaries for oil and mining companies deployed to every land-defending camp across the continent in the last few years.
The provincial government has removed endangered wildlife protections and the firefighting budget. They want to, quite literally, smoke us out so they have unfettered access to the minerals below the surface. This has always been the goal of the colonial project and the genocide of Indigenous peoples globally.
I look out my window at what Grandma calls ‘our emerald green forest.’ ‘I’m scared,’ she’d said just a few days ago, ‘that soon our emerald green forest won’t be so green anymore.’ I know what it feels like for me, a person who has just rediscovered what it means to be human again in the last decade and a half, but I can’t imagine what it must feel like for her, who has always lived in this way. When I was depressed, Grandma told me to go outside and pick the bright yellow flowers that looked like sunshine. ‘Three breaths,’ she says. ‘In the language, we call this medicine. The people say when you are three breaths from suicide, you make a tea and ask this medicine for help.’ And the red clover that grows all around is for balancing estrogen hormones and preventing osteoporosis, the horsetail that grows by the base of the big shield rock behind the house is for collagen, the sweetgrass that grows high around my plywood cabin exterior is for soothing the nerves. ‘Everything we need is in the bush,’ I whisper to myself again.
We need help keeping medical professionals at the health center up the hill. One nurse practitioner works seven days a week, one day in each community along the North Shore of Lake Huron. With rising food costs and soon-to-be privatized health care, what will we do when the land is too poisoned to use folk medicine? What will we do when the rivers and lakes are too poisoned to fish? Every day it’s looking more and more like those who remember what it means to be human will have to give our bodies for the land and the faces that haven’t appeared yet.
Thanks for educating us, it is another attack on the land. You see it firsthand I see it in my neighborhood as a disregard expressed by leaving trash so many places even on the beach that we have access to keep writing dear keep living.