Six years ago, Rocky Bay First Nation — an Indigenous community of more than 1,000 people just north of Lake Superior — began to study the health of their food and water.
Worried about the impacts of paper mills, mines and other industrial activities on the water systems that lead to the world’s largest freshwater lake, fishers from the community collected fish for food and to test for contaminants, particularly mercury.
Ray Nobis was one of them. As a kid, he was taken out of school to learn how to trap and hunt. When he grew up, he became a commercial fisherman, “living off the land and guiding, you know, all the normal stuff that we grew up loving my dad for.”
“And then everything changed,” Nobis, now economic development manager for Rocky Bay First Nation, told The Narwhal. “The environment changed.”
Commercial fishing wasn’t viable anymore, “or magnificent,” Nobis said. The “culprit,” as he described it, was industry setting up on the north end of Lake Nipigon, a large lake just north of Lake Superior, that was polluting the water and impacting fish spawning habitat. In recent years, mining, hydro and nuclear projects, lithium battery factories and biomass operations have been proposed around the lake. That spurred Nobis and others in the community to learn how to test the waters and the beings in them.
The nation partnered with Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., to secure technical expertise — or “non-Native assistance of technology and education and scientific knowledge,” as Nobis called it — to conduct the testing and share its findings. The nation has also secured federal funding for Indigenous Guardians to continue the study for several years. Initial results show elevated levels of mercury in samples of walleye, northern pike, lake trout and sucker. The community developed consumption guidelines for these species indicating the maximum number that can be safely eaten each month, but further analysis is needed to determine whether other fish types are safe to eat.
But to get a fuller understanding of the risks to Lake Superior and by extension their food and water, the nation sought to get six of their neighbouring First Nations on board.