One of the clearest examples of environmental racism in Canada came into starker view this week with evidence that links mercury contamination from a pulp and paper mill to the high rate of attempted youth suicide on a First Nations reserve.
Grassy Narrows First Nation, in northwestern Ontario, is an Anishinaabe community of some 1,500 people. Between 1962 and 1970, a paper mill owned by Dryden Chemicals dumped about 9,000 kilograms of mercury into the English-Wabigoon river system, contaminating the fish with levels of methylmercury up to 50 times higher than what was considered safe and poisoning the people who ate them. The community relied on fish not just for sustenance, but for their livelihood, so their local economy was also devastated.
Today, 90% of Grassy Narrows residents are believed to suffer from symptoms of mercury poisoning, which attacks the nervous system and can result in tremors, insomnia, memory loss, neuromuscular effects, headaches, and cognitive and motor dysfunction.
Researchers have now identified the intergenerational impact of mercury poisoning on the behaviour, emotions and suicide attempts of Grassy Narrows children.
“In the ’70s, following the mercury discharge, youth suicide in Grassy Narrows went from zero – it had been unheard of before that time – to very high,” said Donna Mergler, the lead author of a new study published in the peer-reviewed Environmental Health Perspective journal, at a press conference this week at Ontario’s provincial legislature, where the study’s findings were unveiled. Over an 11-month period in 1977/1978, 26 young people between the ages of 11 and 19 attempted suicide.
“That is an incredibly high rate,” said Mergler, a physiologist and professor emerita in the Department of Biological Sciences at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
Those numbers remain high today, with mothers reporting that 41% of girls and almost 11% of boys between the ages of 12 and 17 have attempted suicide – figures that are three times higher than in other First Nations.
The study uses data collected from a questionnaire conducted in 2016 and 2017 related to 80 mothers and 162 children from Grassy Narrows, along with historical data from biomonitoring programs that collected blood samples from umbilical cords and children’s hair. That allowed researchers to trace how mercury was passed to children in utero.
Most of the women who participated in the study were born between 1962 and 1993.
They were exposed to mercury poisoning prenatally, through their mothers’ consumption of fish, and subsequently as children, teenagers and adults. Researchers also found correlations between grandfathers who had been fishing guides, using the indicator as a proxy for mercury exposure in the family, and mental health and behavioural issues faced by their grandchildren, the children of today.
“You can see this cascade of effects,” Mergler said. “We found that the mother’s childhood mercury exposure is associated with today’s nervous system disorders, as well as a psychological distress.”
Researchers found that the effect of mercury exposure may have been compounded by the intergenerational trauma of the residential school system, in which Indigenous children were taken from their communities and sent to government-funded boarding schools, often administered by Christian churches, where many were abused and died.
For Rudy Turtle, the chief of Grassy Narrows First Nation, who also spoke at the press conference, the study confirms “what we’ve been fearing all along.”
We’re in an emergency in our home.
- Chrissy Isaacs, Grassy Narrows resident
“The impacts of mercury have been very devastating in terms of our economy,” he said. “Our way of life has been totally destroyed. One-hundred percent we’ve been unable to continue our traditional activity.”
“We’re in an emergency in our home,” said Grassy Narrows resident Chrissy Isaacs, in a recording played at the press conference. “Even on social media you see people saying that they feel like they don’t want to live or they don’t know how to deal with what they’re going through.”
Isaacs said that her niece recently died by suicide. “It’s not their fault,” she said. “It’s a part of the sickness from the dumping of mercury, and I feel like we need to make people aware of that.”
Multiple studies have exposed the devastating toll the mercury dump has had on Grassy Narrows, a community that has fought for the government to acknowledge the devastation and deliver accountability. One study released in 2020 found that residents who died prematurely before the age of 60 had five times more mercury in their bodies than those who lived past 60. That same year, decades of lobbying by the community secured a commitment from the federal government to build a treatment centre for people suffering from the effects of mercury poisioning. But three years later, costs have ballooned, and the project has yet to break ground. A report in 2017 suggested that the decommissioned mill was still leaking mercury.
This week, Chief Turtle called on the government to provide “fair compensation” to his community for the devastation wreaked by the toxic dump. The researchers said they hoped the study would help restore the health and well-being of Grassy Narrows residents.
“This study was possible only because of the leadership of the people of Grassy Narrows, who fought for decades to expose and correct the health impacts wrought by [mercury] contamination of the English-Wabigoon River system,” noted Sarah E. Rothenberg, of Oregon State University, in an a separate Environmental Health Perspectives article.
“Because of their advocacy and bravery, the results of this study may inform interventions that could benefit millions of people living in vulnerable communities where [methylmercury] exposure is elevated.”
