Indigenous Water Problems

I suppose that if you are in Canada and you pay at least moderate attention to the news media, you have heard about the First Nations water issue, which is that many of the indigenous peoples of this country live in communities that do not have water that is fit to drink, and in many cases not even to use for washing. Sometimes the problem is chemicals that have leached into the water table. Sometimes the contaminants are biological, often from lack of sewage control. This isn’t a simple matter of “They are shitting on themselves” as one professional lobbyist told me; it takes capital to build the controls and processing for sewage.

Our federal government made promises about resolving the water toxicity problem, and has made some efforts, but the results have not been what they want us to believe. The Liberals do not want to lose face by being seen to not have fulfilled the promises (they have shown that they have plenty of other ways to lose face 😋), so they enhance the results of their initiative. I don’t want to totally deride the efforts. First, the government has at least not hidden from the problem, and second, they have made some effort. Yet, as someone with firsthand involvement in looking at the problem and plotting a solution, I can see that the problem may be covered in cosmetic hype if we so allow.

I had occasion this past summer to visit a reserve that is supplied with drinking water from a neighboring reserve. The neighboring reserve has a water treatment plant installed at a school from where water is hauled to the homes of people living on the reserve I visited. I took pictures of the purified water that government functionaries want us to believe has been made fit to drink. Here is a picture of water seen through the access port of a large holding tank located at someone's home. 

 

Someone I know made the following video of the purified drinking water. 

I mention this info for those who think that great progress has been made in detoxifying water on First Nations reserves. There is a lot of work to be done yet. I think about the defenseless elderly and children who do have the ability to amend their situations, and I want to something about it.