[IPSM] Aamjiwnaang First Nation in Ontario seeking support

[aaron at resist.ca]

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: [oth] Aamjiwnaang First Nation in Ontario seeking support From:  
 brett at resist.ca
Date:    Fri, March 10, 2006 9:09 am
To:      oth at ckut.ca
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Aamjiwnaang First Nation, located near Sarnia, Ontario is bordered on
three sides by Canada's largest petrochemical refining concentration (40%
of Canada's Petrochemical refineries) and suffers an overwhelming amount
of pollution related illnessess and side effects, including a skewed
sex-birth ratio of two females to every male successfully born. It's a
pretty shocking story, with new developments unfolding every day. Ron
Plain, an activist on the reserve, has sent me this latest call-out for
support. Does anyone want to follow-up with a story? I don't have much
time, but can lend a hand, and have contacts and a binder of terrifying
information.
Brett
273-9430

*
Just a quick note to ask for your help.

Invenergy has a proposed Gas Powered generating Station 1 kilometer from
Aamjiwnaang Borders. This new plant will release 250 gallons of heavily
chlorinated water in the Toxic Creek known as Talfourd Creek. Without
going into all of the emission particulars it is safe to say that the
air-shed around Aamjiwnaang is well beyond capacity and the thought of
adding to the releases is tantamount to drive the spoon deeper into the
heart of Aamjiwnaang.

I have consulted with our resource people and have a few strategies that
can be employed. From your end two, first is a call of protest to the MOE,
Your MP and MPP. Second is the shame tactic of notifying all your media
contacts and bringing the light of media once again to Aamjiwnaang.

Miikwhech
Thank You
Ron Plain
Chair, Aamjiwnaang Environment Committee
519-337-3144

Some Background:

For release Sunday, Dec. 18, and thereafter

Caught in a toxic web, Canadian natives are alarmed by a shortage of sons

By MATT CRENSON
AP National Writer

AAMJIWNAANG FIRST NATION, Canada (AP) - Growing up with smokestacks on the
horizon, Ada Lockridge never thought much about the pollution that came
out of them.

 She never worried about the oil slicks in Talfourd Creek, the acrid odors
that wafted in on the shifting winds or even the air-raid siren behind her
house whose shrill wail meant “go inside and shut the windows.”

 Now Lockridge worries all the time.
 A budding environmental activist, she recently made a simple but shocking
discovery: There are two girls born in her small community for every boy.
A sex ratio so out of whack, say scientific experts who helped her reveal
the imbalance, almost certainly indicates serious environmental
contamination by one or more harmful chemicals.

 The question: Which ones? And another, even more pressing question: What
else are these pollutants doing to the 850 members of this Chippewa
community?

 Lockridge and her neighbors live just across the U.S.-Canada border from
Port Huron, Mich., on the Aamjiwnaang First Nation Reserve. For nearly
half a century, their land has been almost completely surrounded by
Canada’s largest concentration of petrochemical manufacturing.

 Much of their original reserve, founded in 1827, was sold out from under
them via questionable land deals in the 1960s. It is now occupied by
pipelines, factories and row upon row of petroleum storage tanks.

 The area is so dominated by the industry that it is referred to on maps
and in local parlance as “Chemical Valley.”
 About two years ago, Suncor Energy - which already operates a refinery
and petrochemical plant next to the Aamjiwnaang reserve - proposed adding
another factory to the mix, an ethanol plant to be built on one of the few
undeveloped parcels adjoining the community’s property.

 Lockridge and other members of the band joined to oppose the plant. They
asked biologist Michael Gilbertson to look at a binder full of technical
information about air, water and soil contamination on the reserve.

 In a conference call, he reported that the data showed elevated levels of
dioxin, PCBs, pesticides and heavy metals including arsenic, cadmium, lead
and mercury.

 Almost as an afterthought, he asked a question: Had anybody noticed a
difference in the number of girls and boys in the community?

 At the other end of the line, the Aamjiwnaang and their allies were
suddenly abuzz.
 “All of a sudden everybody in that room started talking,” said Margaret
Keith, a staffer for the Occupational Health Clinic for Ontario Workers, a
public health agency.

 Somebody pointed out that the reserve had fielded three girls’ baseball
teams in a recent year and only one boys’ team. Lockridge thought about
herself and her two sisters, with eight daughters among them and only one
son.

 The question was not as offhand as it seemed. “I had been interested in
sex ratio as an indicator - a very sensitive indicator of effects going on
as a result of exposure to chemicals,” Gilbertson said in a recent
interview.

 Gilbertson explained that certain pollutants, including many found on the
Aamjiwnaang reserve, could interfere with the sex ratio of newborns in a
population. Heavy metals have been shown to affect sex ratio by causing
the miscarriage of male fetuses. Other pollutants known as endocrine
disrupters - including dioxin and PCBs - can wreak all sorts of havoc by
interfering with the hormones that determine whether a couple will have a
boy or a girl.

 If some pollutant was skewing the distribution of girls and boys in her
family and her community, Ada Lockridge thought, what else could it be doing?

 Statistics indicate that one in four Aamjiwnaang children has behavioral
or learning disabilities, and that they suffer from asthma at nearly three
times the national rate. Four of 10 women on the reserve have had at least
one miscarriage or stillbirth.

 “I was throwing up thinking about what was in me,” said Lockridge, who is
42. “I cried. And then I got angry.”
 She got a copy of the band membership list, and tallied the number of
boys and girls born in each year since 1984. Sure enough, the percentage
of boys started dropping below 50 percent around 1993. It is now
approaching 30 percent, with no sign of leveling off.

 The finding was significant enough to warrant a paper in Environmental
Health Perspectives, a well-regarded scientific journal. Lockridge, who
has worked as a home health aide and carpenter’s assistant, was listed as
an author.

 On a recent autumn day, Lockridge stood in the Aamjiwnaang band’s
cemetery. The burial ground occupies a gently sloping patch of ground
sandwiched between a petroleum storage tank farm and a low cinder-block
building with half a dozen pipelines running through it.

 It is hardly a place where anyone could rest in peace. The building emits
a constant, deafening roar that sounds like a wood-chipper buzzing through
logs one after the next. It is so loud that funeral ceremonies have to be
shouted.

 One of the oldest headstones in the cemetery belongs to Lockridge’s
great-grandfather, who died at least 50 years before Suncor Energy erected
a giant flare tower not 100 yards away.

 Lockridge was talking about how security guards watch and occasionally
film her as she pulls weeds around her family’s plots. Suddenly she
stopped short.

 “Okay,” she said. “You getting that smell right now?”
 Traveling around the 3,250-acre Aamjiwnaang reserve is a stimulating
olfactory experience. There are tangy smells, sweet smells and acrid odors
that sting the nose. There is the tarry scent of unrefined
petroleum, and the rotten-eggs stench of sulfur.

 There’s also a “fart” smell, Lockridge said, a “stink-feet” smell and
something that “smells like what the dentist puts on a Q-Tip before he
gives you the needle.”

 Whenever she detects a distinctive odor somewhere on the reserve, she
makes a note of it and records it on a calendar at home.

 Lockridge’s discovery of a sudden shift in sex ratio suggests a new
pollutant came into the Aamjiwnaang’s environment during the early 1990s.
And the fact that the decrease is continuing suggests that whatever that
pollutant is, it is still around.

 So far, nobody recalls anything new coming on the scene during the early
’90s. And the levels of likely suspects such as PCBs and mercury have
actually decreased in the past decade.

 The sex ratio of newborn babies is normally within a hair’s breadth of
50-50, with slightly more boys born than girls. There are very few
documented cases of an imbalance as extreme as the one of the Aamjiwnaang
reserve.

 During the late 1950s, a severe outbreak of mercury poisoning in
Minamata, Japan, caused a decrease in the percentage of male births.
Mercury and other heavy metals cause the preferential miscarriage of male
fetuses simply because their brains are more vulnerable during
development compared to those of females.

 Mercury is unlikely to be causing the shortage of boys on the Aamjiwnaang
reserve, however. Though levels of the metal are elevated on the reserve,
the Aamjiwnaang are exposed to much less mercury today than they were 50
years ago. Back then, poor band members would go to open toxic waste dumps
and extract mercury from the soil by adding water to it, then sell the
metal on the black market.

 The Aamjiwnaang and their scientific advisers believe it is more likely
that endocrine disrupters are to blame. Dozens of synthetic organic
chemicals can interfere with natural hormones by either interfering with
or amplifying their effects. Because hormones are so important to the
development and healthy performance of the body’s organs, endocrine
disrupters have the potential to cause a wide range of effects, from
damage to the brain and sex organs in utero to decreased sperm production
and immune suppression in adults. It is even arguable that they could
influence sexual behavior and violence.

 In her book “Our Stolen Future,” biologist Theo Colborne worries that
endocrine disrupters may be responsible for “physical, mental and
behavioral disruption in humans that could affect fertility, learning
ability, aggression and conceivably even parenting and mating behavior.”

 Some researchers have suggested that endocrine disrupters may be
responsible for numerous alarming trends - rising rates of testicular and
breast cancer, a higher frequency of reproductive tract abnormalities,
declining sperm counts and increases in learning disabilities among them.

 In 1976, a dioxin release at a factory in Seveso, Italy, sickened at
least 2,000 people. Years later, scientists found that men who were
exposed to the highest dioxin levels were more likely to have daughters
than sons. Among men who were younger than 19 years old at the time of the
accident, the ratio was the same as it is today on the Aamjiwnaang reserve
- two-to-one.

 At lower doses, the effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals are subtle
and have been harder to document.
 “Not a lot is known, actually,” said Marc Weisskopf, a research associate
at the Harvard School of Public Health.
 In a 2003 study, he and several colleagues found that mothers who
consumed large amounts of PCB-contaminated fish caught in the Great Lakes
were more likely to have girls.

 It is extremely difficult to say whether background doses of endocrine
disrupters are having any effect on the general population. Scientists in
many industrialized countries - including the United States and Canada -
have documented a subtle decline in the male-to-female ratio since World
War II. But it has been a matter of controversy whether the decrease is
due to industrial chemicals or lifestyle factors and medical advances,
which can also tinker with the sex ratio.

 There is little doubt that endocrine-disrupting pollutants are affecting
the sexual development of wildlife right where the Aamjiwnaang live. In
Lake St. Clair, not 30 miles from their reserve, fish are swimming around
with both male and female gonads. The condition, known as intersex, is
caused when a young fish that is genetically male is exposed to chemicals
such as the fertilizer atrazine, which causes female gonads to develop by
acting like the hormone estrogen.

 The phenomenon has been documented all over the southern Great Lakes -
not just in fish, but in birds and amphibians as well.

 The Aamjiwnaang are getting increasingly worried and obsessed about the
pollution of their reserve. With every new baby, said Ron Plain, a member
of the Aamjiwnaang environment committee, “we have to worry what’s the
matter with that child, five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years
from now.”

 Some people have suggested that the whole band should simply pick up and
leave the reserve for a less contaminated place. But Plain wants to stay
and fight.

 Petitions and demonstrations against the Suncor ethanol plant eventually
convinced the company to choose a location about 10 miles south of the
reserve for the new facility. A Suncor spokesman said that community
opposition was one of several factors that led to the decision.

 Now Plain wants to use the band’s veto power over new pipelines crossing
the reserve as a bargaining chip: For example, in return for allowing a
right-of-way, the Aamjiwnaang would require establishment of a fund to set
up a network of air monitoring stations. The money could also be used to
clean up hazardous waste sites on the reserve, or other environmental
projects.

 “The band doesn’t have the money for that type of stuff,” said Plain, who
runs his own medical supply company. “If we have a million dollars we can
hire some pretty good experts.”

 Alan Joseph is not sure he can wait.
 He has five children - a boy and four girls. All suffer from asthma; the
eldest girl has liver problems.
 He used to catch crawfish in Talfourd Creek and fish in the St. Clair
River, less than a quarter mile from his house. Now, if he wants to go
fishing, he drives 25 miles up the shore of Lake Huron.

 “I really want to move,” he said.
 AP-CS-12-12-05 1335EST

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