Grassy Narrows First Nation – William “Bill” Fobister remembers when things changed, seemingly overnight.
The 79-year-old had grown up fishing across the sprawling English-Wabigoon River system.
And the deep blue waters that lap the shores of his Ojibwe community – Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek, better known as Grassy Narrows – had fed his people since time immemorial.
“[My dad] was a commercial fisherman, and I helped him. That’s how we survived,” Bill recalls, sitting at a yellow picnic table in his backyard on a rainy August morning.
Then, he says, in 1970, “everything shut down.”
That’s when authorities confirmed that a pulp and paper mill in Dryden, upstream from Grassy Narrows, had dumped more than 9,000kg (20,000lb) of mercury into the river in northwestern Ontario, Canada, starting in the early 1960s.
“We noticed the fish were floating in the bays, and then we reported it,” says the soft-spoken Indigenous community elder. “They tested the fish. Sure enough, they found mercury in the fish.”
His family and neighbours soon began to fall sick. The commercial fishing that so many in Grassy Narrows relied on was shut down. And a way of life that goes back thousands of years was unmistakably shaken.
It was one of the worst environmental and health disasters in Canadian history.
“They devastated [the community] without having any concern about what they’re doing to us,” says Bill, who wears a purple hoodie and blue baseball cap emblazoned with a multicoloured fish.
Bill has been diagnosed with mercury poisoning. His late father and some of his uncles also had it, he says. Now, so too do his wife and several of his children and grandchildren.
They are among the 90 percent of people in Grassy Narrows believed to be suffering from mercury poisoning today.
“Almost everyone in the community has something: diabetes, cancers and heart attacks, kidney failure and the liver [problems],” he says, running through the long list of symptoms.
“It’s still ongoing today, and a lot of kids have been damaged.”
That continued harm has pushed multiple generations of people in Grassy Narrows to raise their voices to demand justice and accountability as the river system remains polluted – and, according to a recent study, is getting worse.
Their decades-long battle is now culminating in a landmark lawsuit that could have far-reaching impacts for the environmental rights of Indigenous communities across Canada, with the outcome potentially setting a precedent for how First Nations can defend their territories from industrial threats.
Bill and his neighbours want compensation for past and continued damage to their health and way of life – and for the mill that poisoned them to be shut down, once and for all.
“I don’t think they totally, fully understand what’s happening to them,” he says of affected community members.
“But they notice that they’re sick, they feel different. Even looking at their kids, some of them are almost deformed. That’s the scary part. So a lot of them don’t want to have any more kids because of the fact that they have mercury – they don’t want to pass it on.”