( Akwesasne's Toxic Turtles Cont. Page 5 )

     "We're insisting they look beyond just the truck that appears on their doorstep, so they don't become an active party in circumventing the law," Michael J. Walker, EPA associate counsel for toxic substances, said.33 Environmental spokesmen for the two hauling companies, Browning-Ferris Industries and Waste Management, complained that the EPA placed an unfair burden on them. "They're asking a disposal company to become an arm of law enforcement," said Peter Tarnawskyj, manager of environmental compliance at Niagara Falls-based Browning-Ferris.34

     The EPA's case contended that both hauling companies illegally diluted PCBs dumped near the General Motors foundry, a move that the auto maker had believed would excuse it from having to incinerate, rather than bury, its effluent. Incineration is environmentally more sound but up to ten times more expensive than the burial of wastes. The EPA contended that at least 31,000 tons of PCB-contaminated waste was diluted in order to avoid the standard requiring incineration. The two hauling companies said that by the time the waste in questions arrived at their dumps it was solid, not liquid. This is one way to get around the indictment that applies only to liquid wastes. General Motors reduced the case to a dispute over semantics: "a disagreement over sampling and analysis." The EPA was seeking $14.2 million from General Motors, the same amount from Browning-Ferris, and $7.1 million from Waste Management.

The Hard Road to Recovery

     In August, 1990, Ward Stone said that enforcing agencies were dealing with environmental problems at Akwesasne too slowly, as if they were engaging the offending corporation in a sort of bureaucratic pantomime.

     As I speak, Alcoa is still putting PCBs into the Grasse River. And they are going into the nearby Saint Lawrence into Indian waters adjacent to Cornwall Island, a main part of the fishing and hunting area of Akwesasne . . . Reynolds Metals is heavily hitting the (Saint Lawrence) River with PCBs, fluorides, aluminum, a wide variety of pollutants right now. It's ongoing. The water is still being degraded.

     When I arrived in June, 1985, the United States Environmental Protection Agency was involved at General Motors . . . We still have a pollution problem more than five years later. The river is not cleaned up. (The EPA) didn't identify Reynolds. It was pathology DEC that identified that, and the Mohawks. And so, the EPA is involved, but exceedingly slowly. And it's quite questionable whether or not their standards of clean up will be sufficient to bring the river back--we think that it won't--to a place where the Mohawks will once again be able to utilize the fish and wildlife for food.35

     By December 20, 1990, General Motors officials were complaining they could not meet the one part per million standard for PCBs in river sediment, nor even the ten parts per million required by the EPA on the plant grounds itself. "It's going to be hard for us to agree to a standard we don't think is technically possible," said David L. Lippert, media manager for General Motors' automotive components group in Detroit.36 The EPA estimated that its clean-up plan for the foundry would cost $78 million and would include removal of soil contaminated with PCBs from the reservation, dredging and treatment of contaminated sediments from the riverbeds of the Saint Lawrence and Racquette Point, removal of polluted soils from two General Motors disposal sites and treatment of waste water before it was released into the Saint Lawrence River. The company also threatened to close its foundry if the EPA forced it to close down and clean up its active waste lagoons. Additionally, General Motors argued that to dredge the river would stir up more PCB residue than would be released if the area were simply left alone. For the seventh year since the General Motors site had been placed on the EPA Superfund list, the company and the government continued to dicker over just how to clean up this corner of Mohawk country. As they did, the PCBs continued to spread. Such was the nature of natural life, and death, as 1991 opened in the land of the toxic turtle.

     Six months later, in July, 1991, Alcoa suddenly agreed to pay $7.5 million to civil and criminal penalties in connection with the dumping of PCBs and other pollutants at its Massena plant. The $3.75 million criminal penalty alone was the largest ever assessed in the US history for a hazardous-waste violation. After the company pled guilty to state pollution charges, its chairman, Paul O'Neill, said "Alcoa has a clear environmental policy which was not followed in this instance."37 More bluntly, the company had continued to dump PCBs and other hazardous wastes long after they become illegal. A state investigation had found that during 1989 the company had excavated thirty-three railroad carloads of PCB-contaminated soil while it prepared to install a drainage system. The soil was left piled for more than ninety days, after which some of it was hauled away by train. The company also pleaded guilty to illegally dumping caustic and acidic waste down manholes at its plant in Massena. Alcoa pleaded guilty to four very expensive misdemeanors. The $3.75 million in additional civil penalties were levied because the company failed to report (or underreported) unauthorized discharges of hazardous wastes on approximately 2,000 occasions since 1985.

     Alcoa's guilty plea was hailed as an environmental victory. After the euphoria faded, any at Akwesasne remembered that it was only once small step in the long road to restoring an environment that could once again sustain life in their homeland. The size of the fines merely indicated how great the damage had been and continues to be. Mark Narsisian, who lives in a small cabin near the General Motors foundry, said, "People have the false sense that money will even things out. If I can't plant in the ground anymore, what good is it? If I plant my coins in the ground, (will) corn grow?"38 Narsisian's comments underlie a timeless dilemma for American Indians who have exchanged their land and resources for money; without land and a healthy environment, money is worthless.

     The people at Akwesasne disagreed vehemently on whether their homeland should be opened to gambling, but nearly everyone living there deplores the environmental degradation of the area. Loran Thompson, a spokesman for the Warriors, said that he had had to plow under this garden because pollution from the General Motors foundry had poisoned the soil. Moreover, he described a lagoon near the Saint Lawrence River where he remembered that, in his youth, one could practically walk on the back of the fish. Now there are no fish he said, and the lagoon is a backwash of thick, black sludge: "The family lived off that pond. Muskrat, ducks, geese, fish. We used to swim there, too. I get so depressed just to think about it. . . . You should have seen it here when I was a kid--beautiful, clean, crystal-clear water. We used to come here for our drinking water."39 Now, said Thompson, who lives an eighth of a mile from one of General Motors' dumps,

     I have a hard time explaining to people why I live here. Some days you can hardly breathe, from the styrene that comes out of their (General Motor') smokestack. It's all gone now. Progress took it all away. Progress? We go backwards.40 My father raised us with gardens and animals. That's what I was going to do. I had two beautiful gardens. I was raising pigs; (I) was  going to get horses and cows. . . . I got rid of the pigs. I got rid of the  gardens. People are afraid to start anything here.41

     Thompson's wife died of cancer a few years ago, just as he was finding that his dream of having a farm had died because of the PCB-laced soil. Thompson's family was the fourth generation to farm land now unsuitable for raising any kind of food. They cannot raise crops on it, hunt animals that fed on it, nor fish from water bordering it without poisoning themselves. Despite this, Thompson says he will never move. By his reasoning, he and the rest of the Mohawks were on this land first, before industry spoiled it. "I've lived here all my life," said Thompson, "and I'm going to stay here, even if it kills me."42

     The environmental crisis at Akwesasne had become so acute by mid-1990 that in the midst of the violence over gambling, Mohawk leaders called a press conference to remind people that the biggest problem they faced was environmental pollution, not the gambling feud. The press conference was convened at New York's Five Rivers wildlife preserve, in a joint presentation with Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, New York Public Interest Research Group and other environmental-advocacy groups.

     "If we are to heal the divisions and the crisis at Akwesasne, we first must deal with the environment," elected chief Harold Tarbell said May, 30, three days before his opposition to gambling cost him his seat on the St. Regis Tribal Council.43 Ward Stone said that General Motors, Reynolds and Alcoa had polluted the area for decades. "The PCBs are flowing out of the GM plant right now," he said, contradicting company assertions that direct pollution had stopped.44

     We can't try to meet the challenges with the meager resources we have, said Henry Lickers, a Seneca who is employed by the Mohawk Council at Akwesasne and who has been a mentor to today's younger environmentalists at Akwesasne. Lickers has also been a leader in the fight against fluoride emissions from the Reynolds plant. "The next ten years will be a clean-up time for us, even without the money."45 said Lickers.

     The destruction of Akwesasne's environment is credited by Lickers with being the catalyst that spawned the Mohawk's deadly battle over high-stakes gambling and smuggling. "A desperation sets in when year after year you see the decimation of the philosophical center of your society," he said.46 "It's heinous," he added. "You have a people whose philosophy is intrinsically linked to nature, and they can't use the environment. This is a crime against the whole community, a cry against humanity."47 Many of gambling's most ardent supporters assert that the contamination of Akwesasne made gaming necessary for economic survival, since people there can no longer live off the land. The destruction of a natural world that once fed, housed and clothed the Mohawks has made it impossible for them to make a living in their traditional manner.

     Maurice Hinchley, chairman of the New York Assembly's Environmental Conservation Committee, said that he would continue to press in Albany for action on Akwesasne's environmental crisis. He said that there are few places where so many destructive forces have had as much impact as at Akwesasne. The Mohawks are not alone, however. Increasingly, restrictive environmental regulations enacted by states and cities are bringing polluters to native reservations. "Indian tribes across America are grappling with some of the worst of its pollution: uranium tailings, chemical lagoons and illegal dumps. Nowhere has it been more troublesome than at . . . Akwesasne," wrote one observer.48

Page 5 (End)

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