This island changed because of “environmental racism.” Its Kanien’kéha people are taking back and revitalizing the space
Cody Diabo recently found out that the bay restoration project on Kateri Tekakwitha Island was almost done. He took his family there for a walk to see how a dry, rocky shore had been turned into a marsh full of life.
The island off of Kahnawà:ke, a Kanien’kéha community south of Montreal, used to be a small group of lush, natural islands. But about 70 years ago, when crews were building the St. Lawrence Seaway, they dumped sludge from the river onto the islands, turning them into a single piece of land.
“When I came to the island for the first time since I was a child, I saw corn growing,” Diabo, the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke’s council chief in charge of the environment, said at a news conference on Wednesday. He was announcing the end of a nearly 10-year project to restore water flow in the bay and make its surroundings more natural.
“To be able to see corn, which is important to both the Onkwehonwe and the Kanien’kéha, growing here, where it had been mostly empty for a while, is…That was just a sign that we were doing something great.”
For many years, the island was rocky and dry, with only a few tall grey poplar and sumac trees here and there.
Now, the bay in the middle of the island is a peaceful oasis with a safe place for turtles to lay their eggs and a home for the endangered bank swallows that migrate through the area.
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By the rapids: Bringing back Kahnawake’s bay and water life
More than 15 years ago, the Kahnawà:ke Environment Protection Office (KEPO) started looking into why the bay was filling up with sediment and getting choked by weeds so thick that boating, swimming, and fishing were almost impossible in the small area that still connects the community to the St. Lawrence River.
The seaway, which was built by Canada and the U.S. in 1959, blocked Kahnawà:ke’s access to the river. It replaced the natural waterway with a narrow canal so that large cargo ships could get around the rapids that the town is named for. This cut off Kahnawà:ke’s access to the river and changed their whole way of life. In total, the federal government took 1,262 acres of land from Kahnawà:ke for the huge industrial project.
‘Land expropriation at its worst
Once KEPO realized the sediment buildup was caused by the seaway and agricultural runoff from the Châteauguay River, it undertook modelling to figure out how to increase water flow and invited community members to weigh in on solutions.
A section of the bay was dredged to make it deeper and the Seaway Management Corporation agreed to increase flow by slightly opening its locks. Sediment had piled so high the water was only about 60 centimetres deep, according to Vladimir Koutitonsky, a physical oceanographer who worked on the modelling.
“It was sad to see what had been done without thinking of the consequences for the community,” Koutitonsky said.
KEPO cobbled together funding, mostly from the federal government but also from other sources, such as CDPQ Infra, a subsidiary of Quebec’s pension fund manager the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, which is responsible for the Réseau express métropolitain (REM) light rail project launching next week.
The office was eventually able to purchase a boat designed to harvest aquatic plants so that it could pull up the weeds that had infested the bay, also helping to increase water flow and making the water easier to enjoy. It also created a beach on the islands eastern tip, at the request of community members who wanted to be able to swim in the water as their elders had as children.
Benjamin Green-Stacey, KEPO’s new director, says the construction of the seaway was one of the most traumatic events that Kahnawà:ke had experienced as a collective.
“This is the result of environmental racism. This is land expropriation at its worst,” Green-Stacey said. “There’s this whole generation now that’s grown up without access to the river and we’ll never experience what it was like to have direct river access.
“And so to see it transformed into a more naturalized space… that can help us get back to appreciating our relationship and interconnectedness with nature and with this space, with our place, it’s profound.”
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Cole Delisle, the environmental projects co-ordinator for terrestrial habitats, said he was struck by the deafening sound of frogs singing one early morning this spring when he visited the bay for some field work.
‘To really see our medicines coming back
Diabo, too, remarked on the cacophony of nature sounds the bay now produces.
“Hearing the birds, hearing the insects and just being able to see visually how beautiful it is, this is a good day,” he said.
Lynn Jacobs, the former director of KEPO, said she’s already noticed how many more species have returned to the area, including bank swallows flying over the marsh “by the hundreds.”
“To really see our medicines coming back … it’s example of what environmental stewardship can do,” Jacobs said.
Patrick Ragaz, KEPO’s general manager of field science, who has been working on the restoration project for eight years, said some 100 pairs of bank swallows filled their new habitat just two weeks after it was built.
Green-Stacey says the project is an example of how successful community-driven, Indigenous-led land stewardship can be in restoring biodiversity. In December, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the federal government would invest $800 million over seven years on four Indigenous-led conservation initiatives.
The KEPO director says he hopes awareness of the importance of biodiversity, aided recently by the COP15 conference held in Montreal, and reconciliation efforts in Canada will make it easier for these kinds of initiatives to get funding.
While the restoration itself is completed, KEPO staff have a plan to monitor the bay and continue work on improving water flow for the next 10 years.
Within the next year, they are expected to excavate a road that was used during the seaway’s construction and that is blocking some of the water’s path.
To Green-Stacey, though, the restoration will live well beyond 10 years.
“It’s a forever project,” he said. “We’re going to continue to take care of it; we’re going to continue to steward it, and we’re going to continue to interact with it.”