Poison as Progress: Indigenous Erasure as Economic Foundation

For decades, Sudbury's nickel smelters pumped sulphur dioxide into the air. At peak in the 1960s, they released 2.5 million tonnes annually—making Sudbury the single largest point source of sulphur dioxide emissions in the world. The acid rain sterilized lakes across entire watersheds. Indigenous communities around Wanapitei, French, and Vermilion Rivers watched their fish develop deformities, their crops die, their children struggle to breathe. The landscape was said to have resembled the moon.

Elliot Lake's uranium mines fed Cold War nuclear programs for forty years, dumping radioactive tailings into the Serpent River that sustained Serpent River and Mississauga First Nations. The water turned orange from contamination, yet children continued to swim in it during summer breaks—the only water they had access to. All fifty-five miles of the river system became contaminated, with no living fish remaining in the downstream waters.

Sarnia's Chemical Valley: sixty chemical plants discharged mercury, PCBs, and dioxins directly onto Aamjiwnaang First Nation land for decades. Between 1999 and 2003, only 35% of babies born at Aamjiwnaang were male—one of the most extreme gender ratios ever documented.

Grassy Narrows and Whitedog First Nations: ten tonnes of mercury dumped into the English-Wabigoon river system that fed their communities. The fishing economy collapsed. Generations still suffer neurological damage.

These are not isolated incidents. They are the foundation. Across thousands of kilometers—from the St. Lawrence to the Athabasca, from Treaty 8 territories to Haida Gwaii—Indigenous lands were transformed into sacrifice zones that powered Canadian prosperity. The pattern repeats: extract the resource, poison the land, displace or destroy the people who lived there, engineer legal frameworks that shield those responsible from consequences, and leave taxpayers funding inadequate cleanups while corporations keep their profits. What was lost in this exchange was not simply "economic opportunity" but entire ways of life, knowledge systems that had sustained peoples for millennia, and ecosystems whose value we are only now beginning to understand—far too late.

What Was There Before

To understand what was destroyed, you must first understand what existed. 

The Anishinaabe around the Great Lakes had developed fisheries management systems that sustained communities for over ten thousand years. They understood seasonal fish migrations, breeding cycles, and sustainable harvest levels in ways that would not be "discovered" by Western science until the twentieth century—and often ignored even then. The fisheries didn't just feed people; they were central to trade networks, cultural practices, teaching systems, and spiritual life. When a young person learned to fish, they learned to read water, weather, animal behaviour, and their place in a reciprocal relationship with the living world.

The Cree and Dene across the boreal forest had intimate knowledge of caribou migration, berry seasons, medicinal plants, and the complex relationships between fire, forest renewal, and wildlife populations. This wasn't folklore—it was empirical knowledge accumulated over countless generations, encoded in language, story, seasonal rounds, and land-based practice. A trap line wasn't simply a route; it was a doctoral thesis in ecology, passed down through apprenticeship and experience.

The Wet'suwet'en maintained governance systems that balanced clan authority, hereditary leadership, and territorial stewardship across vast landscapes. The feast hall was where legal decisions were witnessed, disputes resolved, and authority validated—a sophisticated constitutional system that didn't require written law because it was embedded in practice, ceremony, and collective memory.

These were not primitive peoples waiting for development. They were nations with complex economies, governance systems, scientific knowledge, and relationships to land that prioritized long-term sustainability over short-term extraction. The problem for colonial expansion was that these systems didn't generate the kind of wealth that could be extracted, exported, and converted into distant capital. The land provided abundance, but it was an abundance that required you to stay, to learn, to participate in reciprocal relationship. You could not take it all at once and leave. Or could you?

The Dismantling - Indigenous Erasure

Colonial resource extraction didn't just take resources—it had to destroy the systems that would resist extraction. Traditional fisheries were criminalized through licensing regimes that favoured commercial operations while banning Indigenous harvest methods.

 It wasn't about conservation; commercial fleets depleted Atlantic cod to ecosystem collapse while Indigenous peoples were arrested for fishing to feed their families. The goal was to break the connection between people and the resource, to transform a relationship into a commodity.

Hydroelectric megaprojects flooded thousands of square kilometres of Cree hunting grounds in Quebec. The James Bay Project didn't just displace people—it drowned an entire knowledge system. Trap lines that families had maintained for generations vanished underwater. Mercury from decomposing vegetation contaminated fish. Animals whose migration patterns were encoded in Cree knowledge systems disappeared as their habitat was fragmented. What the engineers called "clean energy" required the erasure of a way of life.

Logging companies clearcut Haida old-growth forests on Haida Gwaii for decades. These weren't just trees—they were relatives in Haida cosmology, beings with spirit and role in the web of life. The forests provided materials for canoes, longhouses, totem poles, tools, medicine, and food. They sheltered salmon streams, provided habitat for animals, and held cultural sites. When the forests fell, so did the material base for an entire culture. You cannot carve a canoe from a clearcut. You cannot teach young people to identify medicinal plants in a tree plantation. You cannot maintain a relationship with beings that have been turned into export commodities.

The pattern repeated in nickel country, uranium country, chemical country. Indigenous communities around Sudbury watched the land die. Not metaphorically—literally: the soil acidified, the lakes became sterile, fish developed deformities, crops failed. Respiratory illness became endemic, children struggled to breathe, and when people spoke up, they were ignored, testimonies dismissed. Their knowledge of what was happening to the land was treated as anecdotal, even as the destruction was visible from space.

The Poison and the Immunity

What makes this history particularly grotesque is not just that it happened, but that it was made legal, and those responsible were protected from consequences.

Sudbury's Acid Rain (1930s–1980s):

• INCO and Falconbridge released 2.5+ million tonnes SO₂ annually

• Created one of the world's largest acid rain zones

• Indigenous communities reported fish deformities, crop death, respiratory illness

• Ontario granted permissive emission permits while accepting Crown liability

• Corporation shielded from meaningful civil litigation

Aamjiwnaang's Chemical Valley (1940s–present):

• 60+ chemical plants discharged mercury, PCBs, dioxins onto First Nation land

• Birth ratio skewed to 35% male (1999-2003)—among most extreme ever recorded

• Imperial Oil, Dow, Shell, Nova operated under "licenced pollution" frameworks

• Community's legal recourse severely constrained

Grassy Narrows Mercury Poisoning (1962–1970):

• Dryden Paper dumped 10 tonnes of mercury into river system

• Fishing economy collapsed; neurological damage persists across generations

• 1979 secret indemnity agreement transferred liability to Ontario government

• Victims effectively prevented from suing the corporation responsible

• Mill continued operating with full legal protection

Elliot Lake Uranium (1950s–1990s):

• Radioactive tailings dumped into Serpent River—55 miles contaminated

• 274+ uranium miners dead of lung cancer by 1984

• Children swam in orange, radioactive water; government said nothing

• Federal indemnification shielded Rio Algom and Denison Mines from full liability

St. Lawrence/Ottawa River Contamination (1950s–1980s):

• Domtar and others released mercury, PCBs, dioxins affecting Kahnawà:ke, Akwesasne, Algonquin communities

• Akwesasne became one of most contaminated Indigenous territories in North America

• Regulatory frameworks limited corporate liability while constraining Indigenous legal recourse

The architecture is consistent: extract, poison, protect the corporation, transfer liability to taxpayers, and leave communities with contaminated land and no meaningful path to justice.

What We Lost (and Who Lost More)

When Aamjiwnaang reports that only 35% of babies born are male, we're not just seeing an environmental health crisis—we're watching a culture's future reproductive capacity being altered by industrial poison. When Grassy Narrows continues to report mercury levels in fish above safe consumption guidelines sixty years after the dumping stopped, we're seeing a permanent severing of people from a food source that sustained them for ten thousand years. When the Serpent River runs orange with radioactive sediment, we're seeing the death of a waterway that was central to Anishinaabe life, identity, and sustenance.

This is first and foremost an Indigenous loss—cultures disrupted, lands poisoned, knowledge systems destroyed, futures altered by contamination. Yet as Canadians, we must recognize this loss as our own. To be Canadian is to inherit this history; it is the foundation upon which the nation was built, the soil from which our institutions grew, the wealth that funded our development. Acknowledging that Indigenous dispossession diminished us all; morally, culturally, and economically, is not optional reflection but the essence of what Canadian identity actually means. We lost the chance to learn from peoples who understood sustainability not as a buzzword but as the foundation of long-term survival, and that loss is woven into every aspect of who we are as a country.

The Anishinaabe fisheries management systems sustained populations for millennia through intricate understanding of seasonal cycles, breeding patterns, and sustainable harvest levels. We destroyed them, then spent the twentieth century watching commercial fisheries collapse from overharvesting, requiring massive government intervention and economic disruption. The traditional ecological knowledge we dismissed as primitive would have prevented the cod collapse that devastated Atlantic Canada's economy. We chose short-term profit over long-term sustainability, ignored the people who understood how to maintain abundance, and now we pay the price in depleted oceans and coastal communities that never recovered.

Cree and Dene peoples managed boreal forests with controlled burns and selective harvest, maintaining ecosystems that supported diverse wildlife and prevented catastrophic fire. We suppressed fire completely, treated their land management as ignorance, and now watch as forests become tinderboxes that burn catastrophically, threatening communities, infrastructure, and billions in economic value. The climate knowledge encoded in Indigenous seasonal rounds and land-based practice took generations to develop. We're now spending billions trying to recover that traditional knowledge to understand how ecosystems are shifting, hiring Indigenous consultants to tell us what we could have learned if we'd simply listened in the first place.

Wet'suwet'en governance systems were designed to balance territorial stewardship with resource use across vast landscapes, developed over centuries of managing complex ecosystems. We ignored them entirely, built pipelines through their lands over explicit objections, and now face endless legal battles, international condemnation, and investor uncertainty that makes Canada a riskier place to do business. The RCMP's militarized raids on Wet'suwet'en land defenders cost taxpayers millions while generating global headlines that damaged Canada's reputation and complicated trade relationships. We could have worked collaboratively from the beginning. Instead we chose confrontation, and it cost us economically, diplomatically, and morally.

Sudbury became so toxic that Toronto used it to train astronauts for moon landings. The cleanup has cost hundreds of millions of dollars and continues today. The long-term health costs—respiratory illness, cancer, contaminated water—are borne by public healthcare systems. The economic development that contamination prevented; tourism, agriculture, clean industry—represents lost opportunity that compounds over decades.

The mercury at Grassy Narrows hasn't gone away. It's in the sediment, being methylated by bacteria, moving through the food chain, accumulating in fish. The cleanup and compensation processes are funded by taxpayers. The community's potential economic contributions—blocked by health crises, contaminated resources, and ongoing trauma—represent lost human capital. The social costs of mercury poisoning—disability supports, healthcare, mental health services—are borne collectively.

If we had listened to Aamjiwnaang's concerns in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, Chemical Valley might have developed with better environmental controls, preventing a public health crisis that now requires expensive interventions. If we had respected Wet'suwet'en territorial authority, we might have developed energy projects collaboratively, avoiding conflict that costs money, time, and international credibility. If we had taken Anishinaabe fisheries knowledge seriously, we might have avoided a cod collapse that required billions in economic relief and destroyed coastal communities.

The cruel irony is this: the extraction model that is Indigenous erasure hasn't even made us prosperous in any sustainable sense. It generated wealth for a relative few, enormous costs borne by taxpayers, and economic vulnerabilities we're now scrambling to address. The people we displaced had developed systems for long-term prosperity—not the quarterly-returns kind, but the kind that sustains peoples for ten thousand years. We destroyed those systems, took the resources, poisoned the land, and now find ourselves facing climate crisis, ecological collapse, and economic instability that those systems were designed to prevent.

We didn't just dispossess Indigenous peoples of their land. We dispossessed ourselves of their knowledge, their governance models, their understanding of how to live on this land sustainably. We traded millennia of accumulated wisdom for a century of extraction, and we're now discovering that what we destroyed might have been more valuable than what we took.

The Economic Footnote

There's a common framing that presents Indigenous communities as "economically disadvantaged" or "behind" in development. This is not only ignorant obtuse, but backwards. These communities were structurally impoverished through deliberate policies: their traditional economies were criminalized or destroyed through contamination, they were excluded from resource revenues extracted from their territories, and they were left with poisoned land while profits flowed elsewhere. The "economic gap" is not a development failure—it's the designed outcome of extraction that took everything of value and left the toxic burden behind.

2025: Still Learning Nothing

As Canada enters 2025, the pattern continues. Proposals for new pipeline infrastructure advance through sensitive marine ecosystems and Indigenous territories with familiar patterns: consultation processes that function as procedural requirements rather than genuine consent, injunctions prepared to enforce corporate timelines, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples referenced in press releases while the fundamental questions remain unanswered.

Wet'suwet'en land defenders received suspended sentences in October 2025 for attempting to stop Coastal GasLink construction and now carry criminal records for defending their own territories under their own laws. Trans Mountain Expansion trenched through Secwépemc sacred burial grounds at Pípsell despite opposition. The Secwépemc are now pursuing title claims to protect sites that have already been damaged. The legal framework requires Indigenous nations to prove their rights in colonial courts while pipelines are built through their territories in real time. 

And now a new front has opened: Indigenous nations along the North Coast have already rejected the Alberta–Canada proposal for a new coastal export pipeline. The Coastal First Nations–Great Bear Initiative, representing Heiltsuk, Haida, Gitga’at, Kitasoo Xai’xais, Metlakatla, and Wuikinuxv, have stated that “the answer is still no, now and always,” vowing to fight the project in court and in international forums. Haida leaders have reiterated that oil tankers will never be allowed through their waters, and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs has condemned the MOU outright. Before a route is even selected, Indigenous nations are already defending territories the state treats as open corridors for expansion.

In Aamjiwnaang, the federal government launched a "pilot project on environmental racism" in 2025. After eighty years of documented poisoning, the response to decades of harm is consultations and studies. Not binding emission caps, not health reparations, not recognition that siting sixty chemical plants on Indigenous land was a choice that reflected who Canadian society was willing to sacrifice.

The question that runs through all of this, from Sudbury to Aamjiwnaang to Wet'suwet'en territory, is simple: Who decides what happens to the land? Whose law governs? Whose knowledge matters? And who bears the cost when extraction leaves devastation behind?

Canadian history provides the answer. The wealth flows upward and outward. The poison stays behind. The corporations are protected. The government absorbs liability with public funds. The knowledge that might have prevented disaster is dismissed until it's too late. And we call this progress.

The peoples we displaced understood something we're only now beginning to grasp: you cannot have a prosperous future by poisoning the present. You cannot build wealth by destroying the systems that create abundance. You cannot thrive by treating land and water as resources to be extracted rather than relationships to be maintained.

We didn't just fail Indigenous peoples. We failed ourselves. And we're still failing, still choosing extraction over sustainability, still prioritising corporate timelines over ecological reality, still dismissing the knowledge of peoples who understood how to live here long before Canada existed—and who will still be here long after our extraction economy collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

This is not a legacy to overcome. It is a system still operating. Understanding it is the first step toward building something different—something that might actually last.

photo from the niagara gorge