Click the link to read the article on the Esquire website (Charles P. Pierce). Here’s an excerpt:
Meanwhile, in arctic Canada, the First Nations people who live around North Spirit Lake have been boiling their water for 20 years, and they’re still doing so despite having won a notable court case on the subject a year ago.
“For years, and in some cases decades, Canada has failed to provide safe drinking water to many of its Indigenous communities, including North Spirit Lake, a remote reserve in northwestern Ontario that has been under a boil water advisory nearly continuously since 2001. Decaying infrastructure at water plants and a lack of trained operators has, on many reserves, rendered the treated water undrinkable. Since 1995, more than 250 First Nations have been affected, according to court records. As a result, Indigenous people have fallen ill from gastrointestinal infections, respiratory illnesses and severe rashes, with some ending up hospitalized. Boiling water has become a daily inconvenience, and entire communities, already struggling with chronic financial hardship, must rely on shipments of expensive bottled water.”
So the Native people went to court, and won, and nothing much has changed.
“Last year, Canada’s federal court approved a settlement of a class-action lawsuit filed by three Indigenous communities accusing the government of breaching its legal obligations to First Nations by failing to guarantee access to sanitary drinking water…In the year since the settlement, Canada has spent more than the agreement requires and several First Nations have received new infrastructure, which “represents important progress,” Michael Rosenberg, a lawyer for the First Nations, said in an email. But the government is still a long way from solving the problem. “We’re at a point where the lack of drinkable water on First Nations stands as a really sharp symbol of the failures of the Canadian state,” said Adele Perry, a history professor and director of the Centre for Human Rights Research at the University of Manitoba.”
Just as was the case with the horrors of the residential schools, Canada’s crisis supplying water to its Native peoples presages a similar one in this country, something that the administration is trying to mitigate in advance. But there are complications here that don’t exist around North Spirit Lake. For example, 29 federally recognized tribes depend on the beleaguered Colorado River for their water. Those tribes own the rights to around 20 percent of the water in the Colorado River basin. And this complication has complications.
