When Jenifer Brousseau’s father closed the shaft of the uranium mine in Elliot Lake, Ontario, he asked himself a hard question.
“I turned around and I looked back after, and I asked myself, ‘What did I do? What was I a part of?’” he told Brousseau.
As an Indigenous man, he questioned whether or not the economic gain was worth the environmental risk and health impacts to his fellow workers, of whom “so many died of cancers,” Brousseau said.
There was a sinking feeling in his gut during that moment, she recalls him telling her. The job at the uranium mine was supposed to sustain his family into retirement, but it closed early despite the promises.
Brousseau, a land defender and former Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) host, holds her father’s story close in her ongoing campaign against a massive quarry. The quarry threatens a large population of the endangered Blanding’s turtle that thrives in the ecosystem where the site is proposed; A 2019 study from Laurentian University discovered the area where the quarry is proposed has “among the highest reported densities” for the threatened species.
Brousseau celebrates the innate and ancestral value of the land, and through that worldview, she lives true to her inherent responsibility as a guardian and steward of the land. And so, when Brousseau thinks about “coming home, where I have a very close relationship with the land, I can’t just sit back.”
That’s why Brousseau feels personally slighted when decisions have been made in her traditional territory in pursuit of profit, “only in hindsight to find out it was a bad idea,” she said.
Brousseau points to the old uranium mines that left behind a legacy of toxic tailings, or the local acid plant that forced her First Nation to move the powwow grounds because moccasins were being burned from the spillover, she said,
“As Anishinaabeg peoples, we love our land and the ways and teachings of our ancestors,” she said. “We are returning to remembering, biiskaabiiyaang is returning home after a long journey, returning to ourselves and seeing the need to do things differently.”
Brousseau joined the struggle against the quarry when she reconnected with her middle school teacher, Rhonda Kirby. Brousseau had moved home after a period of time hosting APTN’s Wild Archaeology and supporting movements against pipelines on both the west and east coast.
Now, for their decade-long struggle against the rock quarry, she and her fellow environmental activists have received the 2024 Wilderness Committee Eugene Rogers Environmental Award, an honour given to Canadians who demonstrate exceptional dedication to protecting the environment. The 2024 award marks the first time Ontario-based activists have won.
Katie Krelove, the Ontario campaigner for the Wilderness Committee, said, “it's a great news story, but it is still ongoing, and they are still fighting, and they're still working to advocate to the decision-makers in the province to not permit this quarry.”
Brousseau is developing a film titled 10,000 Turtles, a nod to the abundance of turtles before human-caused pressures threatened their extinction.
Turtles are an “indicator species” that show when an ecosystem is healthy. In the case of the quarry, they “tell us that that was a very sensitive habitat,” Kirby said.
At the same time, Brousseau understands why development is an alluring pull for citizens in her Serpent River First Nation community and the local townships. The uranium mines were viewed the same way.
“This happens a lot: these companies, they put blinders on, they sugarcoat things, they give lofty promises of jobs,” Brousseau said. “But you know, at what cost? At what cost?”
The quarry’s proponent is waiting to submit its final documentation, and once that happens, Kirby will rally the community to voice their concerns. But Kirby is skeptical about their ability to halt this specific project.
“Unfortunately, that’s just paying lip service to our concerns, but we need to go on the record,” she said. “It's all one battle in a very big war, and every little bit that we chip away at hopefully will bring some changes down the road.”
For Kirby, the fight reflects a larger systemic concern emerging from decisions in Queen’s Park. She argues Doug Ford’s open-for-business policies in Ontario have placed the environment at the bottom of the list of priorities. It’s why years after she started to battle the quarry in her backyard, she decided to organize with the province-wide Reform Gravel Mining Coalition to change how quarries are developed in the province.
“Canada and Ontario used to have environmental standards that were higher, and now we're at the bottom of the heap,” Kirby said. “We’re just going backwards and backwards.”
Matteo Cimellaro / Canada’s National Observer / Local Journalism Initiative
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