"Fighting Toxics In A Mohawk Community"

"In the face of environmental devastation Mohawks have battled to preserve who they are, confronting state and federal governments and the scientific industrial complex to maintain their homeland"

"'This is God's country here,' an Akwesasne Mohawk woman explained to me as we sat at her kitchen table over cups of coffee.

She stared past me out her kitchen window that overlooks the St. Lawrence River, and the General Motors Central Foundry. She had just been describing how she stood in her front yard and watched men in 'moon suits' work to clean up the industrial site a few years prior.

'They'd come in here in their space suits and take your water, a sample of it. If that's not alarming, then I don't know what is.'

She described how 'we used to play in that dump. We used to go play in it. We would just scavenge in the junk and go sort through it, pick aluminum and stuff like that, play with paint.'"

Elizabeth Hoover reports for Environmental Health News February 21, 2018.