Statement of Tom Goldtooth, IEN Director

TOM GOLDTOOTH,COORDINATOR
INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENTAL NETWORK

Within our indigenous communities of North America, we find that definitely we are at a higher risk when it comes to the impacts of POPs, especially those that are in the colder climates where we're finding that the air pathways bring those toxic pollutants into our communities. And it's mostly a serious issue-for those populations that still maintain a subsistence culture, a land-based culture.

And we find that even with our communities, when we know that fish is contaminated, when we know that our food chain and our medicinal plants are contaminated, that it is not as simple as to issue a consumption advisory notice, that it is a form of genocide and ethnicide to our indigenous peoples. Because it's not as simple to tell our people not to consume this contaminated fish, because we have a very deep spiritual relationship to the land, to the ecosystem, to the fish nation, the plant nation. And when you disconnect us from that to where we cannot practice our traditional heritage, our spiritual ways by consuming the fish, that it is a spiritual genocide that takes place, a spiritual death. So in many of our communities as we're continuing to collect data that our fish do have high levels of Persistent Organic Pollutants in their systems, that our people are still continuing to consume the fish knowing that we will have high levels of these toxics in our bodies, and we do now.

Right down south of us, St. Regis Mohawk did a breast milk study of the women, and they have high levels of PCB in their breast milk. But a lot of the mothers are continuing to breast feed their children because that's part of the traditional teaching, the natural laws as we call them, that were handed down to us by our ancestors that we have to maintain.

And even the fish in the Columbia River in Western states is contaminated, and they are still continuing to eat this fish, because they have a reciprocal relationship, a spiritual relationship to the fish nation. These things have to be taken into consideration, that we have to stop definitely the production of Persistent Organic Pollutants and eliminate it throughout the world.