Do You Know Who Owns Your Water?

The Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force (HETF) was invited to attend a Great Lakes Gathering at Blue Mountain Lake and it was quite an eye opening experience. Did you know that the Great lakes could be bought and sold to the highest bidder. As a Haudenosaunee person, you would think this could never happen. With the budget crisis and governments at all levels strapped for cash to balance their budgets, some are looking towards the fresh water of the Great Lakes to bail them out.

Different organizations on both sides of the Great lakes that have been working on opposing the privatization of the Great lakes and declare this natural resource as a Common, came together: On the Commons, Council of Canadians, Food and Water Watch, First Nations Peoples, and other people that have been working on this same cause. The theme of the gathering was set from the beginning, how do we take the Great Lakes back from the greedy corporations and put it back in the hands of the people? The Governments are thinking that our fresh drinking water is better off in the hands of the Corporations. We need to stand up and prove them wrong.

With the shortage of fresh drinking water, bottle corporations are buying up fresh water resources all over the world. These Corporations are targeting countries whose Governments are corrupt and would be willing to sell anything for money. One example, a bottle corporation was successful in retaining rights to extract water from a river in Bolivia. Now the Indigenous peoples that live in that area have to pay to drink the water that was once free. Now the river is drying up and the villagers don’t have any water to use on their crops. They are using this as a test case, if they can do it there, then they can do it to the Great lakes.

We did talk about successes over the years. Site 41, in Georgian Bay, 5 Anishnabe women elders were able to fight back against bottle corporation to extract water out of Georgian Bay. They were able to get the people to think of the Georgian Bay as a Common and link it to Lake Ontario as a whole to get more people on board and to get the Government to not grant the contract. If you’re not paying attention, they will take the water right from underneath us. The Nestle Corporation was trying to extract water from Lake Michigan, but grassroots people organized in the area, and were able to defeat the Corporation in Court. This was a short term victory, because the Corporation already appealed saying their rights were violated. What about the rights of the people?

Just recently, The UN General Assembly declared fresh drinking water as a Human Right. All people living on this planet have a right to water. This will be added to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was adopted by the UN general Assembly in 1948. Hopefully this can take the wind out of the sails of the Corporations. We as a people, have to pay particular attention to this issue and pay particular attention to what is happening in our own back yard.

These corporations are forever vigilant to gain control of our fresh drinking water. They will lie, cheat, steal, and do anything to get control and keep getting us to fight amongst each other so we can never rise up and stop them. We need to reach out to all the communities in the Great Lakes, tear down the barriers, and develop a Doctrine that declares the whole Great lakes as a Common and protected it for the people as a whole. We all have a stake in this for the future generations to continue. If we don’t stand together, then we could see our Great Lakes being sold on the stock market as a commodity, then it will be too late.

Indigenous Peoples across the Great Lakes have different view of the Commons than non-Indigenous communities. We never gave up our rights to the Great Lakes. We view our treaties as never giving up the land and the natural resources, but as shared agreements on how we are going to live on this land together to protect the natural resources for the future generations, because they don’t belong to us , they belong to the future generations. In the future we plan to have our own forum and invite all the Indigenous communities surrounding the Great Lakes to come together to see how we can better protect the Great Lakes from disappearing from the future generations.

For those people that want to learn more about this issue and want to help can visit, http://www.ourwatercommons.org or http://www.canadians.org.