Lake Erie, Our Kin

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- "Chronicles" was made possible thanks to a community assets gra provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, Spring Hill Senior Living, support by the Department of Edu and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

(bright music) - This is WQLN.

(gentle music) - Fresh water is vital to life, essential to ecosystems, and human civilization alike.

We rely upon fresh water for eve food and drink, work and play, even ceremony.

Between the United States and Ca live five massive bodies of fres we call the Great Lakes.

Lake Erie is the smallest by vol yet provides drinking water to 11 million people.

Together, these inland seas make up the largest body of fresh surface water on Planet The native people of North Ameri lived in harmony with these waters for thousands of years, honoring them as sacred in their laws and daily life.

They shared a reciprocal relationship with the lakes, only taking what they needed and giving back for what was tak European colonization and settlement of these lands forged new, increasingly one-sided relationships with the lakes, and as an extractive industrial society grew up around them, the health of the lakes declined Lake Erie was abused so badly, i In response, governments created environmental laws to police and protect the water, but threats, both old and new, continue to plague Lake Erie and haunt all of us who call it Today, the Great Lakes are home to more than 30 million people, 10% of all people in the United and nearly one third of all people in Canada.

The watershed spans two countrie eight states, two provinces, and more than 20 Native American tribes and nations.

The lakes are also home to unique and diverse wildlife, including over 3,500 plant speci some of which cannot be found anywhere else on Earth.

Lake Erie is called, "The Walleye Fishing Capital of the World," and produces more fish than all of the other Great Lakes combined.

Erie's Presque Isle Peninsula is a critical habitat for migratory and endangered bir Presque Isle is also the most visited state park in Pennsylvania, attracting more than 4 million visitors every year.

It's part of a regional Great Lakes economy that, if considered its own coun would be the third largest economy in the world.

What is Lake Erie to us today, a resource, an attraction, or is it something more?

Can we restore the lake's health and integrity and simultaneously improve our o If so, what kind of relationship will it take?

(gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) To have a good relationship, the parties involved must respec and treat each other well.

In order to treat someone well, you have to understand who they what they like, what they need, how they respond to stress.

This understanding is essential to any healthy relationship including the one we have with the natural world.

- I commune with the lake, I guess you might say.

It's a very inspirational, kind of a muse for me.

- My Benedictine community obviously is a Catholic organiza Water is one of the essential el in any of our rituals.

Water is a blessing.

Water revives the spirit.

- How would you describe your relationship?

- My livelihood depends on Lake Obviously, I'm a professional advocate for Lake Erie, so it's the focus of my attentio for the majority of my week.

I'm not religious, but I have a spiritual connection, I feel like, to water.

I grew up on a lake, and it's calming for me to be around water.

- Water is life.

Love the water, love to be near because once you're born near wa you tend to want to be near wate - Part of this film is about human relationships to And so my question is, how would you describe Lake Erie?

- Lake Erie, being the southernm is the warmest of the lakes.

It's also, by far, the shallowes Every drop of water that enters from Lake St. Clair and exits over Niagara Falls does so within three years.

If you compare that to Lake Superior, it's hundreds of years before that lake would recycle all of its water downstream.

- It regulates our climate.

We have a microclimate that supports one of the largest Concord grape regions and one of the largest viticultural regions in the country, in the world.

- It's an abundant natural resou It provides a majority of the drinking water to the north coast of Pennsylvan but it also provides an economic from boating, to fishing, to rec - It's a neat combination of thi and it's also protective.

The exterior, the lake side is a lot more exposed to wind and weather, whereas the is more sheltered and protected, and that's where these calmer water and stuff is.

So it provides a lot of habitats and niches for different types of things.

- So there's 872 miles of shorel It's the 11th largest freshwater lake in the world.

So on the Western Basin, there's three basins, Western, Central and Eastern, and the Western Basin's average depth is 24 feet.

The Central Basin's average dept and the Eastern Basin is 80.

So you've got warm water habitat, cold water habitat, you've got the fishing, but that's why this is such a great fishery.

- We have 20% of the water of the Great Lakes, but we have roughly 80% of the fish biomass.

- So Lake Erie is a very special but I think one thing that we fo we all live in a watershed, a piece of land that drains into a body of water, so that everything that we do ev impacts that body of water, and we impact it positively, and we impact it negatively.

So what we have to realize is that we have a responsibility to do as much as we can to lessen our impact on this beautiful body of water.

(gentle music) - When I was teaching social stu I used to talk about this tradit or I guess it was passed-down kn from the original Indigenous peo that they called the Erie Indian And they had this legend about how the Presque Isle Peninsula was formed, and they had such an attachment to the lake, they told a story about how the which it does swell up and would swamp their canoes when they were fishing, and inst the Great Spirit that they believed in, Manitou, put his arm down to protect them from the waves and formed the Presque Isle Bay.

(gentle music continues) - The Native people of North Ame have the longest, deepest relationship with the lakes.

In episode six of "Chronicles," we learned about the Erielhonan, or Erie people from whom Lake Erie got its name.

Today, some of the Indigenous people closest to Lake Erie are the Haudenosaunee, which includes the Seneca, who have lived with Lake Erie since time immemorial.

- A cam, take three marker.

(clapper claps) B cam, take three marker.

(clapper claps) C cam, take three marker.

(clapper claps) - John and I are making this program about Lake Erie, and we chose the title "Lake Erie, Our Kin," because we wanna focus, really, we wanna focus on our relationship to the lake, not just the lake as a body of w that we like to swim and fish in Do you have a relationship with Do you spend much time there?

- I do actually.

- Yeah?

- Yeah, I do, my family's from T and my other half of my family's from the Falls, so I have always had a relationship with Lake Ontario, the Niagra River and Lake Erie, It's part of the reason why I wanted to come back.

When I would drive home from Ind between classes or whatever, when I got up to the Cleveland a and I could see Lake Erie in the I kind of felt like home already even though it was five hours ou It is home, we have maintained a relationship with it, but what a lot of people don't r because of colonialism, we have been forced away from water sources, and we are starting to lose that relationship with the waters, and it's very i for us to maintain it, so we don't lose a piece of our culture as well.

- What is the breadth of the anc Haudenosaunee territory and how does that compare to what it is today?

- Melissa, we don't know how big the territory actually really was.

It's quite a big place that they and it goes basically, what we conceive to be of New Yo going around the Great Lakes, going over to the Mississippi and then going down into the Ohi and then the Cumberland, and then back up the Appalachian back into New York state, that's how big it got in 1700.

That was their administrative control at its apex.

- And what is it today?

- What is it today?

They're islands, they're tiny is - So how does that affect the relationship with Lake Erie?

- It affects it a lot actually.

We don't have people visiting th We don't have people going to the shores collecting clay.

We don't have people taking thei just to go swimming in the lake as much anymore.

That connection is being severed And so all of that knowledge that we have held on for thousands of years, it does slowly slip through your hands like sand if we don't hold onto it.

(gentle music continues) - For the Haudenosaunee, the relationship to nature is ro in their original instructions from the Creator.

The instructions state that water is sacred.

It is everyone's responsibility to offer thanks, and neglecting this responsibili has dire consequences.

These principles are outlined in the Haudenosaunee Great Law o According to Joyce Tekahnawiiaks "This great law of the land is not man-made, "but a greater natural law."

"According to the Haudenosaunee teachings," King writes, "water is sacred on Earth, "although contemporary treatment would suggest otherwise."

- We have been able to live with the natural world for thousands of years with a diversity of peoples over and it's only been the last 400 have we lost control of that.

- Have you worked with the Seneca Nation through the DEP?

- In my DEP capacity, I've worked with many tribes and First Nations across the Gre While Pennsylvania doesn't have federally recognized tribes and First Nations, there are specific roles and ven and other governance entities across the Great Lakes.

For instance, the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, that's an international agreemen between the United States and Ca on water quality protections for the Great Lakes.

Inside of that is the Great Lakes Executive Committee and tribes and First Nations are specifically invited to participate in that, and they oversee activities between the two countries in water use agreements, like the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River Basin Compact and Agreement.

There are sessions in which the tribes and First Nations can participate in that process and provide input.

- When it comes to the Great Lak there are many different states and provinces, two countries, that all have uni that are all used to make decisi about what happens to the Great But where we are right now, there is the original law of this land, the oldest law.

Can you tell us a little bit about the Great Law of Peace?

- We don't have dominion over th It's a commons, it's a living commons with agency.

It's all gifts, everything's a g and so you can't even take without giving back.

So we don't even have a belief s in taking just for yourself.

If you take something, you have to give something.

If you hunt something, you don't over hunt it.

If you hunt something, you don't hunt the first thing y And so we use these simple laws to ensure that the commons exist for everyone, and that's what the Great Law of is to ensure that we all have pe so we can all use the gifts of E (water rippling) - How has the lake changed over - Well, the other thing I though was back in the 70s when I first came here, they had a parody commercial on Saturday Night Live that was supposed to be for Lake Erie Water.

This is before bottled water and everything else.

- And when I want mineral water, I keep it simple, and I keep it I drink Swill, the water that's dredged from Lake Erie.

Nothing's added to Swill.

It comes straight... - It used the theme from Heinz's of slow anticipation as they pou what looked like Lake Erie water (bright music) ♪ Anticipation ♪ (audience laughing) ♪ Anticipation ♪ (audience clapping) ♪ It's making me wait ♪ (gentle music) - It had such a bad reputation.

It was considered a dead lake in the mid 70s.

- Why was that?

- Well, there was so much industrial pollution and runoff and chemical pollutio and there was Hammermill and Erie Coke Works, and there were several things that were right along the lake that just discharged directly into the lake.

- Hmm, so we were a joke, Lake Erie was a joke.

- It really was, it was a joke, but it wasn't.

- So did all of those events, did that lead to some change?

Did we clean up the lake from th - Well, it was a very slow proce I think it's when a lot of these ecological groups formed and began trying to do something end of the 70s into the 80s, but there was such an industrial base here in Erie that it was a long time before things like coke plants and paper mills and things like that really supplied the backbone of business to the Erie area, and they were given the priority.

- Every day I was in the water.

Early on, I swam in the suds of Hammermill Paper Company and used to body surf among all the soap suds.

- Swimming in soap suds... - Like this orange-yellow soap s that just billowed onto the shor And you know, as kids we didn't know any better.

- I heard you used to work at Ha - Yes, I did.

- Can you talk a little bit about that, what that was like?

- I worked at Hammermill for about seven years.

I worked on the paper machines.

I was a fifth hand, fourth hand, third hand, back tinder trainee on the paper machines themselves, pretty dirty work, pretty manual, very labor intensive.

International Paper bought them out in 2002, moved 'em out of town.

- Did Hammermill have an effect on the lake?

- They did, yeah, for many years they were operating.

Well, I told you about the soap suds I used to swim through.

Well, that's all cleaned up and of course, gone away.

But the lake shore is having to rejuvenate itself from that.

They're just now starting to do of the in-ground pollution that occurred over there.

- So Hammermill did have an effect on the environment here.

What effect did it have on the c - Well, it meant a lot of good jobs, a lot of union jobs, and there wasn't much thought at that time, just starting to percolate up, and that was in 1971.

We were just starting to believe maybe we had to pay attention to those kinds of things.

We want business, we want jobs, but how does it affect our envir how does it affect our lake?

So we have to be careful.

- In the 1980s, we had this big to zero discharge into the Great We're still working towards zero discharge.

- Another concern is zero discha of persistent toxic chemicals into Lake Erie.

A new federal program asks indus to eliminate use of many toxic chemicals, except chlorine.

- Chlorine, for instance, was a target this summer of the Greenpeace campaign when they stopped in Erie, and chlorine discharges, in part from pulp and paper mills, who, in spite of technologies that are chlorine-free, still insist on using chlorine.

- We'd like to talk about soluti and we've come to ask you to stop dumping chlorine... (gentle music continues) - If you look at Erie Coke from an aerial view, you see this big black spot on the landscape.

- What did Erie Coke produce?

- Erie Coke produced coke, which is a product that's needed in the steel industry, so it's a very dirty process.

You start with coal and then change it to coke.

- Walk us through the formation, specifically of HECA.

What does HECA stand for and what were your goals and objectives for HECA?

- HECA is Hold Erie Coke Account Erie Coke had violation after vi for many, many years.

But I guess in 2018, we just got to the point where we have to do something about this plant, because they were just way out o and we weren't satisfied that the Department of Environmental Protection was being forceful enough with the company.

The intent of the organization was to bring Erie Coke into compliance, not to close it.

Our goal was to motivate citizen so that anytime people noticed something funky coming out of a or there was an odor that was un we gave them a number to call at There were more fines placed against Erie Coke, but they never would really sit and work with the group, and so we just kept pushing.

Then all of a sudden, December o I think it was like a week before Christmas, they locked the doors.

They did not notify their employ They didn't notify DEP.

- 37 people outta work today.

- They just came in towards the end of the shift, just told us we're relieved from our duties.

- Can you imagine showing up at at 6:00 this morning, and you don't have a job?

We're a week away from Christmas and they have nothing at this po - In 2020, the DEP asked the EPA the Environmental Protection Age to take over the cleanup.

- It's taken more than a year just to remove the immediate threats from the site.

- Crews are still trying to repair the site.

Just how badly was that waterfront land polluted?

- Mercury-laden water, asbestos-covered pipes, and corrosive cancer-causing che left behind in the company's lab Local activists called for two t accountability and answers.

- I wanna see it cleaned up, and I want assurance that there isn't some lingering contamination on the site that's slowly leaking into Lake - At this point, Erie Coke is no for any part of this cleanup.

There's still an ongoing criminal investigation.

- And a federal indictment, tampering with monitoring device to violate the Federal Clean Air - It's just amazing that it star as a group of six or seven concerned citizens, and it's been citizen action that has driven this whole proce - Yeah, this is really a story of what citizen action can do.

- This company had a number of v that they weren't addressing- - Correct.

- And then they closed shop.

Does community consent play into any of these decisions about industries like this locating in communities?

If we're stuck with the bills, shouldn't consent be a part of the process?

- Consent is essential, and there are people, especially all around the Great that are fighting for those issues right now.

(gentle music continues) - SONS is an acronym for Save Our Native Species.

We're an organization that was formed in 1981 because of the dismal situation that the fishery of Lake Erie had gotten to.

Things like native fish were starting to diminish, pollution, and overfishing.

So one of the first things thing is advocate the lowering of the limits on the fish, both commercial and sport fishin The city had a fish hatchery from middle 1800s all the way into the 1960s, and the Fish Commission took it and moved their operation down to Lionsville, so we kind of felt that maybe that was part of it.

Maybe we weren't stocking enough fish in the lake.

So again, we lobbied, and we were able to receive funding, and we constructed a fish hatche Since its operation, the hatchery's probably stocked a hundred million walleye and pe through the Prescott Bay.

We also raised some species of trout over the years.

Right now, we do walleye, perch, and brown trout.

Right now, our walleye populatio at the largest it's ever been and there are, every day, hundreds and hundreds of walleye being harvested by hook and line fishermen.

(gentle music continues) - Two years ago, I decided I'm not going to shut up anymore.

And then, the pandemic happened, and I said, "(beep) it, things are a mess."

- I think too many people take our lake for granted.

In the 70s, when things were so then we had to do something, we have to do something, but now it looks so good, and we forget about it.

- So a lot of the visible pollut that Lake Erie used to be known when it was called the Dead Lake, has been cleaned up.

But a lot of the issues that we see below the surface are complicated and not as visib but still just as important to t - Lake Erie recovered the last time, kind of miraculously, but it took policy and changes, source reductions.

- What types of considerations will agriculture have if they cannot receive water, where will they move to?

- There are 180 invasive species in the Great Lakes.

I believe the biomass of the invasive species is greater than the native speci - Well, a big concern in Lake Erie today is plastics.

There's more plastic in the lakes and ocean than there are fish.

- Nutrients going to the lake from fertilizers.

- The algae, the livestock, definitely the manure.

- You're talking about communica between all of these entities.

- Any industry that is coming into a community, especially today, we need to kno are they gonna be a good community neighbor?

- As new industries, they come into this area and want to establish themselves along the lake, what is going to be their environmental impact?

- And if we were able, just to g to that simple sentence of, "Water is sacred," we would have to start thinking how are the ways that we treat water in terrible ways, non-sacred ways, and very quickly, we can think about what corporations are dumping through their waste and I think the conversation would quickly change.

(gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - "Chronicles" was made possible thanks to a community assets gra provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, Spring Hill Senior Living, support by the Department of Edu and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

(bright music) - We question and learn.