- by Anne Finlay-Stewart, Editor

The climate, the water, the fish and the future were the topics of discussion. A panel of members of the Bagida-waad Alliance were taking questions and sharing ideas with interested community members Sunday evening at the Owen Sound Farmers' Market.

Andrew Akiwenzie, whose family has an "artisan" fishery at Neyaashiinigmiing (Cape Croker), commercial fisherman Guy Nadjiwon, retired scientist John Anderson and Victoria Serda, climate change educator, made up the panel.

Anderson said that the data is clear – our region has seen the effect of climate change by becoming steadily warmer and wetter decade over decade since the 1960s. On the water, surface water has been warming, ice cover has diminished, and winds have picked up.

Nadjiwon said they could once go out and come back safely in small boats, but now even in his steel-hulled tug there are fewer safe fishing days because of the wind. The winds used to die down in January when the lake froze until May, but no more.
Invasive zebra mussels clean the water so that sunlight penetrates 50 feet down, he said, and green moss algae grow not only on the shoreline, but 40 feet out, covering nets in green slime.
Bottom feeding fish are almost gone, and since the introduction of a hybridized lake trout, Nadjiwon says, the whitefish do not appear to be schooling, but are spread thinly around the lake. He spends every day he can on the water, and he wants to share what he sees.

Akiwenzie spoke of his childhood, before the water line went in at his grandmother's home, when he carried 5 gallon buckets of clean water from the bay up to to the house. He fished with family as a young man, and then did many jobs from planting trees in the packed clay of the then-new Erin Mills subdivisions to working for Hydro to being on temporary crews at Dow Chemical in Sarnia. At this last job he remembers pointing out to his supervisor that raw chemical effluent was being dumped into the St. Clair River and being told "Do you want this job? I can get a replacement here in twenty minutes."

He didn't want to be adding to the world's burden, so he returned to his community to be a fisherman. Watching a bear on shore run off with a fish before it could be dinner for a bald eagle – this was the environment he wanted to work in. He sees fishing not as a job, but as a living, and he wants to ensure that young people have the opportunity to have that lifestyle if they choose.

Serda said the purpose of the Bagida-waad Alliance is to gather both the scientific information and the knowledge and skills of the Indigenous community; to create the intersection of the stories of the elders with the needs of the youth to help create their future.

It is a collaborative project, and very open to ideas and partnerships.
"If the public is informed by the science and what we are seeing from the water, maybe they'll be able to do something together," said Akiwenzie, "Small groups in all communities, like-minded people, taking care of what is around us."

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