Mythology and history so rarely collide as they did with the actions of Rosa Parks in the winter of 1955. She refused to give up her seat to a white man. The words have been repeated so many times, they may as well be “once upon a time.” And yet, this is no fairy tale. Parks really was arrested, convicted, and fined for sitting on a bus. She really was living in a time when skin colour officially dictated social station. She really was the symbol of a movement that would cast its shadow over the rest of the 20th century.
With Parks’s passing on October 24th, the civil rights movement was again making headlines-albeit in obituary form. The sombre but glowing reports lauded her courage and spirit, and gave capsule summaries of the progress our culture has made. The implicit self-congratulatory tone, the “look how far we’ve come”-ness oozed from between the lines. But if you flipped another few pages through the front section, you would not have lost the irony of civil rights’ place in the obits.
On the same day, irrepressibly nauseating photographs of the Kashechewan First Nation reserve gave blaring testament to the threatened demise of civil rights. The water at the site near James Bay is contaminated with E. coli as a result of its ill-maintained water treatment plant. Newspapers printed images of babies with pus-filled skin burns and writhing impetigo, toilets overflowing with unidentified gunk, and stovetops cluttered with the pots needed ever since the boil-water orders for the region went into effect some five years.
This dire situation in Kashechewan is a result of jurisdictional haggling. Although the Ontario government has been aware of the water treatment issues since 2003, MP David Ramsay, the minister of natural resources who also oversees provincial native affairs, and federal Indian Affairs Minister Andy Scott have been locked in a rally-for-serve. Prime Minister Martin has called the issue “worrisome,” and his government sent 1,500 18-litre bottles of water to the community per day. Dalton McGuinty said his government was ready and willing to help, it’s just that the PM hadn’t asked. The grand chief responsible for the area, in the meantime, deemed conditions on the reserve to be “Third World.”
Reserve. It’s an interesting concept in this story. Native reserve, water reserve, reserving our civil rights. As it stands in 2005, we haven’t been able to reserve the integrity of any of these things.
Civil rights are due to every citizen of a country. Despite competing debates over exactly what rights constitute the canon, it goes without saying that clean water would number among the top three no matter what your conception of the social contract. The citizens who live on the Kashechewan reserve have effectively taken a trip back in time, and are living in the same kind of biased world Rosa Parks acted out against.
On Tuesday evening the province of Ontario declared Kashechewan to be in a state of emergency, and ordered its evacuation. After a noon-time phone call from Andy Scott, David Ramsay sorted out the province’s duty to act and the country’s duty to put up the cash. How quickly the evacuation is handled, to what alternate conditions the community is moved, and how their home in Kashechewan is dealt with is yet to be seen. Why this lunch-hour chat didn’t happen earlier will likely remain a mystery.
Still, congratulations to both levels of government for finally working together. It’s time to stop the haggling, the finger-pointing, the side-stepping, and the feeble water-sending. Kashechewan needs to reclaim the basic human rights that the story of Rosa Parks has come to represent in our common mythology.
