THE NORTHERN FRONT

In Ontario's hinterlands, a battle is brewing between First Nations, prospectors and the provincial government over a multi-billion-dollar motherlode of metals. Inside the fight for the Ring of Fire.

- Laura Trethewey

Coleen Moonias grew up in the 1980s in Lansdowne House, a tiny Ojibwe community in northwestern Ontario. In winter, when the temperature plunged to 50 below zero, the interior walls of her home glittered with frost. Her parents hung blankets as insulation. In summer she foraged with her cousins for berries, fending off swarms of mosquitoes that rose from the surrounding peatlands. The nearest neighbouring community was nearly 100 kilometres away; Coleen's entire world was this small place bound by blood and marriage. But Lansdowne House was sinking into Attawapiskat Lake, and so, when Coleen was eight years old, its residents moved to a new location nearby, which became Neskantaga First Nation, home to about 400 people. During the move, Coleen flew to Thunder Bay to stay with her grandmother, where she saw white people and heard English for the first time. She even saw her first porcelain toilet bowl, which made a big impression on her.

In Neskantaga, her family lived in an insulated house, complete with electricity and plumbing. But as she got older, the contrast between her life and life in the south nagged at Coleen. In Neskantaga, people had to fight fires at the dump with buckets of water. Why didn't they have their own fire truck? Why wasn't there a high school, so families wouldn't have to relocate or separate so their kids could be educated? And why couldn't she drink the water? The community has been on a boil-water advisory for nearly 30 years, the longest in Canada; pallets of bottled water are flown in every week and stacked in living rooms and offices around the reserve. It creates the feeling of a neverending crisis, as though a hurricane swept through years ago and never left.