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By Kevin S. Minoli
"The walleye is a good fish."
At least that’s what Winona LaDuke said last week. She explained that walleye were the salmon of the White Earth Reservation in Northern Minnesota, where she serves as a school principal.
The native people have relied on the walleye as their sustenance for generations, grilling, frying, smoking, freezing, and storing their catch to last throughout the year. So when the state environmental department set consumption limits a few years back, it struck at the heart of the reservation’s survival.
The state said that a healthy adult could consume one walleye a week, while a child should only eat one a month––a small fraction of what people are accustomed to. The fish were poisoned with mercury, and unfit for unmonitored consumption. LaDuke knew it was not just a matter of what she and her children ate in the future. The phenomena of bioaccumulation meant that she and her son carried with them mercury and other metals from the countless walleye they had eaten in the past.
What angered LaDuke was that she saw the state standards as setting an acceptable level of contamination. As long as people could eat one per week and not have an abnormally high risk of cancer, the state was satisfied.
Then LaDuke answered the question that had been swimming in my head: "Environmental racism allowed this to happen to our people."
Of course, I said to myself, this is an environmental justice (EJ) issue. We can slap a Title VI claim based upon the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on whoever is responsible and fix this whole thing in 180 days!
Last summer I had the chance to do EJ work with the Urban League of Portland. I had two seemingly simple tasks: 1) find a legal remedy for community members who had not received dividends from a grant to clean up their neighborhood, and 2) do whatever I could to get them those dividends.
Like any good law student, I did a little research before I rushed into the field. I researched brownfields, federal grants, and litigation strategies, but I also researched the environmental justice movement itself. What I found was a record of community-based organization resembling the civil rights movement, where residents banded together and through political and legal pressure demanded equal protection from environmental laws.
But I also found something I was not expecting––a warning about the pitfalls of making a community movement a legal movement. Luke Cole, one of the foremost scholars and a leading EJ attorney, noted that filing a lawsuit can take the movement out of the hands of citizens and place it in the minds of a few attorneys, damaging the community in the process. Environmental Justice and the EPA: The Brief History of Administrative Complaints Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 9 J. Env. L. & Lit. 309, 319 (1994).
That warning was echoed when I attended an environmental justice conference in Northeast Portland this September. At a session aimed at white individuals in the EJ movement, we were cautioned about rushing into a situation or community with "the solution." True EJ comes from within, and an outsider who insists she has all of the answers because of her training may end up alienating herself from the community she wants to help.
So when I heard that Winona LaDuke, a nationally-recognized environmental justice advocate for Native Americans, was speaking at the Lewis & Clark Symposium on Environmental Affairs, I saw it as an opportunity to learn more about Native communities. But when I got there I found myself falling into the trap I thought I knew how to avoid. When the formal part of the panel concluded and the question and answer period began, I resisted my impulse to share my take on the whole situation, and ask a question instead.
"But it’s not just about your belly, it’s about your soul."
LaDuke explained that there is more involved in preservation than complying with the written law. In fact, according to LaDuke, we all live under two sets of laws: the "White Man’s Law" and the "Natural Law."
Natives growing up at White Earth were taught the intricacies of the Natural Law, learning the story behind every rock and the unwavering deference for elders. At school, we are taught the intricacies of the White Man’s Law, learning the legislative history behind every bill and affording deference to federal agency interpretations.
I realized that before I go rushing in with my solution or my answers, I better spend some time learning how the Natural Law weaves into my White Man’s Law background; any answer must balance the two.
But I have a lot more to learn before I will begin to understand where that balance is.