In my community of Moose Factory, the clean water crisis never really ends

When I visited my reserve, Moose Factory, for the first time since I was two, one of the first things I did was hike through the bushes to a secluded beach along the Moose River. I was later told that the first thing Sixties Scoop adoptees taken from their homelands do is find water. In many Indigenous cultures, water is sacred because it is where life begins, so it makes sense that those who have been displaced — like me — would be drawn to the source. 

It was the summer of 2022, and in the heat of the day, I walked to the Quick Stop gas station to get a slushie. The gentleman behind the counter told me that slushies were unavailable because the community was under a boil water advisory. Anything that required water, including making coffee and cooking food, was shut down until the advisory was lifted. 

When there is a boil water advisory, community members can buy bottled water in Cochrane, Ont., or other southern towns and bring it to the remote reserve by train. However, not everyone has the time or money for the privilege of transporting goods this way. Folks do their best to take care of their community, but accessing clean water this way is an enormous task that can’t always be dealt with individually. 

Moose Factory Island is a Moose Cree First Nation reserve in Northern Ontario on the southern tip of James Bay, home to about 2,500 people. If you have the money, you can reach it by helicopter or charter plane from more southern parts of the province in a few hours. But for most people travelling from further south than Timmins or Cochrane, it’s a two-day trip. Since I live in Toronto, I usually travel to Cochrane by bus or car. On the bus, it’s a 16-hour trip.

From Cochrane, there is one daily train option, a 9 a.m. Polar Bear Express that arrives at 2 p.m. in Moosonee, where water taxis wait on the Moose River to ferry customers to the island. The single train going south leaves Cochrane at 5 p.m. This complicated journey is the only way most Moose Factory residents have to get to and from Kingston, the closest place they can access complex medical care. 

In the winter, accessing Moose Factory is more straightforward because an ice road connects James Bay communities to the rest of Ontario, allowing trucks to bring bottled water, fuel and groceries. But in spring and fall, the only method of transporting supplies is by helicopter, so the prices skyrocket. A case of bottled water in a remote community like mine can cost close to $40, while in a city like Toronto the same case of water would cost less than three dollars.

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In 2015, former prime minister Justin Trudeau promised to end long-term boil water advisories in First Nations communities by March 2021. The Canadian government defines a “long-term” boil water advisory as one lasting more than a year. They’re behind on this goal: as of March 2025, there are still 35 long-term advisories remaining, mostly in Ontario. 

Even that number downplays the extent of the problem across the country. These long-term advisories numbers exclude some reserves in British Columbia, which were taken off of the federal list when responsibility for monitoring was transferred to the First Nations Health Authority, a unique authority which oversees Indigenous health programs and services in the province.

When I looked up the reserves on the list to be addressed, I was stunned that Moose Factory was not on it. I learned that reserves that only experience “temporary” boil water advisories — even if they last days, weeks or months — aren’t included in the federal promise. These temporary interruptions to clean water systems regularly occur in isolated northern Ontario nations like Attawapiskat, where Charles Hookimaw filed a 500-page human rights complaint to the United Nations last year, claiming that the water in the community hasn’t been safe to drink since the 1980s. In the winter, Attawapiskat residents like Hookimaw haul water across the frozen ground on a sled when tap water is dangerous to consume. 

For years, Moose Factory has been waiting for improvements to the water system, which could finally give the community something most city dwellers take for granted: clean drinking water all year long. But when I visited last summer, I learned that a solution isn’t happening any time soon.

Lack of clean water in Indigenous communities is a legacy of Canada’s history of erasure

My birth mother is Moose Cree from Moose Factory, and my birth father is English; his family settled in North Bay, Ont., in the 1920s. I was born in Moose Factory but spent my childhood bouncing between foster homes, an adoptive home and each of my parents. In one Catholic foster home, I learned how to be a well-behaved little girl so that a family would want to adopt me.

I didn’t know then that I was part of the Sixties Scoop, one of more than 20,000 Indigenous children removed from their homes and placed with non-Indigenous families from 1951 to 1991. While the event was coined the Sixties Scoop because most children were removed at the height of the residential schools, elders recount Indigenous children being separated from their families as early as the 1930s.

The practice of removing Indigenous children from their birth families hasn’t ended and is now known as the Millennium Scoop. As of 2021, over 50 per cent of children in the foster system in Canada are Indigenous, even though they make up less than eight per cent of children under 14. These events continued the project of residential schools that saw Indigenous children removed from their families to assimilate them into Canadian culture. Many of the children faced unspeakable abuse. Even if there was no outright physical and sexual abuse, the cultures and languages were stolen, causing fractures in Indigenous communities that are still healing. 

The reasons given to justify the removal of children like me are the result of colonial harms. Indigenous parents are accused of neglect for having empty refrigerators, even if they feed their children from the land. Some struggle with substance abuse due to trauma. Instead of helping Indigenous parents put food on the table or recover from addiction, Canada takes their children away. 

When I was four years old, I was adopted: though one of my adoptive parents was a non-Indigenous man, I had the good fortune of having an Anishinaabe woman from Wiikwemkoong as my adoptive mother. Her older sister cherished me dearly, and when I ended up in a group home at 12, my aunt got a job there. She made sure to raise me with Anishinaabe values, which are kin to Swampy Cree traditions. For that, I am grateful because many Indigenous adoptees did not have that privilege. 

Another strategy of forcible assimilation used by the government was to create reserves to dispossess Indigenous people of their land. Many First Nations reserves are remote and cut off from transportation infrastructure, leaving residents without basic necessities such as clean water.

Indigenous communities like Attawapiskat and Moose Cree work hard to ensure the survival of their language, cultures and land. Still, when a community constantly deals with crises like contaminated water, it slows progress and prevents healing.

No timeline for planned upgrade to Moose Factory water system, which will be too little, too late 

I travelled to Moose Factory this past August for the Gathering of Our People. The annual event sees all the Cree folks around James Bay come together to celebrate their heritage by dancing at a powwow, heading up the river for sundance and learning the language. Vendors sell traditional crafts like dream catchers and beaded jewellery. Residents sell homemade food during the day and into the evening, when the hockey arena transforms into a concert venue. This past summer, even my uncle Emmett, who doesn’t like crowds, made his way to the arena to watch Los Lobos and Tom Cochrane.

During the shows, the stage glows with multicoloured spotlights operated by Jay Monture, who wears many hats in the community, including repairing the water infrastructure. He told me one cause of boil water advisories is that old plastic pipes crack in cold weather. 

All the schools and public buildings are affected by low water pressure and frozen water pipes, which causes temporary closures, disrupted programs and services and postponed special events, according to Monture. Often when he digs up the earth to get to the leaks caused by frozen pipes, dirt gets in the lines, causing a boil water advisory. Fixing one problem causes another, and the cycle is never-ending. And because Moose Factory does not have adequate access to water for its residents’ needs, the nation has not built more housing despite population growth. 

I told Monture I was headed to the Quick Stop, and he offered me a ride. He showed me a pile of pipes meant to build an extension for the existing treatment plant. But the timeline for that project remains a mystery. Moose Cree First Nation’s water treatment systems have been operating beyond capacity since at least 2015. In 2019, the nation’s chief and council said building an extension to the existing plant is “the number one priority.” 

In 2022, the cost of upgrading the existing water treatment plant, as well as the sewage lagoon, was projected at $51 million, with funding provided by Indigenous Services Canada and the Canada Infrastructure Program.

However, it doesn’t seem as if anything concrete has happened since. The last available public update, from March 2024, is an environmental assessment by Indigenous Services Canada, Transport Canada and Infrastructure Canada, which concluded the project was not expected to have adverse environmental effects. Though construction to extend the water system was supposed to be completed in November 2024, as of April 2025, there were no updates on the status of the water treatment plant upgrades, and construction has not yet begun. Moose Cree First Nation did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the status of the water treatment plant.  

Even once it’s completed, the water filter extension will only help so much. In 2021, the nation’s then director of public works, Abel Wapachee, proposed a new system altogether — but construction wouldn’t start until the extension to the existing plant is complete. 

An upgrade is literally a downstream solution, a last-ditch effort for a problem that has become unavoidably bad. One needs to travel upstream to look for the cause of the issue.

Hunters and fishers witness impacts of contamination up close

Along with contaminated pipes, Moose Factory Cree Nation faces other challenges with its water. Phil Sutherland, who grew up with my family in Moose Factory, pointed out that the Moose River is downstream of several hydroelectric dams and power stations that create silt and environmental contamination. He told me about a study on fish in the rivers that found high levels of mercury.

Ron Spencer, the director of lands and resources for Moose Cree, sent me the report for the study, done in 2024, which was conducted in collaboration with community members, researchers from Trent University and Camp Onakawana, which brings people together for Cree cultural activities on the Abitibi River, a tributary of the Moose River. 

The report gathered stories from Elders and fishers, who shared changes they had noticed in aquatic wildlife, such as skin colour and deformities. The recommendations from the report stated that vulnerable populations, such as pregnant women and people under 40.8 kilograms, should avoid eating walleye from Moose River Crossing, since the predatory fish eat other fish with mercury in them. Although the report recommended eating non-predatory fish such as whitefish and trout, it noted the toxins have already made their way into the ecosystem through the water.

Hunters of the moose that drink from the Moose River also observed alarming signs of environmental contamination. One told the researchers, “[The moose] have these bunch of little sores inside their stomach, like black cysts all over inside. It’s kind of scary when you see it.”

Lindy Linklater, the director of administration and communications at Moose Cree First Nation, told me part of the Moose River is so polluted that where it meets the French River, you can see the divide between where the water is safe to drink and where it has become contaminated. I head out with my uncle on a boat to see for myself — on our way, we saw some masko (bears), and he pulled up as close as possible to take photos.

After about an hour, we reached the spot that Linklater was referring to, and it was shocking to see the change in the water. I was reminded of my last trip, in 2022, when I tried to get footage of fish; the water was so murky that the camera couldn’t pick anything out. 

Jennifer Simard, the nation’s director of Ontario Power Generation relations, told me that the visible brown pollution in the Moose and Metagami Rivers is from erosion. She said the river banks are unstable, primarily from hydroelectric dams, but also because of construction and other human activity.  The French River has never had a hydroelectric dam, and no roads lead to it, so the waters are clear, she said. There are no published studies, but Simard creates updates that can be referred to on these topics, part of her work to preserve the French River.  

Sutherland said Moose Factory used to be “God’s Country,” when the land was untouched and the water was safe to drink. The reserve is still close to heaven, a stunning place to visit, and the land many call home. Like many other reserves, Moose Factory deserves to return to the state where people don’t have to question the water they drink so that many generations to come can rebuild their culture and thrive on the land. 

Updated on April 16, 2025 at 10:25 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the timeframe of the Sixties Scoop, which includes children removed from their homes between 1951 and 1991.