THE ABENAKI NATION, VT-Linking Sick Fish to High Mercury Levels

The Abenaki Nation, based in northwestern Vermont, asked for our help to establish a river monitoring program on the Missisquoi River, a key tributary to Lake Champlain. When we guided the tribe through our standard exercise to elicit specific monitoring questions, their questions took us by surprise:

“We want to know if the PCBs and mercury in the river are causing the sores on our fish”

“We want to know if eating those fish are causing the incidence of cancer in our community”

These were excellent questions, which our monitoring tools at the time were ill-equipped to handle. We quickly realized that the concerns of the Abenaki were not unique and that we needed to expand our monitoring program and to develop new tools that could help communities answer such questions.

That began our Healthy Waters, Healthy Communities Program.

We continued our work with the Abenaki nation to help them answer their environmental health questions. Our efforts were picked up by NPR, which did a special on the project on the NPR show Living on Earth. A Vermont-based, EPA certified laboratory heard the story and offered to help. We took them up on their offer and over the course of a year, processed many water samples, sediment samples and fish samples for mercury. We worked with the Abenaki nation to conduct a public health survey. The work demonstrated that fish consumed by tribal members from local rivers did indeed contain dangerous levels of mercury.

After our work was completed, the Mercury Policy Project used our data and numerous other examples to pass Vermont’s first-in-the-nation labeling law for products containing mercury.