American Great Lakes: so big, but so fragile

For the Anishinaabe, hunting has never been a sport, and they never take life lightly. That's why Tom Morrisseau Borg felt a mixture of gratitude, admiration and humility when the great bull moose approached him: the animal offered itself, a gift of life and meat from the forest that the traditional Anishinaabe trapper would share with his family and friends. Borg grew up near Lake Nipigon in western Ontario in a home with no electricity or running water. The Anishinaabe have fished, hunted and set traps in the area for centuries. After slaughtering the moose, Borg sprinkled it with tobacco and muttered prayers of thanks, as his grandfather had taught him.

Borg cut up the carcass to take home. But when he wanted to extract the liver, which should have been firm and consistent, it liquefied into a bloody, viscous magma that slipped between his fingers. Borg has since discovered similarly diseased livers in several animals. “I find them in rabbits, beavers, ruffed grouse [distant cousins ​​of partridges]. My favorite piece in the rabbit was the rib cage, along with the heart and liver. But we don't eat it anymore.

Borg believes herbicide spraying by forestry companies is harmful to animals living in the Lake Nipigon watershed: “Young shoots are the moose's favorite food. They thrive on them. At least that's what they were doing before the lake was poisoned. “That's how it goes. The herbicides flow into the streams, to the lodges of the beavers. That's why their insides are so messed up. »

“It pains me to see all this damage, this disruption. All the changes I've seen in nature over the past 15 years...I didn't think changes could happen so quickly,” Borg concluded on a cool summer evening at his home in Nipigon.

With graying hair, Tom Morriseau Borg is slender and fit, the result of a lifetime of hard work, spent maintaining gas lines while setting traps. In the distance, you can hear the occasional rumble of a truck on the Trans-Canada Highway.

Borg built his house with his wife and two sons among tall evergreens thirty-three years ago. It overlooks the Nipigon River, an outlet of the lake of the same name, which covers approximately 4,850 ^km² . But, on a map, it looks like a pond next to the expanse where it empties: Lake Superior, the largest of the five Great Lakes, named Anishinaabewi-gichigami (“Great Lake of the Anishinabe”) by the people of Borg .