Filters offer a temporary source of clean water on Six Nations reserve

It’s installation day at Beverley Maracle’s house at Six Nations of the Grand River.

A water man has arrived with a water filter, a small blue and white cylinder, only a few inches long. As it’s attached to her kitchen tap, her need to buy drinking water evaporates.

“Now I don’t have to worry about having to get jugs, or running out of water from the jugs,” Maracle says.

Behind her, a large blue plastic jug sits on the kitchen counter. Until today, it was her primary source of potable water. For Maracle and most of her neighbours on the reserve, access to clean drinking water isn’t easy to come by.

Six Nations of the Grand River is in southern Ontario, a short drive from Hamilton. Reserve residents face a burden in accessing clean water that their neighbours in the city do not: having to directly finance their home’s hook up to the water system.

As a result, nearly 10 years after a multi-million dollar treatment plant was installed on the reserve, only 17 per cent of homes have access to the water it purifies.

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The Dreamcatcher Foundation, partnering with Healthy First Nations, is going house-by-house to distribute temporary filters. Though they can last for more than a decade, they’re meant to be a temporary solution until homes can one day be connected to the plant.

Until then, much of the community stores water in cisterns or wells. Both sources can be contaminated, so residents also buy bottled drinking water. Chief Mark Hill estimates a single household can spend $2,500 on water a year.

Maracle, 50, has lived in her home for 25 years. She draws water for household chores from a cistern in her yard.

“It’s still not as clean as it could be,” she notes. “One time, I got a cut that got infected because the cistern was dirty.”

She tells CityNews that her first experience having running water at home was as a teen.

“My homestead, we didn’t even have running water, so we didn’t have running water until I turned about 17. So before that, we had to boil water and put it in the tub for drinking water,” she explained.

A short drive away, Terri Morrow also lives on the reserve.

At her home, Morrow says they use a filter on their fridge and a water cooler that contains spring water. They also use a cistern that holds the family’s bath water.

“If there is some sort of contamination in the water, I’m basically bathing my children, myself, my daughter in that and that’s also concerning,” shared Morrow.

Morrow’s home is less than a 10-minute drive from the reserve’s water treatment plant. About three years ago when the house was being built, she realized there was no feasible option for her to be on the water line.

“It would have cost me well over $1,700 just to get a line under that road up there and then to my home,” she explained, gesturing to the road at the foot of her driveway. Had she gone ahead, she says there was also no guarantee at the time that water would make it there from the plant.

A registered dietitian and healthcare researcher, she recently opted to receive a filtration bucket from the foundation partners. She says it’s useful for the group programs she runs for community members from her property.

“There’s no running water in the tiny house that I have outside my home, so I thought the bucket would be a good alternative for that space,” she explained.

Morrow says she wants to see data-backed decisions, and results for the community, come out of the filter program, which is still in its early days.

“We can think about systemically how we can really make the greatest long-term impact, not financial-limited impact, because that’s what’s going to keep happening and then we don’t make any changes at all,” she said.

The community has steadily been working to expand water system access over the past decade, partnering with neighbouring municipalities and the federal government on solutions. However, nine years later, just 508 homes are connected to the plant.

“There’s no reason that Caledonia has safe drinking water and they’re like, five minutes [away]. You could drive and you’re there, but I don’t have water here in my home,” shared Morrow. “It’s unacceptable for that to be happening today.”

Under its water servicing strategy, this year the reserve is subsidizing eligible residents’ connections, at a cost of $80 million to the community. Officials estimate another phase of the strategy, for homes on the southern portion of the reserve, would cost $75 million.

“Different circumstances will define the cost,” said Hill. “What we’re seeing from just our phase one range: from $4,000 to $15,000 per home. And that’s just the connection.”

Hill estimates it will cost close to $200 million to connect all the 2,500 remaining homes on the reserve to the water treatment plant. The reserve, in its water strategy, notes that there isn’t “stable and predictable” federal support for pipeline expansion, leaving the community to apply for annual funding from local trusts.

In a statement, the office of Indigenous Services Minister Patty Hajdu said she “remains in regular communication with Six Nations of the Grand River as we work in partnership to find long-term solutions to ensure access to clean drinking water in their community.”

Despite more than 80 per cent of the reserve without access to drinkable water, Six Nations still better off than 27 other Indigenous communities across Canada, which still have long-term drinking water advisories, more than a year past the federal government’s own deadline for solutions.

The minister’s office also told CityNews the federal government is “making significant investments into community-led infrastructure projects” including operation and maintenance funding for clean drinking water in communities since 2015.

“Most recently, we announced $1.5 billion in the Fall Economic Statement in 2021 to accelerate access to clean drinking water in the short term and ensure stability in the long term.”

Back in Maracle’s kitchen, the filter installer demonstrates its effectiveness using water drawn straight from the Grand River. Inside a small plastic water bottle, the riverwater is murky and brown. He attaches a filter to the mouth of the bottle, and slowly squeezes. The water passes through the device, and lands in a cup, clear.

That afternoon, Maracle was also able to pour her first glass of clean drinking water from her tap.

She raised the glass to her lips. “Tastes good,” she said.

In a new series, CityNews will be talking to Six Nations community leaders, residents and water keeper Autumn Peltier about efforts to get every resident access to clean water and why this issue is proving so hard to solve, Canada-wide.