Native Americans in Ontario are living with dried up, contaminated wells and no running water, while Nestle extracts nearly a million gallons of water a day from their reservation.

Twice a week, Iokarenhtha Thomas and her husband grab jugs, pails, and whatever other containers they can find, and drive 5 miles to the nearest public water tap so they can cook, clean and bathe.

The water isn’t potable though, so once a week they also drive 6 miles to the nearest town to buy bottled drinking water.

A university student and mother of 5, Thomas lives at Six Nations of the Grand River indigenous reserve. She’s been without running water since age 16. Her children have never known what its like to have a shower, bath or toilet.

Meanwhile Nestlé extracts up to a million gallons of fresh, sparkling water a day from a well on her peoples’ treaty land.

“When my husband isn’t here, it makes it difficult to do the dishes or anything because I don’t have the strength to carry all the jugs of water,” Thomas told The Guardian.

Each container of store-bought bottled water weighs more than 40 pounds.

A little over a year ago, she tried supplementing with rainwater collected from her rooftop, but stopped when her son was diagnosed with rashes called impetigo, believed to be caused by bacteria on the roof’s shingles.

Some of her neighbors have paid thousand dollars to be connected to a community well only to find the water was too polluted to drink because of sewage contamination from septic beds.

One neighbor lamented to The Guardian about how drought has dried up all the wetlands in the community in recent years, decimating local populations of salmon, trout, pike and pickerel.

In 2013, the community received a $41 million grant to build a state-of-the-art water treatment plant, but because the grant did not cover the cost of plumbing, fewer than 10% of homes are connected to it.

The 90 percent either have no water at all or tap water that’s too polluted to drink.

Meanwhile Nestle pumps massive amounts of spring water from a nearby well known as the Erin Well, which sits on a tract of land given to the Six Nations under the 1701 Nanfan Treaty on expired permits.

The company pays the province of Ontario only $390 per million liters for the water, while paying Six Nations nothing […]

via Indigenous Canadians in Water Crisis as Nestlé Drains A Million Gallons a Day From Their Land — Return to Now