Garden River First Nation student leading research on fish contamination
Jessica Pauze is trying to fill gaps left by provincial testing and western scientific approaches
A graduate student from Garden River First Nation is helping improve the safety testing of fish in her community.
Jessica Pauze is sampling in-land lakes throughout the First Nation's traditional territory and is working to build a custom fish consumption advisory chart for her community.
Ontario has been testing fish across the province for contaminants since the 1970s, but it can't easily sample every one of its 250,000 lakes.
What's more, the majority of fishers in Garden River don't consult provincial consumption advisories because they're not readily accessible, and western science's approach to assessing fish safety doesn't align with First Nation harvesters' needs, Pauze said.
"From a more Ontario guideline perspective, those values are just based on the filet of the fish with skin off," she explained.
"And obviously, we know that Indigenous communities often consume other portions of the fish that aren't considered in government advisories."
Gaps in government approach
Pauze is taking strips of fish from the muscle to the belly and testing the stomachs of some fish for microplastics, she said.
What's more, she's conducting her research year-round to see if the amount of contamination in the fish differs depending on the time of the year.
The Ontario government's research is only conducted in the summer and fall, she said.
Pauze did preliminary research in Echo Lake last summer and is in the early stages of analyzing the more than 85 fish she collected.
She is currently around a quarter of the way through doing heavy metal testing and has also tested some stomach specimens for microplastics – which she found.
In order to make a consumption guide, she'll need to test at least 15 fish per species per lake, she said.
To that end, she has been stepping up community engagement and outreach and doing more sampling workshops.
A handful of fishers have so far signed up to help.
"Our project is based on community-based sampling so that it's actually benefiting Garden River, and the samples we are testing are coming from harvesters from the community and from the fish that the community are actually eating," Pauze said.
"So that kind of allows more transparency and trust in the data."
Pauze and her family have always had a relationship with water and fish, she said, whether it was because they were living near water, working near water or fishing for food.
"I still learned a lot from them about the fish and water where I live and how they've seen it change over time," she said.
"And I think that's what really underlies the research that I do because it showed me that we have knowledge already, and I wanted to show this and use my academic privileges to work with my community."