Coming together to clean the community
Patrick Cross and his brother Vincent picked up a trailer and a truck bed’s worth of garbage on Dickson Road during The
Eastern Door’s annual Spring Cleanup. Olivier Cadotte The Eastern Door
The Eastern Door and Kahnawake Waste Management partnered up last Friday for the 29th edition of The Eastern Door’s annual Spring Cleanup, where community members were invited to come pick up some bags and some gloves to make Kahnawake a cleaner place.
Iotshatenawi Reed, communications liaison for Kahnawake Waste Management, said that the cleanup efforts remain important in the face of the large task at hand.
“I think it’s important to clean up all the time, but to have one day just for cleaning up is really good for our community,” said Reed.
“I know it’s not our mess necessarily, like the individual’s mess, but for them to be helping clean up? I find it nice. I wish that we didn’t have to clean up other people’s messes, but it is what it is, and I think it’s important to clean up.”
By “other people’s messes,” Reed is referring to the continuing issue of illegal dumping, as well as the leftovers of parties on Tekakwitha Island and drink containers and food wrapping tossed from car windows.
Patrick Cross was one of many community members who helped out with the cleaning on Friday, filling a trailer and the bed of his truck with the help of his brother Vincent along Big Fence Road.
The kind of garbage Reed described was the majority of what the Cross brothers picked up that day.
“The dumping over here in different places along the Seaway and Big Fence Road, there is a spot, a little pull off. They do it at night. Nobody comes dump garbage during the day, and it’s not always done from the outside,” said Patrick.
“I hate seeing all the trash and the disrespect of nature. We’ve been told over and over that we’re supposed to be the caretakers of the land, but some of us are the worst offenders.”
An extra frustration for Patrick is that Waste Management’s transfer depot is relatively close to many of the spots where renovation debris and other dumping happens, meaning that if they wanted to, during the facility’s operating hours, they could get rid of their garbage legally and safely.
David Kentarontie Fazio, who advertises on his Facebook page that he regularly comes to pick up scrap metal on the curb to make sure it gets recycled properly - not just for Spring Cleanup - said that sometimes, a lack of awareness can be the cause of some of the garbage problems in town.
“People don’t know that if metal goes to the garbage, it goes to landfills, but on the curbside, it’s going to the scrap yard to get recycled. Education is key,” said Fazio.
Patrick also said that bringing awareness to the problem can help solve it.
“It is not a losing battle. Doing cleanups opens up the eyes of a lot of people,” said Patrick.
For The Eastern Door’s editor/publisher Steve Bonspiel, this edition of the newspaper’s Spring Cleanup Day showed that even with the best efforts of everyone who came to help last Friday morning, a single day is not enough.
“We were in certain hotspots, Old Chateauguay Road and Diabo Road, and just the amount of garbage, of things that were discarded, it’s disheartening. It’s different levels of garbage, too. Some of the stuff has been there for a long time, as you pick up the surface garbage, you pick up the next level of garbage and then if you dig a little bit more, move a little bit of leaves, you find another level underneath,” said Bonspiel.
“A lot of people came out to help today, but I think, more and more, we realize that there needs to be a dedicated committee, 365 days a year.”
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Indeed, in spite of the cleanup efforts on Friday - as well as Kahnawake Waste Management’s month-long Earth Month clean-up campaign and individuals who go around and clean regularly - many parts of the community are still littered with garbage, some recent, some very old.
“Frankly, some people wouldn’t call it a crisis situation, but I would say it is a crisis situation, and the reason being that you don’t regularly have people picking up garbage,” said Bonspiel. “You need a team of people picking up almost every single day, raising more awareness and being visible and having the proper tools to clean this stuff.”
