‘Everybody is a fighter’: Inside a First Nation’s quest for justice

Grassy Narrows First Nation – William “Bill” Fobister remembers when things changed, seemingly overnight.

The 79-year-old had grown up fishing across the sprawling English-Wabigoon River system.

And the deep blue waters that lap the shores of his Ojibwe community - Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek, better known as Grassy Narrows - had fed his people since time immemorial.

“[My dad] was a commercial fisherman, and I helped him. That’s how we survived,” Bill recalls, sitting at a yellow picnic table in his backyard on a rainy August morning.

Then, he says, in 1970, “everything shut down.”

That’s when authorities confirmed that a pulp and paper mill in Dryden, upstream from Grassy Narrows, had dumped more than 9,000kg (20,000lb) of mercury into the river in northwestern Ontario,