Governmental Fiduciary Failure in Indigenous Environmental Health Justice: The Case of Pictou Landing First Nation.

From 1967 until 2020, Pictou Landing First Nation (PLFN) has had 85 million litres of pulp and paper mill effluent dumped every day into an estuary that borders the community. A federal government appointed Joint Environmental Health Monitoring Committee, mandated to oversee the health of the community, has never addressed PLFN concerns about cancer in the community. In this study we accessed the 2013 Canadian Cancer Registry microdata file, and using the standard geographical classification code, accessed the cancer data for PLFN, and provided comparable data for all Nova Scotia First Nations, as well as the county, provincial, and national populations. We determined that digestive organ cancers, respiratory organ cancers, male genital organ cancers, and urinary tract cancers are higher in PLFN than at all comparable levels. Female breast and genital organ cancers are lowest in PLFN than at all other comparable levels. A limitation of this study was not being able to capture cancer data for off-reserve members at the time of diagnosis and the lapse in availability of up-to-date Canadian Cancer Registry data. As this study demonstrates, when governmental regulatory agencies do not fulfill their mandates, First Nations can mobilize to get the data they need. Moreover, as Indigenous scholars acquire the statistical skills to work with quantitative data to address concerns in their own and other Indigenous communities, we can achieve environmental health justice for Indigenous nations, not only in Canada, but around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]