"MASSENA, N.Y. -- Larry Thompson sits high in his tractor cab and drives to a chain-link fence along his family property on the Mohawk Indians' Akwesasne Reservation, where they fished, grew vegetables and played as children. He points to a toxic landfill about 30 feet away, stretching toward the St. Lawrence River."
"'The whole hill,' he says evenly. 'Our gardens were right here, where that sign is.'
Thompson's family put up the sign 20 years ago, warning: 'PCBs, danger area.'
The rural landscape, with houses scattered among fields and trees and along the river, is part of ancestral tribal homelands that once extended 125 miles south to the Mohawk River. The reservation, about 21 square miles on the U.S. and Canadian sides of the St. Lawrence, is home to about 16,000 people.
Immediately upstream is a shuttered General Motors factory, now a federal Superfund site where tons of toxic waste have been removed. Tons more remain, including the 12-acre landfill that has been capped with a layer of clay and grass and declared safe, no longer a threat."
Michael Virtanen reports for KTAR March 26, 2012.
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