Isaac Baker

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 19 2005 (IPS) — For years, the Yellow Quill First Nation, a small indigenous community of 1,000 people located in the south-central region of Canada’s Saskatchewan province, was forced to boil all its drinking water because the local water sources were limited and despicable.

The main source was Pipestone Creek, a nearby stream that flowed irregularly, and sometimes not at all. Upstream of the Yellow Quill Nation, human sewage was periodically dumped into the creek, infecting it with disease-causing bacteria and viruses and giving the water a filthy brown color.

The area’s few wells were also contaminated, and the nearest source of known potable water was over 80 kilometres away.

But all that has now changed. In 2002, the Yellow Quill First Nation became the site of a pilot water treatment and filtration system that provides safe and clean water to its people.

Scientists, Canadian government officials, and the local indigenous population have lauded the new treatment facilities, which are a combination of biological and membrane filtration systems, as both financially and environmentally cost-effective.

Around the world, at least three million people die every year from diseases caused by dirty water, and every eight seconds, a child dies of water-borne diseases.

One of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals is to halve the number of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015 – which will require implementing projects that reach about a billion people.

At a panel discussion at U.N. headquarters Tuesday, experts involved in Yellow Quill’s water treatment system told the story of their success and said they hoped other indigenous communities would follow in their footsteps and realise what they called one of the most fundamental human rights: clean drinking water.

“Safe drinking water is a basic human need,” said moderator Tom Goldtooth, a member of the Indigenous Environmental Network. “It should be affordable and accessible to everyone. For many individuals, and especially indigenous communities, this is not the case.”

The right to clean drinking water is a vital issue for indigenous peoples, Goldtooth said, adding that one in eight native communities in Canada is threatened by bad water.

Unclean water particularly affects the rural indigenous communities located in provinces like Saskatchewan and Manitoba, where agricultural pollutants are far more pervasive than in urban areas, he said. Canadian indigenous communities also have a 40 percent higher infant mortality rate than urban populations, with many of the deaths related to unclean water.

“Unsafe drinking water is a problem around the world, not just in developing countries but also in developed countries such as the United States and Canada,” Goldtooth said.

“In countries where they pride themselves on human rightsàthey are not respecting the right to safe drinking water of their own citizens, their own first nations – the indigenous peoples.”

Hans Peterson, executive director of the Safe Drinking Water Foundation (SDWF) and the leading scientist behind the Yellow Quill’s water treatment installation process, said the community needed more than a “band-aid” water treatment approach like the common method of using chlorine, which makes the water look clean but does little to actually make it safer.

Due to the high amount of agricultural activity in the region, a non-conventional system of water treatment had to be implemented. Yellow Quill needed a whole new facility where harmful microscopic bacteria and the even smaller viruses in the water sources could be sifted out through biological and membrane filters.

While Canadian regulations require that drinking water contain only 50 particles of contaminants per millilitre, SDWF found Yellow Quill’s water to have an astronomical 10,000 particles per milliliter. The water was also filled with bacteria, parasites and harmful compounds like arsenic and ammonium.

“You name it, we had it there,” Peterson said.

After the installation of the new filtration facilities, Yellow Quill’s water now has bacteria rates that are 50 times lower than the national guidelines for drinkable water.

Despite sound scientific evidence and project’s tremendous results, SDWF had initial trouble getting the Canadian government to come on board and fund the project. With the system costing over two million dollars, Peterson said, no one was quick to jump at the opportunity.

However, SDWF finally secured the funds and began construction in 2002. Soon after completion of the facility, which is now collectively owned by the tribe, the “Boil Water Advisory” was lifted in 2004.

Being the first of its kind, SDWF says, Yellow Quill’s system carried with it a very large cost. However, after the facility’s success, SDWF replicated the same system in other indigenous communities.

And, the group reports, the cost is falling with experience. The second system SDWF built, at the Saddle Lake First Nation, cost only 500,000 dollars. Peterson told IPS new projects are expected to cost about 200,000 dollars.

However, the Yellow Quill facility does not just provide clean water for its own people. SDWF helped build a bottled water plant in the community where clean water from the filtration system is bottled and sent out to surrounding areas. The plant, which cost only 25,000 dollars, is staffed by members from the Yellow Quill Nation and brings in an estimated 3,000 dollars a month.

“We even have white people coming in and picking up water at Yellow Quill,” Peterson said.

The panelists said they hope Yellow Quill’s success, both environmental and financial, will further inspire indigenous communities to ensure their people receive clean water. In the last few years, SDWF has received requests from hundreds of communities to take up similar water purification projects.

“As we learn from Yellow Quill,” Peterson said, “Five years from now, we’re going to say, ‘Well, why didn’t we do this all along?'”