A year ago, Eloise Charet was living a peaceful existence in the mountains of British Columbia. Logging companies changed that life. Charet, 47, and her 12-year-old daughter joined others blocking a road in the forest to stop the loggers. Charet was arrested and promptly went on a hunger strike (she calls it a “fast”) that lasted the whole seven weeks she spent in jail.
After that experience, Charet got so worried about the environment she decided to go for a walk. Across the country. She calls it her “walk for water.” She collected samples of water from over 50 different lakes, rivers and ponds from Native and non-Native communities, which she brought along with her.
It took her five months to walk about 5,000 km between Victoria and Ottawa, and soon she may pass through Quebec.
“The right to life is the first sentence in the Charter of Rights,” she says. “Pure water is life and they’re taking it all. I thought this year, What could I do? I’ll do the simplest thing I could think of, just walk for water.”
When she got to Ottawa, she decided to put on a press conference to make her case. She and her supporters poured some of the water into champagne glasses for the journalists. The water in one glass was orange, in another, black. Another glass had little worms floating about. Some of the clear water was even more dangerous, filled with poisons invisible to the eye.
But not one journalist came. “After walking five months, what a reception,” she says sadly. “I was really crying.” She tried to go into Parliament to tell her story, but the Mounties escorted her out.
“I’m totally unsophisticated
and I’m proud of it,” she says, mustering a laugh. “I’m basically a step above a bag lady.”
Today, she’s camped out in a tent down the hill from Parliament at Victoria Island, where she’s on another “fast” (only water) for a month. Some local Native people did a ceremony for her (she’s not Native herself) and lit a sacred fire, which she is tending.
“In terms of the spirit, it has been very inspiring. In terms of the body,” she pauses, “oh, it has been gruelling.”
As Charet passed through Winnipeg she recalls meeting a Blackfoot man called Bear Grandfather who was walking across Canada in the other direction for the same cause, the environment. They talked and discovered that eagles had been following both of them the whole way through.
She is still a little in shock by the environmental destruction she saw. “My whole heart’s twisted in feelings right now. I’m just devastated.”
She saw kids with rashes on their skin after swimming in polluted water and entire families with severe illnesses she says were caused by pollution. She said Saskatchewan (“the country’s breadbasket,” as she puts it) has high levels of illnesses linked with use of herbicides at farms.
Charet remembers a Native Elder out West who came up to her and said, “Tell them in Ottawa our people are dying, our people are dying.” The Elder died himself that night.
“There are no human rights left. It’s only corporate rights,” she says. “I’m concernedas a mother there will be nothing left. We’re coming to the end of everything. Whatwill wake us up?”
