Three centuries of hard times, and counting

1700s: Indigenous people migrated into the Island Lake region, according to Victor Harper of Wasagamack, who leads cultural awareness workshops.

Tongue-tied

FROM his eighth-floor apartment overlooking the Manitoba Legislative Building, retired public health doctor Pete Sarsfield watches like a pesky conscience.

When he was in charge of the Northwestern Health Unit based in Kenora, he shamed the Canadian government by telling the world about unsanitary conditions -- including no running water -- on Pikangikum First Nation.

The result: a 2007 promise of almost $10 million to improve water and waste-water services, plus another $31 million for other community infrastructure on the reserve about 250 kilometres north of Kenora.

So far, no public health doctor in Manitoba has dared raise a similar stink about Island Lake, which has more homes without running water than anywhere else in Canada.

Right to clean water

Hint to First Nations leaders in Island Lake: After you're finished lugging water home and digging a new hole for your outhouse, and if you're not busy giving your kids and grandpa a sponge bath, you might want to think about hiring a lawyer.

Drinking water and sanitation are increasingly recognized internationally as human rights, which might turn out to be enforceable through the courts.

Not that it's clear where Island Lake First Nations would get the money to pursue a legal challenge, considering hundreds of local families are crashing with relatives while they wait for the band to find enough cash to build new homes.

Some First Nations run their own businesses, which bring in revenue they could use to challenge the federal government. (Not that it's easy to set up businesses in communities where basic services such as water and sewer are spotty.) Otherwise, the federal government is the source of all their funding.

The worst of the bargain

ISLAND LAKE — “A hundred years of disappointment,” a banner might have read at last year’s centen­nial celebration of the treaty that brought the indigenous people of Island Lake into a “trust” relation­ship with the Canadian government.

That agreement to share their land in exchange for a settled life as farmers didn't exactly pan out.

Neither did giving up their ceremonies for salvation from the white man's God. In fact, conversion to Christianity created rifts that still divide this neglected corner of the province, making it hard for local people to lobby with a united voice for services they desperately need.

Island Lake's residents were among the last indigenous people in Manitoba to obtain a treaty, largely because immigrants were not interested in settling their land or even building a railway across it. The region was the last to get high-amp electrical service, and residents are still waiting for a road and praying for running water.