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Watertown Daily Times
July 29, 2001
Entrepreneur Aims To ‘Speed Grow’ Fish To Help Mohawks Return To Traditional Diet
By Eliza Bettinger Part 1

Cornwall Island Ontario—The wind whips up tiny whitecaps on the St. Lawrence River, and in the distance sun glints off trucks crossing Seaway International Bridge as Lloyd W. Benedict points to the reedy shoreline of his property on the south side of Cornwall Island.

“I can see my grandmother, back when this was a hay field wearing her straw hat, going down to the river with a pole and a bucket to catch us lunch. Now that is a perfect childhood’ he said.

Perch and walleye, bass and trout – the protein foundation of a Mohawk diet as old as the territory of Akwesasne. “Then when I got older, I would go down here, I would catch some beautiful fish. I’d take them to my mother, and she would say, “We can’t eat those fish.”

That memory has fueled the determined man’s six-year effort to develop an economically viable way to farm fish on the banks of the cold St. Lawrence. This summer, a cutting-edge prototype that speeds the growth of market fish to a quarter of the normal maturation time will go into operation at Mr. Benedict’s company Ekohawk.

The operation will be only the second of it’s kind in the world—but most important to Mr. Benedict is the chance to revisit the meals that his grandparents enjoyed.

PCBs and heavy metals from the Canadian and American industries sandwiching the Mohawk territory have poisoned one of the communty’s primary food sources. Cancer, hormone disorders, brain damage—continue to fish and take your pick of maladies, residents have learned. And since the early 1980s, a transition to standard American eating habits – high fat protein sources, lots more sugar and starches is more or less complete. These new eating habits weren’t due just to the loss of fish. Subsistence farming in much of the territory was obliterated in the 1970s by fluoride poisoning from nearby aluminum smelters. And construction of the St. Lawernce Seaway and the International Bridge in the 1950s hastened assimilation of the community into nearby towns, All the changes added up to the community’s invasion by a new debilitatior: diabetes.

“Food is physical, but it’s also a social structure, a culture; it’s what you do—you go out fishing or hunting or farming. When you move away from that, yoy not only stress the social structure of the community, you stress the physical body,” Mr. Benedict said.

Diabetes is rampant I Indian country. Fifty percent of American Indians over age 45 develop the disease, according to the National Institutes of Health. Experts lay much of the blame on genetics, coupled with changes in eating habits.

Mr. Benedict has his own interpretation.

“Our people are adapted to eating one type of food, the way they have for thousands of years. Europeans, they are a mobile people, a colonizing people—they’re adapted to food changes. In another few hundred years, our people would adapt, evolve to the changes,. But we don’t do that anymore. You don’t just let people get sick ad die,” he said.

Ekohawk is Mr. Benedict’s solution.