| MARINA JOHNSON-ZAFIRIS (Mohawk of Akwesasne), PhD Student, Cornell University

In the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, our people, lands and waters have been a site for data extraction for centuries. For decades, Akwesasne has been treated as a sacrifice zone, attempting to dispossess our community via industrial degradation and toxicant carcerality. Environmental and health injustice in Akwesasne was heightened with the construction of the Massena’s Moses-Saunders Power Dam (1958); the cheap hydroelectricity attracted (and continues to attract) factory and industrial development that disproportionately impacts our community. Akwesasne has been promised clean-up, remediation and accountability- but those promises have failed to be fully fulfilled. Rather, our community is encountering the tactical manipulation and obfuscation of environmental data by settler-colonial governments and corporations.
 
In response, our grass-roots team seeks to take the power of redress into our own hands. The “Reclaiming Akwesasne’s Pollution Data” initiative cultivates interventions that engage in an ontological and dogmatic shift of power dynamics embedded in information and data relations. These interventions include: developing a comprehensive information repository that stories our community’s environmental data history; engaging in anti-colonial methodologies for information acquisition, translation and dissemination; and developing technologies for industrial counter-surveillance and accountability.