An exerpt from a link on Suzanne Arms' website:

Katsi Cook writes:

"I became a midwife, and I was delivering babies to a family who lived within a mile of a Superfund site when I was confronted with a mother’s question: "Is it safe to breast feed?" I found I had no answers to this question, so I began to look for answers.

I found out that our community at Akwesasne is a veritable sink to the Great Lakes Basin. If you look at a map, you’ll see that 25 percent of the fresh water on this Earth is located in the Great Lakes Basin, the sweet water seas that flow out to the great ocean. We’re the largest dump of PCBs in the country at Akwesasne. Everything flows through us. We’re a sink; we’re where all of those by-products of industry settle and bio-accumulate, bio-magnify, move through the food chain, that sacred web of life that we’re all a part of.

Our research began with the mother’s question in the ’80s and has now emerged into the first human health study at a Superfund site that brings together the combined capacity of health research scientists, community members, and health care providers. Mohawk women themselves are co-investigators in the scientific research; we all share power and authorship of scientific papers. That interaction has yielded great fruit in the improvement of our community’s understanding and has become a model of community empowerment and health realization.

Breast milk

Doing environmental health research is very discouraging work — to know that the breast milk of every woman on this planet is contaminated with what our people call the Wahecmah, the bad stuff, the polychlorinated Wahecmah.

My sisters to the north, the Inuits of Kavungnatuk, have the highest documented levels of PCBs in their breast milk in the world. They’re living in bush villages; they don’t benefit from industrialized society, but they bear most of the risks because they eat sea mammals and these chemicals accumulate in their food chain. Without knowing that, they continue to breast feed as they have always done."

It goes on if you want to link, but most is about birth.

Jennifer Tow, IBCLC, CT, USA

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