with hormones and cause cancer. Dioxin enters the environment primarily from incinerators; of the 419 types of dioxin-related compounds, 30 have significant toxicity (WHO 2016, 2).
The effects of PCBs, dioxin and other toxins in the Arctic are more devastating than elsewhere. Legislation against these chemicals is not effective in the extreme north as yet because toxic residues slowly drift toward the Arctic and accumulate there, making it one of the most contaminated places on earth. The body fat of seals, whales and walruses hunted for food is highly contaminated, as is the breast milk of many Inuit women. An Inuit grandmother, politically active in circumpolar meetings, is quoted as stating: ‘When women have to think twice about breast feeding their babies, surely that must be a wake-up call to the world’ (Johansen 2003, 479). The situation is exacerbated because the cost of store-bought food is beyond the reach of many Arctic residents.
The intergenerational transmission of toxins
An illustration of toxic local biologies is furnished by the mercury-contaminated Grassy Narrows’ Wabigoon River system in Ontario, Canada. The government claims that defilement of the river stopped 40 years ago when the paper mill was forcibly shut down, after dumping about 9,000 kilograms of mercury into the downstream river. Today mercury levels in the fish near Grassy Narrows are 15 times the safe consumption limit, and 40 times the limit for children, pregnant women and women of child-bearing age (Mosa and Duffin 2016). The Grassy Narrows people have fought for 45 years for a clean-up of the river, but the Ontario Minister of Environment reiterated in May 2016 that there is no need for this. Further pressure apparently made the government temporarily change its position, but in late 2016, once again, the provincial government backed down, claiming a lack of funding, despite an official report by mercury experts stating that the river remains badly contaminated. Two generations of people from Grassy Narrows and Wabaseemoong First Nations today exhibit symptoms of mercury poisoning, including loss of muscle coordination, numbness in the hands and feet, hearing loss, speech damage and tunnel vision. Fetuses are particularly vulnerable to cognitive damage. Extreme cases result in paralysis, insanity, coma and death (Mosa and Duffin 2016).
In the mid-1950s, mercury poisoning was detected in Japan. First, the local cats appeared to go crazy and some ‘committed suicide’ by ‘falling’ into the sea. Thereafter, humans started to report numbness in their extremities; tremors; difficulty walking; and some appeared to be seriously mentally ill (Kugler 2016). By 1959 it had been established that mercury poisoning was causing the symptoms, and the condition was labelled Minamata disease, drawing on the name of the fishing village where it had first occurred. A large petrochemical plant in Minamata, Chisso Corporation, was immediately suspect. Chisso denied involvement, even though it was clear that an estimated 27 tonnes of mercury compounds were present in Minamata Bay. Protests began in 1959, but it was 1968 before the company finally stopped dumping. Close to 3,000 people contracted Minamata disease, more than half of whom have died. Japanese scientists have been summoned to Grassy Narrows, and state that up to 90 per cent of the people show signs of mercury poisoning that may well be intergenerationally transmitted (Mosa and Duffin 2016).
Social isolation
Research carried out with Romanian children living in orphanages has made clear that a paucity of social relations can bring about significant lifelong harm that may well have intergenerational effects (Nelson et al. 2013). A randomised clinical trial was carried out in which over 60 orphans aged between eight and nine were moved into good foster-care homes, at the expense of the involved researchers from the US, while a control group of similar size was left to languish in the orphanage. The study demonstrated, perhaps not surprisingly, that foster care was much more effective for the wellbeing and development, mental and physical, of these young children than was the orphanage setting in which a single adult may be responsible for 12 to 15 children. But of particular interest were findings that, as compared with never-institutionalised children, the orphaned children exhibited less development in both the grey and white matter in their brains. Foster placement quickly improved development of white matter, although grey matter development did not recover. Furthermore, the majority of institutionalised children showed shorter telomere lengths. As Elizabeth Blackburn, who has worked her whole life on telomeres, has argued, short telomeres ‘powerfully quantify life’s insults’ (Blackburn and Epel 2012, 170). These findings were communicated to the Romanian government. Efforts to map the molecular epigenetics pathways of these findings, and those obtained from other orphanages, are now underway with some success (Naumova et al. 2012). Longitudinal ethnographic research could enrich these findings greatly, and has the potential to influence policy making.
Charles Nelson, a cognitive neuroscientist, has carried out research in Bangladesh and reports that ‘the level of poverty is mind-boggling’ (Hamzelou 2016). He notes that a family of five often lives in a single room; kitchens and bathrooms are communal for an entire compound; latrines flood during the long monsoon season; people cook with wood or coal and the pollution is, as Nelson puts it, ‘unbelievable’. What is more, dirt blows everywhere from unpaved tracks, and the sewers are open. Nelson states emphatically, ‘the polite way to put it is that stool gets into everything … virtually all the children have chronic diarrhoea, which leads to malnourishment and stunting; up to 30 per cent of the mothers are visibly depressed, and high levels of domestic violence exist’. Nelson made a rule that his team must not cry in front of the children. They witnessed tiny babies left to cry in their sodden cribs, and were informed that they were rarely picked up and held (Hamzelou 2016). Neuroimaging research is now underway in a new centre constructed at great expense in Dhaka designed to track the brain development of these children.
Colonisation and historical trauma
This final example makes clear how lasting the impact can be on individuals and groups when systematic efforts are made by invasive forces to overtake and transform groups of people en masse. Canada is home to roughly 1.2 million individuals who endorsed the category ‘Aboriginal’ in the 2006 Canadian census. The majority of these people live in communities that continue to contend with the devastating legacy of settler colonialism, including entrenched poverty and invidious discrimination manifested in so-called ‘mental health’ problems of many kinds. These include substance dependence, depression, violence, and extraordinarily high rates of suicide, especially among young people, estimated in some Inuit communities to be six times the rate in other parts of Canada (Kral 2012).
Independently, mental health professionals and individuals living in First Nations communities have consistently associated these high rates of pathology with the experiences of colonisation that commenced five centuries ago. A concept of ‘historical trauma’ has been adopted to call attention to the collective, cumulative, and intergenerational psychosocial effects that resulted from past colonial subjugation and persist in abated form to the present day (Niezen 2013).
Among the early travesties was the introduction of infectious disease. The mortality rate from infectious disease as a whole was extraordinarily high – on Haida Gwaii, for example, it is documented that between 1700 and 1900, smallpox, measles, dysentery, TB, influenza, and other communicable diseases wiped out many thousands of people. The Haida Nation, with whom Franz Boas worked for some time, went from an estimated population of 20,000 prior to 1770 to less than 600 by the end of the nineteenth century (Kil’iljuss (Barb Wilson) 2009). The full effects of population decimation are rarely fully appreciated: given the climate and an economy based on hunting, the ability of those that survived to procure food is in effect destroyed, and hence individuals ‘with the dubious good fortune of living through the initial sickness die of hunger’ (Daschuk 2013, 12).
This massive population destruction was followed by extensive efforts to ‘whiten’ the Indians, among which was the establishment of residential schools created expressly to ‘kill the Indian and save the child’. Young children were rounded up by school administrators, members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and agents attached
