As It Happens6:32Remembering the sociologist who documented collective trauma, including in Grassy Narrows
Kai T. Erikson, Yale sociologist who dedicated his career to documenting the collective trauma faced by communities in the wake of unimaginable disasters, has died at the age of 94.
A pioneer in the study of collective trauma, his work helped reveal the way tragic events erode communal life and impact people for generations to come, including the devastating impacts of mercury poisoning on a First Nation in Canada.
“There was a real humility in him. He certainly knew that he was not the one who was suffering; he was observing the suffering,” Chris Vecsey, one of Erikson’s colleagues, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
“He was someone who wanted to do good and he exuded that kind of goodness to people. People wanted to respond to him because they saw how genuine he was.”
Erikson, a professor emeritus at Yale University, died in hospital on Nov. 10 in Hamden, Conn., after a long bout of illness, the university announced. He was 94 years old.
Work in Grassy Narrows
Erikson would visit communities that had been ravaged by industrial pollution, oil spills, hurricanes, civil war and more, speaking extensively to residents about how those events shaped their lives.
“Collective trauma works its way slowly into the awareness of those who suffer from it, so it does not have the quality of suddenness usually associated with ‘trauma,’” he wrote in The Sociologist’s Eye: Reflections on Social Life, according to the New York Times.
“But it is a form of shock all the same, a gradual recognition that the community no longer exists as a source of support or solace.”
Decades after a paper mill dumped tonnes of mercury into a river system, Grassy Narrows First Nation in Northern Ontario is getting a one-of-a-kind treatment centre to help residents suffering from mercury poisoning — a problem the community has long raised alarms about.
More than a neutral observer, he would often advocate for the people in the communities he visited, producing reports on their behalf and testifying in lawsuits against the corporations responsible for the traumatic events.
In 1979, he was invited to Grassy Narrows First Nation in Ontario, also known as Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek, where a nearby paper mill had dumped tonnes of mercury into the river system during the ’60s and ’70s.
The First Nation was about to enter mediation with the provincial and federal government; then-chief Simon Fobister wanted to have an outside expert document the impacts mercury poisoning was having on the community.
Vecsey — a professor of religion and Native American studies at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. — joined Erikson on that fact-finding mission.
“I expected to find a community that was in some way safe from the world. It was a place that was, you know, many miles from the nearest highway,” Vecsey said.
“I expected that that kind of distance would have protected them from the dangers that I knew existed with the poisoning of the waters, but I did not expect it to be as devastating as we learned it was.”
Erikson was equally shaken by how many people had become sick, and the sense of hopelessness that had permeated the community.
“I think anybody who would walk into that community at the time I did would conclude that it was in big trouble,” he told CBC Radio’s Ideas in 1983. “I’d say that I’ve never seen more miserable people than I saw at Grassy Narrows when I visited there.”
River still being polluted today
Their report, Vescey says, didn’t have the impact they’d hoped for. Nearly five decades later, the mercury crisis continues, as does the community’s fight for justice, environmental clean-up and support.
Today, an estimated 90 per cent of Grassy Narrows’s population has symptoms of mercury poisoning, which can cause issues including tremors, insomnia, memory loss, neuromuscular effects, headaches, and cognitive and motor dysfunction.
What’s more, a study released in the spring by London’s University of Western Ontario suggests the contamination is being worsened by ongoing industrial pollution from the Dryden Paper Mill, creating high levels of methylmercury — an even more toxic compound than mercury, alone.
Dryden Fibre Canada, which owns the mill, declined to comment on the study.
CBC News has reached out to community leaders in Grassy Narrows to find someone who remembered Erikson. However, most of the residents that Vescey worked with have since died.
A study published in the Lancet in 2023 found that mercury poisoning is major cause of premature death in Grassy Narrows.
Chief Fobister, who spent his life fighting for justice for Grassy Narrows, died in 2019 at the age of 63. His family said at the time that his death was, in part, due to the toxic effects of mercury poisoning.
During a 2013 interview on CBC Radio As It Happens, Fobister spoke about how the mercury poisoning continued to impact Grassy Narrows for generations.
“Our community is bankrupt. Our traditional economy is gone. The mercury has affected us, you know, emotionally and physically. Our people are getting more ill and we just can’t live that way anymore,” he said.
“When is this going to end?”
Over the course of his career, Erikson documented the aftermath of the flooding in Buffalo Creek, W. Va., the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, the nuclear reactor accident in Three Mile Island, Pa., Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and more.
Despite being so close to so much trauma, Vecesy says his late colleague was “bon vivant” who loved life and lived it to the fullest.
He had a way of connecting with people, Vecesy said. In Grassy Narrows, he says, the pair always felt welcome, and maintained friendships with some of the residents they worked with, including Fobister, for decades afterwards.
“Kai Erikson was an urbane, elegant, but unpretentious person. He looked you in the eye, he drew you in,” Vescey said. “He was a real human being — caring, kind, careful.”
