Earth Day isn’t until Sunday but in Kahnawake, they made sure to get a head start Friday.
“Today is the 22nd annual Eastern Door Spring Cleanup here in Kahnawake,” said Eastern Door editor and publisher Steve Bonspiel.
“When I took over 10 years ago, I tried to continue the legacy of Kenneth Deer to clean the community and raise awareness of why it’s important to keep our community and Mother Earth clean.”
Bonspiel along with Kahnawake Waste Management handed out gloves and garbage bags to community members who then fanned out to clean up their areas.
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“I’m heading to the Kahnawake Sports Complex picking up as much garbage as humanly possible so no kids get slashed by beer cans in the coming weeks when they play soccer,” said Daniel J. Rowe, a journalist with the Eastern Door.
Local schools get involved too. They use the cleanup as a teaching opportunity.
“We’re here to pick up garbage to protect Mother Earth,” said 12-year-old Bocephus Daillepoust, a student at a nearby school.
“For us, Earth Day should be every day. We need to keep Mother Earth clean. That’s our way,” said Fran Montour, Daillepoust’s teacher.
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It’s a message Bonspiel says has been lost over the years.
“We don’t look at Mother Nature like we used to,” he told Global News.
“We don’t live in unison with the land like we did. A lot of that is no fault of our own, we were put on reserves. But we also kind of adopted that mindset of ‘I’ll just throw my garbage out,’ why?”
He hopes just by seeing people taking time to pick up trash big and small, others will get the message to stop littering.
“Obviously there’s a need for it. It’s crazy how much garbage there is,” Bonspiel said.
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