Upstate Mohawks want toxic dump moved

MASSENA -- Larry Thompson sits high in his tractor cab and drives to a chain-link fence along his family property on the Mohawk Indians' Akwesasne Reservation, where they fished, grew vegetables and played as children. He points to a toxic landfill about 30 feet away, stretching toward the St. Lawrence River.

"The whole hill," he says evenly. "Our gardens were right here, where that sign is." Thompson's family put up the sign 20 years ago, warning: "PCBs, danger area." The rural landscape, with houses scattered among fields and trees and along the river, is part of ancestral tribal homelands that once extended 125 miles south to the Mohawk River. The reservation, about 21 square miles on the U.S. and Canadian sides of the St. Lawrence, is home to about 16,000 people.

Immediately upstream is a shuttered General Motors factory, now a federal Superfund site where tons of toxic waste have been removed. Tons more remain, including the 12-acre landfill that has been capped with a layer of clay and grass and declared safe, no longer a threat.

Among 89 polluted ex-GM industrial locations around the country, the 270-acre site at Massena is getting the largest single share, about $121 million, of the $773-million cleanup budget established in bankruptcy court last year. The new, post-bankruptcy General Motors is no longer legally liable, but Thompson says the company should pay for a full cleanup and remove the landfill.

Thompson, 57, drove his backhoe last summer through the fence and began digging up the landfill himself. He was arrested and spent four days in jail; he claims the Superfund site is actually on Mohawk land that was never legally ceded.