The group in question was the Traditional Ecological Knowledge Elders, or TEK Elders for short, made up of Elders from First Nations on the 1850 Robinson Huron Treaty lands. The group was founded in 2013 by Ray Owl, from Sagamok Anishinawbek First Nation, and Willie Pine, from Mississauga First Nation. Having spent years documenting the cumulative impacts of industrial forestry and glyphosate use on forests and forest dwellers, they wanted to unite the Treaty nations and work together to push for a glyphosate ban. They leverage their collective knowledge of the ecological relationships that connect life above, on and in the ground beneath their feet — Anishinaabe science based on long-term observations with datasets passed from one generation to the next. Like Jones, most of the original members are from reserves located along or not far from Lake Huron’s north shore, where the northward undulation of the boreal forest at one time provided their ancestors with pristine areas for seasonal harvesting camps and winter settlements.

The difference today, the TEK Elders argue, is that their homelands are no longer pristine — not because they’re not taking care of them, but because others are actively destroying them. For the past four decades, they’ve witnessed the government-sanctioned-and-endorsed spraying of forests with herbicides. Glyphosate, commonly found in weedkillers such as Roundup, is a chemical that kills birches and maples, raspberry brambles and blueberry bushes and other pioneer plants, eliminating the competition against money-making conifers.

When Recollet gets back home to Wahnapitae First Nation, she’s spent over a week away at meetings and conferences. She’s tired from the travel, from spending time in cities and from having been away from the land. But even here, she no longer feels safe going for a walk in the bush. Her community, located an hour’s drive northeast of Sudbury, is surrounded by logging trails — forestry is big business around here. She pulls down her toque, zips up her parka and walks out of her house on the shore of Lake Wanapitei. It’s only a few steps to the reserve boundary; beyond is fair game for glyphosate spraying. Recollet shuffles through the ankle-deep snow and over a fallen tree. “There used to be maples here; they’re gone. And the birches are dying, too,” she says.

She misses the whip-poor-wills she used to hear in early summer. There’s sadness in her voice. “I want my grandkids to be able to walk barefoot on the ground, to go tenting, to learn out on the land. But now, with the spraying, I’m not sure I want to take them to the bush. Is it even safe to do so?” At one point, though, many First Nations men made a living for part of the year in the forestry industry. “Pretty much all the men went up north logging. My dad would go up to Chapleau in the winters; we’d have him back in the summers,” she says. It was a dangerous job, more so than it is today, when much of the work has been mechanized. But back then, forestry didn’t entirely destroy the web of life that holds everything together, at least not to the same extent as today. That was before Roundup.

A manmade organic compound, glyphosate was first created in the 1950s by a scientist at a Swiss pharmaceutical company hoping to invent new drugs. Nothing came out of that research, but the compound was later patented as a boiler and pipe cleaner for its ability to strip chemical build-up. It wasn’t until 1970 that a chemist at the American chemical company Monsanto independently discovered that the compound kills plants, opening an opportunity to cash in by making it the active ingredient in a new weed killer, Roundup. Today, between forestry, agriculture and commercial landscaping, glyphosate is the most used herbicide in the world. Glyphosate’s lethal mechanism works by throwing a roadblock in the biochemical pathway that enables plants to create the amino acids — the protein building blocks of life — necessary for a plant’s cell walls to form. Without these building blocks, the plant can’t grow; sprayed with a glyphosate-based herbicide, it wilts and dies.

While Health Canada and the Pest Management Regulatory Agency insist people following instruction and using low concentrations of glyphosate need not worry about cancer, they, along with the Canadian Forest Service, also maintain it “poses no risk of concern” to the land because the herbicide breaks down in soil and water after the aerial spray has done its intended job. But it leaves behind aminomethyl phosphonic acid and surfactants — some of which may be even more toxic than the parent molecule — along with any residual glyphosate believed not to be carried into the next growing season. To trust Health Canada is to trust that glyphosate is safe for bears and birds and moose, too.

The TEK Elders harbour no such trust. Spending time on the land, they’ve seen that insects and birds, for instance, don’t come back to sprayed areas. They’ve always suspected what dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles have shown: that the impacts of glyphosate on the ecology of a cutblock remain long after it has been sprayed. They also know investigation results vary, something they believe has to do with whom funded the research. One short-term study by the Canadian Forest Service found that plants post-spray had residual glyphosate concentrations that were higher than the maximum allowed by Health Canada in fruit up to 18 days after the spray, while their long-term study showed that the level decreased to below the safety threshold after one month, with trace amounts lingering after one year. But for deer, moose or bears to be affected by spray residue in a clearcut, they’d have to exclusively feed in that area and, while there, maximize the amount they could physiologically eat in a day, a scenario the researchers say is unlikely, so the risk to the animals’ health is low. Also, aerial spraying of glyphosate happens once or twice during the 50- to 80-year lifecycle of a plantation forest, another factor that limits risk. But other investigations show glyphosate residues can remain in vegetation for much longer. A study in northern B.C. found that it can linger for up to 12 years, with greater concentrations in roots than in shoots, translating to greater risk of long-term retention and spread to new growth, and that it takes longer for the herbicide to break down in colder climates.

The scientific conclusions vary, but the TEK Elders are steadfast: no risk is better than low risk. “The forestry companies put up signs to warn us an area has been sprayed. If glyphosate weren’t a problem, they wouldn’t need those signs,” says Ken Meawasige, a member of Serpent River First Nation and CEO of the Turtle Island Centre, an environmental education organization based on braiding Indigenous and Western knowledge systems. “Plus, the animals don’t know they’re not supposed to walk there.” Like his fellow TEK Elders, he wants to see a complete ban of aerial spraying.

It took years of pressure before Health Canada’s regulatory agency bureaucrats agreed to meet with Wahkohtowin; the second such audience took place in December 2025. Flood and Wahkohtowin representatives sat down with the agency in Ottawa to demand a new product safety review (the last one dates to 2017) and to ask it to reconsider its permitting of spraying glyphosate on the homes of moose and bears. “Climate change is killing animals and degrading forests through droughts and wildfires. Add glyphosate, and the habitat disturbance is even worse,” Flood says over the phone. “The science the PMRA used to arrive at favourable product safety reviews came from the manufacturer of Roundup, and that’s just crazy, because it does not consider damage to ecosystems,” he says, with emphasis on “ecosystems.” (The PMRA was renamed the Pest Regulatory Directorate in April 2026; PRD representatives joined Wahkohtowin in the field in the summer of 2026 to see the effects of glyphosate first-hand.) “A cutblock in a forest is not isolated from what exists and grows around it,” he says. What he’s seen out on the land in Treaty 9 reflects the TEK Elders’ testimonies: natural mixed forests converted to monocultures; landscapes broken by clearcuts; biodiversity stunted by chemicals; animals poisoned by glyphosate residue. “Even though a cutblock looks ugly and feels bad, life comes back. New plants grow up and you can hear mice, birds and insects and even see bears come through,” Flood says. “But after that cutblock has been sprayed with glyphosate, it’s dead quiet. There are much fewer or no birds, no frogs, no ants, no aphids, no insects.”

Brent Niganobe, the elected chief of Mississauga First Nation, says his community has passed resolutions in support of the TEK Elders. “Biodiversity evolved over thousands of years, so you can’t just go and add something that doesn’t belong,” he says, adding that the spraying is cheap and lazy. Dressed in a sweatshirt with the text “Decolonize,” he leans back in his chair at the band office. He points at a land use map and explains that they’re in the process of developing their own land management plan in which they have a say. His Nation is not against forestry, but it must be done in a way that respects Anishinaabeg voices and ways of being. “The Creator put us here to take care of the land; let us do so by having our Guardians tend the forests.” It would create jobs while providing ways to get out on the land where healing can happen. “We need to find better ways to manage [production] forests in our Treaty territory,” he says. “Because everything is connected.”

It’s a few days after the TEK Elders meeting in Sudbury. The Elders from Magnetawan First Nation, including Richard Noganosh, have returned home with a strengthened sense of purpose in the fight against glyphosate — they want to host future TEK Elders meetings, knowledge sharing circles, on-the-land training and direct action. Noganosh rolls up in his buggy outside the Lands, Resources and Environment office. His beaded moosehide mitts and the decals on his vehicle — “I brake for snakes” and “I stop for turtles” — reveal his love of the land and the creatures on it. Noganosh forms part of Magnetawan’s Elders Advisory Group, which informs the Lands staff on conservation plans and actions within the reserve’s footprint to ensure they’re carried out with respect and care for all relations, present and future. He walks in and sits down with Nadine Perron, the community’s conservation biologist and wildlife specialist, and Chris Ricker Payette, the Guardians coordinator who hails from Wikwemikong and Garden River First Nations.