When Cody Diabo recently learned that the bay restoration project on Kateri Tekakwitha Island was near complete, he took his family for a walk there to see its transformation from a dry, rocky shore into a marsh teeming with life.
The island off of Kahnawà:ke, a Kanien’kéha:ka community south of Montreal, was once a small archipelago of lush, natural islands — but it became a single piece of land after sludge from the river and blasted rock was dumped onto the archipelago by construction crews building the St. Lawrence Seaway about 70 years ago.
“For the first time coming to the island since I was a little child, I saw