One day last year, Storm Kahealani and his sister Meadow were playing outside when they came running into the house screaming hysterically. “A panther got Daisy!” Meadow cried as her brother sobbed uncontrollably.

Daisy was a goat. She was one of three dwarf Nubians the family had brought when it moved to Florida from Washington state two months earlier. The family settled on 2 1/2 acres of slash pine, sabal palm, and palmetto scrub in a sprawling semirural housing development on the outskirts of Naples, Florida, called Golden Gate Estates. There was a fenced-in backyard for the goats.

Started in the 1950s, Golden Gate is part suburb, part Wild West. On one side lies Naples, a Gulf Coast city of sand beaches, seafront mansions, and luxury hotels. On the other side is the largest expanse of wilderness east of the Mississippi River, including Everglades National Park, Big Cypress National Preserve, and the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge. Golden Gate is an early example of a Florida type: the land venture that lures outsiders into the state’s rural interior with intimations of semitropical paradise. With mile after mile of widely spaced houses, dead-end roads, drainage canals, and more woods and scrub than manicured lawn, Golden Gate is still a beacon for migrants who stream into Florida, young families and graying retirees alike, all looking for a small patch of paradise. It was perfect for goats, too.

Perfect, that is, except for the panthers. One of them had leapt the 4-foot chain-link fence into the backyard, grabbed Daisy, and dragged her toward the palms and underbrush beyond. But a hoof got caught in the fence; the panther had to abandon the animal and flee. Storm’s elder sister, Oceane, carried Daisy back into the yard, where she died. 

“It was emotionally exhausting,” says Christy Kahealani, the children’s mother.

Richard Mertens

“It was emotionally exhausting.” – Christy Kahealani, a resident of the Golden Gate Estates housing development in Naples, Florida, holding up a panther photo taken by a motion-sensor camera set up by state biologists. A panther killed one of the family’s goats.

It was not a rare encounter. Panthers have become frequent visitors in Golden Gate Estates, drawn by the “hobby livestock” – goats, donkeys, mini horses, and other animals – that many residents keep. Along Collier Boulevard, a six-lane avenue separating Golden Gate from the rest of Naples, bright yellow signs warn drivers to watch out for panthers, a reminder of their growing presence. 

Florida panthers are back. Their hunting forays into Golden Gate backyards are just one sign of a remarkable recovery that began almost three decades ago, when the animal’s population had dwindled to perhaps 30 and was on the verge of disappearance. Today biologists estimate their numbers at 120 to 230. Increasingly, they roam west into Naples and its suburbs and north, into the farmland, citrus groves, and ranches that extend up the middle of the state toward Orlando. 

And yet their recovery is far from assured. With 21.5 million residents, Florida is the third most populous state in the country and one of the fastest growing. Houses are going up quickly in Golden Gate Estates, while gated subdivisions, golf-course communities, retirement colonies, and whole towns are springing up in the Florida interior. The development is crowding the panthers, fragmenting their habitat, and putting more cars on the road – the biggest killers of the wild cats. 

Can they survive? Can Floridians learn to live with them?

The Kahealani family has certainly tried. After Daisy died, local wildlife officials descended on the little homestead to investigate the loss and instruct the family how to avoid another. Conservation groups helped build a sturdy chain-link pen to protect the two remaining goats, part of a local program to encourage coexistence with panthers and other carnivores.

Courtesy of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission

A camera trap set up by state biologists captures a photo of a panther and kitten on a ranch in Hendry County in southwest Florida. Female panthers have been detected ranging farther north in the state.

Meanwhile, state and federal agencies and conservation groups are protecting important wildlife habitat by buying conservation easements from private landowners. The state highway department is building wildlife crossings. And support is growing for a statewide plan to protect the long wildlife corridors that still provide a link between the Everglades and the big natural areas of northern Florida. On July 1, the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act went into effect, which provides $300 million for land acquisition and preservation to bolster the network. The measure was approved unanimously by the state Legislature.

For the panthers it’s become a race between growth and conservation – a contest between developers and Florida’s influential environmental community, the many groups and individuals who want to defend the state’s rich natural legacy of which panthers are a premier example. The panthers are adaptable. But for now, the developers may be winning. 

“It’s death by a thousand cuts,” says Dave Onorato, lead research biologist for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the state agency responsible for managing the panthers. “Not one of those developments is going to push them over the edge. But as more and more time passes and more of these developments get approved, there’s less and less habitat available for panthers.”

Courtesy of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission

State biologists tag and examine a panther captured on the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation.

This is a story not of Florida’s sun-drenched coasts but its wild, mosquito-infested interior, a place of subtropical swamps, saw-grass marshes, wet prairies, and pine flatlands; of alligators, deer, hundreds of different kinds of birds – and alien species like feral pigs and Burmese pythons. It’s also a place of citrus orchards, ranches, tomato and sugar cane fields, and increasingly, housing projects that rise quickly on fields too flat to slow the bulldozer’s crawl.

That’s Florida. It’s long been a magnet for developers, beginning with the promoters who drained the Everglades to turn it into farmland. They straightened rivers, dug canals, emptied swamps, and shrank the Everglades system, which once covered the whole of South Florida, to half its original size. Efforts are underway in many places to undo this damage. The future of the panther is tied up with these, too. 

“It’s basically a symbol of wilderness,” says Robert Frakes, a leading panther biologist. “If you have large areas that are wild enough to support panthers, all the species who depend on that ecosystem are also protected.”

The panther’s predicament is not unique. It’s a variation on a theme, the problem of how to accommodate large predators that decades of conservation efforts have helped recover in many parts of the country. The 1966 Endangered Species Preservation Act, and the 1973 Endangered Species Act that followed, threw them a lifeline – animals like grizzly bears in Montana or gray wolves in Wisconsin. They’ve been coming back, creating new controversies and posing fresh challenges to coexistence.  

Richard Mertens

“I want to show my grandkids panthers, not just pictures of panthers.” – Cary Lightsey, a rancher in central Florida who welcomes panthers on his property and wants to save ranchland from development

Floridians love panthers. In 1982, school children voted the panther the state animal, picking it over the diminutive Key deer and the fat but lovable manatee. That was also the year that Thomas Trotta, an engineer from Miami, saw his first panther, in Everglades National Park. Mr. Trotta, who later became president of the Friends of the Florida Panther Refuge, says he’s seen panthers 50 times since then. 

“I spend a lot of time outdoors,” says Mr. Trotta. “I know their signs. I know how to keep my eyes at a distance.” Even in Golden Gate Estates, where panthers have caused so much trouble, a sighting sends a shiver of excitement through the community. Late one night, a panther’s scream woke Justin Schofield, a local resident. It scared him, but not for long. “I think they’re awesome,” he says.

The panther is a subspecies of mountain lion, an animal that once ranged across North America and survives in the thousands out West. Panthers roamed the whole Southeast, but by the middle of the 20th century hunting and habitat loss had reduced them to a tiny remnant in the Everglades. In 1967, they were among the first endangered animals to receive federal protection. By then the problem was more than low numbers. Inbreeding had weakened the population and inhibited reproduction. The panthers had grown gaunt; their tails were crooked. In 1995 biologists released eight Texas pumas, close cousins to the panther, in South Florida in an effort to introduce genetic diversity into the panther population. It worked. 

A broader gene pool has bought time, but it has not guaranteed recovery. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says panthers may be taken off the endangered species list only when three different populations are established. The idea is that distinct but connected populations will ensure enough genetic diversity to enable the panthers to survive indefinitely. But it’s unlikely to happen soon. The only breeding population of panthers is in South Florida. Biologists have identified areas in northern Florida and neighboring states large enough to support other populations. But reintroducing a major predator is contentious, and there is no plan to do it with panthers.

Still, the big cats don’t seem to be waiting. Young males often wander far in search of new territory – Florida panthers have been found in Georgia. But recently, biologists have detected females with kittens north of Florida’s Caloosahatchee River, where they have not been seen since 1973. This has raised hopes that the panthers may be dispersing on their own.

José “Nacho” Benitez, a ranch hand in central Florida, says he saw some. Mr. Benitez works on the Tiger Lake Ranch, just south of Orlando. One morning two summers ago, he went out to turn off an irrigation pump in a small orange grove. 

Richard Mertens

“If I felt I was adequately compensated for business losses, it would be a lot easier to accept the panther issue.” – Liesa Priddy, a rancher in south-central Florida who estimates she loses 10% of her calves each year to panthers

As he walked down a sandy track, Mr. Benitez saw a long-tailed cat in the distance. Sometimes people mistake bobcats for panthers, but the tail gave it away. The panther disappeared into the brush. Another followed, bounding across the track.

“It was just a couple seconds,” says Mr. Benitez. “By the time I got my phone out, they were gone.” A week later, he and another worker found tracks in the grove that looked like those of a female panther and her young.

“They say not many people see one around here,” Mr. Benitez says. “That was neat.”

Mr. Benitz’s experience is consistent with verified sightings in other parts of central Florida. These not only suggest that panthers are moving north, but also demonstrate the importance of ranchland to their long-term recovery.

The many landscapes of the Tiger Lake Ranch tell why. A Florida ranch is not the grassy vista of the Western imagination but usually a mix of open space, trees, and underbrush. There are pastures but also cypress groves, oak hammocks, and pine flatwoods. On the shore of Tiger Lake, cows crowd into a thicket of live oaks, seeking relief from the hot sun. A half-mile away, they graze among scattered pines and clumps of palmetto palm. The trunks of the pines are charred, the ground gray with ash. Ranch hands burned the area recently to control underbrush and encourage new grass.

“The more tender it is, the better for a cow,” Mr. Benitez says of the new vegetation. 

It’s also better for deer, wild pigs, and other animals that the panthers prey upon. Not all ranchers welcome panthers – they also kill calves – but many want ranchland preserved and are glad to join forces with conservationists.

“If you’re a true rancher, a true conservationist, you’re going to love your land and want to preserve it forever,” says Cary Lightsey, Mr. Benitez’s boss.

With his white cowboy hat, wide mustache, and craggy features, Mr. Lightsey looks every inch a rancher. His forebears brought cattle to Florida in the 19th century, after the U.S. Army forced the Seminoles out of northern Florida and into the Everglades. Today he worries about ranching’s future.

“What concerns me is we’re losing our land. ... The developers want to make money on it,” he says. “There’s no love for it.”

Richard Mertens

Calvin Joiner (left) and Wesley O’Conner of Defenders of Wildlife build a panther-proof pen in Mr. Joiner’s backyard. A panther killed one of his family’s donkeys, so they took advantage of a program that helps residents install enclosures.

One way ranchers like Mr. Lightsey protect their land is by selling easements that allow them to continue ranching but bar development. The Lightsey Cattle Co., Mr. Lightsey’s family business, has sold easements to most of its 24,500 acres. 

Mr. Lightsey says he welcomes panthers. “I want to show my grandkids panthers, not just pictures of panthers,” he says.

Other ranchers are less enthusiastic. In panther country farther south, calf kills have become a real problem. And probably no operation is deeper in panther country than the JB Ranch, owned and run by Liesa Priddy and her husband, Russell. “We’re ground zero for the panther,” Ms. Priddy says.

The Priddy ranch covers more than 9,000 acres – almost 20 square miles – just north of the Big Cypress National Preserve. The Priddys raise cows, lease land for limestone mining, and rent to farmers. Part of the property is in conservation easement. The Priddy ranch abounds with life, including deer, turkeys, sandhill cranes, alligators – and increasingly, panthers. 

“When we first started seeing them, 20 years ago, we would see them on the edges,” Mr. Priddy says. “Over time, as their numbers exploded, we see them everywhere.”

Raising cattle in South Florida means more than tending cows. The Priddys and their workers devote a lot of attention to caring for the land in a way that preserves the mix of trees and open space that’s good for both livestock and wildlife. They have machines to mulch brush and kill invasive weeds. They use prescribed burning when they can. Looking out over a field of waist-high thistles, Ms. Priddy sighs. “It’s a never-ending battle,” she says.

Living with panthers isn’t easy, either. Ms. Priddy thinks there are too many of them, but what rankles her most are not the animals themselves, but the difficulty obtaining compensation when a panther kills a calf. Ms. Priddy estimates that she loses as many as a fifth of her calves each year, maybe half of them to panthers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture compensates ranchers for these kills, but they must document each one. And yet panthers usually drag their prey away and hide or bury it to return to it later. Most kills go undetected.

“If I felt I was adequately compensated for business losses, it would be a lot easier to accept the panther issue,” Ms. Priddy says. 

Not far away, a series of projects is underway that will test whether development in rural Florida can be done in a way that accommodates panthers and other wildlife.

Big Collier County landowners want to build three villages just north of the Florida panther refuge, creating the equivalent of a new town of 8,000 houses on existing agricultural fields. County guidelines allow developers to build compact urban communities – no more sprawling Golden Gates – in exchange for protecting farmland and wildlife habitat nearby.

Some conservationists support the plan. To them, building houses on tomato fields while protecting panther habitat is an acceptable trade-off.

“There’s no way to stop this development. ... Either it’s going to happen in a better way or in a horrible way, which is how Florida has generally developed,” says Elizabeth Fleming, Florida representative of Defenders of Wildlife. 

Others have pushed back, alarmed by large-scale development so close to the heart of panther country. They say government officials and developers underestimate the habitat loss, ignore the effects of increased traffic, and fail to address other problems. A letter from the U.S. Department of Interior suggested in March that building so close to the panther refuge invited trouble because prescribed burning will send plumes of smoke over the communities. It asked for a pause in the plans. None was granted.

An example of what lies ahead is already close at hand. Just a few miles away, the planned community of Ave Maria rises improbably from tomato fields and ranchland. Established in 2007, it has grown to the size of a small town, with 12,000 residents, private schools, and a Roman Catholic university. It also has restaurants, a water park, a fitness center, tennis and bocce-ball courts, and the one thing without which any South Florida community is incomplete: golf courses. It bills itself as a place of “big town amenities and small town community.” And residents agree. 

“It’s a nice community,” says David Bramer, an insurance agent from Houston, Pennsylvania. “It’s a safe community.” He and his wife, Janice, are sitting outside a craft brewery on a balmy afternoon. “People are very friendly,” he says.

The small-town glow of developments like Ave Maria is helping fuel a housing boom that shows little sign of letting up. It’s not just consuming land, but also filling roads. Last year, 19 panthers were killed on Florida roads; this year 13 had been killed as of mid-June. Wildlife underpasses help. Panther deaths on Interstate 75 across Florida – “Alligator Alley” – plummeted after the state constructed underpasses. But they are expensive to build, and there is a lot of road that panthers cross where none are available. Meanwhile, the state is laying plans for new tollways across Florida that panthers and other animals will have to cross. 

Still, what worries conservationists most is not any one highway or development but the incremental losses that eat away at the “connectivity” of the landscape. Panthers require enormous territory – a single male ranges an average of 200 square miles – and being able to travel long distances, around cities and towns, farms and housing projects, is crucial to their recovery.

This problem has inspired one of the more ambitious undertakings in the state, called the Florida Wildlife Corridor. Promoted by the Florida Wildlife Corridor Coalition, it’s a plan to carefully identify wildlife corridors and arrange legal protection for them. In many places the corridors are ample, but in some places, such as central Florida, they grow narrow and tenuous. If the corridors can be protected, the panthers might eventually migrate north and establish new populations on their own.

Jason Lauritsen, the coalition’s executive director, hopes the state Legislature’s recent endorsement will generate new support for corridors across the state.

“We need to continue to buy the big, beautiful pieces,” he says. “We also need to safeguard less pristine connections that have real tangible ecological value.” 

In Golden Gate Estates, Ms. Kahealani and her family are still trying to live with panthers. It has not been easy. The attack on Daisy was a traumatic event. Storm, the youngest, couldn’t sleep for nights. “He would wake up screaming,” his mother says.

It was also the beginning of an education. Ms. Kahealani and her family learned not to let the goats out until the sun was well up, and to be careful on cloudy days. They also began clearing the thick vegetation beyond the backyard fence. They didn’t reconsider keeping goats. In fact, they acquired even more animals, including chickens, ducks, and peafowl, creating a noisy, clucking backyard menagerie that stands out even in animal-loving Golden Gate Estates. 

But they’re still nervous. Just a few weeks ago, Oceane, the eldest, watched as a panther slunk through the scrub less than 100 feet away. She recorded it on her phone. As the animal passes, it turns its steely gaze on the backyard for just a moment.

“Don’t you do anything stupid,” the girl whispers to the peafowl, which are normally cocky and loud. They don’t. Then the panther is gone. 

Craig Ruttle/AP/File

On Sept. 25, 2019, Eswatini's King Mswati III addresses the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly. In response to a month of anti-regime protests this year, the king has said that the demonstrations are taking the country backward.

For 37 years, Sibongile Mazibuko stood in front of her high school students in Africa’s last absolute monarchy and made them a promise.

Get an education and your life will be better. Get an education and doors will open in Eswatini.

“What a lie that was,” says Ms. Mazibuko, who now works full time as a pro-democracy activist. For the past two months, this country of 1.2 million next to South Africa has been roiled by the biggest anti-regime protest movement in its history, led and fueled mostly by young people like Ms. Mazibuko’s former students, who live in poverty in the shadow of an opulent dictator.

“This scenario is like grass that you have sprinkled petrol on,” Ms. Mazibuko says. “The only thing left was to find a match to light everything.”

That match took the form of the unexplained death of a law student in early May. The demonstrations that followed in Eswatini echo youth-led movements that have swept other African countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, from Nigeria to Uganda to South Africa. The pandemic and measures to curb it, experts say, have sharply turned up the dial on existing anger about poverty, inequality, unemployment, and police brutality, bringing young people with few other choices out into the streets.

“Young people are saying – blind loyalty isn’t going to work for us anymore,” says Qhawekazi Khumalo, a South Africa-based activist with the Free eSwatini Diaspora campaign. “They want government to be accountable. That loyalty their parents may have felt [to liberation leaders] isn’t there.”

The protests in Eswatini began in May after Thabani Nkomonye, a law student, was found dead in circumstances that pointed to police involvement. Students were the first in the streets, but others followed to express frustration after a ban was imposed on citizens petitioning King Mswati III, one of the few ways that Swazis can register an official complaint.

Swazis have lived under an absolute monarchy since 1973, when King Sobhuza II revoked then-Swaziland’s post-independence constitution and declared himself the country’s absolute authority. In 2018 the country’s name was changed to Eswatini.

Ann Hermes/Staff/File

In what was then known as Swaziland, King Mswati III attends the annual Umhlanga ceremony at the Ludzidzini Royal Village on Sept. 2, 2013, in Lobamba.

“We had faith in this king because he helped free us from colonialism,” Ms. Mazibuko says of Sobhuza. “We were proud for him to be recognized as a king, like they had in England, and not only a chief like the English called African rulers.”

But under both Sobhuza and his son, Mswati III, Swazis have watched their rulers amass large fortunes – the current king had an estimated worth of $50 million in 2014 – while most Swazis remained desperately poor. Nearly two-thirds live below the poverty line of $3.20 a day, according to the World Bank, and the country has the highest rate of HIV prevalence in the world. Youth unemployment is around 50%.  

The king, meanwhile, is the sole trustee of an untaxed sovereign wealth fund worth hundreds of millions of dollars, which grew out of savings pooled by Swazis in the 1960s to buy back their land from British colonizers.

Diffuse protests test a regime

Since June, protests in the country, which is slightly larger than Connecticut, have become widespread and diffuse, including both organized marches and more ad hoc acts like the looting of shops.

“When you look at previous rounds of protest in [Eswatini], they were very organized, undertaken by a specific union or cause. It was very discernible who was in the march and who was outside of it,” says Venitia Govender, a South African human rights activist who has worked extensively on pro-democracy issues in Eswatini. “But this one was just a public outcry.”

Eswatini is far from the only African country where youth-led protests have exploded amid soaring unemployment and pandemic lockdowns enforced by heavy-handed police forces.

In October 2020, demonstrations against police brutality swept Nigerian cities, becoming one of the biggest social movements in decades. Young Ugandans turned out by the tens of thousands in March to protest the disputed results of a presidential election won by Yoweri Museveni, who has held power for the last 36 years.

And in South Africa this month, groups of mostly young people looted shops and burned businesses across the country in an outpouring of rage and helplessness triggered by the arrest of former President Jacob Zuma, though many here say the unrest ultimately stems from South Africa’s rampant inequality and youth unemployment.

“COVID has really raised the urgency of these demands,” Ms. Govender says. “People choose protests as their means of fighting when they don’t feel they’ll be listened to by any other means.”

So far, the Swazi monarchy has made few concessions. The king has called the protests “satanic” and said they are taking the country backward. Last week, he named a new prime minister to replace the one who died in December, snubbing protesters’ calls for the head of government to be elected, not appointed.

Police have quelled demonstrations with live ammunition, and 50 demonstrators have reportedly died. But Zakithi Sibandze, a student and activist in Manzini, says it is too late for protesters to back down.

“We are carrying too much in this country,” she says. “And now every day we wake up imagining a new country. We are imagining what it would be like to be free.”

For years, Geronimo Henry couldn’t talk about the childhood he spent at the Mohawk Institute Residential School in southern Ontario. But when he found his voice, well into adulthood, he began a search for justice around his experience as an Indigenous child separated from his family in Canada’s vast assimilation experiment.

Today, Mr. Henry, who is in his 80s, gives talks to schools, churches, and community groups in Canada and the United States. He is raising funds to build a memorial wall that lists all the names of the Indigenous children who studied in this red-brick building throughout its 139-year history.

And now, after hundreds of unmarked graves of children were found near residential schools in British Columbia and Saskatchewan in the past six weeks, he is pushing for the grounds where he lived from 1942 to 1953 to be searched.

“I demand it,” he says. “All of these schools were connected. What happened at one of them happened everywhere.”

Since the first discovery of the remains of an estimated 200 children in Kamloops, British Columbia, in late May, the federal government released an already allocated $27 million to aid Indigenous nations to search the grounds of the more than 130 schools that were part of a church-run, government-funded network that a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) concluded in 2015 had been created for “cultural genocide.”

The discovery of unmarked graves has not surprised Indigenous Canada. Survivors have long spoken of them. But the physical evidence, made possible with ground-penetrating radar technology, has accelerated the push to locate remaining graves across the country. And as more are found – many experts say the findings to date are just the beginning – Indigenous groups, disparate in their beliefs, will face difficult questions about how to best heal in a long path forward from the intergenerational harms of Canada’s assimilation practices, which only formally ended in 1996.

“Bringing these children back to the community and bringing their spirits home is such an important part of the healing process,” says Kisha Supernant, director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology in Edmonton, who has been working on uncovering mass graves since 2008. “So many of the issues that we’ve seen today that Indigenous communities in Canada and elsewhere face can often be traced back to these systems that broke families, literally took them apart. … If there’s any chance of having a healthy future, we have to do this work and hold people accountable and figure out a way forward.”

“How can you heal if we don’t have all the truth?”

On the Six Nations of the Grand River, Canada’s largest reserve west of Toronto and site of the Mohawk Institute Residential School, Chief Mark Hill wrote an open letter demanding a full search and criminal investigation to find possible remains on the reserve’s grounds. The community has sought $10 million to search an area that spans 350 acres, he says.

Two areas around the school had been previously searched, but the institute’s physical location changed multiple times. It burned down twice. Chief Hill says survivors speak of two former farms where they labored and believe remains could be. That land could be in private hands today. The complexity of the search suggests federal funds won’t meet the needs of Indigenous communities across the country.

Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor

Debbie Bickford, like so many other visitors, talks to Geronimo Henry about his experience as a residential school survivor. He takes questions from visitors whenever he visits, usually on weekends.

The Mohawk Institute Residential School opened its doors in 1831 and was first originally operated by the Anglican Church. It didn’t close its doors until 1970.

Six Nations has been a leader in cultural revival. Two years after the school closed, the Woodland Cultural Centre opened as a thriving cultural space. It currently offers virtual tours of the former school – of the exterior walls where students etched their names, of windows where children tried to escape, and of pipe systems in dorms that children used as play structures when adults weren’t looking.

But Chief Hill is clear that this latest chapter of discovery must go far beyond remembrance and commemoration. “Someone has to be accountable,” says Chief Hill. “These are crimes committed against human beings. How can you heal if we don’t have all the truth?”

Six Nations anticipates the need for psychological services will grow along the way. “I feel for communities right now who are having to go through this, and obviously we will have to as well,” says Janis Monture, executive director of the Woodland Cultural Centre.

“Resolution has to come from within the community”

Not all communities are unanimous in their ideas of what to do next, says Eldon Yellowhorn, founding chair of Indigenous studies at Simon Fraser University, who has worked on the Missing Children Project initiated by the TRC. He is currently leading a team of experts to identify the names of the people buried in 104 unmarked graves in Brandon, Manitoba.

Mr. Yellowhorn says he sees a split between those who want to leave cemeteries where they are and build memorials, and those who want remains returned home. “That’s something that the Native community is going to have to come to some kind of agreement [around], and it could get ugly, especially as people start hiring lawyers and suing for one reason or another. That’s going to drag things on, and it will require some kind of resolution,” he says. “Ultimately, that resolution has to come from within the community. It can’t be one that’s imposed.”

Dr. Supernant says that requests for her services have accelerated and outstripped supply – a specialty that she estimates only about two dozen have in Canada – which shows her that most communities are ready to move forward on searching. But the discoveries have also elicited growing calls for criminal investigations, and that is where she says questions could become more difficult. “It is one thing to take out ground-penetrating radar and locate possible graves,” she says. “It’s entirely another to do a forensic investigation.”

It’s more complicated because children in these schools came from far and wide, so that one school is not attached to one Indigenous community but multiple. At the Mohawk Institute Residential School, some students came from as far as the Yukon Territory.

Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor

Geronimo Henry had a tattoo inked on his hand that reads MRS #48 Survivor, to mark his experience at the Mohawk Institute Residential School. He says children at the residential school were only known by their numbers, not their names. His number was 48.

But most would have been neighbors of Debbie Bickford, who grew up in the next town from Brantford – a history that she says she can’t bear today. Outside the school, a vigil has overtaken the front steps. Weeks after the first discovery at a school in Kamloops, visitors in the middle of a summer weekday arrive at a constant clip. The majority are non-Indigenous Canadians like Ms. Bickford saying they are learning about the abuses of residential schooling for the first time.

“Everything I believe is in question,” she says. “When I heard about these kids, I’m like, there’s something huge these people have been trying to tell us for a long time.”

Many approach Mr. Henry, who often shows up at the school to answer their questions. He tells them about malnutrition – survivors called the school the “Mush Hole” – and how the children were identified by number, not name. His was 48. He shows them the crease in his hand where he had tattooed “MRS #48 Survivor,” a constant reminder of the dehumanizing experience that he lived.

He says he is often asked how difficult it is for him to stand on these grounds. He still gets sad at this time of year, the summer months when other kids went home until the fall, he says. He arrived at age 6, and at the end of the school year would wait by a window at the boarding school for his family to pick him up, but they never did. He didn’t leave until he was 17. “It’s kind of like my home, even though it’s sad to say,” says Mr. Henry.

A search for truth brings him back. “I’ve wanted to get justice for all the kids that went to residential schools. For those people that still can’t talk about it to this day, with the trauma they experienced, whether it was physical, mental, psychological, or sexual,” he says. “And this is especially for those who already passed on that never got justice.”

Ryan Yu contributed reporting to this article.

Julie Bennett/AP/File

Lowndes County resident Charlie Mae Holcombe (right) talks with her great-granddaughter Jordyn Sharp in the driveway of their home in Hayneville, Alabama, on Feb. 21, 2019. Ms. Holcombe spent the morning explaining the failing wastewater sanitation system at her home to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, founder of the Climate Reality Project.

For almost 30 years Perman Hardy obeyed a simple rule: When it rains, turn off the water. 

Ms. Hardy had a failing septic system, and precipitation meant wastewater flowing from her house wouldn’t be treated and released into the soil. More likely, it would flow back into her home. So until the last raindrop fell, she halted everything involving a sink, shower, toilet, or washing machine. 

Still, Ms. Hardy considers herself fortunate. For one, in her hometown in Lowndes County, Alabama – one of the state’s poorest and most rural – many people don’t have access to sewage treatment at all. For another, as of this summer, Ms. Hardy no longer has to follow her rule. 

Ms. Hardy’s is among the first of around 175 homes slated to receive septic systems through the Lowndes County Unincorporated Wastewater Project, which officially launched in late June. More than three years in the making, the LCUWP is a nonprofit partnership among locals, businesses, the state Department of Environmental Services, and the federal government. Residents apply and, if accepted, contribute a down payment and then $20 per month as incentive to maintain the system. The program covers the rest. 

At once, the LCUWP displays how beneficial community projects can be, and, on the national scale, how intractable the issue of wastewater is. Even in Lowndes, with a population of less than 10,000, the issue is too big for any one program to solve. Around 80% of people in Alabama’s Black Belt, a slice of heavily African American counties that once included many of the state’s enslaved people, lack adequate wastewater treatment. Nationwide, more than 2 million other Americans don’t have access to running water or indoor plumbing, and even more go without wastewater treatment. Limited infrastructure is most pronounced in rural and tribal communities, from the Deep South to Alaska. 

As Washington debates infrastructure spending, people who live in those areas are left to look for solutions in the interim. Those involved in the LCUWP hope that their program might become a model for other counties in Alabama and nationwide. Helping pockets of underserved communities won’t end the country’s wastewater crisis, but it might put a dent in it. For those who benefit, a dent doesn’t feel so small. 

“It already has changed my life,” says Ms. Hardy. “The plumbing system has changed my life. The septic system has changed my life.”

From grants to loans: Financing sanitation

Until 1972 there was no national standard for wastewater treatment, and few federal funds allocated to improve it. Then came the Clean Water Act, requiring at least secondary treatment for all wastewater systems nationwide. 

Under secondary treatment, solids separate from liquids and the remaining wastewater is purified with a biological process. To upgrade the nation’s infrastructure, the Clean Water Act allocated more than $60 billion, the largest public works investment in American history, says Adam Krantz, CEO of the National Association of Clean Water Agencies. 

But grants alone weren’t enough. Maintaining wastewater infrastructure is expensive, and many localities neglected that step after taking federal money for construction. In an effort to boost accountability, Congress ended the grants in 1990 and replaced it with a system of low-interest loans available for local governments to upgrade their infrastructure. For rural and low-income areas, this immediately created financing issues and left a path to today’s infrastructure environment of haves and have-nots.

“It should not surprise any of us … that there are still communities in the United States – many communities particularly in rural areas – that do not have sewage treatment,” says Alexandra Dapolito Dunn, a partner at the law firm Baker Botts and an expert on wastewater infrastructure. 

Because households are spread so far apart in rural areas, connecting them on a shared sewer system isn’t practical. Septic tanks or other local treatment systems are necessary but also expensive, often costing upward of $10,000. In areas like Lowndes, the system sometimes costs more than the house. 

As a result, many homes in Lowndes lack any sanitation treatment at all. Households often run their wastewater directly into the yard, with what are known as straight pipes. This harms not only the environment but also residents’ health – incubating bacteria, damaging homes, breeding mosquitoes, and discouraging people from drinking water or using it to shower. 

“The people that tend to be impacted by this most are either poor people or people of color,” says Catherine Coleman Flowers, a former Lowndes resident and founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, which works to improve access to clean air, water, and sanitation in marginalized rural communities.

Noah Robertson/The Christian Science Monitor

Sherry Bradley, deputy director of the Bureau of Environmental Services in the Alabama Department of Public Health, sits at her desk in Montgomery on June 9, 2021. Ms. Bradley has spent three years working on the Lowndes County Unincorporated Water Project to help households there get access to wastewater treatment.

Building trust along with infrastructure

Solving America’s wastewater problem, though, is like solving its housing crisis, says Ms. Dunn. There’s no simple, short-term answer. 

If passed into law, Congress and the White House’s bipartisan infrastructure deal would become the nation’s largest investment in clean drinking water and wastewater infrastructure. The Treasury Department is also allowing states to spend the state and local funds allocated in the American Rescue Plan to help remedy the problem.

Yet, while funding is a big obstacle – local governments are responsible for 90% of wastewater funding, says Ms. Dunn – it’s not the only one. In a heavily Black and historically segregated area like Lowndes, education rates are low and trust deficits run wide. 

Many in the area have spent their whole lives without proper wastewater treatment and don’t know why it’s a problem, or how to maintain a new system. Residents sometimes assume state officials are out to punish them and won’t open their doors. 

Sherry Bradley, LCUWP’s program originator and deputy director of the Bureau of Environmental Services at the Alabama Department of Public Health, spent years driving from her office in Montgomery into Lowndes to form relationships in the county. While onerous, those trips helped her earn the trust of people like Ms. Hardy, who has since become a vocal advocate in the community and chair of LCUWP’s board.

The daughter of a sharecropper, Ms. Hardy picked cotton on a local farm as a child and knows the legacy of poverty and segregation in Lowndes. Like many in the county, she shares property with her extended family, who live in separate houses next to crops and horses.

“I built that trust growing up all my life here,” says Ms. Hardy.

The aim, she says, is for the next generation to have better access and understanding than she had. The LCUWP isn’t the whole solution, but it’s been empowering for the community to see nearly 200 households that are set to benefit. The goal of improving wastewater has taken on so many forms over so many years that broken ground, excavators, and giant septic tanks have become a beautiful and even empowering sight. 

Lowndes County is the center of America’s wastewater problem, says Ms. Bradley, who is traveling to Alaska later this year to share information about LCUWP’s program. But maybe, she says, it holds part of the solution.

“This is an example,” she tells the counties around her. “You can do the same thing.”

Read the first article in our water and justice series.

AP

The Olympic rings are seen at Yokohama Baseball Stadium as the field is prepared for softball competition at the Summer Olympics in Japan.

The Summer Olympics, which open July 23 in Japan, promise to be one of the most unusual Games in modern history. For one, they will be performed before very few in-person spectators. They also are a year late, a result of the pandemic. They are officially still the 2020 Olympic Games. But one thing won’t be new: the suspicion that a sizable percentage of athletes will have broken the rules of fair play and used banned performance-enhancing drugs.

Just how many athletes will cheat in this way is difficult to know, but some estimate it could be thousands of the 11,000 or so who will compete. Australian swimmer Kyle Chalmers, who won the 100-meter freestyle at the 2016 Olympics, has said, “I can probably not trust half the guys I’m competing against.”

Testing to detect doping has improved. But in an ongoing “arms race,” new drugs and new ways to fool tests are always emerging.

In one of the biggest moves against doping in Olympic history, the Russian Federation has been banned from officially appearing at these Games after doping violations that involved hundreds of athletes. However, some 330 Russian athletes will still be allowed to compete under special rules: They will not officially represent Russia but rather the “Russian Olympic Committee.” The word “Russia” will not appear on their uniforms. The Russian national anthem will not be played nor the Russian flag displayed.

Other countries have seen a number of athletes barred, some of them medal contenders. Brazil’s top hope in heavyweight weightlifting, Fernando Reis, has been suspended for doping. Kenya was forced to remove two runners from its team because they failed to take all the required doping tests. And U.S. hurdler Brianna McNeal, who won a gold medal in 2016, has received a five-year ban on competing for numerous doping rules violations.

The rewards from doping for athletes and the prestige for their home countries from Olympic victories can be enticing. During the heyday of doping in the last half of the 20th century, East Germany became the poster child for drug-aided success. Olympic records set in the 1980s that remain unbroken today carry a suspicion of drug-enhanced performances.

Despite the ongoing battle against doping in 2021, there’s reason to believe the situation has improved markedly since the 1980s. But as long as the drugging threatens to create an uneven playing field, the Olympics will never fully become the ultimate showcase of athletic achievement they are meant to be.

“If the point of sport is to test the natural limits of human nature then, by artificially extending those limits, doping is at odds with the essence of sport,” writes Heather Dyke, a fellow in the department of philosophy, logic, and scientific method at the London School of Economics.

The Olympic Charter, set out in 1908, calls for “respect for universal fundamental ethical principles” where “the spirit of fair play prevails.” Athletes should compete under mutually agreed rules so that honest winners may be determined.