Asubpeeschoseewagong - the Indigenous or Ojibway name for Grassy Narrows is situated 80 kilometers north of Kenora, Ontario in Canada. The band membership is approximately 1,000, and their traditional landuse area spans a forest of approximately 2,500 miles. The community has lived sustainably for millennia for physical, economic, cultural and spiritual sustenance.  Approximately 50 percent of the community still lives a subsistence way of life where members depend upon hunting, trapping, and gathering berries and medicines from the land.

The Grassy Narrows community has been through many traumas including attendance in white-governed residential schools, forced relocation away from their traditional living areas, mercury contamination, flooding of sacred grounds and burial sites, and clearcut logging of their forests.  These traumas have led to many social, health and economic problems, as well as the devastation of the culture. 

For thousands of years this community has been strong and self-reliant.  Now, as a result of the continued economic dispossession and cultural anniliation that they have suffered, Grassy Narrows  exhibits the signs of distress that have become typical of First Nations communities across Canada.  Indigenous people, as compared to any other racial or cultural group in Canada, have the lowest life expectancies, highest infant mortality rates, substandard and overcrowded housing, lower education and employment levels, and the highest incarceration rates.  Native people lead in the statistics of suicide, alcoholism, and family abuse.    

In the face of this oppression, the people of Grassy Narrows are actively resisting the continued destruction of their territories, re-occupying their lands, reviving their culture and fighting for the right to manage their land as they see fit, otherwise known as self-determination.