[IPSM] Canada and the [indigenous] Arctic North

[Robin Taylor]

The Berger reports referred to below are available at McGill's First Peoples'
House, where they are on reserve for reading in the house.

The First People's House is open when McGill is in session, usually 9am to
4:30pm, Monday to Friday, at 3505 Peel Street. E-mail
firstpeopleshouse at mcgill.ca.

Robin Taylor

--
Robin.Taylor at mail.mcgill.ca


Quoting Macdonald Stainsby <mstainsby at resist.ca>:

> Canada and the Arctic North
>
> [entire article available here
> http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=30&ItemID=6559 ]
>
> Well, now it appears to be official. On October Seventh, 2004 Imperial Oil
> (otherwise known as Esso) has submitted an application to build the single
> largest mega project of industrialization in the history of the settler
> state of Canada. Along with several Inuit and many other Dene Nations, the
> Deh Cho (Dene) Nations of the Mackenzie Valley are among those whose land
> will be traversed by a 1700 kilometere long natural gas pipeline. It has
> taken many years for oil and gas giants to breakdown the resistance of
> local indigenous nations to such a project. In the 1970's, The Canadian
> Government carried out an inquiry-- the Berger Inquiry-- to examine the
> benefits and costs of the proposed pipeline. The various Nations and the
> Metis would be decimated by such a proposal, according to the Mackenzie
> Valley pipeline review written by Thomas R Berger in 1977 at the behest of
> then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's government.
>
> The reasons for such a recommendation were in mainly two areas: One, that
> a pipeline could not be introduced in such a way as not to (further)
> decimate the traditional lives and practices in the area, associated with
> land use and hunting in a subsistence economy. The other was ecological:
> the risks associated with such a pipeline-- over 1700 km in length-- would
> be so astronomical as to render it beyond the pale in terms of what might
> happen to "the last frontier" even in the unlikely event that there was
> never a spill or an accident. And because one cannot predict the
> unpredictable, the lands that contain among the very last giant migrating
> herds involving hundreds of thousands of animals-- the porcupine caribou
> herds-- need to be protected on their own right, never mind that the
> people who live there depend on the land itself.
>
>
> --
> Macdonald Stainsby
> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green
> In the contradiction lies the hope.
> --Brecht.
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