[IPSM] A Stand in the Forest: Deh Cho Resistance to the Mackenzie Pipeline

[Macdonald Stainsby]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-me-pipeline2jul02,0,7328966.story?coll=la-home-headlines

 >From the Los Angeles Times
A STAND IN THE FOREST
A Stand in the Forest
The Dehcho Indians have long resisted a planned gas line through one of 
North America's last great wildernesses. Can they save their ancestral land?
By Tim Reiterman
Times Staff Writer

July 2, 2006

After the ice broke up and the ferry began running on the Liard River, 
two rangy Indians with weathered faces and easy gaits shouldered a sack 
of beaver and muskrat pelts for the spring fur auction and took a rifle 
for bear protection.

On their short hike through the woods to the ferry landing, Jonas and 
Roy Mouse paused as they often do, heads bowed and caps in hand, at a 
rosary-draped cross that marks the spot where their aged mother 
collapsed and died several years ago. The cross stands alongside an oil 
pipeline that was dug through their forested homeland and that the 
brothers say for eight years drove away animals that they hunt and trap 
for a living.

Today, the brothers, members of the Dehcho First Nations, are facing 
another encroachment on their aboriginal way of life: an even bigger 
800-mile-long natural gas pipeline that would bisect the tribe's 
traditional territory and help spawn industrial development in Canada's 
vast boreal forest, one of the last intact stretches of the Earth's 
original forest cover.

For three decades, the Dehcho have been resisting the $7-billion 
project, which is backed by other native groups in the Northwest 
Territories. But the Dehcho are under mounting pressure to drop their 
opposition to a project that would serve North American energy markets 
as the United States strives to reduce dependence on the Middle East. 
Canada is already the largest foreign supplier of natural gas to the U.S.

The companies that want to build the underground pipeline - Imperial 
Oil, Shell Canada, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil Canada - estimate that 
it would carry 1.2 billion cubic feet of gas per day, which industry 
experts say is enough annually to heat more than 3 million homes for a year.

Recently, officials of Canada's newly elected Conservative government 
signaled their unwillingness to let the Dehcho stand in the way of the 
project, which proponents want to start building in 2008 and finish a 
few years later. Jim Prentice, minister of Indian affairs, declared that 
the pipeline, which still needs regulatory approval, would be built 
along the Mackenzie Valley with or without the tribe's blessing.

However, Prentice's remarks only stiffened resistance from the 
4,500-member tribe, the largest native group along the pipeline and the 
only one with an unresolved claim to its traditional lands.

Grand Chief Herb Norwegian said that if the government tried to 
expropriate Dehcho land for pipeline construction, the tribe would 
retaliate with litigation and possibly blockades.

"People think of a pipeline like a garden hose in your yard," Norwegian 
said. "But a pipeline of this magnitude is like building a China Wall 
right down the valley, and the effects will be there forever and ever."

Many Dehcho fear that hundreds of trucks would disrupt their quiet 
communities, that construction camps would breed drug and alcohol abuse, 
and that the massive project would drive away caribou, moose and other 
wildlife that sustain people like the Mouse brothers.

In the long run, they fear the project would spur a wave of oil and gas 
prospecting that would bring more pipelines and roads and so many 
newcomers that the Dehcho could become a powerless minority in the land 
they have occupied for many centuries.

The pipeline would tap into 6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in 
three well fields north of the Arctic Circle. It would move the gas 
south along the Mackenzie River to Alberta province, where it would be 
used to fuel a massive oil extraction project or be sent directly to 
markets in Canada and the United States.

"It is a significant new supply source," said Imperial Oil spokesman 
Pius Rolheiser. One trillion cubic feet could serve all of Canada's 
gas-heated homes for a year, he said.

The project is expected to spur development of other natural resources 
in the Territories, an area that is almost three times larger than 
California but has only 42,000 inhabitants.

"You are going to get a lot of lateral pipelines built into the system," 
said Chris Theal, research director at Tristone Capital Inc., a 
worldwide energy investment bank.

But about 40% of the pipeline route crosses land claimed by the Dehcho, 
and before approving the project, they want a power-sharing agreement 
over 80,000 square miles of ancestral territory, allowing them to 
preserve lands for cultural or environmental reasons, to control 
industrial development and to collect royalties and taxes.

Dehcho leaders acknowledge that withholding support for such a 
significant project gives them leverage to secure unprecedented authority.

Government officials say their demands are unrealistic. "It would give 
4,500 people the power to govern an area about half the size of France," 
said Tim Christian, the chief federal negotiator. "And we certainly have 
not done that anywhere else [in Canada] and do not believe that is an 
appropriate model."

The government recently offered the Indians $104 million and ownership 
of about 18% of their traditional land, but Norwegian called it a 
"low-ball" offer.

Conservation groups are concerned about the pipeline's impact on one of 
the continent's great natural resources, Canada's 1.4-billion-acre 
boreal, or northern, forest. It is home to many of North America's land 
birds and big wild animals and is a major storehouse of fresh water.

"What is extraordinary . is you are opening one of the last great 
wildernesses of the world," said Stephen Hazell, a lawyer with the 
Sierra Club of Canada. "The oil and gas companies will want every last 
scrap of land for exploration."

The Canadian Boreal Initiative, a conservation organization, has been 
working with the government, industries and tribal groups to identify 
land that should be protected from development. But the organization's 
executive director, Cathy Wilkinson, said that only about 35 million of 
the Mackenzie Valley's more than 400 million acres of boreal forest have 
interim government protection. "The worry today is the pace of 
developing is outstripping the pace of protecting areas," she said.

Although the pipeline's right-of-way would be constructed during winter 
to minimize permafrost damage, scientists working for the energy 
companies acknowledged that it would increase the exposure of wildlife 
such as grizzly bears and woodland caribou to hunters or predators.

In addition to a 120-foot-wide pipeline right-of-way, the project calls 
for constructing staging areas, barge landings and camps for thousands 
of workers.

But scientists hired for the project contended that the disruptions 
would be short-term or limited to permanent facilities such as 
compressor stations.

"The ecosystem integrity . will not be compromised," environmental 
consultant Petr Komers told a recent hearing. "Wide-ranging species will 
continue to move through the area and will continue to survive."

Lisanne Forand, assistant deputy minister for northern affairs, said 
construction "will go ahead only if the environmental assessment process 
indicates effects can be mitigated [and] if producers can make it 
economically viable."

Rolheiser, of Imperial Oil, which is the lead company, said whether the 
pipeline is built hinges partly on the cost of any government-required 
environmental mitigation and on the final tab for agreements with 
aboriginal groups. "It is an economically challenging project," he said.

In this frontier region, where tundra and timber lands unfold to the 
horizon, the economy already depends heavily on products that come out 
of the ground.

The diamond mining industry is one of the world's largest, but natural 
gas development could eclipse it, according to Joe Handley, premier of 
the Territories. "This is a good time," he said. "The price is right. 
The demand is there."

Handley believes the pipeline would generate billions of dollars in 
royalties for Canadian governments, as well as spur population growth, 
jobs, hydroelectric power and the first highway through the entire 
Mackenzie Valley.

Nonetheless, Handley said the project must balance development with 
protection of the environment and the traditional ways of life of the 
aboriginal people who constitute half the population.

Fort Simpson, where the Liard and the Mackenzie converge, was founded in 
the early 1800s as a fur trading post. Today, the town of 1,200 is home 
to hundreds of Dehcho. Like the rivers, their feelings about the 
pipeline run deep and wide.

"The land will be ruined," said 15-year-old Jacqueline Thompson. "The 
animals won't walk through it anymore."

"We were First Nations people before the government and made do with 
what we had.. So we are not too worried if the pipeline does not 
happen," said the grand chief's cousin, Keyna Norwegian, the local chief 
in Fort Simpson.

But the grand chief's brother, Bob Norwegian, is the community liaison 
for the Mackenzie pipeline project, and he believes it would encourage 
economic development and job training. "Folks are romanticizing about 
when we lived off the land," he said. "We are not going back to 
snowshoes and dog teams."

Last year, unemployment was 5.4% in the Territories - but twice that 
among aboriginal people. "The Dehcho is one of the have-not regions," 
said Kevin Menicoche, who represents six of the tribe's 10 communities 
in the legislative assembly. "There is no new money coming in."

The other tribes along the route have established an Aboriginal Pipeline 
Group and would acquire up to a third of the pipeline ownership. They 
have set a July 31 deadline for the Dehcho to join or risk losing many 
millions of dollars in gas profits, but the tribe has indicated that it 
would not decide by then.

"They are walking on pretty thin ice, because at the end of the day they 
could end up with no ownership in the pipeline and it could be built 
without any settlement of their land claim," said Fred Carmichael, 
chairman of the Aboriginal Pipeline Group.

But University of Victoria law professor John Borrows, an expert on 
aboriginal legal rights, said the Canadian Constitution, court rulings 
and treaties provide the Dehcho with strong protection against 
government expropriation of their traditional territory.

"If it went to court, it could be tied up 10 to 15 years," Borrows added.

The pipeline's impact could be greatest for people like Steven Jose-Cli, 
who supplement their diet or income by hunting, fishing and trapping. 
One of about 30 Fort Simpson trappers, Cli works part time for the 
town's housing agency but prefers to be at his cabin 32 miles downriver, 
where he was raised.

Recently, Cli loaded an aluminum skiff for his first trip of the spring. 
Ice floes still drifted down the Mackenzie. A black bear rooted around a 
muddy bank, and a beaver cruised along before diving with a flip of its 
tail. In a biting wind, Cli swiftly lifted a shotgun and brought down 
two mallards as gifts for a neighbor.

"I don't want the pipeline to go through because it will destroy it all, 
and this is all I have," said Cli, who has little schooling and has been 
trapping since boyhood.

"They are going to make roads into my trapping area," he said.

Officials for the pipeline project said subsistence hunters and trappers 
would be compensated for relocation costs or any loss of game. 
Addressing concerns that the project would aggravate substance abuse, 
they promised that workers would stay in drug- and alcohol-free camps.

Fort Simpson Mayor Duncan Canvin, a former Mountie who owns the town's 
only liquor store, said he wants business from pipeline workers to 
stimulate the stagnant economy. "Even an aging [person] with a coronary 
would like a pulse now and then," he said.

The last big pulse for Fort Simpson came in the mid-1980s, when a 
pipeline company buried a 12-inch oil line along more than 500 miles of 
the Mackenzie Valley.

The line was built over the objections of the Dehcho, recalled 
Menicoche, the legislative representative here, who said the project 
provided some jobs but not much lasting economic benefit.

The proposed high-pressure gas line would run through largely 
undisturbed areas parallel to the existing oil pipeline near here.

 >From a helicopter, the old right-of-way looks like a grassy roadway 
through an endless expanse of forest. It passes about 100 yards from the 
Mouses' cabin on the Liard.

Although the brothers take charging bears and subzero temperatures in 
stride, coping with the pipeline was a traumatic experience.

When the moose and beavers disappeared for seven or eight years, Roy, 
59, said they had to move to a second cabin deeper in the woods.

If work on the new pipeline gets too close, the brothers said they would 
move to a third cabin. And if the game is scared off again, they would 
have to repeat the arduous task of cutting a new trap line. "We are 
going to be older and may not be able to hunt," said Jonas, 63. "But 
until we can't do it, we will be out there."


-- 
Macdonald Stainsby
http://independentmedia.ca/survivingcanada
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green
In the contradiction lies the hope
    --Bertholt Brecht.