[IPSM] Tar Sands: Environmental justice, treaty rights and Indigenous Peoples

[mattm-b at resist.ca]

Tar Sands: Environmental justice, treaty rights and Indigenous Peoples
Clayton Thomas-Müller

The application of treaty rights as a legal strategy implemented by the
First Nations themselves must be the key focus in efforts to challenge Big
Oil in Alberta. Resources and effort must be placed into building the
knowledge and capacity amongst First Nations and Métis leadership,
including grassroots, elders and youth, to engage in both an
indigenous-led corporate-finance campaign and in decision-making processes
on environment, energy, climate and economic policies related to halting
the tar-sands expansion. Canadian policy makers need to understand that
there is an inextricable link between indigenous rights and energy and
climate impacts.

The Tar Sands: What, How, For Whom?
The tar sands lie beneath more than 141,000 square kilometres (54,000
square miles) of northern Alberta forest. In 2003, thirty square
kilometres (160 square miles) of land had been disturbed by tar-sands
development. By the summer of 2006, that number had grown to 2,000 square
kilometres (772 square miles) — almost five-fold within three years. These
tar sands are the second-largest oil deposit in the world, bigger then
Iraq, Iran, or Russia, and exceeded only by Saudi Arabia. If current,
approved projects go forward, 3,400 square kilometres (1,312 square miles)
will be strip-mined, destroying a total area as large as the state of
Florida. The current process limit of 2.7 million barrels of oil per day
is estimated to increase to six million barrels per day by 2030. Current
and future high oil prices make the extraction and processing of bitumen
very profitable.

Tar sands are a mixture of sand, clay and a heavy crude oil or tarry
substance called bitumen. To get the oil out of the ground, the tar has to
be superheated with steam in “cookers” to make the oil flow. For each
barrel of tar-sands oil produced, between two and 4.5 barrels of water is
required. In 2007, Alberta approved the withdrawal of 119.5 billion
gallons of water for tar-sands extraction, with an estimated 82 per cent
of this water coming from the Athabasca River, a major tributary in
northern Alberta.

The extracted bitumen is later processed in industrial facilities called
“upgraders” into synthetic crude oil to be piped to the U.S. for refining.
These upgrader facilities look like “refinery cities,” with smokestacks
bellowing polluting emissions and wastewater emptied into toxic tailings
ponds. Recently, in sutu technology is being used to pump steam under the
earth in order to make the bitumen flow through wells. By 2010, the
industry is projected to generate eight billion tons of waste sand and one
billion cubic metres of wastewater — enough to fill 400,000 Olympic-sized
swimming pools. Some of these toxic tailings ponds are located next to the
Athabasca. The tar sands are also a major source of greenhouse-gas
emissions and a major contributor to climate change and global warming.

The oil from the tar sands is going south in order to satisfy U.S. energy
needs. The U.S. has reorganized its long-term plans for petroleum energy:
It has set a new goal that requires satisfying up to 25 per cent of its
daily oil needs from tar-sands operations. This involves massive pipeline
construction and expansions running from northern Alberta down through
Minnesota to refineries in Wisconsin and Chicago, through North Dakota,
South Dakota, down to Oklahoma and Texas. Pipelines will also go through
British Columbia to ship the oil overseas.

Blue River, Brown River
The exploitation of the tar sands is a human-rights issue, an
environmental-justice issue and an indigenous treaty-rights issue. For the
most part, however, the public in Canada and the U.S. has not been made
sufficiently aware of what is going on in northern Alberta. The public
still does not understand that the indigenous First Nations communities
are the populations most negatively affected. Dene and Cree First Nations
and Métis live close to or actually in the midst of these tar-sand
deposits, mostly along the Athabasca River basin area. These are the
indigenous communities of Fort McMurray, Fort McKay and Fort Chipewyan.

The tar-sands development around Fort McMurray and Fort McKay is located
upstream along the Athabasca River basin. Current tar-sands development
has completely altered the Athabasca delta and watershed landscape. This
has caused de-forestation of the boreal forests, open-pit mining,
de-watering of water systems and watersheds, toxic contamination,
disruption of habitat and biodiversity, and disruption of the indigenous
Dene, Cree and Métis trap-line cultures.

“The river used to be blue. Now it’s brown. Nobody can fish or drink from
it. The air is bad. This has all happened so fast,” says Elsie Fabian, 63,
an elder in a Native Indian community along the Athabasca River.

>From the perspective of many concerned First Nations and citizens of
northern Alberta, the government has given over the responsibility of
environmental monitoring and enforcement to the corporations. But the
tar-sands development has completely outstripped the ability of the
corporations and the provincial and federal governments to provide either
management or protection.

A recent health study commissioned by the Nunee Health Authority of Fort
Chipewyan provides evidence that the governments of Alberta and Canada
have been ignoring the evidence of toxic contamination on downstream
indigenous communities. The people most at risk of health effects are
those who eat food from the land and water. The Dene, Cree and Métis
communities continue to subsist on a diet of fish and wild game. The
remote Fort Chipewyan community, for example, has an eighty-per-cent
subsistence diet. According to many Fort Chipewyan residents, the
tar-sands mining is the principle cause of both the toxins in the water
and the recent dramatic increases in the number of cancers and other
diseases.

The Mikisew Cree First Nation is located within Fort McKay and Fort
Chipewyan. Chief Rozanne Marcel of the Mikisew Cree has declared, “Our
message to both levels of government, to Albertans, to Canadians and to
the world who may depend on oil sands for their energy solutions, is that
we can no longer be sacrificed.” But the governments of Alberta and Canada
have so far refused to listen.

The areas of concern fall under Aboriginal Treaties 8 and 11. These are
treaties that ensure that lands of First Nations should not be taken away
from them by massive, uncontrolled development, threatening their culture
and traditional way of life. But the de-watering of rivers and streams to
support the tar-sands operations now poses a major threat to the cultural
survival of these indigenous peoples. The battle over the tar-sands mining
comes down to the fundamental right to exist as indigenous peoples.

“If we don’t have land and we don’t have anywhere to carry out our
traditional lifestyles, we lose who we are as a people. So, if there’s no
land, then it’s equivalent in our estimation to genocide of a people,”
says George Poitras of the Mikisew Cree First Nation.

Big Oil vs. Indigenous Rights
The first tier of tar-sands development came into a region mostly
inhabited by Indigenous peoples. As with many historical instances of the
colonization of indigenous peoples and their lands, the Alberta and
Canadian governments enticed First Nations governmental leadership to
lease their treaty reserve lands to the tar-sands industry as a means for
economic development.

Now, however, the oil industry and the Alberta government want to expand
even further. With an anticipated $25-billion expansion of the Athabasca
tar-sands underway, First Nations leadership and community members are
being pressured by Canada, Alberta and the oil industry to partner with
the world’s largest tar-sands corporations. These giant developers include
Mobil Oil, Shell, Syncrude Canada, Petro-Canada and Suncor Energy.

Many grassroots First Nation members have not been part of these
negotiations, however, and most silently oppose tar-sands expansion. The
problem is that most of these members feel disenfranchised. They lack
knowledge and skills in organizing on energy- and climate-related issues.
Many of the elected First Nations leaders are also feeling torn between
the need to bring economic prosperity to their people and the need to
protect the health and environment of their communities. The stakes have
been set high by petro-politics and the money that flows from it.

The ability of First Nations to retain their inherent sovereignty rights
to protect their lands and culture, and to maintain economically
sustainable and healthy communities has been hampered by the Canadian and
Alberta governments. According to many elders and land-based community
members in the tar-sands area, concerns for jobs, housing, income and
economic development are being prioritized over the traditional indigenous
values of respect for the sacredness of Mother Earth and the protection of
the environment.

A moratorium on further tar-sands expansion must be implemented in
northern Alberta. Since the tar-sands expansion is within First Nations’
territories, any effective strategy must acknowledge Aboriginal title and
treaty rights. This will require an urgent, coordinated, collective
response, led by First Nations and Métis.

A moratorium on development is required until the concerns of First
Nations and Métis regarding the many serious issues that have been raised
by this breakneck industrial development are addressed. These include the
human-rights abuses; the human and ecological health crisis; the
climate-change implications; the water- and air-quality implications; the
treaty-rights implications; the tribal sovereignty and self-determination
implications; as well as the cumulative socioeconomic impacts on the
health and way of life of indigenous peoples. Each of these serious issues
must be responded to, respected and protected in a permanent, traditional,
Indigenous framework, in compliance with the spiritual and natural laws,
treaties and inherent rights of indigenous peoples.

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