‘A slow industrial genocide’: tar sands and the indigenous peoples of northern Alberta

Abstract In this article we discuss the impact of the tar sands development in northern Alberta on the indigenous communities of the Treaty 8 region. While the project has brought income to some, and wealth to the few, its impact on the environment and on the lives of many indigenous groups is profoundly concerning. Their ability to hunt, trap and fish has been severely curtailed and, where it is possible, people are often too fearful of toxins to drink water and eat fish from waterways polluted by the ‘externalities’ of tar sands production. The situation has led some indigenous spokespersons to talk in terms of a slow industrial genocide being perpetrated against them. We begin the article with a discussion of the treaty negotiations which paved the way for tar sands development before moving on to discuss the impacts of modern day tar sands extraction and the applicability of the genocide concept. Keywords: indigenous peoplestar sandsgenocideextreme energy Notes M. Mercredi, ‘Slow Industrial Genocide’, The Dominion, 23 November 2009, http://www.dominionpaper.ca/audio/mike_mercredi. C. Samson, A Way of Life that Does Not Exist, London: Verso, 2003, 42. Further citations to this work are given in the text. Ibid., 42. St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber Co. v. The Queen (1888) 14 App. Cas. 46 (J.C.P.C.), summary available at http://www.bloorstreet.com/200block/rstcth.htm. Treaty negotiations, and the ultimate extinguishment of Indian title, were facilitated by the imposition on the natives of coloniser forms of social and political organisation. In the years following 1867, the new Dominion of Canada sought to ‘enfranchise’ Indians through a succession of Indian Acts which ‘registered’ Indians, gave them band numbers, defined them as ‘wards of the state’, created Indian ‘reserves’ under Crown title and arranged native-controlled local government. See Samson, A Way of Life that Does Not Exist, 42. The treaty area most affected by tar sands projects. René Fumoleau, As Long as this Land Shall Last, 2nd edition (Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 2004), 18. A.D. Fisher, ‘The Cree of Canada: some ecological and evolutionary considerations’, in Cultural Ecology: readings on the Canadian Indians and Eskimos, ed. B. Cox (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973), 126–39. R. Daniel, ‘The spirit and terms of Treaty 8’, in The Spirit of the Alberta Treaties, ed. R. Price, (Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 1999), pp. 47–100, 49. Ibid. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 55. Record Group 10, Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa, 3708: 19502-1. Daniel, ‘The spirit and terms of Treaty 8’, 58. Ibid. Fumoleau, Land Shall Last, 65–66. Ibid., 65. Daniel, ‘The spirit and terms of Treaty 8’, 75. Ibid., 76. Fumoleau, Land Shall Last, 78. Canada, Treaty 8, 6–7. Daniel, ‘The spirit and terms of Treaty 8’,77. 26 July 1899, Record Group 10, Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa, 6732: 420–2. See Daniel, ‘The spirit and terms of Treaty 8’, 83; and the interviews with Elders 144–160. Fumoleau, Land Shall Last, 78. Daniel, ‘The spirit and terms of Treaty 8’, 84. Fumoleau, Land Shall Last, 67. Fumoleau, Land Shall Last, 71, Treaty 8, http://www.solon.org/Aboriginal/Canada/Treaty-8.html. Samson, A Way of Life that Does Not Exist, 43. Brody, M Maps and Dreams, 1981, 68. Fumoleau, Land Shall Last, 18. Samson, A Way of Life that Does Not Exist, 44. The United Nations Environment Program, for example, has identified the tar sands ‘as one of the world's top 100 hotspots of environmental degradation’. See International Boreal Conservation (IBCC), Canada's Tar Sands: America's #1 Source of Oil Has Dangerous Global Consequences, 2008, http://www.borealbirds.org/resources/factsheet-ibcc-tarsands.pdf. WWF, ‘Scraping the bottom of the barrel?’, 2008, 27, http://assets.panda.org/downloads/unconventional_oil_final_lowres.pdf. IBCC, Canada's Tar Sands, 3. G. Monbiot, ‘The urgent threat to world peace is … Canada’, 1 December 2009, http://www.monbiot.com/2009/12/01/the-urgent-threat-to-world-peace-is-%E2%80%A6-canada/. ‘The Syncrude tailings pond is now the largest dam on earth, to be rivalled only by China's Three Gorges Dam’, IBCC, Canada Tar Sands, 3. See for a conservative estimate see the citation of a US Department of Energy study in Natural Resources Defence Council, ‘Setting the Record Straight: Lifecycle Emissions of Tar Sands’, 2, www.docs.nrdc.org/energy/files/ene_10110501a.pdf; and for the upper range see Joseph J. Romm, Hell and High Water: The Global Warming Solution (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 181–82; and http://www.greenpeace.org/france/PageFiles/266537/dirtyoil.pdf. Natural Resources Defence Council, ‘Setting the record straight: lifecycle emissions of tar sands’, 2, www.docs.nrdc.org/energy/files/ene_10110501a.pdf. Quoted from Liv Inger Somby's article, published on Galdu (Resource Centre for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples), 3 November 2009, http://www.galdu.org/web/index.php?odas=3757&giella1=eng. Kim Peterson, ‘Oil Versus Water: Toxic Water Poses Threat to Alberta's Indigenous Communicaties’, The Dominon, http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/1429. A. Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005), 121. W. Churchill, Since Predator Came: Notes from the Struggle for American Indian Liberation, 2nd ed., (Oakland, CA, and Edinburgh, UK: AK Press, 2005), 168. But of course not all people who define themselves as indigenous have a strong physical or spiritual connection to land generally or to a specific geographical setting. As Yin C. Paradies writes: ‘although the poor and the rich Indigene, the cultural reviver and the quintessential cosmopolitan, the fair, dark, good, bad and disinterested may have little in common, they are nonetheless all equally but variously Indigenous’ (2006, p 363). Yin C. Paradies, ‘Beyond black and white: essentialism, hybridity and Indigeneity,’ Journal of Sociology 42 (2006): 355– 367. M. Abed, ‘Clarifying the concept of genocide’, Metaphilosophy 37, nos. 3–4 (2006): 308–330, 326. Abed, ‘Clarifying the concept of genocide’, 327. C. Powell, ‘What do genocides kill? A relational conception of genocide. Journal of Genocide Research 9, no. 4 (2007): 527–547, 538. Abed, ‘Clarifying the concept of genocide’, 327. As Abed has so poignantly argued, ‘social death is the harm that makes genocide an ethically unique form’ of destruction (38). D. Short, ‘Cultural genocide and indigenous peoples: a sociological approach’, The International Journal of Human Rights 14, no. 6 (2010): 831–846; and D. Short, ‘Australia: a continuing genocide?’, Journal of Genocide Research 12, nos.1–2, (2010) : 45–68. C. Powell, ‘What do genocides kill? A relational conception of genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research 9, no. 4 (2007): 527–547, 534. Two examples of this perspective are Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 25; and Adam Jones in his textbook Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (New York; Routledge, 2006). Jones wrote; ‘I consider mass killing to be definitional to genocide…in charting my own course, I am wary of labelling as “genocide” cases where mass killing has not occurred’(22). A. Dirk Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin, culture, and the concept of genocide’, in Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed., Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, 3. See Short, ‘Cultural genocide and indigenous peoples’; and Abed, ‘Clarifying the concept of genocide’, on this point. See Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2008): 387–409. Powell, (2007: 538). The ‘Cold War’ era roughly began circa 1945, ‘pitting the US and its ‘Free World’ allies against the “Communist Bloc”…'. See W. Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 1997), 289. Indian land was also used extensively for nuclear weapons testing during this period. Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, 304. Ibid., 324. It this way, the concept of a ‘national sacrifice area’ was first established in official North American governmental policy, whereby certain areas of the U.S/Canada could be demarcated for over-development and exploitation in the name of so-called ‘national priorities’, ‘irrespective of the resulting permanent environmental damages’. See J. Higgins-Freese and J. Tomhave, ‘Race, sacrifice, and native lands’, Earth Light Magazine 46 (2002), http://www.earthlight.org/2002/essay46_sacrifice.html. As Churchill attested, ‘having the last of their territory zoned ‘so as to forbid human habitation’ would' obviously ‘precipitate (the) ultimate dispersal’ of the impacted Native group, thus ‘causing its disappearance as a ‘human group’ per se'. See Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, 185. We must therefore conclude that this policy is genocidal, ‘no more…no less’. In addition, one can see how ‘colonizers attempt to deny…reality by forcing those people who have already been rendered dirty, impure, and hence expendable to face the most immediate consequences of environmental destruction’. See Smith, Conquest, 57. M.T. Klare, (2010) ‘The relentless pursuit of extreme energy: a new oil rush endangers the Gulf of Mexico and the planet’, The Huffington Post, 19 May 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-t-klare/the-relentless-pursuit-of_b_581921.html. Ibid. ‘Although Canada is often seen as a junior partner in many imperial ventures, it has taken the lead in the subjugation of the people of Afghanistan and Haiti. Perhaps more significant, if less well known, is Canada's role in subordinating the planet to the needs of the oil and gas industry’. See M. Stainsby, ‘Into a black hole’, Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action 5 (2007): 87–100, 89. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 89. ‘The recoverable oil reserves in Alberta's tar sands are so bountiful that they vie with oil reserves in Saudi Arabia and Venezuela for top status’. See K. Peterson, ‘Oil versus water: toxic water poses threat to Alberta's indigenous communities’, The Dominion: A Grassroots News Cooperative, (tar sands special issue) 48 (2007): 12 –31, 12. M. Humphries, ‘Congressional Research Service’, North American Oil Sands: History of Development, Prospects for the Future (US:CRS, 2008), http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34258.pdf. E. Black, ‘America with no plan for oil interruption: ironically, as price per barrel drops, American oil supply from Canada imperiled‘, The Cutting Edge News, 3 November 2008, http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=896. Smith, Conquest, 180. Smith, Conquest, 179. This is sometimes referred to as ‘internal colonialism’. Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4, (2006): 387–409, 388. Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, 319; emphasis added. W. LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999), 2. W.C. Bradford, Beyond Reparations: An American Indian Theory of Justice (The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2004):7, http://law.bepress.com/expresso/eps/170. Smith, Conquest, 122; and on the ‘forcible’ point see Short, D (2010) ‘Cultural Genocide…’. H. Zinn, ‘Introduction’, in Ecocide of Native America: Environmental Destruction of Indian Lands and Peoples, eds., D.A. Grinde and B.E. Johansen (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 1995), 1. In A. Dirk Moses, ‘Conceptual blockages and definitional dilemmas in the ‘racial century’: genocides of indigenous peoples and the Holocaust', Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 4 (2002): 7–36, 24. Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, 9. Zinn, ‘Introduction’, 3. The first 40 years of its operation has already seen an incredible ‘influx of workers, machinery and infrastructure’ into the area, which has had severely detrimental impacts on local Native communities ‘socially, politically, and culturally’. See LaDuke, All Our Relations, 84. This has included rises in alcohol and drug abuse, ‘violence, prostitution, elder and spousal abuse’, and abandoned children ‘fathered by workers who are long gone’. See M. Stainsby, ‘The richest first nation in Canada: ecological and political life in Fort McKay’, The Dominion: A Grassroots News Cooperative 48( 2007): 18– 35, 35. Sociologists have referred to these particular ‘ramifications of…development as the ‘ boom town syndrome ’. It is not considered to be a healthy environment for the host population and is exacerbated when the local host community is a different colour, race, and culture from the newcomers'. See LaDuke, All Our Relations, 84 (emphasis added). K.P. Timoney, on behalf of the Nunee Health Board Society,A Study of Water and Sediment Quality Related to Public Health Issues, Fort Chipewyan, Alberta (Nunee Health Board Society: Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, 2007), http://www.borealbirds.org/resources/timoney-fortchipwater-111107.pdf, 54. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 53. ‘As a result of this spill, commercial fishing by local people was cancelled due to an oily taste in the fish’. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 53; furthermore, ‘a 2008 study by Environmental Defense showed that the tailings ponds were leaking 11 million litres of liquid into the surrounding environment everyday’. See I. Willms, ‘Photo Essay: Fort Chipewyan lives in the shadow of Alberta's oil sands’, This Magazine, 1November 2011, http://this.org/magazine/2011/11/01/fort-chipewyan-photo-essay/. Ibid., 53. IBCC, Canada's Tar Sands, 3. ‘Tar sands companies are currently licensed to use over 90 billion gallons of water from the Athabasca River per year – enough water to satisfy the needs of a city of two million people’ (ibid., 3), furthermore, ‘most if not all of this water us taken out of the natural cycle and never replaced’. See K. Thomas, ‘A new wave of exploitation: Canada, Alberta Defy UN, sell off rights to disputed Lubicon land’, The Dominion: A Grassroots News Cooperative 48, (2007): 24–38, 38. IBCC, Canada's Tar Sands, 1. C. Thomas-Muller, ‘We speak for ourselves: indigenous peoples challenge the fossil fuel regime in Alberta’, The Dominion: A Grassroots News Cooperative48 (2007): 13. IBCC, Canada's Tar Sands, 1. ‘These are the communities of Mikisew Cree First Nation and the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation at Fort Chipewyan, Fort McMurray First Nation, Fort McKay First Nation, and to the south, the Chipewyan Prairie First Nation. They are all members of the Athabasca Tribal Council’ (Indigenous Environmental Network (ca.2008) Information Sheet No. 1, Tar Sands: Indigenous Peoples and the Giga Project, http://dirtyoilsands.org/files/IEN_CITSC_Tar_Sands_Info_Sheet.pdf. ‘The observations of the elders are remarkably consistent. They say that the river water tastes differently now – oily, sour, or salty. When the river water is boiled, it leaves a brown scum in the pot. Fish (and muskrat) flesh is softer now, and watery. Ducks, muskrats, and fishes taste differently now. There is now a slimy, sticky, or gummy material…in their fishing nets in winter; this started in perhaps the mid-1990s’. See Timoney, A Study of Water and Sediment Quality, 46. ‘Oilsands poisoning fish, say scientists, fisherman’, CBC News, 16 September 2010, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/story/2010/09/16/edmonton-oilsands-deformed-fish.html. M. Rolbin-Ghanie, ‘What in tar nation? Life amongst the tar sands’, The Dominion: A Grassroots News Cooperative 48 (2007): 2–38; 21. In response to O'Connor's findings, Alberta Health and Wellness released their own report in 2006 which ‘declined to conclude the cancer rate in Fort Chipewyan was elevated’ (ibid., 6). Timoney suggests that this was perhaps due to the fact that the government ‘used questionable statistical methods and assumptions and underestimated levels of arsenic in water and sediment and the fish consumption rate of many Fort Chipewyan residents (ibid., 4). ‘Will Dr. John O'Connor ever be cleared?’, Tar Sands Watch, 20 July 2009, http://www.tarsandswatch.org/will-dr-john-o-connor-ever-be-cleared. ‘Fort Chip cancer rates higher than expected: report’, CBC News, 6 February 2009, http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2009/02/06/edm-fort-chip-cancer.html. Alberta Cancer Board, Cancer Incidents in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, 1995–2006, February 2009 (Alberta Cancer Board, Division of Population Health and Information Surveillance: Alberta, Canada), http://www.ualberta.ca/~avnish/rls-2009-02-06-fort-chipewyan-study.pdf. The report concluded that levels of the rare cancer cholangiocarcinoma were not higher than expected, however (ibid.). However, ‘according to Natural Resources Defence Council senior scientist Dr. Gina Solomon…almost all of the cancer types that were elevated have been linked scientifically to chemicals in oil or tar’. See D. Droitsch and T. Simieritsch, on behalf of The Pembina Institute, Canadian Aboriginal Concerns with Oil Sands: A compilation of key issues, resolutions and legal activities, September 2010, http://www.pembina.org/pub/2083. Alberta Health Services, Fort Chipewyan Cancer Study Findings Released, 6 February 2009, http://www.albertahealthservices.ca/500.asp. CBC News, Fort Chip Cancer Rates Higher Than Expected. IEN, Information Sheet No. 1, 2. Timoney, A Study of Water and Sediment Quality. lbid. Timoney, A Study of Water and Sediment Quality, 71 & 72. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 56, 73. Ibid., 73. E.N. Kelly, D.W. Schindler, P.V. Hodson, J.W. Short, R. Radmanovich, and C.C. Nielsen, Oil sands development contributes elements toxic at low concentrations to the Athabasca River and its tributaries', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences PNAS, US, 2 July 2010, http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/24/1008754107.full.pdf. S. Bell, S., ‘Oilsands pollution worse than expected’, Slave River Journal, 7 December 2009, http://srj.ca/oilsands-pollution-worse-than-expected-p4362.htm. Ibid. As mentioned above, so did Timoney's 2007 report, A Study of Water and Sediment Quality Kelly et al., Oil sands development contributes, 5. Royal Society of Canada, ‘Expert Panel Report: Environmental and Health Impacts of Canada's Oil Sands Industry’, www.rsc.ca/.../RSC%20report%20complete%20secured%209Mb.pdf. Ibid., 107, 148. Water Monitoring Data Review Committee, ‘Evaluation of Four Reports on Contamination of the Athabasca River System by Oil Sands Operations’, http://environment.alberta.ca/documents/WMDRC_-_Final_Report_March_7_2011.pdf. Sierra Club Prairie, ‘Royal Society Report on Tar Sands ignores Traditional Knowledge Indigenous Peoples, Community Members and Allies raise concerns’, http://www.sierraclub.ca/en/node/3554. ‘Making “cents” of the tar sands’, Respecting Aboriginal Values and Environmental Needs, 20 September 2011, http://raventrust.com/blog/2011-09/making-cents-of-the-tar-sands.html. ‘Cancer Rates Downstream from Oilsands to be Probed’, CBC News, 19 August 2011, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/story/2011/08/19/edm-cancer-oilsands-fort-chipewyan-study.html. W. Churchill, Kill the the The of American Indian (San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 2004), in and to is that the ‘ in a was in by the but by Canadian Indian in a from of response to a by a Indian official the of death in the is that Indian children their natural to by so in these and that as a they at a higher rate than in their But this not a in the policy of this which is a to Indian See from The Canadian Holocaust – The of the Genocide of Aboriginal Peoples by and in 2nd ed. The into Genocide in Canada and 2005), (emphasis added). these were the result of of was by top Canadian Indian who in an official report in ‘I the are being created in to rate in the often This is a See from 20 (emphasis added). Smith, Conquest, 44. Stainsby, ‘Into a black hole’, 89. IBCC, Canada's Tar Sands, This Alberta the rate of in the world the Stainsby, ‘Into a black hole’, 89. National Defense Council, et Tar Sands et February August Ibid., 5. Ibid., Ibid., of the currently in Alberta have been in the last years as the tar sands Ibid., 9. Ibid., (2010) over to oil December et al., Tar Sands 5. through a the can the natural gas liquid to from liquid to gas This forms a gas that can the of this as many of the as a to may the response to is to more oil through the can be 6–7. Magazine, over tar sands 6 August 2010, Magazine, ‘A year spill, tar sands oil a July 2011, Magazine, River oil the of to 6 July 2011, See tar land ‘a slow industrial genocide’, See this report on a ‘Slow Industrial an discussion of this see article, ‘Into a black Tar Sands and Indigenous Rights Tar Sands and Indigenous Rights K. ‘Oil Versus Water: Toxic water poses threat to Alberta's Indigenous communities’, The Dominion 48, Ibid. 2008, 3. Stainsby, ‘The richest first nation in Canada, 18. K. ‘Oil Versus K. ‘Oil Versus Daniel, ‘The spirit and terms of Treaty 8’, 76. See Treaty 8, G. am I September 2011, C. Thomas-Muller, ‘Tar environmental treaty rights and indigenous 2008, at Ibid. See for this of the Royal of of the tar sands Smith, Conquest, Ibid. see K. and A. ‘Beyond for a new of the Royal no. See report at See D. ‘The of energy for The November 2011,

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