00:00:30.000Hello, this is Ayanna Young, and I welcome you to For the Wild podcast.
00:00:39.620Today, we are speaking with Arielle Tsekwe-Durange, who is an Indigenous rights advocate and member of the Athabasca Chippewan First Nation, Treaty 8 of northern Alberta, Canada.
00:00:52.140She works to raise awareness about the negative climate, human, and Indigenous rights impacts
00:00:58.160of the extractive industry in her nation's traditional lands and territory.
00:01:03.820Arielle is a founder of Indigenous Climate Action, a national Indigenous civil society
00:01:09.540vehicle to push for a united Indigenous Climate Action strategy in Canada.
00:01:15.540Arielle has worked with various Indigenous and non-Indigenous organizations, including
00:01:20.580the Federation of Saskatchewan, Indian Nations, Indigenous Environmental Network, Sierra Club,
00:01:27.780Rainforest Action Network, and the UN Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change. She is married
00:01:34.560and a mother of two and currently resides in Edmonton, Alberta. Well, welcome, Arielle. I'm
00:01:41.800so excited to be speaking with you today. Thank you for joining us.
00:01:46.520Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
00:01:49.120So Ariel, to start us off with a sense of place, I'd love if you could tell us a bit about your ancestral lands and the territories of the Athabasca Chippewan First Nations.
00:02:03.000Yeah, for sure. So I come from a place in northern Canada, so Treaty 8.
00:02:09.580Now the Treaty 8 territory is quite expansive and extensive. It's actually the largest recognized numbered treaty area in Canada.
00:02:18.200but I come from an area that exists within northern Alberta.
00:02:22.960So we live within what's known as the Peace Athabasca Delta.
00:02:27.640And the Peace Athabasca Delta is right in sort of the heart of the Boreal Forest,
00:02:31.940and it's a delta, so it's a lot of water, a lot of river systems,
00:02:35.880and an immense amount of Boreal Forest.
00:02:38.700The delta is also home to one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites,
00:02:42.840which is the Wood Buffalo National Park.
00:02:45.080And so our territory has already been recognized, not just nationally, but internationally for its rich biodiversity that exists within our territory.
00:02:54.980But just sort of upstream from our territory is the largest industrial project in the world, which is the Alberta tar sands.0.69
00:03:03.400So sort of right in the hub of this beautiful biodiversity that is home to, you know, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the traditional territory of my people, the Dene Sutene people, is this massive industrial project producing some of the dirtiest fuel on the planet.0.88
00:03:23.400And it's not just about the river systems and the flora and the fauna and the plants, but there's also an immense impact on species.1.00
00:03:30.480so we used to have some of the richest herds of caribou and bison and now we have very small
00:03:37.540bison herds and very small caribou herds in fact the decline that we've seen in our region in the
00:03:43.500last 30 years is a 70 to an 80 percent decline in the numbers of these species from industrial
00:03:49.840disturbances to their lands and territory so it's still beautiful we still have a lot of rich
00:03:54.400boreal forests and swamplands and peat bogs and river systems and places where we go fishing
00:04:02.460and hunting and trapping. But it's all sort of being degraded right now from this massive
00:04:08.840industrial project just upstream from our communities. It's difficult to even fathom
00:04:14.240the scope, 10.6 million acres, which is roughly the size of Florida. So I'm wondering if you
00:04:21.680would mind giving us a picture of what this highly destructive GIGA project looks like?
00:04:29.020Then if you could tell us about the process itself. For sure. So I think a good way to visualize what
00:04:36.360our territory looks like, and I actually just sort of stumbled upon this recently. I was
00:04:41.240at an event with a friend of mine who's from Peru. He's at one of the headwaters of the Amazon River,
00:04:48.820and he was showing me pictures of his territory and so many people in the world when we talk about
00:04:54.120sort of rich biodiversity we think of the amazon immediately and we see all these beautiful pictures
00:04:58.740of these rivers snaking through forests and beautiful landscapes that are uninhabited by
00:05:04.180people that is what my territory looks like in fact as we put pictures side by side of our
00:05:09.560territories if you were looking at them directly from above you couldn't ascertain which was which
00:05:15.700And so that was a really, really sort of one of those stark moments for me where I was like, oh, when we talk about the lungs of the earth and we make these references to the Boreal Forest being the second half of the other sides of the lungs of the earth, that that reference is actually quite accurate, not just as a metaphor, but as a visualization of what they actually look like.
00:05:35.420And so we're talking about beautiful greenery, beautiful forests, beautiful river systems and lakes and animals and biodiversity that's so rich and so critical for life on Earth.
00:05:49.800And as you're looking at this space and its beauty and its immense, it seems to go on and on and on, you happen upon these massive pox or sores on the Earth.
00:06:03.440and from flying up above the planes look like little tiny specks compared to the size of some
00:06:09.980of these operations and these operations are done in multiple different ways there isn't just sort
00:06:15.540of one way to access the oil so traditional sweet crude oil that you see in like texas and other oil
00:06:22.340rich places like even in the middle east it's pump jacks lined up everywhere and it's very ugly and
00:06:28.760disturbing but in our territory it's quite different it's not just pump jacks everywhere
00:06:34.260what they actually have to do is they have to rip up the earth they have to remove the boreal
00:06:41.280forest and that rich biodiversity and they sort of roll it all up like literally they collect the
00:06:47.880trees and the plants and they roll them all up and they put them away for what they refer to as
00:06:53.560intended reclamation in the future and then they dig into the earth and they remove the top layers
00:07:00.800of soil and they take those away as well until they dig deep enough until they get to the bitumen
00:07:06.320or tar sands or oil sands and you know there's the technical terms there's the oil industry terms and
00:07:12.280there's what they coined as the political activist terms which is tar sands but the reality is is
00:07:16.780they refer to this as tar sands early on when they first discovered this because they thought it was
00:07:21.560tar but then they realized that it was oil mixed with mud and the consistency of it is more like
00:07:27.080peanut butter which got its name tar sands and so they access this sort of muddy oily soil and then
00:07:35.500they dig it out and they create these massive open pit mines where they have some of the largest
00:07:42.060dump trucks on the planet and massive shovel operations digging into the ground filling up
00:07:49.000these trucks they're as big as a two-story home and they fill them up with dirt and these shovel
00:07:54.160operations are in 24 7 365 days a year extracting this currently we have about 600 square kilometers
00:08:03.500I don't know in miles what that is I apologize but 600 square kilometers of land that's being
00:08:08.680dug up and open pit mines that are cover 600 square kilometers of land in northern Alberta
00:08:15.500And it's not just the operations that are these sort of giant pox on the land of just the operations themselves of these open pit mines, but in order to process the tar sands and turn it into oil or something that resembles an oil similar to sweet crude oil, it's not just your standard ship it in a pipeline.
00:08:34.160They have to separate all that mud and sand from this muddy substance, and they do it by using massive amounts of water that they take directly from the freshwater river systems in the territory, the Athabasca River system, the Mackenzie-Athabasca Basin, which is a glacier-fed water source, one of the cleanest, should be one of the cleanest water sources in North America, but that's also alien now because of this industry.
00:09:01.900but they take fresh water and then they put it into these systems where they superheat it
00:09:06.800and they mix it with this sort of muddy oil and then they spin it until the oil separates from
00:09:13.240the mud and then they take this leftover toxic cocktail of minerals and oils and contamination
00:09:22.380from the mud and the separation and all the leftover water that they've used and they put
00:09:28.120them into these things that they refer to now as tailings ponds. But these tailings ponds are not
00:09:33.760ponds. They're more like lakes. And now they encompass an area close to 300 square kilometers
00:09:39.020of land. So you get to see from an aerial perspective, these giant mines that are covering
00:09:45.400over 600 kilometers of land. And an additional, I think it's around 280 square kilometers
00:09:50.700of toxic lakes of water and the byproducts. But we also have mounds of pet coke, which is
00:09:59.940a toxic carcinogen. And some of these mounds of pet coke are literally on the shores of the river
00:10:06.520system. And then further back even more is another byproduct of the extraction process,
00:10:12.380which is sulfur. They now refer to these mounds as sulfur pyramids because they extract and they
00:10:18.220have all this sulfur as a byproduct, that they're creating these pyramids, very comparable to the
00:10:23.920pyramids of Egypt that are seven stories high, and there are now four of them, that they just stack
00:10:30.500and stack and stack and stack sulfur. They're creating so much pet coke and so much sulfur
00:10:35.740that they can't even find markets large enough to purchase this from them. So we're talking about
00:10:41.600layers upon layers upon layers upon layers of contamination and destruction that you can
00:10:48.940visually see, that you can smell with your nose, that you can taste in your mouth, and that you
00:10:55.860can hear. Because one of the other things about this industry is that these ducks and other
00:11:01.200waterfowls, they fly through the region. They'll sometimes mistake these tailings lakes for real
00:11:08.280lakes, because why wouldn't you? And they've had multiple instances where large flocks of waterfowl
00:11:14.620have landed in these toxic lakes and succumbed almost immediately. They're like modern day tar
00:11:21.500pits, where these animals then sink to their death and die. And in 2008, a flock of 1,606 ducks
00:11:30.660flew through the region, landed on one of the lakes and died. And so since then, now the operators are
00:11:36.260mandated to have deterrent systems and they have these like scarecrows put on all these little
00:11:42.160boats in these lakes and then they're firing these propane cannons every two to five seconds it's
00:11:49.180just like so you can hear it you can taste it you can smell it and it leaves this visceral reaction
00:11:57.720in your soul almost to go from this beauty of something that is reminiscent and looks like
00:12:04.660the Amazon rainforest, and you see these giant sores on the land that just hit you with a wave
00:12:13.460of every sensory system that you can have. And as an indigenous person, it also hits your soul
00:12:20.880and your spirit because these places are not just in the middle of nowhere. These are places
00:12:26.360that my father grew up in. These are places that I knew as a child that were sacred places,
00:12:34.240places where we would go fishing and trapping and hunting and for cultural procurement and
00:12:40.400practices that are now completely destroyed. I remember one of the times that I hadn't been
00:12:46.500there in a really many many years and I drove from the town of Fort McMurray where there's
00:12:51.420just Boreal Forest then you go north of Fort McMurray and suddenly there's these massive
00:12:55.120operations and I remember driving down that highway from Fort McMurray and my family friend
00:13:00.760of ours was just yammering on about how big the industry has gotten since I'd been there and it'd
00:13:04.580been about a decade and as we pulled over this little hill and I could see it I remember as she
00:13:09.720was just talking more and more about what was going on I couldn't even hear her anymore because
00:13:14.240my ears just started ringing and my face got hot and I was looking at this destruction and I felt
00:13:20.600my chest tighten because it was like coming upon a dead relative it was like coming upon something
00:13:27.460so awful and horrible to see that I couldn't breathe and I couldn't do anything. And I just
00:13:34.600remember tears are coming down my face because for the first time in many years, it was like
00:13:41.200seeing someone dead laid out before me and everyone just walking past it. And so it's a really,
00:13:48.180really visceral experience to see that as an Indigenous person who was taught that those
00:13:53.240places are our relatives that the birds and the fish are our relatives the trees and the grass
00:13:59.580and the plants and the medicine nurture us and that these things are critical to our identity
00:14:05.180and who we are as people to just be so blatantly destroyed and displayed in front of you with pride
00:14:11.440by this industry and so for me that's what the tar sands are it's destruction in the heart of
00:14:18.220beauty and in the heart of the territory of my people, in the heart of my identity, is this
00:14:23.900giant sore that people parade around with pride.
00:27:01.060So would you mind shedding some light on what the environmental assessment process is really like for the First Nations? And yeah, let's just start there. What is the environmental assessment process really like?
00:27:18.480So, you know, there's constantly this sort of rhetoric that gets touted by Canadian government officials that we have some of the best environmental standards and regulations in the world.
00:27:35.400I mean, if that were true, would we legalize and allow mounds of pet coke to sit along the shores of a critical river system that's protected under the National Navigable Protection Act?
00:27:48.540Would we allow massive amounts of uncovered sulfur to be just sort of left in open air and so on and so forth for all of these destructive things associated with the tar sands?
00:27:58.600I mean, that simply would not be the case if we had real environmental protection and regulations in this country.
00:28:07.400So within the actual regulatory process, what we see is there's all these regulations that industry is supposed to meet around the expulsion of toxic contaminants into river systems and protection of species and air quality and all these things.
00:28:26.200Now, the biggest issue is that in Alberta's Tarsons, how could they get away with all these things then?
00:28:32.400Well, they've done something that's very interesting.
00:28:36.220They've sort of created small applications for big projects.
00:28:40.700So instead of looking at multiple projects in one condensed area, because that's what's going on, they look at individual projects.
00:28:49.540So you'll have maybe eight different operations back to back to back to back, one against the other.
00:28:55.080Some of them are owned by the same company, but they give them different names or it's
00:29:01.100multiple companies that have traded lease sites and done so.
00:29:04.520And then they all sort of operate in the same region and they submit their applications
00:29:09.280to all those different areas and regulations, whether it's species at risk, whether it's
00:29:15.060fisheries, whether it's, you know, emissions control or I mean, there's multiple different
00:29:19.780areas which they're supposed to abide by.
00:29:21.840But what happens when you start to look at smaller projects is that their impacts are what they refer to as negligible or they don't impact because it's so small.
00:29:33.680It's so minute that they're going to allow 100 gallons of wastewater into the Athabasca River system.
00:29:40.080That's negligible with the rate and pace of the river system.
00:29:45.180But the problem is that it's not just one project.
00:29:47.980It's like six projects, all dumping thousands and thousands of gallons of wastewater into the river system or disrupting thousands of hectares of land or increasing emissions by 50 to 60 megatons per year.
00:30:03.760And you end up seeing a different picture when you come macro.
00:30:08.800And so what we've seen with regulations is that they're very micro and you can't see the bigger picture and you can't see those impacts.
00:30:15.900And then to add insult to injury for Indigenous folks, there is absolutely no review of how these projects impact treaty and Aboriginal rights in the country.
00:30:29.140They don't look at how that project is going to disrupt the traditional fishing of a community.
00:30:39.200And the only way that it is required is if a First Nation community or an Indigenous community steps in and says, hey, actually, that project is going to disrupt our fishing.0.84
00:30:50.760and instead of going oh okay that's great we'll we'll make sure we amend it and we'll figure that0.74
00:30:56.120out government and industry then say okay that's nice prove it it's literally the burden of proof
00:31:05.220is then put onto these communities now we're we're being asked to do this in systems against
00:31:11.380governments and against corporations that both have billions of dollars and resources to be able
00:31:16.480to challenge any argument that we bring forward. So we will bring forward these stories from our
00:31:23.640communities, oral history, we'll bring maps of where we've been and what we're doing in these
00:31:28.220different places, and they will do everything that they can to challenge the accuracy and the
00:31:34.060credibility of those pieces of evidence that we bring forward. And then when we do bring forward
00:31:39.740evidence that's unrefutable for the impacts on our treating Aboriginal rights, they don't actually
00:31:45.400really do much about it except relegate the corporations into a process of mediation with
00:31:52.820the First Nations. So instead of being like, oh, this project impacts these First Nations too much,
00:31:57.720you will not get permission to do so. They'll say to the company, while your project clearly
00:32:03.000impacts the rights of this First Nation, you must now enter into a process of remediation and
00:32:08.800mediation with this proponent of the First Nation and figure out a way to come to an agreement to
00:32:15.060mitigate these impacts and that has resulted in very little it's resulted in you know for instance
00:32:21.620one company has created something called a reclamation lake so they were going to destroy
00:32:27.760a critical fishing ground along the river system and so they're like oh yeah i guess we're going
00:32:32.980to probably impact that it won't be safe to fish there anymore so we're just going to go into a
00:32:37.680totally random part of the boreal forest we're going to dig a lake we're going to take water
00:32:41.660from the river system we're going to put it in there we're going to take some of the fish from
00:32:44.720the river and we're going to put in this lake as well and then that will be your reclamation fishing
00:32:49.660area and that's where you can go to fish now because we've destroyed the other one now you
00:32:54.580can imagine most people don't go fishing there because one it's not a traditional place to fish
00:32:58.660and secondarily the fish survival rate for that lake not reclamation compensation lake is what
00:33:05.920it was called it's compensation lake is not actually being effective in compensating and
00:33:10.840its mitigations capabilities are negligible at best. And so we end up with these systems that
00:33:17.420while they have all of these sort of check marks that they can check off for sort of Western
00:33:23.780society environmental standards, they're looking at the micro so they're not even really effectively
00:33:29.000looking at them properly because it needs to be looked at cumulatively and it's not. There's no
00:33:34.280real system in place to review effectively the impacts on treating Aboriginal rights0.99
00:33:41.080unless First Nations people can come up with the money, the time, the resources to find out and to
00:33:48.280prove to these companies and to government that they are impacting their rights, that they're
00:33:53.100impacting things. And sometimes it's abstract, you know, like how do you prove that increased
00:33:58.300emissions and particulate matter from a company that's 85 kilometers away is increasing respiratory
00:34:06.140diseases in your community how can you prove that the increases of cancer are associated directly
00:34:12.060to a company because it's not one company it's all of them all of the emissions are increasing
00:34:16.940respiratory diseases it's not one corporation it's not one project and so you end up in this
00:34:22.220situation where we're like well we have increases in respiratory diseases we have increases in
00:34:26.320cancer and autoimmune diseases and we bring that to a hearing or a regulatory review process
00:34:32.540and it's dismissed as evidence because there's no way to prove that it has any association
00:34:38.340because it's an individual application rather than a cumulative application. So there's serious
00:34:43.720problems within the regulatory review process in recognizing the cumulative impacts as well
00:34:49.340as the impacts to treating aboriginal rights. The way that this toxic culture treats earth1.00
00:34:55.860is the same way that it treats women and i'd like to discuss how this influx of labor coming from0.80
00:35:03.720this huge project is affecting your communities according to the native women's association of
00:35:09.200canada there have been over a thousand missing and murdered indigenous women between 1980 and 2012
00:35:15.640so i'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about the man camps and their contributions to
00:35:22.800these numbers? Yeah, you know, I think that's one of those things that doesn't get enough attention.
00:35:29.600Because within the research on the murdered missing women, sort of portfolio is you actually
00:35:35.360see clusters of where women go missing. And they're sort of in these industrial hubs of the
00:35:41.060country, including in Alberta. So obviously, large urban centres, like Vancouver and Toronto have a
00:35:46.760large number because of population numbers. But in places where you see massive resource
00:35:52.480development, you see sort of a incompatible number of missing and murdered women for the0.79
00:35:59.240population sizes. And that's very true in Alberta. One of the most alarming things is that Fort0.96
00:36:04.940Chippewan, where my community is from, it's a small hamlet, it's an isolated rural community,
00:36:11.500you can fly in only during the spring and summer and fall. There's a winter road that's open in
00:36:17.360the winter 1200 people small isolated community a lot of people come down to Fort McMurray and
00:36:24.000Edmonton for shopping and all those types of things from the community of Fort Chippewan
00:36:30.060we have two missing women one is actually one was confirmed murdered just two years ago they
00:36:37.240found her remains and there's another one that has been missing for five six years now we have
00:36:43.880another woman who is from a community that's impacted by tar sands, just sort of south of
00:36:48.320Fort Macquarie, small community, again, spoke to the UN about the impacts that this industry has
00:36:54.120on our communities, has gone missing as well. And so we have a disproportionate amount of people,
00:36:59.800and particularly women, that have become targets for predators that come. And these predators that
00:37:07.080come, it sounds like insidious in sort of conspiracy theorists, but the reality is,
00:37:12.500the people that come to work in these sites are people that are either a they have no economic
00:37:18.640development in their territory and they're just looking for anything to feed their families and
00:37:22.520they're not doing it for the wrong reasons they're not doing it because they're evil and insidious
00:37:27.660but we also have people that come because they want to be a part of this because they think it's
00:37:32.640man's domination over nature they have no regard for these spaces or the critical need that the
00:37:41.020planet Earth and that humanity has for them. And they are sort of developed these sociopathic
00:37:46.560disconnections to humanity and its place on Earth. And Earth is a female entity, Mother Earth.1.00
00:37:53.860And women become a part of this disregard and this mentality. It's a really great author. His
00:38:00.320name's Jack Forbes. He wrote this book called Columbus and Other Cannibals. He wrote it in the
00:38:05.10070s. He related cannibalism to colonialism. And what he did is he took it even one step further
00:38:11.260because he didn't just say colonialism is a form of cannibalism, but he said that it's
00:38:15.340the wheat to go disease. And so the wheat to go is an Algonquin word and is the name of the spirit
00:38:19.680that is driven by greed and excess and a desire to consume and desire to be stronger and better
00:38:24.960and richer and more powerful than anything else. And that the wheat to go eats everything in its
00:38:30.280path to gain its power and so what we've seen in the americas is european colonialists came to this
00:38:37.440land with the drive of conquest and to reap the material goods that were bountiful here
00:38:41.140and they did this with a violence and a goal to consume the new world and we saw millions tens
00:38:48.780of millions of peoples and animals and species die and it was all wholly justified in the name0.68
00:38:55.340of progress and civilization and women lost their power with the introduction and the imposition of
00:39:03.920a colonial mindset that came with patriarchy and so in our communities we're seeing more and more
00:39:09.820disappearances of murdered and missing indigenous women and I really feel like it's because we've
00:39:16.780lost that connection that humanity has succumbed to this disease of the mind and of the soul0.52
00:39:22.780And that we really are experiencing an epidemic of the Weetigo disease, of people being so consumed with this desire to consume, to be stronger and better and richer and more powerful than anything else.
00:39:37.980And the people that come to these camps, we sometimes see that that disregard for the land also reflects into a disregard for human life.
00:39:46.700and when we live in a patriarchal colonialistic empire such as Canada that disregard extends
00:39:53.600even one step further to women and so I really believe that a lot of what we're seeing is a
00:40:00.260byproduct of this disease of the mind and of the soul that is so pervasive in our culture and so0.87
00:40:07.160dominant in our culture that anyone that tries to challenge these things is considered like
00:40:12.760anti-development and radical leftist and the reality is is I don't think we're being radical
00:40:17.920I think we're being logical I think we're probably the most sound mind people that are out there
00:41:42.080well the impacts of the tar sands clearly do not end at their operational boundaries
00:41:53.400they are far-reaching and multi-dimensional and i'd like to discuss the pipelines you know in
00:42:02.860addition to the impacts to water soil air animals and communities surrounding the giga project
00:42:11.100there's also the pipelines carrying the bitumen away from the oil sands presenting a menagerie
00:42:18.720of threats to communities along their routes including spills water contamination destructive
00:42:25.740infrastructure man camps like we were talking about there were decisions made on three pipelines
00:42:32.620this past November the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain the Inbridge Line 3 and Northern Gateway
00:42:38.260two were approved one was denied the northern gateway and then there's the Keystone XL which
00:42:45.440is intended to travel all the way to Texas which was denied under Obama but will be reconsidered
00:42:52.420under the Trump administration but before we get into the Keystone XL I'm wondering if you could
00:42:57.560explain the route of Kinder Morgan and Enbridge Line 3 and then also what is your analysis of
00:43:05.100why the Northern Gateway was denied and the other two were not? Is there anything that we could learn
00:43:10.880from this? Yeah, for sure. I think that there's a lot we can learn from a lot of these sort of
00:43:18.600new happenings, lessons to learn into the movement and where we can potentially see
00:43:26.820more successes and victories, as well as how insidious the government is at propping up
00:43:32.480another project for us to have to challenge. So first off, Kinder Morgan. The Kinder Morgan route
00:43:39.060has always been on the table. It hasn't been a new pipeline project. As long as the Northern
00:43:44.840Gateway pipeline was sort of on the table, Kinder Morgan was kind of there along with it.
00:43:49.600And so it's been kind of interesting to watch because so much attention and efforts and
00:43:55.740resources were dumped into challenging the Northern Gateway pipeline, but sort of unbeknownst
00:44:01.940to many people, we had the Kinder Morgan pipeline, which followed a very similar route to the
00:44:07.600Northern Gateway pipeline. Now, the Northern Gateway pipeline went into sort of more northern
00:44:12.400British Columbia headwaters. But this pipeline runs from just outside the city of Edmonton,
00:44:17.840where I live. And it goes through the Rocky Mountains, through the borders of Alberta and
00:44:25.940British Columbia, and then sort of travels and snakes southwards, down through the territories
00:44:32.300of multiple different Indigenous communities, and through a very sort of loud and proud community
00:44:40.320of the Shaquemec people in Kamloops. And then it keeps snaking further down into ports through
00:44:47.060Vancouver, as well as into Washington state in places called Ferndale and Cordes. And so we have
00:44:54.020this sort of giant snake that comes off and when it comes down to the end in the coastal waters it
00:44:58.960actually grows three more heads and it goes to three more ports that will then fill up tanker
00:45:04.120traffic and ship it out to international markets that are looking for the oil in Alberta and so
00:45:10.100that pipeline it's not just contested by First Nations either it's contested by mayors and
00:45:15.560municipal leaders throughout the route and it has been since it's been proposed and I don't remember
00:45:22.280the exact date, but it was proposed shortly after the Northern Gateway pipeline that was denied
00:45:27.660under Trudeau government. So that's one pipeline. And, you know, we have this, the Lewe Tooth First
00:45:32.960Nation, which is located in the lower mainland British Columbia near Vancouver, which is
00:45:38.260challenging that through legal recourse as well, under the same and very similar grounds as the
00:45:44.060Yinka Dene and the Coalition of Indigenous People that challenged the Northern Gateway pipeline.
00:45:49.660And so with the Line 3 pipeline, which is the other pipeline that was approved under Trudeau, what's really interesting is that it's a replacement pipeline.
00:45:58.460And I think it's a really sort of sneaky, underhanded way in which the government is trying to make it look like they're doing the right thing.
00:46:05.600So Line 3 is already a pipeline that exists.
00:46:09.080It's also owned by Enbridge, which owned the Northern Gateway pipeline.
00:46:11.640And it's a 1,660-kilometer pipeline, which it will be the most expensive pipeline replacement project in the history of the country of Enbridge.
00:46:22.800Right now, it's almost 50 years old, and it's restricted because of its age to only about 390 barrels of oil per day.
00:46:31.420But they are going to upgrade this pipeline.
00:46:34.080They're going to make it safer and stronger and better, and then they're going to increase the capacity twofold.
00:46:41.640They're looking at a capacity of about 760,000 barrels per day.
00:46:46.440It's so insane to think about the fact that they're like, listen, we're going to do something
00:46:59.900We'll put brand new walls in, and then we'll just ship 760,000 barrels of the dirtiest,
00:47:07.320most corrosive, sinking, contaminating oil that we've seen.
00:47:10.960I mean, we all know from the Kalamazoo spill that happened, was it 2010, that this oil doesn't just float on top and we skim it all away.
00:47:21.120It sinks to the bottom and it completely contaminates the ecosystem almost forever.
00:47:26.500Even the oil spill in the Gulf, if we saw a spill of tar sands at the level that we saw in the Gulf, the problems would be so much more catastrophic than what we saw in the Gulf.
00:47:39.740and we're talking about filling tankers with this oil and shipping it into coastal waters of North
00:47:45.740America and shipping it across vast oceans to other countries. Spills of this oil are going to
00:47:51.420end up with catastrophic impacts because this oil just sinks to the bottom. So you know line three
00:47:56.640it's going to carry the oil to eastern Canada. It will go across Saskatchewan, Manitoba and I believe
00:48:05.560down into the United States. So it'll go into, what is the state? I'm so bad with the state.
00:48:12.020Minnesota, I believe maybe it is, or maybe it's even Montana. I can't even remember. I'm so bad.
00:48:16.820Sorry. So they're talking about having this pipeline through Canada, going east of Alberta,
00:48:22.520down through the United States to take it out to coastal waters in the US Gulf and eastern
00:48:27.680United States and Canada. It's going to go to terminals in Wisconsin, then it's going to get
00:48:31.920exported even further. So we have massive pipelines that are being proposed. And these
00:48:37.320aren't just little small little things. We're talking about massive. Line three is 760,000
00:48:42.100barrels. The Kinder Morgan, I believe, is around 800 and some thousand barrels of oil. And close
00:48:48.000to 2 million barrels of oil per day will be exported just from these two pipelines that
00:48:54.320have been approved. That's just two pipelines that have been approved. And when I say these
00:49:00.260pipeline approvals are green lights to industry in Alberta that it's business as usual. That's
00:49:05.240absolutely the case. And they need this, the oil and gas industry, because we've seen a massive
00:49:11.000economic crash, particularly with the price of oil. And if we can secure transportation for our
00:49:18.140oil to market, it gives the green light not just to these corporations that they can continue their
00:49:23.340operations, but they can send the signal to their shareholders that it's all great. Look, our oil is
00:49:28.260getting to market we have buyers we have routes keep investing your money and it's not just about
00:49:34.700keeping investing our money it's about continuing to participate in a system that locks us in to0.89
00:49:42.380the production of fossil fuels that locks us in to a system that continues to oppress indigenous0.99
00:49:47.700people that continues to look at the environment as something that we can dominate and that you0.95
00:49:54.500know, man over nature sort of mentality. And so the approval of both of these pipelines to me is
00:50:00.000absolutely moving us in the wrong direction. You know, when you were talking about these pipelines
00:50:06.000breaking, I was reading that the bitumen oil is 16 times more likely to breach pipelines than
00:50:13.840conventional oil because it's 15 to 20 times more acidic than conventional oil and seven times as
00:50:20.620viscous so the capitalist justification of this inconceivable slaughter of flourishing ecosystems
00:50:30.360and communities is insane and to now reconsider the keystone excel pipeline would be completely
00:50:41.800incompatible with promises made by the government as the keystone excel would result in numerous
00:50:48.520treaty violations. But because the Keystone XL would travel such a huge distance and affect so
00:50:55.940many communities, it seems that there is an opportunity for a large resistance among
00:51:01.400communities on both sides of the border. And I'm wondering, what is your experience with
00:51:07.320coalescing with resistance groups in the US? And is your organization, Indigenous Climate Action,
00:51:14.740beginning to prepare for this? Absolutely. I think that there is an urgent need to coalesce
00:51:24.240the movements of Canada and the United States. I mean, that border between Canada and the United
00:51:30.320States is arbitrary to Indigenous folks. We didn't create it. In fact, it broke up families. It broke1.00
00:51:36.420up communities when it was imposed over 150 years ago. You know, Canada is celebrating 150 years of
00:51:44.900being a country. And for us, it's not a celebration. There's a whole movement called Resist 150 Years
00:51:51.200because that's what we've been doing is resisting the imposition of a colonial government and all
00:51:55.480the laws and regulations that come along with it, including the regulations to dig up oil sands and
00:52:01.960tar sands and to break up our communities and erode our rights. So when we talk about the
00:52:07.280struggles, particularly of the largest project on earth, because of its extensions and all these
00:52:12.400pipelines that stretch out everywhere, we have to begin to coalesce our movements together.
00:52:17.760Because while this pipeline is going to traverse and go through multiple different communities and
00:52:23.900compromise multiple different water sources and aquifers and sacred sites of indigenous communities,
00:52:30.900The reality is that it's going to do that because of what's actually in the pipe and what's in the pipe is already compromising and destroying and disrupting the water systems and sacred sites and traditional territories and species in our territory.
00:52:48.480That has already happened. It is happening right now. And if we don't connect the fact that these pipelines and these struggles of the people along those pipelines are directly related to the struggle that we are already in in Alberta, we'll never win this battle.
00:53:06.780This pipeline and the Kinder Morgan pipeline and the Line 3 pipeline and the Line 9 pipeline and every other pipeline that's being proposed that's associated with this project is a part of a project that has already been sanctioned as okay, that has already been given the green light to continue, that is already disturbing and disrupting and contaminating and destroying the lives of Indigenous communities.
00:53:33.980We have to start talking about stopping these projects at the source because what we've seen with Trump is he's demonstrated exactly what I have always felt would happen, that you cannot cut off the head of the beast of Hydra because when you cut off one of its heads, another one pops back up or a new head grows exactly from that same place that you just cut it off.
00:53:58.460And when we just talk about pipelines as an individual insulated thing, we're doing no better than reviewing projects as insulated individual projects. We have to look at the cumulative and the larger struggle. And that larger struggle comes from the development of tar sands.
00:54:14.680But even bigger than that struggle, it comes from the institutional racism that has erased Indigenous peoples and Indigenous peoples' rights and humanity's connections to the land and the environment and our space and our place as humanity in a finite ecosystem on Mother Earth.
00:54:32.560If we don't come back to those realizations of who we are and our places on this planet,
00:54:37.820if we don't respect indigenous ideology and cosmology and rights and culture,0.80
00:54:43.440we're always going to see projects like the tar sands.0.86
00:54:47.500Whether it's tar sands in Canada, tar sands in Venezuela, tar sands in the Congo,
00:54:53.100whether it's fracked gas or fracked oil in the Bakken oil fields,0.75
00:54:57.140Until we address the systemic issues that have allowed us to sanction these types of projects, that have allowed us to mute the voices of the indigenous communities that have said no, we'll never win these battles.
00:55:10.980We have to stop these projects at the source by challenging the systems of entrenched white supremacy, entrenched colonial imperialistic attitudes that have looked at Indigenous communities as not being able to take care of themselves, not being able to look after themselves.
00:55:28.840I mean, give me a break. Indigenous people in Canada were the last human people allowed and granted the right to vote in 1960. It wasn't until 1960 that our people were allowed to vote.
00:55:41.180And when we talk about all these different movements, the environmental movement, women's rights and the feminist movement, those movements were moving along and forward without us because they never included our voice.
00:55:54.380And it's only been in the last 10 to 15 years that we've seen a recognition of Indigenous peoples as real critical voices in both the movements for women's rights and the movements to protect the environment.
00:56:08.220And that's really sad. We have a long way to go to understand that it's not just about protecting the environment for white dominant society or upholding the rights of women in white dominant society, that there are more insidious things going on in the underpinnings that have allowed things like the psychosis of the development of Alberta's tar sands or the psychosis of the development of fracked gas or fracked oil.
00:56:38.220in the Bakken oil fields. We have to start addressing the root causes. Otherwise, we're
00:56:43.780never going to win these battles. And so for me, I think we have a lot of lessons to learn.
00:56:48.720We won the Northern Gateway Pipeline, sort of got disapproved or taken off the table. It was denied
00:56:55.480because they did that. They succeeded in doing something that has never been done,
00:57:02.700which is to prove unequivocally that these projects have irreversible impacts on the0.61
00:57:09.540environment, irreversible impacts on indigenous people's rights, and that people didn't want it.
00:57:15.900We had so much concerted effort around that project in this country that we won. And we0.97
00:57:21.660had the same thing in the United States with the Keystone XL. But the problem was, is the oil is
00:57:26.100still being produced. The oil is still looking for a way to get out. And if we don't address
00:57:32.420that issue of why that oil is still being produced and still being allowed to be produced,
00:57:36.960we're always going to have more pipelines to keep fighting.0.99
00:57:56.100He's black as the highway that's leading me0.98
00:59:43.900And we can't just compartmentalize these different issues.
00:59:49.400You know, there's an undeniable conflict between the way industrial growth society conditions us to see the world and the way that traditional cultures know the earth.
01:00:00.120colonial forces continue to persist when holistic ways of knowing the world are forced into a
01:00:09.220reductionist box commodifying living organisms air and water so what has your experience been
01:00:18.440in bridging the gap between these two worlds do you see a better way to integrate traditional
01:00:24.160ecological knowledge into climate change discussions and solutions. One of the things
01:00:30.000that we saw within the environmental movement and why we saw so much attention and resources
01:00:34.300put into pipelines is that we were like, okay, well, we need to make people understand that
01:00:38.620tar sands are really bad and we need to bring it home to them. And we can do that by making them
01:00:44.560realize that the pipelines are in their own backyards and that the whole country is going
01:00:48.340to be impacted by them. The whole continent is going to be impacted by them. At the beginning
01:00:53.720of this sort of movement, which was over a decade ago now, people weren't talking about climate
01:00:57.980change. But now, 2015, even 2009 in Copenhagen, we saw the world arguing, but there was still a lot
01:01:05.220of people on the fence around climate change, but they were trying to come to an agreement to
01:01:09.320address climate in 2009 in Copenhagen. You fast forward to 2015 in Paris, and finally the world
01:01:15.560all agrees, climate change is happening, it's real, we need to do something about it. So we have this
01:01:22.740new tool in our toolkit that we don't just need to use pipelines as a way to bring these
01:01:30.200industrialization and fossil fuel projects into the backyards of regular everyday Americans or
01:01:36.840Canadians. But we have climate change and climate change is unequivocally undeniable.
01:01:42.740The science is out. 97% of the world scientific community believes climate change is real and
01:01:49.880the other 3% are questionable in their arguments to counter it. So we have this sort of tool that
01:01:58.420we should be mobilizing around to be like, we need to be moving away from these things. But
01:02:03.340we're doing this really weird thing. As we're rushing to address the climate crisis,
01:02:08.640we're doing it within the confines of this ideology rooted in this form of cannibalism
01:02:14.800and colonialism still. So instead of trying to find ways to stop what we've done to become the
01:02:21.760most powerful nations on the planet, we still are holding on to that power. We're not letting go
01:02:27.380because we have this disease, this wheat to go disease, and we've commodified everything. And
01:02:33.400now we're even commodifying the atmosphere through these prescribed carbon market mechanisms and
01:02:38.660conservation offsets, cap and trade systems that do nothing to actually challenge the structural
01:02:44.440violence that has got us to where we are and it allows us these governments and systems to keep
01:02:50.080furthering this cannibalization of the planet in jack forbes book one of the things he says is that
01:02:55.340the tragic characteristics of the we to go psychosis is that it spreads partly by resistance
01:03:01.060to it that is those who try to fight the we to go sometimes in order to survive adopt the we to go
01:03:08.080values. And so this idea that there's this sort of mentality that has perpetuated and is permeating
01:03:16.320through society that we cannot survive without progress. And progress is defined within the
01:03:21.400parameters of economic growth, personal wealth, personal gain. And therefore, we continue to
01:03:27.480cannibalize this planet, even though we see that climate change and all the science and all the
01:03:32.300numbers is pointing that we are literally walking towards the cliff's edge. And instead of saying
01:03:38.260stop, people are just happily marching towards the edge and letting this sort of brigade of people
01:03:45.540take us on our merry way towards the end of humanity. And so I think that the only people
01:03:53.600that I've really seen challenge and challenge wholly and not just with, we just need to shift
01:04:01.400to something that's a little bit better, that still lives and works within the confines of0.99
01:04:05.960the structures of cannibalism and colonialism, are indigenous folks. Indigenous folks are ready.
01:04:13.460They're ready for something completely new. Because the systems that have allowed us to create
01:04:20.700this wholly psychotic place in which humanity has gotten to, and climate change is a symptom of it,
01:04:28.520they're willing to say no we just have to stop everything because these systems don't work and
01:04:35.860they were living in north america our people indigenous peoples we have been living in north
01:04:41.460america for thousands and thousands of years was never taking things to the tipping point
01:04:47.720and that's because indigenous peoples ideology cosmology their culture their identity is
01:04:54.320intrinsically linked to the land and the spaces. It recognizes that we are just a part of the
01:05:01.860system, that we are interconnected to it. When colonization came, it didn't just come and kill
01:05:09.620the Indians and take up the resources. It came here and it erased indigenous ideology. It didn't
01:05:17.900even just erase it. It demonized it. It poisoned it against everyone who held on to it. We were
01:05:25.220heathens. We were nothing. We were nobodies. But now as we are coming back, it's like full circle
01:05:32.020because as we start to talk about climate change solutions, where are those solutions coming from?
01:05:37.800Coming from a realization of interconnectedness, permaculture, regionally based climate solutions
01:05:45.320to address trash and composting and energy and passive solar energy and these are life systems
01:05:53.200that work holistically and as an indigenous person they respect the ideologies of indigenous peoples
01:06:01.760those ideologies that were attempted to be erased by the imposition of colonization
01:06:06.780the fact that I know that in 2017 is a testament to the resilience of indigenous folks to
01:06:15.180hold on to that knowledge because it was so intrinsically important, not just to maintaining
01:06:20.700our identities as individuals, but the identity of humanity. And so I think traditional ecological
01:06:27.840knowledge and having that understanding and that rooted and that grounded foundation
01:06:32.800of what humanity is, is going to be critical to building real solutions to address the climate
01:06:39.800crisis in which we're in, and to building real solutions, not just to climate change,
01:06:44.680but to the inequality and to the sort of systems of oppression that have gotten us and allowed us
01:06:52.480to even be in a place where we have to talk about climate change.
01:06:56.560Goodness, thank you so much for that amazing response and this truth that we need to
01:07:05.740decolonize the environmental movement. And I'm wondering, on a tangible level,
01:07:14.440how can people who are involved in the environmental movement, how do we move beyond
01:07:20.740the surface, you know, dismantle the power structures within and start actually supporting
01:07:26.800indigenous climate leadership? I think there's absolutely ways for people to begin on a path of
01:07:32.360real reconciliation with Indigenous folks. But, you know, one of the things that I find troubling
01:07:38.280is that I get a little triggered by that question sometimes, because it makes me feel like the way
01:07:44.760that the government puts the burden of proof on Indigenous communities to prove that we're
01:07:50.060impacted. It's like now we're being asked to prove to the environmental movement folks
01:07:54.940why we're valuable partners. I think that it needs to be put back on you. It needs to be put
01:08:02.240back on the environmental movement, why do you think that we're valuable partners? Why do you
01:08:08.480think we should be included in your movement? How do we work in your movement? Because we have been
01:08:14.300trying in Canada for 150 years to be part of the system, part of the structures. We signed treaty,
01:08:22.200our leaders signed treaty in our countries because we wanted to work in partnership
01:08:26.840with the colonial governments. They did that because that's what they thought they were doing.
01:08:31.120But for 150 years, we have been left out, we've been marginalized, we've been sidelined. And that same marginalization and sidelining of Indigenous peoples within the structures of the colonial government of Canada have permeated and perpetuated within the environmental movement, within the feminist movement, within all of those movements, we have been dehumanized.
01:08:50.220And now, as we move into this place of truth and reconciliation, as they call it in Canada, or this awakening of decolonization within North America and the world over, there's still this hesitancy of people being like, well, how do we work with you?
01:09:04.340And again, that burden of proof is always being put on the Indigenous folks to prove how our rights should be utilized, prove how we should work within the movement.
01:09:14.600And so I throw it back. I think it's time for the environmental movement to dig deep in themselves and to look at where is your privilege? Where is your power? Where are you doing right? Where are you doing wrong? Where can you fix these things? Where can you create those spaces?
01:09:33.480Where can you see indigenous peoples that have been fighting for the protection of their lands and territories for hundreds of years in the Americas, over 500 years in the Americas, where do they fit into your movements?
01:09:46.220We have to think about not simply addressing the climate and saving the environment and switching our energy systems from oil and gas to solar and wind.
01:09:55.640And it's about pushing back against these systems of colonialism, capitalism, oppression, imperialism, all of these things that are grounded in systems that support white supremacy.
01:10:06.960That is one of the biggest problems in this country.
01:10:11.020And I think we need to start talking about it.
01:10:14.040It's going to require an undoing of these sick ideologies created on that foundation.
01:10:19.120And we need to start creating room for new foundations of ideas that respect the values of those that hold original instructions or indigenous peoples.
01:10:31.700We have to become conscious because that's the only way that we can begin to undo the process in which we are currently in.
01:10:39.560I also just want to say one more thing, you know, like an indication of where we are.
01:10:43.800Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, stated that we did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills and the winding streams with tangled growth as wild.
01:10:55.480Only to the white man was nature a wilderness, and only to him was the land infested by wild animals and savage people.