IEN-Canadian Indigenous Tar Sands Resources
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TAR/OIL SANDS: DIRTIEST FUEL IN THE WORLD
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Just Enviromentalism? An Interview with Clayton Thomas-Müller Clayton Thomas-Müller is an activist from the community of Pukatawagan, also known as the Mathais Colomb Cree nation, located above the 56th tar sands campaign organizer for the US-based organization Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN). Most of his work is focused on what he calls political base-building: organizing with First Nations impacted by tar sands development to build the political power of the community and to stop the expansion of the largest industrial development ever known to humanity. Sharmeen Khan interviewed Thomas-Müller in August 2008. Tell us about your political organizing. I grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. My background is what you could call urban native. Most of my family is urban-based, in the north and west ends and inner city of Winnipeg. So I grew up being exposed to the socio-economic conditions that urban aboriginals face in this country. Part of my family has been involved in gang activity so, as a young man, I also grew up in and around Winnipeg’s inner-city gang culture. That led me to frontline organizing with young native people in the inner-city, to organizing with youth involved in gangs, and to working around the question of decolonization and leadership development. This organizing embraced indigenous traditions in order to confront the negative things that young native people are exposed to in European-dominated culture. This early background led me to a lot of different activities, like organizing in the First Nations’ youth political scene, working in prisons with incarcerated young people, and working on restorative and alternative justice models. Really, I was involved in anything and everything related to preventing our young people from falling through the cracks. I was also trying to help young native people understand why it is that we are so grossly over-represented in all of the negative statistics in this country. A lot of that work involved sharing the political analysis that I learned through my involvement with the Native Youth Movement. They carried out actions aimed at empowering young native people by picking up our traditions and decolonizing our hearts, minds, and spirit. How did you go from inner-city youth organizing to environmental justice? I was always curious about why it was that native people faced so many struggles. For example, why does it seem like a societal norm that when you’re a young native man of a certain age you end up in prison? In doing the frontline organizing work I always wondered how we got to be so dispossessed of our culture and of our land. Even I can remember being out on the trap line with my great-grandparents, learning about traditional medicine and harvesting traditional foods. How did it come to be that our people now find themselves in the depths of despair in the inner-city ghetto? After my early 20s, I reached a point where youth leadership development wasn’t enough. I wanted to really shake up the system and challenge the power structure. I began to understand that so many of the struggles that I was involved in were really tied to the national crime committed against indigenous peoples through the destruction of our way of life and through attempts to abolish any memory of our title to the land called Canada. Things actually got to a point where a lot of the First Nations leadership blacklisted me because of some of my political organizing. I became a target because I tried to develop a funding strategy that would make the National First Nations Youth Council of the Assembly of First Nations less dependent on federal funds. This would have allowed it to become more politicized in its advocacy. After I was labelled a radical, I had to leave the country to find work because nobody would hire me. I was offered an organizing job in California as the North American coordinator for an organization called the Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Youth Alliance. This was a coalition of indigenous and non-indigenous activists focused on developing curricula and training spaces for indigenous and non- indigenous peoples to work together in a respectful way. I worked on that project for about a year. When the project came to an end, my wife and I were going to come back to Canada but I was given an opportunity by a friend who worked for the Indigenous Environmental Network to help coordinate a delegation of indigenous peoples from Canada and the United States to attend the third preparatory meeting of the United Nations World Conference on Sustainable Development in New York City. At the conference, I had the opportunity to talk about my experiences as a frontline organizer and I began to notice the connections between the environmental justice issues and the issues that indigenous communities were facing. For one thing, I had come from one of the places where people end up when they get dispossessed of their land -they end up in places like the projects in inner-city Winnipeg. Through that experience, I was offered the position of North American native energy organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network. I went from being a social justice and hard-core sovereignty activist and entered the world of environmental justice. This was a baptism by fire. I was thrust into a job where I had to organize with over 30 different tribes from across North America -from the north slope of Alaska all the way to the Gulf of Mexico -to support campaigns by grassroots community organizations against mega-energy development projects. At that point, the pieces came together. I realized how the movement for environmental justice was really connected to indigenous struggle. Click here to read the rest of the interview |
The tar sands development around Fort McMurray and Fort McKay are located upstream along the Athabasca River basin. Current tar sands development have completely altered the Athabasca delta and watershed landscape, with 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 to the indigenous Dene, Cree and Métis trap-line cultures. |
INFORMATION SHEET NO. 1
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Tar Sands Giga Project“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 its equivalent in our estimation to genocide of a people.” George Poitras, Mikisew Cree First NationThe public in Canada and the U.S. are not aware of what is going on in the tar sands development “sacrifice” zone of northern Alberta. The public does not know most of the populations being negatively affected are Indigenous First Nations communities. Dene and Cree First Nations and Métis live close to and in the midst of these tar sand deposits, along the Athabasca River water basin area. 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. What is Tar Sands [aka] Oil Sands In northern Alberta, beneath 4.3 million hectares (10.6 million acres), an area the size of Florida, are tar sands that 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 is superheated in “cookers” with steam to make the oil flow. For each barrel of oil produced from the tar sands, between 2 and 4.5 barrels of water is required. In 2007, Alberta approved withdrawal of 119.5 billion gallons of water for tar sands extraction. An estimated 82% of this water comes from the Athabasca River. The extracted bitumen is later processed in industrial facilities called up graders into synthetic crude oil to be piped to the U.S. for refining. These up grader facilities look like “refinery cities” with smoke stacks bellowing polluting emissions and wastewater emptied into toxic tailing ponds. Lately, in-situ technology is being used to pump steam under the earth making the bitumen to flow through wells using steam or solvents. By 2010, the industry is projected to generate 8 billion tons of waste sand and 1 billion cubic meters of wastewater – enough to fill 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Some of these toxic-tailing ponds are located next to the Athabasca River, a major tributary in northern Alberta. Emissions from the tar sands are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and a major contributor to climate change and global warming. The tar sands lay beneath more than 141,000 square kilometers (54,000 square miles) of northern Alberta forest. In 2003, 30 square kilometers (160 square miles) of land had been disturbed by tar sands development. By the summer of 2006, that number has grown to 2,000 square kilometers (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; exceeded only by Saudi Arabia. As mentioned above, an area the size of Vancouver Island is already being exploited for tar sands oil. If development expansion plans succeed, 3,400 square kilometers (1,312 square miles) will be stripped-mined if current approved projects go forward. This would be a total area as large as the State of Florida that would be destroyed. Currently processing of 2.7 million barrels per day of oil is estimated to increase by 2030 to 6 million barrels per day. Current and future high oil prices make the extraction and processing of bitumen very profitable. The oil from the tar sands is going south. The U.S. needs the tar sands oil to meet its energy needs. The U.S. has reorganized their long-term plans for petroleum energy by setting a goal to get up to 25 percent of their daily oil from tar sands operations. The U.S. Department of Energy began declaring tar sand reserves as part of their calculations of oil imported from Canada. This will include massive pipeline construction and expansions going from northern Alberta down through Minnesota to refineries in Wisconsin and Chicago and through North Dakota, South Dakota down to Oklahoma and Texas to be refined. Pipelines will also go through British Colombia to be shipped overseas. The Problem – An Environmental Justice Issue The tar sands development has completely outstripped the ability of the corporations and provincial and federal governments to provide environmental management and protection. In the perspective of many concerned First Nations and citizens of northern Alberta, the government has given the responsibility of environmental monitoring and enforcement to the corporations. A recent health study commissioned by Nunee Health Board Society of Fort Chipewyan has demonstrated evidence that the governments of Alberta and Canada have been ignoring evidence of toxic contamination on downstream indigenous communities. People most at risk of health effects are those who eat food from the land and water. These Dene, Cree and Métis communities still maintain a subsistence diet of fish and wild game. Click here to read the rest of the report |
Energy Justice
