First Nations

First Nations Women Arrested For Protesting Hydraulic Fracking On Their Land, Charged with “Intimidation”

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lle-Máijá Apiniskim Tailfeathers, one of the women arrested this weekend for peacefully protesting the plan to “frack” on Blood Reserve land, released this statement yesterday:

On September 9, 2011, we gathered peacefully on the road leading to a newly built Murphy Oil well on the Blood Reserve.  After nearly a year of doing everything in our power to stop hydraulic fracturing from occurring on our land, we felt that time was no longer on our side.  With the imminent threat of hydraulic fracturing about to begin on Blood Tribe land, we decided that we had to act immediately. Over the last year, we have written letters and created petitions, we have tried to raise awareness both within our community and beyond including founding Kainai Earth Watch and the Protect Blood Land website, we have repeatedly contacted the Blood Tribe Chief and Council, Kainai Resources Incorporated, the gas and oil companies, the media, the Energy Resources Conservation Board, and various levels of government including Indian and Northern Affairs Canada but still our rights were violated. Countless times, we were told that this was a matter between members of the Blood Tribe and the Blood Tribe Chief and Council. But as members of the Blood Tribe, we were never asked whether or not we wanted these wells built in the first place.

…I do not feel as though what we did was heroic.  We were a handful of people, including a couple of children, who gathered for a common purpose; to prevent any further desecration of the land.  For us, this place is more than just land; it is the place that has given life to our people since time immemorial. Our culture, our language, our identity comes from the land and it is to the land that we owe our very existence…How can we look our children and grandchildren in the eye and say that we have let such a thing happen? We are nothing without this place

…I want to believe, more than anything, that those behind our arrest knew in their hearts that treating the earth this way is wrong.  And I want to believe, more than anything, that their actions were motivated by fear; which may explain our criminal charges of “intimidation”.  I look back on the last year and am still in disbelief that it came to this point.  From the actual signing of the gas and oil agreement on the Blood Reserve to the arrest and imprisonment of three unarmed Blood Tribe women.  It feels much like a bad dream but somehow this is our current reality.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM2D2PDKORI]

To read the full press release, click here.

Their court date has been set for September 19, 2011 at 10 am at the Provincial Court Building in Cardston, Alberta.

For donations, please contact:

Ingrid Hess, Barrister
ingrid.hess@shaw.ca
More links:

Shape Up Or Ship Out: A Northern Perspective On Global Warming

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Xavier Kataquapit, columnist and author

Xavier Kataquapit is originally from Attawapiskat, Ontario on the James Bay coast. In his popular newspaper column, Under the Northern Sky, he writes about his experiences as a First Nation Cree person. In April he wrote this column, Shape Up Or Ship Out, about how global warming is already affecting the north. Here is an excerpt; to read the whole article, go to Wawatay News.

Everywhere I travel these days, I feel the effects of global warming. Weather patterns are changing, ice caps are melting, glaciers are receding and it is all becoming very obvious.

I first started hearing about a change in climate from some of the Elders from up the James Bay coast about 20 years ago. More recently, I have learned through news from the worldwide scientific community that a phenomenon such as global warming is upon us.

Although there is a debate happening with opposition to this concept being fuelled by big corporations, most reasonable people have accepted that global warming is the result of human-caused pollution.

There are so many ramifications of global warming.

Changes in weather and temperatures, even though they don’t seem critical, can have great effect on wildlife. This means that my people the Cree and the Aboriginal people of northern Canada will be facing changes in our traditions and culture as it relates to our relationship to the land and animals.

Already, we see the polar bear populations being affected as well as changes in the annual goose migration. The shorter winter freeze is also affecting my people’s ability to travel in the North.

In colder months, we make great use of the frozen landscape to move about and a winter road connects communities up the James Bay coast. With the change in climate the winter road is going in later and thawing sooner every year.

Many in the corporate world and some in government are doing their best to discredit the scientists, writers and educators who are trying to alert us to this crisis of global warming. That sounds like a nasty thing to do but it is not the first time this form of denial has been encouraged.

…It is easy to feel helpless with such enormous issues like global warming but we can have a voice...Our future depends on it.

More links:

Under The Northern Sky

Wawatay News.ca: Xavier Kataquapit

Business As Usual Is Over: Value Change Required For Survival

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Today’s blog posting was initially posted on 350orbust on June 30, 2010:

Chief Oren Lyons said, when speaking about Climate Change at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at the UN Headquarters in 2007:

We’re talking about change. People have to change. Directions have to change. Values have to change. There is no mercy in nature; nature has none. It has only law, only rule. You don’t abide the rule, you suffer the result…it’s what you do, and how you live. Business as usual is over…Value change for survival. You’re either going to change your values, or you’re not going to survive. You’re going to abide that law or suffer the consequences…Business as usual is over. Carbon is over. Oil is over. We better find something else. We better find some equity. We’re not going to have the luxury of spending $200 billion in a war. You’re not going to have the time or the money. because you’re going to be paying for the environment, for damages coming. You want to talk about the economy, you’re going to wreck the economies of the world…Change or else…Tell your leaders to get off their ass, let’s get on with life.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWiRFAvxu3k]

Chief Lyons is an Associate Professor in the American Studies Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is  Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan, Onondaga Nation, Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy). Chief Lyon has been active in international indigenous rights and sovereignty issues for over three decades at the United Nations and other forums. He is the publisher of “Daybreak”, a national Native American news magazine.

More links:

Earthkeeper Heroes

Alberta Tar Sands Destruction: Haven’t We Killed Enough Indigenous People On This Continent?

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“With everything in my heart I said I don’t want the death of the Lubicon and Chippewayan Cree on my hands. Haven’t we killed enough people on this continent already?”

This was the question posed to a Republican Congress Person during a meeting in Washington, D.C. this week during the 2nd annual Citizens Climate Lobby meeting. Cathy Orlando, who asked it, is the leader of the Sudbury Citizens Climate Lobby Group and a Climate Project Presenter. Cathy’s day job is the Science Outreach Coordinator at Laurentian University.

Al Jazeera featured a story yesterday by filmmaker Tom Radford on Fort Chipewyan, one of the First Nations communities most severely affected by the tar sands:

I shot my first film, Death of a Delta, in Fort Chipewyan in 1972…Death of a Delta documented the fight of Fort Chipewyan to have a voice in the construction of a massive hydroelectric project on the Peace River, the W.A.C. Bennett Dam. At stake was not only the survival of the oldest community in Alberta, but the protection of a World Heritage site, the Peace Athabasca Delta, a convergence of migratory flyways and the greatest concentration of waterfowl on the continent.

In the David and Goliath struggle that ensued, David won. Water was released from the dam and water levels in the Delta returned to normal. The unique ecology of the region was saved. The town survived.

Today, that same David, the collective will of the thousand residents of Fort Chipewyan, is fighting an even more imposing Goliath. The Alberta oil sands is arguably now the world’s largest construction project. Its expansion will have an estimated $1.7 trillion impact on the Canadian economy over the coming decades. An area of boreal forest the size of Greece will be affected by industrial activity.

Once again the issue is water, but this time it is not just the flow of the river, but the chemicals the current may be carrying downstream from the strip mines and bitumen upgraders. In recent years, according to the Alberta Cancer Board, Fort Chipewyan has experienced an unusually high rate of cancer. Local fishermen are finding growing numbers of deformed fish in their nets. Residents and John O’Connor, the community doctor, worry there could be a connection to the oil sands.

Here is Radford’s documentary on the David and Goliath struggle Fort Chipewyan is in the middle of, To The Last Drop:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQrWZzBOCoc]

More links:

Citizens Climate Lobby Canada

To The Last Drop

Indigenous Environment Network

Congressman: Tar Sands Pipeline Would Turn U.S. Into Canadian “Sewer”

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During a meeting with Canadian First Nations leaders this week, Congressman Dennis Kucinich spoke out against the proposed 2,750-kilometre-long Keystone XL project which would carry oil from the Alberta tar sands across the United States:

“We cannot trust the oil interests to do the right thing for the economy, for the environment. We know that…We saw what happened when we let the oil interests get ahead of the regulation of their industry in the Gulf of Mexico. We are not going to let them turn the rest of North America into a sewer through the tarsands project.”

Source: Crude in Syncrude: Ugliness at Tar Sands Duck Trial
Pelican in Gulf of Mexico during last year's BP Oil Disaster

 

This is a crucial moment for Americans to speak up loudly and let the State Department know that it mustn’t approve this project, which benefits TransCanada Pipeline and the Koch brothers at the expense of Canadian wilderness, First Nations health and traditional territory, American land and water, and all of our future.

Links:

Click here to send the State Department a message.

Keystone Pipeline Would Turn U.S. Into Canadian “Sewer”: Congressman

PM Harper on Alberta’s Pristine Boreal Forest: An “Unuseable Mass of Dirty Sand” Prior to Tar Sands Development

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The picture below is what, last Friday, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called “nature’s biggest unusable oil spill”:

Photo: Warren Cariou, Land of Oil and Water

Unlike our Prime Minister, the First Nations who call Northern Alberta home don’t think of this land of muskeg and forest as an oil spill. They call it home, home for them and for the animals and plants that live there and have provided sustenance for them since time before memory.

Harper’s comment is illustrative of the kind of thinking that has got us to the brink of environmental collapse, with global climate destabilization a reality and ocean acidification poised to destroy marine biodiversity. Wendell Berry, American farmer and poet, argues that wherever we are living, we are in trouble because of a “land-destroying economy” that pursues “production-by-exhaustion”. Mountain-top removal to mine coal is one clear example of this, but extraction of oil in the tar sands is another one. Berry recently addressed a gathering at the Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas:

Extracting fossil fuels from the ground is dangerous, and so is the way those fuels are used to work the ground in farming.

The mining of the forests and soil, along with the extraction of fossil fuels, may have started innocently, but since the European conquest of the Americas, “It took us only a little more than 200 years to pass from intentions sometimes approximately good to this horrible result, in which our education, our religion, our politics, and our daily lives all are implicated,” Berry tells the packed house in The Land’s barn.

Alberta tar sands. Photo: David Dodge, Pembina Institute

If we continue to be led by politicians who view the world around us as an untapped resource waiting to be exploited, we are doomed. Berry condemns Harper and his ilk for putting us into the situation we are in, but he also says that because of the “carelessness of our economic life” we all play a part in the destruction of our ecosystem. The solution, Berry says, is for us to learn to do better:

“We can learn where we are, we can look around us and see,” he suggests. We also can rely on land health, “the capacity of the land for self-renewal,” and work at conservation, “our effort to understand and preserve that capacity.”

It won’t be the politicians that push for the paradigm shift that is required. While it’s tempting to get a bumper sticker that says “Ditch Harper. Save the Planet“, the reality is more complicated; it turns out, it’s up to us to change ourselves and then work to change the world:

Berry doesn’t look to educational, political, or corporate institutions for much help in those efforts, suggesting that we instead look to “leadership from the bottom” that can be provided by groups and individuals “who without official permission or support or knowledge are seeing what needs to be done and doing it.”

As was demonstrated by the Global Work Parties held this past weekend, it’s up to us, you and me and the millions around the world who recognize what destruction we have wrought, to change what  “business as usual”  means. I’m rolling up my sleeves – how about you?

More links:

Harper Taken to Task Over Oil Sands Views

Soil and Souls: The Promise of the Land

Oil Sands Watch.org

The Land Institute

Land of Oil and Water: Aboriginal Voices on Life in the Oil Sands

World Religious Leaders: Bold Action Needed On Climate Change

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Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Since Monday, dozens of religious leaders from diverse faiths have been gathering at the University of Winnipeg at the G8 Religious Leaders Summit. Besides Christian, Jewish, and Islamic leaders, there are also representatives from Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu, Baha’i, and Shinto traditions as well as Indigenous Spirituality. It is the first time Canada has hosted the Summit which, for the past five years, has been organized to complement the meeting of G8 political leaders. G8 leaders are meeting in Huntsville, Ontario, later this week.

A significant part of each Interfaith Leaders Summit is the writing of a statement, which underscores the nature of the G8 commitments to the Millenium Development Goals and other processes that move toward equality and justic for all children, women and men. The working statement, which is undergoing discussion and will be different at the end of the summit, can be read by clicking on: “A Time For Inspired Leadership and Action“.

I attended the summit yesterday as an observer, and was impressed and encouraged by the sense of importance and urgency that underscored the 1 1/2 hour discussion on climate change. The statement reads, in part:

Climate change has become an urgent and felt manifestation of our collective abuse of the very environment that gives us life. We see the consequences in melting icecaps and rising sea levels, lost habitats for animal and plant species, and erratic weather episodes that threaten the lives of millions of people.

As scientists discover new accelerators of climate change and note the compression of time available to avoid irreparable damage, it is clear that bold action is needed now. We need to move beyond short-term political interests and arguments over who pays. In our indivisible planet we all pay – and future generations will pay dearly – if we continue to delay decisive action now.

Around the table there were calls for courageous and concrete action. Katherine Whitecloud, an aboriginal leader from the Dakota First Nation and a descendant of Chief Sitting Bull, spoke powerful words to the gathered religious leaders. She reminded the room that the rivers are the veins of Mother Earth, and they are now poisoned.

“My grandmother said, someday we will eat our children. That time has come. We are foolishly and arrogantly raping Mother Earth so She has nothing left to offer…Mother Earth is crying, attempting to rid herself of all the toxins we have poured into her [author’s note: it has been extremely wet here on the prairies recently]. You cannot wait for your president, or another elected official, to do something about this. You have to decide what YOU are going to do for your children, for your grandchildren.”

Katherine then went on to ask the assembled group about the meaning of sacrifice, because that is what is going to be needed at this point in human history.

“Sacrifice is going without so someone else will live…Now is the time for courageous and concrete action. In your heart, you know what that means.”

Katherine demonstrated the kind of bold and courageous leadership that we needed to steer through this crisis, and make the dramatic changes necessary so that our children aren’t consumed. What is each of us prepared to do?


Canada’s Avatar Sands Called “Responsible” by Industry

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Avatar, Canadian-born director James Cameron’s blockbuster, didn’t sweep the Oscars as some expected after getting 9 nominations, but a coalition of 50 indigenous and environmental groups took advantage of Avatar’s high profile to run an ad in the entertainment magazine Variety just prior to the award show earlier this month.

The full-page ad draws the parallels between the film and what is happening in right now in the Alberta tar sands, saying the oil sands are:

“Where Indigenous Peoples in Canada are endangered by toxic pollution and future oil spills.”

“Where Shell, BP, Exxon, and other Sky People are destroying a huge ancient forest. Where giant Hell trucks are used to mine the most polluting, expensive unobtanium oil to feed America’s addiction.”

Micheal Marx,  head of U.S-based Corporate Ethics International, one of the groups that bought the ad stated: “There are people living the Avatar storyline around the world, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to bring attention to that.”

“The tar sands have become the symbol of Canadian inaction on climate change,” said John Bennett, executive director of Sierra Club Canada, another one of the groups that backed the ad. “Avatar is about industrialists wanting to take every last resource and use it without regard for the future, or for those who live nearby. That’s very synonymous with what’s happening with the tar sands.”

Cameron was born in Kapuskasing, Ontario, boreal forest country – the same forest that is being destroyed by the oil sands development. He has been outspoken about the movie’s message. “Avatar asks us all to be warriors for the Earth,” he said recently. “This beautiful, fragile, miracle of a planet that we have right here is our land. Not ours to own, but ours to defend and protect.”

Oil producers defended their industry, calling the oil sands “responsible energy” as opposed to the ad, which they claimed was “irresponsible”.

“If you look at the history of the oil sands, we have had constructive engagement with the aboriginal people for more than 40 years,” spokesperson Jane Annesley said.

Below are some First Nation responses to the oil industry, from the Sierra Club Canada website:

“We used to be able to drink water directly from Beaver Lake and it didn’t hurt us. We can no longer do that, and we can no longer make a traditional way of life in our home territory because of the tar sands developments. The oil companies can phrase it any way they like but no one has ever not dug for oil because of us and we don’t find the consultation process meaningful.”

Ron Lameman, Beaver Lake Cree Nation

“While First Nations have been in the region for more than 10,000 years, major tarsands companies like Syncrude and Suncor have been leasees in our traditional homelands for only a fraction of that time, 40 years to be exact, I would question CAPP’s take on characterizing us as “their” neighbours. I am a member and former Chief of the Mikisew Cree First Nation, the largest First Nation in the Athabasca tarsands and today our First Nation has no “formal” relationship with Syncrude or Suncor, that after 40 years is not something I would characterize as good corporate responsibility. They actually have both recently been applying pressure to the First Nations in our community of Fort Chipewyan for speaking out publicly about environmental, health and other issues that we have observed with the unrelenting pace of tarsands development in the past few years.

While we do have First Nations members employed in the industry and First Nation owned companies as contractors to tarsands companies, there is a growing concerns by First Nations in the region who question our involvement in the industry.

First Nations especially the Mikisew Cree have recently intervened in several hearings for the multibillion dollar project applications and have recommended a moratorium on many of these applications until many of our issues were mitigated or science has caught up to the multitude of questions. So I would question CAPP and other oil companies suggesting
that we are their “full partners and stakeholders” endorsing their actions.

Having productive relationships with the oil and gas sector and endorsing their licences to operate is far from the truth from a First Nation perspective.”

George Poitras, Mikisiew Cree

“CAPP does not speak for aboriginal people; we will speak for ourselves. More and more of us are saying we don’t want your tar sands, we don’t want your pipelines, and we don’t want your oil tankers.

We aren’t interested in being partners with an industry association that has shown such blatant disregard for our basic human rights. CAPP claims to address our “economic, social and cultural needs,” but when our need is for them to stay out of our territories, it’s only their own economic needs that get addressed.”

David Luggi, Chief of the Carrier-Sekani Tribal Council

To take a stand against Canada’s dirty oil industry:

Go to Lovewinter.org to send a message to President Obama to stop the spread of the dirty oil sands oil to the U.S.

Go to www.tarnation.ca to play Tarnation, a video game that lets you blast PM Stephen “Tarper” and Micheal “Oil Rignatieff” with oil, sending them right out of the tar sands – and then send them an email to them encouraging them to change their policy.

For more info check out these links:

Sierra Club Canada – Tar  Sands

Indigenous Environmental Network

“Money Spent on Tar Sands Could Decarbonize Western Economies”

Dirty Oil Sands.org

U.S. Campaign to separate oil and state