The most direct and long-term effects of carving up the land, withdrawing immense amounts of water from rivers, discharging air- and water-borne waste, and the influx of thousands of construction workers — all part of the furious pace of oilsands development — have fallen on aboriginal people and the once-remote places that have been their homes for generations.The area around Fort McMurray, Alta., has a population of about 6,400 First Nations residents, including the Mikisew Cree First Nation, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, the Fort McKay First Nation, the Fort McMurray No. 468 First Nation and the Chipewyan Prairie Dene First Nation. There are also seven Métis locals, which represent approximately 5,000 to 6,000 residents.
Twenty-six other First Nations groups in the Athabasca, Cold Lake and Peace River regions have reported being affected by oilsands development.
In the Cold Lake area, southeast of Fort McMurray, the Beaver Lake Cree have launched a constitutional challenge against the federal and Alberta governments claiming their treaty rights have been trampled in favour of rapid resource development. They also claim the Alberta Energy Regulator has refused them standing as intervenors and ignored the harm to wildlife, water resources and the natural condition of the land caused by the proliferation of oilsands projects in the area
If their challenge is successful in court, it could significantly curtail oilsands development.
And now that more pipelines are needed to get the bitumen to market, First Nations in other provinces are worried that they, too, will soon bear the burden of oilsands development but none of the benefits.
Melanie Dene has lived in Fort McMurray most of her life, though her family is originally from Fort Chipewyan, which clings to the shores of Lake Athabasca about 280 kilometres north of Fort McMurray and was established as a fur trading post in 1788.
These days, Dene, 35, works for the Mikisew Cree First Nation, whose members reside on several reserves in the Fort Chipewyan area. Her job involves negotiating with oilsands developers, who must consult with the aboriginal people impacted by their projects.
She often feels overwhelmed by the developers’ complex, technical plans and the knowledge that their projects will always be approved by the regulators. Funding for the agency she works for is provided by oilsands project proponents, which, she says, adds to the pressure to accept their plans.
Nigel Bankes, chair of natural resources law at the University of Calgary, says the downloading of decision-making to local First Nations doesn’t really satisfy the Crown’s constitutional duty to consult and accommodate aboriginal and treaty rights.
“Instead, the federal government has delegated that responsibility to the provinces, and in Alberta the province has delegated it to the proponents of projects.”
For Melanie Dene, the hardest part of that arrangement “is trying to explain to the proponent the impacts from a cumulative point of view. First Nations people see things in a holistic way. We know that what happens to the river in one area will affect more than just that area. But they always want to talk about specific projects; they don’t want to take everything into account.”
The fact that “Fort Chip,” as it is commonly called, is so far away from the major oilsands projects doesn’t help their cause, either. Never mind that it is downstream and the Athabasca River is a community lifeline.
It flows into Lake Athabasca, a source of water and fish for the Mikisew Cree. And locals often travel between communities by boat in the summer.
But with the pace and magnitude of oilsands development, and the worries about toxic elements going into the river, nobody in Fort Chip eats fish from the lake anymore. Dene says people just feed it to their dogs.
In Fort McKay, a Cree First Nation about 60 kilometres north of Fort McMurray and on the banks of the Athabasca River, bottled water had to be brought in for more than two years after the water treatment plant proved to be ineffective at removing some cancer-causing agents from river water.
Dr. John O’Connor practises at the Fort McKay health clinic. He says some patients complain about skin rashes after taking showers, so he advises mothers to wash their babies in bottled water.
“Even if there is not an acute danger from the water people use for bathing, washing and cooking, what about long-term exposure?” asks O’Connor. “Nobody seems to know what that might be.”
In order to determine what might be causing the skin rashes, a series of allergy tests will soon be conducted on children who have been away from the reserve for a few weeks and show no signs of rash. They will be fitted with a patch that contains a dilution of the contaminants present in the water and air in Fort McKay. If the rash returns, it will be further evidence that the air and water are not as clean as they should be.
A few years ago, O’Connor caused a furor by speaking out about the high incidence of a rare bile duct cancer in Fort Chipewyan, where he conducted clinics for several years, and throughout the oilsands region. Health Canada physicians laid four complaints of professional misconduct against O’Connor with the Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons in 2007, saying he had caused “undue alarm.”
O’Connor’s name was eventually cleared after an investigation by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta, and the anxiety about cancer-causing agents in the water and air lingers. Government reports about cancer rates in the area have proven inconclusive, and no studies have looked at how the cancers might have been caused.
Two years ago, 47-year-old Barbara Jewers died of bile duct cancer only four months after diagnosis. Jewers lived in Fort McMurray and had worked in the Syncrude open pit mines and the tailings ponds for more than 20 years. She was a healthy, active woman — a non-smoker and occasional drinker who loved her job and often volunteered with various social agencies. There seemed no apparent cause of the cancer other than working in oilsands extraction facilities, says O’Connor.
During the six months after Jewers’ death, six people in Fort Chipewyan (pop. 1,100) received a cancer diagnosis, including another with bile duct cancer. This summer, a 58-year-old woman from Fort Chipewyan died from bile duct cancer. She was the seventh person from that small community to be stricken by the rare disease.
“If Fort McMurray was downstream from the oilsands plants, there would be much more of an uproar,” says Melanie Dene. “But it’s not, so nobody else but the First Nations seems to care about the water in the river.”
If you stand on the riverbank in Fort McKay and look south to the horizon, you can see huge emission stacks belching murky clouds. There is a sour smell in the air. Some formerly white older houses on the reserve have a pale yellowy coat. Inside the houses a fine dust settles on everything day after day.
“We’re always dusting,” says Lina Gallup, who is 83 and one of the band’s elders.
Sometimes the smell outside is so strong, residents stay indoors.
The band has installed its own air monitoring system, but Alvaro Pinto, who heads the reserve’s environmental sustainability department, says the community doesn’t get enough information from government agencies and industry about what is in the air and what constitutes a danger point.
According to Pinto, there was an especially strong smell of sulphur last October.
“People start calling here to find out what is going on … Should they stay indoors, evacuate? We can check our monitoring station, but we have no information from either industry or the Alberta Energy Regulator about whether there has been a serious incident at one of the oilsands plants. When we ask, they simply say, ‘We are investigating.’”
The band had made similar inquiries six months earlier, but when they asked for an update in light of the latest incident, industry, the AER, Alberta Health Services and Alberta Environment did not provide any more information or a strategy to deal with such situations.
“Somebody has to tell us we have a problem so we can take action to protect the 700 people, including elders and babies, who live here,” says Pinto.
“Who is responsible to tell us to evacuate? Is it Alberta Health Services, the chief medical officer for the region? It shouldn’t be on us to figure it out.
“I warned them that someone will go to jail if there is a serious incident.”
Source: thestar.com/
Author: Gillian Steward
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