Aside from land used for logging, mining, or white settlements, the people of Fort McKay were promised unfettered rights to hunt and fish in perpetuity. Boucher was a child when his uncle, as headman of the Chipewyan band, added his X to Treaty 8 with Queen Victoria, surrendering their ancestral land around Moose Lake to Canada and Great Britain in return for a reserve along the Athabasca. “Look at the beautiful river, the way it looks now,” her grandfather said.Īdam Boucher was an elder of the Fort McKay First Nation, descended directly from the hereditary leaders of the Chipewyan people, who in the 19th century had intermarried with French and Scottish voyageurs as they established traplines for the North West Company and Hudson’s Bay Company. The force of the current pushed giant floes onto the banks and up the ridge. “It was spring,” she told me recently-the time of breakup, when the ground is still packed with pearlescent snow but the sun weakens the river ice until it cracks and starts to move. Less than a year after the end of World War II, when Celina Harpe was just seven, she sat beside her grandfather on the steps of his cabin, overlooking the Athabasca River in the northern reaches of Alberta. Oil companies hope to mine the entirety of Fort McKay’s heavy-grade bitumen deposits by 2030. Is this simply the price that must be paid? By: Ted Genoways, NovemTar sands being scooped and loaded. At places like Fort McKay, home to First Nations people who’ve lived there for centuries, the money is great but the environmental and health impacts are exceedingly grim. The High Cost of Oil The crude that would feed the XL pipeline comes from a once pristine part of Alberta that now resembles mining operations on a sci-fi planet. Repost from Outside Magazine, December 2014
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