The Canadian government commenced the treaty-making process with the Indigenous peoples of the Athabasca region in 1870, motivated by the Geological Survey of Canada’s reports that petroleum existed in the area. This, in addition to the discovery of gold in the Klondike region, spurred an influx of unregulated settlement and resource extraction in the north. The trajectory of this history has continued to bring the Canadian settler state – and its oil industry stakeholders – into negotiation with indigenous Nations over the Athabasca tar sands. Currently contested is Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway project, which aims to move oil from the Edmonton, Alberta area by way of two massive pipelines covering 1,170km to Kitimat, British Columbia, where it would then be transported to Asia-Pacific markets by super-tankers. This paper examines the widespread criticism of the project from Indigenous and environmental groups, as well as responses to these objections by public/private partnerships between Enbridge, federal and provincial governments and their national security and counter-terrorism forces. It argues that recognising and naming contemporary forms of white settler colonialism, including these types of neoliberal partnerships, is required for new relations to become possible.
I have chosen to use the term ‘tar sands’ to describe the bitumen rich and heavily exploited Athabasca region of Alberta, as well as other deposits of bitumen in Alberta and Saskatchewan. These territories are traditional lands of dozens of Indigenous nations, including the twenty-four First Nations named in Treaty 8 alone. While the term ‘oil sands’ is preferred by the oil and gas industry, and by the Canadian government, bitumen is a ‘tar-like’ substance in consistency, colour and odour that must be chemically processed to become ‘oil-like’.
The Yinka Dene Alliance are also the first signatories to the Save the Fraser Declaration, a declaration based on ancestral laws, which protects the Fraser River watershed regions (and the ocean migration routes of the salmon) from oil and gas exploration, extraction and pipelines. The Declaration has been signed by over 160 nations. For more information, or to read the Declaration see: http://yinkadene.ca/index.php/about
International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), ‘Canada: Indigenous leaders reject pipeline equity offer’, Press Release (16February2011), available at: http://www.iwgia.org/news/search-news?news_id=100
12.
Marchel in HusemanJ.ShortD., ‘“A slow industrial genocide”: oil sands and the Indigenous Peoples of Northern Alberta’, International Journal of Human Rights (Vol. 16, no.1, 2012), pp. 216–37, p. 221.
13.
Such as: Greenpeace; Environmental Defense; the Climate Action Network; Forest Ethics; Dogwood Initiative; the ‘No Tankers’ campaign; The Pembina Institute, etc.
14.
WolfeP., ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, Journal of Genocide Research (Vol. 8, no. 4, 2006), pp. 387–409, p. 390.
15.
Ibid., p. 393.
16.
Ibid.
17.
SmithA., ‘Indigeneity, settler colonialism, white supremacy’, Global Dialogue (Vol. 12, no. 2, 2010), paras 1–31, para. 2.
The Métis are a nation or people whose traditional homelands include Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, extending to parts of Ontario, British Columbia, Northwest Territories and parts of the northern United States. They emerged as a distinct nation over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the intermarriage of white settler populations and Indigenous nations, developing a distinct culture and tradition and land title. The Métis are recognised as one of the Indigenous groups represented by the term ‘Aboriginal’, whose rights are protected by the Constitution. The Métis National Council uses the following definition: ‘“Métis” means a person who self-identifies as Métis, is distinct from other Aboriginal peoples, is of historic Métis Nation Ancestry and who is accepted by the Métis Nation’ (Métis National Council, http://www.metisnation.ca/index.php/who-are-the-metis/citizenship). See also FlanaganT., ‘Resource industries and security issues in Northern Alberta’, report prepared for the Canadian Defense and Foreign Affairs Institute (2009), available at: http://www.cdfai.org/PDF/Resource%20Industries%20and%20Security%20Issues%20in%20Northern%20Alberta.pdf
Taylor and Friedel look at the effects of private-public partnerships on Indigenous nations in the context of the tar sands industry and identify three broad forms of historic relation between the federal government and Indigenous nations: fur trade colonialism; welfare colonialism; and neoliberal partnerships. Again, as the ‘logic of elimination’ continues to structure all three of these forms, and as settler colonialism is a unique structure distinct from ‘traditional’ colonialism – whereby colonisers ultimately aim to return to the metropole – these particularities are lost in Taylor and Friedel’s analysis. Nonetheless, Taylor and Friedel utilise this framework of three forms of relation in order to better understand the contemporary focus on private-public partnership approaches to education and training of First Nation and Métis people in the community of Wood Buffalo, Alberta, near Fort McMurray.
46.
Altamirano-Jiménez in Taylor and Friedel, op. cit., p. 821.
As Smith warns, ‘the consequence of not developing a critical apparatus for intersecting all the logics of white supremacy, including settler colonialism, is that it prevents us from imagining an alternative to the racial state’. Smith, op. cit., para. 20.
55.
Ibid., para. 12.
56.
Ibid., para. 29.
57.
Smith notes, ‘we need to look at how “settlers” are differentiated through white supremacy’, thus complicating the settler/indigenous binary, which has been critiqued by many scholars. Ibid., para. 29.
Lorenzo Veracini in Settler Colonialism: a theoretical overview (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) discusses the notion of the ‘Indian problem’ as a key part of the transferist rationale of settler colonialism and of the ‘Indigenous incarceration/criminalization/institutionalization’ transfer strategy in particular (pp. 45–6). Veracini has argued that settler colonial formations can be summarised ‘as domination for the purpose of transfer’ (p. 34), as ‘all settler projects are foundationally premised on fantasies of ultimately “cleansing” the settler body politic of its (indigenous and exogenous) alterities’ (p. 33). Linking this fantasy back to anxieties over sovereignty, Veracini writes, ‘treating the indigenous “problem” as a welfare matter … [or with] calls to “close the (socioeconomic) gap” between indigenous and non-indigenous constituencies are premised on indigenous dysfunction, not sovereign entitlement’ (p. 46).
61.
Flanagan, op. cit., p. 8. Caledonia is a municipality in southwestern Ontario, which lies on Six Nations of the Grand River (Haudenosaunee, Six Nations) territories. Conflict between the majority of the settler community and Indigenous peoples and their allies erupted between 2005–2007 over ongoing development projects on settler-unrecognised Indigenous lands. Indigenous activists and their allies occupied the Douglas Creek Estates development site, and created a blockade halting development by Henco Industries. In response, thousands of Caledonia’s settler residents held rallies and on several occasions confronted the Indigenous activists, resulting in racist and physical violence and increased police and government involvement in addressing the land dispute. See: Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, available at: http://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100016337/1100100016338
62.
Flanagan, ibid., p. 9.
63.
Ibid., p. 12.
64.
The term ‘band council’ refers to the legal system of Indigenous governance imposed by the Canadian state through the Indian Act. Band councils do not necessarily recognise hereditary chiefs or elders, and are thus controversial governing bodies in many Indigenous communities. Chiefs or chief councillors of the band councils are thus not necessarily hereditary leaders.
Smith’s notion of multiple logics of white supremacy, the intersection of the genocidal logic – which anchors colonialism – and the orientalist logic, which anchors war, is particularly prevalent in the recent messaging of ‘ethical’ Canadian oil. In the Canadian context, the orientalist logic combines with the genocidal logic in the tar sands, and justifies the use of these counter-terrorism/national security measures targeting Indigenous leaders working with environmental groups. Smith, op. cit.
It is important to note that while Smith’s first logic of white supremacy (slaveability/anti-black racism) has not been a part of my analysis because it is not as evident in the context of the Canadian tar sands industry and opposition to it, it too is present. This white supremacist logic works as ‘the anchor of capitalism’ because it ultimately ‘commodifies all workers’ and uses racial hierarchy to value these ‘commodities’.
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