The Exhaustion of Wood Buffalo National Park

Abstract

Wood Buffalo National Park is Canada's largest and the world's second largest national park. For the last half century, industrial mega projects such as BC Hydro's W.A.C. Bennett Dam first and tar sands oil extraction later have been exhausting the “natural resources” of the park, decimating wildlife, and severing the sacred relations among Indigenous people, their ways of life, and their land. This extractivist regime has led to a point when, in 2014, the Mikisew Cree First Nation—frustrated by the Canadian government's continued unwillingness to listen to their grievances—filed a petition to ask UNESCO to add Wood Buffalo National Park to the list of the world's endangered World Heritage sites. In this article, we describe how such events unfolded and what the current situation signifies for environmental politics, wilderness conservation, and Indigenous relations with settler society within a colonial state.