By Clayton Thomas-Muller
I come from the Cree nation in northern Canada. As a young man growing up there, I had a lot of opportunities to be out in the bush in the summer doing wonderful things with my cousins to connect with our sacred Mother Earth. I remember walking down the cliff from our cabin to the beach on our beautiful lake. We’d go wading out into the water and it would never get deep. The bottom of this lake was beautiful white clay, and we used to fling it at each other.
It was only in my teenage years that I came to the understanding that that lake was not actually a lake, it was part of a vast flood plain that had been created by the damming of the Churchill River, otherwise known as the Missinippi which is “Great River” in my language, by huge hydroelectric corporations to provide cheap electricity to urban centers in southern Canada. What we were swimming in was highly contaminated water, because when you submerge vast tracts of the Boreal forest to create reservoirs for these huge power stations, they release mercury.
At that point, I began to understand that something was horribly wrong. I knew that I needed to go on a journey to find the ability to articulate this wrong feeling and to work for our people to try and find justice. After doing gang intervention work and leadership development with inner city native youth in Winnipeg, my journey brought me to California, where I met my lifetime mentor and someone that I have the honor of calling uncle, Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network. He gave me an opportunity to join the struggle for environmental justice, to work with our community people, to help them in a good way so they could build their capacity to speak for themselves on matters that are affecting them.
The Indigenous Environmental Network includes about 250 indigenous communities, individuals and organizations throughout North America fighting to protect the sacredness of Mother Earth from toxic contamination and corporate exploitation. IEN was created in 1990 by a council of elders in the Navajo community of Dilkon, Arizona.
Back in the 1990s, we were finding that our communities were being disproportionately poisoned with toxic chemicals compared to other races because of our close relationship to the land and our subsistence cultures. It’s no different in regards to energy development. The link between unsustainable energy consumption in the Americas and the destruction and desecration of indigenous homelands and culture is undeniable.
As indigenous peoples, we reject the notion that our lands and our way of life should be sacrificed at the altar of irresponsible energy policies. Indigenous peoples in the United States, and Canada and throughout the Americas have experienced systematic and repeated violations by oil, by gas, mining and energy industries of our treaty rights, and particularly those that protect our traditional lands. Oil and gas developments have consistently caused human rights violations and horrific damage to our traditional territories that have sustained us for time immemorial.
An example of this destruction is on the North Slope of Alaska, where Indigenous peoples have been under attack by oil and gas development for 30 years. There is an industrial complex in Prudhoe Bay the size of Rhode Island, which emits annually more toxic waste than the entire D.C. metro area.
In that area, 40 of 400 people in the Inupiat village of Barrow, who subsist on bowhead whale and other seafaring life, have rare forms of cancer. The Gwich'in people, who subsist on the porcupine caribou herd, tell us that the meat from the caribou that feed around the Prudhoe Bay oil patches is turning yellow and inedible.
Alaska ranks fourth on the EPA’s list of most polluted states because of unregulated dumping of toxic waste by not only by the oil and gas industry in the Cook Inlet, where they are allowed to dump off of their sixteen off shore oil platforms, but also by the U.S. military, which is one of the biggest polluters in the country.
Now, there’s a race by oil consortia, one in Canada, and one in the United States to build 1,700-mile natural gas pipelines to connect with the tar sands in northern Alberta. Industry says they’re trying to get the lucrative gas deposits in the Mackenzie Valley Delta in Canada, in the North Slope of Alaska, down from market in America’s burgeoning natural gas economy. But what they’re really trying to do is to get that gas to the tar sands in northern Alberta, which contain the second biggest oil deposit on the planet next to Saudi Arabia. So you can bet your bottom dollar that the Bush administration and all their cronies are salivating as they attempt to diversify their oil sources, because of problems in the Middle East, because of problems everywhere else.
They’re trying to get this gas down to the tar sands so they can use it to melt the sand to extract the oil. The companies plan to rip off the top layer of ground, which happens to be pristine boreal rainforests with fresh drinking water streams, lakes and rivers, and then mine 30 meters of clay off the surface so they can get to the tar sands. For every barrel of oil they extract they need to use four barrels of pristine drinking water and four barrels natural gas.
The tar sands happen to be underneath the home of the Diné Nation in northern Alberta. The toxic slag ponds from tar sand development there are so big they can be seen from outer space. Now, the companies want to increase this to ten times the current operation so that Canada can become the number one producer of oil to the United States in the future.
The IEN has been working with the Diné community of Fort Chipewyan to build the capacity of the Diné people to be able to start to stand up against this huge development, where not only North American energy giants have their fingers, but now also energy companies from India, China and all over the world are actively engaged in this very lucrative and destructive industry.
Thirty-five percent of America’s fossil fuels are directly under, or adjacent to, native American and Alaskan native communities. So the reality of it is that all local energy production directly impacts our people’s way of life.
It’s also important to remember that climate change and the fossil fuel based economy are inextricably linked. The fight for climate justice is directly related to the fight for energy justice and the need for a low carbon economy—a renewable energy economy. IEN has been on the front lines for a number of years now fighting to educate our tribal leadership and society about the fact that in native America we need to be setting the trends in developing renewable energy.
Climate change is the civil rights issue of my generation. It impacts virtually every segment of society, including those who cannot speak for themselves. Failure to act on these issues is like committing a passive act of violence against future generations.
Excerpted from a plenary talk by Clayton-Thomas Muller at the 2006 Bioneers Conference. As Native Energy Organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network, he has been on the front lines of stopping industrial society’s assault on indigenous peoples’ lands to extract resources and dump toxic waste. He is policy analyst with Canada’s National Aboriginal Healthy Organization and has been recognized by Utne Reader as one of the top 30 under 30 young activists in the U.S. Visit the Bioneers Store for a recording of his complete talk.
