![]() ![]() We worked with community leaders from the Mikisew Cree Nation, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, and probably a dozen other First Nations from British Columbia, southwestern Ontario (where Enbridge was building its Line 9 crude oil pipeline), and the Lower 48 (where TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline would be part of a massive pipeline from Alberta to Texas). ![]() Everyone has their own ideas, and every one of them comes with some level of risk. I had some powerful people shout at me in front of other powerful people, telling me that my strategy and tactics, and specifically working in partnership with the Aboriginal legal regime, were not effective. Not all division within the movement is sown by oil giants. We call this the Native rights–based strategic and tactical framework.Īt that time, the white environmental organizations in the funding world were uninterested in human rights and were focused exclusively on the climate. IEN understood that if we channelled resources to First Nations to support a multipronged strategy of legal interventions in the courts and on-the-ground organizing rooted in ceremony, leading towards mass mobilization, we could eventually defeat Big Oil. Since those pipelines were heading to refineries south of the border, I organized the first trip of funders and heads of the major national environmental organizations in the United States, and they saw tar sands as a credible way to lubricate the ushering in of a climate change policy in the United States. We realized that we could make it a much, much worse investment. ![]() And it’s no secret that tar sands oil is a high-cost, low-margin investment to begin with. If it’s worth less, the return on investment of tar sands projects drops. Oil that can’t get to market is worth less. We figured that if we started to choke-hold these pipelines, we could keep the tar sands landlocked. The strategy we settled on was what we called a “rights and title campaign.” We would assert our rights to our territories. And our lawyers and activists protect those treaties. The reason oil companies love to slap their logos on Native projects is that they know we hold the key to their vaults. In Canada, Indigenous Peoples have a powerful legal regime, through constitutional protection of their treaty rights to hunt, fish, and trap. That’s because the colonists and extractive industries need us. The way Native men and women become addicted to the jobs provided by energy companies, just as their brothers and sisters become addicted to booze and crime, is not incidental to colonialism. The social divisions within Native communities are not an unfortunate side effect of colonialism. They divide and conquer, because they need to. From Brazil to Oklahoma, from Nebraska to Alaska, extractive mega-projects need the machinery of colonialism. The clues had been staring us in the face for years. Even remote First Nations living in the midst of the tar sands development-staring down billions in international capital, a government that had a centuries-old history of mistreatment, and an army of bulldozers and dump trucks the size of prehistoric beasts-had to have some leverage. No matter how mismatched the fight, the underdog always has some advantage she can use (and I say “she” deliberately it’s always the women who first take up the challenge). ![]()
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