‘They’re destroying us’: Indigenous communities fear toxic leaks from Canada oil industry – By Leyland Cecco (The Guardian) / April 23 2023
Recent leaks from oil sands tailings ponds have contaminated water, sowing mistrust among local First Nations people
Alice Rigney was born on the northern shores of the Athabasca River, a mighty body of water that flows from Canada’s western ice fields and terminates in the far reaches of the province of Alberta.
Alongside her 16 siblings, she spent her youth harvesting berries and drying white fish in a tiny village known as Jackfish Lake.
“I didn’t need anything more. I didn’t have a desire to have more. I had my parents and we had a good home. They taught us the values of being a good person,” she said. Despite living without electricity or running water, Rigney considers herself lucky to have been born there. “What more could a child want?”
All of that has changed. The village and the whitefish are both gone, displaced by a huge dam built in the late 1960s. And when a global demand for oil spawned a rush to mine the region, the waters that had long sustained the Dene, Cree and Métis peoples became something to fear.
