Rethinking March Madness and Manifest Destiny in the Tar Sands

This post originally appeared on Fast Forward Weekly.

Driving across the expansive American west is a surefire way to get a little perspective on what’s important.

I had spent the weekend in Salt Lake City with family and friends to watch the first and second rounds of March Madness, the annual college basketball tournament in the United States. It lived up to its billing, with Harvard upsetting New Mexico and my beloved Gonzaga Bulldogs going down in flames to a Wichita State team that shot the lights out.

I had picked Gonzaga to win the whole thing, so I was in a very grumpy mood as we swung the car north across the wide open expanse the locals call Big Sky Country. After an hour of sage brush and snow-capped peaks I began to relax, and basketball seemed of little consequence. A red-tailed hawk soared high overhead, reminding me that the total annihilation of one’s March Madness bracket was nothing compared with other kinds of annihilation.

Everywhere I looked — from Salt Lake City to Twin Falls, Idaho and then Missoula, Montana — was once the homelands of dozens of aboriginal people. No longer. They were all decimated, and those who survived were pushed onto reservations because of an economic imperative known as Manifest Destiny. The land and water and wildlife aboriginal people had occupied for millennia was just too damn valuable to the capitalists and settlers invading the west to be equitably distributed. The vast majority of these “resources” were literally stolen, sometimes after treaties had been signed, right out from under the people who had lived there long before the agricultural revolution even began.

Although the historical details were slightly different in Canada, the process was the same — and the most unsettling thing is that it continues to this day. In the tarsands, greed has trumped morality and the rule of law, and aboriginal people are once again seeing their lands ransacked by economic alchemists who want to turn an area the size of England into a profitable wasteland.

Aboriginal people in northern Alberta signed Treaty 8 in 1899, which most people don’t know applies to an area larger than France in northeastern B.C., northern Alberta and northwestern Saskatchewan. Father Lacombe assured First Nations that if they signed the treaty, their lives would remain more or less unchanged. Treaty 8 included provisions to maintain the livelihoods for the native populations in the region, such as entitlements to land and hunting, fishing and gathering rights on ceded lands. According to the treaty itself, this agreement is valid “as long as the sun shines, the grass grows, and the rivers flow.” Which is to say, forever.

Industrial activity was allowed, too, as long as the federal government consulted with aboriginal people to accommodate their interests and protect their constitutional rights. Herein lies the rub.

It’s really hard to argue that the massive invasion of development that has already taken place on Treaty 8 lands in northern Alberta, never mind the even more massive amount of development that is planned for the future in the tarsands region, doesn’t impinge on native treaty rights as guaranteed by the constitution. Just ask the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN).

“Our rights are being overlooked and that is a truth that cannot be denied,” said ACFN chief Allan Adam, after the Alberta Court of appeal dismissed AFCN’s application for leave to appeal a decision of the Joint Review Panel to not review the adequacy of Crown consultation before deciding whether to approve Shell’s Jackpine Mine expansion project. “If there is a violation of our constitutionally protected treaty rights it should be dealt with before this project is found to be in the public interest. A project of this magnitude couldn’t possibly be in the public interest if our rights have not been upheld and we have not been adequately consulted.”

That seems like a reasonable conclusion, given the wording of the treaty, and the fact toxins are being deposited in ground and surface water, fish and moose are growing tumours bigger than golf balls, and wildlife habitat is being degraded on a scale not seen since the bombing of Hiroshima. Water guidelines are being exceeded and it is likely that pollution also contravenes the Fisheries Act. And caribou? They’re bound to go the way of the dodo, which will make them awfully hard to hunt by the aboriginal people who once depended on them.

One wonders what Albertans would have to say if this kind of excessive and irresponsible development were taking place upstream from, say, Calgary or Edmonton? I’m guessing that the residents of Calgary and Edmonton would be outraged at the destruction and fearful for their health, and they would demand a stop to things. But out of sight is out of mind, as they say, and life is just sooooo busy these days.

The appalling way we’ve treated First Nations people in northern Alberta makes any claims of ethical oil and responsible tarsands development little more than an ironic and tasteless joke. I hope the AFCN takes its case all the way to the Supreme Court, and wins. Perhaps that’s their Manifest Destiny.

Image Credit: Ojibway mother and child. Provincial Archives of Manitoba.