Onstage, Jeremy Dutcher sings in a deep, yearning tenor. On the phone, he giggles as he attempts to choose his favourite of Canada’s natural sites, considering options around the country before giving up. 

“I’m very, very fortunate as a musician. We get to see a lot of the country that I don’t think a lot of people always get to,” Dutcher says. “There’s a lot of beautiful places out there.” 

But the pianist’s heart will always be in Wolastokuk, or Fredericton, N.B., where he grew up as a member of Tobique First Nation. For centuries, it’s been the home of the Wolastoqiyik, or “people of the beautiful river:” both the land and the community are named for the Wolastoq, or Saint John River, that winds up from the Bay of Fundy. 

Honouring the language is central to Dutcher’s work. His 2018 debut album, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, integrated century-old wax cylinder recordings of traditional songs, while 2023’s Motewolonuwok featured new songs in both English and Wolastoqey. Both won the Polaris Prize. Dutcher says there are fewer than 100 people left who are fluent in Wolastoqey, also known as Maliseet-Passamaquoddy. 

“Our Elders say ‘the language is the land, and the land is the language,’ ” he says. “There are certain words in our language that are really an onomatopoeia for what we’re hearing. For example, the word for bird or birds is ‘sipsisok.’ You can kind of hear the flutter of their wings.”

Along with working on a horror movie score, Dutcher has performances coming up in Canada and beyond. After playing with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra on June 21, the Two-Spirit musician will head to Norway for a Pride gig, before summer festivals in Elora, Ont., and Dawson City, Yukon. Next, some stops in Japan, followed by concerts in Prince George, Vernon and Oliver, B.C., this fall. 

Each trip is a chance to witness even more of the world’s natural beauty. When we connected with Dutcher, he told us what he’s seen so far. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity — all opinions are the subject’s own.

What is the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve witnessed between the Pacific, Atlantic, 49th parallel and Hudson Bay, i.e. what people call Canada? 

To just pick one is to do a disservice to the rest. I was just in Iqaluit, Nvt., for the first time, at -40 C. The land is really inspiring, but it’s the people everywhere that really light me up. Last summer, I was in Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland and that was another place that took my breath away. 

For me, to be around mountains is awe inspiring. I just got back from the Banff Centre for the Arts, which is nestled within the mountains. It’s dry as hell. My lips and my skin were in a riot. But it was so beautiful, it’s just really stunning.

Sorry, I couldn’t pick one. 

What is the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve seen outside of Canada?

Last summer, I played an Indigenous music festival among the Sami people, the Indigenous people of Scandinavia. This concert was in northern Norway. To get to fly into the fjords and then take a bus all throughout the mountains — the way that water meets rock, I’ll remember that for a long time. It’s really stunning up there. We got to go out on the water in these see-through kayaks, so we’re able to really watch what’s above and below. That was a really special time. 

Think of three iconic Canadian animals and choose one each to kiss, marry and kill. 

It’s probably gonna be kill moose. They’re so nice and fuzzy but like, kill a salmon, you feed your family, kill a moose, you feed your community for a month. Sorry, moose. 

Beavers are not so friendly. But I feel like I could get him on my side. Marry him and work on him. 

I’ve already kissed the cod, so why not do it again? 

Name a person or group doing something meaningful for the environment that everyone should know about.

This is going to be a bit of a sideways answer, but hear me out. It is a climate solution, but it’s also something that’s really near and dear to my heart. About three years ago, my mother, Lisa Perley-Dutcher, and some members of our community started the first language immersion school for the Wolastoqey language, Kehkimin. It’s on this beautiful lake. The whole philosophy is that our language can’t really be learned in a classroom like a European language. You need to go out and experience the land and have a relationship in order for the language to come. 

They go out and walk with Elders every day. It’s this beautiful reframing of educational space, environmentalism and how it’s really connected with language. These young people are having a deepened relationship with place and space through language and through community connectivity. For me, this is the most beautiful and grassroots way of enabling our land defenders. 

Name a person who could significantly help mitigate the climate crisis if they really wanted to. 

My quick and flippant answer is Mark fucking Carney. 

My other answer is me. I mean that like the royal me — wait, it’s the royal ‘we,’ isn’t it? All of us could be doing better.  

But also Mark Carney. Our leadership, who have been democratically elected, are not moving with what the majority of the country would like — which is not to see our beautiful lands put in danger with pipeline projects. It’s really out of step with the direction a lot of us know we need to be going. This is what the land has been telling us.

Listen to the ones that are speaking from a place of knowledge and that are in relationship with this place in a way that we’re not. I saw the movie Yintah a couple weeks ago. It’s about the Wet’suwet’en land disputes. It’s really a cool insight on us being strong in who we are as sovereign Indigenous people and speaking for this place, how that can actually have a tangible impact on these resource projects. We can say no. And when we do say no, it’s been affirmed in the courts again and again and again, from Delgamu’ukw to the Marshall decisions. We have a right to say what happens in our unceded territories and — how did I get on this trip? 

Oh, Mark Carney. I don’t know that he has that good intention. The ways in which I’ve heard him speak have been like ‘drill, baby, drill.’ That feels regressive to me.

Researchers at Yale University, the France-based Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society and other institutions have found women tend to be more concerned about climate change than men. Why do you think that is? 

We’re so sick, we’re so gender sick. The same functions and institutions that seek to suppress our women and girls are a detriment to all. That weight sits heavy on all. 

The aggression and extractive mentalities that are so much of what we’re seeing in masculine presentation today — I don’t think they’re actually a fundamental part of a healthy masculinity, but I do think this state we find ourselves in, there’s a violence to it. It’s not surprising to me that it bears out in research. 

There is a mentality which values accumulation, whether that’s of resources or of capital. In order to accumulate vast capital, you need to do something to the land. There’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of men doing this — which is not to say that there aren’t female CEOs and oil executives that are doing bad by the globe. Any group that thinks that it can take, take, take, without offering and replanting and re-sowing: if we let our societies be run by this particular kind of person, we find ourselves in this place, which is our Earth crying out for something else. And I think a lot of people are too. 

The province that I come from, New Brunswick, for the last eight years we had an Irving oil executive as our premier, but now we have a Liberal woman in and I wonder if that might change the nature of how we think about land and space and place, rematriate our society. I think this is also a climate solution, to encourage our strong women into leadership. 

The logics and philosophies that got us into this place — extractive mentalities and patriarchy and all of these heavy things — they’re not going to be the same methodology that get us out of it. We need to fundamentally rethink the spaces of power and who gets to speak. 

Outdoor cats, yes or no?

Outdoor everything. Yes.

Tell us about a time you changed your mind about something, environmental or otherwise. 

I have a bad habit of smoking and I used to be a little careless with the butts. And a friend said ‘hey, dogs eat those up sometimes and it makes them quite sick. My dog got sick that way.’

What might feel like a small form of littering, when we think about our size and the size of those around us, we should try to walk lightly all the time. This is such a small, stupid example, but I try to take a little thing to put my butts in so I can dispose of them.

Tell us about a time you tried to change someone else’s mind about something.

For me, it’s less about trying to change anybody’s mind, but about being a little more vocal about what’s in my mind. Trying to let that shine towards people and offer them solutions, too.

I was talking about the school earlier, with my mother. After Canadians started to have a lot of conversations about residential schools and survivors, people wanted to help. They want to be part of the solution, to make our society more equitable. But it feels intangible, because for so long, they haven’t had relationships with Indigenous people. What I’ve realized telling people about this school is they want to put their energy, their good, their spirit, towards something that can help heal. 

I really feel like that’s the work we need to be doing right now, rather than giving anybody advice.

Rocky Mountains or Great Lakes? 

Sometimes in the fall my friend Melody McIver, this amazing Anishinaabe violist and Earth-worker, they gather this beautiful food called manoomin, what in English people call wild rice. It’s harvested in the Great Lakes, it actually grows right on that lake water. You go in your canoe and you have these sticks and you hit those grains of rice into your boat. It’s a real process, but it’s a beautiful one. I haven’t been in a couple years to go up and rice with my friend Melody, but that’s such a strong memory for me. 

So I have to stick with the Great Lakes. They’re beautiful. They feed us, both in our spirit and literally, with the rice in our bodies, too. 

What’s a beautiful or useful thing you’ve owned for a really long time?

Probably my hand drum. It was passed down to me, so it’s been around for a really long time. Old things, whether it’s objects or people or ideas, we need to be careful with them and we need to protect them and we need to go slow and we need to listen. Old things always remind me to be mindful. 

If you could dip a toe off of Canada’s coastline, what ocean would you pick?

It has to be the Atlantic. I’m an East Coast person, through and through and through. Not many places feel like home other than the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean. I long for that place all the time, but I live in Montreal for now.

Who in your life has had the greatest impact on your connection to nature? 

It’s my oldest brother, Shane Perly-Dutcher. He’s a beautiful artist and metalsmith. We are 14 years apart. He was very much taking me around as a young person and showing me how to work with the land, harvesting red willow roots and stripping bark. We’d go around and harvest and pick fiddleheads. That helped me to not just think about the land as abstract, that only a national park is a sacred place. No, it’s all sacred. The side of the road over there is sacred too. This is all beautiful land. He showed me that. 

Smoked salmon or maple syrup? 

There’s a restaurant in Vancouver called Salmon n’ Bannock, and they have a salmon sampler. You can try salmon done in like six different ways and it is insanity. One of them is a maple salmon situation. Ever since then, I’m like, why choose? We can do both. 

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Angello Johnson’s shoulders burn, and his arms feel like they could fall off with each swing of the axe. 

Instead of piercing through the wood, he uses the butt of the axe to unravel long, thin strips called splints. 

A well-seasoned basketmaker in Akwesasne, Johnson often spends hours by the cherrywood fire outside his family home pounding logs of black ash — a tree treasured for fibres that naturally separate into flexible layers ideal for crafting.

“There’s other materials out there that can be woven into baskets, but black ash is the heart and soul of basketmaking here in Akwesasne,” Johnson says.

Working with this material is a tradition he wants to share with his daughters, Willow and Taya. 

“I really want them to have that experience before it’s just a story that we used to tell,” he says. 

They aren’t old enough to chop trees or pound black ash into splints. But seeing them hold the splints he harvested — watching, learning, weaving — gives him hope the tradition will live on.

“But, with the emerald ash borer here chewing on the trees as we speak, the clock is ticking,” Johnson says.

The beetle that’s killing the forest

In 2016, the emerald ash borer, an invasive species from Asia, began desecrating the southern forests of Akwesasne, a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) community that straddles the Canada-U.S. border near Cornwall, Ont. Nearly a decade later, the tiny green bugs have spread through entire forests, leaving 99 per cent of ash trees exposed to them dead. 

Emerald ash borers will die in extreme cold and Canadian winters previously provided a form of defense against the species’ northward spread. But warming temperatures due to climate change have exacerbated the beetle’s destructive impact. Its likelihood of surviving as larva has increased, and its feeding period has lengthened.

The devastation extends beyond the woods in Akwesasne. Since first detected in Michigan in 2002, the wood-boring beetles have infected black ash trees in 35 American states and five Canadian provinces. 

In the summer, beetles lay their eggs on the bark of trees; when they hatch, larvae bore into the tree, then chew their way out after maturing. The infestation eventually kills the tree. As it dies, the tree’s growth rings become paper-thin, making the wood unsuitable for basketmaking, and once infected, the tree has only about two years to live, raising questions about the future of the long-standing Kanien’kehá:ka tradition.

From tree to tradition, basketweaving passed down across generations

Some of Johnson’s fondest memories of black ash are the moments with his father, Eric Sunday, and his great-uncle, Clyde Cree, working together to harvest and pound wood for baskets.

The three would hop in the truck and drive around Akwesasne forests until they found the right tree. Cree, with a practiced eye, could spot a mature, ready-to-harvest ash tree without even leaving the vehicle. 

“Great-uncle Clyde Cree, he’s passed on now,” Johnson says. “I was so fortunate to soak up as much knowledge as I could from him so that way I could pass it on.”

Black ash basketmaking has been a part of Kanien’kehá:ka culture for as long as anyone can remember, with splint fragments found in the northeast United States dating back 3,000 years.

“It’s the whole art of it. The art of connecting with Mother Earth, your family, your Elders, it’s a traditional thing,” Johnson says.

“In the ’60s and ’70s, each family had at least two or three people in their family that were dedicated basketmakers,” Sunday says. “These trees are so important to our people.”

As a child, Sunday remembers watching his mom basketweaving in a circle with other female basketmakers, all speaking Kanien’kéha. 

“When they had the circle of basketmakers, you could not talk English. You must talk Mohawk,” Sunday says. “That’s gone. We gotta bring that back.”

“For every tree that dies is a chip away from our culture, a tradition that will soon be lost,” Sunday says.

Today, as Sunday pounds the black ash splints outside alongside his son, Johnson, they continue this tradition by speaking Kanien’kéha to each other.  

“We’re not the best at it, but we throw it back and forth,” Sunday says. 

Protecting Akwesasne’s black ash

When he first heard about the emerald ash borer, Johnson says, “I was just a basketmaker.” Now, he also works as a land resource technician to preserve the black ash trees and protect his craft.

For the forestry department of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, an arm of the community’s government based in New York state, Johnson supervises a field crew of four full-time employees and two seasonal workers, all dedicated to harvesting black ash and stockpiling splints. 

“The most we can do now is tree injections on the trees we want to save, seed collecting and really trying to find those remote pockets that haven’t been touched yet,” Johnson says. 

Injecting trees with insecticide can protect healthy black ash from the beetle for up to four years. While effective when properly administered, the chemicals for the injections are expensive. It’s also a time-consuming process that requires a certified technician like Johnson.

The team also harvests black ash seeds, which are then shipped to Colorado and preserved in “big underground seed banks,” Johnson says. But the trees only produce healthy seeds once every five to seven years, and with their numbers steadily declining, it’s essential to seize these limited opportunities to harvest as many seeds as possible.

The Saint Regis tribe hopes to replant the black ash, restoring the forests to their original density, when the insect is no longer a threat.

These preservation efforts aim to “stretch out our time with this resource as long as possible,” Johnson says.

‘Link in the chain’: preserving basketweaving is about knowledge as well as trees

Preserving black ash isn’t just about protecting the tree. It’s also about passing down the knowledge of basketmaking tied to it. 

Johnson started his basketmaking business 12 years ago. Good Mind Design also passes on Traditional Knowledge through workshops.

“I really fell in love with the whole teaching aspect, just bringing out that creativity in somebody and then seeing them light up with joy,” Johnson says. 

At a recent workshop with 20 participants, Johnson started the class with a question.

“How many of you have made a basket before?” he asked.

Only three women raised their hands.

Some shared childhood memories of their grandmothers weaving baskets, but said they never learned themselves. 

“I’m trying to get as many people up to speed with basketmaking as possible,” Johnson says. “That way, hopefully, they can remember and teach their children or grandchildren once the trees come back.”

“Knowing that I now have the knowledge that I can pass on is such a gift, and I’m just so honoured to be part of that link in the chain,” Johnson says. 

“It’s very satisfying to know that what I learned myself and then passed on to my son is sticking,” Sunday says, smiling at Johnson. “My job is done. It’s his turn.”

Though Sunday began as a log pounder and mentor to Johnson, their roles have reversed: he is now learning the art of basketweaving from his son. He’s proud his granddaughters are already developing a connection to the craft through Johnson’s teachings. It gives him hope for the Kanien’kehá:ka and the resurgence of their traditions.

“Our people are resilient like the tree. We’ll come back,” Sunday says. 

“We’ll make it. We’ll survive.” 

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Waubgeshig Rice has a way with words, both written and spoken. Whether true or imagined, his stories are somehow both concise and hefty, and even when sad, they’re full of beauty. 

During nearly two decades as a journalist, most with CBC, he covered Indigenous communities with knowledge and respect at a time when many others didn’t. Rice, who grew up in Wasauksing First Nation, wrote fiction on the side until 2020, when he turned to it full time. His most recent, last fall’s Moon of the Turning Leaves is a sequel to 2018’s Moon of the Crusted Snow, both bestsellers set in a fictional Anishinaabe community after a global crisis. The first book is eerie and unsettling. The second is slightly less terrifying, but still adventurous.

“I wanted the land itself to be more of a central figure to the overall narrative,” Rice says about the second book, which he calls a “quest of discovery.” 

“It becomes a force that influences both the plot and the characters at various points in the story.”

On the phone, Rice — who just sold two more books, one of which will bring him back to non-fiction — is as thoughtful and sharp as on the page. He’s also just plain funny. Here are the Sudbury, Ont., resident’s answers to The Narwhal’s Moose Questionnaire. 

This interview is edited and condensed for clarity — all opinions are the subject’s own. 

What’s the most awe-inspiring natural site you’ve witnessed between the Pacific, Atlantic, 49th parallel and Hudson Bay, what people call Canada? 

I think off the top of my head, the yearly ice breakup is just something to behold, right? When you consider just a few months prior, it’s open water, and then it’s all hard water, like essentially another surface, and then it melts again. So beholding that water cycle. It sounds kind of mundane, but having grown up on Georgian Bay, this vast body of water before me, it’s just something I’ve really appreciated every year of my life, essentially. 

What’s the most awe-inspiring natural site you’ve witnessed outside of Canada?

Being in the Andes Mountains in Peru. I hiked the Inca trail with my wife in 2013 and being in mountains walking amongst the clouds is just like — I’m getting goosebumps now, thinking about it all this time later.

Think of three iconic Canadian animals. Pick one each to kiss, marry and kill.

I will pick the beaver to marry because they’re so resourceful. It builds its own habitats. It can literally fell trees with its mouth, which is just awesome. A beaver for just how excellently capable it is in nature.

To kiss, I would say probably a bear. I have an affinity for bears because I come from the Bear Clan, in the Anishinaabe culture. And of course, bears can be dangerous, and you shouldn’t kiss them straight up, but I just have this love for the creature itself, because of how I was raised. When you’re Bear Clan, the role that comes with that is being part of the protectors of the community, but also having medicinal knowledge too. So I take pride in that. At the same time, with being like a big, tough kind of protector, you also need to compliment that with some affection. So that’s why I would kiss the bear. 

Kill, oh, man, I don’t know. Maybe an invasive species, like the zebra mollusk. 

Name a person or group doing something meaningful for the environment that everyone should know about.

I am always inspired by young Great Lakes Anishinaabe people in general, who are raising awareness of freshwater and the importance of protecting it. The Georgian Bay Biosphere, they have a very important Nishnawbe element to the work they do. They hire young people from my community, Wasauksing First Nation, and from other Georgian Bay communities like Shawanaga First Nation. 

Name one person who could significantly help mitigate the climate crisis, if they really wanted to.

The billionaires. Bezos and Musk and those guys who could literally pour billions into mitigation efforts. Why they don’t is beyond me. I would just hope that they could find some compassion somewhere in their lives. 

Outdoor cats, yes or no?

I’m into it. I’m for them. If cats want to live in a barn, or, you know, in a shed or something like that, let ‘em be.  

Tell us about a time you changed your mind about something, environmental or otherwise.

I changed my mind about Nickelback years ago. I thought I was too cool for them, but then I noticed myself bobbing my head the more they came on the radio. So I’m appreciative of Nickelback now. 

Tell us about a time you tried to change someone else’s mind about something.

I don’t know if I can think of a specific moment. I just recall being in online conversations, trying to change people’s minds about things and recognizing the futility of it, and just knowing that it’s a waste of time and energy. There’s this digital divide between you. That’s kind of prompted me to lessen my engagement on social media. I find it more impactful just to try to meet people face to face and just have real discussions with them.

Okay, you have to choose: Rocky Mountains or Great Lakes?

Great Lakes, without question. 

Researchers at Yale University, the France-based Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society and other institutions have found women tend to be more concerned about climate change than men. Why do you think that is? 

I don’t want to speak entirely in generalizations, but in my experience, women are more empathetic and more reasonable than men are. I grew up with more women influencing my life than men, for sure, and being closely connected to my Anishinaabe culture on the rez, I saw that appreciation and respect for crucial elements, like the water, like the trees, the air. 

What I loved the most was how women in my life taught me to spend time with all those things and to understand their power, but also their grace and their beauty and how they’re all interconnected with each other, right? 

If you could dip a toe off Canada’s coastline, which ocean would it be in? 

Probably the Pacific, because, you know, off the coast of B.C., the beach comes paired with those nice, big, beautiful mountains. Of course, there are beautiful mountains on the eastern side, like the Torngats Mountains in Labrador. But I think the ones in the lower coast of B.C. are more accessible. 

What’s a beautiful or useful thing you’ve owned for a really long time? 

I have a hand drum that I’ve had for a really long time. I play once in a while, but my kids play it now, and that’s a really beautiful thing to behold, because it’s keeping that beat going that was instilled in me at a young age, as young as they are now.

What’s the farthest north you’ve ever been, and what did you do there? 

I went to Eureka in Nunavut, the research base there, in 2004 I think it was. It was when I was working for The Weather Network, and we went up just to do a profile on the researchers and the base itself. So it’s as far as I’ve been, and was an amazing experience.

Name a way you interact with the natural world on a daily basis.

Walking in the bush. Even where I live, close to downtown Sudbury, there’s a lot of forests and a lot of bush area, even behind our house. So I try to just spend a few minutes out there, or maybe even an hour, if I have the time just to walk among the trees and put my feet on the ground. 

If you could ask one person, alive or dead, their thoughts on climate change, who would it be?

I would probably ask my great-grandfather, whose name was also Waubgeshig. I never knew him. He died back in the 1950s but it would be interesting to know how he felt about water levels on Georgian Bay, depleting fish stock in Georgian Bay, shoreline erosion and so on. He was known to traverse that shoreline basically his entire life. So, yeah, it’d be interesting to know his thoughts. 

Alright, you have to choose: smoked salmon or maple syrup? 

Maple syrup, mostly because I was raised harvesting sap and helping my grandmother make it. 

Who in your life has had the greatest impact on your connection to nature? 

Probably my parents, because they chose to raise me and my brothers on the rez. They were living in Ottawa when they found out I was coming along, and they made the choice to move from there, back to my dad’s home community. My mom’s of settler background, so it was obviously a bit of a leap for her, too. But they wanted to raise their kids in the bush and for that, I’m grateful. 

And whose relationship with the natural world would you most like to impact? 

Oh, my kids, for sure. It’s harder, because we live in a city compared to my own upbringing, but we take them to Wasauksing regularly, they consider that their second home. Growing up in northern Ontario — or just Ontario, because some people get upset if you call Sudbury northern Ontario — they still have access to all this beautiful water, trees and rolling hillsides. To see them appreciate it really means a lot to me. 

Would you rather be invited to David and Victoria Beckham’s Muskoka cottage, or Harry and Meghan Sussex’s B.C. escape?

I would say the Beckhams. I’m more of a soccer fan, and plus, you know, it’s closer.

Last question: camping, yes or no?

Yes, as much as possible. 

If you can think of an interesting person whose Moose Questionnaire answers you’d like to know, send us a note: editor@thenarwhal.ca.

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A year after being named Ontario’s first standalone minister of mines in 50 years, George Pirie is consolidating authority over his ministry. In March, Pirie, the former mayor of Timmins, Ont., introduced Bill 71, the Building More Mines Act, which hands Pirie decision-making powers over exploration and mine closures, once relegated to staff. 

A 35-year mining industry executive and former president and CEO of Placer Dome Canada, Pirie has been tasked by the Doug Ford government to encourage mining in the province; notably in the northern Ring of Fire region, amid growing demand for critical minerals such as nickel, cobalt and lithium, seen as crucial for the battery building needed to transition away from fossil fuels towards electrification. 

The act, which received royal assent in May, is currently undergoing public regulatory consultations as to how to put the legislation into effect. But Bill 71 faces criticisms from First Nations, non-governmental organizations and legal experts who say the minister has given himself too much authority over mine exploration and closures that should remain in the hands of technical staff. 

“I think it gives a heck of a lot of power to the minister — and much unfettered discretion,” says Elizabeth Steyn, assistant professor at the University of Calgary’s law school teaching a course on critical minerals, regulatory frameworks and geopolitics.  

The ministry did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions about Pirie’s technical expertise or whether the minister would receive technical briefings and recommendations from staff prior to making decisions on exploration and closure plans. 

There’s also the issue of the province’s duty to consult First Nations, with some Indigenous communities also displeased the act broadens requirements on everything from closure plans to financial assurances to cover the expenses of the closure. Bill 71 cuts off their access to information, they say, making First Nations wary of allowing mining in their territories despite potential economic benefits.

The legislation “just adds to the fear, it adds to the distrust that’s already there,” says Lawrence Martin, director of lands and resources at Mushkegowuk Council, which represents eight Cree communities along the James Bay coast. “It’s disrespecting everything that the people want to believe in the government to do, to help out with. But every step of the way, this gives them another reason to point out: ‘There we go again, we’re about to get screwed again.’ ”

Ontario mining minister has taken power away from technical staff and given it to himself

Among the most significant changes Bill 71 makes to the Mining Act is a provision that takes power away from two non-political staff and passes it on to Pirie. The bill would “permit the minister to exercise any power and perform any duty of a director of exploration ” — who oversees mineral exploration and permitting. The act also moves to “remove the position of director of mine rehabilitation” — which is to oversee the closure of mines and recovery of minerals from tailings and waste — and transfer this position’s decision-making authority to the minister. 

The two director positions are responsible for the beginning and end of the mining life-cycle respectively, and so have conflicting interests, Steyn says. 

Steyn, a former director of the mining law, finance and sustainability program at Western University in London, Ont., explains Pirie has centralized the responsibilities of these two positions into one person — himself, as minister. 

“The director of exploration wants to see the development happen. The director of [mine rehabilitation] has to deal with the consequences and the fallout. But [the minister is] taking all of the powers and consolidating them onto himself.” 

Eliminating the position of director of mine rehabilitation is particularly troubling in the context of remediating and re-mining waste, says Steyn. Mining companies can apply for a permit to recover minerals from tailings, and under the old act, the director of mine rehabilitation granted these permits on the condition the land would be improved with “respect to one or both of public health and safety” following its recovery. 

Under the new act, conditions for health, safety and environment must simply be “comparable to or better than it was before the recovery, as determined by the minister.” Steyn notes that not only does the act drop requirements to improve the land’s condition, but it leaves the question of whether the tailings are in a similar state prior to its re-mining up to the minister.  

“That’s a heck of a qualification,” she says. “It’s very subjective — it’s in the minister’s opinion.”

The broad standards also concerned Martin. “There’s a Cree word, mamash, which means ‘half-ass’ or ‘haphazardly,’ ” he says. “We can’t bring the land back to the way we found it. That’s understood. But the people don’t want to have it put back in place half-ass, either.” 

David Good, a professional geologist and visiting scientist-in-residence at Western University, says “the process of permitting a mine project is lengthy and complex.” Good, who was a former vice-president of exploration for several Ontario mining companies, says the decisions to approve projects are “by definition political, and the minister should have the skill and experience necessary to make such determination.”

The closest global legislative parallel Steyn could think of is in western Australia: there, the Aboriginal Heritage Act of 1972 enabled mining companies to apply to destroy Aboriginal heritage sites, requests which were reviewed by a committee before being decided on by politicians. “That minister basically rubber-stamped every request that came from a mine that affected sacred sites,” Steyn says, including the destruction of heritage sites at Juukan Gorge by Rio Tinto in 2020, which caused international outcry. 

“Now, fast forward to Ontario, and it’s giving the exact same kind of powers to the minister,” Steyn says. “The potential for abuse is so rife. It’s just unseemly for me in a balanced, democratic sense.”

“We are really dependent on the minister of mines being a very prudent, very wise person — somebody who’s absolutely not biased towards any party.” Steyn says, pointing out [Pirie’s] history as a mining executive. “We don’t have to wonder what camp he is in,” she says. “I’m not saying Minister Pirie will abuse it. But the potential is there.” 

Minister Pirie did not respond to questions from The Narwhal.

Ontario Ministry of Mines staff will no longer review closure plans

Under previous legislation, government staff with technical expertise reviewed closure plans to “flag concerns” if mining regulation requirements weren’t met. The new amendments will end that practice, which was put in place upon recommendations from the auditor general in 2015. Instead, “qualified persons” outside the government will be allowed to perform a review — while policy is being drafted to define just who is a “qualified person,” the ministry is currently proposing it be someone “authorized to practice in Ontario in the areas of engineering, geoscience, agrology or landscape architecture,” limited to “the scope of [their] professional practice.” 

This, Steyn says, means a mining company’s staff or hired consultants could be the ones reviewing closure plans. “Basically, you’re letting the mine sign off on their own closure plan. There’s no external review,” Steyn says. 

Good says, however, industry engineers, geologists and other “qualified persons” will be both trained and experienced, and “all of them take this responsibility very seriously. Nobody will risk their reputation or livelihood on shoddy or incomplete work.” 

Steyn points out though, in a volatile industry dependent on significant capital financing such as mining, “people get under extreme pressure from bad operators. If your boss says to you, ‘Sign on the dotted line or we are going bankrupt because we can’t keep raising financing,’ some people will cave under pressure.” 

Industry malfeasance is an exception, not a norm, Steyn says. “I’m not saying this will happen in every operation,” she says, adding “we only need one Mount Polley, one Brumadinho mine disaster.”

Such disasters, Good says, are “the hammer over the head” of every qualified person. “The mining industry is populated by many professionals with impressive records and the technical expertise to prepare closure plans,” he says. That said, he believes these plan assessments should be made public through environmental review processes. “Nothing would or should be hidden,” he says. 

First Nations say Ontario Mining Act fails to address the duty to consult

First Nations have highlighted several issues in the Building More Mines Act, saying the legislation fails the government’s duty to consult affected Indigenous communities. For example, the legislation enables what the ministry calls a “conditional filing order,” which would allow the mining minister, at a company’s request, to approve an incomplete closure plan “that does not contain all regulatory requirements,” with stipulations to complete unfinished elements of the plan at a later, specified date. 

Mushkegowuk Council released a public response to the act in April: it states that the use of a conditional filing order “would force First Nations into consultation on mining proposals with no clear assurance the impacts of the project would be adequately remediated. Such a scenario makes free, prior and informed consent an impossibility.” 

The act also loosens the requirements for companies to notify the ministry if plans for a mine change. Under old legislation, companies had to file a “notice of material change” to the director of mine rehabilitation if a project was altered or expanded, switched ownership or if “any other material change has occurred” that could affect the closure plan. If the director of mine rehabilitation position is eliminated, the mining minister will oversee a truncated change notification process.

Under the Building More Mines Act, companies will only have to file a notice of material change if changes “could reasonably be expected to have a material effect” on the closure plan. ” 

In April, Jordan Benoit, policy manager of the territorial planning unit for Grand Council Treaty #3, which represents 28 Anishinaabe communities in northwestern Ontario, wrote the Mining Ministry with a number of criticisms of the bill, including this elimination of most change notices: “This proposed amendment may let important [notices of material change] ‘slip through the cracks’ and not receive proper consultation. First Nation communities need to assess a [notice of material change] themselves … .”

This move also empowers Pirie, Steyn says, as the act now allows the minister to determine what constitutes a material change, “because everything is done by the minister.” Material changes of any kind should be evaluated “in the objective sense of the word, not the watered-down, ‘discretion of the minister’ version that we have here,” Steyn says. “There should be ongoing consultation between a mine and its stakeholders. This is international best practice.” 

“It behooves any responsible and prudent mining operator to follow international best practice rather than just to scrape by the provisions of the lowest denominator law,” Steyn adds. 

Will the Building More Mines Act actually lead to more mines?

Jordan Hatton, director of economic development at Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek, says his nation on Lake Nipigon, north of Thunder Bay, “is a very pro-development community.” After pushing Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek off its land to build dams and provincial parks, Canada only granted the nation reserve land in 2010.

 “We’re trying to rebuild from scratch,” Hatton says, adding the community has industry partnerships and agreements with companies such as Rock Tech Lithium and Imagine Lithium. 

Even so, Hatton says, the Ontario government’s loosening of mine requirements on everything from closure plans to financial assurances is “not going to build support among the Indigenous population in the membership of our First Nation or other First Nations.” He believes Bill 71 is “probably going to harm” the development of future mining projects more than help it.

Martin, of Mushkegowuk Council, says the legislation is “not a good way to sell this mining [to the region],” he says. “If people were able to feel any kind of comfort to accepting a mine, if they could see the proper, responsible way of setting up these processes, it would not be so bad.” He says communities at the southern end of James Bay are already coping with the aftermath of abandoned mines in their region; to the north, the most infamous case is Attawapiskat First Nation, which continues to deal with fallout from the Victor diamond mine run by De Beers, which failed to monitor mercury levels that seeped into the local water system.   

Hatton, Martin and the public statement by Benoit of Grand Council Treaty #3 all say Indigenous communities do not have the resources to adequately process the exploration agreements and consultation documents sent their way by companies, and to avoid further delays, Canadian governments should provide them more resources to hire staff. 

While the act’s changes might seem to save time and money for companies in the short term, Steyn says, potential legal challenges from Indigenous communities and non-governmental organizations could cause more delays in the long run. 

“I can assure you that a contested project takes a heck of a lot longer and can drain a fortune,” she says, adding she attempts to “walk a balanced line” considering the needs of Indigenous communities, non-governmental organizations and industry. “I’m all in favour of getting critical minerals, but we can’t be irresponsible in how we do this.” 

Steyn believes the legislation is a missed opportunity for the government to establish stronger First Nation and other stakeholder engagement.

“I don’t think it will get anywhere,” she says. “There’s simply too much that they are trying to do that’s not within their power.”

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Opposing a large hydro dam can be a lonely experience.

Just ask Roberta Frampton Benefiel, a long-time resident of the Labrador community of Happy Valley-Goose Bay, 36 kilometres from the boondoggle Muskrat Falls dam now nearing completion. 

As a member of the Labrador Land Protectors, which brings together both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, Benefiel now faces the possibility of yet another megadam on the Churchill River. If the proposed Gull Island dam is built, the Churchill “won’t be a river anymore,” she said in an interview with The Narwhal.

Mercury rising: how the Muskrat Falls dam threatens Inuit way of life

Yet when reached on the phone last week, Benefiel sounded positive — even optimistic — about the future of a growing global movement to stop the construction of destructive hydro dams. 

She had just returned from a three-day conference in Winnipeg organized by Wa Ni Ska Tan (a word that means “rise up” or “wake up” in Cree) to discuss the devastating impacts of large hydro projects across Canada and around the world. 

The sold-out conference brought together about 300 people, many from communities impacted by projects like the Site C dam under construction in northeastern B.C., the Keeyask dam under construction in northern Manitoba and dams in the global south in countries including India, Panama, Brazil and Colombia.

Roberta Benefiel of the Labrador Land Protectors at the Muskrat Falls Public Inquiry in St. John’s, NL on Wednesday, March 27, 2019. Photo: Paul Daly / The Narwhal

“This was really where, as a riverkeeper in Canada fighting a dam, we needed to be,” said Benefiel, who is also a member of Grand Riverkeeper Labrador, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the Churchill River and its estuaries. 

“Because we’re so far away and because we were just one Canadian dam group it just didn’t seem to work as well as it does with this Wa Ni Ska Tan group. Connecting with all the Canadian-affected communities was so important.”

Senator Mary Jane McCallum, who has advocated for the rights of hydro-impacted communities in Manitoba, said in a keynote address to the conference that she wants to launch a special investigation into the impacts of large Canadian hydro dams on Indigenous communities.

“You represent hope because you speak it and you walk it,” the senator told the crowd. “You’re intelligent, focused, witty and know when to break out into tears or laughter. That’s all good medicine. You are role models to me and I will carry this weekend to Senate with me to let me know that I’m not alone. And neither are you.”

Mary Jane McCallum speaking at the conference. Photo: Wa Ni Ska Tan

Social and environmental impacts of dams felt globally

Such an experience was precisely what the conference’s organizers had hoped to foster. 

In a post-conference call with The Narwhal, Wa Ni Ska Tan’s Ramona Neckoway and Stephane McLachlan said the three packed days of panel discussions and strategizing helped combine isolated struggles into a powerful international network. 

Neckoway, who is from the hydro-impacted community of Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation in northern Manitoba, said photos of eastern Himalayan dams shown at the conference by political ecologist Deepa Joshi “are so familiar to me in terms of what we see, even though it was halfway around the world.” 

McLachlan, coordinator of the University of Manitoba’s Environmental Conservation Lab, recalled other moments such as when a band councillor from Tataskweyak Cree Nation in northern Manitoba asked to get 50 copies of a strategy handout from a Brazilian dam opponent. In another instance, a fisherman from South Indian Lake showed a delegate from Panama a map of all the projects that Manitoba Hydro International (a controversial consulting subsidiary of the Crown corporation) has led in the Central American country.

Each instance represented a sharing of knowledge and experience among people who may have never met outside the conference, Neckoway and McLachlan noted. 

On the last day of the conference Panamanian Jonathan González Quiel released a statement saying connecting with other hydro-impacted individuals and communities is critical. 

“We used to be just a group of different rivers, but now we have converged to create a big ocean.”

‘That’s not consultation. That’s bullying’

It wasn’t all hopeful, however, with many moments of sorrow and frustration expressed throughout the conference. 

The opening panel featured Indigenous people whose communities have been negatively affected by the Site C, Muskrat Falls and Keeyask dams. 

Connie Greyeyes of Fort St. John, B.C., said resource projects, including the Site C dam, have increased the price of basic needs such as housing and food while the creation of man camps has compromised the safety of Indigenous women and girls. 

Denise Cole of the Labrador Land Protectors spoke about the potential collapse of infrastructure for the Muskrat Falls dam that could flood the homes of 1,000 people, as well as the impending methylmercury contamination of fish, a traditional food source for local Indigenous people.

A reckoning for Muskrat Falls

Members of Manitoba’s Tataskweyak Cree Nation talked about how their water has become dirty and contaminated since the advent of dam construction, which they said has brought with it significant social disorder, the abuse of drugs and alcohol, racial discrimination and the destruction of ancestral practices of hunting, trapping, fishing, and gathering. Burial sites, artifacts, and ancient trails have all been lost.

Robert Spence, a band councillor for the nation, broke down in tears while describing some of the impacts of the Keeyask dam and other large hydro projects. 

“The water was supposed to be the answer to all of our people’s prayers,” he said to the room. “Whenever I hear the word ‘development’ I cringe. To me, it’s such a dirty word.”

Consultation and partnership agreements among the Crown corporations building the dams and impacted First Nations were also deeply criticized at the conference, with some dismissing these elements of the process as the equivalent of blackmail. 

Spence described the effort to consult Indigenous communities and come to an agreement around benefits sharing as “a piggybank for lawyers and consultants.”

Cole added the reliance on consultation with a small number of “established leadership” can lead to project managers and bureaucrats ignoring community members.

Connie Greyeyes, pictured far left, said consultation around large-scale hydro projects can feel like bullying. Denise Cole, second from left, from the Labrador Land Protectors warned of a rise in methylmercury in the Muskrat Falls reservoir. Moderating the panel is The Narwhal’s B.C. legislative reporter Sarah Cox, pictured far right. Cox is the author of Breaching the Peace: The Site C Dam and a Valley’s Stand against Big Hydro. Photo: Wa Ni Ska Tan

“Our idea of consultation means that we have a meaningful consultation and come to an agreement that fits for everyone,” Greyeyes said. 

“Not ‘here’s what we’re going to do, you’re going to like it and accept it and take this amount of money or you’re not going to get anything at all.’ ”

“That’s not consultation. That’s bullying. That’s the way it is.”

Two Treaty 8 First Nations in British Columbia — West Moberly First Nations and Prophet River First Nation — have filed civil actions alleging that the Site C dam, along with two previous dams on the Peace River, constitutes an unjustifiable infringement of their treaty rights. 

A third Treaty 8 First Nation, Blueberry River First Nations, has launched legal action on the grounds that the cumulative impacts of industrial development in its traditional territory, including the Site C dam, infringes its treaty rights. 

Hydro in global south comes with high costs, privatization, displacement

International activists brought stories of similar destruction and dispossession.

Deepa Joshi of Coventry University in the United Kingdom condemned the framing of hydroelectric power as a “climate solution” given its immense social and environmental impacts and greenhouse gas emissions from reservoirs. 

She attributed the expansion of the “green economy agenda” in the global south to the post-2008 recession and desire for investors to find new profitable markets. That shift, Joshi said, was enabled in countries like India by reforms that made dam-building less financially risky and more profitable. 

Latin American attendees of the conference also tied recent dam-building sprees to shifts in global political economy, with Elisa Estronioli of the Brazilian Movement of Communities Affected by Dams noting that Brazilians pay exceedingly high rates for electricity because the sector has been privatized. 

Many hydro-affected communities in northern Manitoba also pay very high costs for power despite being most impacted by its development.

Manitoba’s hydro mess points to Canada’s larger problem with megadams

Quiel said the same corporations are building and financing these “projects of death” in Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama: “We have to expose and visualize who this enemy is that’s threatening our region,” he said through a translator.

KJ Joy of the India-based Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management said a conservative estimate of people displaced in India due to development projects over the last half-century is 40 to 50 million, with hydropower projects one of the biggest factors in displacement.

The Report of the World Commission on Dams, published in 2000, estimated that between 40 to 80 million people have been displaced globally by large dams, including between 26 and 58 million in India and China between the years 1950 and 1990. China’s Three Gorges Dam, completed in 2006, displaced an estimated 1.2 million people and flooded 13 cities.

On a much smaller scale, the forced displacement of people is also occurring in B.C. with the construction of the Site C dam. The global human rights group Amnesty International says the Site C project does not meet international standards for forced evictions. 

Costs of damages from Manitoba Hydro ‘incalculable,’ organizers say

As with any event of such a scale, there wasn’t one specific takeaway or solution that conclusively set the way forward. 

But many ideas emerged from a brainstorming session on the last day: class-action lawsuits against Crown corporations, engaging youth in hydro-impacted communities and helping them remember what life was like before the dams, improving public awareness with outreach and education campaigns, funding solar and wind power projects and introducing a moratorium on all new large dam projects while working to decommission existing ones.

Wa Ni Ska Tan organizers said the group will continue to strengthen international alliances, host more gatherings, and potentially work with McCallum on a special investigation into the impacts of large Canadian hydro projects on Indigenous communities. 

Benefiel said one of the biggest issues her group faces in drawing public attention to the impacts of Muskrat Falls is a lack of funding, especially compared to publicly funded Crown corporations that don’t have to raise money for TV ads, media relations or lawsuits.

An ‘invoice’ tallying the costs of hydro development in the province of Manitoba as ‘incalculable’ is delivered to Manitoba Hydro. Photo: Wa Ni Ska Tan

“They can outdo us in the media, they can out-fund us,” she said. “We really need to pull together and show a very strong resistance across the country in order to provide that glue that would pull in some funding for us to do these things.” 

That strong resistance was on full display at the end of the conference: a march through the freezing cold to the Manitoba Hydro building with banners, signs and chants led by Indigenous people from across Canada. 

There, conference participants delivered an invoice to the Crown corporation for a litany of hydro-caused damages: destruction of waterways, a decline in fish populations, methylmercury contamination and loss of culture among them. 

The total cost listed at the bottom of the invoice? 

“Incalculable: too great to be calculated or estimated.” 

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The federal government has boosted its investment in Indigenous-led conservation projects across the country, announcing it will commit $6.4 million into 22 projects. 

The funding is for the Indigenous Guardians pilot program, which began in 2017 with a $25 million announcement and now encompasses 40 programs across the country.

The guardians projects put local Indigenous people on the land to monitor and protect their traditional territories. 

“In Canada, we find that Indigenous-led stewardship is taking on a new significance,” says Ethel Blondin-Andrew, a former Liberal MP who is now the chair of the Sahtu Secretariat in the Northwest Territories. “They are keepers of the land, protectors of the land; they know the land best.” 

Of the 22 newly funded projects, most are in the northern territories and northern parts of the provinces. 

Funding will help process food from the land 

One project to receive funding is in Gitanyow First Nation territory near Terrace, B.C. A guardians program started nine years ago was awarded $420,000 over three years to continue.

A large part of that funding will go toward a facility for processing food harvested from the land. Fish and wildlife biologist Kevin Koch, who heads the Gitanyow program, says a sampling program at the facility will help the First Nation monitor the health of the animals and what is being harvested, and protect food security. 

“Data is power,” he says. “Decisions are made based on data. Protecting territories requires data.” 

The new funding will allow a second team of guardians to monitor habitats and populations of birds, fish and mammals, conduct stream and wetland assessments, and make land-use planning decisions.

Koch says before the guardians monitored moose, B.C. conservation officers told him they were making “one or two” monitoring visits to the area each hunting season, meaning the hunt in Gitanyow traditional territory was going essentially unmonitored.

A pair of full-time Gitanyow guardians last year made more than 100 patrols, with a budget of less than $100,000. 

“When we’re out there, we’re often finding things [conservation officers] would like to find,” Koch says with pride. “Now, they’re calling us.” 

Return on investment high for guardians programs

It’s exactly the kind of work Valerie Courtois, director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, boasts about when asked about the value of Indigenous guardians. 

The Indigenous Leadership Initiative is advocating for a national network of guardians programs that would accompany a growing system of Indigenous protected areas.

“We see that guardians don’t just do a good job of protecting and managing protected areas,” she says. “They help build relationships.” 

The return on investment for guardians programs has been reported as up to $2.50 for every dollar invested in terms of the reduction in incarceration, reduced violence, language retention and other social benefits.

“It’s an investment that allows us to really be who we say we are,” Courtois says. 

The investment can also be a boon to private industry. Guardians patrolling a remote part of a mine site in Labrador noticed a leak in a slurry pipe. The slurry was draining into a fish-bearing brook, an offence that would have cost the company an enormous sum in automatic fines and cleanup costs — but because the guardians noticed the leak, it was stopped immediately.

“Just that intervention paid for the cost of the program,” Courtois says.  

Guardianship a ‘meaningful’ occupation

The oldest of these programs in Canada, the Coastal Guardian Watchmen Network in British Columbia, has been running for decades in different forms. 

“Back in the old days there were guardians and watchmen, and those sort of things, ever-present on our land,” explains Guujaaw (Gary Edenshaw) of Haida Nation. “It really wasn’t something we brought to [the federal government] and said, ‘Can we do this?’ ”

Like Koch, Guujaaw says a lot of the work the watchmen do on the coast makes up for a lack of commitment to on-the-ground monitoring from the responsible provincial and federal departments.

Today they cover a large portion of the West Coast, from north of Vancouver Island to Alaska. And they manage everything from ecotourism visitors to herring fisheries. It’s a way of asserting sovereignty while also protecting the resources that have sustained the First Nations for millennia. 

Guujaaw says aside from its political and ecological necessity, it’s just a great job. 

“For the guys that are working, it’s a meaningful, good occupation, being out on the land and representing their people in an honourable way.”

He says that while there may be economic returns, “that’s certainly not the point of it.” 

Guujaaw is currently a special advisor to the Coastal First Nations, which had their coastal watchmen program funded in the recent announcement. 

Ethel Blondin-Andrew was recently in the territory covered by the coastal watchmen, in a boat on the Central Coast as she returned from a retreat at the Hakai Institute. 

As the boat zipped between lush rainforest islands and islets, she admired the proliferation of life the guardians were protecting — humpback whales, deer, seals, eagles. It led to a moment of realization for her. The relationship, she understood, was a two-way street.

“We are only half of what we should be. We are incomplete without our environment, which should be healthy, and without our species,” she says. “It occurred to me that guardians need the land, and that the land needs guardians.” 

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Jean Polfus had a moment of clarity sitting around a long oval table in Tulít’a, a community on the Mackenzie River in central N.W.T. It started with confusion over a pair of Dene language words.

Goecha gots’anele. The words refer to a process in hunting whereby a hunter will circle around downwind to head off a caribou or a moose, taking advantage of an instinctual attempt to catch a predator’s scent.

Polfus, rolling the unfamiliar term around in her mind, began to absorb some of its meaning. Goecha gots’anele. It related to wind and even to textures of snow. It related to particular places. It encompassed an entire way of thinking and the relationship between the hunter and the caribou; between the wind and the land.

It crystallized in her mind how language is rooted in the land. And the land, in turn, reflects the culture.

“It’s just absolutely beautiful how connected the words are to the land, and how connected the words are to the relationships people have with the animals,” she says.

That moment in Tulít’a in 2014 set Polfus on a course of interdisciplinary research that would never stray far from her newfound appreciation for the knowledge around her.

“It’s hard to really understand how people can perceive the world in a different way when they use a different language that you can’t understand,” she says. “I just got a glimpse of it.”

It’s an understanding shared through generations of Dene people. As one of Polfus’ community advisors, Walter Bayha, put it to her, quoting his own grandfather, “Our history is written on the land. The language comes from the land.”

A camp in the Mackenzie mountain range in central Northwest Territories, where non-Indigenous scientists and Indigenous knowledge-holders work side-by-side. Photo: Jean Polfus

More scientists are immersing themselves in Indigenous communities

This wealth of shared knowledge did not spring forth at random. Polfus has spent the last seven years living in Tulít’a, a community of less than 500 people along the Mackenzie River. She built her career studying various types of caribou — mountain, boreal and barren ground, all of which live there — and how they interact with different habitats.

Living in the community gave her an irreplaceable edge in understanding the caribou. More importantly, it granted her the time and space to win the trust of community members. Their knowledge shaped her work.

Polfus is part of a growing movement of scientists who don’t just “consult” with Indigenous communities — they immerse themselves in them, learn from them, share knowledge and return something to the community in the process. The Dene call this mode of thinking “łeghágots’enetę,” translated to “learning together.”

“It’s finding the questions that you have in common,” says Aerin Jacob, a conservation scientist with the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y). “Where’s the overlap between [questions] communities want to have answered and what is your expertise?”

That overlap can be a place of both great opportunity and great resistance. It’s the site of an ongoing clash of vibrant traditions, a stubborn establishment and curious minds.

And in some places, in some ways, it just might be the future of science.

Changing science

In 2017, the three largest federal funding bodies for science, health and social science research in Canada announced a brand new type of grant. Indigenous Research Capacity and Reconciliation Connection Grants grants of up to $50,000 were awarded the following year to projects that “identify new ways of doing research with Indigenous communities.”

The new awards were a response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 65th call to action: to establish a national research program to advance the understanding of reconciliation.

Importantly, more than half of the grants were dedicated to Indigenous not-for-profit organizations — not universities.

Internationally, the scientific establishment has been taking notice. Community-involved science received a strong endorsement in a June editorial in Science co-signed by Jane Lubchenko, former administrator of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Expanding the range of effective solutions and scaling them globally requires scientists to engage actively with communities,” the endorsing authors wrote.

Jacob says this broader acknowledgment is an important step to legitimizing research that falls outside of the academic establishment, adding that the movement is still finding its feet.

“It’s increasingly recognized by funding agencies as being important, but that doesn’t translate yet into huge amounts of research funding,” she says.

Still, the conversation has evolved a long way from how things were done in the not-too-distant past, when there was no guarantee that researchers would even engage with Indigenous communities more than absolutely necessary.

“I think 10 years ago it was a really progressive idea to even table your findings at a community meeting,” says Megan Adams, a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria.

Adams has been working out of Rivers Inlet on the central coast of B.C., in Wuikinuxv First Nation territory, in close collaboration with community members. From the very beginning, that collaboration has meant going much farther than sharing a slideshow over coffee.

In the first two weeks of Adams’s graduate program — when she was supposed to be starting classes at the University of Victoria — her supervisor, Chris Darimont, instead sent her to Wuikinuxv to listen to community members.

Western science seen as ‘a tool’ to stop grizzly trophy hunt

The stunning rainforest inlet, 100 kilometres north of Port Hardy, B.C., is home to abundant salmon runs that power local food, social and ceremonial fishing, as well as a sport-fishing industry.

It’s also home to a large and very visible grizzly bear population.

“Where I work, bears and people live side-by-side,” Adams says.

The community wanted to know more about the bears’ diets and how that could inform their harvesting practices.

“If bears don’t get enough food, not only do people have to see bears — who they care about — suffer, they also face increased bear-human conflict,” Adams says. “This is about food security for you, and food security for bears.”

Heiltsuk researcher Howard Humchitt collects samples of bear fur in his traditional territory. Photo: April Bencze

Throughout her research, Adams checked in with elders and community members. They directed her collaborative work with the Nation. But the community wasn’t simply in search of information out of a sense of objectivity in the tradition of Western science. Their goal was to establish an evidentiary basis, parallel to their own traditional knowledge, to stop the grizzly bear trophy hunt and they saw Adams’s research as a means to that end.

“Western science was one of many tools they were using to stop the hunt,” Adams says.

Science holds its own objectivity in high regard. But Anne Salomon, associate professor at Simon Fraser University, says scientists who believe in their own objectivity are fooling themselves. Scientists are operating from an unavoidable position of bias, from the way they’re trained, to their values and beliefs, to the ways they formulate questions and gather data, she points out.

“It’s farcical to think that any science is unbiased,” Salomon says. “We do what we can to still get an approximation of the truth we’re interested in, in the least biased way possible.”

Asking for consent from Indigenous communities

Salomon, regarded as one of the foremost practitioners of community-involved ecology research in Canada, learned her approach early on at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre. All ecological research projects at Bamfield, no matter how small, are brought to the Huu-ay-aht First Nation for approval first if they involve Huu-ay-aht lands.

Salomon thought that was just how things were done, so when she arrived in Alaska she approached the local Sugpiaq villages to ask for their input into her work surveying the creatures that live between high and low tide.

What they told her formed the basis for her research.

“It was in talking with the chief and talking with the people that they told me about the decline in this particular chiton that led to all this work,” she says. The community wanted to know why. “That’s such an interesting question ecologically, and also in terms of conservation.”

The species in decline, the leather chiton, turned out to be a keystone species in that ecosystem, a species whose presence or absence has knock-on effects for the entire food web. In picking up on that trend, the Sugpiaq had noticed something resource managers had missed, and they noticed it because the community has an interest in the species as a resource — and because it was steps from their front doors. That is often true of Indigenous communities, Salomon says, and that wellspring of local knowledge and curiosity draws her back to them again and again.

“Theirs is a deeply marginalized voice — when in reality it should be revered,” she says.

Today she believes scientists have a much more pressing duty to consult with Indigenous communities. Ḵii’iljuus (Barbara Wilson), a member of the Haida Nation, convinced her that the duty was grounded in the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The requirement for “free, prior and informed consent” applies to researchers, Salomon says, and that means accepting the answer.

“When you ask for consent, you have to be prepared for ‘no,’ ” she says.

The work Adams has done with First Nations along the central coast has also combined traditional knowledge from the community with modern scientific approaches. Using local knowledge has helped them establish shifts in the bears’ habitats dating back well into the past, further than science alone would allow. It has led to renewed understanding of the multifaceted, deep interactions between bears and salmon, involving the communities at every stage.

“When we started that habitat work, the province didn’t believe the Kitasoo [Kitasoo/Xaixais First Nation] were seeing grizzly bears on islands,” Adams says.

People who had spent their entire lives in close contact with grizzly and black bears would be told the obvious by a provincial scientist: that black bears, too, can look brown. Backing up what was already well known by the local First Nations with knowledge that was more palatable to government employees was one part of building the case for that knowledge to be accepted by the government.

“The dialogue has really changed.”

‘We’ve been studied to death’

The Heiltsuk First Nation’s sprawling coastal rainforest territory borders that of Wuikinuxv First Nation to the northwest. It’s known for its stormy waters, mysterious spirit bears, abundant marine life and towering red cedar, Douglas fir and hemlock trees. That rich coastline has been threatened over and over again over the past decade by overfishing, diesel spills and the prospect of unwelcome crude oil pipelines.

The Heiltsuk’s unceded lands overlap in the south with those of Wuikinuxv First Nation at Calvert Island — home to the Hakai Institute, a relatively new research organization that focuses on coastal ecosystems.

Hakai came to Calvert Island in 2014. It wanted to build out its field research station to conduct field research across the territory, from its shallow seabed to cascading rivers high above its inlets and islands.

Both First Nations insisted on a collaborative approach.

“I hear people say, ‘We’ve been studied to death,’” says Jess Housty, a Heiltsuk First Nation councillor in the coastal community of Bella Bella.

Housty says researchers were often coming to the community and taking what they needed — in the form of interviews with elders or other knowledge holders, or invasive animal-based ecological research — then leaving, “advancing their careers with nothing tangible left in the community.”

That is no longer the case.

Researchers who want to work in Heiltsuk territory must now get approval from the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department. It’s a way for the First Nation to vet projects before they begin. Housty says ultimately it’s about the expression of Heiltsuk sovereignty over their lands and waters — something from which the First Nation has never shied away when it comes to other pressures on their resources.

“It’s not enough to say you’re sovereign — you have to act sovereign,” Housty says, quoting, as she often does, the community’s elders.

Most applications are accepted or returned to the researchers with suggestions on how to improve them. Some have been outright rejected — “often social science research questions that we felt were racist or exploitative of the community,” explains Housty.

Those researchers who are not willing to adapt their proposals to work within the community’s rules are shown the door.

“That helps you weed out the people who you don’t want working in your territory to begin with,” Housty says.

Practice is starting to spread

Other benefits also arise when the community asserts control over how research is done in its territory. The Hakai Institute employs Heiltsuk members as field technicians. In Wuikinuxv First Nation, Adams has been trying to leverage the funding and privilege that comes with her affiliation with the University of Victoria to work with youth, running a camp in a hard-to-reach part of the territory.

Polfus has been doing the same in Tulít’a, spending time in schools and working with community members in an effort to expand local capacity.

“I really hope … the next generation of researchers doing work on caribou in the North are from the communities,” she says.

That’s already happening in Bella Bella, where a school-based program is giving young people the chance to shadow resource officers and collect real data that will be used by their community to inform decision-making. Time spent out on the land is part of their curriculum.

Other First Nations are now taking notice and the practice is starting to spread.

“We are visited by, I would say, about a dozen communities a year,” Housty says. The visitors are looking for advice on how to assert sovereignty the way Heiltsuk has done, and on how to get a stewardship program up and running.

When the Gwich’in land claim was complete, covering a large swath of northern Yukon and the Northwest Territories, one of the first steps taken by the newly empowered First Nation was to establish a board to oversee all research in Gwich’in territory.

“Once the project takes place if they collected any tapes, any kind of documentation, they would have to give us any kind of tapes, transcripts, photos related to the project,” says Sharon Snowshoe, who heads the board. The data is used to inform local decisions and advocate for local development priorities. It’s also a safeguard for the future.

“It’s going to be available for the future generations,” Snowshoe says.

‘The biggest opportunity to discover something new’

When 23-year-old Henry Huntington arrived in northern Alaska in the spring of 1988, straight out of Cambridge, he intended to stay a few months to round out his polar knowledge.

More than 30 years later, Huntington is still there.

“I just got hooked,” he tells The Narwhal. “You had real communities, people who had been there for thousands of years doing interesting things.”

When Huntington arrived, the subsistence whaling hunt of the lñupiat communities — their way of life — was under threat. The International Whaling Commission had unilaterally withdrawn its approval for Indigenous whaling and the communities were left reeling.

Rather than accept the decision, however, the whalers decided to fight back with science.

Traveling from place to place along the coast gathering information for the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, Huntington found himself floored by the amount of local knowledge and its overlap with the whaling tradition.

Henry Huntington gathering local information in Koyuk, Alaska, in 1995. Photo: Henry Huntington

“It was like a little spark,” he recalls. “People crowded around the table, and had lots to say about where the ice was, where the whales are, what they do, where the people go, what the key features are, what their names are.”

But when he went to publish his results, he was met with resistance from the scientific establishment, which largely believed science was meant to come from scientists, not from Indigenous whalers.

“They seemed to give flimsy reasons for not publishing,” Huntington says. “For a lot of people, this was something new, and hard to quantify. How much faith should you give in the words of some guys who’s spent his life out on the land, but has he had any training? Is there any rigour associated with this? Is he saying things just for his own benefit?”

Huntington made a conscious effort to publish his work collaborating with communities as ecology or biology papers rather than as anthropology, firmly asserting the place of traditional knowledge in natural science and moving the practice into the mainstream.

Necessary to build trust

Chris Darimont, Raincoast chair at the University of Victoria and science director for Raincoast Conservation Foundation, has spent his entire career working in cooperation with Indigenous communities. He sent Adams to Wuikinuxv, having built trust and setting the groundwork for her arrival over many years.

He argues that no matter how much say a community has over the direction of research, just like any good science, it’s all peer-reviewed and replicable.

“Our responsibility is not only to that community, but we have a professional responsibility as scientists to do good work, and critically — here’s a key part — have our work subject to peer review, and submit work that is reproducible,” he says.

Huntington says some of the resistance he met in his early days in Alaska has been overcome, opening the door to more applications for this kind of work. Some of the openness is sincere; some less so. But overall, he says, echoing Adams, “that attitude has changed, or at least the rhetoric has changed.”

As it grows in acceptance, scientists may start encountering the awkward moment when their results disagree with the community’s traditional knowledge.

“When you have disagreements between the two types of knowledge, that’s where we have the biggest opportunity to discover something new,” says Polfus.

Dene elders survey their territory in the Mackenzie mountains, Northwest Territories.

Indigenous communities provide insights into caribou and whales

For Polfus, that happened in the Mackenzie mountains near Tulít’a. Science has three categories for the caribou found there: mountain, barren ground and boreal. The Dene have another subcategory of mountain caribou, known to them as tęnatł’ǝa — the fast runner, a subtype the elders say comes from far away, “possibly as far away as the ocean,” she says.

“This type hasn’t been identified by western science,” she says. And it still hasn’t; that will require a dedicated study involving linking DNA in scat from caribou to community members’ observations of tęnatł’ǝa individuals. It could have major implications for policy, since different caribou are protected in different ways by species-at-risk legislation.

“But there really wouldn’t be another word for this in Dene language if it wasn’t important for their hunting success.”

Sometimes, however, the implications aren’t so supportive of the scientific interpretation of the world. Huntington encountered that tension as he worked on St. Lawrence Island, in the Bering Sea.

Among the knowledge he gathered about whale migratory patterns and behaviours, he discovered something surprising. Whalers in the community had a word for whales coming alongside their boats on the side away from the harpooner, eyeing up the whaling crew. If the crew was found worthy, the whale would offer itself to the crew on the harpooner’s side of the boat.

The very idea of a whale endangering itself like that — let alone deciding to sacrifice itself to another species — flies in the face of all biological science. Yet there the word was earnestly shared with the scientists.

Reviewers had a hard time believing it.

“Fair enough, from the biology point of view,” Huntington concedes. But he felt that the term revealed enough about the whalers, along with their worldview and their traditions, that it was a valuable observation regardless of whether it made sense to biologists.

“That speaks to a whole relationship with the whales that informs and motivates the way the whalers do their thing,” says Huntington, who included the term in his results.

Asked if he believes the biology can ever be reconciled with the traditional knowledge, Huntington demurres; it doesn’t really matter what he believes.

“Maybe the two will never agree,” he says. But “if we go in with a filter of saying, ‘I’m only going to take seriously the things that make sense to me,’ we’re really closing our minds.”

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A decade-long battle to build a $1.5 billion gold and copper mine in the traditional territory of the Tsilhqot’in First Nation is back in a federal court — again.

The legal twists and turns of this project, first proposed back in 2008, are many and hard to keep track of.

Between defamation lawsuits, rejected project proposals and lost judicial reviews it’s near impossible to stay on top of this controversial mining proposal, although that’s exactly what the Tsilhqot’in First Nation has had to do at every step of the way.

The Narwhal created a handy-dandy timeline to help layout the flow of legal proceedings that continue to this day.

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In Dawson City, Yukon, you can get a Chinese buffet at Gold Village before picking up a few essentials at the Bonanza Market. A block away, across from the river, you can get some Yukon gold from the Klondike Nugget & Ivory Shop.

Despite the hand-painted signs and old-timey decor, the turn-of-the-century gold rush isn’t just a memory here. Two reality TV shows, Gold Rush and Yukon Gold, chronicle the ongoing search for gold in the region, while unprecedented numbers of mines are digging up riverbeds and wetlands.

The gold rush, it seems, is in full swing: the Yukon Geological Survey pegged total placer mining production at $94 million in 2017, an amount comparable to the peak production during the Klondike.

The name Klondike itself derives from a mispronunciation of the word Tr’ondëk, which loosely translated refers to a part of the river.

And when it comes to the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation — from whose territory this bonanza is being extracted — one might assume a major windfall.

Yet that’s far from reality.

According to the First Nation, their share of the gold mining royalties last year was around $65 — not quite enough to buy a tank of gas at the station next to the Bonanza Gold Motel.

“The amount is still in 1906 legislation,” explains Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in chief Roberta Joseph. “It’s still back in the Wild West.”

Indeed, the royalty system laid out in the Yukon Placer Mining Act seems so outdated as to be almost comical:

“There shall be levied and collected on all gold shipped from the Yukon a royalty at the rate of two-and-one-half per cent of its value,” it reads.

“Gold for the purpose of estimating that royalty shall be valued at fifteen dollars per ounce.”

Fifteen.

Dollars.

Per.

Ounce.

That’s like estimating the value of a television at $5.

At the time of writing, the spot price of gold was $1,566 per ounce, 100 times higher than it was a hundred years ago when the legislation was written.

“It’s a joke,” says Lewis Rifkind, Mining Analyst at the Yukon Conservation Society. “The Yukon gets more in campground fees than in placer mine royalties.”

Incredibly, Rifkind is downplaying the discrepancy.

Yukon statistics show the government brought in $26,715 in placer mining royalties in 2017.

Camping fees from non-residents alone amounted to $348,000 — more than ten times as much.

“In the Yukon we’ve been mining gold for over 100 years and we are still dirt poor,” he says. “We have all this wealth, and year after year we give it all away.”

The “royalty” isn’t even really a royalty in the conventional understanding, as in, a levy collected on a resource.

As the Act states, the Yukon’s royalty is only collected on gold dust or bars shipped from the territory — which, when it was written, was probably most or all of it. Today, with jewellers right in Dawson City making and selling products for the ever-growing throngs of tourists, not so much.

Each ounce of gold dust or bars being exported from the Yukon nets the government (and, eventually, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation) 37.5 cents. If it’s sold to gold buyers in Dawson, the First Nation gets nothing.

River rocks are piled high after being sorted and dumped during placer mining operations. Photo: Jimmy Thomson / The Narwhal

Old rusting machinery crowds the road heading into Dawson — but deeper into Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in territory a new gold rush is growing. Photo: Jimmy Thomson / The Narwhal

‘Ignorance, greed and envy’

The Alberta royalty rate is 200 times higher than that in Yukon; B.C.’s is 20 times higher.

A report from the Financial Advisory Panel in 2017 pointed out that the 37.5 cents per ounce the government gets from placer mining doesn’t even manage to recover the costs of supporting the placer mining industry.

It recommended that the government review its royalty rates and maybe institute a system like that in Alaska. There, less successful miners pay no royalties and others pay a royalty that reflects modern prices.

The Klondike Placer Miners’ Association retorted with a fiery open letter from its president, Mike McDougall —  which was sent to The Narwhal in response to an interview request — blaming “ignorance, greed, and envy” for the public desire to up the royalty rate.

The association received $120,000 in transfers from the Yukon Government in 2017-18, according to the advisory panel report.

Premier Sandy Silver, who has lived in Dawson City for nearly 20 years, ran in the Klondike riding on a promise not to raise the royalties — and steadfastly stuck to it.

“The placer miners are a pretty powerful lobby,” according to Rifkind.

But it’s more than that, he says. There’s a happy old-timey gold panner on Yukon licence plates. People like to refer to placer mining as “the Yukon equivalent of the family farm.”

Placer mining is ingrained in the territory’s culture and collective psyche, and it’s a way for small-scale operators to get into mining without facing the extreme costs associated with starting a larger mine.

“Sometimes we in the environmental movement tend to overlook that,” he admits.

Growing disturbance

That $65 the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in received last year came with real costs to the environment.

“You basically have to destroy the stream that the gold is in,” Rifkind says.

The rounded riverbed stones piled high into miniature mountains along the Klondike Highway tell the story of how that damage comes to be: placer miners scoop up the rocks and gravel from current and historical riverbeds, sort through them for gold, and dump the waste rock, or tailings, as they move along.

“Such mining can gut invaluable riparian areas and can severely and permanently damage streams, devastate fish, and threaten human health,” wrote the University of Victoria Environmental Law Centre in a letter to the B.C. Auditor General last year.

“It can interfere with traditional hunting, fishing and gathering practices and infringe Indigenous rights.”

A 2002 study found that as many as five per cent of Yukon streams have been affected by placer mining, which “has resulted in extensive changes to stream channel morphology and stability.” Digging up the river kicks up silt, choking and smothering downstream plants, insects and fish. Fish have trouble moving, feeding, reproducing and growing in water with even low amounts of sediments hanging in the water.

“There are some creeks that have been disturbed to the point where there’s not an ability to use it for drinking, or spawning for fish,” Joseph says.

The so-called “Yukon equivalent of the family farm” often takes the form of large-scale, irreversible disturbance to the landscape. Photo: Sebastian Jones / Yukon Conservation Society

Placer mining also disturbs the habitat of the riverbanks, the fragile and extremely productive riparian areas that the Environmental Law Centre says house two-thirds of Canada’s rare and endangered species.

And they don’t just come back. The same 2002 study found that vegetation had a hard time growing once placer mining had moved through because of the lack of fine sediments.

Any return to normalcy, it found, “could take many decades to centuries.”

The growth in the industry in recent years — driven in part by high gold prices as well as the notoriety from the reality TV shows — is unprecedented. The Yukon Geological Survey counted 25,219 placer claims in good standing in the territory, “which is the highest number of claims dating back to 1973 when our records were initiated.”

Rifkind says the government has been doing a good job of keeping on top of the growth in mining, enforcing its existing laws. But those laws, he says, don’t go far enough to mitigate the damage inherent to the industry.

“The actual placer mining activities recently have been quite well enforced and monitored, but it doesn’t get away from the fact that it’s still placer mining.”

According to the Klondike Placer Miners’ Association, there were 159 active placer mines in the Yukon as of last year. Joseph estimates that 85 to 90 per cent of them are in Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in territory.

“They think this is place they can come and get rich,” she says.

‘Mined areas are even more unique’

A sign overlooking the Klondike River describes the rapid change that took place in the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in traditional territory when the gold rush began:

“Within two years, Tr’ochëk had changed beyond recognition. Gone were the fish racks, salmon traps and cooking hearths. Now there was a dense clutter of tents and cabins, a sawmill, a brewery, saloons, stores and the one-room cribs of prostitutes.”

Today the renewed frenzy is once again making its mark on the landscape. In the Indian River wetlands south of Dawson City — where half the territory’s placer gold comes from — the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in say their territory is becoming unrecognizable.

“Peat and fen wetlands that took thousands of years to develop are now at risk of being wiped out in only a few years,” the First Nation wrote in a letter to Carolyn Bennett, Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations.

They are asking for a study of the cumulative impacts of placer mining before another project is approved.

“The river and its tributaries were heavily staked by placer miners in the 1980s and 1990s; today, licensed operators in the valley are among the top producers of placer gold in the Yukon.”

The letter stresses that cumulative impacts haven’t been taken into account by individual licence application processes, and now, an as-yet unmined part of the wetland is being considered for mining.

Individual developments, taken together, have been transforming the Indian River wetlands for decades.

As they are, the wetlands produce clean water, habitat for game animals, endangered species and other wildlife, flood control, sinks for pollution, as well as cultural values like hunting, fishing, trapping and tourism. It’s the only major wetland area in Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in territory.

“We consider that the overarching benefits of intact wetlands…to the many within the Dawson community, including First Nations citizens, outweigh the financial gain to the few private industry operations mining gold from wetlands,“ reads a letter to the Yukon Water Board asking for a public hearing to discuss the current mine proposal.

According to the First Nation, the Indian River itself used to be salmon habitat. Salmon no longer spawn there.

Reclamation of wetlands is unproven and expensive, and in its submission to the water board, an engineering firm hired by the proponent said as much.

“The expectations…have to be tempered with what is physically achievable and what is economically feasible for family-based Yukon placer mining operations,” the firm wrote, referring to oilsands mining projects, where attempts at rebuilding bogs and fens has yielded mixed results. “It would be incredibly expensive, frustrating and imprudent to attempt to reclaim post mined sites to peat land wetlands given the high likelihood of failure.”

Security is rarely collected against the costs of cleanup in case a company is not able or willing to complete the remediation — but Rifkind says remediation in many cases would be an extreme undertaking regardless given the way placer mining turns ecosystems quite literally upside down.

“It’s almost impossible to do effective reclamation,” he says.

Stuart Schmidt, a local supporter of the placer mining industry who describes growing up hunting and trapping in the Indian Creek area, wrote a letter in support of the project for the water board.

“I understand the concern expressed by many people who feel that there is enough mining in the Indian River Valley and that it should come to a stop,” Schmidt wrote. “They argue that the Indian River is unique. That is true, all areas are unique but the mined areas are even more unique.”

Lawsuit could be considered

The Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in say they are in the midst of negotiating with the Yukon Government to update the Placer Mining Act.

Legislative reviews that were promised as part of devolution, which concluded in 2003, have not resulted so far in any update to the Placer Mining Act or the royalties associated with it.

When the government declined to update the royalties, it instead updated the way it splits royalties with the First Nations. That brought the total amount of royalties, to be divided among 11 Yukon First Nations, to $36,110.71. To sweeten the deal, the government kicked in a one-time “gesture” payment of $600,000, also to be split between all 11 First Nations.

After years of sitting alone at the bargaining table, and without any progress on an actual increase in the returns on placer mining and an evaluation of its cumulative impacts on the land, Joseph says the First Nation may consider legal action.

“The Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in have given up millions and millions of ounces of gold,” Joseph says. “When we have an agreement we all have to be acting in good faith to ensure that we all benefit in good faith.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story suggested that legal action is being considered by the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation. The First Nation has clarified that it is not currently considering a lawsuit but that it may consider such action if the Yukon government does not pursue further changes to the Placer Mining Act.

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The Tsilhqot’in Nation is urgently searching for ways to block an exploratory drilling program for the New Prosperity mine, a controversial gold and copper project that was formally rejected by the federal government on two separate occasions.

An injunction preventing the exploratory drilling — permitted by the outgoing BC Liberal government on its final day in power — was lifted Friday after B.C. Supreme Court Justice Ward K. Branch dismissed the Tsilhqot’in Nation’s legal bid to stop exploration in the remote area 125 kilometres southwest of Williams Lake.

Drilling equipment and road building machinery can now move into sacred Tsilhqot’in territory despite the project’s lack of federal environmental permits.

Earlier this month the Tsilhqot’in called on the B.C. government to quash provincial permits for Taseko’s exploratory drilling program.

“It is one of the most sacred places we have and some of our most significant archaeological finds come out of that area so having them clear trees, build highways and roads will destroy centuries of culture,” Chief Joe Alphonse, Tsilhqot’in National Government tribal chairman, told The Narwhal.

Exploratory permits allow for 122 drill sites in tribal park

The exploration — which includes 76 kilometres of roads and trails, 122 geotechnical drill sites, 367 trench or pit tests, 20 kilometres of seismic lines and a 50-person work camp — would take place in traditional Tsilhqot’in territory, adjacent to the only area in Canada where Aboriginal rights and title has been recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada.

The decade-long legal battle over Taseko’s plans for the open-pit gold and copper mine has centred around Fish Lake, known by the Tsilhqot’in as Teztan Biny, and Nabas, an area of cultural and spiritual significance, which is where the exploration work is planned.

It is also the site of the historic Dasiqox Tribal Park, a 3000 square kilometre patch of land located adjacent to the nation’s title lands, where the Supreme Court ruled the Tsilhqot’in have constitutionally protected rights to hunt, fish and trap.

Following the B.C. Supreme Court’s decision to allow preliminary mining activity in the area, a the Tsilhqot’in launched a petition to protect the area.

Efforts to establish Aboriginal rights, protect environment “long and difficult”: Judge

The Tsilhqot’in alleged the B.C. government had breached its duty to consult, but Justice Branch found that the key question was not the degree of consultation, but the outcome, and quoted a previous decision that said “while reconciliation may not be achieved because of an honest disagreement over whether the project should proceed, that does not mean the process was flawed.”

Justice Branch acknowledged the project represents a collision course of conservation, Indigenous rights and natural resource development.

“The history of the simultaneous efforts to establish Aboriginal rights, protect the environment and develop what may be one of the world’s largest gold deposits, has been long and difficult,” he wrote in his decision.

“Based on the evidence presented to me, all parties and governments appear to be acting in good faith to advance what they each perceive to be the proper use for the land,” he wrote.

“But, unfortunately, good faith cannot always prevent disagreement. That is when courts must step in to help the parties move forward.”

For the Tsilhqot’in the New Prosperity mine appears a battle that never ends — despite both the provincial and federal governments agreeing the mine would have significant adverse environmental effects on culture, historical sites, fish habitat and moose and grizzly bear populations.

Taseko is also fighting the two federal rejections of the project in Federal Court of Appeal and appears to pin company hopes on a reversal.

In a letter, written in March last year to the province and Tsilhqot’in, Taseko said the federal rejection should have no bearing on the provincial exploration permit.

“The present status of the federal environmental assessment does not, in any way, prohibit such information gathering,” the letter said.

Taseko did not return calls from The Narwhal.

Exploratory work may boost shareholder interest

Chief Jimmy Lulua of the Xeni Gwet’in First Nations Government said people have not endured 25 years of panel hearings and court cases simply to have Taseko and B.C. run roughshod over proven Aboriginal rights.

“We’re past the stage of consultation,” he said.

“The drilling program stands to displace our families, threaten our sacred sites and interrupt our ceremonies and teaching opportunities for our youth. Teztan Biny and Nabas are a no-go zone for Taseko Mines.”

On its website, Taseko acknowledges the fate of the project is uncertain: “In light of the federal government’s decision not to issue the authorizations necessary for the project to proceed, and the related ongoing legal proceedings initiated by Taseko, there is considerable uncertainty with respect to successful permitting of the project.”

However the company has pushed hard for the right to conduct exploratory drilling and road building.

Alphonse said he believes the company is pushing to conduct the exploration work in an effort to pull in investors and make shareholders believe there is still a chance the project will go ahead.

“It’s a senseless project. The best possible scenario on this project will not overturn the federal decision. The federal government has rejected Taseko’s plan twice now making it virtually impossible to ever have a project there,” he said.

The provincial exploration permit was issued on former premier Christy Clark’s last official day in office and at the height of the wildfires raging in Tsilhqot’in territory.

Alphonse — who, along with other chiefs, is hoping to meet with government representatives this week — said the NDP should now do the honourable thing and stop the permit in its tracks.

The Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources told The Narwhal in an e-mailed statement that Taseko “has applied for an Occupant Licence To Cut, which is necessary to undertake the scope of the work that the Notice of Work granted. That application is currently with the Statutory Decision Maker for consideration.”

While stopping the exploration work is the priority, Alphonse also dreams of holding the former BC Liberal government accountable for making the last-gasp decision that has such long-term ramifications.

“It was so very irresponsible. We will be exploring that. We need to remind people how that permit came to be,” Alphonse said.

Taseko Mines donated $137,450 to the BC Liberals between 2008 and 2017. In addition, CEO Russell Hallbauer donated more than $96,000 and company chairman Ronald Thiessen donated more than $64,000.

Meanwhile, Tsilhqot’in leaders will be holding meetings with the membership to look at ways to oppose the exploration program.

Alphonse said it’s a possibility the Tsilhqot’in might appeal the ruling, despite the additional cost of returning to court.

You can’t put a price on your belief system. You can’t put a price on your religion — that is what keeps you balanced, ” he said.

*Update Tuesday, August 28 9:53pm pst. This article was updated to add comment provided by the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources.

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In the dying days of the former BC Liberal government, a poison pill was left for the incoming New Democrats in the shape of an exploration permit for a highly contentious mine that had already been rejected by the federal government.

Following the election, Tsilhqot’in Nation hopes were high that, after spending more than a decade battling Taseko Mines Ltd., the new government would withdraw the permit. Instead, the NDP government is watching from the sidelines as lengthy and expensive legal battles continue.

Mine permits issued on last day of Christy Clark government

The exploration permit was issued on former premier Christy Clark’s last official day in office and at the height of wildfires raging in Tsilhqot’in territory just over one year ago.

The company, Taseko Mines, donated $137,450 to the BC Liberals (the only party it has supported financially) between 2008 and 2017. The company’s CEO and director, Russell Hallbauer, donated more than $96,000 of that under his name. Company chairman, Ronald Thiessen, donated more than $64,000.

At that time, the BC Liberal government, faced with outrage at the tone-deaf move, said in a written statement that the decision was not political and was made by a “statutory decision maker, who, in this case, was a senior permitting inspector located in Kamloops.”

That seemed to indicate the decision could be reversed, but nothing has changed and, as the Tsilhqot’in community continues to spend scant funds on court cases, members are baffled that the government has not withdrawn the exploration permit, Chief Joe Alphonse, Tsilhqot’in National Government Tribal Chairman, told The Narwhal.

It was a low blow and it is now time for the NDP to make it right, Alphonse said.

“It was very, very dirty politics and we got caught in the crossfire,” he said.

“The Tsilhqot’in calls on the current B.C. government to step up and implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, along with the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as they have long committed to do,” he said.

Mining plans clash with Indigenous tribal park

Taseko wants to construct 76 kilometres of new or modified trails, 122 drill holes, 367 test pits, 20 kilometres of seismic lines and build a 50-person work camp. The company contends the three-year exploration program is necessary to gather information for the proposed $1.3-billion New Prosperity mine 125 kilometres southwest of Williams Lake, even though the proposal cannot go ahead without federal approval.

The exploration would be close to Fish Lake, known by the Tsilhqot’in as Teztan Biny, a sacred site that has been the focus of the fight against Taseko’s plans for an open-pit copper-gold mine.

“That’s our church,” Alphonse said.

“It’s not about walls, it’s not about art. It’s where our spiritual leaders go to obtain their vision, their wisdom and that’s what they are planning to disrupt.”

Alphonse said he has talked one-on-one with Premier John Horgan about legalities and has been assured government is looking at options.

“We have said they must do more. Sooner or later they have to show some leadership and I think there’s enough evidence in court now that by pulling the pin on this company it would be difficult for (Taseko) to win a big, huge legal challenge,” he said.

Alphonse believes that the spectre of the Carrier Lumber case, which, in the 1990s cost the former NDP government millions of dollars, continues to haunt politicians.

The government was forced to pay the company more than $30 million and hand over 1.5 million cubic metres of wood without stumpage fees, after cancelling the company’s timber rights following logging opposition from First Nations.

If the government was sued by Taseko, the Tsilhqot’in Nation would be willing to step in and argue on the government’s behalf, said Alphonse.

“As Tsilhqot’in people we are the only Indigenous people in Canada — and in the world — that have actually proved they have aboriginal rights and title so the steps the company has to take anywhere in Canada are different from here in the Chilcotin. There should be a higher level of consultation and accommodation,” he said.

A 2014 landmark Supreme Court of Canada ruling found the Tsilhqot’in people had Aboriginal title to more than 1,700 square kilometres of their traditional territory.

The proposed exploration work is outside the area where Aboriginal title was granted, but is in traditional territory in the area where the Dasiqox Tribal Park is being created.

“Our vision for the land, one that we are creating with the Dasiqox Tribal Park does not include destabilizing an entire ecosystem,” Chief Russell Myers Ross, vice-chair of Tsilhqot’in National Government, said in a news release.

‘Potential for irreparable harm’: Judge

There are few answers from the provincial government and the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources declined to comment because “this matter is before the courts.”

Neither is it clear whether the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations is willing to issue a cutting permit that would be needed in order for much of the work to proceed.

Calls to Taseko from The Narwhal were not returned, but the company website, while acknowledging “considerable uncertainty with respect to successful permitting of the project,” describes the New Prosperity mine as a project that has the potential to dramatically increase shareholder value and improve the economic well-being of local communities.

The Tsilhqot’in Nation was granted a temporary reprieve last month with a B.C. Supreme Court injunction preventing Taseko from starting exploration work until Sept. 10, or until Justice Ward Branch rules on a Tsilhqot’in challenge to the permit.

Branch said in his Oral Reasons for Judgment in granting the injunction that “there is potential for irreparable harm” if the exploration goes ahead.

“As a simple example, the program will involve the destruction of trees, which Taseko Mines Ltd. accepts will take many years to recover, even with an aggressive remediation program. Cultural practices will also be difficult to carry out during the construction period,” Branch said.

Although Taseko argued that delays would be costly, Branch pointed out that the minerals underground are not going anywhere and, even if the company gets the legal go-ahead, full exploration work cannot proceed until the province grants a cutting permit.

B.C. mining laws out-of-date

The timeline for the company is partially driven by the environmental assessment certificate granted by the former provincial Liberal government in 2010, meaning construction must substantially start by January 2020.

Which still leaves the overriding question why exploration is necessary when the mine cannot go ahead without federal approval and, as the project was rejected by the pro-industry Harper government because of environmental and cultural concerns, there is little likelihood it will be approved by the Trudeau Liberals, Alphonse said.

“This project is meaningless, but, as long as there’s a sliver of hope, the company will continue to draw in investment money,” he said.

Erica Stahl, staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law, said an additional problem facing the Tsilhqot’in and other First Nations is B.C.’s antiquated mining laws that give mineral claims precedence over every other land use.

Would-be miners can stake a claim to minerals in the ground and, with a ministry permit, start exploration without the consent of landowners.

“This is a live issue in B.C. right now because our mining laws are over 100 years old and were written in the context of the last gold rush — and that’s still the kind of mentality they facilitate,” Stahl said.

Unless the government amends the mining laws, it is likely that the question of how mining claims interact with aboriginal rights will have to be settled in the courts, especially as the government is committed to UNDRIP, which demands free, prior and informed consent from Indigenous communities before resource development, Stahl said.

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