The Yukon government has rescinded approval of a controversial resource road that would have opened ATAC Resources’ access to vast mineral claims in the Beaver River watershed.

A spokesperson with Yukon’s Department of Energy, Mines and Resources confirmed the decision Monday in an email to The Narwhal. The 65-kilometre ATAC road, which was given a conditional green light by the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board in 2017, would have created all-seasons access to a portion of the company’s three mineral claims that form the Rackla gold property. The new route would have connected Keno City to the Tiger gold deposit, the site of a proposed open-pit gold mine where ATAC Resources hoped to produce 268,000 ounces of gold.

Those who worried the road would have opened an undisturbed watershed to scalable development welcomed the news.

“I am ecstatic,” Randi Newton, conservation manager with the Yukon chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), told The Narwhal. “I’ve hoped for this outcome for many years, and it’s a relief that it’s finally here.”

“What this decision does is remove a major looming threat to the environment of the Beaver River watershed and it creates the opportunity to set down a sustainable vision for that watershed,” Newton said.

ATAC Resources, a Vancouver-based exploration company, is seeking legal counsel regarding the decision, according to Andrew Carne, the company’s vice-president of corporate and project development.

“ATAC does not agree with many material aspects of the government’s decision,” Carne said in an email to The Narwhal. “The Tiger gold deposit remains a high-quality advanced-stage exploration asset with significant value to be unlocked.”

A spokesperson with Energy, Mines and Resources said the department was unable to immediately provide comment.

Location of ATAC Resources Rackla gold property in Yukon. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Concerns the ATAC road would open up wilderness to growing development

The proposed ATAC road would have provided an initial entrance to the company’s 185 kilometres of mineral claims and exploratory projects. During the road’s assessment and eventual approval by the Yukon government in 2018, many conservation groups and Yukoners expressed concern the road would act as an invitation to further industrial incursion in the watershed.

ATAC Resources currently accesses its claims through a series of trails and by air, making exploration work costly.

A map showing ATAC Resources’ three Rackla gold properties and the location of their airstrips.The ATAC road would have provided 65 kilometres of access to the company’s mineral claims within the Beaver River watershed but those claims extend for a total of 185 kilometres. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

The prospect of a new road caused concern for the CPAWS, which noted easy access could lead to an avalanche of new development proposals, none of which were considered as part of the proposed route’s cumulative impact when it was approved.

The road flamed frustrations that mineral development is allowed despite the absence of completed land use plans. In a recent public engagement process conducted by an independent review panel, participants pointed to the ATAC road as an example of Yukon’s failure to consider the cumulative impacts of mining and industrial development on the landscape.

A report released by the panel found the road “was used as an example of a poor consultative process, where free entry staking was used for the purpose of creating road access to a property against the wishes of the First Nation and community.”

The panel found the road’s approval led to the retroactive creation of “a sub-regional land use planning process outside of Chapter 11, with the assumption made by many that the future road would be part of the plan and the landscape.”

One participant told the panel, “This is planning done entirely backwards and driven by private industry action without consideration of actual community- and Indigenous-driven processes.”

The sub-regional land use plan for the Beaver River watershed was conducted by the Yukon government and the Na-cho Nyäk Dun First Nation, on whose territory the ATAC Resources’ gold claims are located.

Without the ATAC road, some hope the sub-regional land use plan can be scrapped for a broader land use plan that will encompass the entire Beaver River region.

“What this has done is create space to develop a land use plan that’s right for the region, that respects the long relationship that the First Nation of Na-cho Nyäk Dun has with the land, that respects the ties that Yukoners have to the Beaver River and respects the wild creatures that live there,” Newton said.

Na-cho Nyäk Dun Chief Simon Mervyn didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Roads can significantly alter how environments function

Roads can literally slice and dice the environment, affecting the habitat and ingrained migratory patterns of wildlife. The Beaver River watershed is home to moose, wolves and grizzly bears.

The ATAC road would have crossed through wetlands and over rivers, potentially disrupting otherwise intact ecosystems, Newton said.

She added the road would have introduced a cascade of impacts to the watershed, including opening up the region to new hunting pressure.

“There’s beautiful salmon habitat in the Beaver River watershed that could have been impacted,” Newton said. “This 65-kilometre road was very likely the start of what would have been a very long road network.”

CPAWS recently released a report that cautioned the assessment board against approving road projects before land use plans are completed.

A porcupine climbs over a concrete safety barrier on the outskirts of Whitehorse. Photo: Malkolm Boothroyd

“Land use planning can take that broader view of how much development is allowable in an area, which areas should we keep remote and free of roads,” Malkolm Boothroyd, the report’s author and campaigns co-ordinator at the Yukon chapter of CPAWS, told The Narwhal in a previous interview.

“I think we’re hoping that Yukoners will talk about it and figure out how many roads there should be in this territory and what areas we want to keep road-free,” he said. 

“I think what’s very special about the Yukon is that there are still areas that you can’t drive to. That’s incredible habitat for caribou and grizzly bears and that’s really rare in this day and age.”

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On April 24, 1932, 500 young workers trekked uphill toward Kinder Scout, the tallest of the hills in England’s Peak District.

The plateau was posted against trespassing — locals called it “the forbidden mountain.” Games-keepers hired by land-owners and armed with clubs caught wind of the trespass and waited near the top.

Five of the “ramblers” were arrested by police. But the walkers had successfully crossed a milestone. From that day, laws slowly began changing: The ancient English right of public access to, and responsible use of, private lands was returning to the people.

Canadians (outside Quebec) are heirs to the British system of common law. Parallel to the British experience, there also existed in Canada a population that freely hunted, fished and traversed territory they considered a “commons.”

But in a series of events not entirely dissimilar from the violent enclosures in England, Scotland, and Ireland, the historic denizens came to be considered undesirable to landowners embracing new forms of market economy. They were forced from their homes through starvation and by outright acts of bloodshed and terror, expulsions sanctioned by courts and reinforced by acts of Parliament.

Hiking a Lakota warrior path

In 2015, together with Prairie historian Hugh Henry, I walked the 350-kilometre North-West Mounted Police Patrol Trail from Wood Mountain to Cypress Hills, Sask. The 19th-century trail was used by Lakota warriors. James Morrow Walsh of the NWMP rode the trail more often than anyone before or since, as he tried unsuccessfully to get his superiors to accept Sitting Bull’s stay north of the “Medicine Line.”

The NWMP sign at Chimney Coulee, Sask. Photo: Matthew Robert Anderson

In 2017, we walked the Swift Current to Battleford Trail, used by Métis traders, Big Bear, and Col. William Otter and his troops in the 1870s and ‘80s. We crossed land near where Colten Boushie had been shot by Gerald Stanley only the year before our walk.

Our group included First Nations and Métis hikers, and the Catholic archbishop of Saskatchewan. Again we were led by Hugh Henry of the Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society and walked with the permission of local land-owners.

In June 2018, on a grant from Concordia University’s Part-Time Faculty Association, I walked the Kinder Trespass Route to research the 1932 English trespassers. Although different in history and geography, there is a link between these trails and pilgrimage routes I’ve walked in Norway, Scotland and Iceland. That link is public use.

In her book Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit states:

“Walking focuses not on the boundary lines of ownership that break the land into pieces, but on the paths that function as a kind of circulatory system connecting the whole organism. Walking is, in this way, the antithesis of owning.”

The curse of barbed wire

My grandparents were settlers. The heirs of settlers still benefit from the government’s promise of “free” land, a promise conveniently omitting the takeover and clearing of Indigenous territory. I recall my father speaking of Métis families he knew who lamented the coming of barbed wire because it changed their ancestral patterns of movement across the Prairies.

The Canadian plains are divided at one-mile intervals by roads called “grids,” but as we discovered time and again by walking, the historic trails follow geographic features while ignoring lines of ownership.

Lawyers defending Gerald Stanley referred to a man’s impulse to defend his “castle.” It is against that colonizing impulse that the social transformation of Canada’s majority society must take place.

The commemorative plaque of mass trespass of Kinder Scout at Bowden Bridge Quarry, Hayfield, U.K. Photo: Creative Commons

For the most part, land-owners and walkers now live comfortably with each other. Ramblers close gates behind them when entering areas with livestock; land owners provide turnstiles to traverse fences easily and occasionally allow access through their yards. Studies have shown that access to green space, such as happens with the right to roam movement, aids mental health, environmental awareness, and social cohesion.

The trespass itself has entered British pop culture. Brits are proud of what they now call “the right to roam,” and the Scots “the right of responsible access.”

No Canadian ‘rambling’ movement

Canada is hardly the United Kingdom. There is no rambling movement and perhaps no one in Sudbury or Saskatoon trying to escape the grimy factory life of 1930s Sheffield or Manchester.

But there are historic trails. They deserve access; keeping their memory alive will require public interest. And Canada has an important issue that British land-owners and ramblers never faced — the question of Indigenous treaty rights and First Nations access.

Ken Ilgunas is a long-distance walker and a rare voice advocating the “right to roam” in the United States. However, Ilgunas appeals primarily to early settlements and to the American Founding Fathers for reasons why public access is both historic and important. I believe that the precedents for a North American “commons” come even earlier than that, in the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the land.

I am in no way suggesting First Nations should be content with the “right to roam.” Canadians must live up fully to the treaties and continue to implement the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. However, as a Settler-descended academic, I’m suggesting changing our own non-Indigenous culture with an eye to our own past, to help prepare for the more fundamental changes needed to rectify the many wrongs committed against Indigenous peoples.

Recent tensions between farmers and First Nations in the Canadian West have focused on narratives of trespass. Indigenous scholars and commentators challenge others to “invert the intrusion narrative.” Bringing the “right of responsible access” to Canada could be one small step toward doing this.

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This is a guest post by Evangeline Lilly, Canadian actress.

For those of you who don’t know me, I am a Canadian actress who has been living abroad in Hawaii for the past ten years. I have been involved in such well-known projects as the television series “Lost”, the indie hit “The Hurt Locker”, the blockbuster film “Real Steel” and the upcoming second and third “Hobbit” films.

To hear Evangeline Lilly tell her story, listen here:

I grew up in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta surrounded on all sides by the never-ending golden fields of wheat that so signify the Canadian prairies. From there my family moved to British Columbia where flat, open plains were replaced with majestic, mountain vistas and beautiful green valleys. Trees, rain, snow, farms, wildlife, snow peaked mountains and insects defined my upbringing.  

From my Grandfather’s homemade cabin in the Gulf Islands to our summers spent camping on the Okanagan Lake, as a Canadian I was always surrounded by natural beauty.

I remember when I was summoned away from Canada. There was a job waiting, it offered a lot of money, and it meant I would move to Hawaii…Hawaii: paradise. If you know anything about my history, you’ll know that that job was my role as “Kate” on the television series Lost and you’ll know that I took it and left Canada…never to move back.  

So now, I have been living in “paradise” for ten years. Do I miss home? Always. Every day that I’m gone. Because, you see, being Canadian is in my bones, it’s an identity that I can’t and don’t want to escape. Tropical beaches with turquoise waters are beautiful, but my heart wells and my soul sings when I see pine tree covered mountains and stretches of interminable deciduous forests.

I am Canadian. I can’t help myself. Beavers, and moose, and bears, and squirrels all make me feel proud. Snow, and ice, and lakes, and rivers are all a part of me. The Rockies, Niagara, the Great North, and Hudson’s Bay are symbols of who I am. Rosy cheeks, frostbite, neighbours, and hard work are all a part of my Canadian identity.

When I think of home, I think of the wilderness. Canada is one of the last natural expanses left on planet earth, but right now, that vestige is being seriously threatened.  

The tar sands in Alberta, the construction of new pipelines, the industrial abuse of clean water, the elimination of environmental laws and mistreatment of First Nations peoples are some of the greatest threats to our identity as Canadians. We are known as harmonious people: living in harmony with ourselves, with the rest of the world, and with nature.  

But our response to these issues has not been in keeping with that reputation. In a time when the world needs to band together in order to learn how to live in harmony with nature, I would have expected Canada to be leading the charge, but we’re not.  

Preserving nature in Canada is not just about Global Warming – it’s about preserving our heritage, our history, and our harmony: our identity.

Will you stand against the damages being done to our wilderness? Will you stand up for nature because as a Canadian, nature has shaped you?  

I am Evangeline Lilly and I am Canadian. What are you?

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