Land, Race, and Logics of Extraction in Alberta's Tar Sands

Troubled Knowledge: Land, Race, and Logics of Extraction in Alberta’s Tar Sands

Samantha Helen Spady

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Social Justice Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

Troubled Knowledge: Land, Race, and Logics of Extraction in Alberta’s Tar Sands

Samantha Spady

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Social Justice Education

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

2020 Abstract

This dissertation examines how tar-sands extraction comes to be seen as normal and an inevitable consequence of present-day lifestyles. The research is built from interviews with 30 white oil-industry workers involved in oil-extraction projects in the Athabasca tar-sands deposit.

The ways in which oil has shaped economic and social relations not only in Fort McMurray, AB, but in the Canadian state generally are significant to unravel and examine. This study attempts to capture the ways that tar sands are made possible through state policy, investment, and economic structuring, as well as how these things are experienced at the level of the individual. I analyze the logics, and rationales used to justify continued extraction in this region, and I work to debunk them and also to understand how and why they are so powerful. Furthermore, I contrast the ways in which oil extraction comes to make sense to itself, besides the ways in which Indigenous people have demonstrated this logic to be limited and, in many cases, untrue. I work through these different ways of relating to—and understanding—oil, in order to contrast the different worlds that are competing in this place.

Acknowledgments

This section was one of the most anticipated and most dreaded to write. Anticipated because I think it is the most beautiful part of any dissertation. I always want to read about the friends, loves, and mentors that helped the author make a work. This section is also dreaded because the task of thanking all who made this and PhD School possible and survivable seems hopeless. I’m filled with gratitude, astonishment, and pure joy at all of the incredible people who are in my life and who have been there for me in the many moments of doubt and grief that have accompanied this degree. To those who I fail to mention, please chalk that up to my exhaustion and not a lack of gratitude.

To begin, I want to start with my supervisor Dr. Eve Tuck. The ways you have shown up for me and all of your students over the years have left me overwhelmed and deeply moved with respect, admiration, and endless gratitude. You became my supervisor four years into this PhD, but I wouldn’t have finished this project without you, and this project wouldn’t have been what it is without you. You have modelled how to be kind, helpful, and supportive in an environment that can tend to punish those qualities, all the while still maintaining healthy boundaries. How you move through academic spaces has made me hopeful for the types of futures that can be built. Your clear and consistent mentorship, and deep commitment to ethical relationships has helped me to do work that matters, in ways that I can be proud of. I will be forever grateful for the opportunity to build a relationship with you, and for all the hundreds of things I’ve learned from you along the way.

To Dr. Tanya Titchkosky, thank you for your unwavering support, and thoughtful feedback. The questions you asked me at various points in the degree have stuck and rung in my ears as I’ve written this dissertation, pushing me to be more thoughtful and precise. To Dr. Deb Cowan, thank you for your enthusiasm in this project, and the attentive feedback you have offered to make this dissertation stronger. Thank you to Dr. Michelle Murphy for your scholarship and kindness, it has been exciting to be introduced to a whole new field through your work, and your pedagogy.

Thank you to Dr. Sherene Razack who I began this project with. The tools, ideas, and questions you armed me with have served me well. Thank you for encouraging me to pursue this project, and for being its first supporter. Thank you as well to Dr. Martin Cannon for supporting me to do

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the PhD in the first place, and for sharing many opportunities to work with you on Graduate Assistantships.

This dissertation is enriched by all of my friends in the BDS movement. Your energy, analysis, and deep sense of justice have made me a smarter activist and a more useful academic. As well, thank you to all my comrades in the labour movement. I’m grateful for all of the practical skills and much needed perspective that I learned from our time together. The spaces that BDS work and CUPE offered me during this degree gave me a sense of purpose and helped to make my time at UofT feel as though it mattered. For this I’m especially grateful.

A massive thank you to the Study Buddies: Hye Jin Kim, Rusa Jeremic, Caitlin Campisi, Noah Kenneally, Shawna Carroll, Suzanne Narain, Nickie Van Lier, and Sarah Snyder. You are all brilliant and kind and I’m so grateful that in doing this degree I got to cross paths with you all. Our group was such a beautiful consequence from feeling lost and sad in the hustle. There’s so much more I could say about all of you individually, but I will just say thank you for your friendship, for your support, and for your collective wisdom.

Thank you to all the members of the Tuck Co-Mentoring group, past and present (the list is too long, but you know who you are!) This was such a special and supportive space and I’m so grateful it gave me the opportunity to meet so many incredible people. Creating this space and community with you all was an invaluable and precious outcome of this degree. I feel so lucky that I had this support and I can’t wait to see what you all do next. It will undoubtedly be incredibly radical, fascinating, and brilliant: don’t let anyone stop you.

Thank you to my team in the Dissertation Success Program for helping me to structure my days, learn how to set writing goals, and for keeping me accountable for showing up for myself. Another big thank you is owed to my brilliant astrologer Julia Wawrzyniak-Beyer for sage advice in hard times. To my several Skype writing buddies, your company and accountability made getting up everyday to write possible and even exciting. I’ve spent most mornings over the past year waking up to Skype with Megan Scribe for a pep talk and a push to get writing. This dissertation got done because of those chats and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to build this friendship with you.

To my academic soulmate Siobhan Angus: writing, reading, and thinking together has been one of the best parts of the last six years. I’m bursting with love and gratitude and excitement for what we do next. I hope we get to spend many years writing books and making art together. Thank you.

I owe many thanks to my friends: Stephanie Nakitsas, Theo Wardlaw, Sabrien Amrov, Annabel Bruno, Mischa Berlin, Kim Veller, Marnie Bjornson, Simon Cheeseman, Nathan Jackson, Heather Braid, Nicole Matte, Amanda Whitten, Danika Brisson, Amy Kishek, Vic Benjamin, Pat Hoban, Quinn Cobalt, Khadijah Kanji, Sameena Topan, Chaya Porter, Gita Madan, Celeste Ali- Akow, Bridgette Dalima, and Cheryl Athersych. You are all brilliant and I’m so lucky to have such quality people in my life. Thank you for the years of support and encouragement. You all helped to make my life more full and fun.

To my parents Chris and Merv Spady, thank you so much. For your unwavering enthusiasm for whatever I decide to do with my life, even when you don’t understand or completely agree with it, I am eternally grateful. Mom, your infectious optimism has helped me more than you know, and I’m so grateful for your boundless energy to be helpful and to make things happen. Dad, your quiet patience, eager generosity and reminders to not take myself too seriously have served me well throughout this degree, and in life. Your support has included very needed financial support for which I’m forever indebted. I couldn’t have stayed in school this long if it weren’t for your generosity. To the Barlows and Gendrons, thank you for welcoming me into your family. Thank you for your curiosity about and support of my work, and the countless ways you’ve encouraged me along the way.

Thank you to Jeff Barlow. I found you and your love at the beginning of this degree, and I can’t imagine what it would have been like without you. I have relied on your honesty, your unwavering confidence in my abilities, and your keen reality checks about what is especially bizarre about academic life to keep me going. I love you, thank you for all of it.

I owe a debt of gratitude to my participants. I was consistently humbled by their openness and willingness to talk to me. People often talk about how the community in Fort McMurray is a special one, and the number of strangers that stepped up to help me collect data shows how true this is. Thank you to Myrna Matheson and Randy Paradis for sharing your home with me in Fort

McMurray. You were the best hosts, and your dogs were the best company during long days of transcription. Thank you for your friendship.

Lastly, a very heartfelt thank you to the water protectors and land defenders of Treaty 8, and across Turtle Island. In particular, I’d like to acknowledge the organizers of the 2014 Healing Walk for welcoming me and the many other participants in attendance to join your beautiful refusal of extraction. I think about that weekend often and this research has been shaped by the generous world building that was demonstrated and shared through your event. Thank you.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...... iii

List of Tables ...... ix

List of Figures ...... x

List of Appendices ...... xi

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms ...... xii

Introduction ...... xiii

Chapter 1 Methods ...... 1

1.1 Theoretical Commitments and Author Positionality ...... 1 1.2 Settler Colonialism...... 8 1.3 Critical Place Inquiry ...... 15 1.4 Participant Demographics and Recruitment ...... 17 1.5 Interviews ...... 26 1.6 Complex Personhood ...... 29 1.7 Data Analysis ...... 31 1.8 Limitations ...... 33 1.9 Unforeseen Challenges ...... 34

Chapter 2 The Place of the Tar Sands ...... 38

2.1 A Place in the Middle of Nowhere ...... 41 2.2 Tar Sands as an Indigenous Place ...... 44 2.3 Treaty 8 ...... 49 2.4 Colonial Practices of Mapping...... 54 2.5 Colonial-Capitalist Relations ...... 59 2.6 Oil Intimacies ...... 63

Chapter 3 Infrastructures ...... 66

3.1 Infrastructures That Matter ...... 69 3.2 Social Relations of Oil ...... 70 3.3 Researching “Commercial Uses of Bitumen”...... 73 3.4 Critical Infrastructures ...... 76 3.5 Routes Elsewhere: Bridges, Highways, and Airports ...... 80 3.6 Corporate Sponsorship of Public Infrastructures ...... 84 3.7 Making Fort McMurray Home ...... 85 3.8 Building a Recognizable Home: Building a Settler City ...... 90 3.9 Spaces for Work, Spaces for Rest, and Spaces for Leisure ...... 96

Chapter 4 Misunderstandings of Indigenous Refusals ...... 101

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4.1 Indigenous Employment in the Industry ...... 103 4.2 Disbelief and Claims to Ignorance ...... 107 4.3 Ethical Oil ...... 110 4.4 Assessment and Consultation: Rubber Stamping Development ...... 115 4.5 Progress ...... 119 4.6 Natural Pollution and the Sand Cleaning Business...... 125 4.7 Inescapable ...... 131

Chapter 5 Tar-Sands Futurities ...... 135

5.1 Extractivism ...... 137 5.2 Inevitability ...... 138 5.3 Settler Futurity ...... 140 5.4 “Fish, Trees, Oil, Rocks” ...... 141 5.5 Pluriverse ...... 144 5.6 Thinking with Materiality and Animacy...... 149 5.7 Transitions...... 155

Chapter 6 Conclusion ...... 159

6.1 Summary of Findings:...... 162 6.2 Contribution and Implications ...... 164 6.3 Future Research ...... 167

References ...... 169

Appendices ...... 185

Appendix A: Recruitment Appeal ...... 186

Appendix B: Letter of Invitation ...... 189

Appendix C: One-On-One Interview Informed Consent Form ...... 191

Appendix D: One-on-One Interview questions ...... 193

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List of Tables

Table 1. Research Questions and Methods Used ...... 7

List of Figures

Figure 1. Land being reclaimed ...... xiii

List of Appendices

Appendix A. Recruitment Appeal...... 186

Appendix B. Letter of Invitation ...... 189

Appendix C. One-On-One Interview Informed Consent Form ...... 191

Appendix D. One-on-One Interview questions ...... 193

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms

ANT Actor network theory

CAPP Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers

EIA Environmental Impact Assessments

GCOS Great Canadian Oil Sands

IOSI Institute for Oil Sands Innovation

MBA Master of Business Administration

MISN Mining Injustice Solidarity Network

SAG-D Steam-assisted gravity drainage

SIA Social impact assessment

STS Science and technologies studies

ACFN Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation

ATV All-terrain vehicle

BANANA “Build absolutely nothing anywhere, near anyone”

NIMBY “Not in my backyard”

RCMP Royal Canadian Mounted Police

UofA University of Alberta

UofT University of Toronto

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Introduction

“If you do a walk through of some of those reclaimed lands you would never know it was an open-pit mine.”

—Research Participant 23

Figure 1. Land being reclaimed. Source: Rainforest Action Network, 2014.

Large signs appearing along the highway north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, read “East Mine Reclamation in Progress.” Reclamation is the term used to describe what happens to a tar-sands mine after all the oil has been extracted. The area currently being “reclaimed” is a piece of land over a kilometre wide. It is covered in sand and toxic tailings ponds, the water byproduct of turning tarry bitumen into a crude that can be shipped down the pipeline. The irony of the image, that this scene of waste and ruin is currently being reclaimed back to its “original ecological function” has made it a popular one with environmental groups to show the shallowness of the industry’s and provincial government’s reclamation policies. Land reclamation is part of a regulation that oil companies must follow as part of their land-lease agreements with the

xiii xiv provincial government. Once a mineral or oil and gas lease is no longer “productive,” meaning it can no longer be mined, the oil company must return the land to the ecological functions it had before it was strip-mined. Reclamation requires large scale transformation of the land. Joly (2017b) describes this as including “contouring the landscape, re-establishing hydrological systems with groundwater liners, covering the landscape with peat and mineral soil, re- vegetating disturbed areas, and remediating toxic tailings” (n.p.). Following the Alberta government’s policy, these areas are intended to be used for agriculture, recreation, forestry, or Indigenous land use (Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act, 2000). This utilitarian definition allows oil companies to claim that the reclamation will undo (or at least lessen) the negative consequences of oil-extraction projects (Joly, 2017b).

These sites include places for leisure, including Crane Lake—a former Suncor mine which has been reclaimed into a four-kilometre hiking trail, noted on the Fort McMurray Tourism website as an excellent spot for bird watching. The Syncrude East Mine described above, is available for scientific research into wetlands and mine reclamation. Most famously, there is the Syncrude bison herd. Syncrude partners with the Fort McKay First Nation to manage a herd of wood bison on another reclaimed piece of land near the main entrance to the Mildred Lake site. These wood bison are raised for both profit and conservation goals, as wood bison raised here have at times been introduced to support the wild bison populations in Wood Buffalo National Park to the north.

The wood bison first came to Syncrude in 1993, as part of the research being conducted on the reclaimed land, to determine if the particular reclaimed area could sustain large mammals (Thurton, 2018). The company had initially looked at using beef cattle for this research, but working with the Fort McKay First Nation, wood bison were chosen instead. The herd now numbers over 300 and is a widely promoted element of Syncrude’s environmental and corporate- social responsibility narratives. However, the company’s marketing of this project as a successful initiative bringing together environmental stewardship and partnership with the Fort McKay First Nation carefully avoids the larger concern over how and why wood bison have been put into a vulnerable position in the first place. Dene desires to practice respectful relationships with bison and caribou in this region, as defined in the Dene word níh boghodi (explained in greater detail in Chapter 1), are not honoured when the provincial government continues to lease out land for future oil development. The Syncrude herd of bison is lauded as the future of environmental

xv stewardship practices, without first addressing the problems that oil extraction cause in the first place. Nor do these reclamation projects challenge the legitimacy of the right of the provincial government and oil companies to use the land in these ways.

Syncrude has built a lookout for tourists to view the bison’s grazing land and has marked this site with a massive stone sculpture of a wood bison herd. Here there is also the trailhead for the Matcheetawin Discovery Trails, marketed to tourists as “a Cree word meaning beginning place,” and the Sagow Pematosowin Trail, described on tourist information pages as “Cree for living in peaceful co-existence with the land” (Fort McMurray Tourism, n.d.). The 4 km trail system weaves through 50 hectares of reclaimed land, displaying the different types of landscape the oil company has reconstituted, including spruce and aspen forests, jack pine forests, grasslands, and wetlands (Fort McMurray Tourism, n.d.). However, on these recreation sites, the land is returned to the Crown or retained by the oil company to manage and take care of. Even while under development, these places are supposed to be subject to Treaty Rights of land use (Baker & Westman, 2018), yet the oil lease seems to push the pause button on these concerns as development of the resource takes precedence—under the guise, that one day, when the resource is gone, no one will be able to tell there was even a mine there before.

Janelle Baker and Clint Westman (2018) have questioned the role of the reclamation policy in approving project development at a massive scale in this region:

Ultimately, one cannot help but wonder: when there are land disturbances as obvious as some of the world’s largest open-pit mines and tailings ponds that are actually lakes visible from space, how can a company be so bold as to claim their activities will have no significant impact, and how could a regulator legitimately approve a series of such megaprojects over a short period? The answer lies in part in promises for reclamation. (p. 151)

Reclamation becomes the reparative promise that is supposed to make up in the future for damage done in the present. It is these delayed ethics that are supposed to make the present injustice tolerable, and play a crucial role in the approval process at the level of state regulators: According to Baker and Westman (2018), “the proportion of oil sands disturbed land that has been reclaimed to date is infinitesimal” (p. 151).

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Reclamation is only considered at the point that the project’s life cycle is complete—that is, once the resource is no longer “productive.” Joly (2017b) has traced how the language of reclamation reflects colonial impulses to seek to “improve” the natural environment by means of a colonial concept, productivity. She has described how early attempts to reclaim tar-sands extraction sites aimed to make the land “more productive, useful or desirable than it was in its original [pre- extractive] state” (Department of Energy and Natural Resources, 1976). By creating more useful landscapes that could repurpose old extraction sites into commercial forestry sites, Joly argued that the state “reinforces Indigenous erasure: by eliminating and replacing Indigenous geographies, the land becomes productive settler space” (Joly, 2017b). Keeping the land productive and useful, as defined by white possessive logics of colonial capitalism, maintains this particular understanding of land and prevents policies that that might include relational healing, or re-Indigenization, of reclaimed sites. Reclaimed sites are often on still-active oil lease sites where public entry is prohibited, further denying Cree, Dene, and Métis people access to these places. Oil companies will host Indigenous ceremonies on reclaimed sites as “a one-time spectacle of corporate-social responsibility” (Joly, 2017b; also Wanvik, 2016) while denying continued access to these places after the fact.

Many people in my family have worked for oil companies in the tar sands. The ways in which this work has given them authority and certainty in explaining the oil companies’ ethical practices and environmental standards has also made it difficult for them to take seriously any alternative accounts of the effects of extraction. But even for those who don’t know these practices as intimately as my family, the way reclamation has been mobilized to defend ongoing effects of strip mining remains a powerful logic for many in the region. The idea shared with me by the participant in the epigraph to this Introduction was something I heard over and over again by other interviewees: Reclamation will undo the damage that is there now—what is the big deal? They’re going to reclaim it one day anyway. Participant No. 4, a mining engineer, readily agreed that while it takes a long time to get strip mines back to their original state, “at least we’re going to have to do that; no one is going to reclaim Toronto anytime soon” (2016).

I start with the story of reclamation in order to introduce the powerful ways in which tar sands are normalized in Fort McMurray. In one sense, the reclamation story is what this whole dissertation is about. Settler science and technology are said to work to improve the land in some way, thereby justifying land theft and destruction. A more ethical or just future is promised, one

xvii that must be patiently waited for until all the oil is gone, and settler uses of this land are exhausted.

Cree, Dene, and Métis people have also described reclamation policies and practices as unsatisfactory. They have engaged in a multitude of different ways to engage, resist, and refuse with the processes that attempt to appropriate more land to oil companies. These actions have included participation in formal studies for land use, environmental impact, and cultural impact, needed for state approval processes. As well, when these processes have resulted in a dismissal of negative impacts in the interest of so-called economic benefit (Environment and the Energy Resources Conservation Board, 2013), First Nations have launched legal actions against oil companies (Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, 2011) and against the federal government (Bergot, 2018). The engagements and benefits from the oil companies have been uneven, and typically operate on a First-Nation-by-First-Nation basis, in what Taylor and Friedel (2011) have described as a neoliberal partnership model. The model is preferred by oil companies who do not engage Indigenous peoples collectively or through the basis of Treaty, but on a one-on-one basis with individual band councils or individual people in leadership positions. For these authors, this model has worked to cultivate divisiveness and competition for benefit agreements or sponsorship from the oil companies that often exclude non-Status Indigenous people and Métis communities (Taylor & Friedel, 2011, p. 832).

I am careful to not examine the particulars of these agreements, engagements, and interactions with the intention of critiquing or analyzing the efficacy or political strategy found in them, but to say that the relationships between oil companies and local Cree, Dene, and Métis nations in this region are incredibly complex. Yet it is possible to look to the multiple ongoing legal actions, local activism, ceremony-based water walks, and other sites of refusal, and understand that Cree, Dene, and Métis people have desires for this place that far exceed extraction and oil development for profit.

These other ways of relating to, desiring, and understanding this place are how I try to question and interrupt how the tar sands are understood as a place overwhelmed by the destructive effects of the oil industry. In positioning Cree, Dene, and Métis relationality and desires for this place that exist outside of extractive and property relations I attempt to understand the multiple and contested meanings of this place. I do this in part, through the concept of the pluriverse.

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The pluriverse is a concept and analytic that describes the existence and entanglement of several cosmologies and ontologies existing at once, contesting the idea that we live in a single, universal reality (Law, 2015; de la Caden & Blaser, 2018; Law & Liens, 2018). The ways in which land or place is understood is a consequence of the relations of power that exist there and condition what can be known and as a result what types of relations can be fostered there. An important argument that emerges from this literature is the way in which certain practices naturalize nature as a concept distinct from culture/human activity and in turn create particular versions of reality. For example, colonial or extractive practices create the reality where nature and culture are distinct categories, making it logical to pursue extraction for human profit with very little consideration for the effects that extraction might have on the land, waters, or the nonhuman species that live there. However, other ways of understanding relationality to lands, waters, and nonhumans create different realities. I draw from Indigenous scholars who describe epistemologies that practice very different relations with nonhumans, lands, and waters, offering more ethical, nonextractive ways of organizing life and resources; and as a result create different realities and possible futures. These alternate realties, relations, and knowledges exist, and power mediates which ones are recognized as real, and which ones are targeted for erasure.

In this dissertation, I understand the conditions and practices of Canadian settler colonialism to be only one way to relate to this place, though one that exerts itself with the full power of the state. A version that attempts to be universal, and works to erase or eradicate other ways of understanding land, waters, and nonhuman beings. These other ways of relating or understanding land or place include Cree, Dene, and Métis epistemologies that offer other ways of seeing and knowing that contest colonial-extractive practices of reducing life, land, and resources to only their commodity value (Todd, 2017, Gómez-Barris, 2017). I trace how the place of the tar sands is understood and related to in several different, and competing ways.

Throughout the dissertation I describe different moments where the multiple versions of this place can be briefly seen, and trace the ways in which a single-extractive-reality is then re- secured and held onto. The worlding that must take place to maintain only one version of this place – as a place of extraction – takes place consistently and requires several assumptions and beliefs about the world, and in particular, colonialism and capitalism, to maintain its internal logic and normalcy. In tracing these logics and practices, I try to reveal the contingency of them

xix and demonstrate the possibilities that enduring alternatives offer to the “one-world world” that currently normalizes extraction and settler colonialism (Law, 2015, p. 127).

Bitumen, bituminous sands, tar sands, oil sands: these are all terms to describe the sticky, tarry sand found along the Athabasca River and throughout northeastern Alberta where huge deposits of this substance form what is called the Athabasca deposit. This is the largest known oil-sands deposit in the world, although in Canada there are oil-sands deposits in northwestern Alberta in the Peace River Valley, to the south of the Athabasca deposit in Cold Lake, Alberta. Globally, this oil is also found in Venezuela, and in smaller deposits in Kazakhstan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Madagascar. I have chosen to use the different terms—bitumen, tar sands, and oil sands—somewhat interchangeably throughout this dissertation. However, these terms have political genealogies that are important to my participants and to people in the industry and the region. Bitumen (or bituminous sands) is the more technical/scientific term, brought by the European fur traders, explorers, and surveyors who saw this tar ooze from the riverbanks of the Athabasca River. Tar sands was the more common name used by everyone, including the oil industry and the government, until the 1960s when oil sands replaced tar sands to describe the economic value of the oil that could be extracted here (Gailus, 2012). In the mid- 1980s, government and industry began promoting oil sands over tar sands through public relations campaigns given that tar sounded dirty and less useful than oil (Gailus, 2012).

Up until the early 2000s both terms were used interchangeably, but as environmental groups began to exclusively use tar sands in reaction to government and industry, the two terms became polarized (Gailus, 2012). It is often felt that if you say tar sands, you must be someone critical of the industry, and to use oil sands you are supporting or promoting it. While the title of this dissertation and my own politics favour the use of tar sands to depict that this work will engage critically with the industry, I also have found myself slipping between all three terms. It is not uncontested to do so, and I’m sure some readers will find this unclear or even misleading. All of my participants used oil sands, even those who were critical or had left the industry for ethical/moral concerns. Overall, I would say they feel that the term tar sands is too divisive and fails to understand the nuance or complexity of life here. It is a term that many of my participants feel has been used to scapegoat the people that work here, and to unfairly make an exception of this place and this industry. Fairly or not, the political implications of using tar sands are

xx significant—so significant that I intentionally used only oil sands when speaking to participants, so as to not alienate or judge people who had agreed to sit down with me.

My own use of tar sands includes a sympathy to the ways in which it has been used to critique and draw attention to this place, but also with a deep care and understanding for the people who feel that this term is too loaded. I worried that this nuance would be lost because of the weight of the term, and in an effort to meet participants on common ground I had no problem using oil sands in our conversations. As I have written this dissertation, I have tended to use oil sands in moments where I’m relying on participant excerpts and data to reflect the types of politics they were engaging in while using this word to make sense of their lives in relation to oil. While I have used all three terms throughout, they are not neutral, and are often tied to a rigid political binary of anti- or pro-oil-and-gas.

The tar sands have at various times in the last 10 years been subject to fierce international criticism and condemnation. Movie stars, musicians, and other celebrities make headlines for travelling to this place in northeastern Alberta, flying over the huge open-pit mines and wide lakes of toxic tailings. Tar sands have come to represent several conflicts that intersect at once. Settler colonialism is one: Treaty 8 lands have been appropriated for oil leases and have undergone development on an incredible scale. Outside of Treaty 8 territory, tar sands get to market through pipelines that cross countless other Indigenous territories, providing the driving motivation to build new, heavily contested pipelines like Keystone XL and Trans Mountain. Struggles against these pipelines and several others have highlighted this connection, drawing attention to the ways in which this commodity flows across a continent in ways that dispossess others along the way. Furthermore, that these projects, and the pipelines to transport their product to market, continually receive the support of the state highlights the intersections between the Canadian nation state, oil companies, and the logics of settler colonialism that sanction these appropriations. This support includes financial incentives and tax subsidies, direct investment in pipeline infrastructure, and the use of the police and state surveillance apparatus to protect industrial infrastructures and secure territory for further expansion.

Some research has analyzed the Canadian and Albertan context in the framework of the petrostate, so that democracy is seen to be weakened by the power of the oil companies and the oil economy (Adkin, 2016). What these studies miss is the foundational role of settler colonialism in

xxi the creation of the Canadian nation state. Without understanding land appropriation and resource extraction as central to the beginnings of Canadian political, economic, and societal systems, it becomes possible to misunderstand the problem, and as a result, prescribe the wrong solutions when thinking about how to shift away from oil-dependent economies and from extractive relationships to lands and waters. My work addresses this question and is in conversation with several notable dissertations that have brought together research on tar sands, the Canadian state, labour, and settler colonialism.

These dissertations include research on Indigenous experiences of the oil boom in northeastern Alberta. Angele Alook (2016) has written about the different experiences of young adults from the Big Stone Cree Nation, located near the Wabasca oil deposits southwest of Fort McMurray. She has examined the ways in which oil work has impacted the communities of the Big Stone Cree Nation, including how jobs in oil have impacted different work and educational trajectories for Nation members. Alook also describes how oil work influences migrations off reserve, including into Edmonton, and what these migrations mean for identity, life experiences, and family ties. Lena Gross (2019) has conducted research on the experiences of oil development for Cree, Dene, and Métis people who live near Lac La Biche, a small town to the south of Fort McMurray. Gross, who conducted ethnographic research, examined the impacts of resource extraction on cultural and land-based practices, as well as the ways in which extraction and pollution became normalized. In another anthropology dissertation, Tara Joly (2017a) worked with the Fort McMurray Métis to conduct a landscape ethnography in order to understand how land-use policy has impacted trap lines and other treaty-protected activities on land slated for tar- sands development.

Another important work on the tar sands includes the recently defended dissertation by Katie Mazer (2019). Mazer examined the uneven labour geographies between Maritime provinces and resource-extraction regions like northeastern Alberta. Mazer traces the various state policies and programs that attempted to encourage migration from poor, rural regions of the Maritimes to other regions of the country where resource-extraction projects were experiencing labour shortages. Mazer examined the relationships between mining companies and state interventions designed to encourage migration to address rural poverty through employment in resource extraction. She attended to how race works within these histories of migration and in the policies themselves, particularly in how whiteness and class function to produce difference within the

xxii relations and geographies of extractive labour. Mazer’s dissertation confirms my own findings on the role that inevitability—of needing to migrate for work in resource extraction, and for the certainty in resource-extraction economies as well—plays in legitimizing development agendas and in the hardship experienced by migratory workers from the Maritimes. Mazer’s work describes how economic realities structure what people begin to think is even possible or imaginable, and the ways that this works in the favour of extraction futurity. These studies offer important perspectives on issues related to this dissertation and about the future and the stakes of extracting oil in Canada.

Jen Preston (2017), also writing about the state’s role in resource extraction, has discussed the nexus of settler colonialism and neoliberalism. For Preston, the tar sands are part of the racial extractivist capitalism that was foundational to the classic Canadian staples economy. She examined how neoliberal racial logics have shaped and transformed extractive tar-sands economies, and the various tools used by the state to promote, protect, and expand upon this industry.

Lastly, Nishant Upadhyay (2016) provided a thorough accounting of the racial and colonial dynamics that have shaped South Asian diasporas in Canada. Upadhyay conducted research with South Asian communities including those in Fort McMurray and Vancouver. The research they conducted in Fort McMurray was predominantly with professionals working in the oil industry, and the ways in which heteropatriarchy, racial difference, Indigeneity, and colonialism structured the making of the Canadian settler state as well as South Asian diasporas in Canada.

These dissertations have marked a recent proliferation in research on the tar sands, and have included much-needed discussions on the intertwined nature of race, extraction, capitalism, and settler colonialism in this region. These scholars have thoughtfully described the histories of this region, which saw it transformed into a hub of extraction, as well as the current racial and colonial logics that structure how the land is used, valued, and understood today. These dissertations also demonstrate that understanding this region is more important than ever. As we face an accelerating climate crisis, questions about oil extraction and consumption become more urgent. We know that 80 percent of the oil in the Athabasca oil deposit remains unextracted. Found deep beneath boreal forests, this oil is accessible through in-situ methods, and promises over 50 to 100 years of economic activity in the region. However, we also know that if this

xxiii amount of oil were to be extracted and burned, climate crisis would also be inevitable. In these ways the tar sands are an important place to study the crossroads of these overlapping and co- constitutive systems and forces.

My work has attempted to be in conversation with these important studies so as to contribute to the story of the tar sands in a way that centres the question of land and the conditions of settler colonialism. Approaching this study in this way allows me to think about energy transition and sustainability in different ways as well. Much research has emerged thinking about the Anthropocene. This term has been adopted to describe the geological time period in which humans and human activity have acted as “a global chemical, biological and geological force” (Mitchell, 2011, p. 260), resulting in the moment of anthropogenic climate change we current face. The dating of this time period has faced much debate, though many have identified the starting point as 1784, when coal-fired industries began to proliferate worldwide due to the steam engine and the rise of industrial capitalism (Morton, 2013; see also Malm, 2016; Moore, 2016).

However, many have critiqued the naming of this era the Anthropocene, in that anthro universalizes all humans’ effect on the earth. This erases the fact that not all humans have had an equal impact on creating the conditions that have caused this era and the environmental crises that are a result of it. Jason Moore (2016) has rephrased Anthropocene to Capitalocene, to highlight the role of capitalism and capitalist logics in creating this era: “the Capitalocene signifies capitalism as a way of organizing nature—as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world ecology” (Moore, 2016, p. 6). To capture the geographic and racial inequality of the actors who have led anthropogenic climate change, Grove (2016) termed this era the Eurocene, and Mirzeoeff (2018) called it the White Supremacy Scene. These interventions have tried to capture the ways in which Anthropocene, as a term or as a set of literatures and debates, can erase important histories of violence and unequal economies that have shaped the present moment. Donna Haraway (2016) used the word Cthulucene, which attempts to capture “ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming in times that remain at stake,” arguing that “human beings are not the only important actors in the Cthulucene, with all other beings able simply to react” (p. 55). The rejection of anthropocentrism in this literature understands anthropocentrism as part of the foundational problem that has led to extractivism, capitalism, and climate change. However, as several scholars have noted, these debates have not examined the role of colonialism in anthropocentrism, and how the drive for imperialism and colonial conquest

xxiv have worked to export this anthropocentrism across the globe (Davis & Todd, 2017; Gergan, Smith, & Vasudevan, 2018; Whyte, 2017, 2018). These critiques argue that it is crucial to understand how settler colonialism has been foundational to creating the economic, political, and social systems that continue to accelerate anthropogenic climate change. As Davis and Todd (2017) have argued, colonialism and settler colonialism

. . . was always about changing the land, transforming the earth itself, including the creatures, the plants, the soil composition and the atmosphere. It was about moving and unearthing rocks and minerals. All of these acts were intimately tied to the project of erasure that is the imperative of settler colonialism. (p. 770)

This erasure included ways of knowing and organizing political and economic life that did not rely on anthropocentrism. The imposition of settler colonialism included the “severing of relations” between humans, lands, waters, and more-than-human species (Davis & Todd, 2017, 770). In this dissertation I am interested in thinking about how the relationships imported through colonialism can be traced to current practices of extraction, and how deeply this has shaped anthropogenic climate change.

Furthermore, in this dissertation I examine how tar-sands extraction comes to be seen as a normal and inevitable consequence of present-day lifestyles. The ways in which oil has shaped economic and social relations in not only Fort McMurray, AB, but in the Canadian state more generally, are significant to unravel and examine. To examine these relations, I have developed the following research questions.

1. What are the logics that make places like the tar sands seem inevitable or indispensable when they are not? 2. a) How does a place like the tar sands become normalized? b) How do people who live and work in this place makes sense of the tar sands? 3. How is Indigenous resistance in this region understood or misunderstood? What makes these misunderstandings logical (i.e., make sense within themselves)? 4. What kinds of infrastructures are required to make a mega-industrial project like the tar sands possible?

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These questions attempt to capture the ways that tar sands are made possible through state policy, investment, and physical production of space and infrastructure, as well as how these things are experienced at the level of the individual. In jumping scale, between the micro and macro, I also think about how these scalar levels work together, and through one another to make tar sands inevitable. Furthermore, I contrast the ways in which oil extraction comes to make sense to itself beside the ways in which Indigenous people have demonstrated this logic to be limited and, in many cases, untrue. I chart through these different ways of relating to, and understanding oil, in order to contrast the different worlds that are competing in this place.

Overall, in this dissertation I examine sense making—tracing, analyzing, and thinking alongside how participants make sense of the tar sands, of oil economies, and the ways these industries are critiqued and refused. Sense making as a method or a practice comes from fields and methods like phenomenology (Ahmed, 2006) and interpretive sociology (D. E. Smith, 1999; Titchkosky, 2008; Wynter, 2003). Sense making asks how certain things come to make sense as natural, how certain taken-for-granted facts, situations, or relations come to be understood as “what is.” Tanya Titchkosky (2008), in her study to understand how access narratives ended up positioning disabled people as absent or irrelevant from university spaces, argued that

. . . how people justify “what is,” is an interpretive social act. The interpretive act of justification is tied to collective understandings of the meaning of “what is.” . . . As an interpretive social act, justification is not merely second order to the fact of exclusion; it is out “facticity,” it is a “form of human life,” it is how we do exclusion as well as generate its everyday sensibility. (p. 41, emphasis in original; quoting Gadamer, 1991, pp. 216, 220)

In a similar way, this study examines sense making as a type of justification—how tar sands come to make sense; how they are justified; and what versions of the present and the future are assumed, taken for granted, or considered possible. Another way to describe this is how what is taken for granted is created and sustained. Certain beliefs, attitudes, or values are not simply mistakes that can be corrected with more knowledge; they comprise a practice of making and remaking a certain version of reality, or of the world, that continues to remake unequal power relations. Moments of sense making require an unpacking, an examination of what appears natural or taken for granted, so as to understand what exactly is happening. What exactly is

xxvi making sense? And what does that sense require? In tracking the assumptions of how sense- making moments make sense within themselves, I hope to learn more about the entanglements between logics and practices of settler colonialism, nationalism, capitalism, and how these forces shape people’s lives. To disrupt sense making is to show it as a process that humans actively take part in, one that is not natural, that serves to recreate the current status quo. In the chapters that follow I describe the particular logics and rationales that make it possible for oil extraction to be thought of as an inevitable and necessary practice.

To begin, in the next chapter on methods, I provide an overview of this dissertation project and the guiding questions of the research. This includes the theoretical commitments of this research and the methods used to conduct this study. I provide an overview of the ethical considerations that were present in conducting this research, and explain how I chose the research location, population, and interview questions. As well, I outline the decisions I made for conducting data collection, and for data analysis. I have included an overview of the literature on settler colonialism, and desire-based frameworks for research in order to examine the political implications, and commitments that are central to this research and this dissertation.

In Chapter 2, I describe the tar sands as they exist with or without human knowledge of them. I begin with how my participants described this place as being located “in the middle of nowhere.” Positioning Fort McMurray in this way makes sense from the perspective of participants who drive or fly long distances back to the communities they came from, and the unique location of Fort McMurray deep in the northern boreal forest of northeastern Alberta. In contrast to how my participants described and made sense of this place, I then describe Cree, Dene, and Métis relationships to, and histories of this place. I discuss how Cree, Dene, and Métis people relate to these lands and waters as more than a site for resource extraction, and to the creation of a settler city and its infrastructures. I examine how this land was brought under the control of the Canadian state through the signing of Treaty 8, and how from the beginning this acquisition was already concerned with the extraction and profit from mineral and petroleum deposits found there. I also describe how embodied experiences of labour in this place have structured settler relations to these lands that include extractive, violent intimacies. This chapter takes the lands and waters of the Peace-Athabasca Delta as the starting point of this research, and tries to trace how this place has become transformed by colonial acquisition and oil extraction; but also how it also remains a homeland for Cree, Dene, and Métis people.

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In the third chapter, Infrastructures, I think about how the demands for infrastructures for both extraction and city building have worked to normalize oil extraction and have built settler permanency in this region. This chapter was deeply informed by the effects of the wildfire that burned several parts of the city of Fort McMurray in May 2016. Conducting interviews in the fall of 2016 only months after this wildfire, led to many conversations about the role of infrastructure played in making Fort McMurray a livable, desirable place in which to put down roots. While the infrastructures needed for oil extraction and export were also prominently in the news at this time, as debates about the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain pipelines were carrying on between the federal government and opponents to the pipelines, participants encouraged me to consider the ways in which infrastructure also deeply shaped their everyday lives in this place, and the effects its presence and absence had on how they were able to imagine their futures here. Building infrastructure for extraction was deeply about building settler permanence, belonging, and home in this region. This investment in industrial, extractive infrastructures alongside the intimate infrastructures of building a home must be analyzed within the framework of settler colonialism. This chapter examines what types of future become possible when particular infrastructures and investments are made with tar-sands or extractive futurity in mind, and not Indigenous futurities. Seeing this as a deliberate choice makes it possible to change, and to reimagine what could be built and what relations could be encouraged here instead.

In the next chapter, Misunderstandings of Indigenous Refusals, I examine how participants made sense of several examples of criticisms and refusals of tar-sands extraction projects. The critiques I raised in the interviews included the negative environmental impacts the tar-sands mines have had on nearby lands and waters and on climate change; as well as including several concerns raised by Cree, Dene, and Métis nations about the appropriation of Treaty lands for new project development. In this section I grouped participant responses into categories, in order to demonstrate the ways in which many of these responses sounded alike and were deeply rooted in particular ideas and beliefs about Indigenous people widely held by Canadian society at large. These responses included narratives about so-called ethical oil, progressive Indigenous employment policies adopted by the oil companies, and corporate-social responsibility more broadly. As well, they included disbelief in negative impacts of the mines; they felt that there had not been enough research to adequately prove negative environmental impacts.

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Such ideas are based on foundational ideas about the inherently progressive narration of history, and a belief in the good or ethical practice of both oil companies and the Canadian state with regard to their relationship to Indigenous people. This chapter attempts to provide counter-facts to the common defences of, or ways of normalizing, the tar sands. In this chapter I try not to position participants as the problem, or set them up as an example of what not to believe, but instead to trace how their attitudes and beliefs on these issues are a result of foundational Canadian national mythologies that sanction land dispossession, and erase state violence under the imaginary of a benevolent, tolerant nation state.

Lastly, in Chapter 5, Tar-Sands Futurities, I think through the belief, which many participants shared with me, that oil extraction is inevitable. Participants described feeling stuck in the ongoing demand for oil that has driven tar-sands extraction. The region’s (and province’s) economic dependence on oil seems to have led to few opportunities for work in other fields. However, using the concept of the pluriverse, as I described above, it is possible to understand that particular practices create particular realities. I think about how participants shared the ways in which oil feels inevitable or inescapable, both in their own individual lives and more widely in society at large. In contrast, I draw from Indigenous scholars who describe epistemologies that practice very different relations with nonhumans, lands, and waters, offering more ethical, nonextractive ways of organizing life and resources. I use this scholarship to examine how pluriverse solutions to climate change and extractive capitalism offer an important intervention to how many are conceptualizing responses to these crises.

In concluding this dissertation, I think through the contributions and implications of this research.

Chapter 1 Methods

1.1 Theoretical Commitments and Author Positionality

I grew up in Fort McMurray to parents who both worked for a large oil company. I was rarely exposed to the now much more public and common critiques of the tar sands. They were the ‘oil sands,” and they were what my parents did for a living. It wasn’t until I left Fort McMurray and moved to Ottawa to begin university that I began to learn that the tar sands were a very contested industry. This is a story of both place and time, I moved to Ottawa in 2006 which coincided with international climate change campaigns that targeted the tar sands as “dirty oil.” Two years later, in 2008, 1600 ducks landed on toxic tailings ponds at Syncrude’s Aurora mine and died instantly. The news made international headlines and propelled the tar sands into the public imagination as a focal point for climate change activism. If I hadn’t been living in a different place at this time, I’m not sure that my reaction to these events would have been to become critical and skeptical of the oil industry. If I was still at home it would have been very easy to accept the narratives of corporate-social responsibility, strict environmental regulations, and ethical oil.1 At this time and in this new place, my politics were shifting. I was involved with student union and feminist organizing at university and was exposed for the first time to ‘real’ environmentalists. A category of person that was often mocked or made to appear unrealistic by my extended family. My roommate brought me to talks and events about the tar sands and I slowly realized that my hometown was a complicated place, and one that was tied up in not only the threats of climate change, but also ongoing colonial appropriation of Treaty lands. Learning about my own position as a white settler on these lands highlighted the unequal and contested relationships of power that I was deeply embedded in. I don’t tell this story to be prescriptive about how people should come to care about this place, or become conscious about these issues. Especially since I don’t attribute my learning to the institution of higher education I attended, but

1 Ethical oil is the idea that Canadian oil operates under more ethical and moral standards than oil from other places in the world. Throughout much of the late 2000s several campaigns were run to promote this narrative. I discuss ethical oil in greater detail in Chapter 4.

1 2 instead to the people I met and relationships I made there. I tell this story instead to think about how places and times worked to propel me to this research.

For many years, the damage of the tar sands is what convinced me of the problems there, and the reasons for why it should be stopped. The damage to not only the land, but the water, and the impacts this had on communities upstream motivated my interest in pursuing this project for my PhD research. I had such overwhelming and conflicted feelings about my first home that doing a PhD seemed, at the time, a really useful way to work through them. Importantly, given my material dependence on it, I felt a deep conflict about how to relate to this place. There have been many times in my life when the money earned through oil work bailed me out and paid my rent during stretches of unemployment and funded parts of my education. These complicities have made me uncomfortable and leaves me as entangled in this mess as the participants who I have interviewed.

As I started to imagine and build this project I was still operating from this place of conflict and shame. This place and the trouble around it were and are deeply personal to me. So personal that the research I originally had imagined aimed to excavate how people ignored, dismissed, or otherwise reconciled working in this contested place and industry. Then, in 2015 Dr. Eve Tuck was hired in my department and I was introduced to her critique of damage-based research for the first time. A year later she became my supervisor and pushed me to think about how this project could use desire-based frameworks and think about the material place of the tar sands more seriously. I don’t think I completely understood what that actually could be, or fully meant until I started reading the work of Indigenous feminists and Indigenous technoscience scholars. Reading the work of Kim TallBear, Zoe Todd, Robin Kimmerer, Michelle Murphy (among others) with Tuck’s desire-based framework in mind helped to shape the theoretical commitments of this dissertation, and also the ethical and political commitments of how I have represented the data I collected.

To begin, I will explain desire vs. damage-based research briefly. Damage-based research operates from a theory of change that seeks to repair or change conditions of pain or damage by documenting them in order to hold those responsible accountable for these negative effects. This approach to research believes that collecting the pain of those who are suffering will bring about positive changes. Tuck (2009) questions not only the efficacy of this approach in actually

3 bringing about material or political gains, but also the longer-term consequences on people and communities who are defined by narratives of their damage. These narratives can create people and communities susceptible to “pathologizing analyses” (Tuck, 2009, p. 415) that postpone the work of creating opportunities to address or repair inequity, in order to catalogue and take account of deficit and failure. As an antidote, Tuck (2009) calls for desire-based approaches to research. That in the place of documenting pain, strives to “understan[d] complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives” (p. 416). This approach, “is intent on depathologizing the experiences of dispossessed and disenfranchised communities so that people are seen as more than broken and conquered” (Tuck, 2009, p. 416). Elsewhere, Tuck and Yang (2014) have described how desire-based research can also work to reveal and the relationship between damage narratives and settler colonial inevitability. Tuck and Yang (2014) argue:

As a framework, desire is a counterlogic to the logics of settler colonialism. Rooted in possibilities gone but not foreclosed, “the not yet, and at times, the not anymore” (Tuck, 2010, p. 417), desire refuses the master narrative that colonization was inevitable and has a monopoly on the future. By refusing the teleos of colonial future, desire expands possible futures. As a mode of refusal, desire is a “no” and a “yes.” (p. 243)

Thinking about how this research could answer to this call to interrupt the assumption that a colonial future is inevitable, I have tried to centre the desires of Cree, Dene, and Métis people of this place. Their desires for land and life, their desires for clean water and the possibilities of having Indigenous futures here instead of colonial, extractive ones.2

2 It might be easy to mistake how I have characterized Indigenous desires for these lands and waters as exclusively anti-oil or anti-pipeline. However, this would miss the complexities of how different Nations have positioned themselves in relation to various development projects. There are several First Nations governments who have come out in support of controversial pipelines, and in support of oil sands development. However, the fact that there are First Nations in support of pipelines or other controversial projects does not somehow make it less valid that there are Nations in opposition to it. Yet, as we can see in the example of the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s fight against the Coastal Gas Link, the elected band council government (Wet’suwet’en First Nation) has approved this project without the support of the Unist’ot’en hereditary chiefs (unistoten.camp, 2019). While much has been written about the difference between band council and hereditary governance structures in relation to the Indian Act and settler colonial imposition of governance structures (Copegog, 2019; Imai, 2012; Haudenosaunee Confederacy, 2019); there is also a political decision I have made to centre the anti-oil and anti-pipeline desires. In doing this however, I also want to acknowledge the complicated, often divisive, and complex politics present in doing so.

Shifting my focus to a desire-based study instead of a damaged one, I have made settler colonialism and extraction the object of this study—not my participants. There are many frameworks of research that position people as the object of study, research that tries to understand the pieces of truth that exist inside them and excavate that to the foreground and build knowledge from that. Instead I have asked participants about their experiences and narrations of life in this place to help me understand how settler colonialism works to normalize extraction here, and ultimately how places like the tar sands become possible, become inevitable, and become desirable. Had I chosen to centre the damage done by industry here I would risk pathologizing both the place itself, and the communities most impacted by this damage, an approach that Tuck (2009) has described, “in which oppression singularly defines a community” (p. 413). Furthermore, this approach operates, “from a theory of change that establishes harm or injury in order to achieve reparation” (Tuck, 2009, p. 413), which has been proven to not only be ineffective, but also limiting (Tuck, 2009, p. 413).

Tuck and Yang (2014) have expanded this further, describing how logics of pain end up reproducing developmental hierarchies that repackage racist assumptions for the current political moment. They argue, “Under a developmental hierarchy, in which some were undeterred by pain and oppression, and others were waylaid by their victimry and subalternity, damage-centred research reifies a settler temporality and helps suppress other understandings of time” (Tuck and Yang, 2014, p. 231). Temporality and futurity are ideas I expand on more fully in Chapter 5. However, what is important to understand about temporality in relation to my methods, is that in choosing instead to employ a desire-based framework, I attempt to interrupt the “metanarrative of damaged communities and white progress” (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 231) Tuck and Yang (2014) reiterate: “Desire-based frameworks, by contrast, look to the past and the future to situate analysis” (p. 231). I have done this in how I have structured this dissertation. Describing the epistemologies of how to understand this place as something other than a place defined by extraction, I draw on Cree, Dene, and Métis desires for this place that exist in the present, the past, and the future. In doing so I position this place as more than damaged—as alive, as abundant, and as also impacted by industry and extraction. Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017) argues that thinking of places as only damaged is not only limiting, but inaccurate. Damage centric understandings of extractive zones also work to erase all of the other ways that people, animals, and life exist alongside extraction. She clarifies, “Like any systems of domination,

5 extractive capitalism is not totalizing in its destructive effects” (Gómez-Barris, 2017, p. 4). She warns that, “if we only track the purview of power’s destruction and death force, we are forever analytically imprisoned to reproducing a totalizing viewpoint that ignores life that is unbridled and finds forms of resisting and living alternatively” (Gómez-Barris, 2017, p. 3). In the shift from damage to desire it becomes possible to imagine other ways of relating to not only places, industries, but also the chemicals themselves. Michelle Murphy (2017a) conceptualizes an approach that conceives instead of chemical relations. Chemical relations that are caught up in structures of racist, colonial violence, but that also “embrace impure and damaged forms of life” (p. 500).

Michelle Murphy’s approach considers how desire-based frameworks can be utilized in environmental justice research. This body of research has often focused on highlighting the damage done by industry and capitalism to people and places as the central objective of its work. Murphy’s intervention helps me connect to how ideas of rejecting research on damaged bodies, peoples, and communities, can be applied to think about damaged places, lands, waters, and nonhuman species. Instead of recreating the damage-based studies of this field, Murphy offers the idea of alterlife to capture a different approach to studying chemicals, industrial damage, and how these things affect bodies, waters, and land. Murphy (2017a) argues: “Studying alterlife requires bursting open categories of organism, individual, and body to acknowledge a shared, entangling, and extensive condition of being with capitalism and its racist colonial manifestations” (p. 498). This includes thinking of life as an “enmeshment and enfleshment in infrastructures” (Murphy, 2017a, 498), and not solely the damaged outcome of extractive colonial industries. Murphy offers the idea that, “Alterlife is resurgent life, which asserts and continues nonetheless” (Murphy, 2017a, 500). This approach is immensely useful in how I have come to understand a place like the tar sands. It is easy to catalogue and list the different ways that the oil industry has transformed, damaged, and irreparably changed this place, however, if I want to imagine possibilities for different futures for this place I need to think differently. Murphy (2017a) explains:

Life forged in ongoing chemical violence is also life open to becoming something else, which is not a nostalgic return, but instead the defending of sovereignty starting here, within oneself and each other, here in the damage now. There is no waiting for a better

condition. The alter-wise of alterlife is a nondeferral of the decolonial, seized now, despite its impossibility. (p. 501)

Thinking about how tar sands are also more than the sum of its damage; about the parts of this place that persist and are still alive, attempts to respond and relate differently in the present. Scholars in Indigenous technoscience have demonstrated how to think about desire while simultaneously indicting the systems and practices that do violence. When we refigure our scales of time, when we recentre the agentic aliveness of lands and waters, it becomes obvious that we can reconstitute ways of being in this place that are not extractive and damaging. It is telling that as a white woman I struggled for a long time about how to talk about Fort McMurray as a place that was simultaneously beautiful and damaged. All I had to do was listen to Indigenous scholars who have long loved places, people, communities, and worlds ripped apart by colonialism, but still insist that what is valuable in these things could still be loved and perhaps repaired, saved, or protected from the massive transformations brought by colonial violence and theft (TallBear, 2017; Whyte, 2016, 2018). These theoretical commitments, and these scholars have helped me to think about how to study the tar sands without relying on the types of damaged-based discourses that position this place as being ruinous, overcome by a destructive industry. However prevalent the industry remains in this place; it has not overcome this place. From these beginnings and commitments, I developed the first two sets of research questions.

1) What are the logics that make places like the tar sands seem inevitable or indispensable when they are not? 2) A) How does a place like the tar sands become normalized? B) How do people who live and work in this place makes sense of the tar sands?

In order to account for how criticism of the industry is reconciled or dismissed, I then asked

3) How is Indigenous resistance in this region understood/misunderstood? What makes these misunderstandings logical?

Lastly, as the project developed, and I began to make connections to the physical and built environments that were created to make extraction possible in this place, I wanted to know

4) What kinds of infrastructures are required to make a mega-industrial project like the tar sands possible?

These questions formed the foundation for developing interview questions (Appendix D) and structured how I designed the research project. In Table 1, I outline the method I used for answering each question.

Table 1 Research Questions and Methods Used

Research Questions Methods Used to Answer Question

What are the logics that make Interview questions: places like the tar sands seem 2. Can you tell me the story about how you started doing the work you do inevitable or indispensable now/the work you did as an oil worker? when they are not? 4. Do you think working here has changed anything about you? Can you describe that to me? [Follow up specifically for positive and negative changes?] 10. How long do you see yourself living and working here? What might change your mind about that? 11. What kind of future would you like to see for yourself? For your children? Is that possible here? - Coding for descriptions of high demand for oil, oil intensive lifestyles, Canadian economy runs on oil, and employment and lack of well paying jobs outside of oil (a) How does a place like the A)—Interview questions: tar sands become normalized? 14. What do you wish people understood about living here? (b) How do people who live 15. Is there anything you think outsiders don’t understand about the oil industry and work in this place makes and its relationship to Indigenous peoples and the environment? sense of the tar sands? - Coding for descriptions of Fort McMurray as “any other place” or “any other suburb” B) Interview questions: 7. What comes to mind when you think of what life is like in Fort McMurray in comparison to other places? 9. Can you describe the best parts of living here? The hardest parts? 10. How long do you see yourself living and working here? What might change your mind about that? 11. What kind of future would you like to see for yourself? For your children? Is that possible here? - Coding for evaluations of Indigenous hiring policies, environmental standards, and demand for oil How is Indigenous resistance Interview questions: in this region 12. Have you ever felt judgment from others for working here? Can you tell me understood/misunderstood? about a time that happened? What makes these 13. One of the concerns about oil development is how it impacts nearby misunderstandings logical? Indigenous communities. What do you think about the way this oil field impacts Indigenous people who live close to here? 14. What do you wish people understood about living here? 15. Is there anything you think outsiders don’t understand about the oil industry and its relationship to Indigenous peoples and the environment?

(table continues)

Table 1 (cont’d.)

What kinds of infrastructures Interview questions: are required to make a mega- 6. Tell me about where you live (when in Fort McMurray)? industrial project like the tar 7. What comes to mind when you think of what life is like in Fort McMurray in sands possible? comparison to other places? 9. Can you describe the best parts of living here? The hardest parts? 10. How long do you see yourself living and working here? What might change your mind about that? 11. What kind of future would you like to see for yourself? For your children? Is that possible here? Coding for home/belonging/descriptions of place

1.2 Settler Colonialism

This dissertation is invested in foregrounding relations of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism has been defined as a unique form of colonialism in that the invader comes to stay, and attempts to create a new society in place of the Indigenous ones (Wolfe, 2006). Interrelated to imperialism, colonialism became “the port of imperial outreach” (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012, 63), and served multiple functions including the extraction of and transportation of commodities, and as a site of cultural and national production. Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) accounts for colonialism as a process of nation building and one that requires dehumanization. She describes colonialism as

[a] particular realization of the imperial imagination. It was also, in part, an image of the future nation it would become. In this image lie images of the Other, stark contrasts and subtle nuances, of the ways in which the Indigenous communities were perceived and dealt with, which make the stories of colonialism part of a grander narrative and yet part also of a very local, very specific experience (L. T. Smith, p. 24).

In this way the experiences of colonialism around the world, both colonial and settler colonial contexts, require imaginaries of settler/colonizer and Other. What Fanon (1963) narrated as the colonizer bringing the colonized into existence, as both settler and native being constructions of colonialism. This relationship between settler and native has been narrated by Dene scholar Glen Coulthard (2014) as

. . . characterized by a particular form of domination; that is, it is a relationship where power—in this case, interrelated discursive and nondiscursive facets of economic, gendered, racial, and state power—has been structured into a relatively secure or

sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority. (pp. 6–7)

Coulthard (2014) argues that in Canada this colonial domination is maintained structurally to secure “ongoing state access to the land and resources that contradictorily provide the material and spiritual sustenance of Indigenous societies on the one hand, and the foundation of colonial state-formation, settlement, and capitalist development on the other” (p. 7). Tuck and Yang (2012) have clarified that settler colonialism is distinct from conceptualizations of external and internal colonialism; because these modes are employed in the operation of settler colonialism at the same time, “there is no spatial separation between metropole and colony” (p. 5). They give examples of internal colonialism through forced removal of Indigenous people from homelands to reserves, and U.S. Boarding Schools (and residential schools in Canada), and forms of external colonialism through resource extraction on Indigenous lands in the U.S. southwest and Alaska (and in this case, on Treaty and unceded lands all throughout Canada). Tuck and Yang (2012) argue, “The horizons of the settler colonial nation state are total and require a mode of total appropriation of Indigenous life and land, rather than the selective expropriation of profit- producing fragments” (p. 5). In this way settler colonialism is primarily about settler replacement of Indigenous people, and while it may also include the extraction and appropriation of resources this is not the central organizing principle. Settlement is distinct from immigration because as Tuck and Yang (2012) clarify “Immigrants are beholden to the Indigenous laws and epistemologies of the lands they migrate to. Settlers become the law, supplanting Indigenous laws and epistemologies. Therefore, settler nations are not immigrant nations” (see also A. J. Barker, 2009, pp. 6–7).

Settlement is about making a home on Indigenous lands, a process that involved the implantation of European legal practices that worked to construct white entitlement to dispossessed lands. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015) argues that, “Taking possession of Indigenous people’s lands was a quintessential act of colonization and was tied to the transition from the Enlightenment to modernity, which precipitated the emergence of a new subject into history within Europe” (p. 49). Moreton-Robinson reiterates that racialization was crucial to justify taking lands. However, her work helps us to theorize the role of land and property in racialized subject formation. Tracing the wide sweeping legal, economic, and social reforms that took place throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in Europe, Moreton-Robinson argues that the transition from

10 feudal to propertied relationships centred on the rise of “possessive individualism” (Davies & Naffine, 2001; Thielen-Wilson, 2011). Possessive individualism is the “increasing consciousness of the distinctiveness of each self-owning human entity as the primary social and political value” (Davies & Naffine, 2001, pp. 32–33). The idea of private ownership of property was further accelerated through the laws of the nascent nation state, as well as its regulation of population (Foucault, 2003; Moreton-Robinson, 2015;).

Property sets up relationships between people, creating the conditions in which legitimated violence can take place. The domain of “nonproperty,” also constructed as the frontier, works to sanction the violence required to conquer/control such space, to transform it from ‘the wild’ into propertied land that can be controlled and counted (Blomley, 2003, p. 135). At the boundary of civilization lies the frontier, the idea that settled colonial North America (Blomley, 2003, p. 125). The frontier, as Blomley (2003) argues,

offer[s] a striking contrast between the domain where property and security coexist and its antithesis—the violent spaces in which property is absent” (ibid.) The frontier, as a lawless, violent space is only lawless in that it is not ordered, and under the control of property (and property’s law) This appears as a neutral boundary, but “serves as a condition of possibility for property’s violence, distinguishing and constructing at one and the same time. (p. 135)

Through the enactment of property, which Blomley (2003) argues is discursive, material, performative and corporeal, “invest[s] [space] with particular valences and political possibilities” (p. 122), that ultimately order hierarchies, and sets up the relationships between certain bodies in those spaces (Blomley, 2003, p. 122). In the settler colony, these relationships of possession require Indigenous dispossession (Blomley, 2003, p. 129). However, the violence of dispossession is also forgotten “though a shift in emphasis and attention from processes of dispossession to possession” (Blomley, 2003, p. 128). The violence between law and the propertyless (or property owner and propertyless), as Blomley points out, is carried out invisibly as a function of the law, instead of being seen as the function of property itself.

In the settler colony, this takes place through what Patrick Wolfe (2006) calls a, “logic of elimination” that permeates all institutions, spaces, and laws. Striving for the continuous removal of Indigenous peoples to make way for the settler state, and its control of territory. Placing

Indigenous territories under the control and order of property then allows for the administration of dispossession and for the settler state’s possession. Access to land, as Patrick Wolfe argues is, “settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element” (2006, p. 388). In contrast however, Wolfe argues that this operation is more about the need to secure territory, and not centrally about race (288). However central land remains to the settler project, race remains crucial to both settler colonialism and the very ability to transform relationships through property.

Many scholars describe how the law has been used to distinguish Indigenous peoples as different (premodern, primitive, deficient) in order to justify their removal from their land and pursue policies of assimilation and genocide (Barker, 2011; Cannon, 2011; Lawrence, 2004, 2012; Razack, 2015). Furthermore, that these practices simultaneously operated to build and secure a white settler society (Razack, 2004; Thobani, 2007). Possession of the land took place through property regimes that relied upon the racialization of property regimes themselves. As Cheryl Harris (1993) has shown, property law remains “contingent on, intertwined with, and conflated with race” (p. 1714). The processes in which race has been embedded into property rights includes both the racial domination of Indigenous people through removal/genocide and the enslavement of Black people, which structured the capacity to create property rights in the United States. C. Harris (1993) argues:

Whiteness shares the critical characteristics of property even as the meaning of property has changed over time. In particular, whiteness and property share a common premise— the right to exclude. This conceptual nucleus has proven to be a powerful centre around which whiteness as property has taken shape. (p. 1714)

The legal frameworks that determined the right to exclude are entangled in the racial formation of property rights. Similarly, in the Canadian context, Dempsey, Gould and Sundberg (2011) describe how private property was one instrument through which Indigenous peoples were racialized as inferior, “due to their apparent lack of this particular land management regime” (Dempsey et al., 2011, p. 240). Dempsey et al. (2011) argue, “conceptions of private property in Canada are deeply entwined with colonial and capitalist systems of governance that sought to create a white setter society in which Euro-American models of land and subject reigned supreme” (p. 241).

Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015) describes this process, linking the establishment of legal and state forms of regulated possession with the emergence of what she calls a “new white property- owning subject” (p. 49) that emerged post-Enlightenment. Moreton-Robinson argues that in addition to changing legal, state, and economic relationships, this also created a shift at an ontological level. She writes, “The structure of subjective possession occurs through the imposition of one’s will-to-be on the thing that is perceived to lack will; thus, it is open to being possessed. This enables the formally free subject to make the thing its own” (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. 50). The act of asserting something as “mine” is an act of subject formation, as the subject embodies the idea of property as a normal and natural part of social life; possession of one’s own self develops into possession of land and other people. Fanon (1963) also describes this process as one of self-creation:

The settler and the native are old acquaintances. In fact, the settler is right when he speaks of knowing “them” well. For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence. The settler owes the fact of his very existence, that is to say, his property, to the colonial system. (p. 36)

In this passage, Fanon (1963) demonstrates how race operates in the subject’s formation, but also how race legitimates the dispossession in order to free up land for the setter to possess in the first place. Racialization “dehumanizes the native [by] turning him into an animal” (Fanon, 1963, p. 7), an object the settler can control and remove from land that becomes his own. However, it is the racial category of the native that is created; as Tuck and Yang clarify, Indigenous is an identity that remains independent of settler colonialism and predates the arrival of colonializers. Fanon (1963), however describes the encounter as conquest, as the settler dominates in order to possess (p. 7). Moreton-Robertson (2015) put it this way: “Ascribing one’s own subjective will onto the thing is required to make it one’s property, as willful possession of what was previously a will-less thing constitutes our primary form of embodiment” (p. 50). Possession forms “the ontological structure of white subjectivity” (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. 50) which relies upon possession of one’s self (mind, body, ideas, feelings) (ibid). However, this possession was not just self-defined through the Cartesian split between mind and body, but through the racial hierarchies that were created throughout European colonialism, the development of the Trans- Atlantic Slave Trade, and multiple racial dispossessions of empire building (da Silva, 2007; Lowe, 2015).

Lisa Lowe (2015) describes the ways in which racial difference is not universal or fixed thing, but instead are and were “local, regional, and differential, articulated in dynamic, interlocking ways with other attributions of social difference within various spaces in an emerging world system” (p. 7). Tracing the convergent and overlapping processes of and linkages between Indigenous expropriation, African enslavement, indentured migration, and other racial dispossessions of colonial-capitalist expansion, Lowe offers a way to account for what she terms, the “intimacies” between the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. In this way racial formation circulates between these continents and is contingent on particular histories that overlap and inform each other, while not attempting to make these different processes and violences equivalent. To clarify, as Renisa Mawani (2009) observes, “how meanings of differences are produced, organized, and regulated through power,” works to shape “the effects of these meanings on socio-political arrangements” (p. 2). In this way settler colonial states like Canada are founded on these racial logics and the linkages to the capitalist and colonial practices that made them possible through stolen land, anti-Black racism, and slavery, as well as migrant labour and xenophobic policies that sought make a white settler state.3

In addition to social and racial transformations, settler colonialism also sought and seeks to transform the land itself. Kyle Whyte (2016) argues that this looks like “terraforming,” to transform the settler colony into a version of the Europe left behind. This includes importing plants and animals, damming rivers, removing forests and other Indigenous land features to build cities, farms, and other types of extractive industries. Whyte (2016) describes, “industrial settler campaigns erase what makes a place ecologically unique in terms of human and nonhuman relations, the ecological history of a place, and the sharing of the environment by different human societies” (p. 8). Lorenzo Veracini (2010) describes this as the settler objective of progress or betterment, he writes, “When settlers claim land, it is recurrently in the context of a language the refers to ‘higher use’ and assimilation policies are recurrently designed to ‘uplift,’ ‘elevate,’ and ‘raise’ Indigenous communities” (p. 20).

3 Due to the scope of this dissertation I have not included the depth of scholarship on anti-Black racism in the Americas, nor have I discussed in detail the thorough ways that the relationships between the settler colonialism, anti-Black racism, chattel slavery, Orientalism, and other forms of racism have been theorized in the Canadian context (for more information see Maynard 2017; Walcott; 2003; McKittrick, 2006; Mawani, 2009; Mahrouse, 2014; Upadhyay, 2016).

Uplifting, or improving the land, works as a form of “original appropriation,” i.e., John Locke’s theory that labour, mixed with land, or work on the land, earned the settler his place on this land. Tied to other theories that sought to dispossess Indigenous people from their land by proving or describing how settler’s could ‘use’ the land more efficiently, or effectively, or that Indigenous people didn’t use the land at all in the first place, “original appropriation” offers an powerful narrative for settler belonging. Labour functions as a form of emplacement, or place making for the settler (Blomley, 2004), creating a relationship to land through work that becomes a “technique of settler belonging” (S. Jackson, 2012). This extends to the relations of capitalism that are pursued by the state, which can be understood as part of a colonial-capitalist project.

Drawing again from Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard (2014), we can understand colonial dispossession as foundational to capitalism. Coulthard’s reworking of Marx’s Primitive Accumulation theory helps us to attend to the ways in which dispossession looked and functioned differently in North America than it did in Europe. Coulthard (2014) argues that the capital relation “tends to concern itself most with the adverse structural and ideological effects stemming from expropriated labor” and takes for granted the idea that “land is not exploitable, people are” (p. 14). Coulthard (2014) argues that instead of the capital relationship,

. . . re-establishing the colonial relation of dispossession as a co-foundational feature of our understanding of and critical engagement with capitalism opens up the possibility of developing a more ecologically attentive critique of colonial-capitalist accumulation, especially if this engagement takes its cues from the grounded normativity of Indigenous modalities of place-based resistance and criticism. (p. 14)

Seeing land as exploitable, and de-centring the supremacy of the human relation makes room to account for how settler colonialism has shaped the ways of knowing what is exploitable. As well, the focus on the colonial relation to land takes into account how dispossession worked on a labour level in North America. Instead of dispossessing people in a process of proletarianization, Coulthard (2014) argues that after the fur trade period, “Canadian state-formation and colonial- capitalist development required first and foremost land, and only secondarily the surplus value afforded by cheap, Indigenous labor” (pp. 12–13). Instead it was the dispossession of land that formed the “dominant background structure shaping the character of the historical relations between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state” (p. 13). This allows us to take into account

15 how Indigenous struggle (including anticolonial and anticapitalist struggle) has centred around the question of land, and importantly, Coulthard (2014)emphasizes,

a struggle not only for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms—and less around our emergent status as “rightless proletarians.” (p. 13)

What Coulthard, and many other Indigenous scholars remind us, is that the capital relation alone misses the ways in which the colonial relation transformed meanings of land and the nonhuman (de la Cadena, 2015a; Kimmerer, 2013; Todd, 2017). The transformation of Indigenous land into Treaty-Crown land was not just about privatizing the commons for the use of the state, but also a transformation of the value of land. Locke and Marx (and much of Western philosophy and political economy) both share this understanding of land’s value—that its value comes from the work that is invested into it (Engle, 2011, p. 31). Whether communally or privately held, the labour with the object adds value and subsequently ownership and extractive relations to land. In this way both capitalist and socialist/communist projects still understand land to be primarily as a resource from which value can be added or extracted; not as something that is alive, or agentic. Sandy Grande (2004) clarifies, “both Marxists and capitalists view land and natural resources as commodities to be exploited, in the first instance, by capitalists for personal gain, and in the second by Marxists for the good of all” (p. 27). Centring the colonial relation in this analysis attends to how colonialism transformed relations to this place in particular ways that have resulted in significant efforts by the state to make tar-sands extraction possible and profitable. These analyses also allow me to examine the multiple ways in which it could be possible to understand this place as not only the sum of its damage, but the effects of particular ontologies and ideas about futurity that are still changeable.

1.3 Critical Place Inquiry

This research is also greatly influenced by the emerging methods and approaches that centre place in research. Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie (2015) have described a series of approaches, research methods, and methodological orientations to research “through which meaningful engagement of place can be undertaken” (p. 2). Thinking of place in research requires understanding the role of places in the research itself, “the where of the research encounter”

(Anderson & Jones, 2009, p. 293). For Tuck and McKenzie (2015), “when we stop viewing place as a static backdrop for social life and research, and instead consider more fully how place and materiality more broadly are mutually constitutive with the social, it changes the research frame” (p. 100).

In this way I have drawn upon decolonizing and Indigenous approaches to understanding land and place, including ideas of reciprocal relationality with nonhuman actors and kinship (de la Cadena, 2015b; Kimmerer, 2013; TallBear, 2017; Todd, 2017), as well as approaches developed in feminist and queer technoscience which grants agency or animacy to nonhuman beings including materials like stones, instruments, and water (Barad, 2007; Chen, 2012; Haraway, 2016). However, I am not collapsing these approaches in their treatment of nonhuman actors, because these two approaches contain very different ethical, relational, and theoretical commitments. The former understanding animacy and agency inside of a cosmology of kinship, and reciprocal relations between humans and nonhumans, as well as being knowledge that is place and time specific (Kovach, 2009). The later uses a “secular” framework that attempts to disrupt life/nonlife binaries that have been constructed by Western knowledge production (Chen, 2012; TallBear, 2017, p. 191). The stakes of these approaches are different, and also the potential they each offer for change or transformation. In this way I follow Tuck and McKenzie’s call that, “The task of critical place inquiry is to organize itself around commitments to Indigenous sovereignty, refusal, and the nonabstraction of land—not as peripheral points or extra considerations, but as foundational to its praxis” (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015, p. 149).4 The nonabstraction of land in this case is a way to fight against the tendency to view land as the backdrop of life, and foreground the relations of settler colonialism that have worked to

4 Critical Place Inquiry builds upon other theories of place, including geographer Doreen Massey’s (1991, 2005) work that suggests place is relational and deeply connected to time and physical processes. Tuck and McKenzie (2015) have described the ontological differences between the concept of place as it is used and understood in social sciences and geography more generally, and how place, or Land, is understood in Indigenous knowledges. As opposed to Western philosophical traditions that carry on into critical social science research, the materiality of place is often in relation to anthropocentrism and human action. In contrast to Indigenous cosomologies that understand land in relation to it “spiritual, emotional, and intellectual aspects” (Styres, Haig-Brown, & Blimkie, 2013), and “familial, intimate, intergenerational, and instructive” qualities (Tuck & McKenzie, p. 57). Tuck and McKenzie have argued that crucially Critical Place Inquiry is first and foremost “accountable to Indigenous peoples and futurity” (p. 29).

17 deterritorialize land, and transform it as a commodity or resource. Furthermore, organizing research around these objectives attempts to create research that “is explicitly political in its intentions and ethical obligations to land, people, and other species” (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015, p. 151). In approaching research in this way there is no attempt to make claims to ‘pure’ or ‘neutral’ knowledge, but instead a commitment to analyses and knowledge that expose logics that justify and explain away unequal distributions of and abuses of power.

1.4 Participant Demographics and Recruitment

In my interviews I spoke to participants about their histories, and experiences of working in the oil industry. I was interested in how labour in this industry shapes knowledge and experience, though I was less interested in participants’ work lives. We discussed what their actual jobs were and what this work means to them, but of greater importance was how work in this particular place has influenced other parts of their lives. Specifically, these interviews attempted to understand how their work life interacts and intersects with their life outside of work; from where they live, to what they do, to how their work has changed (or not) their understanding and experience of environmental and Indigenous criticism of the industry they work in.

In order to ensure a wide variety of experience I conducted purposive rather than random sampling. I recruited participants from a many different types of employment in and related to the oil industry (e.g. professional, manual labour, technical). I also included a wide variety of demographics like martial status, education level, and employer. However, because this study was also interested in the conditions of settler colonialism in this place, I only interviewed participants who are white Canadian citizens. There are significant populations of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour who live and work in Fort McMurray, however their experience is not the focus of this work. I am interested in how white settler people understand their place in this region, and how they make sense of the work they do in relation to the nation. I understand this experience to be different than those who migrate from other places, and whose place in the nation is always contingent on race and/or the conditions of their arrival into the Canadian nation.

However, it is important to note that there are several dissertations that do account for these experiences and have carefully described the ways in which colonial and racial logics structure how Indigenous (Alook, 2016; Gross, 2019; Joly, 2017a), and racialized workers (Upadhyay,

2016) experience employment in the tar sands. In particular, Nishant Upadhyay (2016) has written about the experiences of South Asian professionals in Fort McMurray and “studies the modalities of othering” (p. 14) that take place across complex relations of heteropatriarchy, whiteness, Indigeneity, anti-Black racism, casteism, anti-Sikh, and Islamophobic ideologies. Upadhyay has carefully accounted for the ways in which colonialism has imbued and embedded these various structural and historically specific processes of racial othering and how they take place unevenly across different South Asian diasporic communities in Canada. While Upadhyay’s work looks at South Asian experiences, their dissertation thoughtfully attends to the ways in which race in Canada is co-constituted through multiple forms of difference including anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism, as well as heteropatriarchy and class.

Angele Alook (2016) has studied the experiences of members of the Bigstone Cree Nation who work in the oil industry and the impacts of oil development in the region. In her study, Alook examines the gendered experiences of work, school, and family life, and traces different trajectories of her participants into oil work, as well as other work off reserve. She finds that due to the types of highly gendered work in the oil industry many more men from Bigstone Cree Nation are employed in oil work off reserve than women and she traces the different ways that this influences work and school choices for community members.

In this dissertation I was intentional about talking to people who were employed in the tar sands at the time of the interview or within the previous five years. This was intentionally sought out because I wanted to understand how the experience of working in this industry, the constant exposure to the effects of industry on the land, and the experience of relying upon this work for an income and a career, all shape how the criticisms of this industry (by both climate activists and Indigenous land defenders alike) are understood and made sense of. I hypothesized, that people currently or recently engaged with the industry would have very different stakes in the debate than climate activists or environmentalists (Helferty, 2018). There are other studies that focus on worker experiences of inter-provincial migration from Eastern Canada (Heller, Bell, Daveluy, McLaughlin, & Noël, 2015), and the Maritimes (Mazer, 2019). Katie Mazer’s (2019) dissertation in particular traces the role of state policy in these migrations; examining both the conditions that structure rural poverty in the Maritimes, and the policy changes to employment insurance that have pushed seasonal workers to migrate for jobs in resource extraction. Mazer traces the historical and contemporary state interventions in the national labour market, and the

19 relationships between policy makers and resource extraction (in particular mining) companies that require a flexible workforce for their operations. My work however examines how oil workers understand the place of the tar sands, and the ways in which this is experienced as a normal and inevitable industry.

For this research, I ended up successfully recruiting about one half of participants who were either commuters or worked for oil sands projects in Edmonton or Calgary. “Commuters” are people who commute from other cities and provinces to work in the industry for a certain number of weeks at a time and live in employer-provided housing (known as camps) during their shift. The other half were full-time Fort McMurray residents. This was purposefully done in order to understand the different types of relationships to the industry and to the place of the tar sands itself. In order to be eligible for this study, participants had to have worked in the oil industry within the last five years. There were four participants who had left the industry in the year before the interview and now worked in other fields. This was partly due to the downturn experienced in the oil industry in 2016, some people had been laid off and found work in another industry. Participants ages ranged from 22 to 60. I was originally interested in interviewing younger workers (ages 18 to 40), to understand how a population that came of age during an era of heightened awareness of Canadian-Indigenous relations, (e.g. The Official Government Apology for Residential Schools, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and activist resurgence typified in Idle No More), now understood Canadian-Indigenous relationships and colonial histories in relation to tar-sands development. However, during the recruitment process, I had three people over the age of 40 who were interested in my research and offered to participate. I found two of these interviews very interesting and valuable, the findings from which ended up in the dissertation. The third had very poor reception on the cell phone that was used to call me and as a result the interview transcript wasn’t able to capture a lot of what we discussed. This interview did not end up in the dissertation, however the conversation informed the process as much as any other.

Participants held a variety of different positions in the oil industry. Sixteen participants were full- time residents of Fort McMurray or were at the time of their employment with an oil company. Nine were commuters working in camps. However, only one of these commuters was a seasonal worker, meaning she moved back home to her home in Newfoundland for the spring and summer months (when fewer oil projects run) to live off of the Employment Insurance she banked while

20 working through the fall and winter at oil camps. This worker was also the only participant I interviewed that worked in the camp-service industry. She was employed as a cook in one of the camps to the north of Fort McMurray. The rest held year-round positions or tried to piece together contracts to offer them full employment. Some of these workers preferred commuting, especially those who worked shifts that offered them equal times at work and at home, like the so-called family-man shift of seven days on and seven days off. However, many more commuters ended up in these roles because they couldn’t find work in the places they lived full time, or couldn’t find work that paid as well as the oil industry commuting roles could offer. Four of my participants were Calgary based, but worked for oil operations that were active in Fort McMurray. Some oil companies have staff who work in Calgary in various positions, but often at the professional and executive level. Typically for Fort McMurray residents, landing a job in Calgary is considered very lucrative. However, one of the Calgary based participants did not work in a corporate style job, an

d instead had been employed in a welding firm that did projects for oil sands operations.

I interviewed two participants who worked in health and safety roles, working in the field monitoring safety procedures, leading trainings, and other types of environmental and health monitoring. These participants came from very different backgrounds, one professional, one as a first responder. However, both described this role as crucial to operations, though at times placed them in an adversarial role to workers, unions, and management who occasionally saw their role as slowing down day-to-day operations. I interviewed six tradespeople, including welders, millwrights, and pipefitters; of this group, all were men. Two of these tradespeople had since progressed in their careers to take on administrative office roles working on the maintenance and scheduling end of operations. This seemed to be a career trajectory for tradespeople as they aged and no longer wanted to work full time out in the field or in the shop. These two participants helped make up the five overall who were nonprofessional office workers. These workers did not start their employment in the oil industry with a university degree, and instead worked their way up to office jobs, starting in either the warehouse, or like I mentioned, as a trades journeymen. There were eight professional office workers, those who entered their employment in the oil industry with a university degree and worked in roles like accountant, communications/public

21 relations, community relations, supply chain management, procurement, and human resources. Two of these eight were executives at small oil companies, one in operations, another in human resources. In a similar category to the professional office workers were engineers. I interviewed eight engineers, many of whom were specialized as mining engineers. Engineers, depending on their interest, ambition, and skills worked in a wide variety of positions including technical roles for building, maintaining, and reclaiming mines, but also in executive and financial roles. This meant that some engineers worked out in the field supervising labourers or in the mine with massive machinery, and others held more standard executive style office jobs. Three of the engineers I interviewed had taken advantage of the programs offered by their employers to work towards a Master of Business Administration degree (MBA) while they worked full time. These companies partnered with universities to develop flexible programs and reimbursed large amounts of their employees’ tuition, with the idea that they would use this degree to prepare for a future in more demanding, executive roles within the companies they worked for. These types of programs were also common in many other roles, not just for engineers. One nonprofessional office worker I interviewed was doing a similar work-study program to complete a Bachelor of Commerce degree.

In my study, 12 participants were women, and 17 were men. According to the Labour Market Survey women make up only 21.5 percent of the workforce in the mining and oil and gas extraction industry, overall the workforce is 78.5 percent men (Government of Alberta, 2018). My study did not reflect these demographics, 40 percent of my participants working in oil and gas were women, and 60 percent men. From a 2018 report by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, layoffs reported by the oil and gas industry typically impacted women employees to a greater extent than men. This is in part due to the roles that women hold in this industry. Particularly in layoffs caused by mergers and acquisitions, the staff that are cut are typically in “shared services departments” like communications, and human resources, two areas where women are employed in greater numbers than men (Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers [CAPP], 2018). This report also concluded that office based/indoor roles were predominately held by women, 55 percent of the female oil and gas workforce employed in business, finance, and administration, 17 percent in natural and applied sciences, and 9 percent in management. The report highlighted however, that there was near equity between men and women in management roles, 10 percent men employed in this sector worked in management, to

22 the 9 percent of women. This idea of the oil and gas industry being a leader in equity and progress is one that I examine closer in Chapter 4. According the CAPP report, field-based occupations saw higher numbers of men employed, especially in trades and transportation, and these demographics reflect the make up of my research participants. The vast majority of my female participants held office-administration or engineering positions where they worked inside, and over half of my male participants worked in the mine, in the trades, and in health and safety out on the work site.

The role of race in this research is important to explain further. In intentionally seeking out only white participants, this research has an interest in how labour, and national discourses about oil’s place in the Canada economy shape white oil workers’ understandings of their work and the common criticisms it faces. Though I did not interview people who weren’t white, based on Nishant Upadhyay’s (2016) work with the South Asian oil industry workers in Fort McMurray, this undoubtedly looks different. As a result, the findings, and the experiences shared with me by participants are undeniably shaped by their experiences as white people. While this is a premise of the work, it is not the point of the work. This research is not interested in ‘catching’ participants sharing problematic or racist views, but instead has sought to learn a greater understanding about how participants’ life experiences have created certain common-sense knowledge about the world, including the ways in which race is expressed in that world. As a result, this research did not use covert interview techniques, as I deemed it ethically inappropriate. Tuck and Yang (2014) have argued that “Social science often works to collect stories of pain and humiliation in the lives of those being researched for commodification” (p. 223). Though referring common practices that end up over researching populations that are deems vulnerable or marginalized, Tuck and Yang’s call to do a different kind of research is also applicable here. While my research isn’t dealing in pain, it could be possible to humiliate. This has been a constant worry, and helpful guide as I work to think through how to analyze and represent what participants share with me.

Responding to these calls, I developed interview questions that asked about the participant’s histories and experiences, both in the oil industry and in Fort McMurray. Asking them to describe the conditions that led them to work in the industry (including what their parents did, post-secondary education or other training, how they found their current job) all to provide further context and history to their experience. Additionally, I asked them to describe their lives,

23 the landscapes of Fort McMurray, and their experiences working in a contested space and industry. This approach made sense for this study because I have intentionally tried to shift the focus away from either pathologizing or criticizing participant’s views and beliefs about the oil industry, to thinking about how these stories are a consequence of particular relationships to land, place, and capitalism. I have tried to capture the complexity of ways in which this place is understood and the complexity in how participants have ended up here and how they relate to this place.

Other ethical concerns of this research included the asymmetrical power relationship between researcher and subject. I draw from Laura Nader’s (1972) influential call to study and attempt to still problematize the “research encounter” itself (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015, p. 99) and the power relations that are always embedded in these encounters. In one sense, my choice to study white oil industry workers, as opposed to those displaced and marginalized by the oil developments in this region follows very closely to Nader’s (1972) urge to “study the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless” (p. 289). Indeed, many of my participants occupy dominant positions in society comparative to my own (specifically with regards to gender and income/class). Yet it would be far too simple to erase the power I wield as a researcher, and the ways in which I become entangled in the construction of knowledge extracted from their lives and experiences. The researcher sets the agenda of discussion, asks most of the questions, and uses the responses to achieve a qualification necessary for one’s advancement and ability to build a career. Regardless of the interpersonal power imbalance (as some participants experienced much greater degrees of social dominance than me), this imbalance between researcher and participant remains. With this relationship comes responsibility to the participant and influenced how I structured interview questions, the opportunities given to participants to edit their transcripts, and lastly, how I interpreted and analyzed the interviews. This responsibility guided me to treat their experiences and opinions with care, and work to not present the stories they shared with me in ways that could humiliate or embarrass them.

Thirty interviews were conducted, and one participant chose to withdraw after receiving the transcript. This interview, the corresponding emails, and transcript were destroyed. After each interview was conducted, the audio recording was transcribed, and the transcript was shared with the participant in order to verify that the transcript reflected our conversation accurately and that

24 what was written down captured the ideas they were trying to convey. In about a third of the cases, participants chose to edit the transcript, either removing information they felt might be too specific to their own work or experience and therefore could identify them, or they chose to edit certain things to better describe or clarify the idea they were trying to convey in the interview. The interviews took place in a time period between October 2016 to August 2017. This was a time of economic hardship for the oil and gas industry, which resulted in many people losing their jobs. As a result, many participants wanted to protect their identity in case their own jobs, or future employment could be at risk if they were identified as being critical of the oil industry. In response to these concerns I agreed to all the changes proposed by participants and worked to ensure they were comfortable with the parts of themselves that were obscured in the transcript.

All 29 interviews have informed the work of this dissertation, including notes taken throughout and following the interviews. Though as I have mentioned, the material from one interview does not appear due to recording problems. All interviews were crucial in developing both the codes needed for analysis, and in shaping how I understood the experiences and expertise shared with me by every participant. However, there are some interviews that were drawn on more heavily in certain chapters. The reasons for this are due to some participants having more to say than others in response to interview questions that informed important themes in this dissertation. These interview questions included water pollution in the Athabasca River and Lake Athabasca, Indigenous refusals of both pipelines and further development north of the currently operational oil mines north of Fort McMurray, and climate change. Some participants told me that they did not have opinions on these issues or were reluctant to share and discuss with me. As a result, the chapters that discuss these issues directly draw from those participants who did offer their thoughts on these issues.

Recruitment took place through personal networks including neighbours, co-workers, school friends and family members. I sent out a recruitment appeal and letter of invitation to these networks, asking them to forward my information to potential participants. Following this I then used snowball sampling techniques to identify my potential participant pool. In order to protect participants’ anonymity, I instructed interested participants to contact me directly (and not to reply through the person who sent them the recruitment letter). During my visits to Fort McMurray I posted my recruitment poster in public areas like recreation centres, job posting boards, the curling rink, and union offices throughout the city. I also shared the poster with a few

25 contacts, who put the posters up in their union halls in Edmonton. I had two people contact me through these posters, but ultimately, they both decided not to be interviewed. In January 2017, my recruitment began to slow down and so I purchased Facebook advertisements, targeted to people who had recently visited websites that had to do with oil industry work, ex. Union websites that listed job postings, oil industry websites that listed job postings, and Fort McMurray related websites including the newspaper, radio station, and community hub. These Facebook ads, when clicked, would take people to a Tumblr page I set up that included my same recruitment appeal address and my email address. As far as I can trace, very few people clicked on my Facebook ads, and no one contacted me from this means of recruitment. All of my participants were recruited by people I already knew in the city and industry.

I am especially grateful to my Mom, who sent out countless emails and Facebook messages to her former colleagues and friends. She hustled for my benefit for many months, and I would not have found 30 participants within 9 months if it was not for her hard work recruiting. Looking to other kinds of studies that have some overlap with my own, I know that 30 participants in this population is significant. Paula Butler (2015) describes her experience recruiting mining executives in Canada as a difficult process, and as a result her study includes only 18 participants. There is not a set standard in dissertation research that includes white people as its subject of study. Similar types of interview-based projects have included as few as 18 participants (Butler 2015; Heron 2007), and as many as 80 (Epstein, 2016). Based on methods outlined by Frankenburg (1993), 30 participants is an acceptable average, and was a feasible goal given the time and financial restraints of this project.

Interviews were recorded using a digital recorder, downloaded on to my laptop, and saved on to an encrypted USB stick. The files were then transcribed with identifying information removed, and each participant given a pseudonym. Given the possible economic impacts of being found out criticizing one’s employer (or the perception among oil workers, that this is something the oil industry frowns upon) pseudonyms were also given to the names of participants’ employers. These transcripts were saved on the same encrypted USB stick, also saved to a password protected file on my laptop, and finally backed up to the password protected file storage program Microsoft OneDrive. The signed consent forms, and other materials with identifying information are stored in a lock box, with me having the only access to its key. The key for pseudonyms/other identifiable information is stored on an encrypted USB. Upon completion of

26 my doctoral studies the consent forms, and original audio files will be destroyed. The transcribed interviews will be kept for 10 years, and then destroyed.

1.5 Interviews

I use interviews as my primary method of data collection, and in this project I used qualitative semi-structured interviews. These interviews are developed with Steinar Kvale’s (1996) methods which understand interviews to be a “specific form of conversation” (p. 19) that position interview participants able to interpret and offer meaning to the questions they are being asked. Kvale argues that there are two types of interviewers; using analogies of the miner and the traveller. The first digs for data, and like the miner, turns up whole pieces of intact data. The second, the traveller, allows the interview to take place like a journey and constructs the data through analysis as much as in the interview itself. Kvale argues for this second form of interviewing, and this is how I have collected my data. Kvale has also described the skill of interviewing to be like a craft that requires perceptive listening, and a careful focus on the relationality between the interviewer and the subject. This prioritization of the participant’s experience works to highlight the relationship between interviewer and interviewee, and places issues of ethics and consent to the forefront. The interviewer, Kvale argues, must strive for a “delicate balance between cognitive knowledge seeking and the ethical aspects of emotional human interaction” (Kvale, 1996, p. 125). With relationality at the forefront, Kvale argues that the knowledge created from the interview is co-produced or co-authored with the participant, and throughout the process of interview through to analysis. This makes this knowledge contextual, and relational in that the knowledge can not be excavated from the context and relationship that it was crafted in.

The interviews were typically 45 minutes long, with three that were under 30 mins, and four that were over an hour and a half. The interviews took place in person, and over Skype and telephone. The interviews that took place in person were conducted in Fort McMurray, AB, and Calgary, AB. The interviews in Fort McMurray took place in October and December 2016 and were conducted in Tim Horton’s locations in the city, and in three cases, in participant’s homes to accommodate the participants’ childcare needs. In these cases, the participants were already known to me or a family member before the interview and my safety was never at risk. The interviews that were done in Calgary, AB took place during a weeklong stay in February 2017

27 and were conducted at a Starbucks at the Chinook Mall. The remaining interviews were conducted over Skype and phone. Sometimes the participants preferred to talk on the phone, so they didn’t have to be tied to a computer while they spoke to me; other times, there were connection issues with Skype, and we had to use the phone as a backup to complete the interview. Similarly, in most attempts to use Skype to video conference with my participants, the video had to be turned off at least part of the way through to improve the audio quality. The difficulty we experienced using Skype can be attributed to both the cement walls of my apartment where I held the Skype calls from, but additionally many participants who were commuters chose to schedule their interview with me after their shift during their work week at a work camp north of Fort McMurray. While many workcamps have free WiFi for their workers, it was common for these participants to experience an intermittent internet connection that made video impossible, and we often ended up just using the audio function for the Skype call in the end to get a better connection.

Consent: For each participant I described the general purpose of the study verbally and in writing to participants at the recruitment stage, and again at the start of the interview. I asked the participants to sign a consent form after going through it together to identify that they understood what their participation entailed. Additionally, we discussed their right to withdraw from the study and went over this part of the consent form together. Participants were informed that they could withdraw at anytime during the interview and within 30 days of receiving the interview transcript, they could do so by phone, email, or in person.

The structure of the interviews followed a consistent pattern. I would describe the research project, discuss their decision to consent to the interview with them and reiterate that they had the right to withdraw at any time up to 30 days after receiving the transcript. Additionally, I shared the contact information for the Ethics Review Board of the University of Toronto and my supervisor and advised them that these were people to contact if they felt I had acted in unprofessionally or unethically. We then went through the interview questions, and occasionally I would ask nonscripted follow up questions in order for them to expand or clarify something they had mentioned.

Some interviews were more challenging than others. At least two people were very shy and quiet and answered in one-word answers or very short sentences. It took some rephrasing of questions

28 and short follow up questions for them to expand and offer up more details. One participant I interviewed in person was very defensive coming into the interview, and I got the impression she did not trust me or let her guard down during our conversation. At a later date, another participant I spoke to over Skype gave me a similar impression. In both cases I tried to spend more time explaining the questions and reassuring them of how their identity would be protected. Additionally, I let both participants remove sections of the transcript they felt were too personal or too closely reflective of their identities.

Overall, however, my participants were very open and generous. In many cases they were excited to talk to me about my research. For these participants, the common criticisms of this place, and the industry that sustains it are deeply felt as unjust. Many feel like Fort McMurray has an unearned bad reputation and this interview was an opportunity to give their side of the story and describe the good parts of both the oil industry, and the city and community of Fort McMurray. In these cases I felt that I was able to earn trust participants’ trust more easily given my history growing up in Fort McMurray and being familiar with the industry (both of my parents worked at Syncrude for 25 years, and I spent a summer working in the Utilities department at Syncrude in 2007). I used these experiences to describe myself in recruitment emails and in the interview with participants. In the interviews many people referenced my history and experience as granting me the status of ‘an insider.” I felt this way as well, I know the jargon of the work and the shift shorthands, and I know the specific places and histories of this area, as anyone would know their hometown. However, along with this status of ‘insider’ many participants assumed I supported oil and gas and held similar political views with regards to pipelines and further expansion of oil mines. In the short interaction of the interview there wasn’t time to dispel these assumptions, nor did more than two or three participants ask me about my opinion. I was always direct and clear with participants when they did ask, and in many cases these moments lead to interesting conversations that lead to participants sharing their own complicated feelings about their role in the industry. However, for the majority that did not ask, I tried to be truthful without using the interview as an opportunity to centre my take on the issues or make an example of those who had graciously offered to speak with me. I don’t see this as a deceptive interview tactic however, because I did not seek out to purposely mislead participants. I was truthful in how I described my work and in my commitment to understanding their perspective on these issues. However, there were times I felt as though they were making

29 assumptions about how I felt about particular issues that were never resolved. Yet, I feel this tension isn’t something that can be easily resolved, and is something that I continue to negotiate throughout the dissertation and in my everyday life. I have family members who rely on tar- sands operations for jobs and pensions. I have much loved family members who wear pro- pipeline political buttons on their coats, and who insist on the necessity of pipelines and oil development for Alberta’s future. Even at times when these family members agree with me about the need to uphold Treaty responsibilities to land (or land that was never ceded), and the real threats of climate change, these positions are held to, though perhaps less strongly. I’ve had to negotiate the parts of myself that I share with these people I love and respect, despite how I understand these politics to be aligned with violent dispossession. With this in mind, I did not feel any more conflicted talking with my participants about these issues than I did with my own family.

Despite this tension, I feel the need to clarify that I didn’t mislead participants or try to trick them into thinking I agreed with them. I think given the direct questions I asked about climate change, responsibilities for consultation and consent on Treaty 8 lands, and the negative impacts on water quality, participants would have likely been able to discern my political opinions or that I was at least somewhat critical of the industry. I work hard to empathize and understand the views and experiences they shared with me, and that understanding, held alongside my commitment to recentring Indigenous sovereignty over the lands and waters of this place remains a difficult, yet productive tension in this work.

1.6 Complex Personhood

Before turning to explain how I analyzed and represented the interview data I want to discuss how I have negotiated the conflict between my political/research commitments and the findings themselves. As I explain in Chapter 4, many participants deeply misunderstand Indigenous sovereignty, and relied upon damaged-based narratives about Indigenous people and communities to make sense of Cree, Dene, and Métis refusals of further oil sand development, and more largely, Indigenous refusals of many pipeline projects that bring tar-sands oil to market.

In this dissertation I have tried to think intentionally about this tension. I have been wary and careful to not depict my participants as evil colonizers, nor as loyal dupes to the oil companies. I

30 am also hesitant to position them as working class heroes, both in part because many of them are professionals and comfortably middle class, but also because that particular version of the story could easily erase the ways in which settler colonialism operates on a day-to-day level here and through tar-sands labour. Furthermore, these approaches that identify my participants as a ‘problem’ could easily continue to abstract land into a commodity or backdrop for human activity. It would be easy to relegate land to simply the stuff that is moved by shovels to get to the bitumen that creates work and a living. Instead I have attempted to pay attention to how land is experienced and understood.

I have attempted to share stories and words in ways that would not humiliate my participants, nor make them feel unfairly represented. While I maintain my commitment to understanding the relations and logics of tar sands in relation to settler colonialism, I don’t wish to position myself as the sole knower of this work. In every interview my participants offered me new ways to make sense of this place, and their own labour in the oil industry. As I discuss throughout, there are many participants I spoke to who have since left oil and gas. There are many that wish they could. Even participants who described working in the tar sands as their dream job and wouldn’t want to work anywhere else still had complicated feelings about the future of the planet. To make sense of these complicated situations, have drawn on Tuck’s desire-based framework which utilizes Avery Gordon’s (1997/2008) concept of complex personhood.

Complex personhood, according to A. Gordon (1997/2008), “confer[s] the respect on others that comes from presuming that life and people’s lives are simultaneously straightforward and full of enormously subtly meaning” (p. 5). Tuck’s (2009) adaptation of this concept includes “Indigenous understandings of collectivity and the interdependence of the collective and the person rather than on the Western focus on the individual” (p. 420). This concept and framework, though developed with very different research participants in mind, is still invaluable to my own project with racially and economically dominant people. It helps me to see contradiction or political tension as something generative and useful—as Gordon explains, “all people remember and forget, are beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others” (A. Gordon, 1997/2008, p. 4). It is in this light I have approached the analysis and reporting of findings from my participants. While my participants are not the over researched, pathologized people and communities Tuck writes her intervention for, her call for

31 ethical and desire-based frameworks for conducting research offers me a way to approach the complicated relationship I have had with the findings from my research.

Instead, in the analysis and writing stages of this research I have tried to think alongside my participants and pull apart the implicit assumptions, logics, and common-sense knowings that make their worlds/work/future make sense to them. While at times participant’s explanations about these issues came into conflict with what I hope for this dissertation to do, I still know that they still deserve my respect and to be treated as full complicated humans.

1.7 Data Analysis

Important in analyzing this data was thinking through how to understand the stories participants shared with me about their life and work in Fort McMurray. While I often disagreed with the politics or the practices they described living by, I sought to think of these interviews as a narrative generated by the interview (Kvale, 1996, p. 38). Tuck, Smith, Guess, Benjamin, and Jones (2014) describe this approach as “emphasiz[ing] the ways that the stories shared emerged in response to the questions and relationships generated by the interviews themselves” (p. 60). Tuck et al. describe a kind of analysis that seeks to co-theorize in the space of the interview, and while still engaging after the fact in reflective and critical ways—to respect the word of the participant and not engage in analysis that would otherwise treat their co-theorizations as in need of clarification, intervention, or interpretation. Many scholars warn of the practice of treating the analysis stage as a neutral act, that masks the power relationships embedded in knowledge production (Tuck & Yang, 2014), and treats participants’ stories and words as “brute data waiting to be coded” (St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014, p. 715).

In problematizing how data is analyzed, Roland Mitchell (2008) has advocated for a listening and analytical practice that is

. . . malleable and opened to subtle understandings and interpretations. I intend this type of listening to challenge taken-for-granted notions, norms, and conventions at the intersection of both researchers’ and participants’ understandings . . . to view participants’ ideas as the product of experientially contingent communal/collective understandings, as opposed to unmediated direct access to another’s world. (p. 78)

In this way the interview transcript is not understood as a neutral or objective account of participant’s Truths, but instead the result of a social interaction that is shaped by collective and societal ways of knowing and communicating. R. Mitchell (2008) argued that both participants and the researcher shape what is learned in the interview and how it is understood. “Both participants and researchers bring insights, precursor voices, and reflections to the research process that inform the ways that participants describe their experiences as well as the ways that researchers analyze and subsequently write about those experiences” (p. 92).

With these considerations in mind, coding followed multiple directions. Using Saldaña’s (2015) method, I coded sections where participants discussed their values, attitudes, and beliefs about the oil industry; including common criticism levelled at the tar sands, and Indigenous resistance. To understand the role of place in this research I also coded for stories about connection to Fort McMurray, descriptions of home, and other moments where participants shared experiences of connecting to this place. In a final pass I coded for descriptions of and conversations about how participants saw extractive futures as inevitable. Next, I followed Tuck et al.’s (2014) method of “tree mapping,” which is adapted from Paulo Freire’s Problem Tree exercise. This exercise asks participants to trace their relationships to everyday experiences of injustice to the societal attitudes and foundational ideologies that underpin them. In adapting this exercise to analyze interview data the Tuck et al. (2014) first developed the ‘leaves’ from participants’ interview data that described everyday instances or experiences of the research question. In my own study my leaves were the instances that participants described how demand of oil, or employment in the oil industry felt inevitable, or normal. Next Tuck et al. (2014) asked, “What are the beliefs or assumptions that feed the leaves?” (p. 63). The beliefs and assumptions form the trunk of the tree represent the common assumptions held by society—as identified by the participants themselves. Lastly, in mapping the trunk, they asked, “What are the systemic or ideological anchors— roots—that inform the trunk?” (Tuck et al., 2014, p. 64). These are the metanarratives, the underlying ontologies that are taken for granted and understood to be at the ‘root’ of societal values and assumptions and their everyday manifestations. Following their adapted method, I used the assumptions and beliefs from the trunk to serve as “nuanced, multidirectional codes for use in reading and excerpting interview narratives” (Tuck et al., 2014, p. 64). In using this method, I try to create space for participants’ understandings and co-theorizations to exist in this

33 dissertation alongside the political decisions I’ve also made about centring relationships to place and conditions of settler colonialism.

1.8 Limitations

This approach has several limits and omissions. For one, this approach has somewhat flattened the experiences of white collar professionals with blue-collar trades people and hourly workers. While literature exists on the unique experience of Fort McMurray blue-collar workers outearning white collar workers, this dissertation has treated these experiences more or less the same. In part this is because unlike in other industries there aren’t huge differences between the incomes earned by tradespeople and professionals like engineers (Major & Winters, 2013). There are wage discrepancies based on gender (and gendered forms of labour; Alook, 2016), as well as in nonunionized work, and work that is not directly for oil companies, ex: cooks, cleaners, retail, food service, etc. However, due to many people earning high wages here there have been studies that have found that class position is uniquely minimized in this place, particularly due to the culture of self-sufficiency and individual risk (Major & Winters, 2013). In particular to my own research, I found a similar tendency, which was likely heightened with my questions mostly focusing on place, Treaty, Indigenous refusals of development, and consequences of oil development. I didn’t ask questions about class, and other than discussing their work lives, and how they came to Fort McMurray/tar-sands employment, there were not many opportunities within the span of the interview to discuss their labour or their identities in relation to class.

This study has also not discussed the role of gender and sexuality. Much of the interview questions were related to day-to-day experiences at work, and in the place of Fort McMurray, the work camp, or the oil industry. With this focus on place and work, participants were welcome to discuss either class or gender or sexuality, but these aspects were only raised by participants a handful of times. Again, understanding knowledge to be something that is made, produced in the interaction between participant and researcher, this lack of discussion on this issue is a result of these aspects not being outwardly offered as a point of conversation, and participants not raising them independently.

These aspects of identity and experience would all be worthwhile to probe directly for further research, particularly in the ways in which women experience the male heavy workforce of the camp and trades jobs, or in how queer workers navigate what has stereotypically been a cis-

34 heteronormative work environment. There were several examples in my interviews when women raised examples of gendered harassment on the job and how their superiors either dealt with or ignored the situation. However, due to the limits of time and space in this dissertation I chose not analyze these stories, nor centre them in the discussion. Similarly, there were a few participants who discussed homophobia in their interviews, but no one explicitly discussed having queer relationships, or centred their queer identity in relation to their work life or their life in Fort McMurray. This could have been in part due to an unwillingness to discuss these issues in the public places interviews were held, or about the uncertainty about my acceptance of queer identities, but either way I did not ask or follow up with direct questions on queer desire or personal experiences of homophobia.

Lastly, this research is limited on its sole focus of white workers. Understanding how Black workers, workers of colour, and Indigenous workers make sense of this contested industry, and their relationships to both this place and the labour here would be a significant contribution to understanding race and different relationships to the nation state. There has been some important work that considers these dynamics including, as I mentioned above Upadhyay’s (2016) study on South Asian diasporas in Fort McMurray, Alook’s (2016) research on Indigenous oil workers at Big Stone Cree First Nation, and lastly Lena Gross’s (2019) work with Indigenous oil workers in Lac La Biche, Alberta. These studies offer much different insights into how race functions within tar-sands labour and belonging in this northern community. The way I only examine race through the lens of whiteness and belonging to the white settler state. This is only one aspect of how these dynamics shape particular attitudes, beliefs, and values about oil work. Lastly, this limited focus leaves my work without a complex understanding of racial power and the logics that structure it.

1.9 Unforeseen Challenges

I completed the proposal for this research in late April of 2016. While I was beginning to prepare my ethics application that spring Fort McMurray had been experiencing unusually hot, dry weather. In a place where springtime snow falls and frigid temperatures are much more common, the early heatwave made the surrounding forests of Northern Alberta tinder dry and several forest fires were ignited. Forest/wildfires happened several times while I lived there, and it was

35 common to smell fires burning hundreds of kilometres north when the wind changed during the summer months.

But on May 3 fires burning to the south of Fort McMurray changed direction and suddenly enveloped the city. Within hours the city was notified of mandatory evacuation of the city’s 88,000 residents. However, before many people could leave, the only highway south was closed forcing thousands of people to drive north to shelter in oil industry worker camps while firefighters worked to reopen the highway. In that time, several neighbourhoods south of the Athabasca River were razed by the flames. The wildfire continued to spread throughout the forested areas to the north and south of the city during the following weeks. 19 oil sites were also evacuated along with 8,000 workers housed in work camps. By May 21 the fire had grown to 504,443 hectares, reaching all the way to Saskatchewan. By the end of May the fire had moved away from the city, but two gas line explosions, poor air quality and key infrastructure damaged by the fire and the smoke (including the power grid, the water treatment plant and the hospital) prevented residents from returning. A phased re-entry plan was developed and throughout June and July people returned to the city as different infrastructures were brought back online and neighbourhoods were cleared for re-entry (Government of Alberta, 2016).

This was a deeply traumatic experience for many of my participants, especially those who had to drive through dangerous flames to evacuate, and those who lost their homes. The effects the fire had on participants shaped my research in important ways. The first was timing. I had originally planned to go to the city to do my first round of interviews during the summer months. However, given how long it took to make the city habitable again, and due to the traumatic experience for many I would be interviewing I decided to delay my trip until October 2016. October is just one month into the start of the school year, which was a deciding moment for many evacuees about whether they would return to rebuild their lives or stay in the new places they had evacuated to. Lost friendships were mentioned several times by participants who had seen their friends make the decision to not come back. This also shaped how people viewed the community of Fort McMurray. For many the social problems that plagued the city during the boom years, high rents, transient populations, and spill off effects from the work camps like high rates of drug use, binge drinking, street fights, were all parts of living in Fort McMurray that were difficult. With the fire coinciding with the economic downturn the number of fly in-fly out workers had dramatically decreased, along with workers who were only in the city for temporary contracts

36 and jobs. Many felt as though this was a silver lining from the city’s hardships, as only the most committed and community minded came back to rebuild. Many shared their pride in the city, their fellow Fort McMurrayites, and that this is where they called home. I know from growing up here that these feelings existed before the fire, but the impact of the fire certainly magnified these feelings and narratives about this place.

The second, and most important impact of the fire on my research, was how it put infrastructure on the forefront of participant’s minds. As I discuss in Chapter 3, during the boom years of high oil prices the city felt as though it was bursting. There were not enough roads, services, and other kinds of infrastructure to support the influx of workers. After the downturn and the fire, the newly built infrastructure, that could now comfortably support the lower population left participants feeling much better about building their life in this place. Additionally, the new twinned highway made travel safer, and faster—something that mattered much more post-fire evacuation than ever before.

The other major change in my proposed research plan was the role of focus groups. I had intended to conduct a focus group made up of previously interviewed participants. I was interested in participants displayed openness and interest in discussing experiences feeling conflict in their work and a willingness to discuss these conflicts in depth. I was to ask them about participating in the focus group at the end of the one-on-one interviews. Following Hennick (2014), I planned to approach participants who shared similar experiences, and if possible, shared similar age, gender, life stage, socioeconomic status, and level of authority (p. 39). The focus groups were going to be small (7 to 9) in order to better facilitate group discussions, and build trust and rapport with participants, and between the participants themselves.

However, in the first few rounds of interviews with participants that I met in person, I did not come across many people who would have be suited to this criteria. As interviews progressed, and I did more interviews via Skype and telephone, I came across upwards of six people who would have suited the goals of the focus group, but they were all located in different places, and worked very different schedules. Two of these participants were located in work camps that experienced very intermittent video/audio quality, and another two were currently living in different time zones. With all of these considerations, I made the decision to forego the focus

37 group. While it might have been possible to conduct via Skype, I was apprehensive that this format would facilitate meaningful discussion and allow for participants to gain the trust of each other. Furthermore, the logistics of setting this up proved too difficult, especially given the members who worked out at camp, and had irregular hours. Lastly, by the time I had identified the possible participants, I had already amassed a large amount of interview data that touched on the ideas that I was interested in pursuing in the focus group. Making the decision to not do the focus group did not leave me feeling like I did not get the data I would have had otherwise.

Chapter 2 The Place of the Tar Sands

In December 2016 I travelled home to Alberta to conduct research and also to spend time with my family over the holidays. I met with several people in Fort McMurray before catching a bus south to Edmonton. Once at my parent’s home in Edmonton, I set up a telephone interview with Dave, who was also home for the holidays. Dave makes his full-time home in a small town outside Edmonton. Even though we were both in the Edmonton area, we agreed to meet over the telephone, so that Dave wouldn’t have to leave his kids just a few days before Christmas, during his week off. Dave is someone we call a commuter—someone who makes their home in other parts of the province or country, but commutes to work in the tar sands and lives in camps (employer-provided housing close to the mine sites).1 Dave works the so-called family-man shift: seven days at camp, working 12–14 hour days; and then seven days off, at home with his wife and kids. The family-man shift is one of the few shifts that gives you equal time at work and at home, making it appealing to those with children. The workforce employed in these so-called man camps is still dominated by men, hence the shift being called family-man and not some gender neutral version of it. A few of my participants worked this shift schedule and loved that during their week off they could be a full-time, stay-at-home dad, which helped to make up for the full week away every other week. For Dave, who had worked in coal mines in western Alberta for years before he found the job in Fort McMurray, this shift was the best thing to happen to his family life. On those other jobs he was away two, sometimes three weeks at a time, and with young children he felt like he was always missing out. For Dave, the family-man shift and the significant pay increase he received switching from coal mining to oil mining made a significant impact on his life.

When I asked Dave what he thought of the concerns many scientists and activists raise about the impact the oil industry has had on the environment in this place, he told me, “As far as the environmental impact in Fort McMurray—in my opinion that land was uninhabitable. Where CN

1 Unlike conventional oil deposits that are drilled and pumped out of the earth, tar sands are still often mined in large open-pit strip mines. There are new technologies that include SAG-D (steam-assisted gravity drainage) that more closely resemble traditional oil extraction; however, there are significant open-pit mines still in operation in this region.

38 39 rail is now, it was all water.” For Dave, Fort McMurray wasn’t a place he would be able to live before the transformation brought on by oil development. This statement might make Dave seem particularly dismissive of how tar-sands extraction has impacted the forests, wildlife, and Athabasca River system. His statement could even be interpreted as being ignorant of the incredible scale of disruption and damage brought to this region by oil development. However, I don’t think that Dave is either dismissive or ignorant. His generosity in sharing his time and perspectives with me demanded that I treat his words with an equal amount of generosity and care. Instead of writing off Dave’s perspective as uninformed or indifferent, I want to put his statement in conversation with how other participants described this place as “in the middle of nothing,” or “nowhere.” Dave’s comment in a way questions whether environmental damage matters when no one lives there anyway. While Dave’s and the other participants’ understanding erases all of the ways in which Indigenous people have made lives in this place long before the CN rail tracks were laid, I have pulled out this statement in order to think about how Dave’s starting point for thinking about Fort McMurray is widely shared and accepted.

The problem is not Dave, but the problem is also not not Dave. At the crux of this dissertation is the tension between the structural forces that shape our lives and choices, and the forms of personal responsibility and agency we can still be accountable for. This tension has generated the shape and focus of this dissertation from the beginning; and at different times throughout the research and writing of it I have oscillated between wanting to argue that it is entirely structural, or that it is entirely personal. I’ve been reminded recently, however, that complex problems often demand complex solutions. The problem is always more than just what structures do or what people do, because both people and structures are always being shaped, navigated, refused, complicated by, and resisted by human behaviour and beliefs. Many people who have worked in the tar sands can easily reconcile the problems with this industry; many feel conflicted, but don’t know what to do about their feelings; and many others choose to leave as soon as they can afford to. My participants individually represented all of these positions and more. But choice is always more political than that. Extractive economies, huge investments in infrastructures, and structural limitations on developing alternative employment opportunities that pay decent wages all influence how my participants were first able to make their choices. However, as many participants told me, choosing to work in this place, in this industry, is rarely easy. Moving far

40 from home, enduring long hours, and for some, doing work that is harming the planet, all factor into how this place can be difficult.

Furthermore, as I argue below, decisions to work in oil are also deeply connected to widespread and strongly held beliefs about land use. These are the understandings of so-called productive land use, which were implanted here through colonization, and have since been reproduced and sustained through the law; and through state-sanctioned practices of land use and place making that seek to replace Indigenous use of and knowledges of the land. For Dave, like many white settler workers in Fort McMurray who I spoke to, the starting point of known history begins with European presence in this place, and their practices of settlement and extraction (first of beaver pelts, then timber, and now oil sands) that have been featured in mainstream histories of this region. I would argue that these beliefs and understandings are not a result of my participants’ lack of education, or that the white settler workers in Fort McMurray are simply dupes who agree with the oil companies they work for. Instead, it is important to pull apart how as a society, and a nation, we have been taught and learned to make sense of land in ways that position Indigenous land uses as premodern and not compatible with modern life. With Indigenous knowledge and land use safely contained in the past, the modern or productive uses of land (i.e., for industry, resource extraction, agriculture, or building modern cities) can be installed as the necessary, common-sense uses for settler state economies of extraction (see also Lindberg, 2010). Dave, and many of my participants, understand the progress of Fort McMurray from uninhabitable land to modern city through a historical narrative that places human agency and human action at its centre. Of course, this story of progress hides the violent practices of dispossession that were required for scientific innovation and pioneering oil development to take place.

In contrast, here I discuss how the tar sands are a place that exists with or without human knowledge of them. The land itself becomes the starting point from which to interpret everything else. One way to describe this place would be to recount a chronological history of the written histories of human interaction with it. However, in this telling it would be easy for readers to misread a series of described events as a chronology of human progress, beginning with traditional Indigenous philosophies and practices of land use and ending up at the highly scientific extraction processes that extract oil from this place. Such a chronological telling might also be misread as depicting Indigenous presence on this land as a historical fact, and not as an

41 ongoing presence. Instead, I attempt to centre Indigenous presence throughout the telling of this history, and in doing so complicate the narrative of human interaction with, and transformation of, this place. In doing so I understand European and Canadian state practices of place making as being in response to Indigenous presence and forms of place making that posed and continue to pose a threat to settler/colonial/capitalist transformation of lands and waters. These forms of place making construct places in the abstract—into being solely about their function and economic value. Isolation makes sense when you think of places as discrete and abstracted, defined by their usefulness to humans. Even “nothing” has a context that has formed it—nothing or nowhere in relation to somewhere that has a place and time. In this chapter I trace the histories of this place to think about how a place that is abundant with life can come to be understood as “nothing” or “nowhere.” In thinking about this dichotomy, and the relations that it has emerged from I offer a starting point from which to try to understand how places like the tar sands come to be made and normalized.

I then go on to a discussion of the formations of European land tenure and colonial-capitalist relations that shaped how land appropriation in the Athabasca River Valley was justified. As the Canadian state emerged from the fur trade period, I look to 1899 and 1900—the two years in which Treaty 8 was signed and modern state forms of land tenure and title were created and imposed on this place. I contrast these European philosophical and legal practices with the cosmologies and legal traditions of the Indigenous people of this region and how state place making was made in response to existing forms of place making by Indigenous people. These legal protocols and ontologies trouble and contest the European relations that were imposed through the fur trade, Treaty 8, and eventually extractive capitalism.

2.1 A Place in the Middle of Nowhere

In this section I look at the histories that participants understand as the starting point for this place. While many referenced Indigenous people as the first people of this place, they prioritized the histories of European presence, settlement, and industry, including narratives of human progress and civilization building that began with the fur trade, the exploration for oil, and the eventual scientific breakthroughs that led to the process now used to separate oil from the sandy bitumen. Don, who is now retired from a 40-year career in the oil industry, shared his thoughts about the history of this place:

[Fort McMurray] used to be one of the main hubs up north for a long time. Like, you know, . . . you asked this question about what I wish people would know about Fort McMurray . . . There’s just . . . because . . . the things that happened in that town over the years is a . . . it’s a frontier town for many years. And you see a lot of the pictures of . . . you know, 1900 and 1920s, of people up there, and these old planes and people were flying out of there [with float planes] off the Snye [Waterway] and stuff. It was unreal.

Don describes Frontier Fort McMurray, the version of this place that includes histories of the fur traders, of bush planes, and the early pioneers of oil mining. For Don and others I spoke to, these histories are the ones they learn when they move here from the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, and Heritage Park;2 or through the names of the pioneers that are memorialized on schools, streets, and buildings throughout Fort McMurray.

Don first came up to work, and then live and raise his family in Fort McMurray, in the late 1970s. He remembers Fort McMurray long before the oil booms and busts3 that shaped the city, and loved this place because it was far from city life both geographically but also in terms of a state of mind. Don fondly remembered days when people could ride their Ski-Doo in residential neighbourhoods, when it was smaller, and he knew everyone. The frontier-town version of Fort McMurray evokes an image of an outpost of settlement in the midst of a vast, unsettled, unpopulated region—the forest, lakes and rivers, where civilization had not yet reached. Despite this nostalgia for a smaller and simpler Fort McMurray, the isolation and distance from Edmonton ended up being the reason Don eventually had to leave. When I asked him what was most difficult about life in Fort McMurray, he told me, “Isolation. One road in, one road out.” His wife needed medical treatments in Edmonton that were unavailable in Fort McMurray, and

2 The Oil Sands Discovery Centre is an educational facility about the history of oil extraction and has exhibits on current technical processes used in the industry. Heritage Park, now called Heritage Village, is a historical park with buildings from Fort McMurray’s past that form exhibits about different periods of time. While it contains exhibits on Indigenous people, the park is mostly devoted to moments of European settler history, including the religious missionaries, the fur trade, and early settlement.

3 Fort McMurray, and Alberta more generally are both deeply shaped and impacted by the rise and fall of global oil commodity markets. As oil prices rise, new exploration and extraction projects are developed, workers flock to the city for work, and the city itself grows as new housing developments and services are built up. As oil prices drop, as we have seen most recently since the 2015 downturn, these trends reverse leaving the city and the province with large revenue shortfalls, and increased unemployment.

43 making the regular trip south was difficult, especially since this was during the boom years and the highway was very busy and often dangerous. (I expand on this in Chapter 3, where I discuss infrastructure.) While Don appreciated the frontier-town experience, it was still difficult to live in a place where he could not access all of the things he needed. This lack or absence of services in part defines the meaning of isolation.

Many of people I interviewed experience this place in terms of isolation. Both for those who were living in Fort McMurray and for those who commuted, isolation came up again and again in our conversations. While many had come to love Fort McMurray, and planned to make a future there, nearly everyone mentioned how the feeling of isolation made their life difficult at times. Ben, an electrician apprentice in his 20s who worked for a major oil company, had spent time living in both Fort McMurray and on Vancouver Island. When I asked him what was the hardest part about living in Fort McMurray, he said:

Being far from anything. You’re four hours from Edmonton and that’s maybe one of the harder parts. I guess sometimes the winter, when it’s really cold. You gotta get over that. But I would say the hardest part is being that far from Edmonton. If you want to go anywhere it’s a minimum four-and-a-half-hour drive, every time, right? Now that the highway is twinned it’s a lot easier, but it’s the hardest part. Being almost secluded from everyone. When I lived on Vancouver Island—every 15 minutes on the highway you’re seeing a new little town, whereas here it’s four hours of nothing.

The perception that Fort McMurray is in the middle of nowhere, or surrounded by nothing, is an interesting way to start to think about the place of Fort McMurray. It reveals something about how white settler workers there make sense of place in relation to how settlement feels and is experienced in other places in Canada. “Four hours of nothing” was a common sentiment shared with me by nearly all participants when describing the distance from Fort McMurray to Edmonton. The road south was lonely and long. It made trips home to family members four hours longer and added another leg to already long journeys.

While we can make sense of isolation in terms of geography and access to important services, isolation is also about how participants related to places outside the city of Fort McMurray. Robert, a mining engineer who grew up in the Lower Mainland of BC, has worked in the tar sands and lived in Fort McMurray since he graduated university, about eight years ago. He had

44 come to see Fort McMurray as home and envisioned a bright future there for him and his wife. Although he described the distance from Edmonton as one thing that made life difficult there, Robert also described this isolation as a very unique and valuable thing about living in Fort McMurray. Pointing to the woods just past the subdivision where the Tim Hortons (our meeting place) was located, he told me: “That’s the woods all the way until there aren’t woods anymore. There’s nothing out there and that’s really cool.”

Nothing out there, nothing here before, middle of nowhere, “the woods all the way until there aren’t woods anymore”—nothing was commonly used to describe Fort McMurray’s location, far from major cities and more densely populated regions of the province, and always in reference to the vast wilderness of thick forests that surrounds this place. Isolation is about distance from people and places that are familiar, but also about the idea that this place is in the middle of nowhere. Participants made sense of this place in particular ways that can be traced to ideas of the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius.

In showing how these philosophical foundations have shaped land use for centuries, and as a result, everyday understandings of place in the present, I demonstrate how logics of colonialism offer us only limited ways of engaging with land and place. If certain places are nowhere, then what makes a place legible as a somewhere? In a later chapter I will discuss in greater detail how the building of Fort McMurray into a relatable place (i.e., a settler city) rests on building particular kinds of infrastructure. For now, I turn to the tar sands as an Indigenous place. I contrast the ideas my participants shared about this being a place in the middle of nothing, with the ways in which Cree, Dene, and Métis people know this place.

2.2 Tar Sands as an Indigenous Place

The places where tar sands are mined from the ground continue to be Indigenous homelands, places where there are land-based teachings, where ceremonies take place, medicines gathered, and traplines maintained. Though the extent of and the control that oil companies exert over access to many of the lands along the Athabasca and Clearwater Rivers may feel totalizing, this land is still the homeland for Dene, Cree, and Métis people. Tara Joly (2017b) who has worked with the Fort McMurray Métis community, described an important lesson taught to her by her Métis teacher:

In 2014, on a drive north of Fort McMurray along the regional Highway 63, between tailings ponds and open-pit mines, one of my Métis teachers explained to me that she sometimes prays at an untouched area along the highway. My teacher’s act of praying reinforced the fact that the Athabasca region is still traditional territory, not only an extractive space. . . . Despite environmental damage, my teacher’s ceremonies affirmed that the land remains spiritually salient and embedded with stories, even if they are less visible than before development. (n.p.)

That an extractive place like the tar sands can also be a traditional homeland and viable place for teachings and prayer interrupts more common depictions and discussions about this place by those who critique oil extraction. Instead of centring the damage of the extraction, Métis and Indigenous nations describe their desires for land and life in this place (see also Tuck, 2009). Another example of this orientation are the Healing Walks led by water protectors of the Athabasca River and by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN), whose reserve is downstream from the oil developments at Lake Athabasca. In these walks, Elders and Water Keepers do ceremony on lands and waters actively held by oil companies. I discuss the water walks and other forms of Indigenous refusals in greater detail in Chapter 6, but I raise it here briefly to further the point that Indigenous presence in, and connection to this place, continues.

It would be a mistake to read my discussion of Indigenous land practice as only a legal history, or as facts frozen in the past. In this section, I reference traditional practices with the understanding that these traditions are ongoing, uninterrupted, and living. In this moment that can feel as though extractive land use has overcome all other ways of understanding and relating to this place of extraction, it is important to remember that Indigenous people continue to have ongoing relationships to this place.

Furthermore, in describing Indigenous teachings on land and reciprocity first, I am better able to contrast their relationships to this place to the Euro-Canadian relationships I describe later. Western understandings of place through the resource and extractive value of land structure how dispossession continues to be justified, whereas the relationships I outline here offer other ways to know and value this place outside of extractive capitalism. Lastly, in this way, I am better able to describe how Indigenous forms of place making have been responded to directly by the Crown and later by the Canadian state, which saw (and continues to see) Indigenous practices of place

46 making and legal philosophies of land reciprocity to be direct threats to the state’s regimes of private property and resource-extraction leases.

The places along the Athabasca River and the meeting point of Athabasca and Clearwater Rivers are the traditional territories of Dene and Cree nations, and home to several Métis settlements. Long before European and Canadian interest in tar sands, this tar was used by Dene people to waterproof and repair their canoes (Canada’s Oil Sands, n.d.). Dene relationships to this place go beyond early use of bitumen. The Dene word níh boghodi, which has been translated as “we are the stewards of this land” is used by the ACFN to describe their relationship to the places along the Athabasca River and Lake Athabasca that make up their homelands (Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, 2012). Stewards of the water, the forests, and the Thunzea (woodland caribou), the Et’thén (barren land caribou), and the dechen yághe ejere (or thachin ya n’jere, wood bison) all form elements of the distinctive Prairie Dene culture rooted in this place (Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, 2012). Through níh boghodi, the Dene describe a relationship to the lands and waters of this territory that is fundamentality about responsibility and care. ACFN Elders have affirmed that

. . . consistent with our Nation’s ancestral oral laws, the principle of níh boghodi, the ACFN Elder’s Declaration on Rights to Land Use, Treaty No. 8, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, our Nation has a sacred, pre-existing and sovereign right and responsibility to protect, care for, and manage our air, land, and water. (Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, 2012, n.p.; emphasis added)

The responsibility to protect, or for reciprocal relations towards the land, water and life of this region is fundamental to the Dene understanding of their rights to this place. However, this place is not just Dene homeland. There are also Métis settlements, and Sakāwithiniwak (Woodland Cree) who have lived alongside Dene peoples in these places along the Athabasca and throughout the Peace-Athabasca Delta. Understandings of land as a relational responsibility are shared across Dene, Cree (Cardinal & Hildebrandt, 2000) and Métis (Joly, 2017a, 2017b) legal traditions and practices.

To understand Nîhithaw (Cree) philosophies of the land I cite the work of Harold Cardinal and Walter Hildebrandt. Cardinal and Hildebrandt (2000) interviewed Elders in Saskatchewan about treaty; and have described some of the teachings that were shared with them on the overlapping

47 linguistic, spiritual, legal, and land-based knowledges of the Dene, Nakoda, Saulteaux, and Cree peoples who live in territories that include and extend past what is now known as the province of Saskatchewan.

I am careful to think about the place-based differences of what is now Saskatchewan and the territories that surround the Athabasca River in what is now known as Alberta. These provincial borders are not defined in relation to the homelands of Indigenous nations themselves. Furthermore, Treaties 4, 6, and 8 (the treaty areas in Saskatchewan that Cardinal and Hildebrandt work from) all cross provincial boundaries, and like provincial boundaries, these Treaties were drawn by the federal government in Ottawa before Treaty Commissioners had even visited the region (Madill, 1986). The Treaties encompass many different nations that live in these areas, and it can be easy to flatten or one-dimensionalize the different protocols, languages, and practices each nation has for codifying and protecting relations to other nations, and to specific lands and waters. Yet, as Cardinal and Hildebrandt highlight, there are important similarities between these Nations’ belief systems, and how these spiritual foundations inform the philosophical and legal traditions that govern relations to other nations, lands, waters, and nonhuman beings. Furthermore, they stress that because these laws arise out of ceremony they become irrevocable. Cardinal and Hildebrandt write of this through teachings shared with them by Neheyiwak Elders from Treaty 6 territories. It bears to quote them at length:

The Elders emphasize the sacredness of the Earth, and in particular the sacredness of the Peoples’ Island—North America—that was given to their peoples to live on. The Elders say that the Creator gave the First Nations peoples the lands in North America. The Elders maintain that the land belongs to their peoples as their peoples belong to the land. The land, waters, and all life-giving forces in North America were, and are, an integral part of a sacred relationship with the Creator. The land and water could never be sold or given away by their Nations. For that reason, the Elders say that the sacred Earth given to the First Nations will always be theirs. But more than land was given by the Creator . . . “Iyiniw miyikowisowina” (that which has been given to the peoples) and “iyiniw saweyihtakosiwin” (the peoples’ sacred gifts) . . . The Elders are emphatic in their belief that it is this very special and complete relationship with the Creator that is the source of the sovereignty that their peoples possess. (Cardinal and Hildebrandt, 2000, pp. 10–11)

These teachings are land-specific and rooted in Indigenous cosmologies and ways of knowing. Neheyiwak scholar Tracy Lindberg, drawing from Cardinal and Hidebrandt’s work, has described Indigenous laws more broadly (in relation to Neheyiwak laws) in this way: “In short, the connection, relationship, and ‘right’ to the land were and are inviolable” (p. 91). Therefore, the idea that title to land could be extinguished through treaty agreements to the Crown has no basis in Neheyiwak or any other Indigenous legal tradition specific to this place. The ACFN Elders have affirmed this according to Dene legal understandings as well: “Our Rights to use this lands and water on Traditional Lands have never been extinguished. . . . We only agreed to share our lands and we still consider these lands ours” (Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, 2012). The possibility to extinguish title through treaty is incommensurate with how Dene and Neheyiwak people understand their place on the land, in connection to spiritual teachings and political responsibility.

These laws are about relationality and responsibility. The Neheyiwak word miyo-wîcêhtowin has been translated by Cardinal and Hildebrandt (2000) as “the principle of getting along well with others, good relations” (p. 14), and by Lindberg (2010) as “having or possessing good relations” (pp. 90–91). Miyo-wîcêhtowin “include[s] those laws encircling the bonds of human relationships in the ways in which they are created, nourished, reaffirmed, and recreated as a means of strengthening the unity among First Nations people and of the nation itself” (Cardinal & Hildebrandt, 2000, p. 15), and incorporates sharing duties and responsibilities for the land. Lindberg describes this as a “reciprocal relationship between original peoples, lands, and their Creator,” which she identifies as “the source of our sovereignty as peoples Indigenous to our lands” (Lindberg, 2010, p. 91). Sovereignty is derived from and maintained through responsibility and reciprocity of relationships between humans, nonhuman beings, and the lands and waters themselves. This is a very different understanding of land than is used by the Canadian state and province of Alberta.

I now turn to the settler historical account for how this place was brought under the Canadian state through Treaty 8. Contrasting this relation to the practices and reciprocal responsibilities Cree, Dene, and Métis people have carried out for millennia allows me to think through how abstractions of land (including through Canadian state versions of treaty) have facilitated colonial expropriation of land in physical ways, but also in terms of the systems of knowledge that underpin such relationships to lands, waters, and nonhuman species.

2.3 Treaty 8

In June 1898, a group of 500 Beaver and Sekani people blocked police and miners from entering Fort St. John, BC, refusing to move until a treaty was signed. They protested the effects of the gold rush on their community and on the land, fearing that so many people travelling through their territories would drive away fur-bearing animals along their trap lines. Furthermore, there were complaints of white miners stealing horses, and breaking bear traps (Madill, 1986). The demand for treaty was a desire to formalize how to share this place between the Beaver, Sekani, and newly arrived Europeans. North West Mounted Police Commissioner L. W. Herchmer wrote in a letter to the Minister of the Interior advising urgency to begin Treaty negotiations:

I have the honour to draw your attention to the advisability of the Government taking some immediate steps toward arranging with the Indians not under Treaty, occupying the proposed line of route from Edmonton to Pelly River. These Indians although few in number, are said to be very turbulent, and are liable to give very serious trouble when isolated parties of miners and travellers interfere with what they consider their vested rights. (quoted in Madill, 1986)

The Beaver and Sekani demanded that the encroachment of European presence on their lands be formally negotiated. Treaties and land-sharing agreements were long established political practices among these nations. Their protest at Fort St. John in 1898 was used as an assertion of their political sovereignty to solve some of the problems that white settlers were bringing to the region. This history is important to understand the complexities of how Treaty 8 came to be.

While the Crown saw treaty as a tool for extinguishing Indigenous title, and to secure their rights to and access to resources, there were other possibilities for how Treaty could have been used to share land and resources. The Beaver and the Sekani were political actors, not merely bystanders to their own colonization. While their demands and desires were not reflected in the Canadian version of Treaty 8, nor in its enforcement, their assertion of treaty offered political possibilities for how one might try to understand this Treaty, and what it could offer going forward. As described above, entering into treaty could never have meant extinguishment for Indigenous people, since relationships to and responsibilities to lands and waters have been and are inviolable and sacred (Cardinal & Hildebrandt, 2000).

By 1898, the Canadian state had already entered into several numbered treaties with Indigenous nations, from western Ontario to the Rocky Mountains. The historical confluence of British colonialism, American expansion, and the goals of central Canadian elites and politicians to create a new nation state led to Canadian expansion into the Prairies that required the removal of Indigenous people from lands needed to meet the demands for white European settlement.

Controlling access to land was fundamental to the newly unified Canadian colony of the mid- nineteenth century. This settlement was facilitated through the removal of Indigenous people from this land through multiple laws and practices of the Canadian government under British colonial administration prior to 1867, and the newly formed Canadian state following Confederation. The creation of Indian reserves through legislation in 1850 was used as a strategy of Canadian nation building, as the colony expanded westward the through the continued theft of Indigenous lands. As Mi’kmaq scholar Bonita Lawrence (2003) has argued, the reserve legislation defined who was considered Indian before the law (p. 7), and allowed the colonial governments of Upper and Lower Canada to exert power they still did not have from the British metropole over their population—a first act of self-definition of the emerging Canadian state. By the 1870s, the state of Canada had been formed as a confederation of British territories and had begun an extensive legislative agenda to remove Indigenous peoples from their land for further settlement and agricultural development. In 1877 the Indian Act (1985) was introduced, amalgamating existing legislation governing Indigenous people, including assimilative policies like the Gradual Civilization Act (1857), and above-mentioned laws that served to form the reserve system. Preston (2017a) argued thus: “As Western European capitalist relationships to land were applied throughout Turtle Island, land and life became commodified and a property relationship was established through law and epistemically entrenched within newly forming white settler states” (p. 86). This new colonial-capitalist relationship to land was then further entrenched and formalized through treaty making (Madill, 1986, n.p.).

In the case of northern Alberta, the government became interested in securing a treaty upon learning of reports of minerals and petroleum by the newly formed Geological Survey of Canada. Over the course of the fur trade, many reports had been made about the tarry sand that leaked out of the Athabasca River banks. However, Robert Bell’s 1882 expedition for the Geological Survey of Canada proved to be the most important and significant for changing the region (Chastko, 2004, p. 2). Bell, a trained geologist, theorized that the oil discovered along the

Athabasca River and in the Mackenzie Basin was part of a significant underground reservoir of oil. His findings led to multiple drilling expeditions, between the federal government and private companies alike. Though no one was successful in finding this reservoir, the Geological Survey was convinced by Bell’s findings, and attempted throughout the next few decades to continue charting the area and conducting test drills (Chastko, 2004, p. 2).

Bell’s reports prompted interest in securing title to land for prospecting and mining, and by 1891 the Privy Council wrote they were ready to enter into treaty to “extinguish the Indian title” of this region (Madill, 1986, n.p.). Extinguishment was also discussed as necessary in order to prepare for building railways and making way for settlement into this region. Yet the government would not form a Treaty Commission until 1897. Historian-missionary René Fumoleau (2004) attributes the delay to the political instability created by Prime Minister John A. MacDonald’s death in 1891, and the failure of oil exploration tests, which removed the urgency to pursue mineral and resource extraction in this region (p. 3). Furthermore, after signing Treaties 6 (1876) and 7 (1875), the Department of Indian Affairs was reluctant to enter into further treaties, as they felt the welfare provisions they had entered into were increasingly becoming “a burden” (Madill, 1986, n.p.). However, with the discoveries of gold in the Klondike in 1896, the Department found renewed interest in signing a treaty in the North, to secure access to transportation routes to the Yukon. Furthermore, the gold rush brought a wave of white immigrants (including a number of American prospectors) to the area. The North-West Mounted Police were brought in, to deal with disputes between prospectors and local Indigenous populations. Ultimately, they told the Minister of the Interior, Clifford Sifton, that a treaty was needed to resolve issues arising from the influx of miners.

Local Beaver and Sekani people resisted the intrusion of miners travelling north through their territories on an overland route to the Klondike (as opposed to travelling north via the Peace and Athabasca Rivers). They demanded that the Canadian government negotiate a treaty with the Nations who lived here, if it was going to sanction white encroachment in this place. Desiring access to the mineral resources in the north and fearing that the Nations who had signed Treaty 6 would share their negative experience with the government with their relations to the north, the government finally became eager to sign what would become Treaty 8. However, major discrepancies existed between oral versions shared with the signatory nations, and the official written versions of the Treaty, and government officials worried that knowledge of this could

52 delay ratification and extinguishment of title. J. A. J. McKenna, private secretary to the superintendent general of Indian Affairs, wrote,

[T]he Wood Crees and Halfbreeds about Lesser Slave Lake who are closely connected with some of the Edmonton Indians may be found imbued with an intention to demand all those things the Crees from the South always claim they were promised, and blame the Government for not embodying in the written Treaty. (Madill, 1986, n.p.)

It is clear from these historical accounts that access to overland travel routes to the Klondike, as well as the rights to any potential petroleum discoveries in the Athabasca and Mackenzie Basin regions, were the motivating reasons for the Canadian government to initiate treaty talks. Madill (1986) concluded: “protection and welfare were not important considerations in the government’s decision to negotiate Treaty” (n.p.).

The area set out to be handed over through Treaty 8 was drawn up even before the Commission had left Ottawa (Madill, 1986, n.p.). It included over 840,000 square kilometres of land, including what is now northern Alberta, northeastern British Columbia, northwestern Saskatchewan and south-central Northwest Territories. Sean K. Maher’s (2011) historical account of the Treaty 8 Commission charts the ways in which misapprehension of Indigenous practices of land use justified Canadian appropriation and then settlement of this land. Drawing extensively from the correspondence and travelogues of the Treaty 8 Commissioners from the summer of 1900, Maher illustrates how the commissioners saw the land through the lens of terra nullius. According to the commissioners,

. . . the forest appeared empty as seen from a passing boat moving slowly along the Athabasca River. . . . [There was an] absence of life of any kind along the river, and [from the Commission’s vantage point] even fish seemed to be anything but plentiful. (Maher, 2011, p. 67)

Descriptions of this empty land sought to depopulate the territory and depict Indigenous people and communities as barely human or, in other cases, as a population quickly dying out (Maher, 2011, pp. 67, 68). In many ways my current participants understood this place in very similar ways. For them the land was inhabitable and filled with nothing between major centres of settlement. Seeing nothing where human activity is not central appears to be an enduring legacy

53 of what Maher (2011) has called the “transformative gaze” (p. 71) through which the Treaty Commission saw this place.

Ultimately, the Treaty Commissioners sought to incorporate this region into the Canadian settler colonial project predicated on European settlement and agriculture. Making land productive through labour becomes a form of emplacement (i.e., place making) for the settler (Blomley, 2004). Labour, through the valuable role it plays for the imaginary of building the nation, becomes an important practice for developing identities in the colony for the national subject. (In the Guyanese context, Shona Jackson (2012) called labour a “technique of settler belonging.”) Capitalism and colonialism’s entangled structures co-create these discourses of the settler working to earn a place on the land and in the nation.

Often narrated as the impulse to improve or uplift the land into a higher purpose (Veracini, 2010), these structures were also about civilizing what was considered a wild frontier. Secretary Mair of the Treaty 8 Commission viewed the land in this way. He held a vision for progress, “the civilizing effects of agricultural settlement and for the values of British institutions” (Maher, 2011). Estimating that there was room to settle over a million people there, he also said: “It is safe to predict that what Ontario is today Athabasca will become in time” (quoted in Maher, 2011, p. 71). Treaty 8 was central to his desire that this place, “enormous in extent and rich in economic resources,” should “now be placed by Treaty at the disposal of the Canadian people” (Maher, 2011, p. 71).

Treaty 8 served to define the land in an abstract way. Through it, the Commissioners sought to bring this place under the regimes of private property that would allow for resource extraction and agricultural settlement, both deemed better practices of productive land use than Indigenous ones. From this point of view, Mair wrote that the landscape was primeval, unsettled and unsettling:

Probably the best thing that could happen to that part of the country [south of Lesser Slave Lake] would be a great clearing fire . . . and convert its best parts into prairie and a summer range for cattle. (Maher, 2011, p. 67)

The desire to convert a wild frontier into agricultural lands that could be cultivated using so- called proper European farming and ranching practices was a desire to bring civilization to the

54 land. White possession of these lands was explicitly about extracting resources for the white settler state, and the expansion of civilized land use (understood as European agricultural development and settlement). These civilizing procedures were defined by the Doctrine of Discovery through their opposition to the racially constructed deficiency of Indigenous land use systems (Lindberg, 2010).

In contrast, Indigenous practices of treaty making and definitions of sovereignty completely contest the state’s practice of capture and extinguishment. As described above, Cree Elders have described the possibility of extinguishing title to land as impossible, since the responsibility for the land and, as a result, sovereignty over it, is a spiritual right that is inviolable. It bears to quote Cree and Blood scholar Sharon Verne (1998) at length:

Our spirituality and our responsibilities define our duties. We understand the concept of sovereignty as woven through a fabric that encompasses our spirituality and responsibility. This is a cyclical view of sovereignty, incorporating it into our traditional philosophy and view of our responsibilities. There it differs greatly from the concept of western sovereignty which is based upon absolute power. For us absolute power is in the Creator and the natural order of all living things; not only in human beings. . . . Our sovereignty is related to our connections to the earth and is inherent. The idea of a nation did not simply apply to human beings. We call the buffalo or, the wolves, the fish, the trees, and all are nations. Each is sovereign, an equal part of the creation, interdependent, interwoven, and all related. (p. 23)

When land is considered to be alive, and sovereignty a cyclical and relational concept, Canadian state practices of treaty making are better understood in a different way. Emphasizing extinguishment and possession in treaty making were direct attempts to replace Indigenous knowledge of land with a European one.

2.4 Colonial Practices of Mapping

Mapping and gathering information about this region were important techniques used by colonial administrators to bring new places under their control. Long before the nascent Canadian state considered entering into treaty with the Cree, Dene, and Métis people of this region, it was

55 deemed valuable and of interest to colonial administrators. Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman (2013) described the ways in which mapping was a crucial tool of colonization:

While maps were essential to earlier projects of exploration as well as the documentation of explorers and literate traders before the nineteenth century, it was in the 1800s that maps were understood by many to simultaneously represent the “real” as they symbolized the destiny of settler states. (p. 18)

Cole Harris (2004) identified “maps, numbers, laws, and the geography of settlement” as the most important technologies of dispossession wielded by administrators and governments seeking to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their lands to make way for settlement. Mapping was “a means of discourse that mapped an imperial imaginary” (Goeman, 2013, p. 20). Maps constructed the “spatial imaginary of vast landscapes filled with flora and fauna. . . . Native people in this unjust spatial imaginary become part of the flora and fauna open to settlement, while the state supports its fantasy through law” (Goeman, 2013, p. 18). Read alongside the massive transformation of land tenure taking place in Europe, mapping these places in North America and depicting them as vacant and open for settlement through private property can be directly tied to the formation and enforcement of the enclosure of common lands throughout Britain and Europe.

The mapping of this region cannot be understood without accounting for how the people and institutions mapping it understood the untouched, wild lands alongside the emergence of private property, and imposition of possessive land title. Blomley (2003) wrote about the vast changes made to land tenure in England during the 16th century enclosures, which turned commonly held lands into private property. Several scholars, including Blomley (2003), have shown how the transformation of private property in the metropole made way for systematic colonial expansion abroad (see also Slotkin, 1985). Surveys were used as tools for abstracting land into private property. Surveyors constructed land as an objective, ownable thing that facilitated not only new legal relations to land through private property, but also the social relations that could exist in those newly ordered spaces:

The abstract space of the survey helps make a world that exists, not as a set of social practices, but as a binary order: individuals and their practices set against an inert structure. Space is marked and divided into places where people are put. In the process,

space is desocialized and depoliticized. Yet, at the same time, enframing conceals the processes through which it works as an ordering device. (Blomley, 2003, p. 127)

The separation of people from place, and the making of place an inert structure, made possible “the view that space in general, and property in particular, were disembedded from lived relations and social relations” (Blomley, 2003, p. 127). This included attempts to sever relations to land, and the imposition of European ideological and legal instruments to do so: “Colonization resulted in a sorting of place-based ideological premises of hierarchies and binaries. . . . Settler colonialism continues to depend on imposing a ‘planetary consciousness’ and naturalizing geographic concepts and sets of social relationships” (Goeman, 2013, p. 2). The attempt to make abstracted places natural or neutral, objective things, required violence and legal intervention.

James Scott (1998) described a similar shift in relation to the emergence of the modern state and Foucault’s conception of governmentality. Scott argued that the central organizing principle of governmentality was the state’s concern for creating conditions for certain populations to thrive. As such, in order for the modern state to control society, it needed to standardize and make legible the features of life that had previously been out of the state’s sight. Scott (1998) tracked the emergence of things like “the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, [and] the invention of freehold tenure” (p. 2). The ability to own land outright was central in terms of the ability of the state to organize itself around the administration of this land. In changing the customary practices of land tenure agreements to transferable freehold land title, “the administrative landscape is blanketed with a uniform grid of homogenous land, each parcel of which has a legal person as owner and hence taxpayer” (Scott, 1988, p. 36).

Using grid schemes to divide up land from afar “facilitated the commoditization of land as much as the calculation of taxes and boundaries. Administratively it was also disarmingly simple. Land could be registered and titled from a distance by someone who possessed virtually no local knowledge” (Scott, 1988, p. 51). Yet while the adjustment to freehold tenure in Europe attempted to map some existing or customary patterns of land use, Scott makes the distinction that in the emerging settler colonies of North America, New Zealand, and Australia, this was not the case. European forms of private ownership were not in use by the Indigenous nations of these places, but as well as that, the land itself was not uniform, complicating attempts of

57 administrators to divide it up from afar. The abstraction and commodification of land through homogenous and rigid grids could not always capture the nonconforming features in the natural landscape. The land itself thus posed a barrier to these attempts to measure and sell the land from afar, since uniform grids could not account for the topographical reality on the ground. Scott illustrates this from a satirical verse of settlers in New Zealand during the 19th century. The road on the map was straight and nicely planned on the grid, but in reality, the road was impassable— it went “Over cliffs, and spurs and gullies with a straight and even course | Which precluded locomotion on part of man or horse” (Scott, 1998, p. 51). The nonconforming aspects of land itself complicated the bureaucratic administration of it. These nonconforming aspects of land considered wild or untamed were made sense of through the concept of the frontier.

The concept of the frontier works to sanction legal violence in bringing lands under control (Blomley, 2003, p. 135). The frontier is the domain of nonproperty, of land yet to be conquered and controlled. The places not yet controlled are still wild and natural. Don, the participant who moved to Fort McMurray in the late 1970s, described it as a frontier town. In similar ways, Robert described the neighbourhood as being next to a wild forest: “That’s the woods all the way until there aren’t woods anymore. There’s nothing out there and that’s really cool.” These thoughts also evoke the idea of Fort McMurray as on the edge of a frontier. Understanding places in these terms works to naturalize propertied relationships to land, and also naturalizes land’s distinct uses for different human activities, such as city building, resource extraction, or agriculture. (The creation of bounded spaces is an idea I develop further in Chapter 3.)

It is important to understand the function of the civilization | frontier binary for constructing property regimes. Blomley argued that the frontier is found at the boundary of civilization. This boundary “offer[s] a striking contrast between the domain where property and security coexist and its antithesis—the violent spaces in which property is absent” (Blomley, 2003, p. 125). While this boundary may appear neutral, it “serves as a condition of possibility for property’s violence, distinguishing and constructing at one and the same time” (Blomley, 2003, p. 135). Blomley argued that through the enactment of property, places are “invest[ed] with particular valences and political possibilities”; they ultimately order hierarchies set up the relationships between certain bodies in those spaces (Blomley, 2003, p. 122).

More fundamental, however, is that this process of enacting property abstracts land and makes of it a commodity—a thing that can be bought and sold. In the settler colony we also see this abstraction formalized in the law that required Indigenous dispossession, and subsequently racialized property regimes. The question of who owns the land had to be racialized in order to secure white settler invasion and displacement. Indigenous presence and land use were erased through mapping and the imposition of colonialism’s private property. Furthermore, the Doctrine of Discovery constructed Indigenous property systems of land use as deficient (Lindberg, 2010). Zapotec political scientist Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez (2013) explained:

Although Indigenous territories were imprinted by human actions and inhabitants were governed by complex systems of land use and ownership, disavowing Indigenous peoples and constructing then as “hunter-gatherers” and their lands as being waste or “wilderness” corresponded to a practice of eliminating Indigenous peoples. Moreover, these constructions justified the civilizing action of English settlers and the rejections of Indigenous land ownership. (p. 32)

In this way, state forms of place making on Indigenous lands defined possession through land use that was racially constructed. Cheryl Harris (1993), for example, has argued that property law remains “contingent on, intertwined with, and conflated with race” (p. 1714). The processes in which race has been embedded into property rights have included racial practices of dispossession and chattel slavery, which structured the capacity to create property rights in the United States:

In this way property itself is enacted as means of abstracting land into an ownable possession, and as a process of codifying white supremacy through the legal apparatus that protects ownership and the right to exclude. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015) described this process of linking the establishment of legal and state forms of regulated possession with the emergence of what she called a “new white property-owning subject” (p. 49), who emerged as a result of post- Enlightenment ontology. Moreton-Robinson argued that in addition to changing legal, state, and

59 economic relationships, this also created a shift at an ontological level: “the structure of subjective possession occurs through the imposition of one’s will-to-be on the thing that is perceived to lack will; thus it is open to being possessed” (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. 50). Enacting human will on something then becomes the process in which humans exert their personhood at the expense of understanding relationships between people, places, and nonhumans as connected and reciprocal. The human-centric focus on action or will positions lands, waters, nonhumans, and even other humans as open to possession, removing the possibility of reciprocity and responsibility from human relationships to other places and beings. Creating the idea of a wilderness emptied the land of Indigenous presence and possession in order to make way for the so-called civilizing projects of European settlement, agriculture, and resource extraction which sought to use land in productive ways.

2.5 Colonial-Capitalist Relations

This logic of land use weaves its way through capitalist relations of labour and the environment. Humans acting upon an inert environment, and thus the solidification of a distinction of humans as separate from nature, was described by Neil Smith (2008) as an essential ideology of capitalism. Tuck and McKenzie (2015) explained this binary as “the coproduction of capitalism and science that have ideologically located humans as separate from nature, or better said to reflect the anthropocentricity of this ideology, nature as outside of humans” (p. 152). In this way land became abstracted for its uses for human activity, whether that be resource extraction, private property, or agriculture. Many Indigenous scholars have traced this orientation towards its philosophical roots in the Enlightenment. Anishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts (2017) compared Indigenous cosmologies with Euro-Western ones through descriptions of how each framework makes sense of the agency of nonhuman beings and the land. Terming the Euro- Western framework the “epistemology-ontology divide,” Watts (2017) explained:

A common understanding of epistemology would describe it as one’s perception of the world as being distinct from what is in the world, or what constitutes it (Descartes, 1996). Thought and ideas are reserved for the one perceiving—humans. All other objects, actants, or beings in the world may have an essence (Kant, 1999; Latour, 1987) or an interconnection with humans, but their ability to perceive is null or limited to instinctual reactions. (p. 32)

This division requires many separations between perception and perceiver, between perception and knowledge, and between human and nonhuman, and it creates a hierarchy of beings based on the ability to think and act. It places humans outside of (or above) the natural world and the more-than-human species that live there. In contrast, Watts has put Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee origin stories and Indigenous cosmologies that understand land to be alive, and humans as an extension of this, in opposition to centring the supremacy of human thought and agency (as is done in Western-Euro dominant frameworks of both epistemology and ontology):

The reasoning being that perception is a gift or trait bestowed to the human mind, and most certainly not something possessed by a stone or a river. A river may act (i.e., flow) but does it contemplate this? An Anishnaabe perspective would respond in the affirmative. As we can see from the process of colonization and the imposition of the epistemology-ontology frame, our communication and obligations with other beings of creation is continuously interrupted [by colonization]. (Watts, 2017, p. 32)

The separation of humanity from place and other beings severs the relationality of beings and lands and waters that is inherent and vital to the cosmologies of Indigenous peoples including the Cree, Dene, and Métis nations of the Peace-Athabasca Delta, as described above.

In contrast to the divisions between humans and nature, and the mind and body found in Euro- Western thought, Watts (2017) has used the concept of Place-Thought, which is

. . . the non-distinctive space where place and thought were never separated because they never could or can be separated. Place-Thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and nonhumans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts. (p. 21)

Heather Davis and Métis scholar Zoe Todd (2017), engaging with Watt’s concept of Place- Thought, clarified: “Biota, geology and thinking are one and the same” (p. 769). Davis and Todd (2017) described these divisions as the severing of relations, in a deliberate tactic of colonization: “The processes of colonization severed relations, because it was through this severing that dispossession and integration could take place. Therefore, the genocide of the Americas was also a genocide of all manner of kin: animals and plants alike” (p. 771). Abstraction of places brought under colonial-capitalist rule also attempted to sever relations in

61 order to make land’s use, or land’s productivity for human activity and use, central to its function. Watts’s Anishinaabe concept of Place-Thought aligns with the philosophical understandings and the unique origin stories of Cree and Dene people of the Athabasca region, according to some of whom the purpose of land is always in relation to its sacredness. The utility of land is part of only one element of “an integral part of a sacred relationship with the Creator” (Cardinal & Hildebrandt, 2000, p. 10). Instead of land being a raw resource or commodity that needs work to be put into it to have value, the teachings shared by Elders with Cardinal and Hildebrandt describe land and water as sacred gifts from the Creator that were given to sustain life.

The implantation of European anthropocentrism and the severing of ethical or reciprocal relations brought about through colonialism and capitalism has resulted in other types of relations to land, including dispossession and extraction, being normalized. Glen Coulthard (2014) explained that while violence and repression are central to the maintenance of settler colonial control over these lands, it is important to understand that “settler colonialism should not be seen as deriving its reproductive force solely from its strictly repressive or violent features, but rather from its ability to produce forms of life that make settler colonialism’s constitutive hierarchies seem natural” (p. 152).

Naturalization includes extractive relations to land, ones that normalize practices used in the tar sands like strip mining and building tailings ponds. Extractive relationships towards lands and waters make tar sands and other forms of natural resource extraction a logical practice of land use. These forms of life under colonial capitalism include the social relations of labour that create intimacies with the earth that are overtly violent and extractive—both in how lands and waters are transformed in order to extract oil from the earth, and in how the physical labour and chemical effects of this industry transform the bodies of those who work here. Raymond Williams (1973) pointed out this link, arguing “as if the exploitation of natural resources could be separated from the exploitation of men” (p. 37).

Understanding labour and extraction as relationships to land, we can think through the ways in which these practices impact bodies in addition to lands and waters. Scholars of labour and embodiment have described the experiences and physical hazards of work that have marked bodies through race, class, and gender (Baron, 2006; Callard, 1998; Sangster, 2007). The uneven

62 distribution of these consequences shapes who experience and bear the exposure to the hazards, injuries, chemical/industrial disease, and worker deaths that end up being displayed on the body. As Joan Sangster (2007) has argued, these consequences are not only displayed or marked on bodies, but, “rather, [they are] embodied on a daily basis” (p. 258). Paraphrasing Robert Connell, Sangster (2007) went on: “It is not simply that bodies are defined or constructed differently, but that different experiences and practices literally transform the body, altering it physically” (p. 258). While theories of poststructuralism have offered important critiques of the so-called natural body—in particular feminist scholarship, which has dispelled the naturalization of gender and sex—there is a risk of metaphorizing the material body and how it is “embedded in the immediacies of everyday life and lived experience” (K. Davis, 1997, p. 15). Similarly, Sangster (2007) argued that “the body is a means and instrument of labour, though it is also constituted and reconstituted by, and through, human labour, social and cultural practices” (p. 247).

Alberta has one of the highest rates of workplace injury and death in Canada (Morassaei et al., 2013). In a recent report by the Parkland Institute, the authors warned that these rates would likely not improve, since the public is not aware of these high rates of injury. Employers have been let off the hook. Typically, these incidents happen when employers cut corners to improve profitability, and when government enforcement is lax—when inspections of work sites are infrequent and prosecutions of employers who violate occupational health and safety legislation are rare (Foster & Barneston, 2016).

Reflective of the report’s findings that public awareness of these incidents is very low, these types of workplace injuries, fatalities, and “long dyings” (Nixon, 2011), caused by exposure to industrial chemicals, fumes, and slow toxicity of the industry, were not things that were directly brought up in my interview questions. At times, I asked questions about the higher rates of cancer downstream in Fort Chipewyan, but in terms of direct effects that were experienced, participants did not typically share with me stories of injury, pollution, or death caused by industrial accidents. However, in about three or four cases, participants raised these issues indirectly, in vague or limited terms. A few participants, when asked about how they made sense of the environmental criticisms of this industry, told me that they had become used to the smells of sulphur and other chemical smells from the sites, and used this as proof that the smell and the mine sites were not as bad as some made them out to be. One participant talked about a worker fatality at the Canadian Natural Resources Limited (CNRL) worksite caused by a preventable

63 accident that left him particularly troubled. Another raised the issue of water toxicity (which I discuss in greater detail in Chapter 4), connecting the cancers that have appeared downstream from the sites to his own proximity to the water downstream. In such small moments, these workers described their own exposure to the toxic environments created by oil extraction. I could have focused more on this topic, and interviewed people who had experienced physical illness, injury, or disease caused by their exposure to this work environment. However, this did not end up as the central focus of my research. I raise it here to consider what might not have been discussed, but was still a physical, embodied experience for all my participants—and myself, having grown up near these oil sites—especially in the ways that exposure to these places is something that is not problematized, considered quite normal, and not a concern.

2.6 Oil Intimacies

Writing of Métis laws of kinship and reciprocity, Zoe Todd (2017) described the ways in which she can relate to oil as kin, contesting the ways in which oil is typically understood and related to as solely a commodity for human use and profit. For Todd (2017), drawing from the work of Heather Davis and Dakota scholar Kim TallBear, fossil fuel is “a paradoxical kind of kin—the bones of dinosaurs and the traces of flora and fauna from millions of years ago” (p. 104). Understood this way, the vast oil deposits are interpreted instead as the resting place of long- gone dinosaurs. Todd argued that the oil itself is not harmful, pointing to the useful ways bitumen helped Dene people repair and waterproof their canoes, but its weaponization: “The oil economy turns these fossil beings into threats,” threats that heat our atmosphere and dangerously warm our climate. Separating the fossil kin from the practices of “petro-capitalist extraction and production [that] turn them into settler-colonial-industrial-capitalist contaminants and pollutants” (p. 99), Todd’s relation to oil deposits as kin allows for a greater clarity about where the problem of oil extraction lies—not with the oily fossil kin themselves, but in the ways in which land is exploited and destroyed in order to remove these beings from the ground and use them to fuel colonial-capitalist production.

Thus, it is important to trace the meaning and language used to relate to or describe this oil deposit. Describing it as fossil kin, orienting towards an ontology that is “more-than-human” centric, and Todd has valued reciprocity and responsibility to beings who are not human but

64 whom are seen to be kin. This is a type of intimacy, an intimacy of reciprocity or care. Todd has demonstrated care, thought, and attention towards a relation that has long since passed away.

The bitumen Todd described as fossil kin is something deeply known by the settler workers I interviewed as well. Not in the reciprocal, relational way that Todd describes, but something that is experienced intimately by those who work in this industry. The tar itself gets stuck on machinery, hands, and overalls. Even white-collar workers experience it; the smells of tar and sulphur are common, and many who work in the mine are surrounded by sticky tar on tires, boots, and pant legs. I remember going to work with my Dad in Grade 9 for “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” and seeing the huge plastic tubs of orange oil-wash on the first floor of his office building, which were used by mechanics and truck technicians to wash the sticky tar off the machinery, trucks, tools, and their hands. Though an engineer who no longer regularly worked out in the mine, my Dad had tar-covered work boots on a mat by his office door. The physical presence of this substance, of Todd’s long-lost kin, is trudged home, back to the commuter camps and into the suburbs in town by workers. Fossil kin/tar sticks under fingernails, on the boots, and in the wheel wells of company pickup trucks. These workers have intimate relations to this substance, but they are not about ethics of care and reciprocity that Todd describes. Instead, this relation to land is defined by the violence of extraction.

This materiality is an important factor in how we understand participants’ experiences and the knowledge that is shaped through them. Participants regularly spoke about the ways that living and/or working in Fort McMurray was a unique experience, one which shaped what they thought they knew about the oil industry, and about Fort McMurray as a place itself. Working in this industry is different from working in an office building or factory in other places. The mine site itself, and the buildings and offices that support the work of extraction, are all located outside of the city, at times in sites along isolated forestry roads. In Chapter 3, I describe in more detail the segregation of spaces for extraction and living, but I want to draw attention to the fact that this labour is unique in its intimacy with the very environmental surroundings that must be radically transformed in order to mine oil from the ground. Some who work in the mine drive the trucks and operate the machinery that digs the bitumen from the ground. Others, who work in offices at the site, drive past lakes of toxic waters filled with tailings byproducts on their way into work every morning, and on their way home every night. It is not that people do not know about the destruction caused of the oil industry, but relations to extraction have been widely normalized,

65 and are part of the quotidian and banal scenes that make up the average workday. Raymond Williams (1973) has described how lived experience does not find explanation in abstract ideas, but instead in the felt, material expression of living and being in the world (p. 291). In this way Williams described how particular social and power relations of capitalism have become reproduced (or resisted) in daily life. The relations to land and to labour are reproduced through the ways in which “experience finds material which gives body to the thoughts” (Williams, 1973, p. 291). I understand this to be how settler workers have deep place-based knowledge of the tar sands, yet these knowledges are primarily about a relation to land via extraction. They serve as a kind of affective infrastructure that works to make sense of this place, the labour done here, and the economies that shape the price of oil, continued employment, and the consumption of fossil fuels. These relations to land seek to replace the reciprocal or ethical ones that Todd described. Even at the level of language used, I have referred to this place as an oil deposit, or an area where fossil fuels are extracted. Fossil kin to fossil fuel, the language closely reflects how the shift from relational ontologies to Western rationalist ones end up creating very different understandings of the use of, value of, and responsibility to a place like the Athabasca River Valley.

In this chapter I have tried to show the ways in which abstraction has transformed how this place is used, who regulates access to it, and the legal means through which economic use is privileged above other kinds of land use. In part this is to make sense of how such large-scale transformations take place and shape how many understand this place today. While it may be a place often overdetermined by the extraction that takes place there, the Athabasca River Valley is still a place that exists and lives in spite of this extraction.

Chapter 3 Infrastructures

When starting this research, I did not anticipate that I would be writing a chapter on infrastructure. Growing up in Fort McMurray I was very aware of the lack of infrastructure before and during the oil boom and how it shaped our lives. My family would avoid the highway on Thursdays—shift change day, we would plan trips to Edmonton to receive medical treatments not available at our hospital, and we would get stuck for hours on the highway to cross the bridge during peak traffic. But having moved away these details were quickly forgotten, displaced by an interest in the ways this place, and my relationship to it, figured into the anti-tar-sands politics I had become interested in. Upon returning to the city in the fall of 2016 to conduct interviews for this dissertation, infrastructure quickly came back to forefront. However, instead of how its absence affected day-to-day life, its presence made the city feel very different than the one I had grown up in.

New subdivisions and roads to service them, new shopping centres, new schools, a new bridge and connecting overpasses, a twinned highway south, and a brand new international airport. All of these new infrastructures were built to meet the demand of the oil boom. Since 2014 this boom has slowed, yet there are some new oil projects that are still being developed and built even in the economic slowdown. The newness of the place was also in stark contrast to the scenes of fire damage that were still present that October from the wildfire that burned here in May of 2016. Entire subdivisions razed, the stretches of once lush forest lining the roadways in town were singed and skeletal. This strange moment in Fort McMurray—new and damaged— rebuilding alongside the ongoing building of new subdivisions and buildings—made infrastructure loom large for myself and those I interviewed.

Fort McMurray was always a city under construction when I knew it too, so maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me that many parts of the city looked different. I got lost looking for streets in new neighbourhoods and missed my turn off on the highway because the landmarks I was used to had been replaced with a new concrete overpass. The small talk before and after interviews with participants always centred around infrastructure—the new twinned highway, the new bridge, the new airport. The other infrastructure-talk that came up in these interviews was pipelines. In the fall of 2016 pipelines were being widely discussed. Participants raised the

66 67 ongoing protests and movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, North Dakota and in Canada, debates about Line 3, Trans Mountain, and Northern Gateway pipelines that were nearing government decision deadlines. While I was in Fort McMurray on a second visit in December of 2016 the Trudeau government announced the decision to kill Line 3 and Northern Gateway but approve Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain. Pipeline infrastructure politics figured prominently in my conversations with participants too, as many I spoke to felt like politics were being played with their livelihoods. The building of infrastructure in Northeastern Alberta has been critical for making the tar-sands extraction possible. Without roads, power lines, bridges, and pipelines the industry would not be able to extract oil and send it to market. Infrastructure, as my participants shared with me, was deeply about making their everyday lives livable as much as it was about economic security on a national scale that could impact future oil development and therefore their jobs.

Recent scholarship on infrastructures has highlighted the social and political possibilities of these physical structures, networks, and systems. Infrastructures facilitate social relations in ways that can teach us about power, inequality, and desire. Berlant (2016) argues that infrastructure ends up mediating or ordering social life through arranging, making possible, and foreclosing particular relations (p. 393). This ordering also takes place relationally and spatially, Michelle Murphy (2015) has explained this as the, “spatial arrangements of relationships that draw humans, things, words, and nonhumans into patterned conjectures” (p. 104). Infrastructures, who they serve, who they do not, also show us which futures will be built, and which ones will be neglected. Deb Cowen (2017) describes, “Infrastructure demands a focus on what underpins and enables formations of power and the material organization of everyday life. Visions, ideas, and analyses are important, but the future must be built, and “concretized” in ways that sustain sociality” (n.p.). It is through the tracing of desires and objectives that infrastructure will help make possible that I am able to think about why infrastructure became such an important theme in this research. The lack of functioning infrastructure for so long made Fort McMurrayites acutely aware of what is missing, and what new structures have made their lives easier, and in many cases, safer. As Ara Wilson (2016) points out, “if [infrastructure] works, what feels new and modern—the technological sublime (Larkin, 2008)—eventually becomes part of the background environment—the barely seen telephone pole” (2016, p. 269). Infrastructure is still new enough in this place to not fade into the background. The ways in which pipelines, bridges,

68 and highways all figure so largely in the conversations I shared with participants have directed me to write this chapter and think about infrastructure in two ways. The first is “critical infrastructure” (Cowen, Garelli & Tazzioli, 2018; Pasternak, 2017; Pasternak & Dafnos, 2018), what scholars have termed the infrastructures that make global economies and logistics possible. The second, “infrastructures of intimacy” (Wilson, 2016), are not unrelated, but as Cowen (2017) describes, “Infrastructures are the collectively constructed systems that also build and sustain human life” (n.p). They structure how life and society is reproduced. The choices that are made by the state, by industry, and by communities to invest in particular infrastructures over others, for certain populations over others, reveal what is valued, what kind of futures are imagined to be desirable, and how these futures get organized and supported to thrive.

All of my participants, whether commuters or those who lived full time in Fort McMurray, pushed me to also think seriously about the role infrastructure plays in shaping their lives in this place. During the boom years the failure of infrastructure systems to meet the demand of the growing population shaped how they understood their own permanence in this place. Whereas now, with significant upgrades made, futures feel more permanent and oil extraction seems more inevitable. Brian Larkin (2013) argues that the collective, affective effect of infrastructure demonstrates its political impact. Larkin (2013) describes that infrastructures show us how “technologies come to represent the possibility of being modern, of having a future, or the foreclosing of that possibility . . . happens on the individual as well as on the societal level” (p. 333). Similarly, many described Fort McMurray as arriving closer to a “real” city, of not having to rely on trips to Edmonton as much, and finally having enough services to meet the demands of the population. These sentiments reflect recent scholarship on the aesthetic and affective elements of infrastructure describe. Infrastructures that are the object of feelings like attachment, desire, and hope. Amin explains, this is “how public sentiments of progress, modernity and well- being become attached to iconic buildings, highways, or new housing and shopping complexes” (Amin, 2014, p. 138; see also Harvey & Knox, 2012; Manton, 2013). Affective attachment for the infrastructures that have made life feel more possible and more permanent here demonstrate the significance of infrastructure in creating settler futurities that will also desire extractive futures.

I trace the conjoined ways in which infrastructure for extraction and infrastructure for settlement have shaped how certain futures are imagined and desired in this place. As Cowen (2017) argues,

“Infrastructure is by definition future oriented; it is assembled in the service of worlds to come” (n.p.). What we assemble in this place sets the path for a world to come. In this current formation, the world to come is one that continues to extract and consume oil. It is also a future that takes for granted the settler state’s control over this land, and the jurisdiction to continue to grant huge areas of land through leases to oil companies to develop. In a later chapter I delve into the way this positions oil as inevitable, but in this chapter, I look at how these relations are structured through the investments in and building of infrastructures. Suburbs, pipelines, highways and bridges have all made extraction possible in Fort McMurray. To think of both the economic infrastructure of highways and pipelines alongside the infrastructures of the intimate (suburbs, schools, and shopping malls) positions me to think about how my participants have narrated their experience in Fort McMurray as being one of both employment in extractive industries, but also about their own place making, or home making, in this region.

3.1 Infrastructures That Matter

In this chapter I argue that infrastructure matters and think through how desires for infrastructures are desires for particular types of futures. Recent scholarship has focused on how infrastructures allow us to ask how power works (Amin, 2014; Cowen, 2017; Wilson, 2016). Ash Amin (2014) illustrates this idea, describing the, “symbolic power [of infrastructures] and their social selectiveness” (p. 138). The social selectiveness Amin references can be seen in the how some places are shaped by the excesses and ease of their infrastructures, while others are, “let down by failed, incomplete or mismanaged infrastructures, forever patched up by improvised measures that most tax the poor” (Amin, 2014, p. 138; also see Robbins, 2007; de Boeck, 2012; Graham, 2010; Humphrey, 2003; Jaglin, 2014; Pieterse & Hyman, 2014).

This includes “critical infrastructures,” the term that Shiri Pasternak (2017) draws from Canadian state and surveillance agencies that monitor Indigenous resistance, blockades, and occupation of infrastructures like highways, pipelines, and rail corridors that interrupt supply chains, and access to natural resource extraction. These economic and industrial infrastructures provide the material with which to trace state investment in the production of extractive economies. Thinking through the work needed to make these extractive economies possible through the building of and maintenance of infrastructure illustrates how these choices are made with certain futures, and assumptions about land in mind. Wilson (2016) argues,

Curiosity about infrastructure leads to information about the concrete allocation of resources in relation to collectivities or commerce: Who shoulders the obligations entailed by provisioning infrastructure? Who has ownership and control? Who is excluded? Feminist and queer frameworks bring attention to the who of these questions, particularly in relation to heteronormative, gendered, or racist criteria. (p. 274)

In this way, examining infrastructure creates another avenue to think about place. Wilson (2016) asserts, “One reason for attention to infrastructure is empirical: relationships take place in environments comprised of these material and immaterial, functional or failing networks” (p. 248). Infrastructures also shape the places they are in. This is pronounced when thinking about how the infrastructures needed to carry out extraction of tar sands have drastically transformed the places along the Athabasca and Clearwater Rivers. Changing the physical features of a place, also changes how places can be used, lived in, and not lived in. Infrastructure can create a sense of permanence. The features of a city: paved streets, sewage lines and water pipes underground, power and telephone poles, streetlights, sidewalks, schools, parks, and shopping centres; they are made from poured concrete, bricks and mortar, asphalt, and steel. The distinct grids of the suburban subdivision order space in certain ways that make it feel as though it has controlled the “natural” environment to create a slice of civilization amongst the dense forest. Infrastructures can also work to abstract space, to deterritorialize its features and segregate it into the categories of rural, urban, industrial, residential. In attending to Fort McMurray’s infrastructure, I try to imagine both how infrastructure shapes place, and how place shapes infrastructure. I describe how social and economic relations become shaped by oil, and how this creates desires for both the place itself, and for settler permanence in this region.

3.2 Social Relations of Oil

Timothy Mitchell (2011), in his history of the relationship between democracy and fossil fuels, has described the ways in which the properties of these different forms of energy have resulted in very different social, economic, and political relations. He describes the different social relations and “modes of social life” that first developed in the era of coal, and then the transition into the current era of oil. Tracing the development and use of these fossil energies. Mitchell shows the different possibilities for political agency within the sociospatial forms of social reproduction that coal and oil created. Writing about the transformations that coal made possible, Mitchell

(2011) has described how infrastructures like the mine and railway became sites of democratic emergence (p. 85):

Great volumes of energy now flowed along narrow, purpose-built channels. Specialised bodies of workers were concentrated at the end end-points and main junctions of these conduits, operating the cutting equipment, lifting machinery, switches, locomotives and other devices that allowed stores of energy to move along them. Their position and concentration gave them opportunities, at certain moments, to forge a new kind of political power. (T. Mitchell, 2011, p. 19)

For Mitchell, the physical properties of coal shaped the particular infrastructures, processes of urbanization, and political transformation through trade unionism that were consequences of how coal needed to be mined, transported, and burned. Coal is heavy, and to mine and to ship it is labour intensive. It relies on inflexible shipping routes on rail lines, making the coal companies susceptible to work stoppages and interruptions caused by organized labour at either the point of the mine (miners’ strikes), or on the railway (railway workers’ strikes). Workers all along the coal supply chain had the power to interrupt “flows of carbon that connected chambers beneath the ground to every factory, office, home or means of transportation that depended on steam or electric power” (T. Mitchell, 2011, p. 21). This effect was not only derived from the unions and organizations that were formed, nor the emerging ideals of democracy that were able to spread through these organizations, but in the fact that workers actually had “an effective way of forcing the powerful to listen to [their] demands” (T. Mitchell, 2011, p. 21). The amount of carbon energy that these workers mined and moved gave them the leverage and means to build political agency through strikes and other disruptions to the energy supply. Mitchell argued that the power derived from these acts transformed political and democratic life in Europe and North America throughout the early twentieth century.

In contrast, oil has very different properties. It is typically pumped from the surface, using fewer workers and under closer supervision from management. It is a liquid and light in weight, and therefore can be transported via pipeline and ocean shipping routes, which are more flexible and require less labour than rail. The supply chain is also much more flexible, making oil much less vulnerable to organized labour’s strikes and sabotage that coal is susceptible to. Tracing the geopolitics of the early to the middle of the twentieth century, Mitchell described how these

72 properties of oil were strategically exploited by oil companies and politicians to control this energy source. He argued that the democratizing world was also a colonizing one. The imperialism of the interwar years in particular worked to delay the development of a Middle Eastern oil industry, as firms sought to create American- and European-led monopolies in the region (T. Mitchell, 2011, p. 86). State-industry collaborations were also used by the British government to deal with the political upheavals caused by strikes and unrest in coal districts. They sought to weaken organized labour through accessing and controlling a source of fossil fuel without the political demands and concessions made to organized labour that were required to keep coal supply chains moving. For Mitchell, this reconfiguration—away from coal and towards oil—affected self-determination and democratization in the Middle East, as well as in the economic and political life of North America and Europe.

In another study examining the social and political relations and effects of oil, Matthew Huber (2013) traced the way daily, everyday practices of oil consumption have made possible “ways of living, thinking, and feeling” (p. 8). Huber connected the ways in which oil has facilitated automobility and the new social-spatial, geographic forms that this automobility made possible. The individualistic single-family home of the American suburb, made possible by oil, remade social reproduction, reshaping political life in the process. Huber (2013) asked, “What if the most problematic relation to oil is the way it powers forms of social life that allow individuals to imagine themselves as severed from society and public life?” (xi). For him this mobility, and the independence and meanings of freedom and nationalism that it structured, afforded important perspectives on what he called “the wider geographies of social relations, lived experiences, and meanings through which oil is objectified, and fetishized as a vital and strategic ‘thing’” (Huber, 2013, p. 6). Mitchell’s and Huber’s focus on the ways in which these capital–social relations transform or shape the state and forms of political life is significant. Their arguments about the materiality of oil and the important role it plays in shaping social and spatial relations, help highlight the ways in which mobility has become a significant way in which my participants understood the role of oil and the way the city was built around certain assumptions of mobility.

Supply chains, cars, suburbs, highways, pipelines, airplanes, and plastics: my participants encouraged me to see oil everywhere. Though I do not centre my arguments on the capital relation in the same way that Huber and Mitchell do, I am interested in how oil in general and the tar sands in particular shape the modes of social life in Fort McMurray as well. Participants

73 understood oil’s place in the world because they saw the ways in which our lives have come to depend on it, particularly the ways in which those critical of the tar sands would be unable to function without the things that oil provides. Directly, it supports things like the supply chains for food transportation; indirectly, it supports the larger processes of the state through taxation and oil revenues that fund hospitals, universities, and running the national economy. This connection to the state also includes educational institutions, and the investment in engineering and scientific research needed to make extraction possible and develop the future of extractive technologies.

Thinking of education and research as another type of infrastructure, I now turn to the ways in which developing the process to refine tar sands was actively invested in and sought after by both provincial and federal governments throughout the early twentieth century.

3.3 Researching “Commercial Uses of Bitumen”

When the bitumen found here was determined to be an “unconventional” oil deposit, the oil itself is trapped in a tarry sand called bituminous sands, and not an easily drillable deposit, the government became invested in finding other uses for bitumen. From the Bell Report in 1882 through the 1960s the research to develop asphalt, roof tiling products and eventually the extraction techniques to turn the bitumen into a shippable form of oil crude was pursued through provincial and federal funding. Funding which many times was fraught and abandoned as provincial and federal government scientists competed with each other to develop the process, and funding was interrupted at various points due to the First and Second World Wars, and the Great Depression. While fur traders, surveyors and colonial officials had made reports of bitumen in the area for centuries, it wasn’t until 1913 that engineer Sidney Ells from the Department of Mines in Ottawa began a research expedition with government funding to conduct a study on the commercial potential for bitumen. Ells developed early techniques of separating the oil from the sand after travelling to the Mellon Institute of Industrial Relations in Pittsburgh (Turner, 2018, p. 37). From these studies the earliest commercial use pursued was in the production of asphalt. However, the research at this time was set aside in 1915 as Ells was recalled to Ottawa for war time service.

In, 1920, the president of the University of Alberta, Henry Marshall Tory wanted to take back control of bitumen research from the Department of Mines at the Geological Survey of Canada.

To head up the provincial research, Dr. Karl Clark, a chemist working in the Department of Mines, was appointed to the Research Department at the University of Alberta. The Research Department was then granted provincial affiliation in 1921 and became the Scientific and Industrial Research Council of Alberta, the precursor to the Research Council of Alberta. Building on Ells’s findings from, 1915, Clark discovered that the sand and oil could be separated by treating bitumen with hot water. The steam would evaporate the watery coating on the bitumen, letting the sand separate and the oil to float to the top. It was the University of Alberta where Clark set up a hot water separation plant prototype to further refine the process. With this discovery, governments became eager to determine whether this deposit could produce fuel.

During oil crises in the 1920s the federal government once again funded Ells’s research, this time at the same time the provincial government continued to fund Clark’s. Turner (2018) describes, “There were vague agreements to work jointly, but mistrust between the two levels of government was always high. Ells and Clark viewed each other to some extent as rivals, working on similar but far from identical techniques for processing bitumen” (p. 38). Clarke built an experimental plant on the Clearwater River in October 1929, meanwhile Ells built one on the Horse River with a private partner from the United States. However, with the Great Depression the Alberta government disbanded the Research Council, and Clark had to abandon bitumen research to resume his work at the University of Alberta.

The discovery of a conventional oil deposit at Leduc, outside of Edmonton in 1946, brought about significant changes to the Albertan economy. In the wake of the oil discovery, the province reconvened the Alberta Research Council and began to invest in Clarke’s bitumen research once again. In 1948 the provincial government took over a failing private experimental processing plant called Bitumount, and they rebranded the site the Alberta Government Oil Sands Project. Dr. Clark was sent to resume his research on hot water processing. As part of this research, the government commissioned a report on the commercial viability of tar sands. The report, written by Sidney Martin Blair, concluded a barrel of crude oil could be produced from the bitumen deposit, and sent to Ontario processing plants using Clark’s methods, for $3.10. The market value would be $3.50 a barrel, proving that the deposit could turn a profit. This report was used by the provincial government to solicit investors, and by 1953 the Great Canadian Oil Sands (GCOS) consortium was constituted from various former private mines like Abasand Oils,

Canadian Oils Ltd., Champion’s Oil Sands Ltd., and American oil company, Sun Oil Co. The GCOS began their commercial scale mining activities in 1967.

The partnerships between industry, the provincial government, and the University of Alberta were instrumental in both the research, and the creation of the first oil sands mine. This legacy continues into today with many different partnerships between oil companies and the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Engineering. One engineer I spoke to who had graduated from the UofA’s Mining Engineering program described the links between the university and the tar sands. Talking about the incentive to pursue a career in the oil sands after graduating from UofA Mining Engineering, David told me,

There's a huge draw [to work in Fort McMurray], and you can even tell if you go down to the mining school at the UofA... All the company's names are there, they all sponsor different laboratories, there is sponsorship there and the reason [for] the sponsorship is because they want highly qualified people coming back. It all takes money, the university isn't going to get enough of it from just the government and from tuition and stuff so. And so they do sponsorship and it shows, and because they put the money in they get the quality people coming back out.

David describes this type of sponsorship between public institutions and oil companies in realistic terms. It serves the university because of lack of government funding for post secondary education, as well as the company’s ability to contribute to the quality of their future hiring pool. I describe these kinds of sponsorship programs in the context of industry goals of gaining social license later in this chapter, but raise this quote here to demonstrate the ubiquity of oil money in departments like Engineering, and other spaces where the future of oil extraction is being shaped.

Another example of this is the University of Alberta’s Institute for Oil Sands Innovation (IOSI). The institute was formed in 2005 between the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Engineering and Imperial Oil Resources Ltd. According the institute’s website, the number of partners has now expanded to 161 participants worldwide and seeks to develop “Oil sands operations with a reduced environmental footprint by minimizing water use, consuming less energy, lowering greenhouse gas and other emissions, yielding high quality products at lower cost.” (Institute for Oil Sands Innovation, n.d). While this language attempts to put forward the research goals of finding less-damaging ways to extract tar sands, a 2017 document outlining the Institute’s

Research Themes and Priorities includes “extraction, online instrumentation for oil sands, product cleaning and partial upgrading, and tailings process fundamentals.” Extraction of nonrenewable energy can never be sustainable, and while a reduced footprint that wastes less water and emits fewer toxins is not unimportant, larger questions of climate change, toxicity of water pollution, and the government’s perceived right to lease Treaty land for oil mining cannot be thought through when innovation of oil sands technologies is the overarching project. The University of Alberta has launched their own responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and describes their approach to implementing the Calls to Action from the TRC Commission in “a thoughtful, meaningful and sustainable way” (University of Alberta, 2019). The University of Alberta has created initiatives in the spirit of the Calls to Action in a way that attempts to build a welcoming environment for Indigenous students, staff, faculty and community members by implementing Indigenous perspectives. Yet, the University of Alberta has limited this engagement to Treaty 6 territories, conveniently avoiding complicity in the ongoing extraction projects in Treaty 8, and many other places, by their Faculty of Engineering.

Lastly, it is important to think about the amount of money and time that went into making the tar sands possible. If this energy, investment, and institutional support were devoted to renewable energy research, or research into energy transition, it might be possible to build and imagine these alternate futures. Alberta, in particular, has experienced several difficult years economically due to global oil commodity prices. The downturn highlighted the serious drawbacks of having an oil dependent economy that must rise and fall with boom-bust cycles, yet the decisions made by the last government were to seek out further pipeline approval to secure extractive futures here. I discuss energy transitions in further detail in Chapter 5, and now turn to how infrastructures like pipelines, roads, and railways are of crucial importance to the state, to which much surveillance is devoted to protecting.

3.4 Critical Infrastructures

Infrastructure is an important concern of governments, and is undoubtedly a crucial practice of statemaking, and place making. Wilson (2016) shows that the very word “infrastructure” is drawn from the French word for the understructure of railroads—developed during the height of French colonial period (p. 267), and appears and circulates in language throughout the twentieth century to describe military and defence initiatives, post war rebuilding objectives, and

77 eventually in international development terminology. Wilson (2016) goes on to explain, “This history shows that the rubric of infrastructure was created through colonial and imperial development projects of modernity; as such infrastructure was also a transnational, public project” (p. 268). It comes as no surprise then that the state is very interested in infrastructure. Pasternak (2017) describes the term “critical infrastructure,” a term used by Canadian government departments and intelligence agencies as “a vague designation for fixed capital that forms the object of international security collaboration between states and industry to protect global supply chains” (p. 223). State interest in infrastructure in this context comes out of a situation wherein the state perceives a threat from the remote and often limited access to sites of resource extraction in Canada, and the proximity of these sites to many Indigenous reserves. Pasternak shows that the spatial dispersion of reserves in places where resource extraction takes place, or near other “critical infrastructures” like shipping routes, pipelines, or railroads make the threat of “Indigenous protests, blockades, or assertions of jurisdiction over land and resources disrupt, as the RCMP puts it, “infrastructure, both tangible and intangible, that is essential to the health, safety, security, or economic well-being of Canadians and the effective functioning of government” (endnote 99)” (Public Safety Canada, 2013, p. 242). The critical transportation of goods, resources, and energy through territories proximate to reserves, Treaty lands, and unceded territories creates an absence of certainty that is desired by both the state, and the workings of capitalism. Pasternak (2017) identifies, “This vulnerability is deadly to the logistics industry” (p. 242), which manage supply chains globally. The infrastructure needed to maintain these supply chains and ensure the profitable transportation and sale of goods and services, but also crucially, natural resources like oil, becomes a critical concern of the state, a concern confirmed by the ways in which RCMP and Canadian surveillance agencies focus on protecting the infrastructures that support these supply chains. Anne Spice (2018) has described how with this definition of “critical infrastructure,” the Canadian government mobilizes specific language, “to transform oil and gas infrastructures from industry projects into crucial matters of national interest” (p. 42). Spice (2018) argues that by creating the conditions for white land ownership, capitalist exchange, and “cementing settler ontologies that naturalize the existence and domination of the nation state” (p. 45), infrastructures are the conduits for colonial dispossession and expansion into unceded territories. As a result, when Indigenous people disrupt commodity flows, security responses by the state and law enforcement expose the ways a space like the reserve forms part of the carceral state “by providing a solution to that which exceeds and destabilizes sovereignty

78 via a spatial reorganization of populations and depoliticization of that process.” This dynamic of fixing populations in the midst of fluid and deterritorializing economies must be understood in the context of settler colonialism, where technologies of containment are not simply about building walls to keep people out, but more precisely form “a technology of separation and domination” within an internal settler-colonial occupation. The reserve-prison circuitry is primarily about securing territorial jurisdiction where the state claims sovereignty by cannot exercise control (Pasternak, 2017, p. 241).

This securitization and surveillance have been made more public in recent years as anti-pipeline activism and land defence has come head to head with major pipeline and oil companies. Jen Preston (2017a) has traced the creation of the K Division which was formed by the Canadian government in June 2012 in response to increased organizing around stopping Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline by Indigenous nations, environmentalists and settler communities along the proposed route. The RCMP-led “anti-terrorism” unit, called K Division, Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET; Public Safety Canada, 2013) also includes officers from CSIS, the Edmonton and Calgary police forces and Canadian Border Services. The creation of this division was criticized for criminalizing Indigenous objections to the oil industry and pipeline development. Preston (2017a) argued, “The perceived threat of coalitions between primarily non-native led environmental groups and Indigenous communities has elicited crisis discourses of anti-terrorism, and radical extremism” (p. 172). The K Division, described by the RCMP as playing a “critical role at the forefront of Canada’s Counter-terrorism strategy” (Public Safety, 2013), demonstrates the consolidation of national security intelligence for the purpose of protecting and supporting the development of critical infrastructures. RCMP Assistant Commissioner Gilles highlighted intelligence gathering as the key to guarding oil infrastructure in Alberta. Gilles told reporters in 2012, “We are basically looking at any individuals or groups that pose a threat to critical infrastructure, to our economy, to our safety that is based on either religious, political or ideological goals” (Canadian Press, 2012). In his statement, Indigenous assertions of jurisdiction over land are recast as threat to national economies and the safety of its citizens. Furthermore, the question of sovereignty is reframed, in some ways more accurately, as a spiritual, political, or ideological concern. Though by recasting the goal of sovereignty in this way, it becomes possible to dismiss the resistance to fossil fuel extraction as existing only with radical or fringe religious or political beliefs. The inclusion of “religious goals” alludes

79 simultaneously to Christian and Muslim extremist terrorist or sabotage acts. The former referring to the oil well bombings done by preacher and white settler, Wiebo Ludwig. Ludwig, who was the patriarch of his isolated religious community accused the oil industry of poisoning him and his family through the extraction of sour gas in Peace River Country in Alberta. Ludwig was charged and convicted of sabotaging and bombing oil wells. In the media he was depicted as religious fundamentalist, someone whose ecoterrorism was grounded in rigid religiosity (Nikiforuk, 2002). In many ways the K Division did not mobilize the image of Indigenous resistance to oil and pipeline development, but instead the threats of Ludwig-style ecoterrorism and/or the common Islamophobic trope of terrorism targeting the oil sands which circulated heavily in the region post 9/11.

Indigenous refusal of pipelines and oil and gas development on their lands has been a difficult thing to translate to people situated in Fort McMurray. For those I interviewed, it was impossible to bring up the subject of Indigenous sovereignty and pipeline resistance without hearing about the Aboriginal hiring and training policies of the major oil companies. There was not a single instance where participants began to discuss the question of sovereignty without prefacing it with some mention of the policies oil companies have instituted to hire Indigenous-owned companies or pursue some kind of affirmative action policies for Indigenous hires. While I go into the premises and assumptions about wage labour being a desirable trade off for dispossession from lands and colonial policies of genocide and assimilation, I will only mention briefly how this positions “Indigenous resistance” to critical infrastructure in the place of Fort McMurray. Because there is a perception of the oil companies doing the “right” thing by Indigenous people, the settler people I spoke to made sense of Indigenous resistance to further oil development in confused and unclear ways. Particularly in Fort McMurray, there is a perception that Cree, Dene, and Métis people of this region are profiting and largely benefiting from oil extraction. The response I heard many times from participants was that if there are problems with other Indigenous people resisting development in other places, it is because they haven’t received the benefits that many in Fort McMurray have been able to attain. In part, they see the building of infrastructures like highways, bridges, and airports as spin off benefits. The perception that there was nothing up in Fort McMurray before oil development (discussed in Chapter 2) also creates the understanding that without oil development, the local Cree, Dene, and Métis nations

80 wouldn’t be enjoying the types of infrastructure they do now. This reflects what Cowen (2017) has argued about the ways in which infrastructure can naturalize injustice; she writes:

But the infrastructures that distribute the necessities of life are themselves unevenly distributed, and they can inhibit as well as enable connection. The story of infrastructure is also one of disconnection, containment, and dispossession. In popular discourse, expressions like “the other side of the tracks” or “the back of the bus” hint at how infrastructure organizes inequity alongside vitality. Infrastructure may entrench injustice in systems that seem technical rather than political, instead of technopolitical, and thus can serve to naturalize those relations. And infrastructure does not simply reflect existing inequality, but may engineer and entrench new forms.

This explains how the huge disparity between infrastructures, and earmarked spending for new infrastructure projects that exists between the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (majority settler population), and the nearby reserves of Mikisew Cree First Nation, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Fort McMurray First Nation, Fort McKay Cree Nation, and Chipewyan Prairie First Nation have become normalized and taken for granted. It becomes a technical problem of funding applications, of local leadership, and bureaucracies. This creates a situation where oil companies can be celebrated for sponsoring new facilities in these communities, like recreation centres, as both a gesture to the oil leases on nearby Treaty lands, and response to the lack of public funds to build these types of infrastructures in the first place.

3.5 Routes Elsewhere: Bridges, Highways, and Airports

Sara Dorow and Goze Dogu (2011) have done research with both long-timers (their name for people who live and work permanently in Fort McMurray), and commuter populations in Fort McMurray. In their research, they had had participants sketch out maps of their lives in Fort McMurray. In their findings, infrastructure had a prominent place in the maps of many industrial worker (tradespeople, labourers, other blue-collar workers) and professionals who did not plan on putting down roots in this place. In these maps, these participants often had arrows pointing to the airport, or the highway, referencing the “stop gap practices” of getting away from their hectic work schedule and lonely nights in the worker camps. In this way, especially during the boom years, the infrastructure to get out of the city made enduring the long days (compounded by lack of infrastructure inside the city), and constant pace of work possible. Their findings highlighted

81 what one participant, who I’ve named Chris, described to me about working in Fort McMurray during the height of the boom years.

Chris is in his forties and has four kids. He lives in Grande Prairie, and recently found a job working here as well. For close to ten years Chris commuted from Grande Prairie to Fort McMurray, which is an 8 hour drive away. He has since left oil and gas, in part because of the toll commuting took on his family life; he’s now divorced and having primary custody of his kids has made commuting impossible. However, he is very happy to get to live and work in the same place now. He shared that he didn’t realize how hard his job in the oil sands was on him physically and emotionally until he stopped. He now works the standard 40 hour work week and gets to see his kids every night. Thinking back on his time in Fort McMurray, Chis described it this way,

It was so hard to commute [to the work sites] in Fort McMurray—trying to cross the bridge. Everything you try to do could take two or three hours if you work north of Fort McMurray. That used to be so frustrating—that you’d be—here you are you are working a 10 or 12 hour day, and then it takes you two hours to get home . . . and it was—you know, they talk about that oil boom, and it was just—I didn’t go to the bars and participate in that, but it’s just like everybody was just go, go, go, go, all the time.

Chris lived in town with a friend during the time, and not in the camps where many commuters stay during their shifts. As a result, Chris had to join the thousands of cars on the highway at shift change, adding hours to his already long day. The frequent accidents that blocked traffic were often due to driving errors made by fatigued drivers.

This is what another commuter, Jeanette, told me about dangerous highways, “I know that the highways up here are atrocious, and that there’s, um, like, multiple fatalities everywhere because of the highways, and how people travel so far to get up north to get to their job sites.” In addition to the inadequate road infrastructure, the pace of work lead by the quick expansion of extraction projects lead to long hours and long commutes for many workers, making them unable to drive as safely as they might under normal circumstances. In her job, unlike Chris, Jeanette lives in camp. While this lifestyle is not something she sees herself doing in the long term, she prefers living in camp to driving into site everyday. At the end of her shift she flies home to Calgary, avoiding the highway and the shift traffic completely. Many people shared with me their various

82 strategies for avoiding the highway at certain times. Brittany, a woman in her mid-twenties, who recently made the change from being an accountant to working as a heavy haul truck driver told me that the winters here were hard because she was afraid to travel the highway. “Yeah but usually I try to avoid the highway for the winter, which is a long period of time to not going anywhere, but yeah you do go a bit stir crazy.” She tries to wait for a clear weekend in March to drive to Edmonton for a break from the isolation she sometimes feels in Fort McMurray.

For these reasons, and the fact that Highway 63 is the only major road into the region, the highway south is a significant infrastructure to the people of Fort McMurray. Until 2016 there were significant sections of this road that were only a single lane each way. The highway was extended up to Fort McMurray in the late 1960s for early oil sands production. However, improvements to this highway were not made in time to handle the volume of traffic travelling during the height of the oil boom. One long-time resident of Fort McMurray told me, “Sometimes you were taking your life in your own hands to drive down the highway.” In the last few years, the highway was finally twinned—two lanes each way north and south, making passing, and carrying wide loads much safer. Twinning the highway was always an important objective for this community. Oil companies had to ship wide loads of heavy equipment parts up the highway—slowing traffic behind it and leading to huge traffic jams that often lead to drivers taking risks. In addition, the sheer volume of cars travelling to and from Fort McMurray on this road made it dangerous and congested. Fatalities and serious accidents were a common occurrence during this time, during serious accidents the highway would be closed for hours, redirecting the mass of vehicles to a small secondary highway instead. Now that it is twinned, nearly everyone I spoke to told me how much easier it is to get to Edmonton, they feel safer. The faster, safer route out has made living here easier and less isolating. Isolation, as I discussed in Chapter 2 is not only the distance from the major city of Edmonton, but the perception that they are a city in the middle of nowhere. Feeling that they are surrounded by “nothing,” i.e., the spaces of settlement found in other more densely populated parts of the province or country, shape how people make sense of their place in Fort McMurray, and also their desires for infrastructure. A safer, faster highway out is an interesting thing to desire in a place you are actively engaged in making your home, but its presence makes life here more comfortable, and more permanent.

In thinking about the highway, my participants only spoke about the ways this highway posed a risk to life through poor design, too much volume, and risky drivers. They didn’t talk about the risk highways in both Northern and resource-extraction communities pose to Indigenous women, girls, and two spirit people. Though this wasn’t something they raised or discussed in the course of our interviews, it is still worth thinking about the ways this infrastructure also facilitates particular forms of racialized and gendered violence. The final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (National Inquiry MMIWG, 2019) highlighted the dangers resource-extraction projects bring to Indigenous communities. The report found, “substantial evidence of a serious problem” (National Inquiry MMIWG, 2019, p. 593) from resource-extraction projects. These industries create “boomtowns,” often resourced by labour from “mancamps” which create environments where there are increased rates of sexual violence, domestic violence, and drug- and alcohol-fuelled offences (National Inquiry MMIWG, 2019, p. 593). The report found that “This increased rate of violence is largely the result of the migration into the camps of mostly non-Indigenous young men with high salaries and little to no stake in the host Indigenous community” (National Inquiry MMIWG, 2019, p. 593).

While these projects are not exclusively in oil and gas (the report includes other types of mining projects, hydroelectric dam projects, and other forms of natural resource extraction), to pretend that Fort McMurray is immune to these findings would be naïve. As of March 2019, there are at least six Indigenous women from Fort McMurray and the surrounding communities who have been murdered or have gone missing (McDermott, 2019). The design of the camps, and the very gendered demographics of commuting workers in general, 59 percent male, 40 percent female (Census Profile, 2016), create difficult conditions for commuters (Ruddell, 2011). Ruddell argues that the rapid population growth experienced in “boom town” communities, like Fort McMurray, typically results in particular outcomes that lead to more criminality and social disorder: “In addition to crime, quality of life issues—such as traffic density—as well as increased costs for housing and demands for physical, mental and social health services stress the social fabric” (Ruddell, 2011, n.p.). These trends are seen in other resource-extraction communities, including Australia where several studies have described the ways in which long distance commuting creates more stress and many negative impacts on the workforce which drives increased substance use, criminal activity, and violence (Barton, 2002; Bull, 2007; Carrington, Hogg, & McIntosh, 2011). The infrastructure of these camps, or perhaps the lack of

84 infrastructure, along with demanding work schedules and time away from worker’s own communities creates an environment that can easily become dangerous. This is something that people in Fort McMurray feel sensitive about, as the national story about this place during the height of the boom years was about the social disfunction and alcohol and drug abuse that plagued the camps, the industry, and police. How this ends up disproportionately impacting Indigenous women, girls, and two spirit people is something my participants didn’t describe, or perhaps even connect to while talking about the danger surrounding Highway 63.

3.6 Corporate Sponsorship of Public Infrastructures

Craig, who grew up in Fort McMurray but now works for a pipeline company based out of Calgary doing tar-sands projects told me how the failure of the provincial and federal governments to make the necessary investments in infrastructure created a situation where private oil companies had to step in and do it themselves. He explained it this way,

When you look at infrastructure along on Highway 63, there’s an overpass that Suncor, the company itself, built because it was necessary—it was a safety issue—but the province using the funding mechanisms available to it, such as royalties to fund that infrastructure to support the growth and the economy in the region. Suncor built that overpass itself and did so with private funds. Another really good example [of company sponsorship] would be MacDonald Island, a world class recreational facility with a ton of things for, like you said, kids, for families that was built largely on private dollars because public funding just wasn’t there. The Black Box Arts studio for improv kids at the new high school up in Timberlea, that was built using Suncor funds because the province wasn’t going to pony up the dollars for innovative arts programming. Where the government has been absent, the companies stepped in. And I think one of things that people observe when they go up there is wow, there are world class facilities, there’s beautiful infrastructure up here. Where did it come from? Oh, I see a company name all over it.

Craig understands that the failure of governments to invest in the infrastructures needed to keep up with the pace of development as a failure to support the growth of the region. He found this frustrating and short-sighted as he is optimistic about the role oil extraction currently has and will have for the economic health of the province and nation more broadly. Craig found this

85 particularly frustrating that it was the same governments who talked a lot about the importance of energy economies, that failed to fund the infrastructure needed to stabilize them and promote their growth.1 Craig explained the role of companies in advocating for public investment in infrastructure this way,

The twinning of Highway 63 is another great [example], if you want to look how long it took and how it was actually companies saying “it’s not safe for us to move our loads up anymore, we can’t build projects unless you get this Highway done.” Public safety is paramount to a lot of companies up there and all companies up there because you know, if you can’t do it safely it’s going to come back to haunt you, but a lot of what it takes to do your job safely and efficiently is the infrastructure in place to participate in the economy and that is again, a government role.

Craig identifies the important role infrastructure plays in making extraction projects possible. He went on to say, “I look at this and I’m very critical of where we were provincially up until recently, and I’m very critical of our federal landscape up until recently because as much as we tout our energy as being a source of stability for the future it was also not given the background resourcing to thrive.” For Craig, the government’s abdication of responsibility to the oil companies is something that he is hopeful will change now that conservative governments have been replaced provincially and federally with parties that more openly embrace the public funding of infrastructures, schools, and other community desired facilities.

3.7 Making Fort McMurray Home

Up to now I have examined the types of critical infrastructures that have made extraction possible. I now want to think about what Wilson (2016) has termed “infrastructures of intimacy,” in order to contrast how the state, the industry, intimacy, and social reproduction all connect into one another to recreate and maintain settlement and extraction in this place. As I’ve shown, people in Fort McMurray are acutely aware of the infrastructures they miss when they compare it

1 There are several notable studies on Canadian company towns (single industry towns) that describe similar situations and conflicts when these towns lose their primary industry. See Bradbuy, 1980; Bradbury, 1999; Halseth, 1999; Hayter 2003; Lucas, 1971. Scholars have also written about the transformations in resource extraction work that has shifted away from the creation and maintenance of resource towns to instead long-distancing commuting in camps (Storey, 2016; Mazer, 2019).

86 to the places they have come from. At the height of the boom this included better roads, safer highways out of town, more schools, single-family homes, a long-term care facility, parks, sidewalks, and streetlights. The speed with which Fort McMurray was built, mirroring the boom and bust of the oil commodity markets, created what Rob Shields (2012) has termed feral suburbs. These incomplete subdivisions alongside the untouched boreal forest create wild spaces of domesticity that reflect the unique cultural and economic features of this place. When you live in a place that is being built around you, you watch the wilderness being brought under the regimes of infrastructure. Trees and bushes are removed, water and sewage lines are put in, and then roads and sidewalks and streetlights are installed: these form the skeleton of a neighbourhood that has not been built yet. I learned to ride a bike in one of these empty subdivisions. All of the hard infrastructure had been built just as oil prices dropped, removing the demand for single-family homes and leaving the subdivision to sit empty for a decade until the price of oil rose once more.

During the boom years, subdivisions were built quickly, and infrastructures (such as paved roads, sidewalks, and streetlights) that had previously been built before houses went up would now at times be built after the houses had gone up. This is Shields’s (2012) half wild, half domestic “feral” situation. He described these subdivisions as “well-planned housing developments yet inadequate, unsatisfying places to live in the sense that lack of services and consumption opportunities [was] compounded by a sense of geographic distance and isolation” (Shields, 2012, p. 208). Such features made these suburbs unable to be fully domesticated. (Those I spoke to agreed that the isolation, distance, and lack of services and shopping centres were downsides of living in this place, many would disagree that they made Fort McMurray inadequate or unsatisfying.)

Shields’s evaluation of the livability of this place aside, the term feral is an interesting one to use as a descriptor of this place. The unfinished houses being built, the construction machinery parked in the backyard, and the presence of the forest close by, all “trouble the conventional staging of suburban environments that inform taken-for-granted ‘settlement’ of the built environments and the wider landscape of ecosystem and climatic context” (Shields, 2012, p. 208). Whereas the suburb is imagined as a place of domesticity, the feral suburbs of Fort McMurray are a place that cannot quite be tamed. However, this wildness is what many participants find to be a desirable feature of living there. Many shared with me that when friends

87 and family come to visit from out of town, they proudly take them to the Birchwood Trail system, which runs through the wooded areas between subdivisions. The closeness to nature and adoption of outdoor activities is something many said they developed once moving to Fort McMurray. Their appreciation and enjoyment of nature proves to them that the destruction required for open-pit mining of oil sands is containable and small in comparison to the land that remains untouched and beautiful.

Yet this idea that living in this place, which cannot quite achieve the “taken-for-granted ‘settlement’ of the built environments” that a suburb or a city attains elsewhere, provides an interesting way of thinking-through settlement, permanence, and settler futurity. This is because in Fort McMurray the settlement is never complete. The isolation and distance from other spaces where settler normalcy is taken for granted make city building, creation of infrastructure projects, and development of new subdivisions, shopping malls, and schools a deliberate and conscious task of settling the city. How participants evaluated how far the city had come was an interesting way to think about this idea of taken-for-granted settlement as well. That the city had become a place for young families and was no longer just a working town highlights how investments in certain infrastructures over others have worked to shape this perception and feeling among those who live here.

Participants regularly referred to livability in terms of infrastructures—how things had improved in recent years as projects to build roads, schools, and suburbs had caught up with the pace of population expansion. If infrastructures build futures, and facilitate the social reproduction of particular aims and hierarchies, how can we think about the recent investments in facilities for children and young families in this place? Who is imagined to live in this place, whose future here is desired? Christopher, a professional who worked in supply chain management for a major oil company, spoke to me a few months before he and his young family left Fort McMurray to move to Calgary. He was excited about the new jobs he and his wife had found in Calgary, and in the downturn no less, but he found there were plenty of opportunities for their child in Fort McMurray, which had made it hard for them to leave:

I would say looking around at what the opportunities are here for children to do is a lot more than anything that I’ve ever seen before in my life. You look at all the different programs that people have their kids in that I hear about, just walking around you can see

all of the different play places, there’s the different facilities—there are exponentially more than I remember for myself.

This was something I heard from participants with and without children, the sense many people share is that Fort McMurray has become a great place to raise children. Melissa, who had lived in Fort McMurray for nearly 10 years, watched these facilities and services increase over the years:

The opportunities for young families here are crazy. Even just Mac Island alone is crazy, that place blows my mind. And just the school systems, and everything they have. I started playing volleyball recently, and the games are in the high schools here, and we had to walk through the high schools and I’m just looking at these places and it’s crazy, and it’s nothing like we had when we were in high school.

Melissa was from a small town in the Maritimes, so it could be argued that the underfunded education systems in economically depressed rural Nova Scotia could be a poor comparison point to the newly built schools of a city in Alberta. But I also heard these types of comments from people who had moved to Fort McMurray from larger urban areas like Montreal, and the lower mainland in British Columbia.

Malcolm, an engineer and now executive, joked that “If [Fort McMurray] wasn’t good for the kids we’d be gone by now.” He and his wife had two children and had decided to stay in Fort McMurray for the long term. Part of this decision was because of the work opportunity here, but also the quality of education and facilities for their children:

We find the school systems, maybe I’m biased because my wife works in them, school systems excellent here, we’ve got great amenities and great schools, great sport programs. We also, and not to make Fort McMurray about money, but you also make the type of money up here that you can afford those opportunities for your children to pursue secondary education. So I don’t really see Fort McMurray limiting what we want to do in our family at all, in any way.

In many ways, the city had emerged as a stable, suburban place to raise families in. More than just the schools and amenities, Malcolm described to me their close-knit community, and how that is something he loves about Fort McMurray. He has neighbours who he considers good

89 friends, they have neighbourhood-wide barbecues, share child care duties, and look out for one another. He said:

As far as living in Fort McMurray itself, I wish people could see the community that we do have here. Not just the negativity that the media seems to portray. It seems that whenever you see a clip of Fort McMurray, it’s the downtown strip, when you see, you know they talk about drugs, and homeless people, and shift workers working 14 hours a day and not getting to see their families, and they talk about divorce, they don’t talk about the vast majority of people here who are making a good living for themselves, giving a great living to their family. And that community that we have here.

Malcolm’s distinction between the Fort McMurray he loved and the bad-reputation, boom-town version of Fort McMurray was one made by many. Melissa, who I introduced above, said that at times she took on the role of ambassador for Fort McMurray when visiting friends and family back home to promote how the city had changed. She felt that the way the media talked about Fort McMurray was misleading and unfair. When we were talking about what she wished people understood about this place, she remembered all of the negative things Fort McMurray had been called during the height of the boom years—things like “Fort McCrack, Fort Smack, and Fort McAsh Tray.” She added:

I’m kind of defensive when it comes to Fort Mac, because I love it here. And it’s a beautiful place, and people who just crap it all over it, for it being an oil town, or being transient, yes, you know it has its issues, but so does every place. You can find the issues here you find everywhere; it’s just maybe magnified a little.

Melissa and several others said that in reality they felt that this was a place full of hard-working people who were trying to do the best for their families. Many noncommuters even shared their sympathy with the negative portraits of commuters painted by the media and at times the local community. They understood that this picture—commuters being the problem, bringing drugs, violence, and crime into the small community—was unfair when many of the commuters were just trying to make a living for their own families. They felt that the whole community including commuters had been misunderstood; for them, their community was defined more by white middle-class values. Many told me the silver lining in the hardships of the economic downturn and the wildfire was that a lot of people who weren’t committed to the city did not come back.

These hardships had pushed out for good those who were here for a quick buck, or who participated in the rough underbelly of the city. The people who loved it, the people who wanted to put down roots, came back to rebuild.

3.8 Building a Recognizable Home: Building a Settler City

How the city is built is also a reflection of what kind of lives are desirable. The city planners and developers are not building skyscrapers or condos. Instead, they build single-family housing in subdivisions that look like most other new build single-family homes in Canada. So much so, that participants regularly described Fort McMurray as looking like any other suburb. Shields (2012) asks,

What then is one to make of Fort McMurray’s mode of land and community development that is so patently North American “suburban” yet still Other? It conforms to images and forms of the North American middle class rather than to those of the local, the working class or to the village rubric of the surrounding Métis, Cree and Dene settlements (p. 209)

In this section I argue that recreating the North American suburb, in part an objective of the oil companies to make life more possible here and ensure a long term, stable workforce for their operations; is also a project of settlement and creating the conditions for settler permanence here. To argue this, I look at the ways in which participants see their homes as both entirely ordinary, and yet exceptional. Creating the banality of the suburb next to an extraordinary extraction site works to normalize the conditions of this extraction, and create the types of settled, and taken- for-granted scenes that erase Indigenous presence. As Cowen (2017) argues, “Infrastructure is not simply proximate to urban centres; it is literally constitutive of the city.” The drive to build infrastructures for the suburban subdivision, for the reproduction of middle-class family life here constitutes the city itself.2

2 The sprawling literature on suburbs and suburbanization includes significant critiques that demonstrate the military origins of the suburb (Harper, 2007; Johnson & Jackson, 1981; Lutz, 2001; Olwell, 2004), including how these suburbs were built as a result of the political economy of the post-war state (Cowen, 2008; K. Jackson, 1985). Furthermore, the literature has described how suburbs were both shaped by and co-constituted through auto-mobility (Huber, 2013; Sheller & Urry, 2000), racial segregation (Freeman, 2006; Silberman, 1962; Thompson, 1999; Wiese, 2005), gendered labour and space (England, 1993; Saegert, 1980; Strong-Boag, 1991), and normative sexuality (Howard, 2013; Tongson, 2011). In these ways the suburb was built to support and reproduce particular social

Robert, a mining engineer I mentioned above described the banality of the city here when talking about how people don’t understand that there are families and other close-knit communities here. He told me,

Lots of people are like “where do you stay?” “what’s it like?” It’s like fucking Calgary— it’s just a suburb I live in. A bunch of homes, it’s boring, we have streetlights in the wrong places . . . just like you! [Laughter] Like that part of it I wish people understood. It’s like if I put you here and I told you it was Calgary and you’ve never been anywhere else you might believe me. I’d say downtown is far away you can’t see it. if I put you right here on foot would you know? No.

I have included Robert’s description of this place for how it references a normalcy about suburban places like Calgary that is assumed. What Robert doesn’t say, but is worth questioning here, is what is he referencing about the suburb that is assumed to be like any place else? The suburb has often been critiqued for its sameness, or uniformity (Duany, Plater-Zyberk, & Speck, 2000). Going further than just the visual uniformity, much has also been written on how suburbs create homogeneity among class, race, and income (Jurca, 2001; Moos & Mendez, 2015), and contribute to uneven geographies of income (Ley & Lynch, 2012; Walks, 2011). This normalcy is also about ubiquity, Alan Walks (2013) has argued that suburbs have emerged as, “the dominant mode of urban existence” (p. 1471). I understand Robert saying that to create a place that mirrors this common type of urban living, even in an isolated city in Northeastern Alberta, demonstrates the normalcy and uniqueness of life here. It is in fact this normalcy that makes the criticisms of the town and the tar sands themselves that much more ridiculous to Robert and many other participants. Asking him what he wished people understood about this place, he told me, “I wish they understood that it’s a real town and it’s on the frontier and it’s full of normal people and we’re all just here to do the best for us and for our families and that sort of stuff.” This tension, that this place is both a frontier but also like any other place is a useful way to understand how participants relate to their life here. While this place challenges them (through

relations which also had significant political and economic implications (Huber 2013; Oakley, 1986; Patterson, 1996).

92 the parts that are like a frontier), it also has many things they need and like that are familiar from places they lived before.

The sentiment of unique normalcy was shared by another mining engineer, also in his early thirties who had been working in oil sands since finishing university. Moving to Fort McMurray from a rural farming town in Southern Alberta, David was unsure about what awaited him when he got to Fort McMurray based on the bad reputation the city had during the boom years.

So, it’s not like that and you know what, it probably wasn’t so much like that [the rough reputation] at even that time as I thought it was, especially once you get up here, in the residential neighbourhoods and stuff. Fort McMurray is no different than any other residential area. I mean you can drive around residential Calgary and it looks a lot the same, or Edmonton.

The way these suburbs reflect “normal” places like Calgary and Edmonton suburbs was remarked upon several times by participants when I asked them what they wished people knew about this place. Additionally, many people made the distinction of “uptown” being a safe and normal neighbourhood in juxtaposition to the “rougher” downtown. Several participants who had lived downtown when they first moved to the city, talked about the rough neighbourhoods and how different it was once they found a new place in Timberlea or Thickwood. Now living “up top” (uptown is on the top of the river valley, downtown built in the valley, along the Clearwater River) their lives and homes are just like anywhere else. Except here they can make more money than other places, and enjoy new schools, roads, and facilities. Furthermore, in contrast to the days of the oil boom, life is more enjoyable now.

Making this place livable has been an important objective for the municipal government, and the oil companies alike. During the boom, when traffic ground to a halt and every retail, and food service provider had lines out the door, the city felt difficult to live in. As oil developments grew, the city was swamped with people it couldn’t hold. As a result, livability has always been a concern for the future of oil extraction in this region. Especially for highly skilled and trained workers that companies invest in to recruit and retain. In order to create a stable workforce (as opposed to relying on a commuter workforce that the companies would have to pay to fly in and out and board), the oil companies have taken a role in creating conditions for a desirable life in this place. The sponsorship of facilities I quoted Craig describing earlier, company sponsored

93 social clubs, and the building of suburbs all sought to make this place one employees would want to stay. In this way, it is isn’t just the building of pipelines and highways that facilitates extraction economies, but the creation of infrastructures that enable intimacy, and social reproduction that are also crucial for making extractive futures possible.

One example is the oil company CNRL which worked with the province and the city to build the residential neighbourhood Eagle Ridge. This is the neighbourhood, or subdivision, where I conducted many of my in person interviews. Cowen (2017) explains, “Extractive industries and entrepreneurial states seem to agree that their joint interests and respective fates are contingent on infrastructure. Without infrastructure, life as we know it stops” (n.p.). Public-private partnerships to develop neighbourhoods in time for the beginning of new oil projects enmesh oil companies into the everyday lives of the families who live here (Shields, 2012, p. 210). New employees are also encouraged to put down roots through various incentives for homeownership. While some of these incentives have slowed with the market, in the mid-2010s new recruits were hired out of university; at times with $75,000 signing bonuses and mortgage support programs available to them if agreed to stay with the company for four years. There were company wide “retention” bonuses, and other programs like “Living Out Allowance” to help employees afford the expensive Fort McMurray rental market.

Making a desirable home in this place is also about reproducing the elements that the settler workforce left in other places. Davis and Todd (2017) have argued that the colonial project was “enacted through a brutal system of imposing “the right” way of living” (p. 769), i.e., in Fort McMurray the North American suburban standard. This right way included transforming the territories they invaded to look like home. Davis and Todd (2017) go on to explain, colonizers “refused to see what was in front of them; instead forcing a landscape, climate, flora, and fauna into an idealized version of the world modelled on sameness and replication of the Homeland” (p. 769). I want to point out that this home isn’t even that ideal to many participants—Robert’s description of the boring, ill-planned suburb he lives in speaks to this. However, the ways in which this is mobilized through housing developers and city planners ends up looking like any other suburb in any other Western Canadian city. The sameness breeds normalcy and banality— which in turn is how many participants would describe their lives, their jobs, their desires for this place. They want to live in a place where they can earn a good living, have good opportunities for their children, and Fort McMurray offers this and more. However, the other side of this is to

94 create a place where Indigenous presence is moved to the containable sites of the reserve, or to the purview of corporate managed Aboriginal initiatives. The idea that Fort McMurray was an empty wilderness before the oil developments, helps to produce the idea that Indigenous people were either nomadic trappers, or that they come from the reserves they were relocated to. The violence of relocation and dispossession is erased and managed by the progressive narratives of kindly fur traders, multicultural tolerance, and technological achievements of science to turn bitumen into crude.

Colonizers refusal to accept the place-specific relationships between lands, waters, and nonhuman beings has been described by Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte as what drives the desire to create what Davis and Todd (2017) have described as, “the vision of a displaced Europe, fundamentally altering climate and ecosystems,” a process they call “terraforming” (p. 771). This terraforming can be seen as wetlands are drained and forests clear cut in order to dig open-pit mines, as well as the reconstruction of forests into suburbs. The subdivision—Eagle Ridge I referenced above is built on to a hillside. The roads, drains, and stormwater ponds all work to direct water down the hill and away from resident’s basements. Large sections of hillside are terraced to make flat sections on which to build upon. As Whyte (2016), “industrial settler campaigns erase what makes a place ecologically unique in terms of human and nonhuman relations, the ecological history of a place, and the sharing of the environment by different human societies” (p. 8). As forests are cleared, the nonhuman beings who lived in them must move. Some trees are replaced to offer shade and improve aesthetics in the bare front yards laid with fresh sod. However, the loss of habitat is not remarked upon as these neighbourhoods are all bounded by large sections of “untouched” forest. With so much abundance, the effects of human impact feel less significant. With so much around still wild, the desire is to settle Fort McMurray and make it feel like home.

This drive for settlement is also deeply racialized. In a report published by the Fort McMurray Métis Nation, it was revealed how the city of Fort McMurray collaborated with the housing arm of Syncrude Canada to evict Métis families from an area called Moccasin Flats, which was a Métis road allowance near the convergence point of the Athabasca and Clearwater Rivers (Longley & Joly, 2018). Road allowance communities is what Métis communities that settled on road allowances are called. Road allowances were 66 foot wide strips of land set aside by Crown surveyors for future road development. Many Métis communities were forced to settle on these

95 areas of land after being driven from their homesteads following the 1885 Rebellions. Without access to reserve land, or other safe places to go, they sought out these road lines and other Crown lands that were at least temporarily vacant of settlers to build new communities. Due to the precarious title of these lands, they were often not secure and had uncertain futures. However, by the late 1970s, the community at Moccasin Flats was still in existence, it served as an important meeting place for Métis families who would come there in the summer to pick medicines and fish, and also served as a more permanent home for many families (Longley & Joly, 2018). This community however was targeted for eviction in 1975, when the New Town of Fort McMurray began to collaborate with the housing arm of Syncrude in order to build the Syncrude Towers housing complex (Longley & Joly, 2018). As well, the town sought out this land to build a proposed marina, which has never been built. The town labelled the community as “squatters” in order to serve them eviction notices and clear the way for development. Ignoring the Métis forms of community here, the town government sought to create Fort McMurray into a recognizable settler city.

Indeed, this drive to turn Fort McMurray into a knowable settled place continues today. With state-of-the-art schools and recreation facilities the municipal government works to create the conditions of settlement here. This is especially noticeable as many other places endure austerity and deindustrialization, leaving public institutions and infrastructures in ruin. In place of the transient “work town” that could face the fate of many other company towns that fade into ghost towns after the mill or the mine closes down, Fort McMurray strives to provide the certainty and stability desired by oil companies to continue to extract this oil—estimates have reported at least 50 to 100 years of “deposit” still waiting to be mined. Whether the climate can sustain the burning of that 100 years of tar sand is carefully sidelined, but this vision, promoted by the municipality and oil companies alike provides the basis for city building and settler permanence. Many of the participants shared with me that more and more Fort McMurray was where they planned to stay for the duration of their careers. It is a common story here that people come with a one or two year plan, to make their money and then return home with their riches. Many of my participants who were either long-timers here or were “putting down roots” to stay, had originally had this plan as well. Claire, a Newfoundlander in her forties who had been working here for almost 20 years joked that the “one or two year plan” [is] now commonly called the “one year-two year-five year-and-twenty-year plan. Because usually you come and you like it

96 and then you end up staying.” While the people who shared their experiences of this place with me had built strong friendships and connections to this place, most admitted to knowing very little about the Cree and Dene reserves to the north and south of the city. In this way, the connections and relationships remain focused on fellow settlers, and to a large extent, human- centric. Many shared that they had made the best friendships in their lives in this place, fast friendships were made as many people were from somewhere else and remembered how hard it was to start over in a new place. Yet these relationships are taking place less than 50 km from a place of total disconnection, of destruction, as trees and wetlands are removed to make way for open-pit mines and the roads, power lines, and pipelines that serve them.

The infrastructures built for extraction have ordered this reality. In this way, extractive infrastructures arrange relationships between humans, nonhumans, lands, and waters into hierarchical relationships of sacrifice (Murphy, 2015). The lands, waters, wetlands, and nonhuman beings are sacrificed to make way for extractive futures demanded by Western consumption and extractive economies (see also J. Gordon, 2015). That these sacrifices are taken for granted and not mourned comes as a consequence of hierarchies of lives that matter. Davis and Todd (2017) explain that, “What settler colonialism, and its extensions into contemporary petrocapitalism, does is a severing of relations. It is a severing of relations between humans and the soil, between plants and animals, between minerals and our bones” (p. 770). In similar ways, lands themselves are severed. Segregated into spaces for extraction, spaces for suburban homes, and spaces for the “enjoyment of nature,” these delineated spaces create binaries between nature and civilization (N. Smith, 2008; Watts, 2017). Privileging human use, enjoyment, and profit from land erases the complex ways life was sustained in this place before surveyors, oil companies, and city planners came through to design how life in this place might be built.

3.9 Spaces for Work, Spaces for Rest, and Spaces for Leisure

Significantly, these suburbs offer a recognizable home away from the work sites and the less desirable downtown area. Shields (2012) asserted that the contradictions of this place are managed through, “a concerted effort to separate domestic space from the production environment of the oil sands without integrating or conceding to the surrounding boreal forest” (p. 213). The constitution of land for particular types of use in these places is a feature that has marked this region since the development of bitumen extraction. Places are highly segregated,

97 and access to places of extraction is tightly controlled by the oil companies who employ security companies to prevent nonauthorized people from entering or even viewing many work sites. Places are described and talked about in these distinct terms as well. “Out at site” is how the settler population in Fort McMurray describes the workscapes of the extraction sites. There is a distance of about 30 km from downtown Fort McMurray north to the nearest work site at Suncor (some other sites are over 100 km north of the city), making “out at site” a description of both the geographical distance of the sites from the city, as well as the physical difference of landscape. “In town” references the city of Fort McMurray itself, especially for the segment of the workforce that live in employer-provided housing (called camps) in the more distant work sites. The people I spoke to who live and work in Fort McMurray understand that these places are very different. It made sense to them that the work site would be the ugly, industrial, and damaged place that it is—but that this damage is the cost of getting oil out of the ground. And to paint all of Fort McMurray with these industrial descriptions would not accurate. In opposition to the “site,” Fort McMurray itself is a small city nestled in the river valley. There are dense forests that line most of the roads around town, and there are beautiful places to drive, walk, or bike to enjoy the “natural landscapes” of this valley. This abundance of “natural” environment makes it possible to distinguish the industrial damage of the open-pit mines from the lush greenery and tall trees that seem to encompass the rest of the city.

Scale was something brought up in relation to the damage of the tar sands multiple times in interviews. They draw a distinct line between what they see as the workplace of the mine, and the relative beauty of the boreal forest and the Athabasca River Valley. It corresponds that a mine, an upgrading facility, a tailings pond, or a well site would be ugly and not pleasant to look at. But that these places are bounded by dense forests prove their point. While the scale of the tar sands is huge, the scale of untouched forests, wetlands, and grasslands is even greater.

The bounded space of the mine, that it begins at the end of a highway edged by dense forest, creates the segregation of the environmental impact. The segregation of the place of the tar-sands extraction and the city itself in part creates these boundaries. Many residents I interviewed bristle at the condemnation of the region by celebrities and their colourful descriptions of the tailings ponds and open-pit mines. The extraction sites have been called moonscapes, Hiroshima, Mordor, and wasteland. Those who work out at site agree, it’s not pretty, but many make a clear distinction between site and town. This boundary makes it possible to see environmental damage

98 as containable. The scale of the impact may be large, but just a few kilometres south that impact is barely felt. If that level of environmental damage can’t be perceived in town, then the impact further south in the rest of Canada is surely imperceptible. The boundary also makes the discourse of “reclamation” believable. As discussed in the introduction, participants regularly discussed the provincial government’s regulation on oil and gas rights, that after the land is no longer “productive,” it must be returned back to its original state.

The distinctive places of work, leisure, and home all shape how oil extraction is understood as an inevitable end of oil production, and creating the conditions for people to do just that. In creating a modern city in the middle of nowhere, the infrastructures of this city are able abstract this place in ways that “terraform” it into the North American suburb. In doing so, Indigenous presence is erased, or removed to the reserves outside of the city. The histories of Dene, Cree, and Métis forced removal to reserves as a result of Treaty 8 is forgotten and naturalized, as if they are only the original people of the reserve.

In his account on the signing of Treaty 8, Dennis Madill (1986) describes the fraught process of imposing Treaty 8; in his account, he writes,

At Fort Chipewyan, Bishop G. Breynat summarized the Indians’ position by stating that “Crees and Chipewyans refused to be treated like the Prairie Indians, and to be parked on reserves . . . It was essential to them to retain complete freedom to move around [to be able to hunt and trap].” Also included in the long list of demands of the Chipewyans was a railway link with the south. (n.p.)

Madill’s account shows us the power of infrastructure to naturalize certain knowledges of place. In the end the vast majority of Cree and Dene people were “parked on reserves,” and this segregation of space has become taken for granted for many of my participants. I will discuss in greater detail how participants make sense of the land conflict between Cree, Dene, and Métis people and the oil companies and the governments that approve their land leases in the next chapter. However, I do want to point out that there is the belief that the march of “progress” is inevitable, and so are the relations of capitalism, oil extraction, and dispossession of lands this requires. I use Madill’s work to show that in 1899 the Cree and Dene wanted a railway line to the south while still wanting to continue to hunt and trap freely on their lands. Their demand effectively rejects the commonly held belief that some participants shared with me that

99 traditional Indigenous lifestyles are incompatible with modern life. Similarly, activist Winona LaDuke, from the White Earth Reservation in Northern Minnesota, has described the desire for infrastructures that serve people’s needs. LaDuke explains,

I say that most of our Indian reservations don’t have adequate infrastructure. We’d like a little help with our water and sewer systems there . . . . I want pipelines, I want infrastructure, for people, not for fossil fuels, not for oil companies. (Democracy Now, 2016)

In this way, infrastructure allows us to trace how it is an active investment to prioritize infrastructures for extraction and for settlement. The future currently being desired is an extractive future. However, once it is understood to be a choice, and not a natural consequence of inevitable Western consumption and oil-heavy lifestyles, it becomes possible to actively re- prioritize what futures are desired and invested in. Infrastructures for creating the conditions of permanence for a settler workforce needed for the extraction of and mobility of fossil fuels could be replaced with infrastructures that imagine, desire, and build different futures. These different futures could be ones that centre relationality and ethical responsibility to lands, waters, and nonhuman beings. Rethinking the possibility, or potential of infrastructures allows us to see both the current choices and futures being pursued, and the ways in which it is possible to demand and build alternatives.

To conclude, this chapter has traced how infrastructure creates the conditions that make oil extraction not only possible, but part of a desirable future for the settler population of Fort McMurray. Infrastructure, in its many forms, is necessary for oil extraction to take place here. The types of “critical” infrastructures, of roads, pipelines, and bridges make it materially possible for oil to be dug from the earth and transported to market. Additionally, infrastructure also works to make Fort McMurray a permanent home for the oil industry’s workforce. In turn, building the conditions of settler permanence here then creates the justification for further extraction and continued development. Creating a demand for oil jobs for its population that in turn further justifies the massive scale of extraction projects in this region. Once the city has been built and generations of people start to call this place home, the deeply felt connections to this place get entwined with the oil economies that sustain it. In this way infrastructures not only produce the

100 economic and extractive relations in this place, but also the interpersonal, the intimate, and the social relations too.

Chapter 4 Misunderstandings of Indigenous Refusals

In the introduction I briefly described some of the different ways that Cree, Dene, and Métis people have resisted and refused tar-sands development on their traditional lands. Participants made sense of Indigenous presence, refusals of oil development, and employment in the oil industry in a number of different ways. It is difficult to generalize the complicated and contradictory ways participants responded to the questions I asked them about the different ways in which the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, the Mikisew Cree First Nation, and Fort McKay First Nation have, at different moments, resisted further oil extraction on Treaty 8 lands. For many, the refusals of these nations were not known about, or were met with disbelief. Many have the idea that the oil companies “do right” by these nations through employment/hiring policies, training opportunities, and infrastructure spending. As a result, many didn’t know how to make sense of the examples I shared with them about the ACFN’s court case against Shell Oil Company, Mikisew Cree First Nation’s legal case against the federal and provincial governments over granting oil leases on Treaty land, and Fort McKay First Nation’s fight to protect Moose Lake. I trace the various ways that participants responded to this information in order to think through how certain assumptions about land, Treaties, and the law inform the possibility for many settler workers to hear and listen to what Cree, Dene, and Métis people of this place actually say about the tar sands.

It is difficult to capture these different beliefs and the assumptions that underpin them into distinct categories, but generally participants responded to these questions in four different ways, though in many cases participants’ answers included most or all of them at different moments throughout the interview. The point in categorizing responses isn’t to describe types of people, or degrees of correct to incorrect, but to make sense of the underlying attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs that structure them. The first set of responses figured around the idea of Indigenous employment in the oil industry. This idea is built from the assumption that wage labour in the oil industry is a fair trade off for the dispossession and destruction of lands and waters. The second is disbelief or claims of ignorance in knowing about the ways in which Cree, Dene, and Métis people have contested oil development. The third assumption is that of historical and scientific progress. These responses assume that the world and/or history to be inherently progressive, and

101 102 therefore reconcile the fact that there might been injustices in the past or even currently unjust practices, while also believing that the state, the industry, and scientific technology will evolve to solve these issues. Lastly, there were people who described to me very conflicted feelings about working in the oil industry, both for the ways in which the industry was complicit in climate change and environmental destruction, but also for how it had impacted local Cree, Dene, and Métis nations. A few people described to me that they had to try to disassociate at work in order to do their job, and still have this knowledge, and their political beliefs while doing it. In having this complicated relationship to their livelihoods, these participants felt trapped by the realities of earning a living under the conditions of capitalism. In a similar way, they felt overwhelmed by the ways in which their lifestyles, and that of Western society more generally depend so heavily on oil. The feelings that oil extraction was essentially inevitable, and their own lack of other employment options create the conditions in which they continued to do their work in the oil industry.

This research did not interview Cree, Métis, or Dene people from the area around the Athabasca and Clearwater Rivers. While I participated in the 2014 Healing Walk, I did not seek approval for participant observation, nor did I even witness the water ceremonies as they took place around the tailings ponds on the 14 km loop between Syncrude and Suncor mines. This chapter doesn’t detail the various ways in which Cree, Dene, and Métis people have at various points engaged with, participated in, or refused oil development on Treaty 8 lands. The inclusion of these facts up until now has been to describe the ways in which Indigenous people have and continue to resist oil development, and to provide a background in which to make sense of participant’s stories and understandings of what Cree, Métis and Dene people think and do about oil development.

I have deliberately been vague with attaching quotes to people in this section, as I am careful that in doing so it might be possible to read these participants as individually espousing attitudes or opinions that could be understood as anti-Indigenous or racist. The point of these interviews was not to “catch white people being racist.” That is not particularly new or exciting research, as many Black, Indigenous, and scholars of colour can, and already have attested to. Furthermore, my participants did not agree to talk to me about research that sought to do that. Instead, they agreed to talk to me about their experiences in the oil industry, about living in Fort McMurray, and about how they understood environmental and Indigenous criticism and resistance to the tar

103 sands. That ethical responsibility guides the way in which I introduce and work with the stories and opinions they shared with me below. As well, I include quotes from participants as a whole in order to show how these responses end up sounding very similar and speak to collective and societal knowledges of oil extraction, Indigenous Treaty and land rights, and the possibilities for change.

4.1 Indigenous Employment in the Industry

In the interviews, I asked each participant what they thought of Indigenous refusals of oil sands development. I cited examples that included the legal actions taken by local First Nations against oil companies, concerns about water pollution for communities downstream, and the larger question of putting pipelines through Indigenous lands without the consent of the nation whose land it is on. In response nearly everyone told me about the Indigenous employment programs the oil companies promote. These responses included the following:

“But we employ a lot of the Aboriginal individuals at company B.”

“We create opportunities at least for those people who want to do fly in and fly out [from Fort Chipewyan] as well.”

“They’re [Indigenous people] benefiting from it as well.”

“And a part of that [the employment policies to hire Indigenous people first] you know, is a bit of a feeling of social responsibility and a desire to work with the people who are from here”

“Well the oil sands for one actually hires Indigenous people, they actually welcome [them], just like any others.”

“The companies that I’ve worked for up there . . . They are, uh, mostly for treating the Natives up there, I think it is good. They have given them a lot of breaks. They have helped them form companies; they have helped them run companies.”

“I think outside of Fort McMurray, people probably don’t make the connection of how many successful Aboriginal companies have been formed to provide for the oil

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companies up here. I work for a construction company, and we get a lot of pressure to have Aboriginal content when we’re doing work for the oil companies.”

These statements, and ones similar to them were shared over, and over again in the interviews with white oil sands workers. It was consistent across interviews with blue-collar and trades workers as well as white collar professional workers. Commuters and Fort McMurray residents alike, and across different ages and genders. Furthermore, these statements were shared by people who were both critical of the industry and those who felt that criticisms of the industry were misplaced or unwarranted. In the case of people who were critical of the industry, but still responded to these questions with a discussion of Indigenous hiring and employment policies, they were often offered with a shrug, or an “I’m not sure.” The sense that participants were unsure how to make sense of successful Indigenous businesses, large lawsuit settlements, at the same time as the instances of resistance, and complaints by local nations was evident. In some instances, the responses to questions on Indigenous refusals of further development were met with blanket statements about environmental policies as well as an overview of various Indigenous hiring practices of the major oil companies.

In discussing these statements I want to get at an underlying assumption of them: i.e., that wage labour is an adequate, or sufficient trade off for the dispossession, and destruction of Cree, Dene, and Métis territories, lands and waters that are subject to Treaty and the rights to land use that come with that. One way to analyze this would be to compare the different employment and training policies of the various oil companies, and their subsidiary contractors. My initial instinct in presenting this work was to examine the different employment and training policies of the oil companies and compare it to reality. There is research that demonstrates how Indigenous employees remain in lower waged, physically demanding jobs that have higher rates of precarity and injury (Davidson & Gismondi, 2011, p. 99–101; L. Gross, 2019; Taylor & Friedel, 2011, p. 826). According to a 2018 report by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP; 2018), “in 2011 about six per cent of Canada’s oil and natural gas industry’s labour force was made up of Indigenous peoples, compared to 3.4 per cent employment in all industries across Canada.” This demonstrates that oil and gas does hire more Indigenous people than other industries, but I want to think more about what this narrative does and makes possible. This is because the perception among the vast majority of people I spoke to, is that oil companies are “doing right” by the Cree, Dene, and Métis people whose homeland includes the Athabasca

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River Valley and the sections of land that constitute vast bitumen oil deposits. This perception was a huge factor in how they explained to me the conflicts surrounding the oil industry in this place, and in places where pipeline disputes were ongoing.

I want to make clear that I don’t intent to paint Cree, Dene, and Métis people as only being acted upon by the industry and the state in this discussion. As Baker and Westman (2018) have described, many First Nation and Métis governments have tried to cope with the “tsunami” of development in this region in many different ways. This has included working at different times to access infrastructure and other financial benefits from corporations and the state. Like Baker and Westman (2018), I too don’t see it as my place to criticize or evaluate community decisions to engage with different types of benefit agreements and consultation processes, as they describe, these “are responses to complex histories that can only be met with survivance (Vizenor, 2007)” (p. 145). Furthermore, Baker and Westman show that due to Indigenous consultation guidelines set out by provincial and federal governments for oil companies to follow for new projects, choosing not to participate means that concerns are neither recorded nor part of consideration. Consultation and achieving consent for a project does not register refusal to participate or a refusal of the project. Refusal in this process essentially means there are no complaints and therefore the outcome will likely end with the company receiving approval for their project (Baker & Westman, 2018, p. 145). However, participation in consultation activities, including traditional land use assessments very often lead to the same outcome of project approval. Baker and Westman have demonstrated that both consultation practices including traditional land use studies and environmental impact assessments in Northern Alberta’s oil region do not work to protect Treaty Rights to subsistence-based land uses. They argue that these assessment processes work, “as a form of negative reciprocity” (Baker & Westman, 2018, p. 145). They show that once these assessments and studies have extracted knowledge from Indigenous people, it becomes weaponized, “refined and distilled to meet consultation requirements, so corporations can extract bitumen from sand” (Baker & Westman, 2018, p. 145).

In this context, the outcome of Indigenous employment programs, business initiatives, and training opportunities are spin off effects that ignore Indigenous rights to consent—and the right to refuse consent. Casting this employment as an example of the oil industry’s generosity, and commitment to corporate-social responsibility misunderstands the problem. It assumes the state has the right to take the land and lease it to oil companies in the first place. If you think of Treaty

106 as only an extinguishment of title, it is then the Canadian government’s legal right to develop a resource. It can then appear as if the state, and industry are going above and beyond the environmental and Treaty regulations in place to then offer training and employment to Indigenous people.

The idea that Cree, Dene, and Métis people would then, after that perceived generosity, refuse further development is then met with confusion, or frustration. As one participant told me, “I can’t imagine it [oil extraction] would be bad for those communities.” One participant, who was in his early thirties and worked as an engineer for a major oil company in the region described the situation in these terms.

It’s [the employment programs are] super big and nobody cares about that, they only care about the one person in Fort McKay who is complaining, while also simultaneously owning these businesses that are doing a cleaning on the sides making good money. In Fort McKay, it’s in a pretty shitty place . . . geographically wow! Good and terrible decision. But I feel that people that live there are engaged and compensated for the impact the industry has on their living. People in Fort Saskatchewan complain about upgrading refineries I don’t know, it’s the same deal.

This participant’s explanation is interesting both for the way he makes sense of employment practices, but also for the comparison of Fort McKay First Nation to the settler city of Fort Saskatchewan, located to the northeast of Edmonton. Fort Saskatchewan has a Dow Chemical plant, and an oil refinery that have at various times leaked gases that have impacted the community. While I don’t want to dismiss the concerns that people who live near these refineries and plants have about the quality of their air and exposure to toxic chemicals, the comparison ignores the very different conditions that have lead people to move to Fort Saskatchewan versus the conditions in which the village of Fort McKay, and the Fort McKay First Nation ended up being built next to industrial sites.

Fort McKay was established first as a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post, and from there became the home of over 700 Cree, Dene, and Métis people as colonial policies pushed people on to reserve to access resources (Fort McKay First Nation, n.d.). When the Great Canadian Oil Sands plant was built in 1958, the reserve was already established, and generations had lived here while carrying out traditional hunting, trapping, and fishing on surrounding Treaty lands to

107 supplement their incomes and diets. Now these practices are nearly impossible—either from lack of access to the land in which trap lines were maintained, and hunting grounds now being the site of oil companies and tailings ponds and open-pit mines, but also due to the pollution and other damage brought to the ecosystem from the development of oil extraction here. This participant’s assessment that Fort McKay was “in a pretty shitty place . . . Good and terrible decision” misunderstands how the reserve ended up here in the first place. His assessment is that it is both good and terrible, in that the reserve is next to the mines, and therefore good for access to work and employment opportunities afforded to them through Indigenous employment policies, yet terrible in that they end up with the negative consequences of living next to a massive industrial site. The destruction of the land upon which other ways of sustaining themselves created the need for wage labour to provide a livelihood. There is also a particular relation to land sustained in this belief. That land, and resources, are there for human ingenuity and human extraction. That the land might itself be an actor, alive and agentic cannot be made possible when human-centric activity is privileged. In this way the colonial extractive relation to land are sustained, and the trade-off is opportunity in the form of access to waged labour.

4.2 Disbelief and Claims to Ignorance

The second way in which many participants made sense of these questions on critiques of the industry and Indigenous refusals of further development on Treaty lands was through disbelief or claims to ignorance. In these responses participants either claimed that they didn’t know about Indigenous desires for stopping development, did not think there were negative effects caused by the oil industry on Indigenous communities downstream, or, they described not knowing enough about the issue, and in many cases wanted someone to do more research on if the oil industry was having a negative effect. In a few of the interviews, I raised the question about local First Nations governments taking legal action against oil companies, and the reports of rare cancers being experienced downstream in Fort Chipewyan. In response the conversations that followed and the questions several participants asked included admissions of disbelief and ignorance.

“I don’t know a lot about that.”

“I’m not aware about any of the cancers.”

“I’m not educated enough in it.”

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“I wasn’t familiar with that.”

“As far as environmental factors towards them [the people who live downstream in Fort Chipewyan] I really haven’t heard any real debates or news about that to be honest.”

In some interviews these statements were made as a push back to my claims. In others they were met with concern. One participant, who was a commuter and has since left the industry told me,

I kinda keep track of it as much as I can, but you hear about the fish stuff, and there’s an inquiry, and then there doesn’t seem to be enough come out of it, right. You don’t hear enough about it, so I’d like to see some more research into it, even though I do believe that, you know, most of the oil companies are—you know, are compliant with the regulatory—regulations [that] are out there—but maybe there is some stuff that’s happening that is naturally occurring too, or, you know, what—what are we maybe dumping back into the river?

This participant believes that there must be some impact on the water quality and the effects downstream, but like several people I spoke to feels that more research needs to be done to know the extent of the oil industry’s role in these effects. His question that, “maybe there is some stuff that’s happening that is naturally occurring too” is an idea I go into later on, about the role of “natural” causes of pollution found in the Athabasca River Valley that several participants raised as well. However, in this section I want to stay with this idea of needing more research.

At times the request for more information or claiming ignorance of these issues came across as defensiveness or discomfort with going on the record to describe something that was controversial or could implicate their employer. However, when this conversation was met with concern for how water contamination was impacting people downstream, the request for more research was a common response. One participant told me,

I’d like to see some more research into, myself, and put some real dollars and some real research into it, just so we can have that confidence that, are we doing this? Or you know, what can we do to help reduce it? Or what is actually causing it right? . . . So again, it would be—I think there should be some funding up there.

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Whether more funding is needed support research that could offer more clarity or not, there have been numerous studies conducted by scientists in this region, since at least the early 1970s (Timoney, 2013). In an important study conducted by a group of researchers from the University of Alberta, Queens University, and Oceana International that have reported the, “oil sands industry releases 13 elements considered priority pollutants under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act, via air and water, to the Athabasca River and its watershed” (Kelly et al., 2010, p. 16178). Countless studies have been conducted on the chemical pollutants that are a consequence of oil extraction (Parajulee & Wania, 2014; Schindler, 2014; Timoney & Lee, 2009; ), as well as studies determining the impacts on air quality (Makar et al., 2018; Parajulee & Wania, 2014) and at the heart of many concerns about oil development, effects on water quality (Galarneau, Hollebone, Yang, & Schuster, 2014; Gerbrandt, 2015; Kelly et al., 2010; McHolm, 2017; Nero et al., 2006; Radović, Oldenburg, & Larter, 2018; Schindler, 2013; Timoney, 2007). Where scholars have identified a gap is between monitoring and regulatory bodies: “a gulf between increasingly authoritative findings in scientific literature and monitoring efforts and the slow pace and inconclusive nature of research (and inadequate or nonexistent monitoring) around human health, cultural thresholds and indicators, and socioeconomic impacts” (Westman & Joly, 2019, p. 239). In this way regulators and monitoring agencies have failed to adapt monitoring practices to accurately evaluate impacts that oil development is having on this region. Yet, despite this growing body of research, there is a general dismissal or disbelief that enough has been done.

I think it is important to consider that for many participants, requesting more research is also about requesting more information in general. It is not necessarily that they disbelieve the complaints made by people in Fort Chipewyan, or the studies conducted by biologists, but for many participants this was the first time they had really engaged with these critiques. They had little context for my discussion of legal actions against oil companies, and of the studies released on the effects of the oil industry on the Athabasca watershed. This is in part because many participants hold positive opinions of the oil industry. In their day-to-day they interact with other people who also hold positive views about the oil industry, and these types of scientific studies rarely make mainstream news. Furthermore, participants described how over the course of their workday they carry out various environmental protocols on the job site. One participant described how at one site all employees had to put a tray under their parked vehicles to catch any

110 oils or chemicals that might leak out of the undercarriage of their vehicles. Another described a lengthy “cariboo audit” that had to take place before a new site could begin construction. In these instances, the delay or interruption of business as usual worked to support the oil industry’s narrative of rigorous environmental stewardship. These understandings are further supported by the industry’s self-promotion of their reclamation policies, and more widely held beliefs that the Canadian government is one of the strictest regulators of the oil and gas industry in the world. Pride in the ethical-oil discourse that has been created by the industry and conservative commentators was evident in many conversations about the possible negative impacts of this industry.

4.3 Ethical Oil

Many people that I spoke to shared a belief that the Canadian oil industry was ultimately an ethical one, and that all levels of government maintained some of the highest environmental standards in the world for the industry. They believed that the self-monitoring practices of the oil industry went above and beyond was asked fort by the already strict state regulating bodies. These beliefs made it difficult to comprehend either the scientific data about negative environmental impacts, or the concerns raised by Cree, Dene, and Métis communities about how development disrupted trap lines, interfered with animal migration patterns, and intentionally destroyed lands where people knew medicines were picked and ceremonies and teachings were done (L. Gross, 2019, p. 180).

As many commentators have noted, the ethical-oil narrative is full of falsehoods that spin the idea that Canadian oil is a version of a locally owned, responsible industry that acts as an anchor for the economy. This categorization relies on comparisons to the totalitarian petrostates of the Middle East and Africa whose human rights and environmental records are known to be abysmal (Nikiforuk, 2010). However, the reality is that the key companies who operate in the tar sands— Suncor, Shell, Nexen, Total, and Exxon—all also have operations in the very places that ethical- oil proponents criticize for human rights abuses and environmental damage. The idea that Canadian oil somehow constitutes a local mom-and-pop business greatly misconstrues who the major operators are (Nikiforuk, 2010). Unlike buying organic or local produce in the grocery store, you can not just go to a gas station and ask for the pump that uses only Canadian-made gas. Many parts of Canada get most of their petroleum from other, less ethical places because oil

111 exists in a global commodity supply chain that cannot be separated out by supplier or by company (Nikiforuk, 2010). Furthermore, the ethical-oil discourse relies upon Islamophobic and racist premises that link violence to places that are understood to be backward or barbaric. Ethical-oil campaigns, including the original one launched by Ezra Levant in 2008 and more recent campaigns by the pro-oil and pipeline group, “Canada Action,” spotlight various unethical and violent practices that happen in other oil-producing countries, seeking to emphasize the idea that such bad things do not happen here in Canada. Some examples from the ethical-oil campaign include: “Conflict oil funds terrorism, Ethical oil funds peacekeeping”; “Conflict oil countries: women stoned to death, Canada’s oil sands: Woman elected mayor”; “Conflict oil: forced labour, Ethical oil: good jobs”; “Conflict oil: degradation, Ethical oil: reforestation”; “Conflict oil: persecution, Ethical oil, pride” (all: Hickman, 2011). Tag lines about conflict oil are superimposed on images of Brown and Black people: an image of a man in a kaffiyeh, to symbolize Arab/Muslim terrorism; an Arab woman in a hijab, to demonstrate the message about women being stoned to death; an image of former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, along with a text on forced labour; and a Black man walking through an area of destroyed land that is burning in the distance, to demonstrate environmental degradation. Also pictured are two Brown men in nooses about to be hanged, contrasted with the image of two hands entwined wearing rainbow bracelets, to illustrate the idea that Canada is a safe haven for queer people who are otherwise experience violence in their own backward countries. It is important to pay attention to how whiteness and the Canadian state is positioned as more progressive and civilized in comparison to how images of Brown and Black people, and symbolic clothing like the kaffiyeh and the hijab are used to depict violence, persecution, and fundamentalism. The ethical-oil narrative employs national mythologies about Canada, which

[have] always depended on race. It is informed by the notion that “we” know about democracy and “they” do not; that “we” have values of integrity, honesty, and compassion, that “they” do not; that “we” are a law-abiding, orderly, and modest people, while “they” are not. (Razack, 2004, p. 13)

This follows orientalist culture clash logics, namely:

The close connection between assertions of cultural difference and racism has meant that in white societies the smallest reference to cultural differences between the European

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majority and Third World peoples (Muslims in particular) triggers an instant chain of associations (the veil, female genital mutilation, arranged marriages) that ends with the declared superiority of European culture, imagined as a homogenous composite of values including a unique commitment to democracy and human rights, and to the human rights of women in particular. Culture clash, where the West has values and modernity and the non-West has culture, consolidates membership in the dominant group; it provides belonging through enabling dominant groups to imagine that they share something in common, something that marks them as superior. (Razack, 2007, p. 88)

Ethical-oil narratives position the things that happen in other oil-producing nations along this continuum. This in turn co-constitutes Canadian oil practices as inhabiting a moral space of civilization and human rights.

Throughout my field work, during the most recent economic downturn, the antihomophobic message was recirculated online as pro-pipeline advocacy increased. One meme-like image of two white women kissing contained the message: “In Canada lesbians are considered hot! In Saudi Arabia if you’re a lesbian YOU DIE!” The image depicts how the cis-heteronormative male gaze fetishizes queer women, in an attempt to demonstrate Canadian progressive views on homosexuality and legislation on same-sex marriage. The image received a lot of attention from critics and advocates for Canadian oil alike. It demonstrates how advocates of and believers in the ethical-oil narrative can see this image as proof of Canadian virtue, and fail to see the very dynamics of sexism, homophobia, and toxic masculinity that shape that same narrative.

Similarly, how gender and other forms of diversity were described followed a related narrative in my research. Craig, the pipeline employee I introduced in Chapter 3, described to me the pride he felt in working in the Canadian oil and gas industry:

When you look at the way the industry tries to frame itself, we are reflective of the cross section, of the broad cross section of Canadians. I work on a diverse staff, I work with a very gender-balanced staff, I work with a management team that is made up of a number of different voices and collective focuses and common goals that are universal to all Canadians.

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Craig saw his workplace/industry as committed to inclusion and equitable hiring practices. Diversity, gender balance, and representation of universal Canadian goals or values—Craig described the industry in progressive terms. This idea was shared by a number of people I spoke to, particularly tradespeople, all of whom were men. In these conversations I asked if they worked alongside many women in their jobs. They all responded that their work environments as tradespeople were predominantly male. However, many shared stories about the recruitment programs their employers, and at times trade unions, put into place to recruit and train more women to work in the trades. Many described this as an example of progress that the oil and gas industry was committed to furthering.

Gender, when it appeared in our conversations, became another way to talk about oil and gas in a progressive or liberal narrative. Women I spoke to about the gender dynamics of their workplace used similar ideas to use the concept of gender equity to further champion the oil and gas industry. Three women spoke candidly about some instances of sexual harassment they had experienced at work: in one case a participant described a human resources training session where they were told that it was best for women in the industry to ignore or dismiss any harassment they might encounter. Yet, even in these conversations, many described these problems as perpetrated by old timers who had not “gotten with the times.” The idea that the oil industry was a leader in gender equity allowed this harassment to be viewed as an aberration, the result of a few backward-thinking individuals, not as a structural or systemic problem. Similarly, these ideas reflect how the ethical-oil campaign identified gender equality in their messaging. Comparing women’s rights in Canada to abuses that women experience in various other oil- producing countries further entrenched these ideas. Raising questions or instances of gender inequality in the Canadian oil industry actually ended up getting turned around to become an opportunity to promote the practices and reputation of the oil and gas industry.

Lastly, in the ethical-oil narrative and in my interviews, ideas about Indigenous employment policies were heavily circulated. These ideas were used to erase colonial realities and present the idea of partnership with Indigenous communities. Tracey Friedel (2008), in her examination of a series of greenwashing advertisements by oil companies operating in the tar sands, argued that the idea of Indigenous partnership was powerful:

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Through the myth of partnership, energy corporations position themselves as “good” and “fair,” in line with Canada’s own national discourse, while glossing over the social and environmental destruction that accompanies fast-tracked crude oil production. (pp. 247– 248, citing Mackey, 1999/2002, p. 72)

Ethical oil works in the same way, drawing upon existing narratives and beliefs about Canadian national goodness and virtue to repackage oil companies and the tar sands as part of this nationalist story:

[T]he inclusion of Native bodies in narratives of corporate-social responsibility should be seen not as improving upon the social and environmental contexts where development takes place, but as aiding transnational energy corporations in constructing an image of responsibility. (Friedel, 2008, p. 249)

This idea of responsibility is a significant one. It is not just about responsible practices of environmental protection and partnership with Indigenous communities but is also about responsibility to oil consumers—getting the product to market. The demand for oil and Western society’s dependence on it figured into conversations on the endurance of this place to produce oil and the future of work here. In this way, work in the oil industry was refigured as a social good, providing an essential service not only to the immediate community, but also to the nation at large.

Participants regularly made this link between their work in the oil industry and the good of the nation as a whole. While it may seem a stretch to some, they saw their industry as an anchor of the Canadian economy and understood that tax revenues produced from oil were funding hospitals and universities across the country through federal redistribution schemes. Relatedly, Friedel argued that the public promotion of and positioning of oil companies as both philanthropic and generous, through narratives of economic partnership with Indigenous communities, worked in ways similar to how nationalist discourses of Canadian benevolence and multiculturalism cover over conditions of racial inequality and settler colonialism. Friedel (2008) saw the oil industry’s self-promotion as a reflection of what was happening in Canadian society already, serving “to cover over the devastating social and environmental impacts of, for example, oil sands development” (p. 241). In this way, belief in responsible oil companies, and more

115 general beliefs in Canadian goodness, both work to limit what can be believed about the realities of oil extraction.

4.4 Assessment and Consultation: Rubber Stamping Development

While the discourses of progress and ethical oil work to erase and minimize the conflicts that continually surround this industry, research has been conducted questioning the actual practices of assessment and regulation that are so often touted as the strictest in the world. Concerns over the legitimacy and standards for environmental impact assessments, and land use consultations have been identified by several scholars. These processes of assessment are carried out by oil companies in the process of seeking approval for new projects. Reports are often written by consultants that work with oil companies to compile the various studies and evaluations needed to be judged by the government regulators. Baker and Westman (2018) argue that traditional land use consultation, designed as a process to identify and reduce the impact of industry on Treaty protected practices like trapping, hunting, and fishing, function to extract this knowledge from Indigenous communities to streamline approval processes (p. 144). Due to the “tsunami” of development in this region, a consultation industry has emerged to carry out the political and participatory processes required by the state to approve oil projects. However, there are many issues with how this industry operates, including, as Baker and Westman (2018) have identified as research modalities that assume industry’s arrival to northern Indigenous communities is overwhelmingly positive (p. 146). They write,

Consulting research in northern Canada in general, and impact assessment in particular, have reflected to a large extent mainstream views in the settler society about culture change . . . Specifically, culture change is understood in common-sense terms largely as unidirectional and imbued with a sense of development and progress, with economic benefits automatically accruing to First Nations. Such a view still holds sway in oil sands consulting and EIA and contributes to devaluing traditional land use and traditional environmental knowledge and promoting a specific type of future landscape and land use (Westman, 2013). Project proponents and consultants underwrite this view with optimistic offers of the industrial future backed with promises of jobs, payments, and reclamation. (Baker & Westman, 2018, p. 146)

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While Baker and Westman have clarified there are many assessment consultants who are rigorously trained in social science qualitative research methods, and otherwise critical and thoughtful researchers who work in the consultation industry, they warn that there is a lack of regulation of standards of these assessments and the people who conduct them. There are many consultants carrying out studies without any training in basic social science research techniques, without awareness of ethical protocols (particularly what this may require in Indigenous communities) and producing reports that are abound with circular thinking. Baker and Westman give many examples of testimony printed in traditional land use and other types of SIAs where Cree, Dene, and Métis people explicitly testify in assessment meetings, and in written reports that despite registering the negative impacts the proposed projects will have on them, they know no one is listening and that the project will get approved anyway.

Even more troubling is how settler logic about Cree, Dene, and Métis people has been used to justify further dispossession of lands in these reports. In their review, Baker and Westman (2018) demonstrate that

. . . consultants also use questionable reasoning when First Nations members tell companies that industrial development has severed them from parts of their territories: they conclude that proposed developments will have no impact on traditional land use because they assume it has already corroded due to [previous] industrial impacts. (p. 150)

In these cases, the experience of industry already impacting people are then further weaponized to erase how even more development will impact them even further. The questionable logic aside, this is also part of the overarching problem with how cumulative impacts are assessed overall. In environmental impact assessments (EIAs) done for proposed new projects, Baker and Westman have found that the concept of cumulative development is rarely addressed meaningfully. Authors of EIA studies have ignored historical baselines, or as I heard in my own interviews, report that there is no baseline from which to judge because there isn’t enough research. In spite of the fact that environmental research has been taking place in the Athabasca Delta since at least the early days of oil development here in the early 1970s (Timoney, 2013). Lastly, EIAs have typically not considered the impacts from other operations already at work here—pieces of land identified for development are evaluated individually and without the

117 context of how many other companies are already operating in the proximity (Baker and Westman, 2018, p. 150).

The demands these studies have placed on Cree, Dene, and Métis people is also important to take account of. During the height of the boom years the number of proposed projects was monumental and demands for participation in these studies were constant. Furthermore, participation often meant that the oil companies could then report they had consulted with Indigenous people and projects would get approved even with the negative impacts clearly outlined in reports and consultation documents. The speed at which development progressed also meant that people were rushed through consultation, and aspects like the Traditional Land Use Assessment were often very sparsely filled out. Ten years ago, during the height of project expansions during the oil boom, George Poitras, former chief of the Mikisew Cree First Nation, gave these public remarks,

If you are trying, as a First Nation or as an environmental NGO, trying to keep pace with the development, trying to intervene or review the different applications that come before the province for every one of these projects, it’s a nightmare, trying to keep up. The pace of the development is unfathomable. It’s actually hard to think about. We have a capacity of about six people to monitor this type of activity, and in the last eight months there were three different hearings, and the Mikisew had intervened in every one of them . . . And it’s a pretty lengthy process . . . Trying to keep up with the demands is a very challenging activity for us on a day-to-day basis.

The impacts of just keeping up with the assessments alone are worth reiterating. Particularly, because as I have mentioned, these assessments are often in support of a foregone conclusion— project approval.

In 2010 a report was released by the Royal Society of Canada Expert Panel on Environmental and Health Impacts of Canada’s Oil Industry, which is now referred to as the Gosselin Report. The study commissioned an expert panel of esteemed scientists to review and assess the “merits of oil sands development in relation to its environmental and health impacts” (1), and to identify gaps in research. In their review of three social impact assessments (SIAs) submitted by oil sands projects the panel found significant inconsistencies and irregularities in how the assessments dealt with the same sets of data. The report found that consultants hired to compile and write the

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SIAs tended to not provide enough adequate quantitative data, nor did they collect enough useful qualitative data (Gosselin et al., 2010, p. 255). The lack of data was present in both descriptions of costs and benefits of a proposed project. Gosselin asked, how can benefits be assessed if potential impacts are not fully assessed? The review found that there was a lack of sufficient support in the documentation provided by EIA consultants to regulators to prove net benefit impacts of proposed projects (Gosselin et al., 2010, p. 255). Less attention was given to the cost in favour of the projects, and in large scale development “the prevailing analysis in EIA reports suggests that the larger the project, the greater the benefit (with benefit here referring largely to government revenues and job creation” (Baker & Westman, 2018, p. 149).

These findings were affirmed by another recent study, by scientists Campbell, Kopach, Komers, and Ford (2019) which show huge discrepancies and irregular standards between EIAs on pieces of land that shared similar habitats and animal species. Campbell et al. explain that as EIA are supposed to report baselines for wildlife species and habitat conditions in the area of a proposed project, pieces of land that are next to each other and share similar characteristics should have reported similar wildlife and habit baselines. In reviewing 30 assessments they determined that studies used inconsistent methods, and regularly had different results for the same areas being assessed. The report finds “316 different mathematical models were used to measure habitat and they came up with different results from each other 82 per cent of the time” (Weber, 2019). Furthermore, among the EIAs reviewed, only 33 percent included any form of independent verification. Campbell et al. found that assessments that included this independent verification were two times more likely to report serious environmental impacts from the proposed project. Whereas, the majority of these EIAs that did not verify results were much more likely to report minimal impacts. The authors reported that “since there’s so much variation with so little checking, there’s no way to tell which assessments are more accurate” (Weber, 2019). The research shows that there are serious doubts on whether the negative impacts of development are adequately captured in assessment practices. It appears as though possible negative impacts are irregularly reported, and positive impacts are more favourably weighted. Overall, it is clear that these types of assessments (environmental impact, social impact, traditional land use, and cumulative impact) are being carried out to meet federal and provincial legislation and fiduciary duty to consult in order to get approval and not to carefully consider the effects of oil development.

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With such widespread abuses and inadequate reporting, it is important to unpack how the oil companies still maintain the perception of ethical practice and trust. Overall, I attribute this to deep seated beliefs in the inevitability of progress. Participants largely believed that Canada had the strictest environmental and ethical standards in the global oil industry, and that the problems I’d raised were more likely aberrations than the norm. I now turn to examine several critiques on how progress works to justify the sacrifice and erasure of some for the larger project of a just future.

4.5 Progress

Progress remains a powerful narrative that underpins much of how participants described to me the oil industry’s relationship to Cree, Dene, and Métis people. It is important to think about progress narratives more closely to understand what work these narratives do. For progress narratives to make sense to themselves, they require certain ideas about history in order to explain what the present moment currently looks like, and what types of futures await us. Tuck and Yang (2014), drawing from the work of Frederic Jameson (1981), identify history as a “master narrative of inevitability, the logic of teleos and totality: All events are interconnected and all lead toward the same horizon of progress.” (p. 235). I understand progress to be related to the idea of “needing more information” or “funding more research” about the impacts of the tar sands on the Athabasca watershed. This logic follows that if we are involved in unethical behaviour, it must be a result of not knowing better, and once we know better, we will stop. Being better, or as Leigh Patel (2016) has described as exceptionality, is what progress demonstrates:

As a settler colony, ideas of progress signal a state, meaning both a condition of and government, of exceptionality. Being exceptional works to justify and historicize the ongoing racialized societal structure of land theft, human subjugation, and wealth accumulation. (p. 398)

Progress in this way offers an exception for what would otherwise be immoral, or condemnable action. This exceptionality was described as many participants as how the oil industry strives for excellence. Craig, the pipeline employee I quoted above, described the oil and gas industry’s investment in renewable energy as evidence of their commitments to environmental protection.

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We have one of the largest renewables portfolios in Canada, Company C has some of the largest renewables portfolios in Canada, and if you take the Research and Development dollars that are being devoted to a transition… my company, and both pipeline and oil extraction companies really lead the pack.

With these investments and commitments to other types of energy production, it becomes possible to view oil and gas companies as taking progressive action. Craig goes on to describe,

I think there are a number of things that's needed to be the answer [to current levels of oil consumption], but I do see the energy industry playing a huge role in making the transition because I know that we are currently investing as an energy company and not just oil and gas as sources of energy, but as a more holistic view, all sorts of energy sources will be necessary to continue with the styles with which we've become accustomed.

In this framing, Craig sees energy transition being led by oil and gas companies. This was actually quite a common idea that was shared with me by many participants. Green capitalism, or other innovations driven by the oil and gas industry were described as exciting and plausible solutions to the threats posed by burning fossil fuels. Understanding the companies that drive pipeline and oil development agendas to also be the actors that are taking action on the climate crisis offers a progressive arch to the current reality.

In this way, progress can also be understood as a theory of change. A theory of change that must first identify the damage or injury done in order to repair it, what Tuck (2009) has called “damage-centred research” (p. 413) and which I described in Chapter 1 discussing the methods of this study. Tuck (2009) has argued that this approach had “a time and a place” (p. 415), but questions it’s efficacy in actually repairing wrongs that have been done. Furthermore, she questions whether the wins that might come out of these approaches are worth the consequences of thinking of people and communities as pathologically damaged by the oppressions they face (Tuck, 2009.). For my participants, their belief in an inevitably progressive arch of history has made this theory of change very useful. If there are negative effects of oil development here, we must first learn about them, through more money allocated to conduct good research on it, and then to determine how to repair those negative effects. This idea is also sustained by misunderstandings of Indigenous communities. Viewing local nations as “in need” of the

121 rehabilitation that development and work in the industry further positions oil companies as ethical saviours. When this is the frame of reference, it becomes difficult to pull apart the implicit assumptions that are being made about the impact oil development will have.

Furthermore, the idea that we know about what bad things are happening and we’re just not acting on it seemed to be more impossible than the idea that oil companies were operating unethically in this region. Tuck and Yang (2013) identify the ways in which pain or damage centric research also works to create a hierarchy of development,

[I]n which the pained body (or community or people) is set back or delayed on some kind of path of humanization, and now must catch up (but never can) to the settler/unpained/abled body (or community or people or society or philosophy or knowledge system). (p. 231)

This works to create a developmental hierarchy that understands those oppressed by white supremacy and settler colonialism to be “waylaid by their victimry and subalternity” (Tuck & Yang, 2013, p. 231), whereas those not victimized can progress to higher levels of humanity; creating the distinction between white progress, and everyone else who is still too damaged (Tuck & Yang, 2013, p. 231).

This theory of change also understands Cree, Dene, and Métis employment in the oil industry in similarly developmental or progress frameworks. Progress here being understood as adopting Canadian lifestyles of wage labour in the oil industry. One commuter, an engineer who had initially started working in the oil industry as a lead for a team made up of Indigenous people explained the situation in this way,

It’s well, yes well, we’ve given them an opportunity to do things our way, and maybe that’s not for them, but I want them to still have the opportunity to do things the way they always have done things. So, we have to make sure to allow them to do that. We don’t interfere with that. And the fact that stuff comes from, because I know that just the fact that we’re there, there are differences. There is sound and the uh whatever—smells and whatever that comes out of the operation, that you know, the guy isn’t going to want to take his trap line out across a tailings pond, right? You know, if that’s where his trap line used to be, he’s not going to be, that’s going to interfere with his happiness. On the other

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hand, if we don’t work with them to say, alright, well we’ll allow you to preserve this land, and we’ll do everything we can not to interfere with that and um, uh um, and we’ve done so much for opportunities for some of them to do things the way we do things, and I think that that can be helping to make harmony too so . . .

In this excerpt, the participant is describing and evaluating different ways to make a living, or to make a life in this place. In one scenario, you have the Cree, Dene, or Métis trapper who wants to continue to keep trapping and doing other land-based activities that are associated with more traditionally Indigenous ways of living. In the other, you have the Cree, Dene, or Métis trapper who then tries out the wage labour model, and all of the lifestyle changes that occur with this way of making a living, giving them the chance to make a career in the oil industry and accumulate wealth. I read this excerpt understanding that the participant who said it truly believes that Cree, Dene, and Métis people have a right to continue to pursue land-based ways of life, and that these ways of living are valid and good. I don’t want to misrepresent his words and pretend he thinks of these other ways of living as inherently backward or unworthy. However, this excerpt shows how these different modes are constituted in opposition to each other, and constructed on assumptions about Treaty land use rights, and Cree, Dene, and Métis desires for this place.

The first assumption is captured in the participant’s assertion that “we (the industry) allow you to preserve this land.” This description understands the Canadian state (and the province of Alberta) to be the arbiter of land use. When the province leases land to the oil companies, the oil companies are then in control of the land, the oil company can then decide to “allow” you to preserve this land for Treaty and constitutionally protected land uses. However, you can’t let or allow someone else to do something on land they are already allowed to be on. If the land it is already their own, they can do what they please without being “allowed” to in the first place. This is the first fundamental conflict in assumptions held by many I spoke to. Who ultimately controls the land, and who has access to it was a fundamental misunderstanding shared by the vast majority of people who spoke with me. In order to think that there is no conflict over the land, colonialism must be something that was settled long ago, and current disputes are not about control over land, but instead ways to protect certain activities out of a sense of responsibility or ethical practice of the oil company. Indigenous sovereignty is not understood to be the central question upon which these tensions turn. It becomes about corporate-social responsibility,

123 training and recruitment initiatives, and cultural sensitivity training. Without understanding that the state’s claim to this place is only contingent on sharing the land, in ways that don’t dispossess huge areas of land from use to build open-pit mines and tailings ponds, it is difficult to understand the root of the conflict or the stakes of it.

Secondly, from many interviews, it was clear that many people misunderstand what is meant by Indigenous land use rights. For many, including in the excerpt above, the traditional land use activities like hunting, trapping, and fishing are subsistence activities from a bygone era. To choose to sustain yourself through these activities instead of waged labour is seen as a confusing or unrealistic choice when so much effort is being made to recruit them to work for the oil companies, and entrepreneurial support to start businesses that service these companies. It was also misunderstood that people are pushed into waged labour because oil development has taken away the possibility of sustaining oneself through the land. The participant quoted above recognizes that the tailings ponds will interfere with the trapper’s happiness but doesn’t connect to how this may then cause the trapper to lose his ability to sustain himself, pushing him into the wage economy more fully. In many ways this is understood as conflict between modern lifestyles and traditional lifestyles, a way of making sense of this that obscures the effects and present manifestations of colonialism.

Many participants made sense of pipeline disputes between pipeline companies and the Indigenous nations whose land is crossed by proposed routes in similar ways. One participant, who had been a commuter, but since the downturn had left to start his own business outside of the oil industry described the issue in this way:

And as for pipelines, my view is crashing trains into towns and burning down them down is not as effective as pipelines. I think they get a very bad rep. It [pipelines] is the safer way to do it. It’s more environmentally friendly than coal burning trains. But there needs to be a better relationship and better discussion with landowners that they’re going through. I think First Nations understand that it’s part of our changing country and if they feel they are part of it they’d be more receptive to it, but they feel they’ve been slighted, which they have, for the past however many generations so they’re not open to it. I think we need to tackle the relationship issue first because the environmental ones speak for themselves . . .

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This idea that Indigenous people are opposed to pipelines because they are retaliating against generations of injustice again misunderstands the stakes of the conflict. Cree, Dene, and Métis people are protecting lands from further development, development that irrevocably changes the quality of the land, in many cases destroying the ability of the land to sustain life (Barker, 2016; L. Gross, 2019; Joly, 2017a). Misunderstanding the problem in this way fails to grapple with the incommensurability inherent in settler futurities that include tar-sands and extractive futurities, and the types of futurities desired by Cree, Dene, and Métis people. In regard to pipelines, we see Indigenous nations protecting their lands and waters as the central organizing principle of their actions. To make the case for better consultation, or inclusion of Indigenous people into the processes that approve and build pipelines works from the logic that both settlement and extraction are inevitable. If these processes are inevitable, asking what must change or be stopped to make possible an Indigenous futurity becomes impossible—the question of sovereignty, of settler control of land are already decided. The best outcome possible when beginning from this framework can only be better consultation, a better deal or impact benefit agreement with oil and pipeline companies, or opportunities for waged labour. This is the “better” future that is on offer, one that happens to seek assimilation, and ignore how current extraction and consumption of oil threatens our ability to sustain life on a heating planet.

There is a temporal shift in how we can evaluate the present consequences of oil spills, a heating climate, and toxic waste when the present and future are held out to be inherently more progressive than the past. The power of these historical metanarratives Patel (2016), Jameson (1981) and Tuck and Yang (2013) describe is that they erase the parts of these histories that contradict the better story of more ethical and more just oppression. The “better” future, a future where we have improved upon what we do now, works to justify the ongoing adverse effects being experienced, or sacrificed in the present. Writing of the death of 1,600 ducks that landed on the tailings ponds at the Syncrude Aurora mine in 2008, Jon Gordon (2015) argued that the pervasive idea of progressive history narratives work to justify the violence, death, and dispossession required to extract bitumen in the present. J. Gordon (2015) explained that the defence of duck deaths, worker deaths, and of the destructive practices of open-pit mining were made normal and banal through the appeal to a better future (p. 40). Drawing on George Grant’s (1965) Lament for a Nation, he argued that in this orientation towards history

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. . . the necessary gets narrated as the good. . . Men assume in the age of progress that the broad movement of history is upward. Taken as a whole, what is bound to happen is bound to be good. But this assumption is not self-evident. The fact that events happen does not imply they are good. We understand this in the small events of personal life. We only forget it in the large events when we worship the future. (J. Gordon, 2015, p. 37)

J. Gordon (2015) argued that it is the worship of a future with fewer or no worker deaths, cleaner and more sustainable mining practices, and the promise of reclaimed work sites that function to justify the current deaths and sacrifices made more largely in the service of oil extraction and our huge consumption of it (p. 43). In similar ways, the Cree, Dene, and Métis desires for sovereignty and access to their Treaty lands are understood in a similar trajectory. While they may be unhappy in the moment, the fact that what is happening is in service to a progressive future makes it justifiable. That we need oil now, and in the future reclaimed mine sites will eventually be reclaimed to once again become trap lines or walking tails, makes it possible to understand an unjust present as working towards an ideal future. This orientation to narrating current practices of mining alongside opportunity and ethical business practice makes sense when the present and future are seen to be working towards positive outcomes.

4.6 Natural Pollution and the Sand Cleaning Business

Alongside the narrations of progress, employment, and the need for more information, participants also evoked the idea of natural water pollution. Particularly those participants who lived in Fort McMurray full time and were more familiar with the places around the Athabasca River regularly suggested to me that part of the reason that places downstream, like Fort Chipewyan, were experiencing polluted water was due to naturally occurring pollution. These responses were often offered in response to the question of negative impacts on water quality in the Athabasca River, Lake Athabasca and its tributaries that have been linked to oil production (Kelly et al., 2010). It wasn’t until I had done almost 10 interviews that I realized participants, particularly those who currently live in Fort McMurray, were regularly responding to this question in the same way. Each time it struck me as a bit unbelievable, but as I continued to hear it over and over, including many times from commuters as well, that I realized this was a significant way in which participants were making sense of the oil industry’s effects here. For them, this reasoning wasn’t just a convenient excuse, but something they believe could be a real

126 factor that was causing pollution and mutation in fish, animals, and humans. Participants responses included:

“There is an impact there, and they’ve been downstream of that bitumen deposit for generations and generations and generations. And they have been, they’re entire existence, been downstream from the bitumen deposit. And like I alluded to earlier, it’s not just because of the industry, but it is also from the naturally occurring causes.”

“I know also that the oil seeps into the water that they [communities downstream] drink.”

“The riverbed is all oil.”

“Oil is leaching into the water, period.”

“If you see the geology it’s how close the oil is to the banks of the river.”

“It has to do with the natural bitumen and stuff that’s in there.”

“There’s oil sand in the riverbed, there’s riverbed that is leaching out into the side of the hill into the river naturally.”

“They [Cree, Dene, and Métis people] had oil coming out of the ground and pouring into the river and that was naturally.”

“You know what’s off to the right as you are going into downtown, you literally see the oil coming out of the side of the hill into the river.”

In these responses it is local knowledge of the area, from those who canoe and hike or ride their snowmobiles and ATVs along the river valley, that was used to make sense of the effects of contamination experienced downstream. On one level that can seem particularly perplexing, but I understand participant’s reasoning to be evoking the position of “insider.” The idea of insiders and outsiders was a common theme in my interviews. Drawing from the interviews as a whole, the “insiders” are those who understand oil’s place in the world, they understand the lengths oil companies go to hire Indigenous people and improve the environmental effects of their process. The “outsiders” are idealists who don’t see the irony in driving to a tar-sands protest in a fossil fuel burning vehicle, who don’t understand how everyone needs and constantly uses oil, and that

127 the companies are socially responsible and are committed to improvement and excellence. I raise the idea of insiders and outsiders alongside this idea of natural water pollution because I see this formulation as being very rooted in place. For many Fort McMurrayites the idea of being misunderstood, especially being incorrectly depicted by national and international media, is very strong. People shared with me that they felt judged many times for working in the oil industry, for living in Fort McMurray, and for the large sums of money they could earn here. It is this sense of being victimized by the media and policy makers that in part creates the defensive and protective stance many told me they had for Fort McMurray and the tar sands. They have come to love this place, not just the jobs and the money, but the place itself. It is this connection and details of the naturally seeping bitumen into the river that shows they are an insider and that there might be another reason for the contaminated water that is missed by the journalists and celebrities who only fly over the tailings ponds, and don’t actually walk or know the river valley.

One participant told me a story about a time he was in Denver, Colorado for work and was approached by an environmental activist. He told the activist that he was in the “sand cleaning business” a joke which the activist did not appreciate. I think his little story however touches on the way in which some people understand what is happening here, namely, that the scale of the deposit is so large, and so close to the river, that the tarry bitumen has been seeping into the River and Lake Athabasca for millennia. Without other ways to understand bitumen, or other ways to understand the effect of bitumen in the water, they see this as evidence of natural pollution. Bitumen is only understood in this instance as commodity, or as natural pollutant. Whereas Cree, Dene, and Métis people have other ways to make sense of this deposit, including as relation (Todd, 2017), as useful material to waterproof canoes (UofA citation), and as a part of the land and sets of relations and responsibilities that sustains life here (Carriou, 2019; also Cardinal & Hildebrandt, 2000). Only understanding bitumen as a commodity, or as an unrefined version of oil then imbues this natural product with all of the other toxic characteristics of petroleum, whether it is inherently toxic or not. It can’t be part of a complex ecosystem or world, as it is too closely tied to the chemical relations of the oil industry which we know include materials that are poisonous and harmful (Murphy, 2008). The presence of the oil industry here then signifies a major improvement in the ability to measure, know, and prevent further water pollution. One participant, a mining engineer, explained this thinking to me in this conversation:

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Participant: There is no doubt, there is no doubt that the industry has had an impact on water quality. But it’s both positive and negative. You know, I believe that is true. We have positively impacted the water quality by removing a bunch of the deposit, and actually try to deal with the areas that it leaches out naturally. And at the same time, there is, I’m sure there has been a certain amount of groundwater that has been contaminated by tailings. But the logic would tell you it has to. We don’t have history from long enough back to tell us what the particle count of um different chemicals and substances in the river water was before we ever started. We don’t know that. Sam: [Do you mean] there’s no baseline? Participant: There’s no baseline. So, it is so very hard to tell what the impact of industry really has been. Because you have no baseline from which to measure it. And you can measure it upstream from the sites, but it still isn’t representative, because obviously where all the mine sites are in the shallowest deposit right? Like the overburden is the thinnest, and because the overburden is the thinnest that’s where we mined it because it was easy. It’s not economic to dig deep, further away from the river. But the reason the overburden deposit is so much thinner is because it eroded, the river eroded it over time, whether it was during the glacial retreat or now just during regular flow—it has cut into the deposit and because it has cut into the deposit it is carrying the bitumen downstream. And that happened all naturally. So, I do think there is an impact, I don’t know how significant it is. Because it was happening before we got here as an industry too.

The logic does make sense to an extent, except when you ask, if the water is naturally polluted, are the same contaminants linked to the extraction process the ones that are found in the unprocessed deposit? Is the problem of oil seeping into the river creating the same contamination as the contaminants being discovered in wildlife and fish populations, or linked to the various rare cancers in humans downstream? We know from the 2010 study conducted by Kelly et al. that these effects are not natural. They write: “Our results indicate that the source of PPE was

129 from oil sands development . . . If the source were natural erosion of oil sands, concentrations at all sites would have been greater in summer than winter” (Kelly et al., 2010, p. 16182).

The fact that this study, and similar ones also conducted by this research group, and other scientists are still unknown, or not thought to be scientifically certain enough speaks to the power of the industry’s greenwashing messages. Additionally, these messages work along with the resonance that many other powerful narratives about the oil industry. These included responsibility, partnership with Indigenous peoples, and myths of Canadian benevolence that all work to muddy the waters and make the reports of these findings less believable.

However, many times participants shared these views alongside the acknowledgement that the oil industry likely was having some effect on the water. At the same time, some participants who thought the environmental impacts are overblown and exaggerated, also expressed the opinion that Indigenous people should have the right to stop oil development on their land if they want to. These contradictions and overlapping views were common and at this point in the chapter I feel the need to reiterate that it would be inaccurate to paint a portrait of a caricature oil worker or “rig pig” of my participants.

Far more often participants shared sincere opinions that were formed from the sum of their experiences. And alongside these opinions were often times serious doubts, confusions, and discomforts. These complexities show me that the people who spoke to me were trying to do their best to understand the situation they were in, but at times relied upon certain assumptions about the land, assumptions about Cree, Dene, and Métis people, and assumptions about the ethical commitments of the oil industry. These assumptions significantly shaped how they were making sense of things. As I hold different assumptions, I understand this to be where and how we disagree. In discussing these assumptions, I want to de-personalize the individual attitudes, beliefs, and personal opinions in order to understand the logics that make these stories and beliefs make sense to themselves. It is not fair, nor useful in transforming relationships to place and to oil consumption, to write off the people who work in this industry as dupes or ignorant. As I’ve described before, the vast majority of people who spoke to me had either university degrees, or advanced postgraduate designations. These views are not the result of ignorance, but instead rooted in the widespread societal and national assumptions about land, capitalism, and Indigenous land rights.

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This concern over how we might engage with and understand those who disbelieve the science of oil industry water pollution came up in one interview. This person had grown up in Fort McMurray, but then moved to Edmonton to attend university, and eventually became a commuter. He believed that the oil industry was negatively impacting the watershed and communities downstream. In our conversation I shared that many people I had previously spoken to believed that the water pollution was natural. In response to my question about what he made of that line of reasoning he told me,

I think [pause] . . . I think if you are heavily involved in that industry, if you are like a full-time employee with some of those companies like . . . The theory of people saying, you know “this stuff just seeps out into the river,” I think is kind of . . . It’s kind of, I don’t know I kind of feel like it’s horseshit . . . Like people saying, you know, that it’s in the riverbeds and it’s seeping in the riverbeds and that’s kind of what happening in Fort Chip. Then why haven’t people in Fort Chip been dying of crazy cancer rates for like the last hundred years? They are one of the earliest settlements in Alberta like . . . I don’t think it’s . . . just leaking off the river. And that . . . I know, I know people who say shit like that, and like . . . I’m not sure if it’s just a level of ignorance or education like . . . but like . . . You know I think if your, if your life is dependent on the oil industry it makes . . . And while it’s dependent on those plants, it makes people less likely to . . . you know, admit to these type of things or agree with them. I think you are kind of, always going to lean towards, the other way and say it’s not their fault.

This was from a participant who had not initially meant to work in the oil industry, but due to the booming economy in oil sands when he graduated university, ended up working in it anyway. While he makes a distinction between himself and others who disbelieve the effects of the industry on waterways, he too continues to work in the industry, and at times agreed that with the exception of the water issue, the oil industry is a leader in environmental sustainability and ethical business practice. This reality was shared by many of those who felt some sort of conflict working in the industry, and by those who were trying to leave it. This participant, while not agreeing with his colleagues about the role of oil extraction in contaminating lands and waters, understands the constraints placed on people who are currently doing this work to not engage with the criticism.

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4.7 Inescapable

In this last section I describe the ways in which people shared with me the feelings of conflict, guilt, or tension about their role in the oil industry. In this section I look to a few participants responses that discussed Indigenous resistance to make sense of how settlement and resource extraction become taken-for-granted activities that for many seem as if they cannot be stopped. One participant, originally from a small town on the East Coast saw the issue of Indigenous consent as unequivocal. He told me,

Upstream . . . [the pulp and paper mills] are doing far more damage to the water than the oil sands plants. That said, it’s their land. If they don’t want us to dig on it then we shouldn’t be doing it. And I don’t think we should go ahead and take their land . . . they were here before we were, we signed Treaties . . . We have to live in honour of them. And that’s it . . . We’ve created a culture, we created a society that is second tier to the rest of us. And until we do something to address that, we have no business even asking to drill, or dig up the land that they live on, or call sacred so . . . It’s theirs.

For this participant he sees the issue of oil development on Treaty land in black-and-white terms. Indigenous people should have the right to say no. He went on to describe how if there were millions of dollars of oil under their land, we should still not be allowed to touch it. For some participants this knowledge of Indigenous land rights was clear cut and not debatable. As a result, they saw the problem lie with the state, and the oil industry, as opposed to individual people who work in the industry. The above quoted participant grew up working class in Cape Breton, and after university was only able to find part time work in retail. The threat of bankruptcy, and the desire to have financial independence for him and his wife were their motivations for moving to Fort McMurray. The problem for him wasn’t about his individual motivations and complicities in the oil industry, but instead the state’s failure to deal with Treaty Rights effectively. Similarly, another participant who believed that the oil industry was negatively impacting the water, and agreed that Treaty Rights should not be ignored by oil companies told me,

When it comes to a violation of Treaty lands and Treaty rights . . . I understand the anger coming from the communities based on that. But then, like, at the same time is it just our government like not holding up Treaty rights? Or, you know, there has gotta be some sort

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of enforcement to not, not allow . . . powerful conglomerates to do as they please to these people.

These statements understand that the state and oil companies have worked together for decades to make oil extraction possible in this place. Unlike other participants who more readily believe that oil companies are for the most part ethical, and that government regulation is effective, these participants describe that there is something unethical being done. But they are also demonstrating how these things that are supposed to be dealt with by the government, i.e., Treaty rights, consultation, environmental regulation, are being sidestepped in order to make way for oil extraction. This was one of the most important things that participants like those quoted above taught me about how oil industry workers are making sense of Indigenous refusal of oil extraction. In their experience they understand very clearly that we as Canadians aren’t following the rules when it comes to Treaty responsibilities, but that at the level of the individual, this feels very much out of their control. Like the depressed regional economies, (and the policies that structure these economic conditions (Mazer, 2019)), that have pushed people to this oil deposit for work, the fact of Cree, Dene, and Métis people of this place are in conflict with oil companies often feels beyond what people have control over. I understood them to be describing to me the ways in which capitalism, colonialism, and Western society’s demand for oil all collided together to create a situation where a lot of people end up depending on the oil industry for work, and the rest of us, whether we are critical of what is happening in Fort McMurray or not, depend on that oil getting to market. This could be described as a lack of individual responsibility for roles in, and complicities in the combined injustices of dispossession, environmental destruction and climate change, but I think the knowledge that my participants shared with me is that it is actually much more structural than that. Indeed, I think it shows how the individual beliefs about Treaty Rights and injustice that participants shared make little difference in their ability to refuse work in the industry. The ways in which their lives depend upon the oil industry is a result of the state’s investment in this place, and the state’s failure to invest in other places and other industries.

In many ways, these participants described to me that while they would love to leave, they were stuck in the industry, and had now made their home and lives here. Oil and gas is where they have relevant experience, networks of contacts, and have honed particular skill sets. Taylor, an engineer that had finally found work in another field after many years of leaving and going back

133 to oil and gas spoke to me in early 2017. She told me about her conflicts working in the industry and how many attempts to leave had been unsuccessful.

Oh I always wanted to do, to work in renewable energy, and so I found it difficult in that it was always going against kind of my moral focus. I mean I remember learning about climate change when I was a little girl and being really, you know, terrified by it and I wanted to make a difference. And knowing that there were other options out there than what we were currently doing and that no one was really looking at them and that was why I came in engineering, but life has a way of running off on its own so that’s why I worked in the oil industry. But I mean the work was good, it was challenging from an engineering perspective I worked as a design engineer. It was the same work I would have been probably doing if I worked in renewable energy… And I applied for jobs in France in renewable energy because they’re way more advanced than we are in Canada so there a lot more jobs but I was an English speaker… and I didn’t have any experience in that industry so even though I applied for 25 different jobs I didn’t get any interviews. So I called my boss at Company J and they were doing a big wind project. And he said if you help us out for this natural gas project for a few months, we’ll transition you into this big wind farm project. They were doing this, like, research and development on a gigantic scale wind turbine that they were developing, but it turned out that the funding got cut, the project they didn’t end up going ahead so I ended up just working as structural engineer [on the natural gas project] again.

Taylor’s experience trying to leave oil and gas was echoed by several participants. Many described finishing up a big project or contract that gave them some financial room to try to switch into a different field or industry. In some cases these transitions were successful, but in many more, the work participants had to take in order to leave oil and gas required a significant pay cut that they were unwilling or unable to take, leading them back to work in oil. Jennifer, a former welder was another participant who had successfully retrained to work in another industry. She described similar conflicts and shared with me how she tried to make sense of them.

For me to quit my really good paying job, and, and sometimes in my own mind I say I’m laundering the money. I’m taking the dirty money and making it clean. So, you know, I

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justify it to myself. But, uh, for me to quit wouldn’t make sense in terms of really changing the world. You wanna really change the world you need to change hearts and minds and that doesn’t happen by not working in that industry. Because somebody who needs the money, who isn’t going to… uh who hasn’t got… let’s be clear, who doesn’t have the luxury, doesn’t have the luxury to make that kind of a decision, is gonna take the job. So take the job. Right? So yeah, I have had that kind of discord, for sure. You know, people don’t understand a choice to be a welder as a woman, they don’t understand the choice to be a welder because there is clean, better jobs in offices. And those are different choices, those are different arguments.

In these ways, Jennifer understands that as long as the good paying jobs are there, someone will take them. It did not seem like a useful strategy for change to quit her job even when her values often came in conflict with the work she was asked to do. Furthermore, many of those who I spoke to owned homes either in Fort McMurray or in Alberta where oil is the biggest employer this was even more true. For those who had left, more often than not, it was the result of a lay off during the downturn in 2014–2015, or as a result of extreme family stress caused by commuting that lead to a break from the industry. One concluding lesson learned from our conversations was that to seriously think about way to transition away from oil extraction in this place, it is necessary to transition people’s livelihoods first. Thinking about what futures seem possible and the factors that shape them is the focus of the next chapter.

Chapter 5 Tar-Sands Futurities

In the last chapter I described participants who in their interviews described feelings of conflict, guilt, or “stuckness” about their jobs in the oil industry. They felt this way for many reasons including the role the oil industry plays in hastening climate change, and for the impacts these developments have on Treaty Rights. I understand these feelings as how oil extraction felt inevitable for the vast majority of people I spoke to. This sense of inevitability is a powerful way of making sense of the tar sands. It includes both the seemingly inevitable demand for oil that is created by our oil-heavy lifestyles and the inevitable demand for oil to maintain the Canadian economy, as well as the impossibility workers face in leaving well-paying jobs that many people in Alberta have become accustomed to, which introduces an economic inevitability. As oil pulls people into its orbit, oil culture becomes normalized, and its future extraction comes to be understood as an inevitable fact.

In this chapter I explore how the inevitability of oil might be interrupted or rethought through Indigenous epistemologies. To make sense of these contrasting world views, I draw on the analytic and concept of the pluriverse. The pluriverse (de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018) is the idea that multiple worlds exist simultaneously, but that the Western colonial worldview seeks to eradicate these other worlds to make everywhere and everything in its own image (de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018). Through forms of knowledge production, narratives and logics that normalize the conditions of settler colonialism, capitalism, and empire, we see the attempts to unify a singular worldview. This unification works to erase other worlds or paradigms and sever relations to lands, waters, and nonhuman beings to make way for property, extraction, and forms of institutional power like the state.

This scholarship demonstrates how the idea that extracting oil is inevitable is deeply connected to colonialism, capitalism, and the knowledge systems these create. It is important to make sense of this inevitability for several reasons. The first is that when oil is inevitable, it serves as a powerful way to justify continuing to do destructive and unethical practices, even when the evidence that we should stop is overwhelming. If oil is inevitable, we have no choice or agency to do anything otherwise but extract, ship, sell, and consume it. The inescapability of combustion engines, oil-heavy supply chains, and jobs in the oil industry becomes the dominant way in

135 136 which to understand and make sense of these issues. As I described in Chapter 3, drawing from the work of Huber (2013) and T. Mitchell (2011), oil has shaped our economic and social relations, as well as spatial and political realities in significant ways that further entrench these feelings and understandings of oil’s persistence place in our world. The geo-economic-social formations of oil have shaped how we live, eat, work, and build for particular futures. However, in applying the pluriverse as an analytic, it becomes possible to understand this particular oil- shaped reality as only one that currently exists. Alongside this, submerged in certain spaces while enduring in others, exists multiple, different, and overlapping worlds. The submerged perspectives of the pluriverse provide a tangible alternative to extractive futurity. To contrast, re- examine, or interrupt this singular, inevitable feeling or linearity of a settler and tar-sands futurity I turn to Indigenous epistemologies. This is not to say that the solution to these issues is for settlers to adopt or attempt to appropriate these epistemologies (Gómez-Barris, 2017, p. 43), but instead to use these epistemologies to demonstrate plurality. The pluriverse points to the possibility that alternatives to extractivism can still be mediated through things like Treaties and other covenants that have adjudicated how to share the land between different people for millennia, including agreements like the two-row wampum belt. Identifying and thinking about alternatives that already exist which relate differently to the world around us can offer ways to think about resources that are not an inevitable path to extraction. There exist very clear models, or examples of how to live with resources in ways that are more ethical and also don’t require the complete exhaustion of resources and the destruction of whole places in order to access and extract them.

To begin, I root my analysis in histories of resource extraction that have shaped the Canadian economy for centuries to examine how the belief that the extraction and consumption of oil is inevitable is tied to colonial ways of relating to land. I then examine why this particular paradigm must be contested by exploring how the concept of the pluriverse allows us to imagine alternative ways of understanding. Finally, I turn to Indigenous epistemologies that offer alternate ways to understand the material parts of our world that are not simply within the framework of natural resources, or raw material for human activity.

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5.1 Extractivism

The logics and practices that have created and sustained tar-sands extraction in his place can be understood through the term extractivism or as it is used in Central and South American contexts, extractivismo. Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017) defines extractivismo as extractive capitalism, one that “indicates an economic system that engages in thefts, borrowings, and forced removals, violently reorganizing social life as well as the land by thieving resources from Indigenous and Afro-descendent territories” (p. xvii). The literature about extractivismo that has emerged from South America also describes the resistance that has emerged in response to resource theft and the important efforts to regain resource sovereignty locally. Gómez-Barris (2017) argues that, “Since dense genetic plant life and natural resource regions often overlap with Indigenous territories, then we must work to analyze how Native peoples are both constructed by the state and corporate entities as obstructions to the expansion of extractive capitalism and literally block its reach” (p. xvii). This overlap of both resources and Indigenous territory is crucial to understanding how scholars working with the concept of extractivism accounts for land, the nation state and different ontological commitments. de la Cadena and Blaser (2018) posit that, “what is currently called extractivism: the accelerated extraction of natural resources to satisfy a global demand for minerals and energy to provide what national governments consider economic growth” (p. 2). The attempts to grow regional and national economies through natural resource extraction must be understood within existing practices of settler colonialism. In fact, de la Cadena and Blaser argue,

Extractivism continues the practice of terra nullius: it actively creates space for the tangible expansion of the one world by rendering empty the places it occupies and making absent the worlds that make those places. And because central attempts to save the planet are frequently indifferent to those worlds, grassroots protests against extractivism have mushroomed. (de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018, p. 3)

This desire for land and resources to carry out the work of extractive capitalism always takes place within the collaborative efforts of capital and the state to exert entitlement over Indigenous territories. It takes place within the attempts to assimilate or eradicate other ways of living, knowing, and relating to resources, lands, and waters. de la Cadena and Blaser, writing about the pluriverse, describe extractivism within the framework of world making. In this way, the divide

138 between nature and culture comes into focus. In a later section I expand and define this binary, but now I turn to how extraction becomes normalized within the context of Canadian extractive economies.

5.2 Inevitability

I spoke to Mark, in August of 2017 over Skype. Mark had recently started his own business, prompted by his lay off from an oil and gas company in Calgary during the economic downturn of 2015. In his conversation with me, Mark described how he came to understand his work in the oil industry in very practical and realistic terms.

Right now, there’s a lot of very educated people in Calgary, and Canada that work in the oil and gas industry that easily and happily would work for say Tesla or another alternative energy company. I think we need to find a way to foster those companies. Because right now until you get some better option you are not going to get people to give up their entire lifeline for some ideology that someone’s putting on the news. The fact is that they [oil and gas jobs] take care of a lot of families and people in this country. It provides for people so they’re not even going consider it. And I think everyone is well aware that it’s [burning fossil fuels is] not good. That global warming is a real thing and having cars everywhere is not a good thing but it’s the life you’ve created for us and the generation before us has created.

Mark’s description, as much as it feels as though the current situation is inevitable, actually also highlights the contingency of this sector, and offers the realization that with alternative economies there is a way out of oil and gas dependency. As well, he highlights that these alternatives need the same investment and cultivation as the oil industry has received. Mark identifies that there is a way out, but that we haven’t started to move towards it yet.

This excerpt was taken from a point in our conversation that felt very pessimistic, for Mark and myself, we both felt trapped in the current constraints of the economy and the political moment we found ourselves in. The way in which he narrated the situation was as follows: the economy runs on oil fuelled supply chains, consumers demand it, and the oil industry can still make a lot of money and employ a lot of people extracting oil from the ground. For Mark, these things create a sense of inevitability, or rationality for the time he spent in the industry. Mark, and many

139 other participants shared with me the ways in which our current consumption of oil, the lifestyles to which we have become accustomed. Furthermore, he describes the feeling of being scapegoated by the people who use oil, but don’t want to know how it’s made. Though this excerpt is partly about this feeling of inevitability, Mark also offers an answer to the current problems of needing energy and needing jobs. This industry is only entrenched and enduring because we haven’t collectively decided to stop subsidizing oil and gas, and not invested in and created other ways to employ people, and to consume energy. This excerpt describes how this sense of inevitability ends up working to hide how contingent things actually are. While describing how eager and willing people would be to work in another kind of energy economy, Mark concurrently feels like this shift is impossible politically and materially.

The term I use here to describe the taken-for-granted and overwhelming sense of oil’s place in my participants lives is inevitability. The understanding that the consumption of oil is currently inevitable structures many of the beliefs and attitudes towards oil that were shared by everyone I spoke to. There are two sides to this inevitability. The first is demand, that the demand for oil is structurally inevitable. The second is oil’s place in the Canadian economy, particularly as a job creator. Even participants who left oil, who wanted to leave, or who felt very conflicted about global warming and the dispossession of Treaty lands for oil extraction, all felt that the consumption of oil in our cars, planes, and homes was currently intractable. This “realism” is how they made sense of their participation in not only the industry, but in how they described their own consumption of next day Amazon shipping, trips on jet planes, a second car, and eating avocados in February.

Mark, in the epigraph above, also describes how we ended up this way. We know that burning fossil fuels is bad for us in the long term, but as Mark told me, “it’s the life [they’ve] created for us and the generation before us has created.” Acknowledging the structural conditions, Mark also describes that this can feel as though we have little control over how we provide for ourselves and how are lives are set up. Participants challenged me to think about the own way my life is entangled with their labour and the oil industry through my consumption habits and the things that I’ve come to depend on like accessible plane travel, as well as the more structural dependencies like my education at a publicly funded university that benefits from taxes and royalties paid by oil and mining companies alike. In similar ways they pushed me to think about the ways in which capitalism also works this way. They don’t have a choice in selling their

140 labour, and oil and gas is the most lucrative of what is at times, one of the few options for work. This participant captures the ways in which oil feels inevitable to many people who live and work in this region, and indeed the province of Alberta more generally. If there were alternatives people could have the choice to work for those other industries instead. But currently, oil’s place in Alberta’s economy, and imagination, remains central, even to its detriment.

5.3 Settler Futurity

I understand the inevitability that Mark describes to be a kind of settler futurity (Tuck & Yang, 2012) that is specifically about creating a tar-sands futurity or an extractive futurity. Tuck and Yang (2012) have described settler futurity to be types of futures desired that see the continuation of settler control of Indigenous lands and ensure the normalcy of these futures. Tar- sands futurity is similar, it is about a future where tar-sands extraction continues, is made normal, and the questions that contradict and contest this practice are diminished or reconciled.

The limits to growth, and the settler futurities that take economic growth for granted cannot be met, as many climate scientists have demonstrated the incompatibility of a tar-sands future with planetary survival. With this warning in mind I asked participants if they saw a future in this place for themselves and their children. For the most part many people did, because of the high wages, the community being built around them, and the improvements to infrastructures that made their lives in this place less isolated and more desirable. Yet while many participants shared with me that they did have fears about a warming climate, they didn’t see this as necessarily impacting their ability to work here extracting oil for money. The unknown future felt too far away, the impacts too uncertain. This slow approach of crisis reflects what Rob Nixon (2011) has called, “long dyings,” as opposed to the spectacular violence of a single event. Or what Timothy Morton (2013) has termed hyperobject. Objects or phenomena that are so immense, throughout both time and place, they transcend normal understandings and perceptions of space and temporality. As such, the scale is beyond local, human perception or sensory understanding. The complete manifestation of the hyperobject cannot be comprehended, only footprints of the larger phenomena can be revealed or interpreted. Like plutonium radiation or Styrofoam, the scale of both time and space that climate change exists in can only be experienced in one off footprints, or climatic events that are experienced locally and in a particular time. Yet, Fort McMurray hasn’t been immune to these types of footprint events. The

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2016 wildfire that caused significant damage to the community was still a very recent experience for my participants, and many were still dealing with the psychological effects of having been forced from their homes for several months. Some media commentators had used the wildfire to comment on the connection between human caused climate change, tar-sands extraction, and the more aggressive and dangerous forest fires of recent memory (Schwartz, 2016). Many participants shared with me that while they had worries about climate change, these interventions that took their suffering as a moment to criticize them for how they made a living felt callous and unnecessary. Furthermore, for many of my participants, their economic concerns were much more immediate and pressing. If they were to stop working here, that would do nothing to fight climate change, and they would have no way to support themselves. Many referenced the vast oil deposits here, and the estimates that there is over 100 years left of work in this place. Particularly as other traditional oil deposits around the world run out, the industry and the government have often touted the longevity of the Athabasca deposit in comparison. However, understanding the future of oil sands is based on current demand and the longevity of the resource only partially obscure the feasibility of burning that oil without tipping the pace of a warming climate into catastrophic levels.

There were many moments in conversations with participants where doubt was expressed, or discomfort felt in relation to the effects of oil extraction on climate change, the environmental impacts on lands and waters and Cree, Dene, and Métis rights to access Treaty lands. However, many times, these moments were resolved, or at least managed through the idea that we as a society depend on oil, and its extraction and consumption are currently inevitable. This proved to be a powerful way in which people made sense of a place like the tar sands. The narrative follows that civilization as we know it would grind to a halt if we stopped burning oil and fossil fuels. The place of demand, and the ways in which oil, like other natural resources more generally, form the basis for a lot of economic activity in Canada have made it possible to understand extraction as the rule and not the exception.

5.4 “Fish, Trees, Oil, Rocks”

One participant, a mining engineer studying for his MBA named Robert, described his frustration with the way development debates often take place in Canada. He told me, “You have to do stuff [to make money] and our country largely is a resource economy. This is what we

142 do—fish, trees, oil, rocks.” For him the fundamental role extraction has for the Canadian economy is not fully appreciated by many people who criticize pipeline development and tar- sands mines. Describing a course he had taken in his MBA program, he told me how one of his professors had described antidevelopment politics. His argument is that we’re actually transitioning from NIMBY [not in my backyard] to BANANA, which is “build absolutely nothing anywhere, near anyone.” This idea resonated with this participant, and he went on to explain,

So, people have lost sight of what makes this country move. You don’t understand where the money comes from right? It doesn’t come from tech-support for Telus, right? It comes from when we take stuff and we sell it . . . We used to be proud of what we were doing here in this region, like the nation used to be proud of us.

In this way, the participant references the role of the tar sands in nation building and how this fits into a larger history of natural resource extraction. He also exerts a type of economic common- sense argument that he feels is no longer valued anymore. When describing the pride people used to feel in natural resource extraction, the participant references a type of nostalgia for the type of staples economy that shaped the regional identities of the Canadian West. Harold Innis’s (1970) staples theory described Canada’s economic history as an exporter of natural resources to the British metropole. In particular, Innis examined the unequal economic relationship between Central Canada and the sparsely populated, but resource rich hinterland of the West, North and Maritimes. The “staples” (fur, lumber, fish) generated from the resources of the land for export became the driving force of the Canadian economy, and the development of regional economies (infrastructure, manufacturing, etc.) only took place insofar as they were needed to get these resources to market, or to manufacturing centres in other parts of the country. Innis argues that this left Canada with underdeveloped manufacturing and secondary economies, and a weakened national market (Innis, 1970, 1978; Watkins, 1977). This developed the Canadian economy as an extraction economy, dependent on the sourcing and removal of resources for export. The structural legacies of this history continue today not only for economic development, but it also sheds insight into why oil figures so prominently in the Canadian imaginary despite its comparatively small 3 percent contribution to the economy in terms of GDP (DeRochie, 2018; Energy Exchange, 2016; Touchette & Gass, 2018).

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For many of my participants, staples theory continues to be a powerful narrative to make sense of why oil should continue to be extracted here. The assumption this rests upon is that we have to develop resources in order to make money: our economy is based on this activity and realistically must continue to be based on this activity to maintain a standard of living. Above all, it is rooted in the belief that the state has the right and responsibility to pursue these activities for the good of the economic well-being of the rest of the nation. The engineer turned MBA quoted above isn’t unique in thinking this. Many of the other interview participants, in addition to many people in my life who still work in extractive industries or live in places where extractive industries remain as the key economic engine, it is possible to see this type of reasoning as realistic and in many cases inescapable. Nicole, a participant who was in her early twenties and worked in administration in Fort McMurray, described her own migration from economically depressed region to work in oil. She argued that more than her own personal lifeline, oil offered Canadians more than just money, but also the energy source to live their lives they wanted to. She said, “If the oil sands are going to drive what Canadians essentially need as a lifestyle, what we've been accustomed to, then I think the greater good is the oil sands.” In this way, for Nicole and many participants I spoke to, oil sands get tied into narratives of the greater good, and necessary economic activity. Furthermore, for many participants oil extraction is just one of the many other kinds of resource extraction they have worked in. For many mining engineers I spoke to, they worked in remote places mining gold, nickel, and coal during their cooperative work terms for their degree requirements. Other participants came from these types of mining communities in Northern Manitoba, Quebec, and British Columbia, moving from mining town to mining town following employment opportunities that were tied to commodity markets. For many Newfoundlanders in Fort McMurray, the closure of the cod fishery in the 1990s due to overfishing was the catalyst for mass migration to work in the tar sands. This has been the case in economically depressed places throughout the Maritimes as well, as work in fishing, forestry, farming, and other related industries dried up, more people came West to work in oil. Placing tar sands alongside other practices of resource extraction also work to normalizes it, but also indicts the dependence of the Canadian economy on this type of economic activity. As one participant explained to me, “I do believe there’s environmental issues that need to be tackled, [but] there’s always going to be that when you have development.” The idea that development always comes at an environmental cost, and that mining and other extractive practices like lumber and fishing

144 form the basis of the Canadian economy work to normalize and push back against the ways in which tar sands are criticized for the impact made, and long term effects on the climate crisis.

These conversations have prompted me to think about the fact that extractive industries always have an expiration date. The point of natural resource extraction is to remove the resource until it is gone, or until it is no longer profitable, following boom-bust cycles. That many people are pushed into the tar sands for work because of the failure of other extractive industries actually highlights just how precarious this work is. It is also always short-sighted. Even for resources that have “100 years left of work,” it will end at some point. As Albertans have recently seen in places where coal has been phased out, this ultimately leaves communities with very few economic prospects. In this way, rethinking the role of extraction, and what future it has becomes crucial to understanding both the possibilities for just transitions away from fossil fuels, and as a way of understanding how colonialism has shaped knowledge of land from the first instance. Labour in nonextractive, or at least renewable energy industries could be one alternative that could reshape economic dependence on oil. However, without examining how colonialism continues to shape what we value, and what we understand about land, extractive relationships will ultimately continue. And with it the idea that nature and culture are separate, distinct categories that must be managed. To further expand on these ideas, I now turn to the concept of the pluriverse.

5.5 Pluriverse

Emerging from scholarship in science and technologies studies (STS) and actor network theory (ANT), comes the idea that there exists a false binary between nature and culture. The creation of this binary is contingent on practices of science, knowledge production, and rationality (de la Cadena, 2015b; Law, 2015; Law & Lien, 2018). On one hand you have this binary as it has been examined by geographer Neil Smith (2008), who argued that capitalism functioned to spread an ideology of nature as separate from humanity. On the other, scholars like Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser (2018), writing about extraction zones, describe the nature/culture divide through the terms of world making and conquest. de la Cadena and Blaser argue, “After all, hegemonic opinion that nature is -publicly- only nature; to think otherwise, to think that mountains or animals are other-than-human persons is a cultural belief” (de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018, p. 2). An important argument that emerges from the literature on the pluriverse is the way

145 in which certain practices naturalize nature as a concept distinct from culture/human activity and create particular versions of reality. Colonial or extractive practices create the reality where nature and culture are distinct categories, and other ways of practising relationality with nonhuman beings create other realities. Writing of Indigenous ontological and epistemological understandings that understand mountains, land, or nonhuman beings as persons or as agentic gets placed within Western/colonial frameworks as a cultural or spiritual belief. Within this paradigm there is no space for actors, animacy, or agency outside of human activity.

De la Cadena (2015a) describes this divide as part of what she has called the anthropo-not-seen. The anthropo-not-seen, her reworking of the Anthropocene, figures in the foundational ontological and political acts of colonialism that sought erasure of other worlds into the concurrent crises of global land appropriation and a heating climate. She explains,

The world making process through which heterogenous worlds that do not make themselves through the division between humans and nonhumans—nor do they necessarily conceive the different entities in their assemblages through such a division— are both obliged into that distinction and exceed it (de la Cadena, 2015a, p. 1, emphasis in original).

Rooted in colonialism, de la Cadena (2015a) argues that the anthropo-not-seen is “a war waged against world making practices that ignore the separation of entities into nature and culture—and the resistance to that war” (p. 3). De la Cadena (2015a) traces this separation to Christian colonialism, which “required dividing entities into God-created nature (mountains, rivers, forests) and humans, and saving the soul of the latter” (p. 3). She then describes how secularism, and modern politics of the state and the progress narratives it employs further transformed this division. She writes, “the war against recalcitrance to distinguish nature from humanity silently continued in the name of progress and against backwardness, the evil that replaced the devil” (de la Cadena, 2015a, p. 3). Those humans who refused the division between nature and culture became objects of state intervention, cast in terms of premodern or, trapped in history or, in need of improvement. In this way, de la Cadena argues that more than just human activity impacting the geological age of the earth, the anthropo-not-seen demonstrates the ways in which the colonizer attempts to remake the world in its image, and in its reality of the “one-world world.” “The anthropo-not-seen was, and continues to be, a war waged against world making practices

146 that ignore the separation of entities into nature and culture—and the resistance to that war” (de la Cadena, 2015a, p. 2). To demonstrate this concept, de la Cadena describes a peasant woman’s struggle to defend lagoons in the Northern Andes of Peru from a copper mining project. In this story we see the shifts between how waters and lands are seen as property by the state and the mining company, and also as alive and kin by the woman. The state and the mining company engage this place as property, the woman’s property from which the company, through the state, can legally purchase, or appropriate through other legal means. The woman refuses to sell however, and endures attacks from the mining company and the national police. She instead asserts her attachment to the waters and place of the lagoons, “I am not going to stop; they will disappear me. But I will die with the land” (de la Cadena, 2015a, p. 6). De la Cadena argues that this grammar refuses to separate humans from a universal nature. While she can be interpreted as defending an ecosystem, by either environmentalists or allies that agree with her cause, this interpretation positions her as “a subject in relation to an object” (de la Cadena, 2015a, p. 6). Yet, when we think otherwise about the relationality between the woman and the lagoon, other reasons for her refusal emerge.

The “refusal to sell” may express a different relation: one from which woman-land- lagoon (or plants-rocks-soils-animals-humans-creeks—canals!!!) emerge inherently together: an ecological entanglement needy of each other in such a way that pulling them apart would transform them into something else. Refusing to sell may also refuse the transformation of the entities just mentioned into units of nature or the environment, for they are part of each other. (de la Cadena, 2015a, p. 6)

This relationality changes the woman’s resistance from subject acting to save object, to subject entangled within other subjects, defending their shared survival. These refusals, understood in terms of kinship, “transforms rivers, plants, and animals into entities that financial capital, infrastructure, and contamination can kill rather than “merely” destroy or deplete” (de la Cadena, 2015a, p. 6). Nature as outside of culture/humanity makes it easier to separate out what can be easily destroyed, extracted, or taken from.

Furthermore, this idea of nature is rooted in the particular practices that co-constitute it. John Law and Marianne Lien (2018) have argued that “Nature in other words, is neither given nor made, but rather the stubborn outcome of myriad practices that together conjure and confirm its

147 existence” (p. 132). These practices consistently reproduce the binary, and as a result it is “multiple, complex and not particularly coherent”; they identify that nature as “singular and untouched remains a powerful Western imaginary” (Law & Lien, 2018, p. 149). However, these scholars encourage us to ask, what are the stakes of understanding the world in this way? John Law (2015) argues that it is crucial to understand these differences in the framework of terra nullius. It is not enough to simply understand Western/northern and Indigenous ontologies as different, and to incorporate them under a liberal or multicultural acceptance of difference. Law’s (2015) argument clarifies and is worth quoting at length,

If we say that Aboriginal people believe one thing and we believe something else then we may not realize that we are doing this, but in effect we are buying into a version of the terra nullius doctrine. This is because we are saying that the world (or even the universe) is really something like a large space-time box that goes on by itself. And then we are adding that there are people with different beliefs or cultures living in this space-time box. If we are liberal, then we will respect the differences and we will not try to impose our own version of the world on those who see it differently. But even so, and however nice we are, we have not abandoned our basic commitment to the idea of a single all- encompassing reality. Neither have we really stopped assuming that Aboriginal people have got it wrong. Their idea, the idea that the world is a set of differently woven, specific, and heterogeneous creating practices, is a story, but it is not the way things actually are. The idea that reality is a set of contingent, enacted, and more or less intersecting worlds in the plural, perhaps we might call it a fractiverse, may indeed be a nice story, but is indeed just a (cultural) story (see Povinelli, 1995; Verran, 1998). (p. 127)

Law (2015) argues that it is not enough to just accept or understand that people have different beliefs about reality, but that we must reckon with the idea that different realities are the result of and are done through different practices. This forces us into the question of ontology. Law describes that, “This alternative position is analytically radical because it treats reals [or reality] as effects of contingent and heterogeneous enactments, performances or sets of relations. Categories such as ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ may or may not carry into these alternative worlds” (Law, 2015, p. 127, emphasis in original).

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Law’s fractiverse is similar to what de la Cadena and Blaser call the concept of the pluriverse. de la Cadena and Blaser (2018) describe the pluriverse as what existed before the one-world world and what continues to fight for survival in spite of it. The pluriverse is a concept of multiple ways of knowing, of multiple, different, and heterogenous versions of the world that are not commensurable with the dominant worldview of colonial capitalism. This concept tries to capture “heterogeneous worldings coming together as a political ecology of practices, negotiating their difficult being together in heterogeneity” (de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018, p. 4). The pluriverse is an imaginary, that is rooted in specific ways of knowing, ways of relating to and making of worlds. This is what they call a Political Ontology that seeks to offer other ways of relating to heterogeneity that contest colonial conquest of different modes of world making. This concept echoes what Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017) has called as the “submerged viewpoint” (p. xiv). This viewpoint offers a way of seeing and knowing that contests extractive viewpoints that reduce life to colonial ways of seeing that reduce life to commodity value and resources for economic profit.

In this way, Gómez-Barris (2017) describes the colonialism and extraction as the way in which regions of “high biodiversity” are marked out and converted to “capitalist resource” (p. xvi). Examining social ecologies and networks within the extractive global economy, Gómez-Barris (2017) argues that in the multiple regions of South America she studies, that it was “the system that was installed by colonial capitalism in the 1500s” that worked to “[convert] natural resources such as silver, water, timber, rubber, and petroleum into global commodities” (p. xvi). Gómez-Barris (2017) is careful to highlight that this system did not just change the use or value of materials into commodities, but significantly alter the types of paradigmatic and world views that were possible; she writes:

While racial capitalism refers to the processes that historically subordinated African and Indigenous populations, extractivism references the dramatic material change to social and ecological life that underpin this arrangement. Furthermore, the racial logics of South American states are expanded through new forms of extractive capitalism. (p. xvii)

Working with filmmakers and artists in five sites across South America, Gómez-Barris (2017) tracks the ways these artists and their artistic practices “shift how we see, specifically by reckoning with the thick opacity of what lies below the water’s surface” (p. xiv) to consider

149 decolonial approaches and methodologies that might challenge how we understand the totality of the extractive view. Gómez-Barris (2017) offers an argument that demonstrates how ways of seeing, ways of knowing, and ways of worldmaking are all fundamental to how we understand extractive capitalism, the Anthropocene, and the sustained survival of other alternatives. Gómez- Barris further clarifies that the extractive view as a concept “names the violence that capitalism does to reduce, constrain, and convert life into commodities, as well as the epistemological violence of training our academic vision to reduce life to systems” (p. xix). In her formulation, submerged perspectives instead challenge this world view, and “To name the visible and invisible forces between the human and nonhuman, between animate and inanimate life, is to perceive a too-often-ignored network of relationality, or social ecologies, as I term them throughout” (Gómez-Barris, 2017, p. 2). This way of tracking forms of deep relationality that exist even in the wake of violence and extraction works to take account of “life that is unbridled and finds forms of resisting and living alternatively” (Gómez-Barris, 2017, p. 3). Gómez-Barris (2017) argues that, “Like any system of domination, extractive capitalism is not totalizing in its destructive effects” (p. 4).

To think about this further, I now turn to what some of these submerged perspectives might look like in the context of North America. That is, the types of relationality that have survived the techniques of power and control exerted through extractive colonial capitalism. If practice makes reality and functions as world making, like Law (2015) argues, it becomes important to interrupt current extractive practices, and the belief of their inevitability with other knowledges, other practices that understand resources, materials in different ways.

5.6 Thinking with Materiality and Animacy

In this section I try to examine how Indigenous epistemologies approach the question of resource use and offer other ways of relating to the resources themselves that include ideas of agency, reciprocity and kinship. I am careful to describe the distinct place- and nation-specific understandings that act as the foundations of these knowledges. I don’t want to create the idea that there is a pan-Indigenous, universal way of understanding, relating, and describing these epistemic approaches to relating otherwise to resources and land. The various examples I draw from below are rooted in different ontological perspectives, and emerging from unique histories, and places. What they share however, is how they relate to resources as more than just

150 commodities, as having value beyond how they are used or made useful to human activity. I have structured this section based around examples of different materials, and the ways in which Indigenous scholars have described relational and reciprocal ways of interacting with them. The point of this section is to understand how there are different ways of making sense of resources other than the naturalized ways in which my participants, the settler state, and capitalism figure resources into binaries of nature/culture, resource value, and commodity. I also turn to Indigenous epistemologies in order to interrupt the idea of inevitability I described in the first section. Inevitability relies upon ideas about resource use, extraction, and its entanglement with capitalism. Above all I see both the idea of inevitable capitalism, structured through inevitable resource extraction and consumption as crucial idea to unpack, challenge, and imagine differently in order to get at the heart of how we might begin to conceptualize futures that don’t require the continued dispossession and erasure of Indigenous futurity. I see these inevitabilities: of capitalism and extraction as the foundational logics that work to normalize tar sands. It is at this intersection that I am drawn to how other worldviews can and have offered alternative ways to relate to resources and lands and waters, in ways that refuse the idea that we have no choice but to extract resources for commodity markets and capital flows. But furthermore, these refusals include whole other knowledge systems that offer complex and dynamic ways of explaining and prescribing human activities and relationships to the rest of the world.

I begin with a general overview of about what Dakota scholar Kim TallBear has called Indigenous Metaphysics, a renaming of what Vine Deloria Jr. termed American Indian metaphysics. Deloria describes this metaphysic as “. . . the realization that the world, and all its possible experiences, constituted a social reality, a fabric of life in which everything had the possibility of intimate knowing relations because, ultimately, everything was related” (2001, as cited in TallBear, 2017, p. 188).

In this metaphysic, or understanding of reality, social relations between beings are, as TallBear (2017) describes, “co-constitutive entanglements between the material and the immaterial” (p. 191) which perplex both Western philosophical underpinnings and social relations toward nonhuman beings. It has become an emerging trend in academic work to think about animacy, and the agentic quality of the nonhuman and of materials more generally. Writing about this literature, coming mainly from animal studies and new materialism, TallBear argues that scholars having these discussions have too often ignored Indigenous scholarship that also speaks

151 to these concepts. TallBear (2017) describes “Indigenous standpoints accord greater animacy to nonhumans, including nonorganisms such as stones and place, which help form (Indigenous) peoples as humans constituted in much more complex ways than simply human biological terms” (p. 187).

As TallBear reviews scholarship from animal studies and new materialisms she identifies how these fields struggle to define and rework existing Western scholarship to consider the animacy of nonhuman and nonorganisms, TallBear (2017) argues that because Indigenous philosophies did not create hierarchies between beings in the same ways that Western philosophies did, these standpoints ought to be at the forefront of these emerging fields (p. 192). Instead this “boundary crossing” (TallBear, 2017, p. 192) continues to pose difficulties for imagining relations among humans and matter and other species in secular, academic ways. “Non-Indigenous society has put much effort into erecting a barrier between what it is thought humans can know through their materialist, empirical investigations and what (some) humans believe to exist beyond the knowable, material world” (TallBear, 2017, p. 192, emphasis in original). In this way this knowledge exists beyond what we can possess (Moreton-Robinson, 2015), but instead learn from and try to let that learning shape our relations. Far from prescriptive, this approach requires the kinds of deep relationality with the world around us that Western science, philosophy, and society has been built to deny, or characterize within hierarchies of the human (Chen, 2012).

TallBear uses the example of pipestone to illuminate these ideas. Pipestone, also known as catlinite, is a red stone that is carved into pipes used by the Dakota people. The stone, imbued with histories of the Dakota people contains animacy, what TallBear (2017) calls “vibrancy” (p. 195):

We can describe pipestone as vibrant because without it prayers would be grounded, human social relations impaired, and everyday lives of quarriers and carvers depleted of the meaning they derive from working with stone. That story is a flood story in which a young woman is the only one to survive atop a hill, and the blood of all of her dead people—once the waters recede—are pooled in one place that becomes the cannupa ok’e, the blood of the people or the red stone . . . The cannupa ok’e, the quarry, is special not only to Dakota people, but to other Indigenous people who dig there today, and to others

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for whom the pipe is also central. The stone there is sometimes spoken of as a relative, harkening in part back to that creation narrative. (2017, p. 195)

TallBear describes that for some this place is even sacred, though she warns that this distinction can create a binary between sacred uses of this place and the profane, used to further thinking that relies on material/immaterial, rational-or-scientific/spiritual. Instead, TallBear argues that these binaries conflict with a “view of relationality that would acknowledge that Indigenous peoples and the stone have long existed in more intimate and complex sets of relations than the notions of “sacred” and “profane” can represent” (TallBear, (2017, p. 196). More than how this knowledge comes to be defined by Western/settler standards of material or the immaterial, this place is one that centres human-pipestone relations.

Similarly, Tanya Talaga (2017) describes the Anishinaabe story of the Sleeping Giant, an island with a large mountain visible from the shores of Lake Superior where the city of Thunder Bay is now found. Nanabijou was a spirit and a giant who protected the Ojibwe people. Being a generous spirit, he decided to share his secret with the Ojibwe. Embedded in the rock on this island could be found silver. Nanabijou didn’t want anyone to take this beautiful metal away from him, so he asked the Ojibwe to keep his secret and to not tell anyone about the silver, especially the white men. He warned that if the secret was told he would turn to stone and not be able to protect them. The Anishinaabe promised, and Nanabijou told them how to find the rich silver. Nanabijou described that when they found the right point on the island they would find an entrance to a tunnel that would take them to the silver.

The Ojibwe lived in peace and benefited from the beautiful gift they had received from Nanabijou. In return the Ojibwe never divulged the secret and were admired for their beautiful silver ornaments. However, news of their silver gift reached other people and one day a Sioux man, who was actually a secret snake, pretended to befriend the Ojibwe in order to learn the secret of their silver. He waited patiently until he overheard where the secret entrance was found. Finding the silver, he filled his pockets and then set off for his home in a canoe. On the way home from the silver mine, the man ran into white settlers who captured him and made him their prisoner. The man tried to barter for his freedom with the silver he had taken, but the white men just took his silver and asked him for more. The man refused to tell the Ojibwe’s secret, so the white men decided to give the man lots of alcohol to calm him down and encourage him to talk.

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Eventually he was asked again, and this time, under the effects of alcohol, told the secret of where the silver was found. As soon as the secret was told, Nanabijou began to feel heavy. He laid down and slowly turned to stone, the rock forming over the entrance to the tunnel that lead to the silver. Nanabijou’s warning had come to pass, he had been turned to stone. Nanabijou’s solidified body is now called the Sleeping Giant. On the little island at the foot of the Sleeping Giant, you can still see the partly submerged shafts of what was one of the richest silver mines in the region. Settlers have tried to access this silver by pumping water out from the mine, but it continues to flood, and they have never succeeded.

In this story a resource, otherwise mined and extracted by settlers, is a gift given by a generous being. This gift however comes with the expectation of reciprocity, a secret must be kept. And it is not a spiteful or vengeful god that punishes the people for having their secret shared, but a consequence that happens to Nanabijou that he is unable to stop. In this story there is also the violence of white possession, through capture and theft, and using alcohol to get to the secret. This story also highlights the very distinct differences that Indigenous and white epistemologies offer in relations to silver. On one hand it is a gift to be cherished, tied to good relations of keeping Nanabijou’s secret, and on the other, using illicit means to get to a resource for greed and profit. While thinking about this story, and the story of pipestone, I am careful to take John Law’s warning into account. It is not enough to understand these stories as just cultural or spiritual beliefs, and hold on to the one-world, singular way of understanding that is the legacy of the Western world view. Alternatively, it is possible to understand these stories as creating other worlds, other ways of creating reality and ethical relations in the present. Particularly, that the world is full of animacy that expands beyond just the human becomes an important way to figure in relationality, ethics, and responsibilities to other animate beings.

Understanding animacy is complex. Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) describes a moment of frustration while learning the Indigenous language Potawatomi, discovering that nouns can be verbs in its grammar. Kimmerer (2013) describes how this frustration lead to a realization about the ontological teachings of the Potawatomi language—that nouns can also be verbs demonstrates the animacy of all things:

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To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs when everything is alive . . . The language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines, and nuthatches, and mushrooms. (p. 55)

She describes how things like plants and animals are obviously animate, but that in Potawatomi, “rocks are animate, as are mountains and fire and places” (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 55). While this knowledge is distinct to Potawatomi place-specific ontologies, these ideas of animacy and the aliveness of places and other nonhuman beings exists in much literature about other Indigenous ontologies (Basso, 1996; de la Cadena, 2015a, 2015b; Kermoal & Altamirano-Jiménez, 2016; TallBear, 2017; Todd, 2017). Though relations to specific places is the characteristic of these ontologies, and therefore not universalizable, there exists a common thread among these ontologies is that they are “grounded in living relational schemas” (Kermoal & Altamirano- Jiménez, 2016, p. 7). These relationships take place between humans and nonhuman beings, and “are based on the principles of respect, reciprocity, and obligation” (Kermoal & Altamirano- Jiménez, 2016, p. 8; Kuokkanen, 2009; Trask, 2007). Kermoal and Altamirano-Jiménez (2016) show that because this knowledge is produced throughout systems of governance, norms, and familial and community relationships, it cannot be “fragmented into silos or categories; rather, ontologies, epistemologies, and experiences are interwoven into this system” (p. 8).

This leads me back to Zoe Todd’s (2017) work on fossil fuels, which I already discussed in Chapter 2. However, Todd’s description of her relationality to fossil fuels as prehistoric kin bears repeating to think about how we might otherwise understand and relate to resources in ways that interrupt the idea that the only way to interact with resources is to extract them, and that this extraction is inevitable. For Todd, reframing fossil fuel as fossil kin, opens up the possibility to understand the problem of climate change and extraction in different ways. She describes the relations of capitalism that have extracted “these long-gone beings from their resting place, to turn the massive stores of carbon and hydrogen left from eons of life in this place, weaponises these fossil-kin” (Todd, 2017, p. 104). It is the oil economy that turns the remains of these beings into a commodity that threatens our capacity to live on this planet, not the beings themselves. Todd describes using the work of Heather Davis and Kim TallBear to think through the concept of oil as kin. Davis argues that we have relationality and reciprocal responsibilities to the plastics created through petro-chemical production. Thinking of plastics as the offspring of petrochemical politics, Davis refigures plastic as kin that requires care, understanding, and

155 something that we tend to. Todd also draws from TallBear’s description of pipestone, which as I have already described originates from Dakota territory and place-specific knowledges. Together however, these approaches offer a different way to make sense of oil as more than just pollutant, toxic, or threat. Once it is imbued with animacy, or the legacy of once animate beings, it then becomes something to which one has responsibilities toward, that we have to take care of.

5.7 Transitions

The pluriverse, and the idea of widespread animacy offers important lessons from which to begin to think about transitions away from fossil fuels. In many discussions about transition, even when those transitions are called just, there are risks of repeating the same mistakes of not reckoning with how colonialism has shaped our perceptions of reality, including what the problems facing us may or may not be. Energy transition has been gaining political and cultural traction in recent years. From energy workers who experienced the deepest effects of the economic downturn, to policy makers, and climate activists, conversations about a just transition, or a workers led climate plan describe the desire to use impending crisis to transform our economy and society for more equal or just outcomes. These conversations about a just transition away from fossil fuels have grown as more people are impacted by the effects of the climate crisis, and a just transition captures the collective imagination as a possible solution. Prominent examples include the Green New Deal, and the related Leap Manifesto, and other types of initiatives that seek to transform economic dependence on fossil fuels while also advocating for other kinds of racial, economic, and gender justice. However different these approaches are, and the fact that they are still being developed and not a static set of plans, these plans still share the idea of “green growth.” Economists Enno Schröder and Servaas Storm (2018) have argued that proposals for green growth will not do enough to meet the drastic cuts in CO2 emissions that are needed to prevent predicted temperature increases. In analyzing several proposals for “green growth” from several industrialized Western nations, they argue, “The belief that any of this half-hearted tinkering will lead to drastic cuts in CO2 emissions in the future is plain self-deceit” (Schröder & Storm, 2018). Instead, economic output must shrink:

The prognosis strongly suggests that we have reached a fork in the road. We could continue to grow our economies the way we did in the past, but this means we have to prepare for global warming of 3°C to 4°C by 2100 and run a big risk of having to adapt to

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“Hothouse Earth.” Adaptation would mean that we have to come to terms with the impossibility of material, social and political progress as a universal promise: Life is going to be worse for most people in the 21st century in all these dimensions. (Schröder & Storm, 2018, pp. 22–23)

While this analysis is useful to understand the economic outcomes of radical decarbonization, it is crucial to think about futures that transform life as we know it, and not just accept the current arrangements but with a lower standard of living. This is where Indigenous knowledges, and decolonial pathways for building different futures become even more important. Many scholars have critiqued the current discourses of crisis around climate change, arguing that since the conquest of the Americas, Indigenous people have witnessed the end of worlds and environmental collapse multiple times (Bang et al., 2014; Davis & Todd, 2017; L. B. Simpson, 2017; Whyte, 2018). In their analysis of how the Anthropocene and climate crisis is described and narrated by both scientific scholarship and more mainstream cultural representation, Gergan et al. (2018) have argued that these discourses represent a type of “temporal sleight of hand” (2018, p. 2). Gergan et al. argue that these representations and debates imagine apocalypse in ways that work to “escape specific culpability (for instance, in processes of settler colonialism, capitalism, or imperialism) and instead centre a universal human frailty that ends with triumph, a clear moral, and a clean slate” (Gergan et al., 2018, p. 2). Without accounting for how the current crisis is part of a longer history of “continual ecosystem and species collapse” (Harris, 2019) we risk solving the wrong problems. Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017) has argued, “We should be thinking of climate change as part of a much longer series of ecological catastrophes caused by colonialism and accumulation-based society” (p. 3). The solutions to this problem look very different than the green-growth solutions believed by many to be the best way forward:

The issue is that accumulation-based societies don’t like the answers we come up with because they are not quick technological fixes, they are not easy. Real solutions require a rethinking of our global relationship to the land, water, and to each other. They require critical thinking about our economic and political systems. They require radical systemic change. (L. B. Simpson, 2017, quoted in M. Harris, 2019).

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Simpson advocates for anticolonial and land-based struggles that would return land to Indigenous people and transform social, economic, and political relations. Glen Coulthard (2014) has described this transformation as necessary for Indigenous resurgence as well: “Without such a massive transformation in the political economy of contemporary settler colonialism, any efforts to rebuild our nations will remain parasitic on capitalism, and thus on the perpetual exploitation of our lands and labor” (p. 171).

Coulthard (2014) has put it in even simpler terms: “For Indigenous nations to live, capitalism must die. And for capitalism to die, we must actively participate in the construction of Indigenous alternatives to it” (p. 173). Oceti Sakowin Oyate scholar Nick Estes (2019) has reworked this sentiment, arguing, “For the earth to live, capitalism must die” (p. 257). The transformations required to prevent heating to crisis levels or “hot house earth,” all require the massive transformation of relations to land, away from the extractive relationships of colonial capitalism, and towards ones that include more ethical, reciprocal, and multispecies relations.

And yet, these transformation don’t necessarily look like what degrowth economists and theorists describe in terms of lower quality of life and versions of necessary dystopia. Instead it is possible to imagine and build towards futures that centre relationality and an undoing of the types of conquest and violence brought about to make the “one-world world” that offer more desirable futures to fight for. While much scholarship has been devoted to “hope narratives” in climate change activism and education (Hauk et al., 2015; Pihkala, 2018), I see the approach being offered by Indigenous scholars to be very different.

McGinty & Bang (2016) have argued that it is not crisis that is new, but the threat climate change brings to settler entitlement and permeance to land. Instead of teaching land permanence, they argue for dynamic lands that better reflect Indigenous systems of knowledge and notions of time that are not rooted in the linearity of settler temporality. McGinty & Bang (2016) explain, “Indigenous knowledge systems frequently reference both multiple generations and events beyond the range of collective human memory. This perspective opens a place of resilient response to the often fear-based narratives of climate change” (p. 474). Versions of temporality that have a sense of responsibility both to relationships with kin in the past and future offer different ways of understanding present problems and how to respond to them. Kyle Whyte (2018) describes how intergenerational responsibility and relationality through the Anishinaabe

158 phrase, “aanikoobijigan (yankobjegen) can shift the way climate change is understood. The expression means ancestor and descendent at the same time (Copenace, 2017; Miner, 2017)” (p. 228). Whyte (2018) refers to this as a spiralling sense of time it, “refers to the varied experiences of time that we have as participants within living narratives involving our ancestors and descendants” (p. 229). Whyte (2018) describes narrative forms that are in dialogue with how we might speculate and imagine how future generations, and ancestors might analyze a situation, and what they might suggest doing about it (p. 229). He calls this dialogue a type of “philosophizing about what actions we or our communities ought to take to respond to our current situations” (Whyte, 2018, p. 229). But furthermore, this response takes into account relationality beyond just the human and is rooted in knowledge systems that contest the formation of land, nonhuman beings, and waters as “resources.” These are considerations that must be centred in the formulation of energy transition projects and plans. Without taking seriously other ways of knowing and world building, green growth and other types of just transition objectives can too easily reproduce extractive and colonial relationships and knowledges.

Chapter 6 Conclusion

The Healing Walk was born out of a need to heal. The Healing Walk is not a rally, march or protest, but an acknowledgement of the people and other living beings, the water, the land and the air, that is suffering due to our unhealthy energy addictions.

—Healing Gathering, 2016

The Tar Sands Healing Walk was an annual water walk founded by Métis activist Jesse Cardinal in collaboration with other Indigenous women from the organization Keepers of the Athabasca. Hosted in 2014 by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, the event was co-organized by activists Eriel Tchekwie Deranger (Dene), and Melina Laboucan-Massimo (Lubicon Cree). The event began in 2010 and ran under the same name and organization until 2014. (In 2015 it was then renamed the Healing Gathering for the Land and Water, organized by Cleo Reece, a member of the Fort McMurray First Nation). These series of Healing Walks featured water ceremonies lead by Elders and water keepers at several points on a 14 km loop between Syncrude and Suncor, a stretch of highway where tailings ponds are highly visible along the side of the road.

I attended the Healing Walk in 2014. I attended in part because I knew at that point that the tar sands would be a part of my dissertation research. However, I also attended because I felt like I needed to start to reckon with my complicated relation to this place, and the ways I continued to benefit from the extraction that dispossesses Indigenous nations here. The walk felt like a way to support anti-tar-sands movements that still centred on how Cree, Dene, and Métis nations were choosing to refuse. I didn’t go as a researcher because I didn’t even have a project yet. Instead I was there as someone who had seen the tar sands many times but had failed to be moved by them.

The Healing Walk took place in the last weekend in June 2014. I flew to Edmonton to visit with my family, and my parents graciously offered to drive me up to Fort McMurray for the weekend. They had recently retired and moved to Edmonton, so they were eager to go back to visit friends and see the progress of several new infrastructure projects that were still under construction

159 160 when they had left. Even though my parents didn’t necessarily agree with or completely understand the point of the Healing Walk they lent me their camping gear, loaded me up with enough groceries for the weekend, and drove the five hours north to drop me off in Anzac, a small Métis community south of Fort McMurray where the base camp for the weekend was held. Once there I ran into old friends from university and met people from all over Turtle Island who were fighting the effects of oil extraction, including the pipelines to transport it, and the refineries built next to their communities.

The weekend began with workshops on different struggles against different pipelines that would transport tar-sands oil; Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain, Enbridge’s Northern Gateway and the Line-9 Reversal, and several more I didn’t recognize and now can’t remember. Our hosts from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation gave us an opening banquet. We heard from several speakers who talked about the ways tar-sands extraction was impacting people downstream in Fort Chipewyan, and we heard stories from Elders about how the land was different now compared to before oil extraction began. The next morning Elders conducted a pipe ceremony and then buses arrived and drove us north to Crane Lake, a hiking area that has been built over a reclaimed mine to the South of the Syncrude main Mildred Lake site.

The walk began with another ceremony, we were told that water ceremonies would take place four times throughout the walk, one in each of the four directions. I don’t know if the ceremonies were actually private, but I kept my distance, worried I would do something wrong or that I would be intruding. The group was over 300 people so keeping my distance was also easy, during the ceremonies most of us would stand or sit by the edge of the highway; snacking on the sandwiches and fruit given to us by volunteers. When the group started moving again, we knew the ceremony had concluded and we walked on to the next point. Furthermore, these ceremonies are sacred, and as a white settler it would be inappropriate for me to discuss them in detail, especially since I did not have the permissions or ethical protocols in place to do so. What I will say is what was shared with me, and with the public in media releases and social media posts; these water ceremonies were done to heal the toxic waters of the tailings ponds. The Healing Walks sought to heal the lands, and the waters currently destroyed by tar-sands extraction. Positioning healing, through traditional Cree, Dene, and Métis ceremonies, the organizers put forward a different future for this place.

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It was a hot and bright day, several people struggled with dehydration and heat stroke and the organizers were constantly driving by with the accessibility van to make sure everyone had enough to drink. Other than the heat, I remember the feeling of uneasiness as we walked toward the first of several tailings ponds. Unlike in the past when I had seen the tailings ponds from the vantage of the coach bus or car which took me to work, or to see the Giants of Mining exhibit with family members; walking was slow. The proximity to the tailings ponds allowed me to experience this place very differently. From the closer perspective the scale of toxic water was much more damning, and smells of sulphur and tar wafted from the mines to the North. Some people with respiratory conditions pulled on medical face masks, a few people even had more industrial looking respirators. What I didn’t expect, was how people reacted emotionally. At several points along the walk, the new and old friends I chatted and joked with throughout the early parts of the walk, grew withdrawn and quiet. Several began to cry. It is interesting to me now that I was so shocked. People comforted each other by normalizing how jarring and devasting the sights were. These sights that had been so normal to me were made unreal. What moved me even more, was my own indifference to the ponds, the pits, and the sandy dunes and craters. Propane powered cannons boomed in the distance breaking the silence at regular intervals. Cannons that shoot noise across the ponds to scare off migratory birds who might mistake the toxic water for a regular pond to rest on. Next to the Suncor tailings ponds we stopped once again and looked out past the chain link fence over the water. Here Suncor used scare-crow type structures sticking out of the ponds to scare migratory birds from landing on their waters, these scare-crows wore fluorescent coveralls and hardhats, providing a sharp contrast to the oily, toxic lakes.

We stopped for another break in front of the Syncrude site sign, the company tag line read, “Securing Canada’s Energy Future.” This tagline wasn’t new to me. My parents have received company gifts like notepads, pens, hats, and t-shirts with this tagline for years. But suddenly I read the phrase in a new light; it linked settler colonialism, oil extraction, and the Canadian state so clearly with nationalist pride. The whole thing seemed to come together in ways that I’m sure many people already understood but had taken me a lot longer to piece together.

After the long walk, we met back up with the buses and rode back to the campsite south of the city. After another banquet several musicians played for us, including youth from the Tla’Amin First Nation who did parody covers of popular songs with lyrics changed to critique the tar

162 sands. After the overwhelming feelings of grief experienced earlier in the day, the evening felt celebratory and special. It didn’t feel like we were doomed, but instead there were still so many options and alternatives waiting to be made possible.

This water walk continues to be held at a smaller scale, and lead by different organizers. Yet, organizers have continued to frame this explicitly as not a rally, march or protest, but instead as a ceremony-based event around healing and strengthening relations with the lands, waters, and air of this place, and the human and nonhuman beings that live here too. In doing so, the Cree, Dene, and Métis water walkers offer a powerful alternative to engaging with the problem of the tar sands. Like the examples of kinship based struggles I described in Chapter 5, this water walk affirmed other ways of understanding this place that contests the version of this place that positions lands and waters as resources from which to exploit and develop. In this way the walks shift the grammar of what and who is being acted upon. Humans are still the subject, but instead of acting to save the water as object, they enter an intersubjective relationship with their relation. This walk, while having important spiritual and cultural significance, offers a powerful political pedagogy for all that participate in it.

6.1 Summary of Findings:

This dissertation has argued that the tar sands are the logical outcome of colonial and extractive relationships to lands and waters. Tar sands become inevitable, and desirable when land is understood to be a resource for human activity and profit. I have traced how other ways to understand and relate to this place were targeted for erasure to make way for capitalist and settler colonial expansion and extraction in this place. Without other ways of organizing social and economic life in this place, tar-sands extraction becomes a plausible and desired conclusion about what to do here and why it is valuable. However, I have demonstrated this is not an outcome that happens naturally or easily. Instead, this place is only possible through a series of state interventions, including violent dispossession, significant investment in making the technologies and infrastructures of extraction possible, and the subsequent ways this becomes normalized in settler society more widely through racialized narratives of entitlement and belonging. These histories of investing in resource extraction, land appropriation, and economic development have deeply shaped the ways in which settlers understand what is possible in this place, and in the world more largely. Oil and gas are ubiquitous and have shaped the social,

163 economic and political relations of contemporary life (Huber, 2013). As a result, oil extraction and oil consumption, no matter how contested or critiqued, feel like an inevitable reality of how we live our lives. Yet, as I argued, these assumptions are rooted in the logics of settler colonialism. Particularly for those participants who felt trapped by their circumstances and societal demand for oil more generally, the ability to imagine other configurations of power, economics and society felt impossible to conceive.

To challenge these assumptions and logics, I have tried to engage the work of Indigenous scholars who describe other knowledge and political systems that relate to these places in ways that exceed simple commodity value. Instead, these scholars position waters, lands, and nonhuman beings as existing in complex relations that require ethical protocols and reciprocity. In the latter half of this dissertation, I argued that Indigenous epistemologies and world views offer ways forward for those who are interested in both energy transition, and the just transformation of our societies.

In Chapter 2 I described how the place of tar sands was transformed to a place of industrial oil extraction. While still homeland and territory to Cree, Dene, and Métis people, this place has been transformed through the extension of Treaty, settler notions of land use, and the power of the state and oil companies to appropriate huge amounts of land for extraction. In this chapter I described different Cree, Dene, and Métis knowledges of this place and contrasted this to the historical series of events that lead to the signing of Treaty 8, including the discovery of valuable minerals that suddenly made securing the title to this place a government objective.

This history shows us the particular assumptions about land and value that the Canadian state relied upon to determine whether certain places were worth the trouble to take. However, as I described in Chapter 3, creating the conditions to make extraction and settlement viable constitute a significant amount of state investment. Not only does the oil and gas industry receive billions in tax subsidies and direct investment, creating the infrastructural needs for extraction has received significant state intervention. This intervention includes actual construction investment, but also state surveillance to protect these assets, and the creation of spaces where settlement and stable workforces can thrive. The investment in not only hard infrastructures of pipelines, roads, and bridges, but of the informal, intimate infrastructures that make settler

164 communities desirable and more permanent demonstrate how settler futures are invested in over decolonial or Indigenous ones.

Overall, these investments contribute the sense that projects like the tar sands are a normal, and necessary part of the Canadian economy. In Chapter 4 I describe the ways in which tar-sands extraction is normalized, and how Indigenous refusals of this extraction are misunderstood. This chapter examines several assumptions that these misunderstandings rest upon. Here I describe how assumptions of Canadian progress, corporate-social responsibility practices, and rigorous assessment and consultation procedures create the perception that the critiques against the tar sands are unfounded, or misplaced. This extends to the ways in which Indigenous refusals of tar- sands extraction, or pipeline development constitute a misunderstanding. The beliefs in Canadian ethical standards of industrial operations made it difficult for my participants to make sense of what Indigenous people have said about the tar sands, and pipelines. The conflict became quickly resolved through ideas of cultural difference, employment opportunities, and community investment.

Another way that the conflict around the tar sands becomes easily resolved for those that I interviewed was through the idea of inevitability. The idea that the demand for oil is currently undeniable proved to be a powerful way in which conflict about the tar sands could be reconciled. As a result of economic dependency, but also lifestyle dependency, participants regularly described how they couldn’t see a way out, oil is what the world runs on. However, as I have shown, Indigenous epistemologies offer multiple ways of understanding these issues otherwise. Employing the ideas of the pluriverse and Indigenous knowledges that do not create divisions of animacy between the human and nonhuman, I describe how through practice other realities can be understood. This offers us different ways to understand the climate crisis, and the possibilities for imagining different futures.

6.2 Contribution and Implications

In this dissertation I have traced the different logics which make places like the tar sands seem inevitable when they are not. This sense of inevitability was a finding that emerged as I analyzed what participants had to say about the criticism levelled at the oil and gas industry. For them, who understood intimately the supply chains, the byproducts, and the amount of energy our carbon intensive lifestyles rely upon, oil was inescapable. As much as individual participants had

165 worries about climate change, about the abuse of Treaty Rights, and the other types of environmental destruction brought about from oil mining, they also insisted on how at this current moment, oil was inevitable.

The work of this dissertation has worked to pull apart what inevitability means. What practices, relations of power, investments, assumptions, and logics all make this inevitability possible. What makes it possible for the scale of the tar sands to become normalized, and to be seen as a necessary safety net for nation’s economy and workforce. In doing so I described how the tar sands came to be seen as inevitable consequence of several logics including: colonial practices of land use, state investment in extraction technology and the infrastructures needed to make oil extraction viable in this place, misunderstandings of Indigenous refusals to development, and ontological commitments to a single reality that erases other ways of knowing and relating to the world. The implications or applications for this research are not straight forward. However, one potential takeaway is what these findings may mean for discussions about energy transitions.

This study offers a contribution to how scholars thinking about fossil fuel transition might consider the ongoing effects of settler colonialism. As I briefly described in Chapter 5, bodies of scholarship have emerged thinking about the crisis of climate change and what other transformations will need to take place to make energy transition possible. This includes transformations in cultural production and critiques of what some scholars have termed Petrocultures, or energy humanities (Wilson, Carlson, & Szeman, 2017; Kujundzic & Miski, forthcoming). The ways in which oil has shaped the forms of art, literature, and cultural production that embed certain social and economic relations of oil within them. In this way the transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy is understood to also necessitate the transformation of wider systems as well. Many of these approaches offer interesting and valuable concepts and analyses in considering the ways in which petroleum has shaped political, economic, and societal relationships, systems, and politics (Huber, 2013; T. Mitchell, 2011). Furthermore, other bodies of literature including feminist science and technology studies (Haraway, 2016), animacy/post humanism (Chen, 2012) and scholars working with the concept of Anthropocene in anthropology (Tsing, 2015; Watts, 2017), aesthetics (Demos, 2017; Tsing, Bubandt, Gan, & Swanson, 2017), and literature (J. Gordon, 2015) contribute to these conversations about the current crisis, and paths forward towards different types of transition. However, much of this literature does not examine the important work Indigenous scholars have

166 done to highlight the relationship between the joint crises of the Anthropocene and colonialism (Davis & Todd, 2017; Whyte, 2016, 2018). In this dissertation I have tried to engage these critiques and think about how the extractive relationship to land has become normalized and invisible. Indigenous epistemologies offer important lessons for both understanding the context or conditions that have led to this particular moment, and also for building alternatives to our current model. In tracing the ways in which settler colonialism transformed land for extraction in the past, and the ways in which in functions in the present to create extractive futures, this dissertation understands settler colonialism to be a foundational structure of the current climate crisis.

A last contribution of this dissertation has been to offer a greater understanding of alternate facts, or to put into the language of this political moment, fake news. It is clear from this research that several powerful narratives that work to dismiss, confuse, and justify oil extraction have made it possible to deny or disregard the urgency raised by those who work to stop further development in this region. As I discussed in Chapter 3, the idea that pollution is a natural effect of the oil deposit, and that extracting the oil here actually works to improve water quality, was a fact that I heard many times throughout the course of my research. Educated, thoughtful, and otherwise reasonable people believe this to be true. Despite the now overwhelming scientific evidence that demonstrates otherwise, the idea that we just don’t know enough about what the effects of oil extraction are on the Athabasca watershed persist. This has taught me something important about alternate realities can exist. When certain beliefs, values, attitudes, and knowledges about how the world works, what types of change are imaginable, and how change even takes place all deeply structure what we come to know as true or, as reasonable information, and what that information asks us to admit. For many of my participants, their belief in Canadian progressiveness, faith in state regulations and industry self-regulation, and the fact that the world runs on oil and cannot yet move away from fossil fuels have made it possible to believe that the extraction of oil in inevitable, and that only once we shift the demand for fossil fuels will we be able to slow the supply. Furthermore, the types of accounts, facts, and realities that don’t believe this to be true can easily be sidelined, in particular for what they ask of the listener to address. Especially when that knowledge puts into question your entire outlook on the world rests and the parts of your identity that feel belonging to an ethical, otherwise progressive national community.

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In this way the conclusions about practices creating realities (Law, 2015), and the discussion on the pluriverse I described in Chapter 5 have extra resonance when thinking about alternate facts and alternative perceptions of the consequences of tar sands. It is not enough to try to educate or raise awareness, but to material change oil workers’ dependence on this region, and to offer other ways to engage with the places that resource extraction occurs.

6.3 Future Research

This project has given me the basis from which to begin to think more seriously and systemically about transition. As I briefly described in Chapter 5, ongoing debates for energy transition have gained prominence in the last year. In this dissertation I interviewed two people who were part of the organization called Iron + Earth, which seeks to retrain tradespeople who currently work in oil and gas to work in renewable energy fields like wind, solar, and geothermal. They argue that the skills and experiences this workforce has make them uniquely qualified, with a little retraining, to work in the renewable sector. While I did raise this initiative with other participants in the interviews, I wish I had spent more time talking to participants about transition, what this would look like for them, what they would want this to include. One possible outcome from this research would be how it could inform research on worker led transitions away from fossil fuels. Furthermore, this research could ask how these transitions could be developed to challenge settler colonialism and the state’s investment in extractive futures. Understanding extractive futures to be something that is purposefully chosen, invested in, and built, and not a natural or inevitable outcome offers the possibility to build movements and initiatives that work to build nonextractive, and perhaps even, decolonial futures.

Another outcome from the realization of how much work goes into creating and building extractive futures, is to trace the ways this takes places in institutions of higher education. As I described in particular in Chapter 2, state investment in both mining schools and the research to improve mining builds the human and technical resources that create the future of mining in Canada. Canada is the home of over 75 percent of the world’s mining companies (Mining Injustice Solidary Network, 2019). While mining is a significant industry in Canada itself, the majority of these companies operate in South and Central America, Africa, and parts of Asia. The Mining Injustice Solidarity Network (MISN) demonstrate that many of these Canadian companies have poor ethical practices in many of the places their mines operate in.

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Environmental damage, land dispossession, physical violence and intimidation of those who resist these practices, and antiunion activity are all part of the widespread abuses MISN has documented. It would be worthwhile to conduct a closer examination of the similarities between Canadian mining activities abroad and mining activities here. Furthermore, how are these activities supported and made possible through particular education investments in mining engineering schools, and how do these programs partner with mining companies, that have widely recorded abuses, to further normalize and make possible extractive futures. This public investment, and partnership with mining companies, creates the workforce that carries out extraction not only here, but across the world. These consequences demonstrate how these issues are not the isolated problems of a single region or province, but tie together many places and people.

Tracing the ways in which Canadian mining companies work to carry out land dispossession and suppress the land-based refusals that these activities are met with would offer a more global way to understand the connections and genealogies of settler colonialism, the state, and mining around the world. Learning from Indigenous sovereignty struggles and understanding existing state borders as actively and continually contested offers new ways to connect land defence and water protection actions in resistance to Canadian mining companies in new and overlapping ways.

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Appendices

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Appendix A: Recruitment Appeal a) Advertisement on Facebook:

Text that will show on the ad before it is clicked:

Did you work in the oil industry within the last five years? Are you 18–35 years old? Participants are needed for research on experiences in the oil industry, and how work shapes perceptions of the industry.

When the ad is clicked:

Hello!

I am researching the experiences of young oil industry workers, particularly how workers have experienced the various moments of conflict and turbulence in the past 5–10 years. These moments include the widely publicized criticisms of the industry, as well as the recent crash in oil prices that has led to unemployment and much hardship. The objective of the study is to trace how the experiences young workers in the oil industry influence their knowledge of, relationships to, and understandings of society more broadly. Including, how these workers experience criticism of the industry they work in by environmental groups and Indigenous communities. The research will be used for the requirements of my PhD at the Ontario Institute for the Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto. • I am looking to interview participants who fit the following descriptions: • Currently employed or employed at some point in the past five years in the oil industry • Reside(s/d) in Fort McMurray, or employer-provided temporary housing while working in the industry • 18–35 years of age • Canadian citizen of Caucasian decent

I am able to offer participants a $5 gift card for Tim Hortons, and access to a draw to win a $100 gift card of your choice as a token of thanks and compensation for participation.

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Participants may also be interested in being interviewed for the opportunity to participate in a research project, to share their experiences in the oil industry, and to offer their views on the conflict that has surrounded the oil sands in recent years.

The interview will be 60–90 minutes long, in person or by telephone/Skype. Please contact me directly at this link [blind link to: [email protected]] to arrange an interview at your convenience. Your decision to participate in this study will remain confidential.

Thank you, Samantha Spady PhD Candidate, Social Justice Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto b) Message to be sent to contacts via email or Facebook messenger: Hello, I am conducting research on the experiences of young oil industry workers in Fort McMurray, Alberta as part of my PhD research at the University of Toronto. I am hoping you will be able to help me reach out to others who may be interested in participating in my research.

I am looking for anyone 18–35 years of age who has worked in any capacity (professional, manual labour, trades, desk jobs, etc.) for the oil industry in Fort McMurray in the past five years. Participants do not need to be currently employed if they meet this requirement. If you know those who may be interested, please forward them this email with the attached “Letter of Invitation.” Interested participants should contact me directly at [email protected].

Research participants will receive a $5 Tim Hortons gift card, and will be entered into a draw for a $100 gift card of the winner’s choice as thanks for their participation. Thank you! Sam

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Appendix B: Letter of Invitation

Hello!

I am researching the experiences of young oil industry workers, particularly how workers have experienced the various moments of conflict and turbulence in the past 5–10 years. These moments include the widely publicized criticisms of the industry, as well as the recent crash in oil prices that has led to unemployment and much hardship. The objective of the study is to trace how the experiences young workers in the oil industry influence their knowledge of, relationships to, and understandings of society more broadly. In particular how these workers experience criticism of the industry they work in by environmental groups and Indigenous communities. The research will be used for the requirements of my PhD at the Ontario Institute for the Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto.

I am looking to interview participants who fit the following descriptions: • Currently employed or employed at some point in the past five years in the oil industry • Reside(s/d) in Fort McMurray, or employer-provided temporary housing while working in the industry • 18–35 years of age • Canadian citizen of Caucasian decent

I am able to offer participants a $5 gift card for Tim Hortons, and access to a draw to win a $100 gift card of your choice as a token of thanks and compensation for participation. Participants may also be interested in being interviewed for the opportunity to participate in a research project, to share their experiences in the oil industry, and to offer their views on the conflict that has surrounded the oil sands in recent years.

The interview will be 60–90 minutes long, in person or by telephone/Skype. Please contact me directly [email protected] or 647-876-1096 to arrange an interview at your convenience. Your decision to participate in this study will remain confidential. Thank you, Samantha Spady PhD Candidate, Social Justice Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

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Appendix C: One-On-One Interview Informed Consent Form

I am a PhD student in the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, working under the supervision of Dr. Eve Tuck ([email protected]). For my doctoral research, I will be conducting interviews in the city of Fort McMurray, Alberta to understand the experiences of young oil industry workers.

The objective of the study is to trace how the experiences young workers in the oil industry influence their knowledge of, relationships to, and understandings of society more broadly. I am interested in how the everyday experiences of work in the oil industry shape particular beliefs, values, and common sense. In particular how these workers experience criticism of the industry they work in by environmental groups and Indigenous communities.

I will interview approximately 30 current or former (within the past five years) oil industry workers between the ages of 18–35. The interview will be 60–90 minutes in length. Participants will primarily be selected through purposive snowball sampling methods. Participants will be thanked for their time with a $5 gift card for Tim Hortons and entered to win a $100 gift card of the winner’s choice.

Your participation in this research is completely voluntary. You may choose to stop participating at any time during the interview, or up to 30 days after receiving a copy of the interview transcript. Your decision not to continue to participate will not affect the relationship with the researcher or with staff of the University of Toronto, either now or in the future. All personal information will be kept confidential throughout this research process. I will assign you a pseudonym (a false name), and only use that name in my records of our interview.

The interviews in this study will be recorded and transcribed. The interview transcripts and the recordings will be stored on a password protected external hard drive and will only be accessible to myself. The interview transcripts and the recordings will be kept for 10 years after the last interview is conducted, and then destroyed.

I will use the interview transcripts in academic publications, which may include journal articles, web articles, a book, and a doctoral dissertation. Fake names (for both participants and participant’s places of employment) will be used when quoting directly from participants in any research publication and/or conference presentation to ensure participants’ privacy.

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If you have any questions about this study, or would like further information about this project and your participation, please contact me at [email protected] or 647-876- 1096. If you have any questions regarding your rights as a participant, please contact the University of Toronto’s Ethics Review Office at [email protected] or 416-946-3273.

Sincerely, Samantha Spady PhD Candidate, Department of Social Justice Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

I ______, consent to participate in the study conducted by Samantha Spady. I understand the nature of this project and wish to participate. I understand that I can choose to stop at any time. I am not waiving any of my legal rights by signing this form. My signature below indicates my consent.

Signature______

Date______

Participant Name______

Signature______

Date______

Principal Investigator Name ______

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Appendix D: One-on-One Interview questions

 Can you tell me about yourself? What do you want me to know about you before we start this conversation about your experiences as an oil worker?  Can you tell me the story about how you started doing the work you do now/the work you did as an oil worker?  Can you tell me a story that helps me know what your work is like here?  Do you think working here has changed anything about you? Can you describe that to me? [Might ask specifically for positive and negative changes?]  Who is someone you know who is good at this job? What makes them good at it?  Tell me about where you live (when in Fort McMurray)?  What comes to mind when you think of what life is like in Fort McMurray in comparison to other places?  Can you tell me about how the fire impacted you (and your family)? Did the fire change anything about how you feel about living here?  Can you describe the best parts of living here? The hardest parts?  How long do you see yourself living and working here? What might change your mind about that?  What kind of future would you like to see for yourself? For your children? Is that possible here?  Have you ever felt judgment from others for working here? Can you tell me about a time that happened?  One of the concerns about oil development is how it impacts nearby Indigenous communities. What do you think about the way this oil field impacts Indigenous people who live close to here?  What do you wish people understood about living here?  Is there anything you think outsiders don’t understand about the oil industry and its relationship to Indigenous peoples and the environment?  Can you tell me about your background? Where you grew up, what your parents did for a living?