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TOTAL Failure to Respect Life, Humanity & the Earth
News Articles | Sierra Club | September 24, 2010
Read the full article on the originating site
On September 22nd, 2010, the Total North Mine Joint Panel Review examining Total’s application for the Joslyn North Open Pit Mine Project adjourned the hearing to reconvene on Tuesday September 28th, in Fort McMurray Alberta.
During the first day of the hearing, the Joint Review Panel dismissed the statement and concerns of an elder from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation by telling him to ‘hurry and wrap it up.’ The arrogance and discrimination displayed by the Joint Review Panel is disgusting, should be exposed as biased, and hereby removed as an entity that supposedly serves the public as an objective oversight body, for it does no such thing.
The media has portrayed this situation in a manner that trivializes Indigenous sovereignty, specifically the legal weight that treaty rights maintain in Canada, as well as a mainstream and overgeneralized stereotype that First Nations organizations are assumed to eventually sell out with corporations for a ‘piece of the pie.’ There are larger systemic issues at work here that reflect classic colonialism and a lack of basic understanding on treaty rights.
The day after the adjournment, economic and political pressure from Total positioned Mikisew Cree First Nation, in a difficult and complicated situation, to sign a confidential ‘social contract’ for an undisclosed sum of money.
Initially, at the outset of the hearing, Total was faced with a significant legal challenge from the Mikisew Cree First Nation regarding treaty rights. Upon signing this ‘social contract’, the Mikisew Cree First Nation withdrew their intervenor status, their constitutional challenge against their treaty rights, and settled with Total.
The mining industry is known for using economic and political coercion to enforce the business-as-usual path running roughshod over impacted communities. This is the kind of abusive relationship dynamic where industry is the hand that feeds and the hand that bleeds. This kind of political and economic power by corporations must not go unchecked. The environment, the communities, and the animals that cannot speak for themselves are being held hostage by the profit interests of industry.
Meanwhile, numerous environmental and political organizations that claim to oppose the tar sands industry have not followed through with pleads from impacted Indigenous communities in the tar sands region, to have sufficient independent environmental impact assessments conducted in the area. Instead, it is industry, in this case Total, that provides the funding to back independent environmental impact assessments and necessary further health studies.
True solidarity must be shown now by environmental and social justice groups so that Indigenous communities do not remain isolated and continually pressured by industry, with impunity.
Tagged with: total, joslyn north mine project, first nation
