Alice Rigney was born on the northern shores of the Athabasca River, a mighty body of water that flows from Canada’s western ice fields and terminates in the far reaches of the province of Alberta.
Alongside her 16 siblings, she spent her youth harvesting berries and drying white fish in a tiny village known as Jackfish Lake.
“I didn’t need anything more. I didn’t have a desire to have more. I had my parents and we had a good home. They taught us the values of being a good person,” she said. Despite living without electricity or running water, Rigney considers herself lucky to have been born there. “What more could a child want?”
All of that has changed. The village and the whitefish are both gone, displaced by a huge dam built in the late 1960s. And when a global demand for oil spawned a rush to mine the region, the waters that had long sustained the Dene, Cree and Métis peoples became something to fear.
“We don’t drink from the river any more. We stopped drinking way back, as soon the oil industry started,” said Rigney.
A recent string of leaks from tailings ponds at oil sands operations upstream has once again drawn attention to the profound transformation Canada’s largest industry has had on the region – and the distrust that comes with it.
In May, Calgary-based Imperial Oil notified Alberta’s energy regulator it had discovered discoloured water near its Kearl oil sands project.
The regulator soon concluded the water had come from tailings ponds where the company stored the toxic sludge-like byproducts of bitumen mining. Environmental samples showed high levels of several toxic contaminants, including arsenic, iron, sulphate and hydrocarbon – all of which exceeded provincial guidelines.
But the company failed to notify the federal government and nearby Indigenous communities. In February, there was another leak, in which 5.3m litres of tailings water escaped from an overflowing catchment pond. This time, the community was informed two days later.
This week, the energy giant Suncor also announced a leak of 6m litres from a sediment holding facility. In an email to the Guardian, the regulator said the leak “is not processed water from tailings, it is drainage from surrounding landscape” and did not contain tailings.
But the failure of holding ponds, which communities have long been reassured are safe, has sowed mistrust among residents.
“I wasn’t surprised because this isn’t the first time,” said Rigney, an elder in Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. “Companies have been denying that there’s been any leaks or spills ever since the industry started, and they’ve spent years trying to convince us that the ponds are not leaking.”
Imperial and Alberta’s energy regulator say they have found no evidence the tailings spill has had negative impacts to wildlife or fish. They also say none of the tailings have entered the region’s broader river system.
But Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation says the “trust is gone” between communities and the companies, and they have started their own testing of the water and the landscape.
“There’s no way you can come back from that. And we’ll always have what happened in the back of our mind, whenever we’re out on the land,” he told the Guardian. “You can’t ever forget about something like this.”
In early spring, he asked community members to throw out any meat they might have harvested.
Jean L’Hommecourt, who spends time on her brother’s trap line near the Kearl operations, still consumed moose meat after news of the spill spread throughout the community.
“Am I scared? Yes. But who’s gonna replace our traditional foods? If we throw it out, and we’re not gonna have anything to last us until the next harvest. And when you look at how much it costs to buy meat these days, we have to stick with the foods we know,” she said.
This week, the head of Imperial Oil apologized for the failures.
“I feel very bad about that and I’m profoundly apologetic,” Brad Corson, the CEO, said during a presentation to investors, adding the company should have been providing “regular updates” to communities.
On Thursday, Corson and other executives from Imperial appeared before parliament, as lawmakers demanded to know why communities were not notified immediately and why the company still could not provide an accurate assessment of how much tailings water leaked from the holding facility.
Corson – whose compensation nearly doubled in 2022 to C$17.34m, making him the highest-paid oil executive in the country – also admitted it was a “mistake” for the company’s representatives not to offer a prayer, land acknowledgment or a customary gift of tobacco when they met with community members at a disastrous town hall-style meeting in Fort Chipewyan last month.
The Alberta Energy Regulator has hit Imperial with both an environmental protection order and a non-compliance order over the leak and spill, but community members also say the regulator failed residents.
“The regulator sides with industry – there’s no two ways to put it,” said Rigney.
Laurie Pushor, head of Alberta’s regulator, will testify before the committee on Monday amid broader calls, including from the country’s environment minister, to overhaul the current oversight structure.
But for residents who are forced to live in fear about the water they can’t drink or the food that could be tainted, environmental justice remains elusive.
“We’re not talking about compensation. I don’t want compensation. I want them off our traditional land. This is Treaty 8 territory, where my great-uncle signed that treaty. They’re using our land, and they’re destroying us,” said Rigney. “This is a battle worth fighting for. I can’t say I see the light at the end of the tunnel. But as long as I have a voice, I will keep speaking.”
