Episode 13 - Part 1 - Water Knows No Boundaries: Releasing Toxic Tailings Ponds Won't Either

Welcome to, as long as the river flows, a Keepers of the Water podcast. Episode 13 is part one of a three-part series taken from a previously recorded webinar on October 4th of 2022. Water knows no boundaries, releasing toxic tailings ponds won't either join Keepers of the Water and Environmental Defense as they dive into the alarming findings of the report which map decades of the toxic takeover of indigenous territories by tailings ponds, massive reservoirs of oil sands waste water. In part one, Jesse gives opening remarks by giving background to Keepers of the Water and speaks briefly about the National Day of Action for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and 2SL GBTQ QIA+ People. Then Ali from Environmental Defense presents findings from their report 50 years of sprawling tailings. So Keepers of the Water, we partnered with Environmental Defense to host this webinar, which is called Water, Knows No Boundraids. We're an indigenous led organization and our main mission is to protect water. And so we were formed in 2006, indigenous people coming together, the Denny people in the North and the Allies and we were seeing some drastic changes to the water. People got together at that time and formed Keepers of the Water. In summary, there was a declaration made at that time in 2006 and in summary what that declaration states is that water is sacred and that we must work to protect it. Throughout all of our journey as an organization, we've been involved in addressing the tar sands and coal mining and a lot of other issues. It all comes back to water. And so that's, you know, if we ever kind of wonder, like, are we on the right track? We always go back to that declaration and just remember that we are here to protect water. And so that's who, a bit of who we are, we have a board, we have staff, we're a growing organization, we've done a lot, just check out our website and you'll get an idea of who we are. And by co-chairs, we have three women that, you know, the Okamao's, Okamao's, Scueo are boss ladies and those that suit Daranjay, Jean Longcourt and Cleo Race and they help guide us along with the other women on our board. We have some really amazing women like Josie Oje and Diane Drew and they keep us grounded as an organization to make sure that we are walking in the best way possible in this work because it's, it's sacred work for us. We do things a little bit differently and we, we're very proud of that and we, we nurture that and we honor that. So that's a little bit about keepers of the water and when Ali goes to do her presentation, I'll let her introduce environmental defense because I think she'll be able to do that better, which will be right away. So this is a significant day as some of you may or may not know. Today is the, I'll give you the official title. It's the National Day of Action for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Girls and there's a T-S-L-G-B-T-Q-Q-I-A+ people. So that's includes a whole lot of people. I just want to spend five minutes talking about that, you know, traditionally Indigenous people and this, these are things we're learning as we decolonize and we go back to our ways and we're learning about, you know, the ceremonies and the way that Indigenous people, we, the way our people used to live and govern themselves and we're learning a lot that they were, there was a lot of matriarchal systems, which means the women used to run the community. So it was like the elder women, you know, so if decisions were going to be made, it was, we checked in with the women and the women would make the decisions and they would tell, you know, the warriors or they would tell the men what to do and they, we delivered the babies, we picked the medicines, we took care of the community so that's how we were run as Indigenous communities and it was through colonization, though our systems were severely fractured and impacted because when the colonists came over, they were used to, went back then, back where they came from, women didn't have a voice and so they brought that way of thinking to this land and so they would only talk to the women and so when that colonization was happening, the Europeans were coming to the land, they didn't want to talk to the women because that's not how they did things back home, women were not looked at to have a voice and so through like the creation of the Indian act and all of these policies, they, they eroded all of the rights of women and like women weren't even allowed to vote, that's how they formed this colonial government structure, so even non-Indigenous women were allowed to vote because that just showed you how the women were treated. That has trickled through to today, disrespect that disregard the violence towards women and that's where it started and sometimes it's hard for people to hear that because it's like, well that's not me, that's not how I do it, but you know it's somewhere down those lines that women were just seen as nothing, I'll just give you one quick example. So on the, when the effort, the reserve system was being made, the Indigenous people were being hearded, the First Nations people were being hearded onto these small plots of land and First Nation women started marrying, if they married a white man, they lost any status, any privileges as an Indigenous person, they basically became nobody and nothing. If a white woman married a native man, she was given status, so as in First Nation women would marry a non-Indigenous man, let's just say at First Nation women would marry white men, they would lose their treaty status, they would lose any kind of rights that they had that were given at the time to be Indigenous, but if white women came and married Indigenous men, they were given treaty status. So you can see how things are really, really confusing and so it was a lot of Indigenous women that started fighting to get these rights back and I think it was in the 1985 where they reinstated where it was like these women that lost their status could reapply for their status and they became Bill C31, so they still didn't even truly become recognized and we're still fighting today to become recognized. And so through that, through those colonial systems that was put in the minds of people that it's okay to disrespect Indigenous women that we were nothing, you know, I could go on and on and on about that day, but I just wanted to give you guys a little bit of context of what it's like to be an Indigenous woman and especially women of color, they even have a harder time. This day is set aside to talk about it, to remember it, and what are we gonna do about it? Because we can't be setting aside holidays just to say, well, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna pray about it or we're gonna talk about it or think about it. And I challenge you all, what are we going to do to make it better for women and especially Indigenous women on these lines to feel safe and to feel love and to feel included? So we're here in an honor of the women that have gone on, you know, that have been murdered, that are missing still and we think of them at this time. So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna introduce Ali who's the program manager, climate and energy and environmental defense. I would invite you all to center yourselves and think of the water, think of the land, think of the animals, because this is why we do the work that we do, you know, we're here to protect the water, we're here to protect the trees. We think of the animals at this time, we think of the plants, we think of the medicines. So I just welcome you all to center yourselves in that and remember that as we're sharing this information and as you guys are participating, you're here for a reason as well is that, you know, we're not only doing this for ourselves as humans, we coexist with everything, you know, keep that in mind as we move forward in this evening. And so Ali, I will get you to introduce yourself and environmental defense and then we'll just get going with your part of the presentation. That sounds good. Thanks so much, Jessie. Hi everyone, good evening. So my name is Alina Rujo or Ali if it's easier. I go back to her pronouns and as Jessie mentioned, I'm with Environmental Defense. Folks, if you're joining an environmental defense webinar for the first time, welcome, environmental defense works to defend clean water, safe climate and healthy communities. And today we're really talking about all these things as we talk about our oil sands tailings campaign. I'm here today to present to you our report 50 years of sprawling tailings which came out earlier this year. That's some of the work we do on oil sands tailings funds. We also have the chance to collaborate very closely with keepers on a whole range of issues which we'll talk about after this report was co-written between myself and that Jillian who is with Sipa's the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. They're Northern Alberta chapter and so she was able to bring a lot of her conservation background and her north of Alberta background to this work. This report was really there to serve three purposes. First of all, we knew that there was an information gap about what's really happening in the oil sands and related to the tailings funds and so we wanted to make new information public and available. We also wanted it to be a tool so that communities and so that all of you were able to check and counter the oil industries false claims about their responsible production, their responsible management. So we wanted you to be equipped with that and the reports of that's purpose and then we really wanted to center Indigenous knowledge and experiences in the way we interpret the information of the report. So the analysis we did we then had conversations with folks that we'll talk about after to really interpret this in a way that's different from perhaps how environmental groups have been in the past. The report here, it was based on a series of maps and I will go into that right now. Let's talk about what are tailings ponds just in case you're not quite sure as you're joining that tailings ponds is really not a good name for the immense lakes of toxic waste that the oil industry has created in order to store their toxic waste. I don't know if you know this but producing oil from the Alberta tar sands is not a smooth process where you just put something in and then there's just beautiful oil coming out not at all quite the opposite it demands a lot of chemicals and it demands a lot of water. So for one barrel of oil produced it takes three to four sometimes five barrels of water and then all of that water becomes toxic waste which has to be stored somewhere in these open air pits. The tailings are super toxic because as the oil production process happens you have the residue, the rest of the bitumen that stays in the tailing ponds and you also have the chemicals that they add to extract bitumen. So you can just understand that there's a ton of different things in there. Some of the substances you might recognize the names because we know that they're very toxic. In other parts of our lives such as benzene or mercury and those names that you might have never heard before like nephenic acids which are very toxic to wildlife and to people. Tailings are you know one of the reasons that oil production is so destructive because it's a wasteful production technique. Just to give you a few elements as to why tailings are so harmful they've been proven to leak billions of liters of toxic fluids into the groundwater. They're not meant to be perfectly permeable. They they allow for toxic fluids to leak. They also evaporate a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and they also create a lot of loss of habitats because of how much ground they take on over the years. The result of our analysis we mapped out since 1975 to 2020 in five year increments. We basically you know highlighted them over the maps for you to see how much they've grown and you can really see that it's been an exponential growth in such a short period of time. We will talk about what this mapping has taught us because our goal was not just to map them, I showed them on a map and then it kind of moved on. We really wanted to have numbers on what that represented because again this information was not public. We did not know how much land they're taking up. The numbers you can see here basically tell you that just the pond part of the tailing pond already takes up about 240 times the size of the Edmonton Mall which is the largest mall in Canada. I want to put that statistic aside for a moment and tell you that tailings aren't just harmed because of the fluid part. Tailings actually cover a lot more land because they have a lot of other infrastructure and so we wanted to calculate how much do they take over in total? How much habitat do they destroy in total? And we found that that's 300 square kilometers. That's 2.6 times the size of Vancouver. That's three times the size of Paris. So you have this enormous amount of waste that's taking on enormous chunks of territories and then you realize that that's not the whole story because what we were able to see when we mapped out is not only how big they are now but how much they've grown and since 2000 they grew 300 percent. While we're hearing more and more industries talk about responsible management and sustainability what our maps showed us is that their tailings waste has grown 300 percent. Now on the final note about kind of our shocking findings with this report and I know these are a lot of numbers. We want to check how much of this destruction has currently been cleaned up because the industry often puts out messaging about how they're already cleaning up and they're reclaiming the land. And when we look we made the calculation that only 0.1 percent of the area has actually been certified, reclaimed 0.1 percent. So what this taught my co-op of Jolion and I is that Canada's oil production is not only a problem because of its contribution to climate change and all these other things, it's really the home of environmental racism. In the sense that these tailings farms are leaking and evaporating and taking overlands that are the territories of First Nation and may teem people. I told you before that we didn't just want to map things out and move on. We wanted to actually understand what the harm was and this is where thanks to keepers, thanks to Jessie, we were able to connect with Jean Long Court and with Mike Murphy, who both lived in different communities downstream and they were able to share basically how they've seen in their use of the land in their everyday lives and thanks to their traditional knowledge how they've been able to see and interpret these maps. I'm not going to be telling you what they told me. This is their stories to share and I encourage you to look through the report to actually have their direct words. I'm going to tell you the three lessons I learned from them for my own words. I learned from them that language really, really matters and that industry and government is particularly good at using language to minimize the problem. They use language like ponds to hide the fact that their immense flakes. But Jean was also telling me, you know, they use language like industrial projects when it really is about the destruction and the destruction of place. It's not just projects. They use language like reclamation but Jean said that, you know, for her reclamation ends when herself as an indigenous woman has access to the land again. So really telling me that we need to pay close attention to those elements of language because they're often used to make it seem like the problem is less of a problem. The second lesson I really learned from them is that the harm that's done by the tailings is we can really qualify it as environmental racism because it affects the fundamental practices, fundamental parts of life or Jean and Mike. They talked about how it impacted how they're able to fish and do teachings on the land and all these other things that I encourage you to actually read through in their own words and the report. And then they taught me this third thing, which is something that all of you probably have heard before, but sometimes it's really important for us to let it register is that nature doesn't work in silos. Nature doesn't work in a project per project situation. And so while industry will do its best to try to convince us that they're just responsible for one of the ponds or two of the ponds, well, the people that are facing the consequences have to deal with all of them. And so this was a really important learning and in the way that we can't just look at it from a one project or project, but look at it in the sense of all the impacts at once, what we call cumulative impacts. So these were the direct learning that we had in the report. What you just heard from me is the direct result of our maps, which show how much the ponds have grown, how much space they're now taking over, and how little has actually been cleaned up. And then you've heard what kind of harm that's actually doing to communities. So as I said earlier, industry is trying to say that they're cleaning up their mess, they're being responsible about things. What we saw in the mapping is that no tailing pond has been certified, and that only 0.1 percent of all the area disturbed by the industry has been reclaimed. So we're early at a point where there's close to no progress, and that's an important thing to remember. The second one is that both the volume of the tailings and the area continues to grow. So again, when you're hearing industry saying we're managing it, the facts are there, the waste is continuing to grow, the problem continues to grow. And then the third one is that although industry is talking about some numbers like 50 million are invested on reclamation research, and you compare it to the profits they're making, this is really close to nothing. 50 million is 3,000 times less than what they made this year alone. So really trying to keep in mind that the efforts are not there when it comes to actually killing that business. One of our goals with writing this report was having clear recommendations for the government about what can be done. We had seven recommendations, and I don't think you all want to hear that all of them, but there's two that stand out to me as an important basis for the conversation we're having today. The first one is don't create a larger problem than what we already have. Since industry clearly is showing that they're not responsibly managing this current waste, we cannot create new tailing spawns, we cannot create new oil man, if we can't fix the problem, don't make it bigger. And so that was our first recommendation against any new project until the situation is figured out. And both the federal and the provincial government have a way to address this. The second one is that solutions for cleanup have to be agreed upon by the indigenous nations affected and have to be actually good for the environment. And so this is where we get in the topic of today. Jesse mentioned earlier briefly that we're going to talk about the issue of release because industry is now pushing for this new method where they would like to release water or fluids from the tailings into the Afabasca river. They say they're going to treat it, and we can talk about why that's unproven afterwards. But I want to distress really carefully that the cleanup method that needs to be chosen to clean up this waste has to be one that is environmentally safe, and that is a create agreed upon by the nations that are impacted by this. So these were really our recommendations that we had here. Now, if we just want to go briefly to what you can do about all of this, we wanted to make this report helpful for you. We wanted to make it a tool that you can use in your everyday life to have conversations about environmental racism, to have conversation about oil production, and the harm that oil production is doing. To make this report your own, we have a landing page, which is much easier than all of the report. It just has a few of the big statistics, so you can remember them, you can bring them up in conversation, you can tweet them out. Then we have all the maps, and you have this little fun tool where you can just scroll throughout the year, so you can kind of see the evolution. And then my favorite part of the whole report, we actually took the cutouts of all the tailings, and we put them over some of the big cities that you know and love across Canada. But over Vancouver, over Edmonton, over Moran, over Toronto, and you can see how much of the cities they would take. And you can actually download those. So I encourage you, I challenge you, put that on your Facebook, put it on our social media, start a conversation with those, but what oil production means in Canada, because those maps really show what's actually happening on the ground. And with that, I'll leave it at that for now. That was Alien or Rojou from Environmental Defense. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to hear the complete webinar, visit the Keepers of the Water Facebook page, or the Keepers of the Water YouTube channel. Don't forget to download and subscribe to the podcast to be the first to hear new episodes. If you would like to donate to the cause, or find out more about Keepers of the Water, visit Keepers of the Water.ca. McGwitch.