An Ethical (S)pace/Water Is Life Project: Restoring the Athabasca River Ecosystem Through Indigenous Self-Determination

In fort mcmurray, Alberta, bitumen-laced water from the oil industry’s tailings ponds continues to flow into the Athabasca River. This disproportionately impacts Indigenous populations in Fort McMurray and down-river in Fort McKay and Fort Chipewyan. To encourage water co-management and Indigenous self-determination, this possibility investigates the tensions between Western science and Indigenous knowledges and offers a thought-seed for an ethical (s)pace between the two intellectual traditions. This possibility suggests a community project named “Water Is Life,” which would be based in the Alberta oil sands region (aosr). This Indigenous-led program will consist of collaborative workshops that will interweave Indigenous knowledges, literary studies, and policy frameworks to promote water safety and security for Indigenous communities in the aosr. The goal of the “Water Is Life” project is to encourage ethical modes of learning and teaching about the issues of water pollution in Canada and how it affects Indigenous communities. This possibility for an ethical space and pace for healing and learning with Indigenous knowledges can help diversify the environmental humanities to include practical and collaborative modes of tending to the land, animals, waters, and other beings. One of the hoped-for impacts of the workshops is to address how government and corporate systems can enhance their environmental assessment (ea) procedures through Indigenous-centred policies.

Since Suncor (one of Canada’s top oil firms) began operations in 1967, Fort McMurray has been the epicentre of tar sands production in Alberta. The byproducts of this extraction process (tailing materials) are kept in tailings waste ponds. Water loaded with contaminants such as PaHs, naphthenic acids, mercury, and arsenic escapes from the waste ponds and runs into the Athabasca River (Turner 221). Indigenous communities living alongside the Athabasca River, such as the Dene, Cree and Metis peoples of Fort McMurray, Fort McKay, and Fort Chipewyan, are disproportionately exposed to the health risks and environmental uncertainty inflicted by the oil industry.

This project focuses on Indigenous self-determination and Indigenous-led environmental programs as best practices for improving monitoring programs of the aosr and addressing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (sdg) 6 for clean water and sanitation. Instead of “integrating” Indigenous knowledges into existing processes of environmental impact assessments, Canada must adapt its policymaking frameworks to include Indigenous peoples’ right to self-government. Hence, I offer a unique perspective on how to reformulate environmental policies by considering the prospect of holding collaborative workshops under the banner of the “Water Is Life” initiative. This project can bring together Indigenous communities in the aosr and settler allies to ideate policies that respect Indigenous peoples’ water management and health.

The ideation sessions will draw on many theories and practices, such as Indigenous studies, cultural theory, ecocritical theory, creative writing, and scientific inquiry, to collaborate on how building (not just inhabiting) a shelter involves “restoring reciprocity” between people and the more-than-human world (Whyte 158). According to Indigenous worldviews, a healthy landscape can only exist when humans view their relationships with the life surrounding them as kin, “and it calls upon humans to honour these relationships” (Walkem 314). Learning and knowing how to honour our human and more-than-human relationships necessitate a disorientation from “antirelational and nonsituated settler colonial positions of certainty” (Robinson 53) toward practices of shelter-making. Those practices involve restoring “reciprocity among the relatives” (Whyte 158) by partaking in the intertwined responsibilities between people and the more-than-human world to ensure justice for all beings. For Potawatomi scholar-activist Kyle Whyte, it is through renewing Indigenous knowledges that societies can restore reciprocity and “survive and flourish” in times of climate uncertainty (157). The workshops will engage with Indigenous knowledges as land-based pedagogy and will incorporate collaborative techniques through storytelling and creative interpretations of water policies to abandon “hyperindividualism” (Simpson 9) in favour of forming international and intercultural relations. The workshops will examine how the possibility of thinking with Indigenous knowledges and working through creative collaborations (written or performative) can help renew Indigenous knowledges, create sustainable relationships and...