When a pipe breaks: Monitoring an emergency spill in the oil sands and documenting its erasure of indigenous interests in land

Abstract

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork with Woodland Cree First Nation (WCFN), an Indigenous community in the oil sands of Alberta, Canada. We examine a 2013 contaminated water spill within the First Nation's territory. We use field notes, interviews, and spill summaries written on-site to describe the spill and examine the differences between corporate and media portrayals of the spill and cleanup efforts. We explore themes and concerns emergent in conversations and interviews with WCFN members, to document negative aspects of regional racial and gender relations: micro-aggressions seen and experienced on-site by female and Indigenous environmental monitors. We note the difficulties created by overlapping claims to land or jurisdiction. We argue that existing monitoring, reporting, and consultation mechanisms are revealed as wanting by this emergency, as the spill laid bare long-simmering tensions and resentments. At times, these threatened to efface WCFN's status as a community with interests in the spill site and adjoining lands. Such erasure of Indigenous interests in land, brought to the fore by the spill and its aftermath, highlights the psychological distress people feel due to the changes in their landscape and their sometimes fraught historical relationships with neighboring communities.