This post originally appeared on VICE Canada.
On November 22, 2014, a small group of Dene trappers called the Northern Trappers Alliance set up a checkpoint on Saskatchewan’s Highway 955, allowing locals to pass while blockading the industrial traffic of tar sands and uranium exploration companies. On December 1, officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police descended on the site with an injunction from the province and forcibly dismantled the blockade.
Eighty days later, the trappers remain camped on the side of the highway in weather that has routinely dipped below -40 C. They are constructing a permanent cabin on the site that will be a meeting place for Dene people and northern land defenders.
“We want industry to get the hell out of here and stop this killing,” said Don Montgrand, who has been at the encampment since day one and was named as one of its leaders on the police injunction. “We want this industry to get the hell out before we lose any more people here. We lose kids, adults, teenagers.”
“They’re willing to stay as long as it takes to get the point across that any of this kind of development is not going to be welcomed,” said Candyce Paul, the alliance’s spokesperson and a member of the anti-nuclear Committee for the Future Generations. “It’s indefinite.”
“We don’t want to become a sacrifice zone. That’s where we see ourselves heading.”
The trappers say an unprecedented rise in cancer is the legacy of contamination from nearby uranium mines. With significant tar sands and uranium deposits in their area, the trappers are developing a long-term strategy to halt the industrial growth threatening to deform their surroundings and scare away the wildlife they depend on for food, income, and culture.
About an hour north of the alliance’s location, a recent discovery by Fission Uranium Corp. could lead to the development of one of the world’s largest high-grade uranium mines.
Further north, abandoned and decommissioned uranium mines already host millions of tons of radioactive dust (also known as tailings) that must be isolated from the surrounding environment for millennia, while no cleanup plans exist for the legacy of severe and widespread watershed contamination that is synonymous with Uranium City, Saskatchewan. To the east, “an integrated uranium corridor spreading over 250 kilometers” hosts the largest high-grade uranium mines and mills in the world, with their own stockpiles of radioactive tailings and a decades-long history of radioactive spills.
To the west, about 140 kilometers by air, the open-pit mines, poisonous lakes, and petrochemical facilities of Alberta’s tar sands have caused a number of highly publicized human health and environmental crises. In Saskatchewan’s northwest, the impacts of this development are felt through acid rain that degrades the soil, vegetation, and water.
“When they spew the pollution, it affects our water, lakes, fish—any kind of species. Our traditional life destroyed with these oil mines around us,” said Kenneth, one of the trappers. “We’re in the middle of these oil mines and the government’s still not listening.”
For the rest of this article, click here: http://www.vice.com/read/a-dene-alliance-formed-to-resist-uranium-and-tar-sands-mining-in-saskatchewan-892