‘They’re destroying us’: Indigenous communities fear toxic leaks from Canada oil industry

theguardian.com:

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 anymore. 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