First Nations woman navigates community’s anti-oilsands charge
Activist helps give her people a voice
Eriel Deranger was 12 when her father took her north of Fort McMurray, within sight of the Syncrude and Suncor oilsands facilities, to teach her about traditional hunting, trapping and fishing.
“My mom and dad were very political people,” says Deranger. “My dad sort of told us that we have to stop these projects.”
Now 33, Deranger has become something of an official face for her community’s opposition to ramped-up oilsands development in the face of lingering questions about its impacts on the health of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nations, air and water quality, and fish and wildlife.
Officially, she is her community’s Edmonton-based communications co-ordinator, responsible for expressing the conflict inherent in making employment, infrastructure and land deals with industry while protecting a traditional culture and ecosystem.
“I didn’t want to be the face or the voice for tarsands activism, for my community,” Deranger says. But, she says, someone needs to field questions from filmmakers and media outlets curious about the indigenous community that lays downstream from one of the most controversial industrial developments in the world.
Growing up, Deranger spent little time in northeastern Alberta. Her parents split up, and she spent most of her life in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Her early jobs were focused on researching First Nations land claims and working with inner-city youth. Then she became interested in her own community’s land rights issues, and obsessed with the way oilsands projects had changed the Athabasca Chipewyan’s traditional landscape and the scope of the community’s political and economic future.
“I started collecting data and compiling and compiling it, getting more frustrated. It started to consume my life,” Deranger says.
At 26, she returned to the land her father had shown her as a child: “I felt like something had been ripped out of me. Everything I saw as a child, basically gone from that strip of land.”
Since then, Deranger has become a recognizable face in Alberta’s antioilsands movement.
We’re still trying to protect the basics for our people.
ERIEL DERANGER
She has worked for the U.s. - Based Rainforest Action Network and the Sierra Club, she was a spokeswoman on the Lush campaign against the oilsands three years ago and she fought hard for banks to review how they finance industrial development projects — specifically, urging them to take a close look at whether affected indigenous people have been appropriately consulted before a project moves forward.
As well, she has been a vocal opponent of the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, a project that would push Alberta bitumen to tankers off the West Coast and on to Asia.
“I didn’t consider myself an environmentalist at all,” she says. “I was an indigenous- rights activist. I still consider myself an indigenous-rights activist.”
In her new job, she and her community are trying to beat back Shell’s advances; last month she was in Europe delivering a report that links the impacts of Shell’s work on indigenous communities in northeastern Alberta, Alaska and the Niger Delta. This summer she plans to train members of her community to speak to media about oilsands issues and cancer concerns. As well, a report to be released later this summer will recommend new protection zones for woodland caribou that would be co-managed by First Nations.
At the same time, a changing economy has changed the way First Nations people get food (from the market, rather than traplines) and there is work to be done to create jobs and economic opportunities. Officially, the Athabasca Chipewyan urge no new oilsands projects before a complete study of effects on people, animals, air, land and water is done in northeastern Alberta.
“You’ve got to remember that we have mixed emotions about what goes on in the tarsands. We have members that worked with industry for a long time,” Athabasca Chipewyan Chief Allan Adam said.
“Sure, industry helped out our people and gave them a good lifestyle and everything, but we’ve also got to look at the other side of it, because we have a lot of traditional people that still live off the land.”
Prior to Deranger’s hiring, Adam said he received at least one interview request a week and lots of questions about the community’s interactions with industry.
Hiring Deranger is part of the community’s overall communications strategy; Adam noted any official news release from the community is run by a legal staff weighing repercussions.
Looking ahead, Deranger thinks of her parents, who fought nuclear and uranium development in Saskatchewan in the 1970s. Her father, she says, was best suited to a life on the land that was lost; her mother today continues to fight development.
“I hope that my role will change in the next five years, in the sense that I hope that there are more people” involved in speaking out, she says. “I know a lot has changed since the ’70s, but I mean, we’re still fighting development. We’re still trying to protect the basics for our people.”