The Council Should Have Been Here

“The council should have been here” …. This line keeps resonating in my mind.

Last week I prepared a PowerPoint presentation for a class at the Leech Lake Tribal College. The class is learning about the tar sands project that is taking place in northern Alberta. Thus far, the students have done various research assignments on the topic, but had not yet heard the cold hard facts by someone outside of the press. That is, before I came. The class began with a tour at the Enbridge pumping station on the Leech Lake reservation and closed with my presentation at the classroom.

About a dozen students wiggled into jumpsuits and hard hats before entering a gate labeled:
Enbridge Energy
– High Pressure Petroleum Piping – High Voltage –
No Trespassing.

The tour guides welcomed us at the barbed-wire gate to take us through the grounds, but before entering we were warned not to use digital cameras in the breaker rooms or pumping buildings as this may cause an electrical fire. This warning came around the same time a bald eagle flew past a spill site over the pumping station and back into the forest.

In their hands, the students held a questionnaire assignment and were eager to fill in the blanks, but in the end, the guides were unable to provide all the answers. Many of the questions were about the 2002 spill that released 48,000 gallons of crude oil onto the reservation. The blue-collar guides didn’t know much about the spill or how it was being handled or if it was being handled. Needless to say, that is now one of my research goals.

The tour was engineering oriented, so we saw a lot of the technical materials used for the station. We passed through a building that held the enormous breaker boards for the project. Alongside the building was a substation area where the Otter Tail Power substation transmits the energy used for pumping oil through the reservation. We also walked through the pump buildings and they smelled terrible. The oil smell caused many of us to cough for the rest of the tour.

Once back at the college, the presentation started. The PowerPoint consisted of several photos of the tar sands – ranging from extraction, transportation, production and environmental and cultural impact. The students (ranging from 17 – 40 years old) gasped at many of the photos, but even more at the cold hard facts about the tar sands. Similar to others, they couldn’t believe how bad the project is. The students asked several questions: “What happens to the First Nations in Canada,” “How contaminated is the water?,” and “Do they think oil in Alberta will last forever?”

The questions continued well past the end of the 3-hour class when students stayed to find out more about the tar sands. They were outraged that such oil was going to be pumped through their reservation expposing their families to the risks of oil spills.

Finally, one young lady said, “The council should have been here.”

The council should hear these things before making a decision that will affect their community. My next goal? Arrange a meeting or figure out a way to present the cold hard facts of tar sands to the tribal council.