Canadian government, Natives agree to create massive national park

Lutsel Make a Deal

The Canadian government and a tiny Native tribe have agreed to work together to create an 8.3 million acre national park in the Northwest Territories. Three decades ago, the Lutsel K'e Dene tribe turned down a similar proposal, fearing national-park designation would interfere with hunting rights for their main food source, caribou. Now, however, they welcome park protection, which will make the area, almost four times the size of Yellowstone, off-limits to burgeoning diamond and uranium mining interests. "The people of this community have a very, very close connection to the land," says tribal representative Stephen Ellis. The Dene hope to call the park Thaydene Nene National Park, meaning "land of the ancestors." Canadian Environment Minister Rona Ambrose also committed to pushing ahead with an expanded national park system in the larger surrounding area, which conservationists hope will mitigate the effects of an also-planned 800-mile gas pipeline in the region.

straight to the source: The Washington Post, Doug Struck, 14 Oct 2006

straight to the source: CBC News, 14 Oct 2006

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Thaydene Nene Park

On Native Americans as environmental activists with special insights and an especially vulnerable situation, cf. also Peter Mathiessen, "Inside the Endangered Arctic Refuge," in the October 19 issue of the New York Review of Books:
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In 1979, in return for withdrawing their objections to drilling in the Wildlife Refuge, the North Slope Inupiat communities had received large subsidies to raise their health and education standards and to be freed from poverty. . . . Robert and Jane Thompson appreciated the benefits of a decent clinic and good school. But what will happen, they asked, "when the oil runs out and the land is ruined and the people have forgotten how to live in our old way?" The Thompsons were two of the few people in Kaktovik who still spoke out publicly against energy development in the refuge. . . . While most people in Kaktovik had accepted energy development in the 1002 section [the coastal plain of ANWR, crucial for the welfare of many species of birds and mammals], they had always been united against offshore drilling, for fear it might disrupt the migration patterns of the bowhead whale. In 2006, however, sighty-eight out of 188 villagers have come out publicly against development on land as opposed to the five people, not counting Thompson's wife, who were on his side when I visited Kaktovik just four years ago. In a phone call on August 13, Robert told me that through a new indigenous activist organization called "Red Oil," the Inupiat were making common cause with Indian communities all over Alaska in a desperate struggle against the disruption of habitat and the disappearance of sacred animals such as polar bears and seals, dangerous chemical contamination of their wild fish and game, and the fatal damage to their culture and their future that is already on the wind with the retreat of polar ice and the onset of global warming. Most biologists agree that the polar bear is doomed to vanish entirely in this century.
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Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 2:17 PM on 17 Oct 2006

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