Canadian leader collides with Natives' natural resources claims

[unhappycamper]

http://www.adn.com/2014/01/28/3295362/canadian-leader-collides-with.html

Canadian leader collides with Natives' natural resources claims
By Jeremy van Loon
Bloomberg News
January 28, 2014 Updated 19 hours ago

CALGARY, Alberta -- Back in the spring of 2012, while walking in the deep woods of northern Ontario, Sonny Gagnon stumbled across a collection of surveying equipment among the towering spruce trees. Gagnon is chief of the Aroland aboriginal tribe, a band of 450 people living in a village of ramshackle houses surrounded by swampy muskeg. He tracks everything that goes on in his community. And the surveying tools weren't supposed to be there.

"I was ticked off," he says, after learning that the equipment belonged to a subcontractor of Cleveland-based mining company Cliffs Natural Resources Inc.

It turned out Cliffs had plans to mine for chromite to the north of the Aroland reserve and to build a road through the territory to transport truckloads of the mineral to a railhead.

"They weren't consulting us on what they were doing on the land," Gagnon says. "I told them to leave and that we didn't want them back."

[OnlinePoker]

1. And here's the reality of the situation from the same article

"I'm pro-development," he says.

Cliffs would use the road to transport ore from a mine 340 kilometers (211 miles) to the north to a railhead in Aroland. As many as 100 ore-laden trucks a day would pass through the community.

"I want those jobs for my people," Gagnon says. "I want them to be making $400 a day."

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Projects like this and Northern Gateway will go ahead because the natives want the same thing as every other Canadian...a decent living. The companies will dump money into the reserves and the natives will take it because they will think it's in their best interests. I've seen it too many times that they claim to be stewards of the land until they are cut in on a portion of the resource exploitation. Then it's full steam ahead for environmental destruction.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

2. That is a good point.

I fully support First Nations when they want to keep the resources in the ground. But there are some that simply want a bigger cut of the extraction. There is a stereotype that all FN people stand together as some ecological monolith, and that is simply not true. Some are also supportive of privatizing reserve land for the first time ever, so that they can sell it to developers, effectively gutting the 7 generation principle, (that, in itself is not universally held by all FN people).