Unocal boycott first step in saving Lubicon
Securing band's traditional territory key to Lubicon future
By Lubicon Chief Bernard Ominayak
Home on the range? Buffalo eat trainted grasses near Unocal's soar gas plant at Little Buffalo, Alta.
Little Buffalo, AB - As Lubicon, we see our traditional territory different than the oil and gas and forestry companies. They see it as a place to conquer, exploit and then leave. We see it as the place where the Creator put us and intends for us to stay. The resource companies don't see the Lubicon as people with rights to their traditional unceded territory. They see us as an obstacle to be overcome in their relentless drive to exploit the valuable resources that our traditional territory holds.
We believe we not only have rights but that the Creator charged us with a special responsibility to protect and preserve our traditional territory, that only by preserving and protecting our traditional territory will it be able to support future generations of our people.
The oil and gas companies come from elsewhere and will move on after they have stripped our traditional territory of its resources. We have no place else to be. If we can no longer survive on our traditional lands, we will cease to exist as a people.
Before the massive resource exploration in our territory, moose was our primary source of food. Trapping was our primary source of disposable income. We didn't have many material possessions but we were happy and content. We had what we needed to meet our responsibilities to our children and each other. But between 1979 and 1983, the petroleum industry drilled more than 400 oil and gas wells within a 15-mile radius of our traditional community of Little Buffalo. These wells generate $500 million in revenue each year for the oil companies and their allies in the Alberta government.
In the process, they have destroyed our traditional economy and way of life, reducing us to a state of poverty and dependency. Oil and gas company activities inflict terrible social and medical problems that we have never before faced including tuberculosis, respiratory and skin disease, cancers of all kinds, miscarriages, birth defects and still births, family break downs, alcoholism and suicide.
Our hunting is ruined. When the petroleum companies first came in, moose harvest quickly dropped from 200 per year to only 37. In 1983, the harvest dropped to about 19 per year and stayed there. Our income from trapping dropped at the same time from a little more than $5,000 per trapper per year to under $400 per trapper. Welfare dependency soared from less than 10 percent to more than 90 percent.
Welfare dependency devastates a people and their society. Having to stand in line with your hands out just to feed yourself and your family robs you of your self-sufficiency and independence, your self-esteem, confidence and dignity. It does terrible damage to relationships between young and old, husbands and wives, parents and children, leaders and the people who look to them to solve problems.
Welfare dependency was not an inadvertent side-effect of our contact with industrial society. It was the deliberate strategy of the Alberta government. Canada's Supreme Court rules that aboriginal rights are based in part on a people's ability to pursue their traditional livelihoods. The Alberta government intentionally destroyed our hunting and trapping grounds through industry and forced us onto welfare to convince the courts we were no longer supporting ourselves by traditional means.
Sacred ground. A sunset over Fish Lake shows some of the unsullied beauty of the region
The California-based oil company Unocal was one of the first to move in. They did not consult with us or ask our permission. They moved in, took our trails, bulldozed our traplines and scared away the game. They ignored our protests and used their wealth and political influence to block our efforts at legal redress.
Unocal has recently constructed a sour gas plant less than two miles from the site where we want to establish our reserve. It is the first such plant in the area and poses a grave health risk. It produces hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide, chemicals associated with respiratory and skin disease and several cancers.
We have asked Unocal to shut down or move the plant about 12 miles to the south where it would no longer be directly upwind from our reserve site. Unocal has refused, saying the costs are too high and that there is no health threat. They leave us with little choice but to communicate with them in the only language they seem to understand-the language of profits and losses.
Unocal's main consumer outlet is the 76 Products Company, which includes Unocal's West Coast refining, marketing and transportation operations. The majority of Unocal's retail outlets are the Union 76 gas stations, which sell 13 billion gallons of gas a year.
With the help of the California consumer, we hope to teach Unocal that ignoring human rights and the environment costs more than closing or moving a small refinery.
We ask Californians to buy their gas from someone other than Union 76, or return their company credit cards with a note saying why they did so, until Unocal either shuts down the Little Buffalo refinery or moves it at least 12 miles downwind. Such a move will not eliminate all of our social ills, but our children will not have to live in the shadow of a sour gas plant.
And other resource companies will get the message that they cannot disregard people and the environment in their pursuits of profit.
