Kristin Moe

Kristin Moe wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Kristin is a writer and climate justice activist from the US, spending three months in Alberta writing about the social and cultural impacts of the tar sands. Read more of her work at profannecology.tumblr.com .

A history of resistance

May 272013

Features

Idle No More one regional aspect of Indigenous peoples' resistance to destruction.

by Kristin Moe

There’s a remote part of northern Alberta where the Lubicon Cree have lived, it is said, since time immemorial. The Cree called the vast, pine-covered region niyanan askiy, “our land.” When white settlers first carved up this country, they made treaties with most of its original inhabitants — but for reasons unclear, the Lubicon Cree were left out.

Two hundred years later, the Lubicons' right to their traditional territory is still unrecognized. In the last four decades, industry has tapped the vast resource wealth that lies deep beneath the pines; today, 2,600 oil and gas wells stretch to the horizon. This is tar sands country.

Alberta tar sands illegal under Treaty 8: First Nations

Oct 222012

Features

1899 treaty honoured Alberta natives' right to practice traditional lifeways.

by Kristin Moe

Fort Chipewyan is a small indigenous community on the edge of vast Lake Athabasca in Alberta’s remote north, accessible only by plane in summer and by snow road in winter. The town is directly downstream from the Alberta tar sands — Canada’s wildly lucrative, hotly debated, and environmentally catastrophic energy project.

Residents say that tar sands mining is not only dangerous but illegal because it violates the rights laid out in Treaty 8, an agreement signed in 1899 by Queen Victoria and various First Nations. Their legal challenge to the tar sands project could have a powerful impact on the legal role of treaties with First Nations people.

A walk to heal the tar sands

Aug 222012

Features

Alberta First Nations and supporters trek annually to heal toxins on their land.

by Kristin Moe

The column of people stretched out along the road that cut a straight line through the desert, and disappeared into a dusty yellow haze. This was an unnatural desert, human-made. A few decades ago, it was boreal forest, deep and cool. Now it's gray sand — a byproduct, I'm told, of the tar sands refining. The desert stretches out to the horizon, and seems to have no end.