Keepers promoting the health of the river, its people and cultures

“If it continues the way it’s going now, there is no future. They will destroy everything in my community. People are dying of cancers. Fish are sick. The moose are full of arsenic. We have to be careful of how much we eat. We can’t drink the water from the lake.” ~ Peter Cyprien

With the fragrance of sweetgrass and sage wafting on the breeze, Alice Marin offered prayers for a journey that Keepers of the Athabasca River embarked on Sunday to raise awareness about conditions on the historic waterway. 

An elder with the Mikisew Cree First Nation of Ft. Chipewyan, 1,200 km downstream for where she stood at Old Fort Point, Martin was making her first visit to the headwaters of the river that many in her community have come to believe is poisoning them.

“I pray that you open the hearts and the minds of government and industry so that they will be able to understand what is happening,” Martin intoned, before a small flotilla of canoes, kayaks and rafts put in to the rain-swollen river.

The paddlers landed at  the Jasper Airport Group site for an afternoon and evening of demonstrations on how to test for water quality, discussions on how to form a local Keepers group, stories, observations on the river and a report on the state of the Athabasca River Basin.

The Keepers Day celebration drew about two dozen people to what organizers described as the first in a series of public meetings that will be staged over the next six weeks at communities along the Athabasca to “promote the health of the river, its people and cultures.”

Martin said that for several years people in Ft. Chipewyan have been “very concerned with health issues and the water in Lake Athabasca” where fish have shown signs of deformities and medical officials have observed a high incidence of unusual cancers for a community with a population of just 1,200.

With only winter road access, the mostly aboriginal community 250 km north of Fort McMurray “is isolated and the people don’t see what’s going on there,” said Martin. “With a group like this, people can get a sense of comfort that something is being done to convince the governments and the industry that things have to change.”

Peter Cyprien of Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation was with Martin in Jasper on the first stop in the month-long Keepers journey “to make a better future for the oldest community in Alberta.”

Oil sands development, the promise of re-opening uranium mines east of Ft. Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca and the possibility of a nuclear power plant upstream on the Peace River threaten the community’s future, he said. 

“If it continues the way it’s going now, there is no future. They will destroy everything in my community. People are dying of cancers. Fish are sick. The moose are full of arsenic. We have to be careful of how much we eat. We can’t drink the water from the lake.”

Contamination from upstream oil sands developments that in coming years will double their annual gulp of 349 million cubic meters of Athabasca River water, has been the main source of concern since John O’Connor, a doctor assigned to the community, drew public attention to a high incidence of rare cancers in Fort Chipewyan.

In five years he saw five cases of a bile duct cancer that usually touches just one person in 100,000. Other doctors before O’Connor had noted widespread health problems in the community and the Northern Basins River study called for human health monitoring in the Peace-Athabasca delta, but there was none.

“O’Connor saw what was going on; the government didn’t appreciate that,” said Martin. Other doctors accused O’Connor of causing “undue alarm” with his statements about cancer and the complaints are being investigated by the Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Martin said the lesson from O’Connor’s experience is “that if you go against what is going on, you’re going to get into trouble. It seems like a hopeless situation, which is why this initiative is important. People want to do something about it.”

The Nunee Health Board of Ft. Chipewyan hired its own researcher, Kevin Timoney of Treeline Ecological Research, to look at water and sediment data collected in the Peace-Athabasca delta. His findings confirmed community suspicions.

Timoney found arsenic, mercury and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) contaminants were higher than normal. The findings implicate the oil sands industry, he said, but as other researchers have found, natural weathering of exposed bitumen deposits makes it difficult to say exactly where the pollutants come from.

“It is a scientifically challenging problem; more work will be needed to address this question of causality,” said Timoney, who accused the province and industry of  “not been forthcoming to the people of Fort Chipewyan with information that directly speaks to the people’s health concerns.”

The Alberta government has its own studies which conclude that arsenic and cancer aren’t problems in Fort Chipewayn.

Preston McEachern, Alberta Environment’s head of oilsands, asserts that any toxins leaking into the river from the tailings ponds would be diluted by the time they reach Lake Athabasca and Fort Chipewyan. 

As for the carcinogens Timoney found in the river sediment, its not clear to McEachern how they would get inside people. “Aside from somebody eating a plate full of sand every day, there’s no exposure pathway because PAHs don’t accumulate in biota,” he says. “It can pose a threat to biota, but not particularly to the residents of Fort Chip.”

There will be more studies – but not the overall examination of  health issues that O’Connor proposed for the community. This fall, Alberta Environment will start sampling closer to Fort Chipewyan,  and health agencies will test O’Connor’s suspicions of a cancer cluster. 

Harvey Scott of Athabasca, co-chair of  Keepers of the Athabasca with Cleo Reece of the Fort McMurray Cree First Nation, told the Sunday afternoon gathering that he lived the earlier part of his life in Ontario, where rivers were used as industrial sewers.

“I’ve been grinding my teeth for a number of years watching what’s happening on the river,” he said. “We are responsible for keeping our land, our water, we are all obligated to do that. The Keepers is one way to do that - monitor and report.”

“Alberta has a complaint-driven environmental reporting system so we plan on doing that. We’re trying to get people along the river to complain the way people at Fort Chip did this spring. Tell the environment minister what we’re seeing out there. We all need to pull together to save this river and restore it back to its original state.”