A little more than a year ago, B.C. activist Ingmar Lee told a reporter that the petroleum-hauling vessel Nathan E. Stewart was a “disaster waiting to happen.”

Early Wednesday morning, that fear was realized when the American-owned articulated tug and barge ran aground near Bella Bella. Although the barge was empty after dropping off its cargo in Alaska, the tugboat began leaking fuel into the water, threatening the traditional clam fisheries of the Heiltsuk First Nation. 

“It’s unfortunately a terrible thing to see it sunk there,” Lee said Thursday.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

COASTAL FIRST NATIONS RENEWS CALL FOR OIL
TANKER BAN ON BC COAST IN AFTERMATH OF BELLA BELLA SPILL

Vancouver, BC (October 14, 2016) – Coastal First Nations renews its call today for a ban on crude oil tanker traffic and says First Nations must be at the table to determine what went wrong in Thursday’s diesel spill near the Heiltsuk First Nation of Bella Bella, BC.

NEW YORK, Oct 11 2016 (IPS) - Resistance towards the controversial Dakota Access pipeline continues after a federal court rejected requests to halt construction on Monday.

Since August, members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and thousands of allies from across the North American nation have gathered in North Dakota to protest the 1,172 mile long pipeline.

Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2016 12:00 AM

Indigenous leaders and activists who oppose pipelines and other natural resource development projects, such as the proposed Pacific NorthWest LNG project recently approved by the federal government, say they are not being heard by the federal government.

Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, who is president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, said there is a distinct difference between listening, and hearing, and that the federal government is failing at the latter when it comes to the concerns of indigenous people.

The Struggle at Standing Rock:

Pipeline Protest, First Nations’ Uprising

“What white man can say I never stole his land or a penny of his money? Yet they say that I am a thief.” — Sitting Bull, Lakota Holy Man, Grand River.

The fresh new face Canada showed the world at the Paris COP21 climate meetings held out hope for many Canadian climate activists that a national course change was in the works.

In its less than a decade in power, the Harper government extinguished multiple important Canadian environmental laws, muzzled climate scientists, harassed environmental NGOs, created "anti-terrorism" legislation that targets First Nations and other pipeline activists, and generally introduced regressive and reactionary social policy while promoting Canada as the world's new petro-state.

The site where the Pacheedaht people originated — their Garden of Eden — is stunning.

The Jordan River exits a 500-metre-deep canyon, then tumbles toward the sea through a jumble of immense boulders polished as smooth as beach pebbles.

It was here, about 70 kilometres west of Victoria, in a past so ancient it predates legends of a great flood that inundated the world, that the Pacheedaht took their name from foam on the river.

Today, there’s still foam on the river. It signals not the birth of a people, but the death of their river.

EDMONTON — First Nations and environmental groups want the federal government to revisit its approval of British Columbia’s Site C dam which they worry would threaten a national park that is a World Heritage Site.

Groups including the Mikisew Cree and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society say the risk to Alberta’s Wood Buffalo National Park from the dam and upstream oilsands development is so dire that they will ask UNESCO investigators to put the area on its list of threatened sites.