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Latest news about the Safe Drinking Water Team
Indigenous communities in Canada's oil sands region on Monday called for Alberta's energy regulator to be disbanded and replaced following a months-long toxic tailings seepage from Imperial Oil's Kearl oil sands mine. Community representatives were testifying to a parliamentary committee in Ottawa about the impact of the leak and ongoing concerns about oil sands tailings management.
First Nations and Indigenous individuals can breathe a sigh relief as the deadline to submit for compensation with the First Nations Drinking Water Settlement has now been extended. The First Nations Drinking Water Settlement is a settlement (agreement) between the Government of Canada (Canada) and certain First Nations and their members. Any Indigenous individual or First Nation affected by a long-term drinking water advisory that lasted for at least one year between November 20, 1995, and June 20, 2021, will now have until March 7, 2024, to submit their claims.
Birch Bark Coffee Company makes enjoying your morning (or afternoon - we don’t judge) coffee all the more exciting. The organic, fair-trade coffee allows you to appease your taste buds, and support Indigenous communities. Founder Mark Marsolais-Nahwegahbow’s (Ojibwe and Band member of Whitefish River First Nation) mission is to work towards bringing clean drinking water to every Indigenous home suffering from ‘All Water Advisories’ by providing and installing certified water purification systems. For every 100 bags of coffee sold in retail and every 50 online, Birch Bark donates one water purification system to a family in need.
“It follows the story Raven Returns the Water, which is a Tla’amin story,” said Fraser-Munroe. “I think it is, really at the time and I think still today, prescient in that it was discussing the ways greed or one person controlling resources isn’t necessarily good for the community and isn’t even good for the person in charge. Sometimes it can have negative consequences.” The 20-minute performance tells the story of Poho (Raven) who is in her valley and is realizing the environment around her is drying up slowly and animals are dying.
The Saskatchewan River Water Walk is continuing this week as the grassroots group heads across Saskatchewan and Alberta, raising awareness of the need for people to respect the water as a life source. The group were in the Delmas and Battlefords area recently, and will finish the walk east of Prince Albert, at the Saskatchewan River Forks. Organizer Tasha Beeds says the aim of the walk is to increase understanding of the value of the North Saskatchewan River in people’s lives, today and into the future. “It’s more about raising consciousness about the need to see that water as living, to see that all of life needs water,” she said.
A group of Indigenous ceremonial ‘Water Walkers’ have been on a long journey, and recently passed through Rimbey, Ponoka and Wetaskiwin. The group, the Saskatchewan River Water Walkers, made their trek down Highway 53 on July 21, and will walk a total of 1,900 kilometres before they are finished. They “move for the water, for life and for the children.”
After living on the Tyendinaga Mohawk reserve in southeastern Ontario for nine months, he wasn’t looking to use TikTok to copy the latest dance routines. He wanted to highlight some First Nations reserves where clean drinking water remains impossible to find. So last January, from his account called @slapppps, Mcguire showed black water spewing from the pipes of his home. The video went viral, racking up 2.5 million views.
An Indigenous filmmaker is using TikTok to raise awareness about the toxic mess left behind at Giant Mine in Yellowknife, N.W.T., and the health risks it poses to the surrounding community. Morgan Tsetta, a Yellowknives Dene First Nation photographer and filmmaker working in Vancouver, has been posting videos about the mine in an effort to pressure the federal government for an apology and compensation.
Canada’s economy is showing early signs of recovery. The labour market is expanding, government leaders are preparing to release the first federal budget in two years, and companies are identifying post-pandemic investment strategies. In this still-tentative time, some people will claim that a full recovery requires trade-offs. They will say we must prioritize jobs over the environment, industry over Indigenous Nations, and short-term growth over lasting climate solutions. But those are false choices.
“They cut corners every day, every day,” said Justin Gee, vice-president of First Nations Engineering Services Ltd. Gee said he encountered these recurring problems while overseeing the work of a construction firm, Kingdom Construction Limited (KCL), building a water treatment plant 10 years ago in Wasauksing First Nation, along the eastern shore of Georgian Bay, about 250 kilometres north of Toronto. “You have to be on them every step of the way,” said Gee, who was the contract administrator on the project. “You can’t leave them on their own.”
