Claims of industrial genocide in northern AB
Click here to email Troy Adams
11/24/2008
A speaker at a conference of people opposed to oilsands development in northern Alberta says aboriginals face a ``genocide'' as companies release waste into rivers that flow through their communities.
Mike Mercredi told the Everyone's Downstream 2 conference in Edmonton that it's a slow, industrial genocide.
Mercredi, who works for the Fort Chipewayan band studying traditional land use, was brought in from the community 610 km northeast of Edmonton to speak to the event, put on by the Indigenous Environmental Network and Oilsands Truth.
He says that upstream from Fort Chipewyan, oilsands companies have been mining the area around the Athabasca River.
Mercredi says those sites are each allowed to release small amounts of waste into the water which is killing people in his tiny community of 12-hundred.
Mercredi says studies on the subject never questioned the people who were actually sick. (Edmonton Sun, The Canadian Press, ta)
http://www.inews880.com/Channels/Reg/LocalNews/story.aspx?ID=1041802
