“We wouldn’t be able to do it if we weren’t self-sufficient and didn’t develop our own resource revenue. I think that is key in terms of making our communities work and sustainable for a long term,” he says. “The future is ours in respect to how well we educate our young people.”

Boucher’s attitude and pro-development position remains far from the rule for all. The Mikisew Cree, one of five groups comprising the Athabasca Tribal Council, an umbrella organization of northeastern Alberta First Nations, has called for a moratorium on new development. George Poitras, consultation co-ordinator with the Mikisew Industry Relations Corporation and former Mikisew chief, says that although the band is profiting from oil sands business enterprises, it is considering going to court to stop new projects. “There is some legal risk to oilsands developers, there is some possibility of liability because we do have priority rights of use of these lands,” he says, citing worries about industrial water usage and an increased incidence of rare cancers claimed by Fort Chipewyan residents and attributed to oil sands activity. However, the main problem Poitras talks about is lack of consultation. He says it is the same issue that inspired his band to launch a successful lawsuit opposing a winter road on its traditional territory. The legal claim was that the federal government violated its fiduciary or trust duty to consult with First Nations groups.

“It baffles me that neither industry nor government is coming to our community and attempting to reconcile our issues and concerns. It is similar to when the Minister of Heritage approved this road
to go through our lands. A simple conversation with her and I when I was chief would have, perhaps,
mitigated our issues and concerns, and we would not have opposed that road. But she didn’t. She failed. So we took her to court. Essentially, we quashed her decision.”

This is not really industry’s problem, says Don Thompson, president of the Oil Sands Developers Group and former corporate secretary of Syncrude Canada. Court challenges targeted federal authorities rather than industry. “We feel we’ve done a more than adequate job in terms of consulting with First Nations people with respect to our projects.”

The relationship between oil sands developers and First Nations groups has always been good and is only getting better, he says and points to a tradition of talks between industry and First Nations. He recalls that aboriginal community corporations were born to institutionalize a consultation process as the number of companies operating in the oil sands dramatically increased.

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