Canadian Tribe leased land for fracking – protests arise

In the Autumn of 2010, Kainaiwa Resources Inc. (KRI) – a corporation wholly-owned by the Blood Tribe in Canada- signed an agreement with Murphy Oil and Bowood Energy. The Blood Tribe will receive at least $50 million and potentially more in the future.

The deal is a five-year lease which allows access to approximately 50% of Blood Tribe land, roughly 129,280 acres, for oil and gas exploration. The Blood Reserve is located in southern Alberta.

The type of drilling that will occur is known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” Fracking involves pumping massive amounts of water, various and largely unknown chemicals (often toxic), and sand under high pressure into a well. This causes the shale or coalbed to fracture and releases the natural gas.

The companies will drill a minimum of 16 wells on Blood land and generally between 1-8 million gallons of water are used each time a well is fracked. A well can allegedly be fracked up to 18 times. Fracking also requires a chemical cocktail that is combined with the water. Between 80-300 tons of chemicals may be used each time a well is fracked. Apparently, only 30-50% of the water and chemicals are recovered meaning that this potentially toxic waste water is likely to seep into the groundwater and soil around a well.

Some citizens of the Blood Tribe are protesting this deal. They allege Tribe members were not consulted during the negotiations of this deal.
They allege that KRI and the Blood Tribe Chief and Council neglected to maintain transparency during and after the negotiations and left a large number of tribal citizens in the dark.

You can go to PROTECTBLOODLAND.ca for more information.

The article I read on this subject had a very interesting quote from Isapo-Muxika, Crowfoot, Blackfoot Chief, 1880:

“Our land is more valuable than your money. As long as the sun shines and the waters flow, this land will be here to give life to men and animals. We cannot sell the lives of men and animals. It was put here by the Great Spirit and we cannot sell it because it does not belong to us.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 24th, 2011 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Economic Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.