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The Canadian government commenced the treaty-making process with the Indigenous peoples of the Athabasca region in 1870, motivated by the Geological Survey of Canada’s reports that petroleum existed in the area. This, in addition to the discovery of gold in the Klondike region, spurred an influx of unregulated settlement and resource extraction in the north. The trajectory of this history has continued to bring the Canadian settler state – and its oil industry stakeholders – into negotiation with indigenous Nations over the Athabasca tar sands. Currently contested is Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway project, which aims to move oil from the Edmonton, Alberta area by way of two massive pipelines covering 1,170km to Kitimat, British Columbia, where it would then be transported to Asia-Pacific markets by super-tankers. This paper examines the widespread criticism of the project from Indigenous and environmental groups, as well as responses to these objections by public/private partnerships between Enbridge, federal and provincial governments and their national security and counter-terrorism forces. It argues that recognising and naming contemporary forms of white settler colonialism, including these types of neoliberal partnerships, is required for new relations to become possible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Several oil sands mines and refineries are currently recovering oil from the Athabasca River region near Fort McMurray, Alberta. Planning and construction of additional oil sands mines are in various stages of completion. Due to environmental concerns for aquatic life in areas downstream from current and future oil sands activities, surveys were conducted between 1998 and 2000 to determine whether the quality of water and sediments in tributaries of the Athabasca River are affected by flowing through reaches with exposure to natural oil sand deposits. This paper presents the results for metals in bed and suspended sediments collected from the Mackay, Steepbank, and Ells rivers during those surveys. The suspended sediments had a clay content (n = 7) ranging from 36.2% to 65.0%, while bed sediments, which consisted of a predominant sand fraction, had percent clay (n = 39) ranging from 0.0% to 38.1%. A Mann-Kendall non-parametric analysis to assess the longitudinal trend of the metals in the bed sediments found no significant (α = 0.05) downstream trend in the Mackay or Steepbank rivers; however, the Ells River displayed a generally decreasing tend from upstream to downstream. The results provide no indication that metal concentrations in the bed sediments and/or suspended sediments of the Mackay, Steepbank, and Ells rivers increase significantly as the three tributaries flow through reaches that have natural oil sand exposures (McMurray Formation). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Naphthenic acids (NAs) are complex mixtures of naturally occurring acyclic and cyclic aliphatic carboxylic adds that are responsible for the toxicity of the water in the tailings ponds associated with the recovery of bitumen from the Athabasca oil sands. NAs are difficult to analyze due to theft complexity and the lack of commercially available NA standards. This paper describes the use of negative ion electrospray ionization mass spectrometry for the analysis of NAs. Model carboxylic acids, alone and in mixture, afforded mass spectral signal intensities that were highly dependent on extractor and cone voltages and on molecular structure. These effects were also observed for authentic NAs. Under conditions that were close to optimal for all the model compounds, theft calibration sensitivities varied by a factor of < 2, and there were minimal interactions when the model compounds were examined in mixture. Under the same conditions, the authentic NM showed apparent congener distributions similar to those observed previously by GC/MS for derivatized NAs. The similar calibration sensitivities among congeners allowed the use of the standard addition method to determine the approximate absolute concentrations of NA congeners in an authentic sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]