That's a good question.
Going back to 1899, Treaty 8 was signed and it gave us the right to hunt, fish, and trap. Today it's pretty much impossible to go into areas where we went forty years ago. Twenty years ago there were lakes that don't exist any more. There are signs of contamination along the river shores, and you can see this odd foam-looking, weird substance that the elders cannot describe because they haven't seen it before.
The main channel that comes through Lake Athabasca has a silver streak going across it. There are various tributaries that go into the Peace-Athabasca Delta, which is the one of the largest freshwater deltas in the world. There are a lot of tributaries that go into areas where we used to go before, but they are inaccessible today because of lack of water.
The industry uses four barrels of water to extract one barrel of oil from the ground. So if you do the math, in one day I'm pretty sure about a million barrels of water come out of that river. If that Athabasca River is gone.... It has been one of the main sources for rivers that we've used for centuries upon centuries. I foresee that river becoming a creek; it's going to be the Athabasca Creek. So if mining continues at this fast and furious rate, I see that Athabasca River becoming a creek, and there won't be anywhere to get the water.
Now they're resorting to underground streams. They say they're not going to contaminate the underground water, but if they touch the water that's underground, that will affect underground water streams that ultimately lead into the Athabasca River. There are various tributaries and lakes that don't exist any more that were there thirty or forty years ago. Today there are some elders who could take you to places and show you where what you see now as prairies were once lakes. You can now walk across where lakes were at one time.
The cancer rate in Fort Chipewyan has quadrupled in the last ten years. In one month we buried seven people due to cancers that are very rare. One of the cancers is so rare that the ratio is one in a population of 100,000 people. Our population of Fort Chipewyan, where I live, is only 1,200 people. So explain two deaths in one year after being diagnosed with this rare form of cancer. Where is it coming from? These are questions we've been bringing up, and the only answer we can come up with is it's from this whole way of mining oil out of the ground right now.