ABSTRACT
Both the farming and First Nations communities adjacent to Peace River oil sands operations in north-western Alberta have reported disturbing changes in their health and the natural world since in the last decade since oil extraction there accelerated: cattle herd die-offs, asthma, vomiting, moose found with mottled green organs, and worse. Often overlooked in media, scholarship, and activist accounts, the Peace Country is one of North America’s sacrifice zones, where human and environmental health takes lower priority to economic development, powered by the oil industry. Living amid the patch, both Indigenous and settler residents engage in strategic actions, repertoires of survival, with industry and government that they hope will improve not only their own lives, but the lives of their communities—only to be stymied at every turn. To explore how actors both shape and are shaped by fields of power and structural arrangements working at scales often invisible to outsiders, I compare two days of fieldwork: one spent with First Nations council members documenting unmarked burial grounds, slated for pipeline development; and one day with an activist farmer living adjacent to the patch.
