Sleeping With the Devil
Aaron Vincent Elkaim’s photographs document a community trading its way of life to Big Oil
Surrounded by the Athabasca tar sands of northern Alberta, the forest town of Fort Mckay is far from pretty much everything. For the small First Nation community of Cree and Dene tribes that live there though, the remove hasn’t kept things from getting crowded.
The oil industry has been expanding in Alberta’s forests for years, steadily eroding the basis for centuries of tradition and ways of life. With much of their water, land, fishing and hunting already compromised, community leaders decided around 2008 to quit resisting the inevitable and instead work with their new neighbors. The arrangement has since brought them a degree of economic advantage, but to some it’s akin to a deal with the devil.
“In their identity and their culture, they’re very connected to the land,” says Toronto-based photographer Aaron Vincent Elkaim, who documented the community of Fort Mckay from 2011 to 2013. “They can’t eat the fish from the river, there’s no berries growing anymore that they can really eat … the industry is so invasive to the landscape that it’s really clearing everything inch by inch, mile by mile.”
The tribal leaders in Ft. Mckay formed a local consortium to engage with Sunco, the oil and gas giant who are mining at the very edge of their reserve. The deal was to allow operations to continue uninterrupted in exchange for work opportunities for their community.
Performing jobs like driving water trucks or providing catering and custodial services, the tribal communities of Fort Mckay have opportunities that didn’t exist before. In the process though, they’re also supporting the very industry that is inexorably compromising the local environment and upending their traditional way of life.
“That money goes back to housing, to infrastructure, it goes into payments to the people in straight annual cash, payments for supporting kids,” says Elkaim. “It is the inevitable — they understand this — but for them it’s better to benefit than just sit there and watch and get screwed by it. And they are getting screwed, because at the same time they’re making money but they’re losing the foundations of who they are.”
Google hasn’t bothered to send a street view car to Fort Mckay, but from above you can still get a good look at just how much it’s hemmed in by Sunco’s bitumen gathering operations. Just down river from Ft. Mckay the former city of Fort McMurray, now an “urban service area,” houses Suncor’s diaspora of employees (Google has sent a car there).
The company’s upstream production is around two million barrels a year. That might sound like a lot, but it’s a fraction of the nearly 174 billion barrels sitting in Canada’s tar sands.
The tar sands are an absolute boon for Canada’s export industry, and efforts to mine them continue to expand with the conservative government’s support, leaving local communities with little choice but to play ball or find a new place to live.
“They used to fight against the industry, because when it began the river was getting polluted, and that’s where they got their fish from, and their water source was getting polluted so they were really getting pissed off, used road blocks and these kinds of things,” Elkaim says.
“This community, that had their entire history going back thousands of years, was connected to this landscape, and they had a way of life that 30 years ago was more or less entirely traditional.”
After hearing about the situation in Ft. Mckay, Elkaim decided to photograph the current state of the community. Without any response from local authorities to his inquiries, he drove up in November of 2011 and parked his rented camper in a clearing near the center of town.
His early days there were rough — leaders were in no hurry to talk about their situation with a journalist, and locals had no idea what this outsider with a camera was up to. The man that ended up being his key contact in the region at first thought he was trouble, and followed him back to his car before he could explain his purpose.
“He told me, you don’t know how lucky you are — I thought you were a drug dealer and I was gonna roll you.”
Instead of roughing him up, the man arranged for Elkaim to stay with his mother. Over the next four months, Elkaim got to know the community and gather impressions of how things had changed.
While he’s a firsthand witness with clear sight of the facts of the situation, he’s careful not to make statements on locals’ behalf about their feelings on the issue. Some seem to be open to the change or at least indifferent, while others seem to wrestle deeply with the cost of the deal.
Archaeological records indicate the Dene have lived near Fort Mckay for thousands of years. The Cree first arrived when the fur industry found its way into Northern Alberta a few hundred years ago. But the shift in their way of life has happened very quickly, largely over the last 30 years.
“The elders grew up with dog sleds and they got all their food from the rivers and the land and hunting, and it was a very traditional life, and that changed so rapidly,” Elkaim says. “In Canada the native situation is similar to the States in many ways, in that most communities are very poor — they’re very impoverished in Canada, houses are falling apart, they’re dependent on the government in all their money, so in the case of Fort Mckay, they’re completely financially independent and they have good jobs, well paying jobs, and have everything they need financially, so that is a huge benefit in economic terms comparatively to other indigenous people.”
The series, called Sleeping With the Devil after a phrase one of the community elders used to describe the situation, is not a critique of industry per se, but a study of a people undergoing a radical shift in their way of life due to the incredible power of market forces.
There is no shortage of photography documenting the sprawling reach and effects of the oil industry, and the sociopolitical and environmental impact is well documented. To visually portray the tension between new opportunity and lost tradition, Elkaim pointed his camera at the people who were experiencing it.
“I was always trying to find them when they were engaging the land, and their relationship to it, because to me that’s what’s being lost,” he says.
Elkaim is a founding member of the Boreal Collective, a group of Canadian photographers interested in documenting social and environmental injustice.
The documenting of Fort Mckay is part of a larger series of three stories that will form the basis of a book about how native communities around the world negotiate the arrival of creeping industry on their land. It aims to raise awareness and lead to help for those in similar situations. In the case of Fort Mckay the outcome seems pretty much sealed.
“I think it is a ‘before it goes away’ kind of thing,” he says. “They’re in that place where they’re nostalgic for it and they can still do it, it’s still accessible, but they know it’s kind of over in a way, it’s ending … the lights of the industry will be right next to you at night, you will hear them. That sense of being in the land completely will be gone, it’ll be corrupted.”
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All photos by Aaron Vincent Elkaim
