This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting
'I'm travelling through the Arctic, the Land of the Midnight Sun.'
The most amazing view.
For thousands of years, only the hardiest hunters and herders
lived in this inhospitable land.
But now the Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth.
Go back. Go back.
As it thaws, new riches are being revealed.
This is what it's all about - the oil.
All eyes are turning north.
For one bright summer, I will live with the people of the Arctic.
Absolutely loving it.
This is the real thing.
I want to understand how their lives are changing,
and discover what the future holds for this great wilderness.
It's my first sighting of the famous Porcupine caribou herd.
Beautiful, beautiful, so exciting.
I'm in the far north of Canada, in Yukon Territory.
Across the Arctic, great herds of caribou are on the move.
And so are the hunters.
Good shot.
I live with the Gwich'in tribe, the Caribou People.
The life we live, living on the edge.
They've lived here for thousands of years
and depend on the caribou for their survival.
I like seeing the caribou coming through the country here,
it makes things alive.
There's deep respect here for everything.
But this ancient relationship is under threat.
The Arctic is the new frontier for oil exploration.
But what happens to the native people when the oil companies move in?
I'm in Old Crow, in the Yukon Territory, Northern Canada.
It's 80 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
There's no road to get here,
it's accessed only by plane or boat.
It's home to the Gwich'in people.
They believe that at the beginning of time,
their ancestors made a pact with the caribou,
that they would retain part of each other's heart,
so their fates would always be bound together.
Despite some modern trappings, the way of life here
has remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years,
and the Gwich'in still rely on the caribou for their survival.
I think we'll need them.
We'd better have these in the hunt,
huh? I think you do!
'I've come here to join elder Stephen Frost and his family
'on their traditional spring hunt.
'With his daughter, Margaret, and their neighbour, Robert,
'we'll spend a week hunting out on the land.'
Somewhere...out there,
is a herd of 130,000 caribou heading north on its annual migration.
And for the people here in Old Crow,
it's one of the most important times of year.
Stephen and his family need to get enough meat to last the whole summer.
This far north, there are few jobs, and imported food is very expensive.
The caribou hunt is their main source of meat.
The herd is named after the Porcupine River,
a tributary of the mighty Yukon.
The river has been frozen solid all winter and has just broken up.
Huge chunks of ice litter the banks.
It's been a strange winter, eight degrees warmer than usual.
This is not a normal break-up. Sure.
Because we had a lot of warm weather... Yes.
..break-up come early.
Does the ice, when it breaks, does that always coincide
with the caribou coming past? Same time of year?
Yeah.
Why don't they cross when it's frozen?
Well, they're not stupid like us!
Nature kind of look after that.
It's not time for them to cross. Right.
They wait till they are ready to calve...
OK.
..up north. That's when they start moving.
Then, as we round a bend, there's caribou up ahead.
It's my first sighting of the famous Porcupine caribou herd,
named after this very river that I'm on now.
There's about 20 of them.
They were tentatively here on the edge, waiting to cross,
and then we came around the corner and disturbed them.
I love the way they run, they've got such a lolloping old gait,
they look quite dopey.
Beautiful.
These are females heading north to calve, so we don't shoot.
The herd is decreasing each year, so the Gwich'in now only hunt males.
Each spring the caribou migrate 500 kilometres from the Yukon Territory
across the Porcupine River to their calving grounds
in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
In the autumn they head south again.
The herd is constantly on the move,
travelling up to 50 kilometres a day in small groups.
To reach their calving grounds, they must run a gauntlet of predators -
bears, wolves and the Gwich'in.
Stephen's ancestors established their territory here thousands of years ago.
It's right in the path of the caribou and it's rich in wildfowl and other prey.
Wow! That will be your supper tonight.
Looks like fresh beaver on the menu.
Just take it easy when you jump out.
OK, my friend.
Finally, we arrive at Stephen's hunting camp.
This will be our home for the next week or so.
It's been the traditional hunting ground for the Frost clan for generations.
Each family has its own territory, and it's miles from anywhere.
Old Crow is 300 miles from the next nearest settlement,
and this camp is two hours from Old Crow.
There's massive vistas and skies that go on forever.
There's just no-one around.
Really get a sense of solitude here.
'But they do get the occasional visitor.'
And that's to keep the bears out. Sure!
"Mr Bear, please don't break in, I'll one day leave you food."
Aw, that's nice!
Yeah, this is the house.
Wow, check this. It's cold.
It's beautiful, it's so homely.
Get the fire going and... Shall I?
You look very smart this evening. You've changed.
Stephen has a foot in two worlds.
His father was a white Mountie, his mother a Gwich'in,
and he grew up here in this wild place, learning the ways of his mother's people.
This is my country, I mean, I'm brought up here
and I consider myself native to the land, everything.
Um...
..I get very...
emotional or whatever you call it when...
..when I hear the, uh, drilling might take place
in the 1002 land.
The 1002 lands, over the border in Alaska,
are where the caribou go to give birth every summer.
These calving grounds are known by the Gwich'in people
as "the sacred place where life begins".
The Gwich'in are terrified that oil companies
will be granted permission to drill here.
It's going to be pretty sad day if that oil drilling should take place.
What would we do without that caribou?
So people are scared, yeah? Really, they're scared.
The Gwich'in are subsistence hunters
Food is expensive up here and there are few jobs.
Without the caribou,
life here would be near impossible.
The next morning we're joined by Stephen's son, Peter,
and we head out hunting.
We've stopped here because it's another area
that the caribou potentially cross.
But the advantage here is we have this bank we can climb
and use as a vantage point to see where they might... where they might be coming.
I hope our luck comes in.
This hill has served as a lookout for the Gwich'in people for generations,
watching out for the caribou herd on their way north.
The caribou are highly sensitive to changes in their environment,
an the gradual warming of the Arctic is affecting the ancient rhythm
of their migration.
I can't see anything, Rob. Hmm.
Yeah, at this time of day, they're usually laying around on the ice,
where it's nice and cool. Oh, really?
Yeah, but everything has...
everything is changing now, like, even the river is different.
It go out earlier and the snow melt earlier, we hardly had snow this year.
So it's easier for the caribou to get over the mountains over there.
I see. And how important is it for the people in your community
to get the meat from the caribou?
Oh, you know, it's like...it's
our traditional way of living, and...
..you know, a lot of people depend on caribou.
Robert has two young children and, while he does some odd jobs
for a little cash, hunting is what puts food on the table.
He accepts that the modern world needs oil,
but it seems that the consequences are felt more strongly here.
I don't know, it's just...
You can't do nothing about it, you know?
People need fuel to run their boats, people need fuel to run their Skidoo,
they need fuel to run their vehicles, you know.
You can't tell them not to stop, it's just the way...
the way of life.
We settle in to watch and wait.
But there's no caribou to be seen, just a grizzly bear in the distance.
The unusually warm winter triggered the migration early this year.
So we head north three hours,
hoping to spot the last of the herd crossing the river.
Finally, we have some caribou!
Amazing. We just spotted them as they were going into the water,
that little crossing. They've already come out the other side,
so, initially, I thought we'd lost them and that was our only chance gone.
But it seems that they're only crossed onto an island
so they've got one more stretch of water to cross.
And that's where we're going to have to go and have a look,
see if we can finally get our shot.
GUNSHOT
We got one really clean kill there
and then the second one, which was just behind him...
Great shot. Good shot.
They took one shot and killed one outright,
but maimed the one behind,
so then they dispatched that straight after.
And then this third one now,
they killed and they're just finishing off.
GUNSHOT
Peter and Robert get to work, gutting the caribou.
All the edible meat and organs are cleanly cut and put aside,
and the rest is left for the scavengers.
Liver and onions, huh?
Peter tells me he only takes a few caribou each season.
I only take what I need. A lot of times I see them,
and if I don't eat them, I won't take any.
I like seeing the caribou coming through the country here.
They're beautiful, aren't they?
It makes things alive, and you see other game, too.
Yeah, yeah.
No, it was really beautiful, seeing them.
I find myself a little shaken by the experience.
Ooh.
That's quite...
quite visually impactive, that.
We were so close and they were just... just here on the bank,
and struggling in the water to get close, thinking they were going to get away,
finally getting here and then,
bang, down they went.
Really loud, really...
sort of shocking in a way. I've seen this sort of stuff many times, but...
it always shocks me a little.
Big animal. Beautiful.
But I understand it and I'm really pleased for these guys.
Well, you're going to enjoy some good meat tonight when we get back to Blue Fish.
Certainly. Yeah, yeah.
We're going straight back down. Stephen will be happy.
As we're heading back home, laden down with meat, we hit a problem.
A mass of ice floating downriver.
Upstream, the Crow River is breaking up and flowing down into the Porcupine.
We have to get to the bank quickly to avoid damaging the boat.
There are thousands of tonnes of ice flowing past.
Some pieces are as big as a car and could easily overturn our boat.
Looks pretty thick down there, though.
Is it? It's danger for a boat.
It's pretty thick.
We could be here for some time.
It's pretty jagged and it's got a lot a sharp stuff.
It could punch a hole through the boat pretty easy.
We can't go through this.
We can't go through it? So we're stuck?
Stuck with three caribou! Yeah.
On our way home. We're not going to go hungry anyway.
Well, we won't go hungry,
but poor Stephen will, and Margaret.
They're going to be missing out.
Well, so, don't know what's going to happen tonight.
Either we're going to stay here,
in which case we've got three
caribou to eat and lots of firewood,
or we're going to run the gauntlet with all this ice
and try and make it the two hours down to the hunting camp
where Stephen and Margaret are.
I hope we run the gauntlet, but it's not my boat.
We decide to go for it and
see if we can get ahead of the ice.
It's going to be a long night.
Yeah? Slow ride home.
Beautiful and danger.
CHUCKLES: What else do you like that's beautiful and dangerous?
Everything.
It's the life we live.
Living on the edge.
Finally we get clear, and head full speed for home.
Not bad, eh?
Hey, Margaret. Hello!
How are you?
Three caribou.
Are you serious?
Well done.
Whoo-hoo!
That meat will be OK in the boat.
You don't want to attract animals to the camp.
The blood and the guts and the skin
and all that waste stuff
is the one that smells,
so what they're going to do, leave it in the boat overnight.
The hunters is tired now, long day.
We get some sleep and right away in the morning,
and everything's going to be fine.
The next morning, we get to work.
The meat is butchered
and carried to the camp for smoking.
Margaret's in charge of the smokehouse.
Cut it in half and you smoke it like that, and after it smokes a little bit,
like, with the air going through, it dries it a little.
OK, so the thinner it is, the easier it is to dry,
and then it will go all the way through to preserve...?
Yeah. If you just bag it up and put it in the freezer, it could last all winter.
Really? Yeah.
But it don't usually last that long
around Old Crow!
Oh, look, you've been busy.
I didn't see you'd done all this.
Hot here in the Arctic!
Just here? Yeah.
'It's a comforting sight to see the smokehouse so full of meat,
'and there's a good feeling in the camp.'
I'm cooking half a caribou for myself. Gosh.
If anybody is real good, they might have a little bit.
Oh, does that mean I've been good?
Oh, there he is!
Does that mean I've been good? You haven't been naughty today.
Say it louder. You have not been naughty today!
BOTH CHUCKLE
Sure getting hungry. Are you getting hungry, Robert?
Yeah.
It's always good to have fresh meat.
Fancy a little bit of bone marrow? Yes, sir.
There you go.
Some people, they can't drink milk because it don't agree with their stomach.
So us, we eat the bone marrow out of the legs
and then we get all of our calcium out of it.
Can you show me how?
Sure. Let's go.
Wow!
That's quite a lot, isn't it?
Mmm.
It's one of those foods that you just... it just feels right.
It feel healthy, it feels really like something good is going inside you.
I can't really explain it.
It feels like it's full of nutrition. Mm-hm.
The Gwich'in use nearly every part of the animal.
The hide is used for making gloves and moccasins,
and the hooves are boiled down to a jelly and eaten or used to make rattles
to disguise the hunters' movements.
Everything else is eaten, and best of all is the head.
I like mine medium rare.
Everything is edible on a caribou.
The lips, the nose.
Everything.
Eyeball.
The tongue is the best part.
Tongue? Tongue, yeah.
Like, me, I get a pleasure out of...
out of eating it.
Shall I try it? Yeah, don't try it, eat it.
Mm.
Cor, it's tough.
So, it's chewy. Yeah, proper chewy.
This looks a bit better.
Mm.
Nice.
It might be just a little... a little bit on the raw side.
I like it. I quite like it raw.
It tastes like a really, really rare sirloin.
Very, very fine meat.
Beautifully tender,
like it's been pulverised.
Not melt-in-your-mouth, still slightly chewy,
but really delicate.
Got a bigger one over there, a bigger shovel.
'While the meat's smoking,
there's work to do around the camp.
'Firewood to cut, Peter's building a new cabin and there's a garden to tend.'
It's prime hunting season in the Yukon, and wildfowl are returning to the lakes.
Peter and Robert take me out one more time.
GUNSHOT
MAKES ANIMAL CALL
SOFTLY: Just over there in the water.
Beautiful muskrat, just there.
It's really coming closer. He's calling it in and it's coming closer.
With a few geese to add to the caribou,
we've plenty of meat, so we leave this muskrat be.
I can now see how important
the caribou herd is to the Gwich'in.
It's much more than just food.
The meat is given to friends and family in other communities,
which bonds the Gwich'in across their territory.
I've got a big family.
I just hunt for the people that is not fortunate,
doesn't have a boat or a husband to hunt for them, you know.
I met people think I shoot a lot of caribou, but I give it away, you know.
I don't just take it to my freezer and fill it right the hell up, you know.
I've got a big family, so I'll have to look out for some of them.
Like, some of that meat down there I'm going to give to my Auntie Renie.
She's alone, and I always try to hunt for her in the spring,
so...give her some of that meat and I know she's going to be happy for it.
It's my life and I'm going to live it.
I'm proud to be Gwich'in,
put it that way.
I wouldn't change it for the world.
It's nearly time to leave the hunting camp,
but before I go,
Stephen wants to show me something -
a very special and private place for his family.
It's the tiny, old cabin where Stephen's parents brought him up
and it feels a great privilege to be allowed to come here.
This whole bunch of kids grew up in it. How many?
12 of us. 12!
Well, mother and father, ten kids.
Wow.
Just this size. But that's just the way it was.
And then, you know, you're talking about...
goddamn old house you're looking at, you know.
Stephen's father was a white policeman
and he fell in love with a local Indian woman.
Was it possible for him to... to stay a Mountie while he married your mother?
No. Why is that?
I don't know, the...
Some kind of law they had them days,
don't exist now,
but that's how... down the Indian was.
For a white man I guess it's OK,
but for a Mountie...
can't marry an Indian. Really?
Too...too low or something, so he got out of the place.
And then he had to take on the ways of living here, the same as everyone else?
Stephen's mother showed her husband how to survive in the wilderness
and they home-taught all their children.
It may sound romantic, but Stephen hints that there were times of deep hardship.
Yeah, I remember... running out of food.
The one word, I suppose, that just really comes to mind more than any other
that I've picked up from Stephen is...is respect.
There's deep respect here for everything.
There's deep respect for the wildlife, for the natural world in every way
and just the sensation of being here,
I can just sit and watch the river go by...
..and you're just part of it and it feels right somehow.
It's time to leave camp and head back to Old Crow.
We've got enough meat to last the family until the caribou return in the autumn.
It's time to celebrate.
WOMAN: ..Set, go!
It's a big day in the Old Crow calendar -
the Caribou Days festival. It's a celebration
of the Gwich'in way of life,
like a village fete back home, but with muskrat skinning.
Everyone's back from their hunting camps.
They've come together to give thanks for the return of the caribou herd
and the success of the hunt.
STEPHEN: You understand it's from a skinned caribou.
Pay attention,
because times have changed
and we can't lose our old way of doing things.
I guess he's doing it the way you should skin a caribou.
Each clan takes about five caribou in the spring
and donates part of it to the festival.
All the events celebrate and reinforce Gwich'in culture
and the skills needed to live in this harsh place.
Third prize for men's log-sawing goes to Bruce!
'Third prize in the log-sawing contest wins me ten dollars,
'and I'm chuffed to bits.'
But I don't fancy my chances in the goose calling.
THEY IMITATE A GOOSE CALL
The caribou harvest helps sustain the whole village all year round.
All other food has to be flown up here at great cost,
so having a supply of free meat is a lifeline to the community.
It's the best village fete I've ever been to, without doubt.
Just the warmth of the crowd and the bizarreness of the activities.
I'm absolutely loving it!
Do you think the future's bright for the caribou herd here?
I hope so.
I can't answer that,
but it'll be a sad day if the caribou ever take off and don't come back.
We always worry about that,
but when it's there, we make the most of it.
Are you going to enter the jig competition tonight?
I'm not too sure about that.
I'm not too much of a jigger. No, nor am I!
Rather surprisingly, the Gwich'in people are very keen on jigging.
Apparently they learnt the custom from Scottish fur trappers in the 19th century
and took to it with gusto.
The Scots have long gone, but the jigging lives on
and continues late into the night.
Sadly, it's time to leave Old Crow
and head south on the next stage of my journey.
It's been a joy spending time with the Gwich'in,
but their existence seems so fragile,
threatened by events beyond
their control, way over the horizon.
I wish them luck, but I think they're right to be scared.
Tomorrow, I'm leaving to meet a group of Indians
who also used to hunt and trap in the wilderness for thousands of years
until the oil industry arrived on their doorstep.
I'm travelling 1,200 miles south-east of Old Crow,
below the Arctic Circle, to the tar sands of Northern Alberta,
a massive opencast oil mine.
Driving through, it's an assault on the senses.
The one thing that's really overpowering me at the moment,
that you have to be here to experience, is the smell.
It stinks!
It really is a pretty pungent, quite acrid smell in the air.
It's like when you drive past
a road that's just had the tar laid,
the bitumen smell.
It's really, really...
It's very thick and it's not pleasant. And it's everywhere.
The site is so enormous that the only way to really see it is from the air.
The tar sands stretch across an area the size of England
and contain the second-largest oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia.
Vast areas of wilderness have been ripped up
for the extraction of oil from soft sandy soils.
This area now produces 1.3 million barrels a day.
This is the very beginning of something huge
that is going to be happening in the next 50 or so years
and it's...
I don't really need to describe it.
It speaks for itself. It's utter desolation.
And the only feeling I have, sitting here right now, is just...is just sadness.
I feel really, really sad in the pit of my stomach.
That's it.
The extraction process is so energy intensive
that this site has become the single largest
industrial emitter of CO2 gases on the planet.
In a world racked by fears of oil security,
the Canadian tar sands offer a safe alternative,
and production is set to double in the next ten years.
I wonder what's it like
living downstream of this.
Fort Chipewyan is a remote Indian village on the shores of Lake Athabasca,
250 kilometres north of the tar sands.
Until recently, the people of Fort Chip lived a traditional life,
hunting in the forest and fishing in the lake.
Like Old Crow, it's only accessible by plane for most of the year.
But when the tar sands arrived, 30 years ago,
the way of life here changed dramatically.
I'm going fishing with
Mike Mercredi and Robert Grandjambe
on Lake Athabasca.
The lake is teeming with fish, which once fed the people of Fort Chip, but no more.
Now, the fish are only used to feed their dogs.
MAN: Pull him right over the boat.
Pull him right in? Oh, my God!
Right on top of this deck.
Right there, OK. Up onto here?
That's actually a small one, you know.
'Mike and Rob have been helping scientists to monitor
'the health of the fish in the lake,
'after noticing strange marks on some of the fish they were catching.'
So, Mike, tell me, you're
involved in checking out these fish.
What are we looking for and why?
We're looking for abrasions...
cysts, any marks that won't be considered normal.
And what sort of things have you been finding?
Large cysts and abrasions and bruises like that.
And that sort of thing, I mean, that just comes from being in a net for a while.
Some of that does, yeah,
but when you find one with a cyst,
it's like a growth on them. OK. Really?
You can see the difference, almost like a big pimple, some of them.
ROBERT: This is something growing there.
There have been studies of the water quality
that have found pollution levels to be normal,
but the local people say that these have been funded by the oil companies
and they simply do not trust them.
ROBERT: Any testing that's ever been done around here was done by industry.
And if you're paying for it, certainly if I'm paying for something,
I want the results I want, because it's my money you're spending!
So, one could say that,
but one could say they are being honest and being fair, so I don't know.
We just don't know, I think that's the thing.
I think if you're going to get involved in this environmental concern,
you have to be very, very careful, and I think each of us has to be careful.
See, look. Right there. There's something odd.
Maybe it's a fish trying to bite to it. I don't know.
We hear so many different stories from different people...
Different people have different reasons.
..dependent on who they belong to or who they work for
or what political organisation they're from.
We hear different stories. So it's really hard.
There's so much uncertainty.
See this? That's another fish biting it. You have to watch for things like that.
I could say, "God, look at pollution." You have to be careful.
That's another fish trying to eat it, or maybe a seagull.
That would be something you'd want to try to get tested
or see what further investigation as to what that actually is.
There's some real, clear distinctions we have to do first.
Find out exactly what's polluting us, if there is pollution,
find out where it's coming from, and charge, or else...
You know, do something with the people that are responsible for it.
What should happen is that
when you make an application to start some kind of a development,
you should sign a waiver form,
"If you destroy the environment or do anything, you get shot,"
as part of your application.
That would fix them up.
The Canadian Government denies
that the industry is causing harmful levels of pollution,
and says that toxicity levels are no more than would naturally be expected.
However, after much pressure,
it's recently set up an advisory panel to look into the monitoring of the tar sands.
But it feels like it will come too late for the people of Fort Chip.
Something fundamental has already been lost here -
the people's trust in the land and the water to provide for them.
Over the last 20 years, the native people living here say
they've experienced an abnormally high incidence of rare forms of cancer.
Many believe that the tar sands are responsible,
although government health officials
say there's no evidence
to suggest this.
CHANTING
Community elder Steve Courtoreille, like many, has lost a relative to cancer,
and is committed to fighting the expansion of the industry.
STEPHEN: All the money in the world isn't going to fix what has happened.
A drastic change has happened.
It ain't going to bring back all the damage that's been done.
After everything's said and done,
only then...our white brothers are going to realise
that they can't drink oil or eat money,
because everything will be destroyed - the animals,
the plants, the water, the land.
And they're reaping the benefits while we're suffering,
and that's something that's got to change.
I want to know more about the tar sands and the people who work there,
so I head back to Fort McMurray.
I've arranged to meet Chief Jim Boucher. He's a First Nation Indian chief
and chairman of the Fort McKay Group of Companies.
They supply services to the tar sands industry
and provide jobs for the indigenous people.
They're making big money.
How much is 50 of these worth?
Book value is about 40 million. In terms of asset value
of the Fort McKay Group of Companies, it's over 100 million.
100 million, just in assets? Yeah.
Just the one company. Wow!
Yeah, and we have a wide variety of companies.
OK, so you're pretty solvent? Yeah, we're a pretty good entity. Yeah.
Pretty solid.
These native-owned companies provide support services to the industry -
fuel distribution, land reclamation,
haulage and warehousing,
with a turnover of $500 million a year.
So, as well as being chief of the village,
Jim is also chairman of a multi-million-dollar business empire.
You have to have the ability to do the work that's out there
and you have to do it professionally
and in a safe way.
So I think that's what's different about Fort McKay.
You know, the perspective we have
is that we need to be able to do the job properly
and demonstrate that on a continuous basis.
Tar sands oil is also known as dirty oil.
Extracting it from the bitumen-soaked sand requires huge amounts of energy.
It takes a whole barrel of oil just to produce two more barrels.
The industry has only become profitable in the last decade,
largely due to the high price of oil.
This is what it's all about.
Mixed in with this dirt here is the oil.
And in front of me you've got one of the shovels
of which there's dozens all over the
area, scooping up the sand
and then taking it to the processing plant,
where, through seven days of manufacture and process,
all of this gets turned into oil that's good enough to go into your car.
This industry never sleeps.
Trucks haul dirt 24 hours a day, 365 days a year
and will do so until it all runs out
in about 200 years' time.
The expansion of the tar sands site has created a boom town in Alberta.
Thousands of people
have flocked here to get rich quick.
With weekends and overtime
you can make more than $1,000 a day.
We're bringing in people from the Philippines and Mexico
and from other parts of the world, from Europe.
But today, most of the people are coming from Canada.
And wages are high, people are keen to be here,
there's a demand for labour?
There is an upsurge with regards to employment opportunities
and business opportunities
in this region,
as a result of oil sands development.
This is the big driver with regards to the economy
not only for Alberta but for Canada also.
You have to remember oil sands is a major contributor to the Canadian economy.
The Fort McKay Group provides food and board for over 3,000 oil workers.
I'm curious to see
what they think about this industry.
Tar sands, everyone's talking about
it around the world.
There is a fair bit of negativity out there.
Does that come into your minds when you make the decision to come here?
I've never heard anyone complain about the tar sands being a bad thing.
If it wasn't for us, nobody'd drive cars.
Everybody would be riding around in little electric vehicles.
As long as the world has a dependency on oil,
they don't care where it comes from,
but they'll bitch about every aspect of it.
But as long as we can make a good living out of it,
there's no problems.
I couldn't care less, really.
LAUGHTER
And if it was proven
that it was causing serious issues?
If it was proven
and put all over the news and my face was on it,
saying what I just said, I wouldn't like it,
but they're not going to let it get that bad.
The oil companies make too much money to have that bad image all over TV,
so they're going to be working their damnedest
to get to the high standards of, you know, being environmentally friendly,
so I don't think we have to worry about much.
The nearby town of Fort McMurray is where the workers come
to let off steam and spend some of their hard-earned cash.
With a population of 70,000 migrant workers, mostly men,
the town feels pretty grim.
This place here kind of sums this town up for me a little bit.
Cos it is, it's like a boom town.
It's a gold rush here.
Wages here are twice, three times
what they would be in a normal town somewhere else in Canada.
And everybody is here for one thing alone, and that is money.
Fort McKay First Nations runs a haulage business on site
and Jim has arranged for me to meet one of his drivers,
o go for a quick tour of the facility.
Patricia is going to be my driver
and my tour bus is one of Jim's 100-tonne trucks.
What are you like at driving these?
Are they quite fun to drive?
Oh, yeah. It's a good job.
We're off on one of Patricia's regular runs,
hauling dirt from a cleared area
to a newly-made mountain at the other end of the site.
Is this a career forever, for you,
or are you saving up for something? I see myself doing this a long time.
Really? Yeah.
Cos you enjoy it and the money's good? You can move up.
Like, I want to learn how to operate different equipment,
so I'm going to be here for a while. Sure.
Are there any people in the community
that disagree with all of this, you know, big industry happening here?
Um...
Well, the things with the wildlife and the animals,
that's probably the only thing I could see.
But other than that, this is the way
they support their families.
This is the way of living right now... Sure.
D'you know what I mean? It's all we have around us.
Patricia's a single mum, so she's working here to help support her children.
She's also a member of the Fort McKay First Nation.
Her family have been hunting and trapping here for generations.
PATRICIA: My grandma grew up, she grew up in the bush.
She's a tough old lady.
What does she think of all this? She's old, you know.
She doesn't know...
They're not told, like, the elders...
I don't think they're told how much pollution
and how much damage they're actually doing to this, you know?
As soon as they wave all the money in front of them, you know,
so, fine, keep them quiet for a bit, right?
Does it make you sad? Hm?
Does it make you sad? Yeah, I just wish I was...
I wish I was a lawyer.
I wish I could get right in there and...you know, really try to understand,
cos I don't understand a lot of it, either, myself.
If I really understood, really, really understood,
maybe I'd want to do something about it.
But, you know, you can't fight this industry, you know what I mean?
You'd be crazy.
Everything about this place is on an epic scale.
Five minutes ago I was in one of these trucks
and at that time, it was the biggest truck I'd ever seen in my life.
But that was five minutes ago.
This baby...is 400 tonnes,
and it can carry up to 400 tonnes as well.
It's as big as an apartment block. It's a moving apartment block.
You just don't want to get in its way.
I want to know what it was like here
before the industry began,
so Chief Jim agrees to take me out on the Athabasca River.
As chief of the Fort McKay First Nation,
Jim has seen a lot of changes during his time here as leader.
At first, Jim's people tried to oppose the industry,
but the government claimed ownership of their land
and has now sold leases to over 90 oil companies.
What does this make you feel like when you see it here?
This was a good spot for our people
to spend the summer.
They would come here to pick berries.
Had a waterfall here.
Fish, hunt moose...
And how did you feel when you came up against
the power that's here, Jim? What chance did you have?
In 1963, we had no chance whatsoever in terms of stopping this from going on.
It was a decision that was made south of here by a white government
and they made a decision based on what's in the best interest for them.
The people in the community didn't have the resources
or the means to challenge the decision of this magnitude
and we had no say in terms of what goes on here.
Then, in the 1980s, a successful anti-fur campaign
led to the collapse of the tribe's fur-trapping business.
When that occurred, overnight our economy disappeared.
Our people had nothing left to do on the land with respect to trapping.
So, the anti-fur campaign shut down our traditional economy
and put our people into poverty.
We were faced with a dire situation where the only opportunity we had
was welfare from the Government of Canada and the Government of Alberta,
and that was not a very desirable prospect.
So we turned to this opportunity with some reluctance
and tried to make the best of it
so the people in our community can have a future.
Your ancestors, Jim, used to believe that the land was actually alive.
What would they make of this? I think they would have a hard time.
They loved the land.
They loved... This was their country.
This is what they knew.
This is all they knew.
And it's something that was passed on from generation to generation.
Everywhere you go, you can see signs
of where your ancestors were,
where your family was,
and you can have a good feeling
about going to visit places where your family was.
This place here was an important place for our people.
It was a gathering place.
So, when that's gone,
all our memories... of that place is gone too.
Jim wants to show me a small reminder of how things used to be.
His family own a hunting cabin that belonged to his father,
still standing within the heart of the extraction site.
We're accompanied
by a convoy of PR and safety people.
It's a beautiful spot.
Yeah, it's a beautiful spot. It's where my dad used to stay.
Quite a few years ago I built this cabin for him.
You built it for him? Yeah, my brothers and I.
How long ago was it that you built this? Oh, I don't know. Jesus.
15 years ago, maybe? OK.
Quite a few years ago.
And could you hear that high noise 15 years ago?
No, never.
What was here 15 years ago? There was nothing here.
Just squirrels and rabbits and beavers and muskrats and fish
and ducks and geese and...
Great spot. Yeah.
It's pretty dry in here. It's nice. How do you feel now, being here?
I feel good. I feel like the old times. It's good that it's still here.
It's good that there's memories here and...
and, er...
and you can feel your... the spirit of your dad here and... Yeah.
It's the second time on this trip that I've visited an old family cabin,
but this is very different to Stephen's parents' place back in Old Crow.
We're having quite a strange barbecue with all the oil people,
and Jim's older sister, Rose, is cooking up moose and caribou
and clearly hasn't read the script.
Look at the land now.
It's been raped.
That's how I see it.
The land has been raped.
You know, Mother Earth has been raped. Look at it.
Trees are being cut down.
Things are taken out of the land and not being put back properly.
The water is being abused.
The animals are being abused, you know? Where will they go?
It's our land, it's my land,
it's my father's land, and we should have access to it, you know?
And I believe in progress,
you know, to make things better.
But not to totally erase what was there before,
and doing so, you know?
Not to totally erase away a life or a whole nation, you know?
Just for progress?
No, I don't think so.
'I asked John Rhind, chief operating officer of Shell Albian Sands,
'what his company does when it finishes digging up the land.'
Our job is to reclaim that land, and so when we started our operations,
one of the things we do, before we even start putting a shovel into the ground,
is we make agreements in terms of how we're going to reclaim,
when we're going to reclaim
and what it's going to look like at the end of the day.
So, some of what you would have flown over
as you were looking at the other, older, existing operations,
some of that land's already been reclaimed and most people can't tell from the air.
It looks like arboreal forest.
So our job is to return the land back into the same condition,
or similar condition to what we found it in.
But simply re-planting trees
just doesn't deal with the much larger environmental impacts here.
The economic benefits, however, are plain to see.
At Jim's village, Fort McKay,
they spent $40 million last year on new facilities,
and every man, woman and child in the tribe
gets a dividend of $10,000 a year as a share of the profits.
And the cash just keeps rolling in.
Fort McKay is now looking to start its own oil extraction company.
Amongst the trappings of corporate success in Jim's office,
his traditional headdress stands out
as a symbol of the past.
It's beautiful, Jim. Thanks.
How does it make you feel, wearing it?
I feel like I should go to the bar tonight and see if there's any girls.
On a serious note,
it's like every mark of success for modern person and community -
wealth, happiness, health, material goods -
but yet you know what you had in the past as well.
Is it all worth it?
I would prefer that we had the old way of life.
But the fact of the matter is, the old way of life has gone.
It died with my grandfather.
It died with our ancestors.
It died when oil was first produced from the ground in this region.
And we will never be able to bring it back.
Old Crow feels like a long way away from here.
I've met two very different men on this trip.
Jim has accepted his place in an industrial world,
while Stephen is still living with nature,
and embodies a way of life and a set of values
that are disappearing from the Arctic.
Chief Jim has given in to big industry,
but what other option did he have?
It would be so convenient to just blame everyone working here
and Albertans
for all the damage that's happening.
But, really, it's more complex than that. We're all to blame in some way or other.
Anyone who's using oil, including me in this huge car flying around the place.
It's our addiction to oil that's driving the economy,
that is driving what is happening here.
And until that changes, this sort of thing is going to continue.
But the cost of oil doesn't take into account
the damage to the landscape and to the people who were here first.
If it did, would we be willing to pay the price?
Next time, I'm in northern Europe.
I live with the most modern of reindeer herders.
THEY CALL OUT, REINDEER GRUNT
Once again, I'm knackered.
And as my journey ends, I witness the magical return of the arctic night.
I've just been treated to the northern lights, which are finally out to play.