Three Days of Protests Led by Aboriginals in BC Underscore and and Unite Pipeline Opposition – Indian Country Today
By David P. Ball October 25, 2012
Melina Laboucan-Massimo’s family has felt the impacts of an oil spill disaster firsthand on their Lubicon Cree territories in Alberta: burning eyes, headaches, nausea and dizziness.
On October 22 she brought her cautionary tale to 4,000 protesters in front of the provincial legislature building in Victoria, British Columbia. Rallying against a trifecta of pipelines proposed to export bitumen from Alberta’s oil sands, demonstrators reiterated longstanding warnings that the pipelines and further development of the sands threaten Canada’s rivers and pristine West Coast. The events brought some of Canada’s biggest labor unions, including thousands of fossil-fuel-industry workers, together with large environmental groups and aboriginals.
“To this day, I continue to carry that grief and the sadness from knowing what our people are going through, and what is happening to the land,” the Greenpeace climate campaigner and Lubicon Nation member said, describing her family’s symptoms after a major pipeline rupture in 2011. “The land and people will never be the same. And I would hope that no other community would have to go through this. That’s why I’m here today.”
Read more: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/10/25/three-days-of-protests-led-by-aboriginals-in-b-c-underscore-and-unite-pipeline-opposition-142191
