TY - JOUR AU - Whetter, Darryl AB - 1. Introduction How does Canadian literature, a national literature that loves the landscape novel, possibly more than any other national literature does, continue to avoid its most defining landscape—the Alberta tar sands?1 As detailed throughout, the contentious tar sands have had scant manifestation in some Canadian fringe theatre but lack attention in fiction, the country’s most popular literary genre. Canadian fiction is shockingly perhaps collusively silent on the tar sands, while celebrated Canadian landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky rose to international renown partly through his images of them (Burtynsky “CV”). Far worse than a blind spot in Canada’s national literature, this absence of any meaningful treatment in Canadian fiction of what Noam Chomsky and Laray Polk conclude is “the dirtiest oil on the planet” (160) risks contributing to the “cultural genocide” the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, as well as scholars and First Nations members and stakeholders, decry as synonymous with Canadian history and governance (“Truth” 1; Bolen). The disproportionately high incidence of cancer found in contemporary First Nations downriver from the effluents of the tar sands detailed below denotes a chillingly physical manifestation of the Canadian First Nations genocide alternately described as both cultural and physical (Mako 191; Woolford & Benvenuto, 374; Bolen). With the tar sands constituting one of Canada’s major contributions, and a conscious one, to global warming, the genocidal aspects of Canada’s tar sands, which may well be the least sustainable project on the planet, are not only domestic but also international. Canada’s sustained government and social support for a tar-sands industry with intense expenditures of carbon, energy, water, public subsidy and First Nations health risks contributing to the global genocides of climate change inflicted on youth, the globally coastal, the climate vulnerable and what the Pentagon, not simply bloggers, regard as impending “climate refugees” (Hartmann 239). Like Our Sands, my tar-sands novel-in-progress, Canadian First-Nation Anishinabe author Winona LaDuke calls the Alberta tar-sands industry “the ecological equivalent of Auschwitz” (Hanson 7). 2. Destination: Fort Mac, Alberta Two billboards greeted me in quick succession in June 2017 as I drove, as a guilt-ridden Canadian and a researching novelist, into Fort McMurray, Alberta, the epicenter of Canada’s globally notorious tar-sands industry (what CNN.com calls “extreme energy”) (Sutter). Those two billboards, and the danger of the road I was on, reminded me of a third roadside sign, recently removed—the former municipal welcome sign I’d seen photographed in various articles and blogs as well as referenced in books. Until just a few years before my 2017 research trip to the capital of Canada’s contentious petroleum industry, the official sign of the recently fire-ravaged and once-booming, not-yet-busting municipality used to read “Welcome to Fort McMurray: We Have the Energy” (Nikiforuk 57). With nationally high rates of narcotics use by sands workers (“Boomtown”) and Chatelaine magazine declaring Fort McMurray the most lucrative prostitution market in Canada (Preville 118), the city’s semi-retired, palimpsestic slogan “We Have the Energy” is multiply ironic for a coked-up workforce (“Boomtown”) of mostly displaced men that finds Chatelaine quoting sex-trade workers who describe Christmas as one of their busiest days (Preville 118). Given those social pollutants for what is described in The Economist as Canada’s “boomtown on a bender,” the commercial ads on those two billboards knew their market. “Looking for Resources” asked the first, with the headshot of a fictitious “resource”-brokering female employee at left made to look like a schoolgirl with her white shirt, glasses and, yes, a bow in her blonde hair. The first billboard had a bright background, presumably to emphasize the youthful female face of the “resource” receptionist. On the next, with a background so dark it was practically hammered out of cast iron, at far right a whiskered young man with buff arms stressfully gripped his forehead while the caption asked, “Feeling Overwhelmed?” to advertise a help line. Given the overwhelming local, provincial, national, and international threats the Alberta tar sands pose as Canada’s major contribution to global warming, and a genocidal one, the Alberta tar sands provide a horrifying illustration of peak oil, the petroleum industry’s political influence, field work for literary environmental criticism, and a massive if not propagandistic blind spot in Canadian literature. The freakishly high rates of cancer found in the First Nations around Fort Chipewyan, Alberta detailed below are the most vivid manifestations of Canada’s tar sands contributing to a genocide both physical and cultural. The threats of this industry include, but are not limited to, narcotics, a sex trade servicing migrant workers, pollution, and a lethal environmental racism that poisons First Nations. American literature addresses slavery and German literature reckons with the Holocaust. English-language Canadian fiction (aka CanLit; see Douglas Coupland’s definition below) is paradoxically obsessed with landscape stories yet silent on the horrifying landscape of Alberta’s tar sands (and their reverberations in our political, economic, racial, and social landscapes). To complete research on my tar-sands novel-in-progress, Our Sands, I travelled the tar-sands trail in Alberta from a downtown Calgary full of the bright, sky-scraping headquarters of Husky Energy, Cenovus Energy, Enbridge, Encana, Gibson Energy, etc., up to the north-eastern corner of the province and beyond. I here present some interview highlights and field-work from that trip through the southern urban, financial and political landscapes of Calgary and Edmonton up to petroleum-epicenter Fort McMurray (complete with a carbon-expensive helicopter flight over the enormous open-pit mines; see Fig.1). My sands research tour continued and included interviews with First Nations elders and community stakeholders in cancer-ravaged Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, and Fort Smith, North West Territories, two communities downriver on the Athabasca River, the watery ‘lifeline’ (and cancer conduit) that has enabled so much of the notorious tar sands production (Nikiforuk 97–98). This essay expands my field notes from that trip with relevant readings on the sands and from environmental criticism to consider national literatures, climate change, and the possible cultural engagement for writers, artists, and their teachers provided by peak oil, climate change, and environmental degradation (if not environmental genocide). Figure 1: Open in new tabDownload slide Haul Trucks at Work in a Tar-Sands Pit Mine Outside Fort McMurray, Canada (Photo by the Author) Figure 1: Open in new tabDownload slide Haul Trucks at Work in a Tar-Sands Pit Mine Outside Fort McMurray, Canada (Photo by the Author) 3. Route: “Suicide 63” Fittingly for Canada’s national oil capital, Alberta’s Provincial Highway 63 drives directly into the city of Fort McMurray. Highways in other major Canadian cities, like those where I studied and/or taught Creative Writing (e.g., Halifax, Nova Scotia; Fredericton, New Brunswick; as well as Kingston and Windsor in Ontario) route past a municipal downtown core, requiring one to exit highway for city. In “Fort Mac,” the four lanes of Highway 63, aka “the Highway of Death,” run directly through the city (Grescoe). Due to geographic constraints important to my novel-in-progress and which received international media attention when a massive forest fire forced a complete evacuation of Fort Mac (Kassam), Highway 63 is, as my novel’s characters think, like a drawbridge into the castle of the city (and the tar-sands industry). As the Guardian describes, the Spring 2016 evacuation of nearly 90,000 residents found most of them driving south on what is essentially the only road out of the city (Kassam). As Google Maps shows, Highway 63 is one side of Fort McMurray’s rectangular downtown, though the only one made of asphalt, not water. Fort McMurray sits on the confluence of the Athabasca and Clearwater Rivers, and a nearly perpendicular turn in the latter has it constitute two sides of that rectangular downtown. Even the Fort McMurray International Airport feeds directly into Highway 63. Expansions in the oil industry after 2000 made that airport so busy it was not expanded so much as rebuilt, leaving the old airport to service just northern flights, like mine up to Fort Smith, a few hundred meters beside a sleek new airport (“Fort”). The northern-flowing Athabasca River, over which the highway climbs on busy bridges, is the fourth side of Fort Mac’s rectangular downtown and basically the kitchen sink, albeit a historically significant one, of the water-intensive and genocidal tar-sands industry (Nikiforuk 97–99). In a lethal poetic justice, the only highway into the oil city of Fort Mac has a disproportionately high number of traffic accidents and speeding tickets. For decades, the swampy Canadian terrain known as muskeg made the highway harder to expand, yet most of the sands equipment and workers have always arrived from Canada’s more heavily populated south2 (with its lower First Nations populations), not from the less industrial north, with its lower general population but higher concentration of First Nations.3 (In every Canadian province, the population density of First Nations rises the more north one travels.) Before Highway 63 was twinned to four lanes in 2016, the narrow, two-lane predecessor was nicknamed “Hell’s Highway, Suicide 63, or the Highway of Death. The police call it McMurray 500” (Nikiforuk 38). Andrew Nikiforuk’s book-length examination of the sands claims, “According to Syncrude Canada [one of the largest oil producers in Alberta] Highway 63 probably ferries the highest tonnage per mile of any road in Canada” (39). Canada’s magazine The Walrus simply sums up the Fort Mac traffic as “murderous” (Grescoe). More than just heavy machinery and more fuel than just gasoline contributed to the “1000 collisions” on this highway between 2001 and 2005 (Nikiforuk 39). The Economist claims “about 40% of the [oil] workers test positive for cocaine or marijuana in job screening or post-accident tests” (“Boomtown”). Fort Mac does indeed “have the energy,” though the chemicals are often narcotic, not just petrochemical (“Boomtown”). Nikiforuk describes the Highway 63 accidents increasing on Thursday and Sunday nights when “thousands of workers return to their families and girlfriends in Edmonton. Most are exhausted; many are drugged on amphetamines or pissed to the gills” (39). In my novel-in-progress,4 when a young ecoteur couple head north to the Fort Mac epicenter, they overhear cocaine referred to as “the white fuel for the black” and marijuana as “green gas” as well as “CAT fuel” [named for the multi-million-dollar CAT haul trucks Wired regards as “true monsters” and “yellow pachyderms” in the Fort Mac sands] (Koerner). According to Wired, a haul truck like the “Caterpillar 797” is “48 feet from tip to tail and 22 feet high, it creeps uphill with a 400-ton payload at 1 mile per hour” (Koerner). Even pro-mining sites like Mining.com acknowledge that the haul trucks run “24/7” and have “massive tires, which are twice the height of an average man and cost close to $50, 000 each” (Topf). A report by Alberta’s Pembina Institute describes the trucks as, “15 metres long by 7 metres tall”; they have “4-metre tall tires and are 40% heavier than a Boeing 747 airplane” (Woynillowicz 12). However, my novelist’s fieldwork trip there had me complicit in the same peak oil I went there to examine. Whenever I’d been a Canadian car owner, I’d owned something with just four cylinders, and my last car was a hybrid. However, for that drive on the notoriously dangerous Highway 63, I rented yet-another Alberta SUV, re-hearing from the Tom Waits obsession of my grad-student twenties his lyrics, “no one brings anything small into a bar around here.” Carbon-worse, I flew there from the other side of the planet, from Singapore. Normally I try to tell myself that my work as the inaugural director of the first Creative Writing master’s program in Southeast Asia has me working towards greater individual and cultural wisdom. However, we may soon have to admit that the wisdom of carbon expenditures could have an increasingly simple calculus. Don’t go West, un-young man. In one of the many conversations I had with First Nations elders in Fort Chipewyan, Fort Mac, and Fort Smith, Henry Beaver,5 accurately called me out on this very paradox, (and/or hypocrisy and/or carbon collusion) before we finished shaking hands. When I stated that I was writing a novel on the tar sands and had come, in his case, to Fort Smith, North West Territories (just over the north-western border of northern Alberta and downriver on the Athabasca and vulnerable to tar sands pollution), he asked me two relevant questions: “Did you bike here? Did you paddle here?” We both knew that I too had arrived by jet fuel and gas pedal. Even more complex, the same First Nations communities that risk chemical poisoning downriver from the sands have long had intimate economic ties with the lucrative tar-sands jobs. In Fort Chipewyan, when I interviewed the Mikisew Cree Elders Coordinator Stella Marten at the band offices, she summed up Fort Chipewyan as a village “of grandparents and grandchildren.” The parents, she claimed, were all “down south” working in Fort Mac. Working, that meant, in the tar sands. Like my carbon-intensive trip to Alberta, Canadian landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky epitomizes the reciprocal nature of attentive and inspiring art, and of enabling and disabling carbon expenditures, in his international travelling show Oil. His industrial landscape photographs document oil extraction and processing around the world (including several career-making Fort McMurray images). The resultant photographs have been displayed in Canada, China, Germany, the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, Azerbaijan and America (Burtynsky “CV”). Burtynsky describes the simultaneously enabling and threatening nature of oil: When I first started photographing industry it was out of a sense of awe at what we as a species were up to. […] The car that I drove cross-country began to represent not only freedom, but also something much more conflicted. I began to think about oil itself: as both the source of energy that makes everything possible, and as a source of dread, for its ongoing endangerment of our habitat. (“Artist’s Statement”) With creative writing students, I encourage them to seek these sites of personal conflict and entanglement, offering this consolation from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: “Though the artist has beliefs, like other people, he realizes that a salient characteristic of art is its radical openness to persuasion. Even those beliefs he’s surest of, the artist puts under pressure to see if they will stand” (129). Describing one value of landscape art, Neil Evernden claims, “The artist makes the world personal—known, loved, feared or whatever, but not neutral” (100). Canada’s tar sands are arguably genocidal, and their depiction should be anything but “neutral.” 4. States of Matter: the Counterfeit Why behind this What Alberta’s naturally occurring and very unnaturally extracted tarry bitumen was once used by its First Nations to seal and patch canoes and tepees (Farnsworth; Klinkenberg), long before their settler provincial and federal governments would willfully permit and subsidize their poisoning. According to The Atlantic, the Alberta tar sands now comprise a “50, 000 square mile [130, 000 square kilometre] reservoir of heavy crude oil, possibly holding 2 trillion barrels of recoverable oil” (Taylor). Unfortunately for the health of Canada’s citizens, its democracy, environment, and global reputation, most of that oil reserve is, in chemical terms, a solid, not a liquid. Technologically, the Canadian tar-sands industry is devoted to transforming broken slabs of bitumen (which look a lot like the asphalt much of it will become again) into the liquid oil that, curse the planet, still largely makes the world go around. In Chad Harbach’s recent novel The Art of Fielding, when a university president is rebuked by his board for proposing campus environmental upgrades, he’s reminded, “Oil is money” (59). In north-eastern Alberta, that oil sits—as a solid, not a liquid—beneath boreal forests The Walrus describes as “containing a quarter of the world’s wetlands, provid[ing] habitat to five billion birds,” being “a carbon sink twice as effective as any tropical rainforest” (Grescoe). For Canada to get at its (unprofitable) oil, we first have to not so much cut down forests as erase them entirely—soil, water and all. As seen in The Atlantic article’s chilling first photograph, pursuit of tar-sands oil initially requires the levelling of carbon-scrubbing boreal forest (Taylor), going beyond the normal eye-gouging clear cuts that are also an unfortunate specialité de la maison in Canadian forestry (Chung). A Forest Watch study claims, “Of that [global forest] degradation, more than a fifth—21.4 per cent—occurred in Canada, the study found. That’s more than any other country” (“Canada”). Once these carbon-sinking forests have been felled, the stumps and what the sands industry tellingly calls “overburden” (Nuccitelli), which includes water-filtering peat bogs (Kunzig), must be scraped away until the landscape is, in Naomi Klein’s chillingly apt phrase, “skinned alive” (139). In 2013, Canadian singer Neil Young angered many tar sands stakeholders when he visited the area then concluded, “Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima. Fort McMurray is a wasteland. The Indians up there and the native peoples are dying. The fuel is all over—the fumes everywhere—you can smell it when you get to town” (Babad). Mostly three-hundred feet up in my chartered helicopter, shooting photographs out an open window, I routinely smelled the most powerful chemical smells I have ever met in my nearly fifty years of life. At 300 feet up in the enormous northern skies above the strip mines and tailings ponds, my eyes still watered instantly. More objectively, a National Geographic article devoted to the Alberta tar sands states: Nowhere on Earth is more earth being moved these days than in the Athabasca Valley. To extract each barrel of oil from a surface mine, the industry must first cut down the forest, then remove an average of two tons of peat and dirt that lie above the oil sands layer, then two tons of the sand itself. (Kunzig) Once the forest and all its soil and water (a precious resource for this notoriously water-intensive, water-destroying industry) have been scraped, hauled, pumped or even burnt away, building-sized earth-moving equipment can finally come in to smash what to most civilians would look like naturally occurring pavement in some of the world’s largest pit mines (e.g. 100 meters deep) (Woynillowicz 12). Do not assume, however, that this New-New Promethean work is, as our politicians tell us, profitable or even necessary. As detailed below, corporate welfare ultimately fuels those building-sized haul trucks. Unbelievable on another level, in this radically subsidized industry, the profits often leave the country, while the pollutants, including heightened sex and narcotics trades, remain. When burnt, the tar-sands oil directly contributes to warming the planet, and it requires burning more greenhouse gases than other oil sources to get. According to mechanical engineer John Abraham of the University of Saint Thomas in Minnesota, “If we burn all the tar sand oil, the temperature rise, just from burning that tar sand, will be half of what we’ve already seen,” an amount Scientific American pegs at “an estimated additional nearly 0.4 degree C from Alberta alone” (Biello “How”). Once exposed, the slab-like bitumen is generally “processed” into liquid oil in one of two ways, both of which use incredible amounts of natural gas and water, all while emitting substantial GHGs. In the more conventional method, bitumen is scooped out of pit mines and hauled off for processing in trucks are as big as houses (Koerner; see Fig. 1) that run all day every day with engines “roughly equivalent in size to a locomotive engine” (Woynillowicz 49). According to another Scientific American article the second “in situ” refining process, known as “steam-assisted gravity drainage,” requires even more natural gas than the strip-mining method (Biello “Opposite”).6 Drew Zieglgansberger, himself a senior vice president in petroleum company Cenovus, acknowledges that the industry reliance on natural gas means, “We’re burning a cleaner fossil fuel to get a dirtier fuel” (Marshall). Eric Reguly describes this robbing of carbon-Peter to pay dirtier-carbon-Paul the “reverse alchemy” of the tar-sands industry (Woynillowicz 15). Alberta investigative journalist Nikiforuk points out that this daily reliance on cleaner-burning natural gas burns, “enough natural gas every day to heat four million homes” (4). To the rational, the Alberta tar sands cannot seem profitable, let alone conscionable, yet they have been a deepening fact of Canadian political life for the past half century (pun intended). Racially, environmentally, economically and financially, Canada’s tar sands are, as my novel says, “the black mark on the national soul,” extending but diversifying Canada’s genocide against its First Peoples. According to Scientific American, “the [Alberta] oil sands industry has greenhouse gas emissions greater than New Zealand and Kenya—combined” (Biello “How”). Biello goes on cite industry analysts who claim, “All told, producing and processing tar sands oil results in roughly 14 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than the average oil used in the U.S.” and details that tar sands “emissions have doubled since 1990 and will double again by 2020” (Biello “Opposite”). As detailed below, economic inefficiencies of this scale (i.e. of the petroleum industry globally and not just in Canada) invariably require the will of politicians alongside those of investors. For us Canadians, complacency is a source of guilty humor, yet more than fifty years of support by various federal and provincial governments for Canada’s tar-sands industry is both an extension and an aberration of Canadian political complacency. My novel borrows one of many jokes about the Canadian refusal to protest: How do you get fifty Canadians out of a swimming pool? Tell them to get out. True, and not true, for the tar sands. Contrary to the self-satisfied national identity of many Canadians who want to regard themselves/ourselves as global peacekeepers and human rights leaders, we subsidize the environmental, global, and racist crimes of the tar sands to the tune of “3.3bn” a year “from both federal and provincial governments” (Milman). Those subsidies, Canada has long known, directly contribute to lethal toxins flowing into the hunting grounds if not the drinking water of our First Nations people north of Fort McMurray. 5. The Maple-Syrup Genocide One of the epigraphs for an internal section of my novel Our Sands comes, not accidentally, from a waste-management novel, Jonathan Miles’s Want Not: If we unlock genocide from its semantic restraints, as I will do in the pages that follow, we can clearly see that it has occurred, in one part of the globe or another, and in varying scope and intensity, on nearly every day of recorded history. It is civilization. If you are reading these words it is part of you, as it is, painfully, part of me. (381) One of the two epigraphs for the entire novel comes from science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: The Neanderthals lived in Europe for more than a hundred thousand years and during that period they had no more impact on their surroundings than any other large vertebrate . … With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it. (258) Given their known poisoning of northern-Alberta First Nations, Canada’s tar sands is a contemporary extension of its nineteenth-century genocide of First Peoples. Abnormally high cancer concentrations among First Nations living within the watershed of the Athabasca river (that kitchen-sink drain of the tar sands industry) find others who share my novel’s depiction of the Alberta petro-toxification as latent genocide (Gordon 5). Working in and around Fort Chipewyan,7 Alberta, downriver on the Athabasca River, physician Dr. John O’Connor noted five cases of cholangiocarcinoma, a cancer that “normally appears in only one in a hundred thousand people,” among First-Nation residents (Nikiforuk 97–98). Adapting Viktor Shklovsky, my novel hopes to re- and de-familiarize this genocidal, state-funded toxicity. Dr. O’Connor’s subsequent persecution by Alberta Health—the body governing health care in the province of Alberta—suggests state collusion in the Canadian and Albertan toxification of First Nations lands and peoples (Nikiforuk 98–100; Downstream). Speaking before the Parliament of Canada’s Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development on Thursday June 11, 2009, Dr. O’Connor alleges that in 2006, during his time as a physician in Fort Chipewyan, Health Canada “took boxes of deceased files to Edmonton” to do, they claimed, “a study of illnesses in the community” (“Evidence”). In fact, “They had actually given the information to the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board in Fort McMurray … because that board was being asked questions about any potential health impacts of ongoing tar sands mining” (“Evidence”). To recap, in Alberta, if not Canada, energy is more important than health, especially First Nations health. In that same testimony, Dr. O’Connor cites a February 2008 Alberta Cancer Board “comprehensive study” that indeed finds “a 30% higher rate of cancer and, in some areas, rare cancers” (“Evidence”). Inexplicably and contrary to the data, Dr. O’Connor’s public attention to this disproportionately high cancer rate earned him an accusation of “causing undue alarm in the community” by the governing “College of Physicians and Surgeons in Edmonton” (“Evidence”). With his first-hand experience of excessively high concentrations of cancer in general and rare cancers in particular downriver from the tar sands, Dr. O’Connor elsewhere raises the terribly relevant question, “If we could reverse the flow of the river [the Athabasca River, conduit for numerous oil sands effluvia] and people in Fort McMurray had to drink the water that people in Fort Chipewyan drink, can you imagine what the reaction would be?” (Nikiforuk 101). Geography created the northern flow of the Athabasca River, but Canada’s longstanding racism towards it First Nations accepts the known flow of toxins into First Nations in north-eastern Alberta and up to Fort Smith, Northwest Territories and beyond. Canadian state complicity in First Nations genocide is far too easily demonstrated in various government actions beyond the tar-sands strip mines. Various federal and provincial policies in Canada and Alberta subsidize the tar-sands industry (whose companies are often ultimately American) either directly through cash support or indirectly through taxes which are lowered if not ignored. Jeff Rubin is the former chief economist of World Markets at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. Writing in The Globe and Mail newspaper he notes: Do the math on some 2 million barrels a day of heavily discounted oil exports and suddenly you’re talking about an enormous wealth transfer from Canadian oil producers to American refineries. (Note, the subsidy is pocketed by U.S. refiners, not motorists, who don't see the Canadian discount when filling up at the pumps). (Rubin) The Guardian pegs Canada’s subsidy of its biggest green-house gas polluter at “$3.3bn in government subsidies flowing to oil and gas producers in the country a year,” subsidies which “undermine” “Canada’s attempt to act on climate change” (Milman). In 2008, Nikiforuk noted that Alberta hadn’t “publicly reviewed” its oil royalty rates since 1992 (139); the not-easy-to-find rates were in fact “among the world’s lowest” (Nikiforuk 158). The unregulated, poorly monitored royalty rates dropped so low that in 2001–2004 the Alberta government actually made more money from Video Lottery Terminals than the tar sands (Nikiforuk 159). Alberta’s lack of public investment of oil revenue is essentially the opposite of Norway’s planning for the future. Journalist Daniel Tencer reports, “Norway’s [oil] fund amounts to US$192, 000 (C$235, 000) for every person in the country. Alberta's fund works out to C$4, 150 per person in the province.” The oil industry’s influence in Alberta extends beyond laughably low provincial royalty rates; Nikiforuk cites The Edmonton Journal’s description of a “sophisticated bugging device” found “in the office of the Treasury Department in the Terrace Building at the Alberta Legislature” (i.e. in the provincial capital) (160). The Canadian tar sands are part of a doubly global problem where numerous governments create planetary corporate welfare of, according to The Globe and Mail (et al.), “$2-trillion in public subsidies” to accelerate and prop up a planet-killing oil-and-gas industry (Solomon). In a democracy, the use of public money of course questions whether Canada hasn’t also been using public will in its poisoning of First Peoples. Public memory, not just public money, demonstrates the willful racism of Canadian and Albertan governments. Calgary, Alberta, the financial center of Canada’s tar sands, recently saw its Bishop Grandin High School celebrate a 50th anniversary (“50th Anniversary of Bishop Grandin High School.”). Edmonton, the provincial capital of Alberta, hosts a “Grandin” station on its municipal transit light rail network that, according to The Edmonton Journal, included a contentious mural which for “25 years” left “First Nations peoples deeply offended by the benevolent portrayal of residential schools” (Pratt). The mural, still up but now accompanied by others, portrays Bishop Grandin as a positive destination for a First Nations infant being brought to him by a nun (Pratt). Pratt quotes some of the many local First Nations members aghast by how the original mural has long been regarded as propaganda given its rosy depiction of a First Nations infant being forcibly relocated into what is now known as Canada’s notoriously abusive residential schools of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Pratt). In letters, Bishop Grandin overtly promoted residential schools as a calculated act of the “cultural genocide” so lamented by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Grandin writes, “We instil in them a pronounced distaste for the native life so that they will be humiliated when reminded of their origins. When they graduate from out institutions, the children have lost everything Native except their blood” (Holiday). Alberta’s Lac La Biche Museum claims, “Bishop Vital-Justin Grandin in particular frequently asked the federal government to help existing schools continue educating Indigenous children by increasing grants. Bishop Grandin continued to channel his efforts to promote industrial and residential schools throughout the rest of his life” (“Industrial”). The planetary scorching of our current Anthropocene epoch is similarly part of Albertan public discourse, memory and endorsement in the names of its two National Hockey League teams: the Calgary Flames and the Edmonton Oilers. Of the massive Fort Mac forest fire in the Spring of 2016, The Guardian argues that the multinational tar-sands firms Canada bankrolls are in fact “arsonists”: These arsonists have a name and they’re hiding in plain view—because their actions, at the moment, are still considered legal. They’re the companies that helped turn the boreal forest into a flammable tinder-box. The same companies that have undermined attempts to rein in carbon emissions. The same companies that, by their very design, chase profits with no mind for the ecological and human consequences. (Lukacs) “Latent violence,” my novel argues, “is still violence.” Canada’s tar-sands industry is literally poisoning its immediate (though extensive) environment, and adjacent ones, while also helping to create a “tinderbox” planet (Lukacs; Biello “How”). Globally, environmental violence and/or genocide will continue to fall along lines of so-called race. Ecological economist Joan Martínez-Alier advocates for an “environmentalism of the poor” (Buell 22) while Bangladeshi scientist Dr. Atiq Rahman laments “climatic genocide” (Dyer 59). State collusion in the accumulation of known carcinogens like arsenic in the water and wildlife around Fort Chipewyan, or, even further downriver in Fort Smith, North West Territories, surely contributed to Former Salt River First Nation Chief Mike Beaver’s June 2017 comment to me that, “The government might as well just bomb us; at least that’s quick.” In an article bluntly entitled “Oil Sands Raise Levels of Cancer-Causing Compounds in Regional Waters,” Scientific American notes, “After all, by one scientific estimate the Athabasca River deposits roughly an Exxon Valdez’s worth of oil every four years or so along its more than 1, 200-long kilometre journey. But that’s only when scientists attempt to measure the pollution already in the river water” (Biello). Canada’s tar sands constitute a provincial and national genocide while contributing to a looming planetary genocide (of the coastal, the globally poor and the young). Writing for Canada’s largest newspaper, The Toronto Star, Jesse Staniforth’s opinion article headline is sadly apt: ‘“Cultural genocide?’ No, Canada Committed Regular Genocide.” While Staniforth is writing of the indigenous genocide in Canada’s residential schools documented by Canada’s six-year Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the flagrantly racist excuses for the violence of Canada’s past residential school system and its current complicity in the toxicification of First Peoples are shamingly similar. 6. The Black Mark on the National Soul Delusions Although Edmonton’s Azimuth Theatre highlighted tailings ponds toxicity (and classist and racist labor relations) in the 2008 fringe play Swallow, the one-act play has not been published (Gordon 8). Canadian eco-critic Jon Gordon writes compellingly on the sands, but his chosen texts are neither current nor popular: a Rudy Wiebe short story from 1982 and a play of his from 1977 (Gordon 8). Even Gordon, clearly sympathetic to rethinking the tar sands, notes the low attendance at the Edmonton productions of Swallow (9). Fred Stenson’s novel Who By Fire concerns Alberta sour gas, not the sands (and is set pre-1970, not today). No novel short-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize has ever addressed this key figure in Canada’s national portrait, yet international writers as respected (and ecologically-minded) as Jonathan Franzen publicly decry, in a Guardian article of September 13, 2013, a global apocalypse partially defined by “the denaturisation of the planet and sterilisation of its oceans” and characterized by “the transformation of Canada’s boreal forest into a toxic lake of tar-sands byproducts” (Franzen).8 One of America’s most influential writers cites the Alberta tar sands as a global example of planetary destruction in one of the UK’s most respected newspapers, yet my PhD in CanLit and I know of no Canadian novel that examines this most definitive landscape in a country whose literary awards love landscape novels. CanLit’s obsession with landscapes is already a national delusion, and propaganda, so the tar-sands lacuna is both fitting and even more problematic. First and foremost, despite its famously low population density, Canada is not the rural nation popular CanLit suggests it is. Statistics Canada notes a 2011 [the most recent year available] national population split of 81% urban and 19% rural (“Population”), yet CanLit awards so often reward tales of the rural past. In another since-removed online article, “Bookmaker’s Odds: How to Win a CanLit Award,” an analysis of CanLit fiction awards originally published on the national media CBC.ca/arts site, journalist Rachel Giese crunched the numbers to analyze the thirty-one winners from ten years of the Scotiabank Giller Prizes [Canada’s largest and richest prize for literature] and the twenty years of the Governor-Generals’ Awards for Fiction prior to 2005 to find that 70% of those two prize winners were, as quoted by Michael Varga, “set in a small Canadian town or in the Canadian wilderness” (Varga). Interestingly, while various publications and sites quote Giese, she and/or her publisher CBC.ca have since removed the article (Varga; MacDonald).9 Giese’s original award counting, if not the subsequent erasure of its publication from Canada’s national broadcaster, point to Canada’s national interest in landscape stories. Canadian writer and artist Douglas Coupland is far too accurate when defining CanLit in New York Times: Basically, but not always, CanLit is when the Canadian government pays you money to write about life in small towns and/or the immigration experience. If the book is written in French, urban life is permitted, but only from a nonbourgeois viewpoint. … One could say that CanLit is the literary equivalent of representational landscape painting, with small forays into waterfowl depiction and still lifes. It is not a modern art form, nor does it want to be. Scorecards are kept and points are assigned according to how realistically a writer has depicted, say … the quirks and small intimate moments of rural Ontario life …. CanLit is about representing a certain kind of allowed world in a specific kind of way, and most writers in Canada are O.K. with that—or are at least relieved to know the rules of the game from the outset and not have to waste time fostering illusions. Trouble is, the absence of tar-sands fiction in CanLit “fosters illusions” about our not perpetuating genocide(s). The “allowed world” of CanLit is a multiply rapacious one. Anyone familiar with CanLit knows that the Scotiabank Giller Prize (which Coupland goes on to decry as powdered with “mummy dust”), has a monopoly on Canadian literary prestige. The various communication channels of the CBC are also canonizing, especially when they combine multiple platforms like the annual Canada Reads radio event (with its attendant Web pages and social media outreach). The landscape obsession of CanLit is also captured at the official Books section of CBC.ca, where the brief description of the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize winning-novel [by Elizabeth Hay] claims, “Late Nights on Air is a quietly captivating novel about the power of love, landscape and storytelling” (“Late”). As a fossil-fuel landscape, and a genocidal and highly politicized one at that, the Alberta tar sands are truly a “power”ful landscape, yet they do not appear in CanLit. Eco-critic William Rueckert argues, “Poems are a verbal equivalent of fossil fuel (stored energy), but they are a renewable source of energy, coming, as they do, from those ever generative twin matrices, language and imagination” (108). To readers and eco-critics, powerful works of art: seem to be, in themselves, ever-living, inexhaustible sources of stored energy, whose relevance does not derive solely from their meaning, but from their capacity to remain active in any language and to go on with the work of energy transfer, to continue to function as an energy pathway that sustains life and the human community. Unlike fossil fuels, they cannot be used up . … here is a radical differential between the ways in which the human world and the natural world sustain life and communities. (Rueckert 108) Canada’s oil policy, its democracy, its lack of community success with our First Nations, and our self-mythologizing (especially with literature), need a shift towards a healthier energy that is both more profitable and more sustainable. CanLit awards prefer rural novels (though not tar sands novels), while, according to a 2015 article in the country’s largest newspaper, The Toronto Star, “Our self-image is charmingly out of date. … Eighty per cent of us live in cities or their suburbs. It’s not just our cultural identity that is disconnected from reality. The way we govern ourselves is out of sync with who we are and how we live” (Goar). The most recent of Lawrence Buell’s three books on environmental criticism concedes, “Nations do generate distinctive forms of pastoral or outback nationalism (e.g., the myth of the Bush for Australia; the mystique of the far North for Canada)” (16; first emphasis his; second added). The Canadian media (if not psyche) so craves landscape novels that the non-literary magazine Canadian Geographic can (a) publish an article and map claiming to list “The best Canadian novel set in each province & territory” (emphasis added), yet (b) include one of thirteen books that isn’t a novel (Stephen Leacock’s collection of short stories Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, and this for the province with the highest population and, for better or worse, the city of Toronto, the center of Anglo-Canadian publishing) (Doyle). Buell’s “mystique” for the now-toxic Alberta north is not only inaccurate but also collusive. A much-loved canonical poem from the early 1970s (which Coupland rightly describes as the heyday of CanLit) is Gwendolyn MacEwen’s “Dark Pines Under Water.” Its reckoning with a powerful landscape concludes: “There is something down there and you want it told.” There is plenty “up” there in the northern Albertan boreal forest around the Canadian tar sands, with genocides of race and age, of privileged West and globally coastal, with a displaced workforce over-indulging in narcotics and the sex-trade, with national myths, propaganda, and corporate welfare for a planet-destroying industry; I, at least, want this story told. Footnotes 1 Even their name is contentious with, generally, those promoting the industry calling them “oil sands” and everyone else, including many workers, calling them “tar sands” (Cosh; Grescoe). 2 Captured pictorially here: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/04/17/canada-empty-maps_n_5169055.html Cf. http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/earth-sciences/geography/atlas-canada/selected-thematic-maps/16880 3 See (1) http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/prof/92-594/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=PR&Code1=61&Geo2=PR&Code2=01&Data=Count&SearchText=Northwest%20Territories&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=01&B1=All&GeoLevel=PR&GeoCode=61 (2) http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/prof/92-594/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=PR&Code1=60&Geo2=PR&Code2=01&Data=Count&SearchText=Yukon%20Territory&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=01&B1=All&Custom= and (3) http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/prof/92-594/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=PR&Code1=62&Geo2=PR&Code2=01&Data=Count&SearchText=Nunavut&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=01&B1=All&GeoLevel=PR&GeoCode=62 4 My novel Our Sands is scheduled for publication in 2020 by Penguin Random House Southeast Asia. 5 For a photo of Mr. Beaver’s obvious cultural influence see The Northern Journal’s June 22, 2015 article “Traditions Take Centre Stage at Fort Smith Aboriginal Day Celebrations.” https://norj.ca/2015/06/traditions-take-centre-stage-at-fort-smith-aboriginal-day-celebrations-2/ 6 Canada’s contentious tar sands here hold a burning comparison to the first Canadian novel to win the Booker Prize. In its criticism of racial and imperial violence Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 The English Patient, recently recrowned as the public’s favorite Booker-winner, titles one of its ten internal sections In Situ (Flood). 7 Fort Chipewyan is a village, while its aboriginal First Nations include peoples represented by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, who, according to their Web site, “call ourselves K'ai Taile Dene, meaning ‘people of the land of the willow’” (“History”).Other nations reside in the same area, with the Mikisew Cree First Nation sharing offices in the same Fort Chipewyan building (“Who”). 8 The article has been removed from The Guardian site but is archived at: https://web.archive.org/web/20130915070641/http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/13/jonathan-franzen-wrong-modern-world 9 While these two other sources quote the Giese article more fully, footprints of the article are available at archival sites like The Wayback Machine via its original URL of http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/bookmakers.html. 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For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) TI - Bitumen, Bit of Me, Bit of You: Climate Change, National Literatures, Peak Oil, and Canada’s Tar Sands JO - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment DO - 10.1093/isle/isz106 DA - 2020-01-01 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/bitumen-bit-of-me-bit-of-you-climate-change-national-literatures-peak-qz2NfJeapD SP - 128 EP - 149 VL - 27 IS - 1 DP - DeepDyve ER -