Hunting for Hydrocarbons: Representations of Indigeneity in Reporting on the New Mackenzie Valley Gas Pipeline

Abstract

Energy production is, without doubt, a subject of enormous economic importance and interest in North America. Consequently, energy topics are widely reported in American and Canadian news media. This article provides a comparison and analysis of Canadian and American newspaper reporting about one North American energy megaproject: the proposed Mackenzie Gas Project. The central feature of this project, if it goes ahead, will be a 1,220 kilometer natural gas pipeline to move natural gas from the sparsely populated Mackenzie River Delta of Canada's Northwest Territories to market. The Mackenzie Gas Project is currently under simultaneous regulatory review by Canada's National Energy Board (NEB) and a specially convened Joint Review Panel (JRP). The latter is charged with considering the environmental and social effects of the project for the communities along the proposed pipeline route. Because the affected communities are largely indigenous, so are five of seven members of the panel. The review process has taken longer than initially anticipated, but is expected to wrap up by the end of 2007 and result in governmental approval for the energy project. This will clear a major hurdle in the decades-long drive by energy companies to develop these natural gas reserves. The Mackenzie Gas Project story concerns a diverse set of issues, including environmental protection and regulation, economic and social health of northern indigenous communities, North American energy security, financial and commodity markets, corporate investments and profits, economic integration of the United States and Canada, international relations, and consumer issues, among others. Yet the reporting about the proposed pipeline has been framed narrowly as a struggle between the proponents and opponents of economic development. Significantly, reporters have been both puzzled by and at pains to explain to readers the positions of the several indigenous communities that appear at times to both support and oppose the development. There are two key points of this coverage. First, the indigenous communities are not recognized as part of the public and thus do not hold a interest in whether or not the pipeline is built. Rather, indigenous communities are presented as either obstructions or economic opportunists or both. Second, the economic interests of the multinational corporations that aim to build and profit from the pipeline development are rarely mentioned. I became interested in reporting about the Mackenzie Gas Project generally, and about indigenous peoples specifically, after reading feature stories in two U.S. papers: the Christian Science Monitor (Walker 2001) and the New York Times (Krauss 2003a). The focus of both stories was the supposed incongruity of aboriginal participation in the development project. In Krauss's New York Times account, northern aboriginal communities have been driven into an unholy alliance with pipeline developers as a result of animal rights campaigns by environmental activists. Using language intended to remind readers that northern indigenous peoples are hunters, Krauss describes the animal rights campaigns as snared the native populations in sanctions and labels their accusations against the environmentalists as having hit like harpoons to the soul. He completes the image of indigenous peoples as primordial hunters in a modern world with a visual metaphor, a photograph of a dog sled moving across the tundra; in the background looms an oil or gas derrick. The photo caption reads: A symbolic scene in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Their livelihoods in danger, Native Canadians are welcoming oil, gas and mining interests. Walker's Christian Science Monitor story, which is far more positive, concerns the ways that northerners are learning to work with the oil and gas industry. It, too, cannot avoid the allusion to hunting: an accompanying photograph shows an Inuk (singular of Inuit) standing beside a snowmobile. …