Wood Buffalo National Park and the politics of shame: Indigenous advocacy at UNESCO's World Heritage Committee

Abstract

• Oil sands extraction and other upstream activities are having considerable effects on the environment in and around Wood Buffalo National Park, which are not being addressed by federal (Canada) or provincial (Alberta) governments to the satisfaction of regional indigenous peoples. • Legal and quasi-judicial processes at the international levels provide new and complex fields of action for Indigenous Peoples and their allies. • While such processes may not have been designed as participatory or as open to Indigenous input, they represent new spaces for emergent forms of transnational activism , increasingly visible to scholars and political actors alike. • This article adds to these bodies of ethnographic literature by attending to Mikisew Cree First Nation's (MCFN) experience in petitioning UNESCO to address their concerns, marking a more decisive move into international advocacy. • MCFN's impact was arguably somewhat blunted by the structure of UNESCO's World Heritage Committee, by Canadian lobbying efforts, and by the presence of another regional Indigenous group whose goals were not congruent with those of MCFN, but MCFN's efforts may provide an effective example of usage of the politics of shame on an international scale.