Métis/otipemisiw anthropologist Zoe Todd begins her essay, “Fish, Kin and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory,” with the 2016 oil spill on the North Saskatchewan River, in which Husky Energy Inc. spilled some 200,000 litres of oil mixed with diluent into the river near the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan (103). Cities and First Nations on the river had to take emergency measures to protect their drinking water, and “the oil and diluents killed many more-than-human beings within the river,” including beaver and herons (103). Todd reports being horrified as she watched news coverage of the spill from her home in Ottawa (103). “I grew up along the kisiskâciwani–sîpiy (North Saskatchewan River), in the city of amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta),” she writes:
To speak of Edmonton/amiskwaciwâskahikan is to speak a water truth. It is nestled along, and spans, the banks of the mighty kisiskâciwani-sîpiy, which has carved its way deep into the soil and clay and sand and stone to yield steep banks that cut through Edmonton like an artery, supplying the city with water, with life. The river binds Edmonton to a broader watershed. The clear mountain waters, which originate deep in the Rocky Mountains at the Columbia Icefield, become turbid and inscrutable by the time they flow past the factories and sewage plants and homes and bridges of amiskwaciwâskahikan. But upstream of Edmonton, a four-hour drive south-west of the city, near Rocky Mountain House, you can still see the river running clear and with promise. (103)
Todd’s family is “deeply bound up with” that river (103). As it cuts through Edmonton, its banks conceal “dinosaur bones in secret pockets” which “act as reminders of an order of existence in this place that today churns and turns on the risks and riches of Alberta’s oil and gas economy” (104).
“The fossil fuels which animate the political economy of my home province are a paradoxical kind of kin—the bones of dinosaurs and the traces of flora and fauna from millions of years ago which surface in rocks and loamy earth in Alberta act as teachers for us, reminding us of the life that once teemed here,” Todd writes. “But, the insatiable desire to liberate these long-gone beings from their resting place, to turn the massive stores of carbon and hydrogen left from eons of life in this place, weaponises these fossil-kin, these long-dead beings, and transforms them into threats to our very existence as humans” (104). In addition, the plastics we make from those fossil fuels end up in the air and water and land, and the oil itself moves through “pipelines that pervade every corner of my home province” (104). In 2016, “the oily progeny of the petro-economy breached the banks of the river that four generations of my Métis family has been born alongside,” she continues. “This watery violation of the river prompted many people to take stock of the socio-political, economic and legal-governance responsibilities we hold to the lands, waters, fish, beavers, herons and other more-than-human beings of the prairies” (104). Todd describes the glaciers and the rivers as “watery bodies,” suggesting their animate quality, and she traces their flow into Hudson Bay—a destination that makes “the struggles of unassuming prairie rivers a matter of global concern” (104).
Todd describes her birth in a hospital in Edmonton, and the births of her ancestors along that river (105). She only knows her grandfather through stories, the way she only knows “past-Edmonton” or “the waters and fish that were once healthy and abundant” through stories (105). Fish have been her teachers, she says, although her grandfather “was animated by a different animal, horses,” but she has a similar passion for fish (105). She brings her grandfather’s love of horses “to bear on the urgent and entangled challenges of the settler-colonial and petro-state violations of the waters” of her homeland (105). She is concerned about “our reciprocal responsibilities to more-than-human beings within landscapes that had been heavily violated by settler-colonial economic and political exigencies” (105).
Elsewhere, Todd has written about how working with the Inuvialuit community of Paulatuuq in the Northwest Territories taught her “about the dynamic and creative ways in which Paulatuuqmiut (Paulatuuq people) assert their own legal-governance paradigms and Indigenous legal order to protect the well-being of fish in the face of complex colonial and environmental challenges” (105-06). That work taught her that her Métis upbringing had oriented her “to a Métis legal order which informs my responsibilities to fish, water and the more-than-human beings that populate Treaty Six Territory along the North Saskatchewan, Red Deer, Battle and Athabasca Rivers” (106). That upbringing also taught her “the necessity of thinking about and thinking with fish in the urban context” (106). Now she understands how that teaching “was an instructive form of philosophy and praxis which imbued within me a sense of my reciprocal responsibilities to place, more-than-human beings and time,” she writes (106). “But what of my responsibilities to ‘inert’ or polluting materials, like the oil that spilled into the North Saskatchewan River this summer?” she asks. “What does it mean for me to dwell in an active and philosophical way in the realities of the ‘modernist mess’ and ‘toxic vitalism’ which provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan have been saddled with through extractive settler-colonial political economies?” (106).
In order to “tease apart” her “relationality to the various agents involved in, and impacted by, the breach of the Husky pipeline,” she engages the political philosophies of the fishermen she met in Paulatuuq (106). “Having come to understand fish as nonhuman persons, it is possible for me to situate fish within the legal-political landscapes of Indigenous de-colonial resistance and refraction in Canada,” she writes. “Far harder for me to address have been the ways in which the very pollutants involved in the Husky oil spill are themselves the extracted, processed, heated, split, and steamed progeny of the fossilised carbon beings buried deep within the earth of my home province” (106). “What does it mean to approach carbon and fossil beings, including those spilled into the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy, as agential more-than-human beings in their own right?” she asks (106). That strikes me as an odd question, since they are long dead; I was expecting the perhaps more obvious question of how Todd, like the rest of us, is implicated in the carbon economy that is destroying our planet—changing its climate, polluting its waters, causing microplastics to end up in every ocean? Perhaps that question is too obvious, but it strikes me as more vital than the agency of the fern forests that decayed into coal, oil, and gas.
That’s where my mind goes, but it’s not where Todd’s goes. She turns to the work of her colleague Heather Davis, who calls upon us “to tend to our relationality and reciprocal responsibilities to the progeny of the petro-capitalist state”; in her work, Davis “explores how humans are making sense of, and tending to, the growing global geologic presence of plastic” (106). We might as well ask how we make sense of and tend to the cancer that is eating away at our bones. Davis asks us to consider plastic and other “offspring of our petrochemical politics as kin” (106). Todd compares Davis’s approach to plastic as kin to Kim TallBear’s discussion of pipestone as kin, and suggests that both have forced her to reorient her relationship to fossils and stone (106-07):
I have, admittedly, viewed oil and oil-progeny as contaminants, or pollutants, and the oil itself as imbued with messy human politics, which extract it from the ground and flood pipeline arteries stretched across the entire continent. Davis’s work challenges me to train my attention not only towards the fleshy beings I am so intimately familiar with—fish and birds and beavers and moose—but to also mobilise those aspects of Métis law that I grew up with in the service of imagining how we may de-weaponise the oil and gas that corporate and political bodies have allowed to violate waters, lands and atmospheres across the prairies. (107)
I’m not sure what that means, or what it means to “weaponize” oil and gas: even if we viewed it as a sacrament, it would still be toxic.
But Todd presses on, asking what “oil/gas pluralities look like” (107). I’m sensing a philosophical or theoretical intertext in the word “pluralities,” but I don’t know what it might be. “It is not the oil itself that is toxic,” she writes, since it stayed underground for millions of years without causing any trouble (107). “[T]hese oily materials are not, in and of themselves, violent or dangerous,” she continues. “Rather, the ways that they are weaponised through petro-capitalist extraction and production turn them into settler-colonial-industrial-capitalist contaminants and pollutants” (107). That’s true, but only because surface seeps of oil—which would’ve occurred for millennia before it was discovered that petroleum could be used as a fuel in the nineteenth century—were too small to cause much ecological damage. Not everything that is natural is wholesome: think of plants that are toxic to some species—the blue-green algae that appear on prairie lakes in late summer, for example. I’m tempted to complicate my response to Todd by veering off into a discussion of Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the pharmakon, the medicine that can also, in the wrong doses or for the wrong person, be poisonous—but I’m not sure that would be useful: I’m not sure there’s a safe environmental exposure to plastic or to the fire retardants or pesticides developed since the Second World War. Some things are just bad.
Todd disagrees with me. “It is here that I am challenged to reconsider my reactions to the oil flowing along the river,” she writes (107). The oil spilled into the North Saskatchewan is a contaminant, she admits (107). “But it is not this material drawn from deep in the earth that is violent,” she contends. “it is the machinations of human political-ideological entanglements that deem it appropriate to carry this oil through pipelines running along vital waterways, that make this oily progeny a weapon against fish, humans, water and more-than-human worlds” (107). Again, I’m not sure “weapon” is the right word, since I doubt oil companies deliberately destroy those living creatures; rather, they accept their destruction as a cost of doing business, as an economic externality that doesn’t figure in their balance sheets. “Weapon” suggests intentionality, does it not? Are oil spills deliberate or are they negligent? If the oil had stayed in the ground where, arguably, it belongs—since releasing it into the environment, especially the atmosphere, is likely to return our climate to what it was in the Mesozoic Age, which will end much of life as we know it—would there be a problem? No—except for the whales, which were being hunted to near extinction by the need for lamp oil before petroleum was discovered as a substitute.
“So what other worlds can we dream of for the remnants of the long-gone dinosaurs, of the flora and fauna that existed millions of years ago?” Todd asks. “What legal-governance and philosophical paradigms can we mobilise to de-weaponise oil today?” (107). She’s not sure she has an immediate answer, “other than that we must shift the logics of the petro-economy, which are emboldened to contaminate whole rivers and watersheds with oil and diluent, because those narrow conditions of existence are narrowing ever more in the context of the so-called Anthropocene” (107). If we don’t do that, then “we may go the way of the dinosaurs, and it will be because the dominant human ideological paradigm of our day forgot to tend with care to the oil, the gas and all the beings of this place. Forgot to tend to relationships, to ceremony (in all the plurality of ways this may be enacted), to the continuous co-constitution of life-worlds between humans and others” (107). I’m not sure what ceremony means in the context of oil and gas, and I wish Todd had given an example; the best thing we could’ve done would have been to have known, in advance, what damage using petroleum would do, but that foreknowledge is beyond the capacity of a limited and fallible species like humans.
Todd’s immediate response to this situation is to continue drawing fish (that’s her art practice) while engaging “with the complex responsibilities that come with re-framing fossils and fossil-beings—including the petrochemical products of decayed matter buried deep within the earth of my home province—as a kind of kin” (107). “This is a difficult philosophical and political negotiation for me to make, for I have throughout my entire life, seen oil solely in its weaponised form,” she concludes. However, the lessons she has learned from fish and Indigenous Elders can “bring this necessary philosophical and practical engagement into focus” (107). Her hope is that she can “encourage settler Canadians to understand that tending to the reciprocal relationality we hold with fish and other more-than-human beings is integral to supporting the ‘narrow conditions of existence’ in this place” (107).
I agree that settlers need to see themselves in relationship with “more-than-human beings” in this place, although I’m still not sure that including petrochemicals in that category is particularly helpful. I suppose I’m drawing lines around what I’m willing to accept as kin: fish, yes, but invasive carp, no; little bluestem grass, yes, but quack grass, no; crude oil left in the ground, maybe, but the mess left in the North Saskatchewan River by Husky’s negligence, hell no. And I wish Todd had considered the way she is implicated in the “weaponised form” of oil as well. Yes, the petroleum companies are responsible for most of the carbon emissions, and yet most of us drive cars that burn gasoline, heat our homes with fossil fuels, eat food grown with fertilizers derived from petrochemicals and shipped to stores in diesel-powered refrigerator trucks. My point is we’re all part of the weaponization of petroleum, and thinking about the way we are implicated might be more thoughtful than the fingerpointing and self-exception implied by the term “weaponised.” Or is thinking of a kinship relation to petroleum a form of self-implication? I’m not sure. Is there a contradiction between “weaponized” and being kin to petroleum? What would “non-weaponized” oil look like? What would we do with it–aside from leaving it in the ground?
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson, University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Todd, Zoe. “Fish, Kin and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory.” Afterall, vol. 43, 2017, pp. 102-07. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/692559.
