RIVERS WITHOUT BORDERS

Posted In: Iskut-Stikine

Shell Games

If you haven’t heard of the Sacred Headwaters yet, you soon will. The media has been abuzz of late about Royal Dutch Shell’s attempts to brush aside local Tahltan First Nation opposition there and crank up exploration for coal-bed methane. The Sacred Headwaters is the shared birthplace of the Skeena, Nass and Stikine Rivers: three of North America’s most important wild salmon rivers.

Shell may not know who they are messing with in trying to run roughshod over the interests of Tahltan people. Robert Campbell, an early explorer of the Stikine River for the Hudson’s Bay Company was astonished at his indelicate treatment by the people he called the Nahanni when he tried to establish a fort in the Stikine in 1839: "They … demanded payment for inhabiting their country, and if we did not trade like the Russian traders, to clear out." Campbell did clear out, and the resolve of the Tahltan people to be the masters of their own Territory seems as robust as ever. 

For two consecutive years, a blockade maintained by the Klabona Keepers Elders Society from Iskut has turned the world’s second largest corporation away from its plans for the Sacred Headwaters. This summer, the oil giant threatened an injunction, raising the specter of Elders being dragged away by the police as they were in 2006. Shell has put its request for an injunction on hold, but could return to it at any time.

Rivers Without Borders has joined a growing list of non-governmental organizations that support the Tahltans in opposing coalbed development in the Sacred Headwaters. In July we were one of a long list of groups that co-authored a letter to Royal Dutch Shell asking them to abandon their plans for the area. Shell has not yet indicated a willingness to do so, but we are confident that the growing coalition and the resolve of the Tahltans will prevail. Until that time, the Shell games continue.