Ian Willms has photographed the effects of oil extraction on First Nations land in Fort McKay and Fort Chipewyan, in northern Alberta, Canada. Mr. Willms, 28, based in Toronto, is a founding member of the Boreal Collective and spent several months over the last three years photographing his project “As Long as the Sun Shines.” His interview with James Estrin has been edited and condensed.

Q.

How did this project start?

A.

When I graduated from school in 2008 I was hearing a lot about the oil sands in Canada. So I started doing research, and the more I learned, the more horrified I became.

I read a CBC article about cancer rates in indigenous communities that immediately surrounded the oil sands, and I knew right then that was exactly what I had to do. I searched pretty thoroughly for anybody who had done a proper photo story on the community, and I couldn’t find anything that was particularly in-depth.

Ian Willms/Boreal Collective

Q.

What did you find when you got there?

A.

I found a community that was far more developed economically than I had expected. There was a lot of infrastructure, and the homes were more modern than most First Nations communities. That has a lot to do with the proximity to the oil sands and the economic benefit that comes with that.

But the community is still struggling. First Nation reserves are still very dark and damaged places in many ways, and in other ways, they’re incredibly vibrant. So it was not as bleak as I expected it to be. If you didn’t already know that their water was basically coming off of a storm pipe of one of the largest polluting industrial projects in the world, you wouldn’t.

Q.

A lot of photographers who photograph native peoples in North America just hit and run. How did you go about capturing a fuller view?

A.

Well, the most important thing is time. And it’s always going to be more time than anyone’s going to be willing to pay you for.

Beyond that, I think it’s a matter of becoming invested in people’s lives, because if you don’t care, they won’t. And if you fake it, people know. People aren’t stupid. If you treat them like they’re stupid, they’re never going to trust you. And so I spent a lot of time there, I made a lot of friends.

There are a lot if white journalists that go into indigenous communities in North America with a preconceived notion of what these people are like and what they need. But in truth this attitude is just a continuation of the abuse of those people.

What the first nations really need is the respect and the confidence of the rest of Canada, to tell their own stories and to manage their own communities. They need to be empowered but they don’t need others to tell them what to do.

I continually show my subjects the work that I do in these communities and ask if I am getting this right.

Q.

Tell me more about the oil sands.

A.

There’s an oil reserve that’s located beneath Canada’s boreal forest that’s roughly the size of the state of Florida. It’s rich with oil, but the process of extracting it is incredibly energy intensive, difficult and expensive.

The process involved first clear-cutting the forest and then creating a strip mine. They dig the sandy oil out. It’s like hot asphalt. On a hot day, it’s very gooey and very much like tar.

The environmental toll is dramatic. There was a study by an NGO in Toronto, Environmental Defense, that in 2008 found that about 11 million liters of toxins were leaking into the Athabasca River every single day from several toxic-base water lakes in the oil sands region.

Q.

What’s the effect on the people?

A.

It has brought more money into the communities than there was before. With that said, it’s really a small fraction of what they’re actually entitled to. These First Nations get really bad deals from the oil companies in order to leave their lands for oil.

A career in the oil sands may sound good to some people, but really it is the death of their culture because it’s taking the new generation to work toward a completely different way of life. And it’s a way of life that embraces the destruction of their land.

Ian Willms/Boreal Collective

There’s a lot of grief, especially among the elders in the community, over the younger generation not taking an interest in hunting and fishing and trapping. And there’s a lot of conflict among the generation in between the youth and the elders — the generation that are in their late 20s to their 50s; the people who work in the oil sands but grew up hunting, fishing and trapping.

They are very conflicted, because they know what they’re doing. They know that they’re taking away their own land. But they do it because there’s no other option for them to make money. There’s no other way for them to feed their families. These communities are no longer able to be self sufficient off the land like they had been for thousands of years.

Q.

What is the effect of the oil sands on the environment?

A.

Well, they’re finding a lot of animals with physical problems. They’re finding fish with large, golf-ball-sized tumors. There was actually an industry-funded study a few years ago that found that the moose meat had 453 times the acceptable level of arsenic in it.

Ian Willms/Boreal Collective

These people who have hunted this land for a hundred years can read their environment like a book. They know when something’s wrong. They open up an animal, they can see the health of that animal by how it looks. The industry and the government don’t really take that knowledge seriously.

Q.

Who are the peoples that you photographed?

A.

There are different bands — the Fort McKay First Nation, and Fort Chipewyan is Mikisew Cree and the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. But the people know each other and they’re fairly close together. They’re linked by the Athabasca River, which is probably about a five-hour trip if you have a decent motorboat. In the winter there’s an ice road that connects them.

Fort Chipewyan is insulated from the oil sands only because they’re a bit further away. And Fort McKay is literally surrounded by strip mines and tailings ponds.

Fort Chipewyan is dealing with the same process as Fort McKay did 20 years ago. They’ve seen what’s happened to McKay, and now industry wants to start developing their territory, and they’re trying to resist it.

About half the 1,200 or so people in Fort Chipewyan work in the oil sands, and an even higher percentage of Fort McKay works in the oil sands.

Q.

What do you do while you are there?

A.

I try to allow life to unfold as I work. Every morning I would get up and just head out with my camera. And it’s a small town, so you can walk everywhere. I would walk around and say hi to people, and they’d be interested in me because as soon as somebody new shows up, it’s pretty obvious that they’re not from around there, and they are all kinds of curious.

So we get to talking, and sometimes it would lead to important conversations about the oil sands or they’d say, “Oh, yeah, my mother passed away of cancer last year,” or “My son has like crazy abscesses on his legs and we don’t know what they are,” or “I’m a commercial fisherman and I can’t sell my fish anymore because the lake’s polluted there,” and stuff like this. Or other times they would just be like, “Oh, yeah, you know, I’m going hunting today. It looks pretty good.” And maybe I’d get to go hunting and photograph the traditional way of preparing ducks or moose.

Q.

Was it different from what you expected?

A.

It definitely was. I went up there with all of these pictures of indigenous reserves in Canada in my mind. There are many photojournalists that have gone to document the despair and the squalor and dirt of many First Nations.

The pain and the difficulties faced by those people is very invisible. It’s definitely there. You can’t meet somebody and spend time with them without coming into contact with it. But it’s not right in your face like I expected it to be, which was a tremendous challenge photographically because I had to make pictures of something that was invisible and try to suggest it.

Q.

How did you do that?

A.

Well, it may sound flaky, but I just shot from the heart. I tried to really invest myself in the people I met there emotionally — spend time with them, get to know them and grow to really trust them and care about them deeply — and then consider their stories and their experiences in my mind as I walked around, and I would make my pictures accordingly.

It’s not like you have the picture of the oil sands and then the person doing chemotherapy and then the gravestone. It’s much more subtle than that, and it’s also much more than the oil sands. It’s a culture. It’s the loss of their culture that’s really what that essay came to be about. So I made a lot of pictures of the traditional ways of life, like the moose hunters and the fishermen.

There are very intimate, tight family units trying to make it work in the midst of this industrial onslaught and this constant sort of humming presence of danger in the background. Everybody knows that their water and their land is toxic, but it doesn’t look like Chernobyl.

It’s much tougher to really see it, but they know it’s there, and they also feel very powerless about it. You have to consider it as a photograph. So here’s the picture of the girl going wading into the lake (Slide 18), or here’s the mother and daughter with the fresh haul of fish that they’re going to spend the next week eating even though there’s a factory that’s pumping hydrocarbons into that water supply.

Q.

How are the Chipewyan fighting this?

A.

It is their land, so they can make the industry jump through a certain number of bureaucratic hoops in order to slow down the process, but in the end it requires a lot of money.

In 1899 there was a land treaty signed for that region, and the condition of the treaty was that the traditional livelihood of the First Nations should never be compromised. Because the indigenous people didn’t operate in the conventional European sense of time, the treaty stipulated that the land would be protected for as long as the sun shines and the grass grows and the rivers flow, which is why the essay is called “As Long as the Sun Shines.”

The treaties are now seen as this very empty promise. So legally, they really do have a right to stand on. But in a real world practice, it’s just not happening.

Ian Willms/Boreal Collective

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