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I am ashamed that we are knocking on your door with dirty oil

“I am ashamed that we are knocking on your door with dirty oil,” she said. “I want to stand up here as a Canadian and I want to say I am sorry to the workers in Canada and the workers in America who have to go home and look their kids in the eye and know that they are damaging their future. And I want to say ‘yes’ to jobs that allow Americans and Canadians to go home and look their kids in the eye and say ‘I am fighting for you. I am working for you.’”

Two native Canadians also spoke. Chief Jackie Thomas of the Saik’uz First Nation Band in northern British Columbia asked Americans to support her band’s opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline that will bring oilsands bitumen over the Rockies to the Pacific coast for shipment to Asia.

The crowd booed when she told them that the Canadian government had weakened the regulatory review process so that the Gateway pipeline would be approved.

Chrystal Lameman, 30, an Alberta Sierra Club worker whose Cree band is located in the oilsands, told the crowd that the oilsands companies have “completely desecrated” an area of Alberta “the size of a country.”

“If this pipeline goes through your government will further assist in the raping and pillaging of the lands of my ancestors,” she said, as the crowd booed the government.

She described how her people are “dying from cancer,” how fish in northeastern Alberta have cancerous tumours, moose have “puss bubbles under the skin” and babies are airlifted to the hospital for drinking contaminated water “and that’s the truth.”