Performing jobs like driving water trucks or providing catering and custodial services, the tribal communities of Fort Mckay have opportunities that didn’t exist before. In the process though, they’re also supporting the very industry that is inexorably compromising the local environment and upending their traditional way of life.

“That money goes back to housing, to infrastructure, it goes into payments to the people in straight annual cash, payments for supporting kids,” says Elkaim. “It is the inevitable — they understand this — but for them it’s better to benefit than just sit there and watch and get screwed by it. And they are getting screwed, because at the same time they’re making money but they’re losing the foundations of who they are.”

Google hasn’t bothered to send a street view car to Fort Mckay, but from above you can still get a good look at just how much it’s hemmed in by Sunco’s bitumen gathering operations. Just down river from Ft. Mckay the former city of Fort McMurray, now an “urban service area,” houses Suncor’s diaspora of employees (Google has sent a car there).