Coyote Dance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYtFMhKIg3o&mode=related&search=native%20american

YouTube - Coyote Dance

This is on the YouTube channel and is a beautiful piece and I wanted to share.

 

Native Americans fight gas pipeline plan

Native Americans fight gas pipeline plan

BY TIM REITERMAN

LOS ANGELES TIMES

After the ice broke up and the ferry began running on the Liard River in Canada's Northwest Territories, two American Indians with weathered faces and easy gaits shouldered a sack of beaver and muskrat pelts for the spring fur auction and took a rifle for bear protection.

On their short hike through the woods to the ferry landing, Jonas and Roy Mouse paused as they often do, heads bowed and caps in hand, at a rosary-draped cross that marks the spot where their aged mother collapsed and died several years ago.

The cross happens to stand alongside an oil pipeline that was dug through their forested homeland and that the brothers say for eight years drove away animals that they hunt and trap for a living.

Today, the brothers, members of the Dehcho First Nations, are facing another encroachment on their way of life: an even bigger, 800-mile-long natural gas pipeline that would bisect the tribe's traditional territory and help spawn industrial development in Canada's vast boreal forest, one of the last intact stretches of the Earth's original forest cover.

For three decades, the Dehcho have been resisting the $7 billion project, which is backed by other native groups in the Northwest Territories. But the Dehcho are under mounting pressure to drop their opposition to a project that would serve North American energy markets as the United States strives to reduce dependence on the Middle East. Canada is already the largest foreign supplier of natural gas to the United States.

The companies that want to build the pipeline -- Imperial Oil, Shell Canada, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil Canada -- estimate that it would carry 1.2 billion cubic feet of gas per day, which industry experts say would be enough annually to heat more than 3 million homes.

Recently, officials of Canada's newly elected Conservative government signaled their unwillingness to let the Dehcho stand in the way of the project, which proponents want to start building in 2008.

Jim Prentice,minister of Indian affairs, declared that the pipeline, which still needs regulatory approval, would be built along the Mackenzie Valley with or without the tribe's blessing.

Prentice's remarks only stiffened resistance from the 4,500-member tribe, the largest native group along the pipeline and the only one with an unresolved claim to its traditional lands.

Grand Chief Herb Norwegian said that if the government tried to expropriate Dehcho land for pipeline construction, the tribe would retaliate with litigation and possibly blockades.

"People think of a pipeline like a garden hose in your yard," Norwegian said. "But a pipeline of this magnitude is like building a China Wall right down the valley, and the effects will be there forever and ever."

Many Dehcho fear that hundreds of trucks would disrupt their quiet communities and that the massive project would drive away caribou, moose and other wildlife.

In the long run, they fear the project would spur a wave of oil and gas prospecting that would bring more pipelines and roads and so many newcomers that the Dehcho could become a powerless minority in the land they have occupied for many centuries.

The pipeline would tap into 6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in three well fields north of the Arctic Circle. It would move the gas south along the Mackenzie River to Alberta province, where it would be used to fuel a massive oil extraction project or sent directly to markets in Canada and the United States.

"It is a significant new supply source," Imperial Oil spokesman Pius Rolheiser said. One trillion cubic feet could serve all of Canada's gas-heated homes for a year, he said.

About 40 percent of the pipeline route crosses land claimed by the Dehcho, and, before approving the project, they want a power-sharing agreement over 80,000 square miles of ancestral territory, allowing them to preserve lands for cultural or environmental reasons, to control industrial development and to collect royalties and taxes.

Dehcho leaders acknowledge that withholding support for such a significant project gives them leverage to secure unprecedented authority.

Government officials say their demands are unrealistic.

"It would give 4,500 people the power to govern an area about half the size of France," said Tim Christian, the chief federal negotiator. "And we certainly have not done that anywhere else (in Canada) and do not believe that is an appropriate model."

The government recently offered the Dehcho $104 million and ownership of about 18 percent of their traditional land, but Norwegian called it a "low-ball" offer.

Conservation groups are concerned about the pipeline's impact on one of the continent's great natural resources, Canada's 1.4 billion-acre boreal, or northern, forest.

"What is extraordinary ... is you are opening one of the last great wildernesses of the world," said Stephen Hazell, a lawyer with the Sierra Club of Canada. "The oil and gas companies will want every last scrap of land for exploration."

The Canadian Boreal Initiative, a conservation organization, has been working with the government, industries and tribal groups to identify land that should be protected from development. But the organization's executive director, Cathy Wilkinson, said only about 35 million of the Mackenzie Valley's more than 400 million acres of boreal forest had interim government protection.

"The worry today is the pace of developing is outstripping the pace of protecting areas," she said.

In addition to a 120-foot-wide pipeline right-of-way, the project calls for constructing staging areas, barge landings and camps for thousands of workers.

Scientists hired for the project contended that the disruptions would be short-term or limited to permanent facilities such as compressor stations.

"The ecosystem integrity ... will not be compromised," environmental consultant Petr Komers told a recent hearing. "Wide-ranging species will continue to move through the area and will continue to survive."

Lisanne Forand, assistant deputy minister for northern affairs, said construction "will go ahead only if the environmental assessment process indicates effects can be mitigated (and) if producers can make it economically viable."

Rolheiser, of Imperial Oil, the lead company, said whether the pipeline is built hinges partly on the cost of any government-required environmental mitigation and on the final tab for agreements with aboriginal groups.

Fort Simpson, where the Liard and the Mackenzie converge, was founded in the early 1800s as a fur trading post. Today, the town of 1,200 is home to hundreds of Dehcho.

"The land will be ruined," said 15-year-old Jacqueline Thompson. "The animals won't walk through it anymore."

"We were First Nations people before the government andmade do with what we had. ... So we are not too worriedif the pipeline does not happen," said the grand chief's cousin, Keyna Norwegian, the local chief in Fort Simpson.

But the grand chief's brother, Bob Norwegian, is the community liaison for the Mackenzie pipeline project, and he says he believes it will encourage economic development and job training.

"Folks are romanticizing about when we lived off the land," he said. "We are not going back to snowshoes and dog teams."

Last year, unemployment was 5.4 percent in the Territories -- but twice that among aboriginal people. "The Dehcho is one of the have-not regions," said Kevin Menicoche, who represents six of the tribe's 10 communities in the legislative assembly. "There is no new money coming in."

The other tribes along the route have established an Aboriginal Pipeline Group and will acquire up to one-third of the pipeline ownership. They have set a July 31 deadline for the Dehcho to join or risk losing many millions of dollars in gas profits, but the tribe has indicated that it would not decide by then.

Last modified: July 11. 2006 8:17AM

 

Protecting the Wolves continues

Feds Deny Wyo. Petition to Delist Wolves

By BEN NEARY
.c The Associated Press

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) - The U.S. government on Monday denied a request from Wyoming to remove gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains from the federal list of threatened and endangered species.

Wyoming officials, concerned that wolves have been killing cattle and domestic sheep and thinning elk herds, had proposed allowing trophy hunting of the animals in certain areas and classifying them as predators that could be shot on sight elsewhere.

The state proposed allowing the wolves to live unmolested in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks.

In rejecting the state's petition, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Monday that it couldn't remove federal protections for wolves in Wyoming until the state sets firm limits on how many could be killed.

The agency also said the state must commit to maintaining a minimum population of the animals. Wyoming is home to an estimated 252 wolves.

Gov. Dave Freudenthal said Monday that the decision will make it easier for Wyoming to get a judge to decide whether its plan is scientifically adequate.

Just hours before Monday's announcement, Freudenthal and state Attorney General Pat Crank released a letter warning the federal agency that the state intended to sue to compel action.

Ed Bangs, coordinator of the Fish and Wildlife Service's gray wolf recovery effort in Helena, Mont., said Wyoming game managers must be authorized to maintain at least 10 breeding pairs and 100 wolves overall in the state in midwinter before the federal agency can agree to remove federal protections.

``Our conclusion is that Wyoming law, and its plan, really don't provide enough assurance for us to move forward with delisting at this time,'' Bangs said.

Crank said Monday the state is satisfied that providing wolves a haven in the national parks and decreasing protections outside the parks would conserve the population.

Elk calf numbers have dropped from as high as 30 per 100 of the elk population during the winter to below 10 per 100 in areas where there are many wolves, he said.

Jim Magagna, executive vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, a coalition representing agriculture interests, sportsmen and others, said he lost 51 sheep last year and has lost 12 so far this year.

``I think what we're seeing is the wolves are dispersing more and more across the state,'' Magagna said.



07/24/06 23:12 EDT
   

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