On Monday, indigenous youth and elders gathered outside the
Canadian Embassy in Madrid to protest the Canadian government’s support
of the Alberta tar sands extraction and new fossil fuel infrastructure,
including a pipeline that would cut through indigenous lands to carry
tar sands oil from Alberta to Wisconsin. We speak with one of those
demonstrators: Eriel Deranger, a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First
Nation and the executive director of Indigenous Climate Action. “Canada
comes to these meetings touting themselves as a global leader in
addressing the climate crisis, as having great relations with their
indigenous peoples,” she says. “But the reality is … not a single
project that has ever been proposed in the Alberta tar sands has ever
been denied.”