An Indigenous Environmental Activist Is Building a Solar Network in the Heart of Canada’s Tar Sands

Last summer, in a remote Alberta First Nation surrounded by pipelines and increasingly plagued with oil spills and forest fires, workers wearing reflective vests attached 80 giant solar panels to 20-foot poles. Overseeing the operation and coordinating its documentation with a film crew was Greenpeace campaigner Melina Laboucan-Massimo.

"It's a big system," the 34-year-old Cree Lubicon woman told VICE from the job site in August. "It will probably be one of the biggest solar installations in northern Alberta, especially in the tar sands."

Located near Little Buffalo, 450 kilometers north of Edmonton, the Lubicon Lake Band's 20.8 kilowatt Piitapan Solar Project is the culmination of Laboucan-Massimo's masters research, which she is set to finish this December. She and her partner, David Isaac, who shares her interest in renewable energy, planned the unique and customized solar installation from start to finish, and employed three experts and at least ten people from the community—five young people and five adults—to help assemble the project.

The solar panels, which now power the community's health center, are her way of injecting a tangible solution into her community, where residents are "climate hostages," she said.

She and Isaac were able to fund the project almost entirely through $50,000 of private fundraising, including generous donations from Bullfrog Power and Laboucan-Massimo's friend Jane Fonda. She met the 77-year-old actress-turned-climate activist at a dinner hosted by Greenpeace in Vancouver. She told Fonda about the project and the actress said she was inspired and wanted to contribute. "She basically took out her checkbook and started writing a check."

There was no injection of public money due to limited grants for renewable energy projects in Alberta, although the First Nation did kick in support.

"We have such a high solar potential in Alberta," she said. "Solar is also a way for us to move forward, a way for us to stop digging down into the earth and a way for us to look up."

Though her masters in environmental studies was aimed at improving renewable infrastructure in her remote community, the project itself has an even deeper personal connection. In the early spring of 2009, as she was in the midst of her studies at York University in Toronto, she had to drop everything to move back home for a family emergency. Her mother was diagnosed with cancer after working week-on week-off as a community counsellor for a decade in Fort Chipewyan, a community where elevated levels of cancer have been recorded. Though residents speculate that the higher levels of three kinds of cancer are linked to the environmental effects of living near the Alberta oil sands, Alberta's Chief Medical Officer of Health has said there is no evidence of a link. Luckily, Laboucan-Massimo's mother survived and is currently in remission, but the experience was "a big eye opener" for the young Cree woman, who believes the oil sands do have an environmental effect on the people who live nearby.

"It made me realize I had to go home and work on [the environment] full time," she said.

Laboucan-Massimo took a compassionate leave of absence from the environmental studies program, and began campaigning full time for Greenpeace that same year because, as she put it, "I not only wanted to talk about the problems, I wanted to talk about the solutions."

As a young girl, Laboucan-Massimo would go out on the land each summer in a horse and wagon with her grandparents—traditional knowledge-keepers who only spoke Cree—across the lush and vibrant landscape of northern Alberta.

"It felt very free," she told me. "It felt like this was our territory and we were exercising our sovereignty and our right to be on the land, to live off the land."

But as she grew older, the encroachment of industry and pipeline tendrils from the oil patch became apparent. When it started about 15 years ago, the Alberta oil boom brought jobs and about $200 billion USD worth of investment, but it also wreaked environmental damage, including up to 23 times the toxic hydrocarbons in nearby lakes compared to before the oil sands mines were built. Her First Nation lived off the land, and she grew up eating moose meat, but she remembers the day her dad found tumors in a moose he killed. Similarly, her grandparents used the water from the lakes and streams to brew tea, but gradually the water became undrinkable and her community began relying on bottled water—an all too common situation in Canada.

In April 2011, she flew over her band's territory in a helicopter to witness the effects of the province's largest oil spill in 35 years. Though they were 30 kilometers away from the 4.5 million liter crude oil spill, her family felt its impacts. "They couldn't breathe, their eyes were burning," she remembered.

In recent years, forest fires have become more frequent and intense, and Laboucan-Massimo doesn't hesitate to link them to climate change.

"The thing that I think really politicized me was, in the 90s, when I started getting older, and then when I went to high school and university and coming back all the time and seeing the changes in the landscape."

"That was a really hard reality to come to terms with," she said. "It was really upsetting driving back home to visit my family, and see all the heavy industry coming into the area."

"I realized, I can't not do anything about this. I have to act."

Her activism has taken her from the frontlines of the oil sands to protests and other projects around the world. She was on staff with the Indigenous-run Redwire newsletter, which distributed news to friendship centers and prisons. She has also produced short documentaries, including one about the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation's fight against oil sands expansion. She has testified before US Congress on the impact of the oil sands in her community and how Keystone XL pipeline would affect them, and spoken at big oil AGMs.

As a parallel action to the divestment movement, which aims to convince shareholders to give up their investments in big oil, she infiltrated the shareholder meetings of companies including BP and Shell between 2008 and 2011 to force environment into the conversation.

Shareholders in these companies who worried about the effects of oil extraction on the environment gave her proxy shares so she could attend the annual company meetings to push the company's operations in a socially responsible direction. "It was like ally work in certain ways," she said, though she was met with "somewhat of an antagonistic room" when she eventually attended the shareholder meetings and asked questions about the oil sands.

Along with the divestment movement, other major activism efforts she's been involved with have seen some measure of success.

Back in July, Laboucan-Massimo marched front and center at the Jobs, Justice, Climate march as it wound through the streets of downtown Toronto. Organized by Naomi Klein alongside famous environmentalists including David Suzuki, the march aimed to show the false choice between the environment and the economy in the then-impending Canadian election.

Now that Canada has a new prime minister, Laboucan-Massimo is cautiously optimistic that the climate conversation can move forward. "Probably more on the cautious side," she adds.

"Trudeau's going to have some hard decisions to make, and one of them is, you can't be a supporter of three major tar sands pipelines and actually have concrete and effective action on climate."

Trudeau hasn't said no to Energy East. He has supported Keystone XL, though when US President Barack Obama killed the project, Trudeau said in a statement, "We are disappointed by the decision but respect the right of the United States to make the decision." He has said he would ban tanker traffic off the coast of BC, which would effectively kill Northern Gateway.

Trudeau has also promised to reform the National Energy Board and restart the nation-to-nation consultations with First Nations.

"He might be able to overhaul the process, potentially for the NEB, he might say that there's consultation that will happen, but at the end of the day the majority of Canadians and especially First Nations along those corridor routes are in opposition," Laboucan-Massimo said.

"We don't want to see him, just like Harper, be out of step with First Nations and Canadians when they've made their voice loud and clear."

On November 8, months after completing the solar project in the Lubicon Cree First Nation, she attended the "climate welcome" outside Prime Minister Trudeau's residence to present the new Canadian prime minister with solar panels wrapped in red ribbon for future installation at 24 Sussex. The stunt, which was part of over four days of creative action by climate protesters, was designed to remind Trudeau about his climate promises.

"We thought that, having just put up [the solar project], it would be fitting to have someone from Alberta to deliver solar panels to the new prime minister to say that this is the direction that we would like to see our country [go] as young people," she explained in an interview with VICE in early November. "It's really going to affect the rest of our lives."