Anchorage, Alaska — A group of Southeast Alaska tribes requested on Aug. 1 that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights order a temporary pause on Canadian mining activity. They say “reckless” mining activity violates their human rights.
That came after Canada’s Ministry of Land, Water and Resource Stewardship ordered on June 27 that the tribes be denied “participating Nation status,” which has the effect of diminishing their say in the permitting process. Lee Wagner, who is Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshian, and the assistant executive director of the Southeast Alaska Indigenous Transboundary Commission , said the 15 tribes in the commission did everything they could to prove their ties to Canadian lands where gold mining is proposed. They won a lawsuit at the Canadian Supreme Court saying tribes with traditional ties to territory within Canada qualify for participating Indigenous nation status.
That status would require agencies to consult with and accommodate them in the permitting process. Wagner said in a prepared statement, “Canada’s (subsequent) decision (to deny that status) categorically silences those of us who have occupied and stewarded these watersheds for tens of thousands of years, long before the colonial border was established. Canada is putting companies and profit over the rights of its neighbors who are separated only by a colonial border.
Let’s be clear: this is a death sentence for our rights and way of life, the waters on which we dep.