Alberta Oil Sands

Although the concept of environmental refugees has been circulating for more than thirty years, not much has been written about how the displacement of people caused by environmental disasters has entered into public discourses. More specifically, within the empirical investigations into the discourses on environmental displacement, the phenomenon of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) moving inside the borders of their own countries as an effect of disasters has received little critical attention with respect to how it is framed. The present article explores the discursive constructions of IDPs in Canadian news discourse which refer to the destructive 2016 Alberta fire in Fort McMurray, the heart of the tar sands region. Thus, a corpus of news reports is analysed in a discourse-analytical perspective with the intent of identifying specific discursive strategies, frames and patterns in the representation of the social actors within newspaper narratives. The analysis shows that the representations of IDPs in the corpus under investigation are characterized by different patterns of language choice compared to those emerging from the discourses on climate refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in general, evident in previous studies. In the end, what becomes also apparent is that nomination strategies are connected to specific ideologies in discourse, on the basis of which the correlation between the tar sands and the fire is either omitted or mildly unveiled.

This chapter demonstrates that while the environmental impacts of oil sands activities on indigenous communities are often understood to be recent controversies, they are contemporary manifestations of issues that first emerged during the initial commercial development phase of the oil sands industry from the late-1960s to mid-1980s.

Using a case study of Alberta, Canada, this paper demonstrates how a geographic critique of fossil capitalism helps elucidate the tensions shaping tar sands development. Conflicts over pipelines and Indigenous territorial claims are challenging development trajectories, as tar sands companies need to expand access to markets in order to expand production. While these conflicts are now well recognised, there are also broader dynamics shaping development. States face a rentier's dilemma, relying on capital investments to realise resource value. Political responses to the emerging climate crisis undercut the profitability of hydrocarbon extraction. The automation of production undermines the industrial compromise between hydrocarbon labour and capital. Ultimately, the crises of fossil capitalism require a radical transformation within or beyond capital relations. To mobilise against the tar sands, organisers must recognise the tensions underpinning it, developing strategies that address ecological concerns and the economic plight of those dispossessed and abandoned by carbon extraction.

Fort McMurray Métis Elders and land users have observed a decrease in the population density of freshwater mussels (known locally as clams; Unionidae) in the lower Athabasca region (LAR) in recent decades. A community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach, braided with Indigenous Knowledge, is used as a guiding framework to facilitate partnerships and create safe, ethical spaces across diverse knowledge systems to address questions about freshwater mussel health in a locally relevant and culturally appropriate way. Opportunities for Elders and land users to travel along the Athabasca and Clearwater rivers in search of freshwater mussels allowed for the renewal of personal and cultural relationships to place that was braided with the study of parameters relevant to Western science. Our search revealed the presence of fat muckets (Lampsilis siliquoidea), with a limited number of giant floaters (Anodonta grandis), in our study area. However, delineating the types of species present is only the beginning of our work to understand freshwater mussel health in the LAR. We present a methodological discussion that demonstrates the importance of prioritizing Indigenous Knowledge to answer questions that may not have been considered within Western knowledge systems and shows how diverse ways of knowing can be braided to create new learnings together. “Learning together,” in practice, means recognizing that each person has knowledge and skills to contribute, which also involves shared decision making. We maintain that by “learning together,” complex problems can be understood in ways that are more meaningful and insightful than they would be if Indigenous communities, government scientists, or research consultants studied them alone.

FULL CITATION: Debra Hopkins, Tara L. Joly, Harvey Sykes, Almer Waniandy, John Grant, Lorrie Gallagher, Leonard Hansen, Kaitlyn Wall, Peter Fortna, and Michelle Bailey "“Learning Together”: Braiding Indigenous and Western Knowledge Systems to Understand Freshwater Mussel Health in the Lower Athabasca Region of Alberta, Canada," Journal of Ethnobiology 39(2), 315-336, (17 June 2019). https://doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-39.2.315

This article examines the relationship between development politics and environmental regulation and research during the first commercial development phase of the oil sands industry. As demand for oil grew after the Second World War, and oil supplies from the Middle East became less stable, oil companies began building facilities to produce synthetic oil from the bitumen deposits in north-eastern Alberta. The commercialisation of the oil sands industry coincided with the formalisation of environmental policy at both the provincial and federal levels. When the Progressive Conservative Party, led by Premier Peter Lougheed, formed a government after winning the 1971 election, it strengthened and expanded the scope of environmental regulation into the mid-1970s. The 1973 oil crisis changed the economic viability and importance of the oil sands industry. For Lougheed, the oil sands industry became a cornerstone of the PC government’s goals to diversify the Alberta economy. To save the Syncrude project after Atlantic Richfield withdrew its thirty per cent stake in the consortium in December 1974, the Alberta government bought a ten per cent position along with the federal government and Ontario. This article argues that investing in the oil sands industry created a conflict of interest for the Alberta government, as it became both the regulator and the developer of the resource. Using a range of archival sources and oral history, it shows how Alberta’s environmental policies and research programmes were sidelined by the Lougheed government in the latter half of the 1970s, culminating in the cancellation of the Alberta Oil Sands Environmental Research Program in 1980. The marginalisation of environmental regulation and research has contributed to the environmental impacts of the oil sands industry on ecosystems and Indigenous communities, and limited public awareness of environmental change.

Report with Clinton N. Westman synthesizing recent literature on impacts, benefits, and participatory processes for Indigenous communities in the oil sands region. This project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada's Knowledge Synthesis Grant.

Economic and political pressures to extract Canada’s oil sands—among the most carbon-intensive and polluting fossil fuels on the planet—have increased manifold, while heightened risks of toxic spills, climate change, and environmental degradation from fossil fuel use and production have solicited intense public concern. Yet, influenced by neoliberalism, political solutions to climate and environmental crises are often swept aside in favor of market-based approaches to economic and social organization. In the face of such depoliticizing trends, and an economic model that makes life on Earth increasingly precarious, a loose network of environmental organizations and citizens took social and political action against oil pipelines in response to the “failure of institutional representation” (Dufour et al., 2015: 127). This movement—dubbed the anti-fossil fuel or anti-pipeline movement (Klein, 2014)—sought to challenge the dominant cultures and politics of fossil-fueled capitalism to initiate a public conversation about building and governing differently in a socio-ecologically precarious world. For that reason, social resistance to a specific oil infrastructure project, the Energy East pipeline in Canada, presents an opportunity to unpack how political claims for a post-carbon society are enacted and formulated. Drawing primarily on reviews of the social science literature on risk, capitalism, and environmental politics, as well as discourse analysis and in-depth interviews with key anti-fossil fuel movement actors, the thesis aims to explore how anti-pipeline claims problematize capitalist solutions to contemporary environmental problems. It argues that social resistance to pipelines carves out a space in the public imaginary for a future beyond petroleum—and perhaps even modern capitalism itself.

The article seeks to highlight the steady process of offshorization of Albertan legislation and the general wholesale of decision-making processes to the oily hands of multinational businesses involved in the extraction of tar sands oil.

To be published in the English version of A. Deneault, Paradis fiscaux: la filière canadienne, édition Écosociété, 2014.

This article provides a critical overview of consultation, impact assessment, and traditional land use research as these methods of extracting knowledge intersect in the oil sands region of northern Alberta. Based on our experience as anthropologists working in policy analysis, consultation, impact assessment, and community-engaged ethnographic research with impacted communities, we examine public participation and risk assessment procedures, including those conducted through documents and those conducted through personal or group interviews − primarily with Crees. Alberta's oil sands industry has expanded exponentially in recent decades; however, consultation, impact assessment, and accommodation of Cree, Dene, and Métis interests in the region have not kept up with best practices established during the same timeframe. We point to a number of examples where consultation and impact assessment processes have supported an overall political economic push to develop the oil sands as quickly as possible. We argue for improved participatory processes to inform more open political and scientific debate.

— Concerns about a resource curse in Canada have been raised in response to rapid growth in the petroleum sector in northern Alberta. In previous research, there has been little consideration of how symptoms of the resource curse are experienced and managed at a regional scale and by Indigenous communities. An analysis of effects and responses is offered using a natural, financial, human and social capitals framework. Without consideration of how to manage the symptoms of the resource curse, oil and gas activity is likely to further disadvantage Indigenous populations already living on the margins of Canadian society.

The paper is a comparative regulatory analysis of the Alaska Heritage Trust Fund, the Alberta Permanent Fund, and the Government Pension Fund of Norway as developed country natural resource fund (NRF) models. Its objective is to examine how NRFs are regulated. To achieve this objective, it explores and compares the socio-political contexts and regulatory features of the three NRFs, drawing lessons along the way. Given the dearth of publications on the domestic as opposed to transnational regulation of NRFs, it carries out an original review of primary and secondary policy sources, both legal and non-legal documents, along with a synthesis of representative bodies of literature. It finds that NRFs are mainly regulated by laws and institutional support which constitute four key regulatory features: legal frameworks and objectives, ownership regimes, structure and functionality, and governance and operation. The conclusion is that how NRFs are regulated, based on these features, determines their outcomes.

Drawing an extensive primary and secondary information, including interviews, focus groups, and household surveys, this report provides a comprehensive assessment of the potential cultural impacts of the Teck Frontier Oil Sands Mine, located in Alberta, Canada, on the McMurray Métis community.  The study develops a unique set of tools to assess and characterize cultural effects based on the principles of Indigenous knowledge, interrelatedness, and cumulativeness.  The report concludes the project is likely to have significant cumulative cultural impacts on the McMurray Métis community.

This study fills a gap in assessing the potential of emerging technologies and processes to improve economic competitiveness and reduce emissions of oil sands operations. It provides a detailed quantitative analysis of supply cost and emission reduction opportunities for technological innovation in the oil sands in situ process over the short and medium terms. The assessment is performed at the production field level breaking down oil sands in situ process into seven segments: 1) Reservoir, 2) Wells and well pads, 3) Business management and data analytics, 4) Steam generation, 5) Waste and water treatment, 6) Pipelines and transport, and 7) Upgrading. More so, the technology configurations that meet minimum costs and emissions objectives can achieve potential reduction of bitumen supply cost by 34-40% and reduce fuel-derived emissions from in situ oil sands production by more than 80%.

The Canadian Oil Sands are analyzed under the multi-level perspective, for the purpose of building towards a sustainability transition. Despite demonstrating that the oil sands are experiencing initial transitional phases brought about by landscape level political and climate change pressures, evidence suggests that the oil sands regime is comparable to that of the American Military Industrial Complex and the South African Minerals Energy Complex. Thus, we re-term the oil sands as the Canadian Oil Sands Industrial Complex. Particular focus is given to the landscape and landscape shocks as they have been understudied in previous work. It is suggested that landscape shocks may be useful tools in initiating and accelerating sustainability transitions, and suggestions are provided for both policy makers and future researchers in the implementation of these concepts.

This report is primarily based upon focus groups held in Conklin, Alberta on November 14, 2017, follow-up meetings held in December 2017, as well as a final validation meeting held in April 2018. A more comprehensive project—one that includes historical research, point-in-time counts, statistical analysis, and program reviews—is required to fully understand the extent of homelessness in Conklin. These limitations aside, approximately sixty people—representing the demographics of youth, adults, and Elders— participated in the focus groups. An additional twenty people have participated in various verification meetings.  In these meetings, nearly every participant felt they were negatively affected by the housing crisis in the community, with a majority of participants likely meeting the Canadian definition of homeless by being either unsheltered, emergency sheltered, provisionally sheltered, or at risk of homelessness.  The concerns were visually documented via photographs taken with community members.  Specific stories and photographs of Conklin homelessness are woven throughout this report, so that readers can understand the situation through community members’ own eyes and words.

The report is organized into three main sections.  The first section explains the historic and contemporary contexts that have contributed to homelessness in the community.  The second section examines the specifics of the current homelessness crisis in Conklin.  The third section forwards a number of preliminary recommendations for various levels of government that were expressed during the community focus groups. By bringing this information together, it is hoped that the government agencies responsible for housing in the community will finally come together and work with local leaders to address this issue.

The current study has a limited scope and budget and was financed exclusively by CRDAC. It is CRDAC’s hope that the various levels of government and their associated
agencies will use this preliminary evidence to undertake a more detailed study in partnership with the Conklin community in order to understand the full extent of the crisis and provide the resources necessary to address the crisis. As the 2008 Alberta government’s plan to end
homelessness states: “Fellow Albertans don’t belong on the streets or in emergency shelters. Instead, they should be moved into housing and given support to address their challenges, restore stability, and attain greater self-reliance. Each of them deserves the opportunity to succeed.” The residents of Conklin hope that after reading this report, the appropriate government departments will agree to work with them to give them an opportunity to succeed and have a safe place to rest their heads every night.

This report presents archival information, primary oral history interviews, secondary historical scholarship, and primary government sources that demonstrate Fort McMurray is a historic and contemporary rights-bearing Métis community as defined in R. v. Powley. Historical census data, Hudson Bay Company archives, oral history accounts, and genealogical information enable the McMurray Métis community to trace its origins as a distinctive settlement within a broader regional Métis community prior to the time of Effective European Control (herein effective control) of northeastern Alberta. Today, as historically, McMurray Métis community members self-identify as Métis, maintain traditional land use practices in the areas around Fort McMurray, and consider themselves part of a distinctive historic and contemporary Métis community.

Economic and political pressures to extract Canada’s oil sands—among the most carbon-intensive and polluting fossil fuels on the planet—have increased manifold, while heightened risks of toxic spills, climate change, and environmental degradation from fossil fuel use and production have solicited intense public concern. Yet, influenced by neoliberalism, political solutions to climate and environmental crises are often swept aside in favor of market-based approaches to economic and social organization. In the face of such depoliticizing trends, and an economic model that makes life on Earth increasingly precarious, a loose network of environmental organizations and citizens took social and political action against oil pipelines in response to the “failure of institutional representation” (Dufour et al., 2015: 127). This movement—dubbed the anti-fossil fuel or anti-pipeline movement (Klein, 2014)—sought to challenge the dominant cultures and politics of fossil-fueled capitalism to ini...

The paper is a comparative regulatory analysis of the Alaska Heritage Trust Fund, the Alberta Permanent Fund, and the Government Pension Fund of Norway, as developed country natural resource fund (nrf) models. Its objective is to examine how nrfs are regulated. To achieve this objective, it explores and compares the socio-political contexts and regulatory features of the three nrfs, drawing lessons along the way. Given the dearth of publications on the domestic as opposed to the transnational regulation of nrfs, it carries out an original review of primary and secondary policy sources, both legal and non-legal documents, along with a synthesis of representative bodies of literature. It finds that nrfs are mainly regulated by laws and institutional support, which constitute four key regulatory features: legal frameworks and objectives, ownership regimes, structure and functionality, and governance and operation. The conclusion is that how nrfs are regulated, based on these features, ...

This chapter examines the industrialization of the Athabasca region and the subsequent loss of Indigenous space as a process that has been facilitated by Canadian federal and provincial law. It argues that Crown ownership of land and mineral rights dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of land, obfuscated and erased Indigenous cultural and material landscapes, and created a legal framework within which the region could be deemed as an industrial space. It traces the gradual increase in legal colonial control through several major events, focusing on the settlement and implementation of Treaty Land Entitlement (TLE) claims during the twentieth century. The Mikisew Cree First Nation’s TLE claim provides an example of how Indigenous communities have contested Crown ownership of land in the Athabasca region. Historically, provincial and federal reluctance to settle land claims in bitumen-bearing zones shows the increasing importance of prioritizing resource extraction in northern Alberta. While land claims have been resisted by government, they have sometimes been successful, and have created cash reserves and land bases that have helped communities build capacity to carve out spaces in the industrial economy.

In this paper I suggest that it is possible to participate in research as an act of reciprocity; when a community asks a researcher for help on a specific topic, the application of that researcher's skills can be one of the ways they show appreciation for being welcomed into a place. I also argue that a researcher needs to be sensitive to, and participate in, systems of respect and reciprocity belonging to the people, ancestors, and sentient landscape of the place they are doing research.

Procedural environmental justice refers to fairness in processes of decision-making. It recognises that environmental victimisation, while an injustice in and of itself, is usually underpinned by unjust deliberation procedures. Although green criminology tends to focus on the former—distributional dimension of environmental justice—this article draws attention to its procedural counterpart. In doing so, it demonstrates how the notions of justice-as-recognition and justice-as-participation are jointly manifested within its conceptual boundaries. This is done by using the consultation process that occurs with indigenous peoples on proposed oil sands projects in Northern Alberta, Canada, as a case study. Drawing from ‘elite’ interviews, the article illustrates how indigenous voices have been marginalised and their Treaty rights misrecognised within this consultation process. As such, in seeking to understand the procedural determinants of distributional injustice, the article aims to e...

Public Talk, Nov. 26, 2020

Oil sands companies in northern Alberta are required to reclaim land disturbed by their extractive activities. Reclaimed land is meant to resemble a naturally-occurring boreal forest, but reclamation has been criticized for ‘desertifying’ a landscape that, prior to extraction, consisted largely of muskeg (peatlands).

What is the social and cultural context for the creation of these landscapes? Of what value is muskeg, anyways? And, importantly, what does land reclamation mean for Indigenous rights and land use? This talk will consider these questions by examining ways that muskeg and its reclamation appear in Indigenous, government, and scientific discourses.

https://video.unbc.ca/media/Growing+%28With%29+MuskegA+Oil+Sands+Reclamation+and+Health+-+Dr.+Tara+Joly+-+November+26+2020/0_50xn8dx7/195207

In the contested space of energy production in Canada, tension and a series of disputes over land and rights have arisen between the state, industry and local Aboriginal communities. Canadian governments have long exploited the bountiful natural resources of the land, while at the same time attempting to reconcile a difficult relationship with its Aboriginal communities. This case study reveals how the government has yielded responsibility to industry to resolve the many governance challenges of Canada’s extractive hot zone. Through substantial delegation of governance duties to industry, the Canadian Government has placed large parts of its regulatory toolbox in the hands of multinational Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) departments, and hence turned social and environmental planning and programming into corporate stakeholder management. This article sets out to explain these dramatic changes in governance power play and practice by examining the case of the extractive hot zone in Alberta, according to three distinct but interlinked trajectories in governance and CSR scholarship, namely the change from “government” to “governance”, the emergence of a claimed post-political condition and the evolution of CSR practices towards stakeholder management.

Lower McMurray strata distributed across the northern one-third of the Athabasca oil sands deposit filled cross-cutting troughs that formed a giant orthogonal lattice. This pattern of lineament pair bound troughs on the sub-Cretaceous paleotopography was configured by underlying Middle Devonian salt dissolution-collapses. The western segment of the giant 50 km long V-shaped Bitumont trough overlies the 5-10 km wide Middle Devonian salt scarp, which was further dissected by continued dissolution along lineament pairs during the lower McMurray period. There was a more complete removal of at least 100 m of salt beds underlying the eastern trough. Salt removals during the pre-Cretaceous and lower McMurray periods fragmented the overlying Upper Devonian strata into fault blocks that floored these giant cross-cutting troughs and resulted in Devonian block containers that differentially subsided and compartmentalized the lower McMurray deposits. These container fills were mostly coarser sand aggradations across the western trough in contrast to structurally lower heterolithic flood plain deposits to the east. The container fills inherited orthogonal geometrics contiguous with the underlying salt dissolution lattice pattern.

Public participation in natural-resource management has been theorised as a potential means of slowing or halting the ‘treadmill of production’. We examine the institutional processes for citizen participation in bitumen development proposals in Alberta, Canada, home of the tar sands – one of the world’s largest reserves of fossil fuel. Within the context of economic and ecological impacts of fossil-fuel resource development in Alberta, we chart the active treadmill forces, and examine the legal framework that enables public involvement in the province. We also provide a detailed account of the extent of public participation through the available avenues to date. We conclude, in line with the expectations of the treadmill of production, that the institutionalised processes of participation have been restricted to the point of nullifying the possibility of effective, democratic control over the expansion of the tar sands.

Although the concept of environmental refugees has been circulating for more than thirty years, not much has been written about how the displacement of people caused by environmental disasters has entered into public discourses. More specifically, within the empirical investigations into the discourses on environmental displacement, the phenomenon of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) moving inside the borders of their own countries as an effect of disasters has received little critical attention with respect to how it is framed. The present article explores the discursive constructions of IDPs in Canadian news discourse which refer to the destructive 2016 Alberta fire in Fort McMurray, the heart of the tar sands region. Thus, a corpus of news reports is analysed in a discourse-analytical perspective with the intent of identifying specific discursive strategies, frames and patterns in the representation of the social actors within newspaper narratives. The analysis shows that the representations of IDPs in the corpus under investigation are characterized by different patterns of language choice compared to those emerging from the discourses on climate refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in general, evident in previous studies. In the end, what becomes also apparent is that nomination strategies are connected to specific ideologies in discourse, on the basis of which the correlation between the tar sands and the fire is either omitted or mildly unveiled.

Alberta’s royalty debate has focused on rates, exhibiting a myopic approach to the royalty system. Addressing this, the paper qualitatively appraises the Alberta royalty review from a sociolegal standpoint. It claims that the review reveals the context and lessons that could displace the myopia of the royalty debate: this might lead to a holistic understanding of the economic interests of the government and the private sector in the royalty system, and the moderation of claims over royalties. The context revolves around a consideration of how resource development works, the nature of royalty and the changing landscape of the resource sector, and the lessons are on the nuances that should guide the royalty system, metrics that should apply in the calculation of royalties, broader implications of the royalty system, and backing up royalties in case of the unexpected. Overall, the paper presents broader lessons useful to resource economies.

During the Harper years, Canada's international reputation suffered from a perception that the country strongly privileges oil and gas profits over the integrity of the global climate. While a change of tone has been noted with the new Trudeau government, the cautious and incremental approach to carbon pricing coupled by the decision to approve major new fossil fuel infrastructure raises questions about how responsible a global actor Canada really is. Canada's 150th anniversary provides an opportunity to consider questions about Canada's role in confronting serious global issues, as well as the apparent disjuncture between Canada's history as a natural resource exporter and the steps needed to build a low carbon future. At the same time, the commercial and political imperatives driving major energy infrastructure projects (particularly fossil fuel projects) stand at odds with the Trudeau government's commitment to improving relations between Canadian governments and aboriginal peoples. In particular, they clash with the principle of free, prior, and informed consent which Canada has agreed to implement via the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The question of how much fossil fuel infrastructure to build and where is linked to deep enduring themes in Canadian politics, from national unity and federalism to Canada's role on the global stage and the place of indigenous peoples within Canada. At a minimum, adjudicating between these competing claims raises challenges for the present federal and provincial governments. Quite possibly, it also reveals a fundamental incoherence in Justin Trudeau's overall policy agenda.

Since 2011, WBEA has been collaborating with Fort McKay to record and use Cree, Dené and Métis ontologies and specialized indicators to observe four community berry patches (Vaccinium vitis-idaea and Vaccinium myrtilloides) in Fort McKay’s traditional territory. While using community-based research methods, WBEA has supplied the resources and scientific expertise to support the project with passive air monitoring, weather monitoring, and berry sampling and testing. Fort McKay collaborators use indicators such as dust on the berries, proximity to development, taste, colour, size, and ‘plumpness’ to identify quality of berries. Fort McKay community members lack trust in berries that are close to the community due to their proximity to industrial developments, and this impacts people’s access to a nutritionally and socially fundamental food source.  This poster will display early findings of correlations between indicators based on traditional knowledge and measurable contaminants in the berries. It will also provide qualitative results of the Fort McKay collaborator’s observations of change in their berry supply and subsequent impacts on their social, physical, and spiritual well-being.

The Alberta tar sands are examined in the context of Jacques Ellul's analysis of the technological society.  Ellul's theory of technology as a social rather than technical phenomenon illuminates the rhetoric of economic necessity and inevitability used to justify the particular case of the Alberta tar sands industry. Other social values -- including moral goods, future generations, and environmental sustainability -- are subsumed within the efficient mastery of nature. This techno-logic recognizes no logic but its own and thus assumes for itself a sacred character. Applying Ellul's hermeneutic provides grounding for the examination of tensions surrounding the Alberta tar sands.

Scientists working for oil companies in the Athabasca region are developing methods by which to reclaim muskeg (boreal peatlands) on land disturbed by oil sands extraction. The Alberta government requires companies to reclaim disturbed land by achieving equivalent capability of the landscape to support an end land use. Indigenous community members instead define reclamation as establishing not only quantifiable ecological functions, but also relationships to their traditional territories. Tensions emerge as Indigenous concerns are often subsumed within bureaucratic discourses that favour scientific classification and quantification of land uses in reclaimed areas. Divergent responses to muskeg in reclamation activities are informed in part by these competing emphases on quantifiable landscapes as opposed to those that are relational and growing. This article traces this multiplicity through the examination of government and scientific literature and ethnographic fieldwork with Indigenous communities in northern Alberta. Muskeg is used as an analytical tool to explore competing conceptions of land reclamation. Mistranslation of polysemantic terms like muskeg occur on an ontological level, and settler colonial relations and power imbalances between competing languages and knowledge systems proliferate in reclamation activities.