Yellowhead Institute

FEDERAL AND PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENTS’ legal obligation to consult and accommodate Indigenous nations has been confirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada for over 20 years. The duty to consult is triggered when a government’s action may affect Indigenous Nations’ rights. An action that could severely impair Indigenous Nations’ exercise of their rights entails accommodation measures to mitigate negative effects. Additionally, British Columbia in 2019 passed legislation committing the government to align its laws with the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). UNDRIP affirms Indigenous Nations’ right to self-determination, including the right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) to make decisions that affect Indigenous lands. Prior to 2023, British Columbia’s mineral claims regime violated both the imperative to consult Indigenous Nations and the principles of UNDRIP. In the previous system, individuals or companies with a Free Miner Certificate could pay a nominal fee to register a mineral or placer claim through B.C’s Mineral Titles Online. These claims confer a priority right to subsurface minerals and the exclusive ability to pursue further permits to conduct significant exploration work. First Nations had no role in the claims registration process and were only consulted during the later permitting stage. This “free entry” system would have likely remained in place if not for litigation that challenged its constitutionality. 

The Gitxaała Nation and Ehattesaht First Nation first successfully challenged the “free entry” system in 2023, with the British Columbia Supreme Court confirming that it violated the duty to consult. The B.C. government was ordered to reform the regime to implement consultation processes, which was rolled out in March 2025. However, it took an appeal to produce an additional ruling from the B.C. Court of Appeal in 2025 that confirmed the previous mineral claims regime was also inconsistent with FPIC, as incorporated by the B.C. government’s legislation. This judicial acknowledgement that the Mineral Tenure Act is inconsistent with Indigenous nations’ rights under UNDRIP must thus be addressed in subsequent consultative forums and reforms, which could be subject to future litigation. The B.C. Court of Appeal’s decision is being appealed by the B.C. government on the grounds that it is creating “confusion” over the legal status of UNDRIP in Canada (Depner 2026). 

It is worth pausing here to further examine the B.C. government’s position. The B.C. government accepted the need for reforms aimed at incorporating Indigenous consultation to meet both their duty to consult under Canadian common law and the standards of UNDRIP as affirmed in B.C. legislation. However, the B.C. government is challenging the position that inconsistencies between the Mineral Tenure Act and other B.C. laws and UNDRIP are justiciable. The B.C. government is arguing against judicial forms of accountability over how UNDRIP is implemented.

A similar challenge by the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is being made to the Federal Court of Appeal after the Federal Court in early 2025 ruled that UNDRIP serves as an interpretative lens that changes the standards of Indigenous consultation. 

Excluding the judiciary as a venue to challenge the state’s implementation of UNDRIP is the latest demonstration of the state’s preference for controlling processes of decision-making, particularly over land and waters. The evolution of the duty to consult is illustrative of what happens when the judiciary permits the state to use existing decision-making processes that simply integrate additional steps to include Indigenous consultation. In Process as Power, I analyze how the duty to consult’s obligations as outlined in Canadian common law permits Canadian governments to consult Indigenous Nations without adapting to Indigenous standards of good governance. The judiciary did not compel Canadian governments to restructure the process of decision-making, only that Indigenous Nations must be formally included in pre-existing models with the final decision-making power residing with a minister.

Such legitimacy deficits arose when B.C.’s mineral claims regime was reformed to conform to the duty to consult standard. In a six-month review of those reforms, a majority of First Nations survey responses revealed that they perceived the decision-making process to lack transparency and produce only weak accommodation measures. Despite formally meeting the duty to consult, these consultative processes overburden Indigenous communities to review numerous applications because no additional supports are provided (Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals 2025, 16); they do not clearly demonstrate how Indigenous feedback was considered and were even perceived to ignore First Nations (Ibid, 17); and they produce unresponsive accommodation measures (Ibid, 18). These results are striking because they closely mirror issues present in other decision-making processes related to reviewing industrial activities. Process as Power includes an examination of B.C.’s Environmental Assessment process and the same state-driven unilateralism permeates that forum as well. I trace how these deficiencies are tied to the ways in which the duty to consult case law over time permitted state-led decision-making designs while narrowly defining what Indigenous Nations can raise in consultative forums. 

UNDRIP fundamentally departs from the duty to consult standard because it presents an Indigenous-driven framework through FPIC that respects Indigenous self-determination. The fact that governments like B.C., Canada, and the Northwest Territories have passed UNDRIP-affirming legislation showed promising signs that reconciliation politics was backed by some action. But UNDRIP’s implementation was always going to be the real test of these governments’ commitments. In the context of the B.C. Environmental Assessment process, I find that reforms starting in 2018 have made some progress to improve the capacity of Indigenous Nations to review applications and to consistently respect the rights-holding status of Indigenous Nations. Other developments are more concerning, like how decision-making power continues to reside with a minister who is not bound by any party, including a new dispute resolution facilitator. Crucially, in this particular policy area, ongoing nation-to-nation negotiations are being pursued to advance additional reforms to uphold UNDRIP (Environmental Assessment Office 2025). 

Combatting the state’s asymmetrical hold over decision-making in matters that affect Indigenous Nations would be completely undermined if governments could unilaterally decide how to implement UNDRIP. The Eby government’s attempted volte-face to suspend parts of their UNDRIP-affirming legislation in response to the mining litigation is not only a political betrayal to the Indigenous Nations in that province working to advance UNDRIP but also conflicts with the direction established in recent appellate decisions. Canadian appellate courts have explained that legislative commitments, like those aimed at implementing UNDRIP, engage the Crown’s honour, which compels these governments to act upon their declarations. The Crown being bound to fulfill legislative promises related to the goal of reconciliation has been affirmed in other Indigenous rights contexts like the C-92 Reference decision (2024) concerning Indigenous child welfare. As explained in Gitxaała v. British Columbia (2025), the B.C. government’s legislative “affirmation…amounts to a binding Crown promise, namely, that the Crown will act as though the existing legal rights, obligations, principles, minimum standards and goals expressed in UNDRIP in specific relation to Indigenous peoples apply to British Columbia laws, including the common law” (at para. 161). 

The conflict over process rights is just beginning and will continue to entwine both legal and political developments.

Depner, W. (2026, February 7). B.C. seeks to challenge landmark court ruling over mineral rights and DRIPA. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/eby-dripa-gitxaala-ruling-challenge-mineral-rights-9.7078151

British Columbia Environmental Assessment Office. (2025, September). Review of the 2018 Environmental Assessment Act [Backgrounder]. Government of British Columbia. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/environment/natural-resource-stewardship/environmental-assessments/act-review/eao_act_review_backgrounder.pdf

British Columbia Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals. (2025, December). Mineral Claims Consultation Framework—6 month review. Government of British Columbia. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/environment/natural-resource-stewardship/environmental-assessments/act-review/mineral_claims_consultation_framework__6_month_review.pdf

Gitxaała v. British Columbia (Chief Gold Commissioner), 2025 BCCA 430.

Citation:

Do, Minh. “The Politics of Process: B.C.’s Mineral Claims Regime and the Threat of an FPIC Freeze,” Yellowhead Institute. June 02, 2026. https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2026/the-politics-of-process-b-c-s-mineral-claims-regime-and-the-threat-of-an-fpic-freeze

The post The Politics of Process: B.C.’s Mineral Claims Regime and the Threat of an FPIC Freeze appeared first on Yellowhead Institute.

IT’S MY FIRST DAY in Fort Good Hope, and I drive to a camp near the edge of town. I add my borrowed truck to a row of a dozen others, climb out, and then make my way toward a cluster of people. At the centre of camp, Elders are instructing the younger women in a mix of Dene and English, teaching them how to tan moose and caribou hides. The process is intensive: scraping, washing, wringing, stretching, hanging, smoking, rinsing, stitching. It can take weeks, I am told, to tan a single hide, and nobody will finish one this afternoon. 

The mood is light and happy. After observing for a while, I follow the sound of laughter from a few yards away, coming from a plywood-and-sheet metal camp kitchen. I shyly poke my head through the door to see a functional kitchen space and a few women preparing food. I sit down at the table, and people stream in and out to snack on scattered plates of fruit, crackers, and cheese. Everyone chats and laughs together. People are receiving me politely, but not necessarily warmly, so I sit quietly and try to absorb everything going on around me.

After a while, the snack plates are swept away to make room for tinfoil pans heaped with mashed potatoes, pork chops, and salad. People from all around camp stream inside to serve up. The plywood bench seats fill. After a long day of travel, I gratefully accept the paper plate full of food offered to me by one of the cooks. After a while, someone asks what I’m doing in town. When I explain that I had been invited to stay for two months to interview people about Imperial Oil’s nearby oilfield for my research, the mood becomes tense. Two women halfheartedly joke that I should give back the food if I’m working with Imperial Oil. 

Once I clear up the misunderstanding, explaining that I’m here as a university student and not as an employee of Imperial Oil, people are immediately more comfortable, and the mood lifts. I’m told I can keep my plate. A man jokes that I should get a T-shirt that says “Not With Imperial,” and the room laughs. We all finish our dinners, and I am offered dessert.

That summer, I spent two months conducting research in the tiny, fly-in-fly-out community of Fort Good Hope (Rádeyı̨lı̨kóé), a few kilometers south of the Arctic Circle.

The region’s Indigenous peoples’ cultures believe that land, water, humans, air, and animals are sentient. All beings hold power, agency, and value, as all are equal. All beings speak, even the land. The Fort Good Hope Dene and Métis people have their own distinct culture, history, and traditions. They are called the K’asho Got’ine. 

More than 100 years ago, in 1919, a settler working for Imperial Oil “discovered” oil on the banks of the Mackenzie River. Nearly overnight, the region was transformed. Within two years, the Norman Wells Oilfield was established, and the town of Norman Wells sprung up nearby to house its employees. Its size, output, and impact have since grown dramatically. The oilfield has been harmful to the K’asho Got’ine way of life, all while enormously benefitting Imperial Oil. In the 1980s, against the wishes of local people, the oilfield underwent a massive expansion, which included the construction of six artificial islands in the middle of the Mackenzie River.

The very embodiment of colonial extraction, a company from southern Canada extracting oil from Indigenous territory for more than a century, has a fitting, almost cartoonishly evil name: Imperial Oil. The company owns two-thirds of the Norman Wells Oilfield, and the Government of Canada owns the other third.

As of December 2020, fewer than 20% of the employees at the Norman Wells Oilfield are Indigenous to the Sahtú Region, though the workforce does fluctuate. Employment is not a notable benefit for the region.

“We don’t have anything to show for Imperial Oil having been here… Show me the library. Show me the art centre. Show me the Traditional Knowledge centre for Sahtú. Show me the swimming pool for the kids. Show me all those things that were left behind as a legacy,” said Ethel Blondin-Andrew, the first Indigenous Member of Parliament in Canada at a public hearing. Later, she added that if Imperial Oil had done positive things for the Sahtú, they were “well hidden, because I’ve been looking.”

After over a century of oil extraction, Imperial Oil has announced that they are closing the oilfield.

The company submitted a portion of its closure plan in 2022, starting with a proposal for a waste management facility. Sahtú people did not want the oilfield. They vocally opposed its expansion in the 1980s. They have experienced minimal financial benefit and extensive detriment for over a century. And yet, despite the harm brought to the North by Imperial Oil, the company’s official statement reads: “A made-in-the-north solution is appropriate rather than expecting the South to accept the North’s waste” (emphasis added). The Sahtú Secretariat Incorporated shared that they consider “this statement to be a most egregious one, bordering on colonialism… Such thinking reflects badly on the company and makes light of the sacrifices the people of the Sahtú have made over the past one hundred years.”

The company just doesn’t seem to understand how much damage they have done. 

One day, a local man sat me down on a stack of pallets beside the grocery store. One story he shared that day, among many others, was that if you hit a caribou with a stick, you would never see another one. I had no plans to hit any caribou, so this did not mean much to me. He also told me that people from Fort Good Hope used to catch and dry herring in huge volumes, sometimes hundreds in a day. He lamented that it had been over 30 years since anybody had pulled that much herring out of the Mackenzie.

These two stories remained separate in my mind for weeks. Throughout my time in the Sahtú region, dozens of people warned me not to hit a caribou with a stick. I didn’t understand why everybody was telling me this. Did I look like a person who would hit a caribou?

People also recounted stories of pulling herring out of the river by the bucketful, setting up camps to dry them, selling those dried fish to the Northern Store by the bale, and feeding herring to their dog teams during the winter. Then, they would note that herring had become a rarity to catch since the 1980s, just after the oilfield expansion.

The two threads finally came together for me when another Elder went through the familiar story and imparted the same warning about hitting caribou. This Elder explained that the contamination from the islands being constructed, the noise made by trucks and heavy machinery when it was being built, the siltation and contamination, then taking so much oil and using so much water, combined with our lack of respect, amounted to mistreatment of the fish. The herring had disappeared, he believed, because expanding and operating the oilfield was like hitting a caribou with a stick.

K’asho Got’ine place incredible value on the value of reciprocity. A community – and its culture – doesn’t survive thousands of years in the harsh Arctic without treating one another and the land well. If your fish net is extra full one week, you give some fish to your neighbour. Then, if you have an unsuccessful hunt that autumn, another neighbour might share some moose with you. All beings take care of one another. If we are good to the fish, they will remain. If we strike the caribou, they will disappear.

Violating the reciprocal relationship between people and land, whether by hitting a caribou with a stick or by extracting oil at Norman Wells violates this important rule.

In 2004, Elder Lucy Jackson said in a public hearing for Imperial Oil’s water license renewal: “We live on the fish right down the Mackenzie Valley, and the ecosystem is really a concern to the peoples. […] So, I question the credibility of how that is safe for eating.”

Ten years later, in 2014, at a hearing for Imperial Oil’s next Water License Renewal, Ethel Blondin-Andrew, the first Indigenous woman to serve in Canadian Parliament and as a federal cabinet minister, spoke. In her role as President of the Sahtú Secretariat Incorporated, acting as a representative of Indigenous people in the Sahtú region, Blondin-Andrew said that she was “not prepared to eat those fish.”

In 2024, at another public hearing, yet another community member said: “I am hesitant to eat any fish that comes out of the river today. I am worried about the effects of possible contaminants.” Many others echoed this sentiment.

Despite whatever the results of Imperial Oil’s scientific monitoring may show, if these studies are not done with full transparency and community input, if the results are not explained in ways that are easy to understand, and if they are not done in ways that build trust, the results will not matter to the community. As it stands, Imperial Oil maintains that they are not at fault. The K’asho Got’ine have their doubts.

I interviewed dozens of people in Fort Good Hope about their experiences with Imperial Oil for my Master’s research. I asked how they’d been engaged with the upcoming Norman Wells Oilfield closure planning, how they’d felt about that engagement, and what they wanted out of future engagement. I also spoke with many others on the phone, over cups of tea, at community barbecues, at the sewing club, bingo night, graduation, on boats, and at all kinds of town activities.

What I found out is that Imperial Oil’s past engagement with the K’asho Got’ine has long been ineffective because it has not been appropriate for the local culture, governance approach, or style of communication. The rare times Imperial Oil does engage with the community, the information it shares is packed with technical jargon that’s hard to follow. These sessions often feel more like lectures than conversations. People say their questions are brushed aside, or the answers they get don’t match what they asked. Trust in the company has eroded. By ignoring local values of respect and reciprocity, Imperial’s attempts at engagement and consultation have missed the mark.

The herring is another example of this. Imperial Oil’s studies do not engage with ideas of respect or reciprocity, and because Western science cannot see the connection between oilfield operations and the disappearance of herring, Imperial Oil has determined that there is no connection. 

Imperial Oil has announced its intention to close the oilfield. With the closure now approaching, we need to reaffirm the K’asho Got’ine right to lead the reclamation. They must be allowed to define how the land should be used in the future, how to handle the waste safely, and how to repair relationships with the land. K’asho Got’ine must set standards for cleanup, and must be allowed to decide what constitutes “clean” and “safe.” 

I have returned to the Sahtú Region many times since that first visit. I’ve had dinners of fish that I pulled out of a net on a frozen lake, lain in the snow watching the northern lights dance, turned sticky spruce tips into tea for a friend’s sore throat, and sewn beads onto moose hide in front of a warm woodstove. I’ve waved hello to wildflowers, hand-picked blueberries to eat with ice cream, swam in the Rabbitskin river on hot days, and watched a blazing orange sunset last for hours. I have begun to understand the reverence with which people discuss the Mackenzie River, the nearby lakes, the paths that wind around town. I, myself, have begun to love the land. And slowly, I have begun to hear the land whispering, but I can’t quite make out what she’s saying.

At the end of a recent trip, I had the window seat on the flight out. These small planes fly pretty low, so I kept my eyes glued to the ground nearly the entire time. I spotted something out the window, and as we drew closer and it came into focus, I asked the man beside me what I was looking at. With great surprise and joy, he told me that what I witnessed that day should be a secret between me and the land, to tell nobody what she said. He told me what the land was saying and how lucky I was to hear it. He has heard her loud and clear for his entire life. I only heard a fragment of what she said that day, and my, oh my, what she said was beautiful.

Its disrespect has pumped billions of dollars in oil out of the ground, nearly extirpated an entire species of fish, and polluted a waterway that sustains an entire people. Despite enormous profit, very little has benefitted those who live and rely on the land. Finally, though, Imperial Oil has taken almost all it can take. 

We must make sure Imperial Oil gives back. Let us learn from the people of the Sahtú how to repay the land for all we have taken from her. If you, like me, cannot truly hear the land, then you must trust those who can. 

The land speaks to the K’asho Got’ine, and they have been trying to translate for us. All we need to do is listen.

–

This piece was edited by Sahtú Dene writer, Dakota Erutse

Citation:

King, Annie. “After a Century of Oil Extraction: Reclaiming the River at Norman Wells,” Yellowhead Institute. May 14, 2026. https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2026/after-a-century-of-oil-extraction-reclaiming-the-river-at-norman-wells

Artwork: Coming in Under the Lights, Antoine Mountain

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