This is the fourth post in a series on the fiftieth anniversary of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, edited by Mark Stoller. This is a two-part post from Tina Loo, and you can read the first part here.
The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry is celebrated as a model of participatory environmental assessment. Among other innovations, it opened hearings to those who stood to be directly affected by the proposed development as well as public interest groups, provided financial support for their participation, and mandated disclosure of all studies by pipeline proponents and intervenors.
While the formal hearings were held mainly in Yellowknife, Berger took the inquiry to Indigenous communities across the North and to major southern cities to hear informally and directly from people. In doing so, he followed the practice and travelled to many of the same places Justice William G. Morrow did during the Paulette Caveat case – a 1973 land title case – to learn about Treaties 8 and 11 from the Dene.
Berger enlisted CBC North to report regularly on the hearings, creating an unprecedented national conversation about Indigenous rights, development, democracy, and “progress.” In the end, the Inquiry’s community hearings weren’t so much about a pipeline. Instead, they revealed the different ways of life that were at stake, ones that were the foundations of different visions of what Canada could and should be for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.1
That’s what I hope is revealed in this story map. It takes you through all the places the Inquiry visited. But it’s a selective snapshot. The sense you’ll get of the community hearings will be partial – in all senses of that word. I’ve focussed on what struck me, and what I consider to be some of the important issues the pipeline raised. I’ve quoted directly from many of those who testified and provided links to the transcripts, which have been digitized by Library and Archives Canada.
Both journalist Martin O’Malley and CBC cameraman Patrick Scott followed the Inquiry as it happened and have written their own accounts that are worth reading. Writer Richard Van Camp (Dogrib Tłı̨chǫ) has used Chief Frank T’Seleie’s testimony at the Fort Good Hope hearings as the basis for his story “Like a Razor Slash,” included in the graphic novel collection This Place: 150 Years Retold (2019).
I invite you to dive into the transcripts themselves, a rich record of voices from what was both a frontier and homeland for northerners. But in the meantime, enjoy these “travels with Tom.”
- See Tina Loo, “Pipe Dreams: Imagining Different Futures for Canada in the 1970s,” Canadian Historical Review. https://doi.org/10.3138/chr-2024-0065 ↩︎
Featured image: A still from “Travels with Tom” story map, created by the author.
