Kinder Morgan plans to start work on Blue River Man Camp

Monday, March 12, 2018

Blue River is a tiny community of just 157 people along the North Thompson River, about two and a half hours northeast of Kamloops. It’s an idyllic mountain village dependent on outdoor tourism, with visitors enjoying river trips in summer and snowmobile tours in winter.

Soon this sleepy valley will be disturbed. American pipeline giant Kinder Morgan plans to start work this month on a 16-hectare camp to hold around 1,000 transient workers. As is often the case the oil and gas sector, most of them will be men.

That has Indigenous women nervous about the well-established risk of violence that runs alongside this sort of resource development. Secwepemc activists, whose territory would house three of the camps, issued a declaration opposing the sites. The declaration has been endorsed by over 3,000 organizations and individuals from all over the world.

“We do not consent to Kinder Morgan building pipelines or man camps on our unceded territory where we hold Title. We stand together against any and all threats to our peoples, our women, our two-spirits, our children, our lands, the wildlife, the salmon, the waterways,” says Kanahus Manuel of the Secwepemc Women’s Warrior Society.

She’s right to be concerned. A 2016 report from Amnesty International linked oil and gas development to widespread violence against Indigenous women and girls in northeast BC. It found an influx of people, in particular young men, led to a rise in crime rates. High wages in the resource sector also drove up prices forcing people into insecure housing or illegal work.

Recently the Union of BC Indian Chiefs endorsed the campaign to stop these man camps inside unceded territory. “The hyper-masculine culture of these work camps contributes to the crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls that currently grips this country,” said UBCIC Vice-President Chief Bob Chamberlain. “Construction of these man-camps, in close proximity to our communities, is unacceptable.”

Kinder Morgan posted a notice in the Clearwater Times a few weeks ago that it plans to begin clearing the site, installing security fencing and bringing in construction materials and equipment this month. Preparing these sites is one of the first steps the company must take to start work on its project, which does not have the consent of two-thirds of the First Nations impacted.