Urgency,
Action, and Grounded Aesthetics in Warren Cariou's Tar Sands Texts
ISABEL LOCKHART
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, extraction in the
Alberta tar sands has expanded at an alarming rate in spite of frequent lapses
into unprofitability and countless predictions of the industry's demise. Unlike
the easier, cheaper, and more "conventional" drilling of crude oil, the "tough"
or "unconventional" process of bitumen extraction is so expensive that tar
sands multinationals run at a loss whenever global oil prices fall. Yet, too
big to fail, this zombie industry has been repeatedly kept alive by the
Canadian state and tenacious shareholders, not to mention conservative efforts
to rebrand the sands as "more ethical" than other sources of oil.[1]
The projected growth of the tar sands over the next twenty to thirty years
contradicts Canada's professed climate goals, as the economies of the Western
provinces are deeply dependent on bitumen. Each revival of the tar sands amounts to a classic case of
"dithering"—to use novelist Kim Stanley Robinson's term for climate
inaction in our historical moment—in which the profound reach of fossil
capital punctures political resolve, over and over again (2312).
In
response to Canada's tar-motivated withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol in 2012,
Warren Cariou's "Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto" (2012) is an urgent attempt "to
make visible the physical reality of the Athabasca oil sands mining
developments in Canada, a reality that has been occluded by corporate and
governmental disinformation as well as by citizens' unwillingness to face the
consequences of their actions and their inaction" (17). In its formal
heterogeneity, "Tarhands" is a microcosm of Cariou's work as a whole. Since his
2009 documentary film Land of Oil and Water, he has dedicated much of
his academic and artistic attention to the tar sands, exploring a range of
forms and genres to better convey the stench, the sight, and the feel of
bitumen extraction. Like many other tar sands texts, "Tarhands" is interested
in a logic of visibility and, at least at first glance, the accompanying hope that
visibility might lead to citizen revolt and a shift in the status quo.
Visibility, afforded by various artistic modes, might buttress science to
appeal to our environmental sensibilities and generate a counter-force to a
seemingly immortal industry. Somehow, even, the tenor of urgency held in tar
sands media might trickle down to policy makers, causing them to become
suddenly alive to the enormous, "external" costs of the operations: irreparable
damage to the local ecosystem and global climate change.
This is a visibility optimism
shared by arguably the most prominent tar sands' artist, Canadian photographer
Edward Burtynsky, whose 2009 TED Talk evinces a desire to reach a critical
public and raise awareness. He uses photography to share this "unseen" oil
world and to "deal with what I think is probably one of the most challenging
issues of our time, how to deal with our energy crisis" ("Photographing"
00:00:09; 00:02:45). Followed by images of pipelines, refineries, highways, gas
stations, parking lots, trucker's jamborees, derelict automobile plants, tire
piles, and scrapyards, the tar sands are one of the originary horrors at the
start of Burtynsky's Oil series on
the lifecycle of petroleum. The emphasis is on the shock-power of revelation:
on making something invisible visible, on bringing something hidden to light.
The question of "visibility," and
its relationship to political action, is a concern of much petrocultures
scholarship. Although Marxist aestheticians have addressed the problem of
representation under late capitalism, theorists of petrocultures suggest that
there is something especially problematic about petroleum.[2]
For Amitav Ghosh, in his provocative contemplation on "petrofiction" in 1992,
the multi-lingual and multi-sited character of the "Oil Encounter" between the
United States and the Middle East make it an especially difficult object for
"much of modern culture" (30-31). The form of the novel in particular is
resistant to oil's "slipperiness" (30). According to Ghosh, this is why, "when
there is so much to write about," this encounter has "proved so imaginatively
sterile" (30). In response to Ghosh, a number of scholars argue that global oil
encounters are in fact everywhere in
culture, but not necessarily as legible objects. Oil's pervasiveness in
culture, and its material pervasiveness as fuel for everyday life in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, requires different excavational reading practices.[3]
Even when the petroleum industry is, clearly, at the thematic center of the text,
the assumption is that it has been revealed to a public for whom oil
infrastructures, although everywhere, are generally obscure, or obscured—"receding
into spaces made deliberately invisible by private and state interest," as Jeff
Diamanti and Imre Szeman put it ("Nine Principles" 140). Whether explicitly
"about" petroleum or not, petrocultural objects operate within a field of
invisibility. Oil hides in plain sight.[4]
Meanwhile, Ghosh's initial observations about petroleum's slipperiness to
fiction, and culture broadly, are still relevant to tar sands texts however
intentional they are about bringing oil to visibility: how to communicate the
sheer scale of extraction, the global reach of the bitumen economy, the tangle
of pipeline networks, the bodily effects of toxic exposure, and the largely
peripatetic workforce?
For many photographers and
filmmakers, the answer is to meet scale with scale. As the narrator of the tar
sands documentary Petropolis: Aerial
Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands (2009) tells us, the birds-eye view
presents a "new perspective of a landscape we cannot comprehend from the
ground" (00:36:20). Attempting to capture the horrifying magnitude of the
extraction processes, aerial photography and film have emerged as dominant tar
sands forms. To most spectators, in fact, the tar sands are only seeable as such. A cursory Google
image search of the "Alberta tar sands" or the "Alberta oil sands" reveals page
after page of Burtynsky-esque aerial shots—breathtaking, fascinating, and
dreadful. Aerial photographer Louis Helbig aptly named his collection on the
tar sands Beautiful Destruction
(2014) to capture the apparently antagonistic affects evoked by these kinds of
images. There is something synecdochic at work here, as the extravagance of the
tar sands gesture to objects even larger and more abstract: petroleum
dependency, climate change, and the "human epoch" of the Anthropocene.[5]
In this article, however, I
investigate Warren Cariou's more grounded aesthetic across written and visual media—a
"from below" mediation of the tar sands, literally positioned and produced in
proximity to the material of bitumen. The question of visibility, for Cariou,
is really a question of how to make tar fully sensible to an imagined audience
presumably located far away from the site of extraction. I am interested both
in Cariou's experiments towards visibility, or sensibility, and in his
ambivalence about the capacities of art to effect action along a "revelation"
logic. More and better representation is all very well, but how this might lead
to material change is a persistent problem or frustrated hope across his
projects. The diversity of his work—comprised of short stories,
documentary films, manifestos, academic scholarship, photographs, and
"petrographs"—would itself seem to suggest a preoccupation with
representational possibilities and limits, a restless searching for the form
most suited to the task of communicating environmental destruction.
Cariou's work is also "from below"
in the more typical social sense, in that his task of representation is not
just about making sensible the impacts of industry but also Indigenous presence
against the settler social relations that underpin extraction in the region
currently known as Alberta, on the ancestral lands of the Cree, Dene, and Métis
peoples.[6]
Akin to oil, settler colonialism might be thought of as another phenomenon
hiding in plain sight—everywhere and nowhere at once, letting die and
making live, highly visible to its variously dispossessed and racialized while
generally invisible to its beneficiaries.[7]
Yet settler colonialism cannot be included unproblematically as just another
phenomenon to represent alongside fossil fuel capitalism, since this
does not get at their inseparability. Moreover, the long timeline of
settler colonialism in Alberta puts pressure on the register of urgency that
dominates representations of, and responsive action to, the tar sands and
climate change more broadly. In grappling with the dual and co-constitutive
conditions of petromodernity and settlement, I argue that Cariou's proximate,
grounded aesthetic carries an alternate politics of action that refocuses from
representation of bitumen to relationships with bitumen. By
intervening directly in the use and meaning of bitumen, Cariou's practices
offer us an alternative to the terms of urgency, visibility, and action that so
often frame climate art.
A Messy Manifesto
Tough or unconventional extraction is a key feature of late
fossil capitalism. Despite prognoses pointing to "Peak Oil" in about 2005,
petroleum production has continued apace. This can be ascribed to the
development of unconventional processes to compensate for the increasing
scarcity of accessible crude. Such unconventional processes include hydraulic
fracturing, deep-sea mining, and tar sands extraction. In an effort to conceal
the Alberta tar sands' unconventionality, the Canadian Association of Petroleum
Producers insists that the tar sands should be referred to as the "oil sands."
The term tar sands is "incorrect," the website chastises, "because bitumen and
tar (asphalt) are different compounds" ("What are the Oil Sands?"). The
industry is not insensible to the rhetorical advantages of referring to the
sands as tar sands if you want to convey something of their nastiness, and the
advantages of referring to the sands as oil sands if you want to convey
something of their conventionality.
Even
relative to the nasty world of oil, the tar sands are unusually and
unconventionally nasty. The extraction process is highly mechanized and
emits three to four times more greenhouse gases than conventional oil
extraction. Tar sands deposits are typically a mixture of bitumen, sand, clay,
and water, and a huge amount of water is required to "liberate" the bitumen,
approximately three barrels of fresh water to every one barrel of oil output. Meanwhile,
bitumen oil is more viscous and acidic than crude oil, making it more likely to
leak from a pipeline and considerably harder to clean up.[8]
The Alberta deposits consist of three major reservoirs—Athabasca, Peace
River, and Cold Lake—together underlying about 55,000 square miles of
boreal forest, part of a unique sub-Arctic biome.[9]
In Alberta, approximately twenty percent of mining is open-pit and eighty
percent is in-situ. Deposits lying greater than seventy meters from the earth's
surface require the in-situ method, involving the injection of hot steam down a
well-pipe to loosen the bitumen. Deposits lying less than seventy meters from
the surface can be mined directly using the open-pit method. Canadian activist
Naomi Klein dubs the process "terrestrial skinning," where the "overburden" of
trees, topsoil, muskeg, and animal habitats are stripped away to access the tar
(qtd. in Wenzel "Overburden"). On top of this, both in-situ and open-pit
methods suck up vast quantities of water from the Athabasca River at one end of
the cycle, and unleash spews of toxic liquid into tailings ponds at the other
end.
Cariou
became interested in the tar sands when the oil companies started drilling not
far from his hometown of Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan. As he explains in the
opening scenes of his documentary Land of
Oil and Water (2009), he had never thought of his home as being connected
to the tar sands activity in the neighboring province of Alberta (00:01:35).
This changed when the companies realized that the bitumen deposits "extended
well into Saskatchewan" (00:02:20). To get a sense of what might soon befall
his community, Cariou, who is Métis, travels to the majority Indigenous hamlets
of Fort McKay and Fort Chipewyan, respectively 38 miles and 170 miles from the
boomtown of Fort McMurray where open-pit mining operations hug the Athabasca's
edge and rely on its water supply. All open-pit mining in
Alberta occurs just north of Fort McMurray: Fort McKay is right in the center
of the tar sands industrial area, while Fort Chipewyan sits downstream. There, Cariou talks to Cree, Dene,
and Métis people daily having to weigh up the huge environmental costs of
extraction against tar sands jobs they have little economic security to refuse.
As one resident of Fort McKay puts it, "pretty much they stripped our land and
fed everybody money to keep their mouth shut" (00:20:36).
Cariou's
creative essay "Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto" plays with the etymology of its
form, manus festus—hand struck.
One of its epigraphs reads as half of an imagined dialogue: "Have you noticed
anything about your hands? I mean, I didn't want to say anything at first, but
I couldn't help seeing it, and... what are friends for, right? If you had
guacamole in your teeth, I'd say something. If your fly was down... not that it
is! Nothing like that. But still, I just thought I should ask: have you
noticed?" (17). Like the epigraph, the whole manifesto is written in this
second person address to an imagined "Canadian" who needs to be shocked into
seeing the tar dirt on their hands. The speaker, an emissary from the Tarhands
Institute "stink-tank," is exasperated: "something is already rotten in the
petro-state, and NOBODY SEEMS TO NOTICE" (21). Since appeals to reason have
failed, the manifesto targets shame as an emotion that might prompt its reader
to action, comparing the complicity in, and complacency about, petro-capitalism
to other scenes of everyday shame, like getting guacamole stuck in your teeth
or forgetting to do up your fly, or going in to shake someone's hand and
noticing "too late, that yours was dirty" (25). Then, beyond shame, the
manifesto moves to abjection as a mobilizing force: the "milk you drank at
lunch" is contaminated with particles of tar from your hands (27). If the
separation from waste is a signal fantasy of modernity, as Cariou posits in "Wastewest"
(2011), then the reminder that petrochemicals mix with milk and circulate in
our bloodstream appears suddenly in the manifesto as body horror.[10]
The
response of an imagined reader to these reminders is presumably not that of a
Futurist. Above the guacamole epigraph is an epigraph from Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti's 1909 "Manifesto of Futurism": "Look at us! We are not out of
breath, our hearts are not in the least tired. For they are nourished by fire,
hatred and speed!" (qtd. in "Tarhands" 17). In its glorification of industry
and violence, the Futurist Manifesto is a highly sensory text, reveling in the
roar of automobiles, the taste of ditch water, and a series of misogynistic and
misogynoiristic images as Marinetti and his cohort hunt the streets "like young
lions" guided by smell more than sight (Marinetti 12). If the Futurist
Manifesto represents the dark embrace of petroleum, slipping seamlessly from a
love of speed to a love of war and death, then Cariou's Messy Manifesto sets
out the stakes for its reader: either you respond with revulsion or adoration
to this technology and its waste products. Adoration, as Walter Benjamin
theorized of the Futurists, would equate to consumption of fascist aesthetics,
a degree of self-alienation such that mankind "can experience its own
destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order" (Benjamin 195). To his
imagined Canadian addressee—a liberal southerner coded not so subtly by
that guacamole—Cariou suggests that a moderate, measured, equivocal
response to the tar sands is a kind of appeasement to the fascist glorification
of war.
Framing
his Messy Manifesto against the terms of the Futurist Manifesto, Cariou links petrocapitalism
to war. Not just war in the sense that petroleum in the twentieth and
twenty-first century has fueled global militarism, nor just in the machinic
aesthetic sense of the Futurists, but also war in the sense that the tar sands
region is a warzone. This is a word
used by one of Cariou's Fort Chipewyan interviewees in Land of Oil and Water, and the language of war is a recurrent feature
of Cariou's tar sands works (00:35:27). Indeed, of the sixteen photographs in
the manifesto, only six appear to have been taken from the ground. The others
mainly consist of aerial shots of the tailing ponds. Underneath one of the
ground shots (of a Syncrude security fence), we learn that the conditions on
the ground jeopardize their own documentation:
What I remember most about the tar
sands is the stink. We stood there with our cameras, trying to capture a record
of that obliterated landscape, but I could hardly even see. The fumes were like
hammers: sulfur and benzene and diesel and something else—a dead smell, a
charnel residue on the back of my tongue. I had a migraine in half a dozen
breaths. I breathed into my shirtsleeve, trying not to retch. How could people
work in this, day after day? How could the Cree, Metis and Dene people of Fort
Mackay live in it? (20)
This is warzone reporting from the heart of petromodernity,
reminiscent of Kristen Simmons's account of the 2016 #NoDAPL struggle at
Standing Rock, "a warscape of heavy military equipment and smoke" ("Settler
Atmospherics"). While Simmons's article describes violent attacks on protestors
by police and security forces, Cariou's manifesto zeroes in on slower forms of
bodily harm; yet both are different incarnations of what Simmons calls "settler
atmospherics," the "normative and necessary violences found in settlement—accruing,
adapting, and constricting indigenous and black life" ("Settler Atmospherics").
If these are warzones, then they are "structural, not eventful," as Audra
Simpson puts it (Mohawk Interruptus 154).
The structure of settler colonialism doesn't throw up occasional, exceptional
wars, but it is itself total warfare. The land is in "a state of
continued expropriation" and its peoples are "in their own constant state of historical
emergency" (154).
Cariou's
ground shots and accompanying text draw attention to the conditions of artistic
production and the embodied presence of the photographer. If resources, as
Stephanie LeMenager suggests, can be understood to possess aesthetics—or
if aesthetics are our experience of the world, "a relationship with matter as
such"—then Cariou wants to interrupt the smoothness, the pleasure, the
facility, and invisibility of petroleum culture, where energy can be delivered
into the home, as if by magic, thousands of miles from the site of extraction (LeMenager
"When Energy"). He does this in part by reminding us that the manifesto and its
photographs were produced in toxic conditions. Further, like all good
manifestos, the Messy Manifesto offers its readers a program to follow: "Join
us. Together we can make visions that shudder a billion eyes, make a stink to
awaken the nostrils of the world!" (32). This is its method of conversion: to
jolt others into acknowledging, and then acting on, their entanglement in both
petroleum production and a state of permanent settler war. What the action is
remains obscure, but the process of political education is, first, a form of
petro-sensory overload set to undermine both the bourgeois forgetting of, and the
fascistic pleasure in, violence.
Not
long after publishing the Messy Manifesto, Cariou began experimenting with a
photographic process he calls "petrography." As Cariou explains, petrographs
are "contact prints made with a mixture of bitumen and lavender oil applied to
a polished metal plate. After about 13h of direct sun exposure, a kerosene
developer is poured over the plate and the finished petrograph emerges: a
highly reflective surface in a distinctive golden hue, imprinted with an
elusive monochrome image" ("Portfolio" 253). If Messy Manifesto is a project in
defetishizing the commodity of petroleum by revealing the degree of our bodily
entanglement in sites of extractive violence, then petrography intensifies this
appeal to the body of an imagined viewer. By "using the bitumen to show what
bitumen mining has done to the earth," Cariou illuminates the inescapable
character of petroleum in the twenty-first century (253).
This ouroboros of representation,
the conflation of the medium and its object, is not a novel innovation but,
rather, an homage to the very first photograph. Cariou was inspired to
experiment with petrographs when he realized that Nicephore Niepce had used
something called "bitumen of Judea" to create "View from the Window at Le Gras"
in 1826. Like "View from the Window," Cariou's petrographs are impossible to
misconstrue as transparent windows onto the reality of the tar sands, but
nonetheless "give us new perspectives on the pervasiveness and the symbolic
potency of petroleum in contemporary culture" ("Petrography"). Even as
petrographs capture tar sands landscapes and infrastructure, the bitumen itself—the
viewing medium—is what is most emphatically revealed to the viewer.
Whether it's the angle of sunlight on the plate or the corpse of a fly that got
stuck in the bitumen as the petrograph was developing, the bituminous medium
insistently asserts its presence (see Figures 1 and 2). Meanwhile, the
reflective metal plate "means that viewers see not only the image itself, but
also darkened, petroleum-coated reflections of their own surroundings, and even
their own faces" ("Petrography"). In Cariou's petrographs, the tar sands do not
exist "over there," but also, with each viewing event, the tar sands exist
wherever the viewer is situated.
Figure
1. Cariou, Warren. "Syncrude Plant and Tailings Pond Reflection." 8 x10 inches Petrograph
on Aluminum. V.1, 2014. Images
© Warren Cariou - only to be reproduced with the artist's permission.
Figure
2. Cariou, Warren. "Strip Mine Horizon to Horizon (detail)." 4 x 6 inches
Petrograph on Stainless Steel. V.1, 2014. Images © Warren Cariou - only to be reproduced
with the artist's permission.
An Elder Brother
Story
Even though commercial bitumen extraction in Alberta did not
begin until 1967, the presence of bitumen has long informed colonial
relationships in the region. Following independence from the British in 1867,
Canada purchased "Rupert's Land," encompassing the Athabasca region, from the
Hudson's Bay Company in 1870. This led to a comprehensive assessment of the
newly incorporated territory and its resources by the Geological Survey of
Canada (GSC). Naturalist John Macoun led the first GSC expeditions over the
course of the 1870s, referring to the tar sands as "the ooze" with possible
commercial value (qtd. in Pinkus 45). Macoun's GSC successors, geologists
Robert Bell and Robert McConnell, confirmed this impression in reports that
greatly influenced, as Hereward Longley puts it, "southern imaginings of the
Northwest, and made the expense and obligation of a treaty with the region's
Indigenous peoples look minimal" (Longley 18). Bell's report told a thrilling
story of a material occurring in "enormous quantities" with "practically no
limit to the quantity which may be obtained for the digging" (Bell 34). This
enticing prospect of petroleum, combined with the rush of settlers migrating
north for Klondike gold in the mid-1890s, led the federal government to begin
negotiations for Treaty 8. The treaty was signed in 1899, in quick pen-work
"extinguishing" the "rights, titles and privileges" of its Indigenous
signatories from the Dane-zaa, the Cree, and the Chipewyan (Denesuline)
nations, among others ("Articles").[11]
Treaty 8 cleared the way for more
settlement in the region, and the first half of the twentieth century was a
period of enthusiastic knowledge production about the tar sands. In 1913, the
Department of Mines delegated mining engineer Sidney Ells to map, document, and
conduct experiments in the region, which he did for the next thirty-two years.
By his own account, he was "enthralled" by the sands (Recollections 2). In 1962, as commercial production began to look
like a possibility, Ells proselytized with a vision of the resource he had
dedicated much of his life to: "Where now the almost unbroken wilderness holds
sway, industrial plants may arise and tall stacks dominate the landscape. Few
will then pause to consider what these developments represent, but success will
be the reward of those who had a part in the undertaking" (100). Indigenous
nations are conspicuously absent from such surveys, their lands and livelihoods
swept away by the rhetorical force of "wilderness." In 1967, the Great Canadian
Oil Sands plant opened in Fort McMurray.
Now,
in the twenty-first century—the decades that have so far witnessed the
most aggressive expansions of the tar sands industry—conditions on the
ground include: elevated levels of rare cancers, headache-inducing air quality,
contaminated food sources, caribou population decline, tailings-polluted ground
water, dangerously low river water, and acid rain.[12]
In "Wastewest," Cariou says that the struggle for Indigenous communities in the
tar sands is a "struggle to ensure that they don't become waste, that they don't become wasted lives" (00:35:30). And yet if
the tar sands are a site of intensified violence in the total warzone that is
settler colonialism, then the Cree, Dene, and Métis peoples who live there are
neither helpless victims nor heroic resistance fighters. As Cariou documents in Land of Oil and Water, the situation is far from uncomplicated, and
communities are often divided as to whether they should participate in or
resist the tar sands boom. Jobs in the industry constitute one way to survive
the hostile living conditions created by the industry itself and colonialism
more broadly, which restricts Indigenous access to traditional territories and
foodways. "While conducting the interviews for my film," Cariou writes, "I
routinely encountered a sentiment among Indigenous people of the region that
there was nothing they could do to stop oil development in their territories,
and so the most they could hope for was to make the best of a very difficult
situation" ("Oil Drums" 586).
In
official public relations communications, the Canadian Association of Petroleum
Producers cares for Indigenous
peoples, working with Indigenous
groups "to seek ways to mitigate impacts and to share the benefits of resource
development" ("Indigenous Relations"). This is a dynamic that Cariou names
"neoliberal reconciliation," which describes the way that corporations sell
industrial "development," job creation, and corporate-funded essential services
as the most effective means of colonial redress ("Oil Drums" 583). In reality,
Indigenous peoples provide a valuable source of precarious labor. Their
involvement as laborers also carries symbolic surplus value, as the stereotype
of the Native-as-environmentalist lends "an appearance of responsible
environmental practices," effectively "redwashing" extraction (589).[13]
Moreover, images of Indigenous peoples laboring in the tar sands implies
community consent, giving the "impression that they accept and even condone
these developments" (589). In other words, the use of Indigenous peoples as
symbolic capital is central to the PR production of a social license to operate.
Cariou's Elder Brother story, "An
Athabasca Story" (2012), could be read as an allegory of this complex of
settler colonial relations of production in Alberta, a context that confounds
homogeneous reports of Indigenous resistance as much as it confounds the
industry's account of a consenting, enriched community and labor force. In his
study of the function of Elder Brother stories in Cowessess First Nation,
Robert Innes explains that the values that guided practices historically for
the Cree, Ojibwe, and Métis are "embedded in the stories of Elder Brother" (8).
Elder Brother stories involve the character of Elder Brother, a trickster or
cultural hero known as Wîsahêcâchk and Nanabush to the Cree and Ojibwe
respectively, who regularly finds himself in some (often amusing) difficulty.
How he navigates this difficulty, and whether his actions result in positive or
negative outcomes, models behavior for the listening or reading audience. This
is "relational guidance" not just for human interaction, but also informing
"how humans should relate to nonhumans, be they animals, land, or spirits"
(30). If the manifesto and the petrography both operate within a logic of
political action prompted by an embodied recognition of the realities of
petroleum extraction, then "Athabasca Story," as an Elder Brother story,
complicates what is meant by action.
"Athabasca Story" begins with
Elder Brother walking westward over an unfamiliar land, looking for warmth,
food, and any relations who might provide for him. He is so hungry that his
stomach is "like the shrunken dried crop of a partridge" that rattles inside
him as he walks (70). Eventually he smells something, a noxious smoke that he
hopes might mean warmth. Following the scent, "worse than his most sulfurous
farts," he finds its source in a big house surrounded by land totally empty of
"trees, of muskeg, of birds and animals" (70). He also sees "enormous yellow
contraptions that clawed and bored and bit the dark earth and then hauled it away
toward the big house" (70). Although he has a bad feeling about all of this, he
doesn't want to spend the night cold and hungry by himself. So he walks into
the empty land and solicits conversation with a man working one of the earth
movers. Misidentifying Elder Brother as someone from Greenpeace, or just
someone looking to be a nuisance, the worker threatens to call Security on him.
Before moving aside, Elder Brother just wants to know one thing: "what are you
doing with all that earth?" (72). The man answers:
It's very special dirt, this
stuff. We dig it up and take it over to the big house, as you call it, and we
mix it around in there and after a while it's ready to burn. Fuel to heat your
house, if you have one which I doubt. Gas to power your car. Diesel to move
this big rig here. All of it comes right out of the ground. You can tell by the
smell of the air around here. Just like napalm in the morning! (72)
The reference to napalm, and the Vietnam war film classic Apocalypse Now (1979), situates Elder
Brother in a warzone. As a highly flammable and dangerously sticky substance
made of gelling agents and petrochemicals, napalm is not a metaphor so much as
a material relation of bitumen. Like Marinetti and the Futurists, the worker
relishes the smell of death. But, once again—as in the Messy Manifesto—the
war encoded here is the permanent war of settler dispossession. The worker
tells Elder Brother that the land doesn't belong to him, and his presence on
the land is interrupting the project of resource extraction and wealth
accumulation.
Motivated
by damaged pride, resentment, and cold, Elder Brother decides to dig for some
of this "special dirt" himself. Throughout, "Athabasca Story" assumes an
audience more in the know than Elder Brother, and this dramatic irony is a
chief source of the story's wry humor. The moment Elder Brother starts digging
into the tar, we know where this is going. "I imagine you can guess how that
worked out," the narrator laughs with us at Elder Brother's expense: "Elder
Brother was stuck fast in that Athabasca tar" (74). After two days of being
stuck in the tar, Elder Brother gets extracted by one of the earth movers and
dumped in a pile of the special dirt, the tar pressing "into his nostrils, his
ears, his mouth, even into his clenched bum" (75). The earth mover then carries
him to the refinery, where "he was made very warm indeed" (75).
So it ends very badly for Elder
Brother. By negative example, there are some possible lessons to glean from his
behavior. First, even though the worker complacently informs him that burning
the dirt is warming the planet so that "the winter never comes back," Elder
Brother, thinking only of his coldness, interprets this as a good thing (72).
Second, he tries to take more of the special dirt than he needs for immediate
warmth. He dives in as deep as he can go to gather enough of the dirt to last
him for decades, and this is how he becomes stuck. Third, he doesn't listen to
the voice of the dirt when it cries out, "Elder Brother, you're hurting me!"
(73). His failure to respond to the dirt means that the dirt doesn't respond to
him when he calls out, "Help me! I'm
sorry I didn't listen to you. I'll leave now without taking anything at all"
(74). Like many Elder Brother stories, Elder Brother is cosmically punished
because he gets too greedy or fails to act in reciprocity.[14]
At the same time, it is not clear
that Elder Brother had many other options available to him, and the story is as
much about his struggle as it is about his foolishness. Cariou portrays him as
someone negotiating extremely difficult circumstances in a land of few
relations, a land conditioned by "failed settler kinship," as Kim TallBear
names it ("Failed Settler Kinship").[15] He knows
from the beginning that he should have turned away, but "that would mean
spending the night by himself, freezing and chattering and rattling, and he
couldn't bring himself to do it" (71). He tries to hail the worker as a "dear
relation" and thus enter into reciprocity with him, but the worker "talked as
if he had no relations at all" (72). Under these blighted conditions, what
would resistance have looked like? If the example of Elder Brother is supposed
to serve as a deterrent, what is the recommended course of action instead? Sean
Teuton states that the "oral traditional trickster reminds us through his hasty
and unself-aware behavior that we should reflect before diving in for our
desires, for what we truly need might be right in front of us" (qtd. in Innes
29). Although Elder Brother is hasty and lacks foresight, it is not clear that
what he truly needs is right in front of him. He needs warmth, and the special
dirt appears to be the only available source.
The story stages the profound way
that the tar sands industry, and the long history of settler colonialism in the
region, work to restrict Indigenous economies, foodways, and kinship relations—a
mechanism that fuels Indigenous participation by force of necessity. This
situation problematizes any anti-extractive "action" that does not consider
settler colonialism, or does so only as a matter of fleeting inclusion. As
Andrew Curley and Majerle Lister argue, "extractive industries have helped
assuage some of the longstanding impacts of genocide, violent displacement, and
forced assimilation," but "[c]limate change is a politics largely ignorant of
Indigenous peoples' complicated relationship with extractive industries" and
"the depth of colonial entanglements is not well understood or accounted for
within political proposals" (260; 258). If the tar sands industry were suddenly
to collapse, Indigenous peoples would be among the first to suffer from this
boom/bust cycle, replicating the decline of the fur trade and successive
resource frontiers.[16] Situating
the current ecological terror of the tar sands in the long timeline of settler
colonialism changes both how we narrate the contemporary moment and the
politics we use to address it. This is not a remedial gesture that would simply
include settler colonialism in an account of the tar sands. On the
contrary, a reading of "Athabasca Story" shows how settler colonialism is the
structuring condition of possibility for the tar sands, creating a fraught
terrain of entanglements such that "action"—if art could be relied upon
to prompt political action—must take anti-colonialism or decolonialism as
its constitutive framework.
As numerous Indigenous studies
scholars have explained, the idea of the Anthropocene—in its governing
discursive formation, at least—fails to consider European settler
colonialism as a terraforming project responsible for deep-time planetary
impacts and climatic change since its beginnings in the sixteenth century,
while also effacing the uneven distribution of environmental risk along the
divisions of race, class, and gender intrinsic to capitalism.[17]
These erasures, as Potawatomi philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte argues, contribute
to "epistemologies of crisis" that experience and narrate the present as
unprecedented and urgent (53). Epistemologies of crisis are central features of
settler colonial power, in which the crisis object—in this case, climate
change—is leveraged to conceal or justify injustice, furthering
appropriations of Indigenous lands and waters for the "common goods" of
conservation, carbon sequestration, renewable energy infrastructure, etcetera.
As an alternative to the dangerous urgency of epistemologies of crisis, Whyte
emphasizes "epistemologies of coordination" that "organise knowledge through
the vector of kinship relationships," responding to change without compromising
responsibility to diverse human and nonhuman others (62). Although much of Cariou's
tar sands work is pitched to the tenor of urgency, it also holds incipient
forms of non-urgent action sensitive to the interrelationships of a local
ecosystem and distinct from a model of action based on artistic consciousness-raising.
I explore these forms of action in the final section below.
Storying
Bitumen
On a surface reading, Cariou is very explicit about the urgent
project of making the tar sands visible or sensible to critical publics. This
is the motivating premise for both the Messy Manifesto and his petrography. Yet
his work also expresses an ambivalence about the capacities of art to effect
action. There is a desperation to the tone of the manifesto that conveys a
sense of exhausted options. Even as the manifesto recruits "irrational" affects
like shame and disgust to reject the toxicity of the tar sands, it also
includes instances of normalization: underneath the paragraph about the
horrifying stink of the tar sands, Cariou quotes a security guard who says he
"used to smell it, too" but "after a week or two you don't notice a thing"
(20).
If, however, we pay attention to
what Cariou is doing with his tar
sands work rather than adjudicate the efficacy of his representations, then we
arrive at a different angle on the question of action. In his portfolio of
petrography, Cariou writes that,
While I started out with a
representational goal—using the bitumen to show what bitumen mining has
done to the earth—my art practice has gradually become at least as much
about my own relationship to the bitumen I use in the process. This project
requires a level of intimacy with petroleum that is sometimes fascinating but
is also troubling: creating a petrograph is a messy, smelly, and somewhat
dangerous business [...] However, as I spent more time with the bitumen I came to
understand it not only as a source of potential danger but also as a creative
collaborator, helping to reveal new ways of seeing the world. I also think of
the bitumen as a kind of medicine, one that can cause damage if used
improperly, but one that can also provide valuable gifts if it is approached
with the proper respect. This is why I leave an offering of tobacco or
sweetgrass wherever I gather the bitumen I use in my petrography, in keeping with
Métis cultural teachings about reciprocity, gratitude, and maintaining good
relations with the land. (253-4)
This is not the first time that Cariou has used the word
"intimacy" with respect to energy materials. In a short keywords essay on
"Aboriginal," Cariou describes energy
intimacy as a kind of energy ethic in which "every community member
necessarily has direct and personal relationships with the sources of their
energy" (18). This opposes extractive energy logics, "which by its very
definition is about taking energy out of its context, turning it into a
commodity that can be circulated in a global economy wherein its value is
guaranteed by virtue of its sameness, its uniformity" (19). Even though Cariou
is not using the bitumen for energy in his petrography, he is nonetheless
enacting an intimate relationship to bitumen in its local context and derailing
its circulation in a global market. The pace
of petrography likewise contravenes an extractive energy system based on
speed at every level of the production-consumption cycle—from efficiency
of extraction and processing, to the necessarily rapid delivery of the fuel to
a global market, to the pace of living that petroleum has made possible, most
grossly celebrated by the speed credo of the Futurists.[18]
Petrography, by contrast, requires a huge amount of work and patience to
produce a single print.
Over
the course of his experiments with bitumen, Cariou begins to relate to the
substance as a kin-relation, just as Elder Brother was unable to do. Taking it
from the land requires care and reciprocity, otherwise "nature withholds
further gifts from the transgressor and his or her community" (Cariou,
"Aboriginal" 19). And using it in this way, as something other than commodified
energy, echoes the use of Athabasca bitumen by the Cree and Dene to caulk their
canoes (Cariou, "Tarhands" 23). Although the material reality of
naturally-occurring bitumen can appear monstrous, Cariou's alternative use of
bitumen emphasizes that monstrosity is not intrinsic to the substance but the
way that it has been put to use under capitalism. While harvesting the bitumen
for petrography, Cariou is "amazed to see that this undisturbed bitumen habitat
was teeming with lush plant and bird life [...] and I realized then that the bitumen
has another side: it can support life and can even be a source of
life-affirming energy if it is left in its natural state" ("Portfolio" 254).
Ironically through bitumen, Cariou is able to see the tar sands region beyond
its warzone status. This offers a glimpse of the region after the tar sands, one markedly distinct from the industrial
promise of "reclaiming" or "remediating" the land. Tar sands "reclamation"
zones are attempts to clean up the waste products of extraction and return the
land to its previous state. Reclamation, however, is principally governed by
the extraction companies and has been met with Indigenous refusal.[19]
As continuations of settler colonial business as usual, the rapid and
solutions-oriented process of reclamation is a signal example of a crisis
epistemology at work. Compare this to the slow temporality of Cariou's kinship
building with bitumen.
In
the monograph Fuel: A Speculative
Dictionary (2016), Karen Pinkus wonders whether her dictionary "can help
scramble our thinking about fuel [...] to open up potential ways of interacting
with substances (real and imaginary), by wrenching them out of narrative
(violently in some cases), and placing them into the form of an idiosyncratic
dictionary so they could eventually be replaced by users into new narratives"
(6). I read Cariou as doing similar work via different methods, scrambling the
dominant narratives about bitumen (as either magical energy or demonic toxin)
and making it available for new narratives. Cariou's art practices seem to
model a different kind of "action" to the "revelation" economy of action that
depends on an unveiled horror. "Athabasca Story" holds this alternate action
ethic too, in the final paragraph addressing its audience directly: "sometimes
when you're driving your car and you press down hard on the accelerator, you
might hear a knocking, rattling sound down deep in the bowels of the machine.
That's Elder Brother, trying to get your attention, begging you to let him out"
(75). Set in mythic time, this Elder Brother story culminates by revealing the
source of the rattle in a petrol engine. In the context of the story, however,
it adds to the understanding of bitumen as kin, this time in the form of Elder
Brother asking you to help him out.[20] In one
reading, the story could be promoting more conscious consumption—pause before you fill up your gas. But
in another, it is promoting a relationship with bitumen outside of the
extractive energy relation altogether. "Letting Elder Brother out" could index
something quite radical, a reorganizing of relationships to matter that
disrupts settler capitalist social relations. The act of storying bitumen in
this way, as a kin relation, is a form of asserting Indigenous relationships on
and with the land.
I
began this article with the logic of visibility in the tar sands—that is,
an investment in the urgent communication of the tar sands to those who simply
have not seen the true reality of the extraction project yet, and the hope that
the more that is revealed, the greater the critical mass required to shut down
the industry. I read Cariou's grounded aesthetic as crucial to making the tar
sands more "visible," or available to the senses. Cariou seems undecided,
however, as to whether mediated exposure to the sensory realities of the tar
sands prompts political action. He is also sensitive to the nature of such
action in the context of settler colonialism. I therefore track an alternate
ethic of action modeled by his artistic practices. In "Nine Principles for a
Critical Theory of Energy" (2020), Jeff Diamanti and Imre Szeman critique a
political approach predicated on "unveiling," since unveiling "presupposes that
seeing things for what they are, as opposed to what they appear to be, disposes
with the sedimentation of material and discursive histories in bodies and
landscapes: a debunking, rather than a sifting through" (154). Although Cariou
seems invested in engendering shock in his representation of the tar sands—an
economy of urgent action dependent on "unveiling"—he also practices a slow,
grounded "sifting through" of bitumen's other meanings, potentialities, and
relationships.