Indigenous communities in western Canada, an area rich in oil and gas deposits, receive a consultation request for every pipeline, mine, pit, seismic disturbance, dam, and forestry project that populate their traditional territories. Over the course of the regulatory process, communities provide evidence of existing land use and the cumulative effects of industrial development to show how a particular project would change their relationship to the natural world. The jewel of these exchanges, the environmental (and socio-economic) impact assessment (EIA), is a document that attempts to quantify how the project would disturb the environment and includes an assessment of the larger impacts on Indigenous communities.[1] There are two interwoven elements to illuminate in what follows: the first is a critique of EIAs more generally. The second is a discussion of how historians might use the evidence and theoretical framings proposed in EIAs to think more broadly about how the continued destruction of the natural world is enabled through the supposedly consensual and fair approval processes conducted by regulatory bodies.
Since their introduction into the regulatory process, EIAs have largely focused on data gathered by methodologies rooted in the physical and natural sciences. The reports written by industry-hired environmental consultants tend to make the argument that after reclamation and through the process of natural recovery there will be no significant impacts to the environment, and therefore no impacts to Indigenous rights. The use of “scientific expertise,” as many of these industry-supported reports are written by environmental scientists, is wielded to proclaim that the industrial project in question will not itself cause long-term impacts to the environment. The issue is not with environmental science, but with the built-in assumption that were there to be no other industrial projects, the land would recover, and wildlife and vegetation would return. Never mind that the construction of one Right-of-Way (RoW) through the forest is used as an argument by industry to continue paralleling RoWs indefinitely (once a cutline is made through the wilderness, industry experts will claim that twinning another pipeline will cause minimal damage because the RoW already exists). The process of contesting these documents that can be hundreds of pages in length by small and underfunded Indigenous consultation departments can be incredibly frustrating. And even with the resources and ample time to respond, countering the absurd hypothetical arguments put forth by industry can feel futile. This is the process by which tens of thousands of industrial projects are approved every year in Alberta.[2]
The reign of the natural sciences, however, may be ending. A recent Supreme Court ruling, Clyde River (Hamlet) v. Petroleum Geo-Services Inc. (2017), found that environmental assessments must consider Indigenous rights as rights rather than deduced from environmental conclusions. Therefore, assessments cannot solely extrapolate from the level of degradation to the environment the impacts to Indigenous rights. Indigenous rights must be assessed as rights stemming from national and international law. The methodological tools of social scientists and humanities scholars, armed with approaches that can more aptly explain how industrial development impacts subsistence harvesting as culturally bounded and meaning making, should undoubtedly become more legitimate in the regulatory process. The social scientific approaches that could illuminate how major industrial projects impact Indigenous culture, tradition, and spirituality that are currently left out of or trivialized in assessments should experience newfound legitimacy.[3]
However, is the problem really one of methodological inclusion? Much like the critiques of the current assessments, there is an underlying assumption that if the regulatory bodies that make the decisions on development projects simply had the correct information, if only they properly understood the human cost of industry, these considerations would meaningfully determine approval of major projects. One of the leading anthropologists in assessing EIAs stated in 2006 that “In spite of constitutionally protected treaty rights to hunt, trap and live traditionally on the land, and a documented interest in continuing this practice, development has had major impacts on Aboriginal traditional land use in Alberta. Regrettably, environmental impact assessment is an important handmaiden in this process, through the close working relationship between consultants, industry and government.[4] The issue lies more with the ultimate goal of the process – approving an industrial project with the veil of Indigenous consent through perfunctory participation – rather than the methodology.[5] And this is of course not lost on Indigenous participants in this process, many of whom submit letters throughout the regulatory process explaining how their rights are infringed upon or how the process is unsound. Concretely, maybe it is worth saying that the institutional processes in place to assuage Indigenous concerns about development, while they could certainly be improved, cannot be the only site of struggle.
Social scientific and humanities scholars certainly have a role in assessing how industrial projects will impact Indigenous communities. However, it is also worthwhile to take a step back and think historically about the regulatory process as such. There are certain constraints baked into regulatory analysis, for example. One of the imposed limitations in the process is temporal: assessments to the environment and Indigenous peoples must begin during the upswing of oil extraction in the 1970s, effectively separating the processes of the twentieth century from the large-scale extractivism that began in its last decades. For someone interested in analyzing socio-economic transformations, the context of the twentieth century is important because it is during this period that the fur trade declined drastically, impoverishing Métis, First Nations, and non-Treaty Indians who had become reliant over the previous century on fur sales to contribute to subsistence hunting, fishing and gathering. The Indian Act (1876) had shaped Indigenous governments, establishing a limited form of local governance where ultimate authority was invested in a federal Minister. As a historian trained in the colonial Andes, the context during defining moments of colonization is always critical: one cannot explain the Spaniard’s conquest of Tawantinsuyu without understanding the concurrent and devastating internal imperial wars of Inca succession, just like one cannot understand Indigenous participation in the oil and gas industry without the parallel crisis of their internal economies in the middle of the twentieth century.
Another issue is one of framing endemic to the regulatory process, wherein the liberal logic of rights is prioritized over an analysis that examines how the transformation of the landscape has altered social relationships within Indigenous communities. Considering that the right to subsistence is enshrined within treaty and constitutional rights, qualitative and quantitative impacts to labor, foodways, and lifeways, among other areas, would be worth investigating. For Indigenous communities impacted by development, labor contracts are a part of the negotiation in EIAs, with industry committing to temporarily hire a certain number of Indigenous laborers. The reverberating impacts of seasonal labor, from impacts on the family to knowledge transfer to a shifting reliance on wage labor, transform social relationships within communities. Whether included as evidence in hearings or not, one of the areas that merits further investigation, one that social scientists and humanists have the tools to employ, is an analysis of how intensive industrial development continues to transform Indigenous mixed economies.[6]
Zooming out even further, the regulatory process, and the way in which certain kinds of knowledge are legitimized and arguments framed, is in and of itself of interest to environmental historians. As we stand on the precipice of missed 2030 climate targets, EIAs contain hundreds of pages justifying the expansion of oil and gas and adjacent industries. For anyone wanting to understand how, in the face of unprecedented climate disasters, project after project continues to be approved, EIAs would be a good place to begin to understand how consultation produces and legitimizes uninhibited industrial expansion.
[1] Depending on which regulatory body is triggered by the nature of the project, the report can be called an environmental impact assessment or an environmental and socio-economic impact assessment. Regardless, social and economic considerations are included in both assessments.
[2] According to the Alberta Energy Regulator, 37,151 applications were processed in 2024/25. See “Alberta Energy Regulator Annual Report 2024-25,” accessed October 8, 2025.
[3] A critique of how biological and ecological science is used to support industry’s claims would be worthwhile, but outside the scope of this paper. For a review from social scientists, see Clinton N. Westman, “Assessing the Impacts of Oilsands Development on Indigenous Peoples in Alberta, Canada,” Indigenous Affairs 2–3 (2006): 30–39; Clinton N. Westman, “Social Impact Assessment and the Anthropology of the Future in Canada’s Tar Sands,” Human Organization 72, no. 2 (2013): 111–20; Janelle Marie Baker and Clinton N. Westman, “Extracting Knowledge: Social Science, Environmental Impact Assessment, and Indigenous Consultation in the Oil Sands of Alberta, Canada,” The Extractive Industries and Society 5, no. 1 (January 2018): 144–53; Patricia A. McCormack, “Conclusion: Studying the Social and Cultural Impacts of ‘Extreme Extraction’ in Northern Alberta,” in C. Westman, T. Joly & L. Gross eds., Extracting Home in the Oil Sands: Settler Colonialism and Environmental Change in Subarctic Canada (Routledge, 2019), 180–198.
[4] Westman, “Assessing the Impacts of Oilsands Development on Indigenous Peoples in Alberta, Canada.”
[5] Baker and Westman make this point about participation as consent in their article “Extracting Knowledge.”
[6] Not using EIAs as an archival resource, but one such study is Rebecca Jane Hall, Refracted Economies: Diamond Mining and Social Reproduction in the North (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022).
*Cover Image: Aerial view of the Syncrude Mildred Lake site, an Athabasca oil sands mine works in northeast Alberta, Canada. Image taken from Wikimedia commons.
[*Cover image description: The image includes Syncrude Tailings Dam and basin to left of the bright yellow sulfur stockpiles, with Mildred Lake and the Athabasca River in the background.]
Edited by Amelia Diehl; reviewed by Deniz Karakas.