Gas Station

In many rural and remote northern communities, the frictions and possibilities of pipeline proposals have galvanized Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups who hold divergent views of oil and gas industry expansion, and whether to support it. At a moment when complex cultural, geo-political, economic, and ecological tensions inflect the conditions of dialogue about pipeline projects, how can artistic practices engage publics in meaningful ways? How can artists support contemporary struggles for decolonization and the transformative possibilities of affirmative environmental actions? Driven by a need to disentangle from the legacy of big oil and our habituated use of fossil fuel, can artistic practices propose new ways of thinking and support resistance to infrastructures of extraction during this time of energy transition?

A strategy we have adopted in “Trading Routes: Grease Trails, Oil Pipelines,” a research-creation project that focuses on the intersecting geographies of Indigenous fish grease trails and proposed Alberta-British Columbia oil pipelines, is to look closely at our landscapes, through scholarship and material production. By examining the converging trade and extraction routes in Western Canada, including pipelines that overlay the geographic routes along which fish oil/grease was traditionally traded, we seek to better account for the ways in which an environmental/social justice perspective can be supported by research-creation practice.

Gas Station is a portrait of one of the many places we encountered on our field visits to northwest British Columbia. It draws our attention to the complex questions of how to see and understand the current state of colonial violence, resource extraction, and environmental destruction in this region. The Petro-Canada station is situated at the junction of Highway 37 and Highway 16, two of the very few travel corridors within this vast territory. Here, the expansion of oil and gas pipelines continues to be debated, including concern for the subsequent increase in tanker traffic that would threaten the pristine shores in this culturally rich area. The station is stately, acting as a beacon and a geographic marker in this contested terrain of mostly unceded lands in the territory of the Tsimshian, Haisla, Wet’suwet’en, Gitxsan, and Nisga’a peoples. From this crossroad, these highways link to urban centres many hours away, and connect sparsely populated local communities (including reserves).

Highway 37 originates at the Pacific coastal town of Kitimat and extends northward to link BC to the Yukon and Alaska. Kitimat, planned and built by the Aluminum Company of Canada (Alcan) in the 1950s, is the terminus of highly contentious proposals for oil and gas pipelines and an expanded tanker port. It is at the head of the treacherous 80-kilometre-long Douglas Channel waterway that would be used for shipping crude oil to oversea markets. It is also one of the finest fjords and principal inlets of the BC coast. Extreme tides, remoteness, and its inaccessible shoreline make it particularly vulnerable to maritime accidents. Economic and environmental tensions along this route are part of cultural life—with the area bearing the cyclical history of boom-and-bust mining and logging economies. Resource extraction and infrastructure projects are negatively impacting ocean waters, fisheries, and the salmon-bearing rivers that once also supported huge harvests of oolichan, a small fish rendered to produce oil/grease valued for its sustenance, cultural significance, and trading commodity status.

Highway 16 from Prince Rupert on the Pacific coast, extending east into central Canada, is a land artery in a region where road travel is problematic, with—until just this past year—no reliable public bus service or cell phone connectivity. Highway 16 is also known as the “Highway of Tears,” a name that demarcates a travel route where many Indigenous woman and girls have met with violence.

The junction of these highways is not only a site where contradictions and tensions related to the movement of resources become apparent—it also carries deep interspecies relationships, centuries of Indigenous histories, and ongoing trauma driven by settlement, cultural erasure, and land dispossession. While they extend far beyond its bounds, these difficult relations are condensed in the photographic image. The monumental Petro-Canada sign evokes the red and white Canadian flag with its semblance of a maple leaf. The sign’s underline of bank and credit card logos fuses nationalism and consumption (of both petrochemicals and credits card deals). Somewhat less obvious, on the edge of the frame, an RCMP cruiser with its royal crest insignia makes Canada’s colonial heritage and institutional presence felt.

Distinct from the authority conveyed in these highly-designed markers, hand-painted signs on weathered wood point to places of bears and glaciers, while small official maps enclosed behind glass beckon travelers to come closer. Other signs express deeper forms of community (Friends of Wild Salmon) and reference the cultural and environmental significance of the Scared Headwaters of the Nass, Stikine, and Skeena Rivers—affirmative calls for protective impulses, expressions of ecological concerns, and the need to defend land, water and fish.

Positioned at the highway intersection, demanding our attention, the gas station appears out of sync with the landscape. Polarized national debates about energy infrastructure expansion are prominent and flood popular media, but it is primarily small communities in remote northern landscapes, far from the eyes of Canadians living in urban centres, that are most directly affected and where the effects are seen and experienced. I contend that by thinking through images like this one—attuning ourselves to what they show us and what they hide—we can provoke questions about the intersection of colonial violence, resource extraction, and environmental destruction in Canada’s North.