For years, Melissa Daniels traveled to the vast wilderness of northern Alberta to collect naturally occurring salts in lands her ancestors once hunted and hunted. She mixes salt with wild flowers from the forest and sells it in small batches.
But the Canadian National Park Agency recently ordered her to stop, a move that angered her community and highlighted the park’s troubling history.
For thousands of years, the people of Denesuline hunted and trapped the scattered boreal forest that crossed Alberta and the Northwest Territories. But in 1922, they were forcibly evicted when Canada began creating what would eventually become the sprawling 4.5-hectare Wood Buffalo National Park.
Daniels, who runs the wellness company Naidie Nezu (“Good Medicine” in Dene), still returns to these lands and consumes approximately four liters of salt each year.
But in a recent letter from Parks Canada, she was told she would not be allowed to continue. “Since the salt pans … are within the boundaries of Wood Buffalo National Park, this is problematic,” the letter said. “We ask that the salt from the park stay in the park and not be sold as an ingredient in the bath mix or other products.”
Location of Wood Buffalo National Park
The leader of Athabasca Chipeuyang’s first nation, Alan Adam, said Parks Canada had never bought back the actions against its people or fully compensated them for the loss of their homeland. Allen said the letter to Daniels was “another reminder that Canada is still in the very early days of reconciliation.”
Parks Canada said the traditional collection of salt for personal use is allowed and is common practice in the park, but commercial extraction is not allowed. The agency said it regretted not using dialogue with indigenous partners on the issue.
Wood Buffalo is one of the largest parks in the world and is a critical habitat for the largest free-floating buffalo population on earth. Its watershed is the only untouched breeding ground for endangered donkey cranes.
It became a World Heritage Site in 1983, but UNESCO recently expressed concern that the Canadian government was failing to manage the park.
In addition to the deteriorating environment in the park and the growing threat of resource extraction projects along its borders, a recently published report documents how the people of Denésuliné suffered when they were ordered to leave the area. The elders tell stories of burned huts and loss of access to their hunting grounds.
The salty plains of Wood Buffalo National Park. Photo: All photos of Canada / Alami
A resident, Charlie Merredi, told the report’s authors that creating the park was not right because “people should come first before the bison.” Mercredi said: “The park does not want to admit that they have done something wrong to us, because they will have to pay a lot in terms of compensation.
Another, Leslie Wilzen, talks about growing up, knowing that land that has been inhabited and hunted by her ancestors for thousands of years is forbidden. – How do you describe it in words?
While national parks across the continent have been declared victorious for protecting vast areas of wildlife and environmentally sensitive areas, some come with a dark history.
People who are forced to leave their land in the name of conservation are also part of colonialism, and although the climate crisis will require a shift from “dirty” to “clean” power, it also requires a radical reconfiguration of energy dynamics in environment “, Naidi Nezu, Daniels’ company, says in an Instagram post. “Colonialism is colonialism is colonialism.”
Daniels wrote that she is not worried about the warning and will not stop producing her “illegal” salt. “Every time you decide to support Naidi Nezu and soak in our forbidden bath salts, you soak in reparations that cost a century,” she said.
Add Comment