M President
It is with the deepest respect for your administration that Idle No More writes to urge you to move cautiously on the Keystone XL Pipeline project into Canada until full inclusion of Indigenous concerns are included.
• It has become evident in the transference and extraction of the Athabasca tar sands, near and around Indigenous territories, the environment is not being managed in a sustainable way. The adverse affects, all ecological in nature, directly affect Indigenous communities in three ways:
(a) Waterways are being contaminated;
b) Wetlands continue to be decimated which protect the Cree and Denesuline way of life, the caribou;
(c) Indigenous populations will be displaced and have to leave their ancestral homelands to seek safer conditions against their choice.