Last summer, a logging company cleared approximately 1,200 metres of an Indigenous ancestral trail in Bigstone Cree Nation territory, Treaty No. 8 region (northern Alberta), in spite of government regulations in place to protect land.
As an ancient archeological site, the trail should have been protected by the Alberta Historical Resource Act. A Historical Resource Impact Assessment should have been conducted to assess the site’s protected value.
The logging company, Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries Inc., conducted a “desktop” assessment. But no one physically visited the area, and the assessment missed identifying the trail.
The trail is a valued cultural place, as the Bigstone Cree Nation Lands Department repeatedly informed Alberta-Pacific. Darren Decoine, the Bigstone Lands Department GIS technician, repeatedly requested detailed maps of the logging plans from Alberta-Pacific, but he says they were never provided. The company is supposed to provide shapefiles (maps in raw data form) that the First Nation can overlay with their own data about traditional land use to see if any sites might be damaged.