Little that Alberta First Nation can do as logging company destroys part of protected ancestral trail nationalpost.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nationalpost.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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