Fossilized Industries and the Decolonized Futures Visible Beyond The Looking Glass

By: Michelle Yao

When I was younger, I used to fantasize about owning a house in the middle of Disneyworld. In this imagined future, I would naturally start each day with Mickey-shaped waffles and then end each night beneath bursts of Magic Kingdom fireworks.

While waiting for this dream to be realized, I resigned myself to pretending that the smokestacks surrounding my hometown made up our very own Cinderella’s Castle. In actuality, they are a symptom of our local economy’s reliance on the petrochemical and plastic industries. The swath of sixty-three-and-counting industrial facilities pressed up against our homes is known as “Canada’s Chemical Valley.” 1

The top left photograph depicts a distanced view of Chemical Valley’s refineries as they are reflected on the waters of Lake Huron. There are refinery towers that are emitting smoke and yellow light against a black night sky.

The top right photograph depicts a distanced view of Cinderella’s Castle while red and green fireworks are being released into the night sky. The light of the fireworks and that of the castle are reflected on the water at the forefront of the image.
The bottom left photograph displays a closer shot of a chemical processing facility. Against a blue night sky, the facility is releasing white smoke and multicoloured lights.

The bottom right photograph displays a closer shot of Cinderella’s Castle at night. The Castle has been lit up in blue. Gold and silver fireworks are going off on either side of the castle.
Pictures of Chemical Valley, located in Sarnia, Ontario (left), placed next to pictures of Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida (right). Top left photograph by Marcus Johnstone via Flickr. Top right photograph by Mark Willard via Disney Parks Blog. Bottom left photograph by Jon Lin via Flickr. Bottom right photograph by Candace Lindemann via Flickr.

At night, the gas flares hovering above the plants glow like fallen stars. The refineries are always running, but they’re at their most disarming in the dark. No longer a mere backdrop to rush hour traffic, their presence becomes undeniable to the city dwellers driving past. Most Sarnians have acclimated to—if not outright embraced—the oil and gas corporations’ toxic reign. Still, it’s sobering to contend with the visible manifestation of the slow violence that we tolerate in exchange for our livelihoods. Of course, denial is a luxury not everyone can afford.

Yesterday

The Valley feels like a permanent fixture, but it only became so well-fortified during World War II, when Sarnia was charged with producing rubber for the Allied forces. Long before all of this, Aamjiwnaang territory spanned both sides of the waterway that the refineries now pollute.

Then English and American settlers encroached on these lands, which were ceded in a series of treaties that created six separate reserves spread across both “Canada” and “America.” Colonial intrusion didn’t stop there. The 20th Century saw the state repeatedly annexing reserve land and selling it to oil and gas companies, all in the name of economic expansion.2

Today

Over 850 Anishinaabe people inhabit the 13 square kilometres that now constitute Aamjiwnaang First Nation. The Reserve is surrounded on all sides by Dow, Suncor, and Shell facilities. Everyone living in the surrounding area experiences health disparities as a result of our proximity to these plants. But in a prime example of environmental racism, Aamjiwnaang inhabitants remain by far the most exposed to Chemical Valley’s toxins. About 60% of the air emissions happen within five kilometres of their community.

Chemical Valley didn’t always exist, but it’s such a foreboding force, it’s hard to fathom that there was ever an era before its existence. But maybe we don’t even need to resort to this effort of imagination. The Valley’s greenhouse gas emissions are stoking up climate catastrophes. Fossil fuels are a finite resource. If state and industry leaders won’t stop the plants from polluting, then maybe the structures will soon destroy so much that there won’t be anyone left to man the castles’ stations.

According to the World Doomsday Clock, thanks to many global leaders’ failures to address climate change, we’re now 100 seconds away from the “midnight” that signals a man-made apocalypse. Cinderella’s rags reappeared when the clock struck twelve. When unsustainable industries wreck the world, will the remaining ruins eventually give way to renewed biodiversity—the reappearance of plants, animals, and everything and anything but those pesky, pernicious humans?

I hope that we’ll never unearth the answer to this question. As April Anson has pointed out, the impulse to embrace an indiscriminate end to humanity—as if it’s an inevitable conclusion—reeks of ecofascism. It implies that all humans are equally responsible for environmental crises. Never mind that Indigenous communities—like Aamjiwnaang—are persistently working against the ecological issues wrought by late-stage capitalism and colonial violence. At the same time, such communities are also the ones most impacted by the manmade harms that have been outsourced to their homes. 

Tomorrow

When considering the future, let’s operate from a desire-based framework, as suggested by Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck. What kind of future do we desire for ourselves, for future generations? I’d like to see an end to Chemical Valley’s pollution. However, I don’t want this to come to pass as a consequence of large-scale destruction.

Many activists are already in hot pursuit of a viable future without industrial pollutants. Aamjiwnaang youth have specifically formed groups like the Green Teens to defend their land and culture. They’ve brought attention to their cause through rap performances, photography, and even an original documentary. If we want to shake the Valley off, then supporting such groups will be fundamental to seeing this paradigm shift through.

In the corner of a conference room, four prints of photographs are being displayed on metal stands that are lined up next to each other. From left to right, the prints respectively depict a trail surrounded by greenery, a person standing in front of a fence enclosing a refinery tower, light on water, and a streetlight against a background of trees and a yellow sky.

The photography of the Aamjiwnaang’s Green Teens being displayed at the Community Forum on Pollution and Action. This event took place on February 8, 2011, within the city of “Sarnia’s” limits. This showcase is specifically called ‘Photo-Voice,’ and it allowed the teens to “voice their views about living in an unhealthy environment in a healthy fashion.” Photograph of Green Teens display by Marcus Johnstone, via Flickr. Additional information about the showcase via The Starfish.

Vanessa Gray was the founder of the Green Teens. She is still a dedicated activist who, among countless other contributions, now helps organize “Toxic Tours” around the Valley. Every fall, visitors from all over bear witness to the Valley’s environmental destruction. The sights, sounds, and smells are a shock to those who haven’t been deemed expendable by the settler state.1

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. The tours also serve as an opportunity to share stories, honour Anishinaabe resilience, and build alliances so that everyone can work towards different, more desirable futures. After all, actual action must follow inspiration.

The Day After Tomorrow

Thomas King has noted how mass media and museum displays often implicitly insist that the “past was all [Indigenous people] had. No present. No future.”3 All the while, he observes, “Native writers [have begun] to use the Native present as a way to resurrect a Native past and to imagine a Native future.”3

This kind of resistance extends beyond writers, of course. The stories that the Green Teens tell with their creative displays are also powerful assertions of their community and culture’s past, present, and future. Not only are such local activists imagining decolonized futures, they’re also tangibly building paths to reach towards these outcomes.

Meanwhile, the Toxic Tours weaponize national historic sites’ rubberneck tour format to highlight Aamjiwnaang’s ongoing resistance. If museums are so compelling, then here’s one detailing the antiquated violences that the government has gone to great pains to preserve. If theme parks are so appealing, then here’s one that doesn’t need to pump artificial smells into the air to transport outsiders to a reality that might have previously been shuttered to them.

The stories that the Green Teens tell with their creative displays are also powerful assertions of their community and culture’s past, present, and future.

As one of few racialized immigrants living in Sarnia, I’ve often felt like a tourist passing through. I’m a settler that has reproduced processes of colonialism by trying to assimilate into a culture predicated on violence. Then again, I’m also an individual who’s lost a parent, a kindergarten teacher, and who knows what else to the chemical castles that I’ve spent the second half of my life escaping.

That’s the tricky thing with toxins. As Alexis Shotwell has observed, “[r]ich people have an easier time enacting the kind of redistribution or avoidance of poison … [but] these practices are temporary and illusory; we cannot in the end be separate from the world.”4 Anyone who thinks that they’re untouchable should take a second look at the refineries ruining the atmosphere we share.

In any case, now that midnight’s about to strike, I’ve found myself turning back to my hometown and envisioning a better future set in the same space. Disney’s corporate spell has worn off. I now dream about worlds without castles of any kind. Instead of superimposing Fantasyland’s image onto the refineries, I’d now like to see a world where clean air and clean drinking water for all isn’t solely confined to my wildest wishes.

In my imagined future, Green Teens and other desire-driven change makers will be the ones leading the charge on casting aside capitalist contaminants. We’ll act in time and reverse the most devastating impacts of climate change without losing anything valuable on the way. 

Maybe the future will still have Toxic Tours, but the tours will be describing archaic practices that have long been abandoned. Let these unsettling records show us why these self-destructive smokestacks should remain locked in the past. Future generations will learn of these losses, but I hope that they won’t mourn them. I know I won’t. 

: Fake postcard with teal text reading Toxic Tours, greetings from the Chemical Valley Historical Exhibit. Below this is the sentence, unearth fossils from the imperial age. The surrounding visuals depict silhouettes of families observing refinery towers at Chemical Valley from behind handrails.
A postcard from the imagined “Toxic Tours” of the future. While there is a picture of what Chemical Valley looks like in the present day, I have reframed this image to suggest that the depicted “historical exhibit” displays only artefacts of a long-lost age where companies like Shell and Imperial Oil were still primitively polluting this land. Original photograph of Chemical Valley by Wikimedia user P199, via Wikimedia Commons. Clipart of shell by Noun Project user Vectors Point, via The Noun Project. Clipart of railing by Susann Mielke via Pixabay. Clipart of left silhouettes by Mohamed Hassan via Pixabay. Clipart of right silhouettes by Gordon Johnson via Pixabay.

Print Works Cited

  1. Gray, Beze, and Alice Damiano. “Aamjiwnaang Toxic Tours.” Local Activism for Global Climate Justice: The Great Lakes Watershed, edited by Patricia E. Perkins, Routledge, 2019, pp. 183-191.
  1. Wiebe, Sarah Marie. Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley. Kindle Ed., UBC Press, 2016, ch. 5.
  1. King, Thomas. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Kindle Ed., House of Anansi Press Inc., 2005, ch. 4.
  1. Shotwell, Alexis. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Univ of Minnesota Press, 2016, p. 85.

Michelle Yao

Michelle Yao (she/her) is an undergraduate student at McMaster University. She is currently enrolled in the Bachelors of Health Sciences (Honours) program and pursuing a Minor in English and Cultural Studies. At McMaster, she is an Archway mentor; the Teaching assistant for the course Global Health Advocacy; the Communications Director for the school’s creative arts magazine, Incite; and a Resources and Advocacy Co-executive at the MSU Student Health Education Centre.

Having grown up around Canada’s Chemical Valley, she is especially passionate about dismantling structures that perpetuate environmental racism and colonial violence. Michelle’s undergraduate thesis revolves around the study of cultural competency in healthcare education. She is also studying the impacts of environmental racism on youth mental health with a research group affiliated with Global Water Futures and the McMaster Department of Pediatrics.