Canadian leader collides with Natives' natural resources claims [View all]

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http://www.adn.com/2014/01/28/3295362/canadian-leader-collides-with.html

Canadian leader collides with Natives' natural resources claims
By Jeremy van Loon
Bloomberg News
January 28, 2014 Updated 19 hours ago

CALGARY, Alberta -- Back in the spring of 2012, while walking in the deep woods of northern Ontario, Sonny Gagnon stumbled across a collection of surveying equipment among the towering spruce trees. Gagnon is chief of the Aroland aboriginal tribe, a band of 450 people living in a village of ramshackle houses surrounded by swampy muskeg. He tracks everything that goes on in his community. And the surveying tools weren't supposed to be there.

"I was ticked off," he says, after learning that the equipment belonged to a subcontractor of Cleveland-based mining company Cliffs Natural Resources Inc.

It turned out Cliffs had plans to mine for chromite to the north of the Aroland reserve and to build a road through the territory to transport truckloads of the mineral to a railhead.

"They weren't consulting us on what they were doing on the land," Gagnon says. "I told them to leave and that we didn't want them back."