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By Ruth Kamnitzer Living downstream from one of the world’s largest industrial projects isn’t easy — especially when things go wrong. When the community of Fort Chipewyan in Alberta, Canada, learned there had been a major spill of toxic wastewater from Imperial Oil’s Kearl tar sands site, it was chaos, says Melaine Dene, acting director of the Mikisew Cree First Nation’s department of government and industry relations. The remote community of nearly 800 mostly Indigenous people, better known simply as Fort Chip, sits on the southwest shore of Lake Athabasca, about 250 kilometers (155 miles) do…

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